Ask The Tech Guys 2006 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Hey, hey, hey. It's time for the very first. Ask the Tech guys for 2024. Coming up, a look at CES. Scott Wilkinson tells us what kinds of TVs to get ready for.

0:00:11 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Mikah Sargent, and we talk about a really important phishing scam you should be aware of, involving Facebook Marketplace, google Voice and, well, what you need to do.

0:00:22 - Leo Laporte
And is it possible to keep a calendar and address books synchronized between an iPhone and a Windows machine without using the cloud? We'll find out next on Ask the Tech Guys.

This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2006,. Recorded Sunday, january 7th 2024. Don't slow down in the diaper aisle. Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by DeleteMe. Have you ever searched for your name online and didn't like how much of your personal information was available?

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First, you sign up. You submit some basic personal information for removal. DeleteMe experts will find and remove your personal information from hundreds of data brokers, helping reduce your online footprint and keeping you and your family safe. DeleteMe will continue to scan and remove your personal information regularly. This is important. It includes names. It includes addresses, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media and property value, and more. Now, since privacy, exposures and incidents affect individuals differently, their privacy advisors ensure that all customers have the support they need when they need it. Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy, by going to joindeleteme.com/twit and using the code TWiT, that's joindeleteme.com/twit and use the code TWiT for 20% of your privacy. Well, hey, hey, it's time once again for the brand new Ask the Tech Guys first show of 2024.

0:02:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it is indeed, you look so sharp Mikah Sargent. You look very dapper. Leo Laporte, I got a fade.

0:02:26 - Leo Laporte
You did get a fade To match your fade.

0:02:27 - Mikah Sargent
Look at us. We're both faded.

0:02:29 - Leo Laporte
Faded glory, so the original fade really didn't look like this. It had a big afro on the top right and so you looked like a pencil eraser or something. But this is a little bit more. I thought I'd be with more with the kids because I knew that you you know you were going to, so I thought maybe I'd look more youthful.

0:02:46 - Mikah Sargent
I quite like it.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
And I like it paired with your new glasses.

0:02:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you're not wearing today, but no, I just thought they're really heavy.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
They hurt my nose, oh, do they? Oh, no, I only wear them if I want to make a statement like hi, I'm Mr Magoo. This is the show where you answer your questions about technology at 888-724-2884. And if you're watching live, you can get in live. Right now, that's two to 5pm Eastern on Sundays, 888-724-2884.

0:03:17 - Mikah Sargent
You can also visit us by going to calltwittv from the browser of choice. We suggest using your phone. If you go to calltwittv on your phone, you've got that microphone and camera right there on the device. You'll be connected to a zoom room where you'll hang out. We ask that you, please. You will find it somewhere, likely on the bottom of the screen if you are on any device a little hand icon that says raise your hand. You want to tap raise hand or click raise hand. That's how we know that you actually have a question, that you're not just hanging out because you want to, which is totally fine. You can't hang out. I have a question.

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
Yes, who's Ray?

0:03:53 - Mikah Sargent
Ray, it's Ray's hand. Why am I Ray? Oh, raise hand. Oh dear, I gotta go. That's a dad question. I quit.

0:04:01 - Leo Laporte
A dad joke hidden in a question we want to hear from you, though. So it's part of the fun of this show is the is the conversation in the back and forth. The interaction that we have with you are fabulous fans. This is our last show before CES 2024. You and I will be skying down to Vegas to stay in the presidential suite at the beautiful MGM grand, where people will come to us with their gadgets and gizmos. A train, a, a, a, a, a, a. A queue of 5,000 different people will walk into our room. Show us the gadget. You each have 30 seconds and we'll be done next year.

0:04:38 - Mikah Sargent
It's a great time. It's a lot like a show that I think's on NBC where you're pitching your gadgets hey have you ever gone, as you've got to see? Yes, yeah, three times, three times. Hated it every time, but yes, it's a hard show to go to.

0:04:52 - Leo Laporte
People love it. Tech journalists love it because it's a chance for them to see other tech journalists, which is kind of pathetic.

0:04:58 - Mikah Sargent
They don't get out much, and I do kid. The first time I went, I really enjoyed it. I think it's always fun, yeah Cause it's just a splendor and awe and all these wacky gadgets just as much as there are the normal things.

0:05:09 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of like your first time in Vegas in general. Yeah, it's like, wow, this is cool.

This second time is how quickly can I get out of here? Ding ding, ding, right, yes, and CES is that times a thousand. It's in the Vegas convention center, but it's also in the other venues throughout the city. It's very hard to get around because there's, you know, there'll be about 150,000. I don't know how many it is these days. Yeah, that's one point. It was over 200,000. It's not just journalists, by the way, some tech press, but mostly dealers, the whole idea of the consumer, what used to be called the consumer electronics show. It's put on by the Consumer Electronics Association, which makes you think CES would be the consumer electronics show. But no, they say it's not. It's just CES is put on for dealers, people who run. Who runs a consumer electronics store anymore? I don't know. It's for Best Buy to come and see things. So it's a lot of things. It's car stuff, it's stereo stuff, it is certainly some computer stuff, although the big computer companies kind of bowed out like it, like Microsoft and Apple, because they've got their own events.

0:06:17 - Mikah Sargent
They don't need to do this.

0:06:19 - Leo Laporte
But really and we're going to talk about it in just a bit because Scott Wilkinson will be joining us what it really is is a TV show. It's where you see the new TV technology and I think that's of the broadest general interest. A lot of the stuff you're going to hear about it goes January 9th through 12th, so you'll be hearing a lot. What's funny, the other thing is you'll be hearing a lot January 9th and 10th.

The journalists go out this weekend they're on their way out now for pre-show shows where companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to have, like an event in a ballroom where the journalists are fed shrimp and there's a chocolate fountain Always a chocolate fountain and you go there and they get you there with the food. But then there's these little booths of only maybe 15, 20, 30 different high paying people to get to the front of the line. Basically, it's a skip at the line event Because lazy journalists and we are all lazy cover. You'll see. What you'll really see is there'll be a lot of mysteries about the very first thing inside the door. Yes, at showstoppers or pepcom, those are the two very first thing inside the door because they go oh, okay, quick, get the camera over here.

All right, we'll do real quick and then it's Joe blow from CBS Chicago and look at this, it's the amazing toilet robot. And then, or for one year, it was a. It was a happy brush that would. It was a haptic brush. Oh, one year it was literally a robot that would deliver toilet rolls to you. None of these really are real products. They're just there to get your attention and to get this, the local affiliate news attention. So you'll see that, and then a really intrepid reporter will go deeper into the event and see the other stuff, but mostly it's to get the shrimp. That's Sunday, that's Monday, Then Tuesday the show doors open and that is an event that you'll see on.

Instagram, you'll see, you'll see videos of this. It's, you know all the, all the people are herded into the hall outside of the main entry and then the doors open and they flood in and I expect Scott will tell us, but usually Panasonic or one of the big TV companies I wouldn't be Panasonic anymore, maybe. Maybe Samsung will have a like this giant video booth, because this is where the TVs all are, and you go through a tunnel of Q led TVs or whatever, out into the, into the thing. It's quite an event, it's quite fun, and then you try desperately to find something new and interesting.

0:08:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's like oh, this is the same, this is the same, this is the same. Where's the new stuff? It often ends up being that quirky little stuff that's different.

0:08:53 - Leo Laporte
And there is. It used to be. They called the international hall. I don't know what they call it now, but there's a their offsite in another ballroom down the road. There's all the weird, quirky little stuff, the small booths that were cheap. That's where Dick D Bartolo goes, so in a couple of weeks we'll get his report of the of the crap and it's there's fun stuff.

For a while last time I was there, which was in the year of our Lord, 2020, right before COVID, it seemed to be everybody wanted to make a robot that would make something for you Pizza, bread, ice cubes, chopped liver, whatever, and that was a big trend. So there's always a trend that'll be interesting. There's the trend story Everybody the version will do that. Everybody will do that. Usually nothing, you see, there is of great importance because a it won't be coming out until the end of the year. If ever, really remember, they're going there for the dealers who make their purchase decisions for the rest of the year. Most of it will be end of 2020. If ever, a lot of this there, just so that you can, they can gauge interest, and if dealers say, well, we really don't want that uh, you know, automated potato peeler then they won't make it, so it's a mixed bag. The TVs are the most important things God will consider. Tell us what to expect TV wise. Are you.

Is there anything you'll be looking for in your? Because nowadays, the smart journalists just sit here and let the poor, lower level, lower echelon grunts do the work.

0:10:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I actually. I'm planning on having on a great journalist who works in the smart home area. On.

0:10:40 - Leo Laporte
Thursday that will actually be the one area of big interest, because matters now been out for a year. Are we going to see any?

0:10:46 - Mikah Sargent
movement in that and that is what Jennifer Paterson Tui of the British will come on and talk to us about. So thankfully she's going to be there and is looking through it and we're going to have like a trends discussion about honestly where everybody's putting their attention when it comes to the smart home right now and what we'll see there. That'll be good.

0:11:06 - Leo Laporte
We uh, next week we will do our traditional father Robert scams as much crap as he can at CES and then brings it back and puts it all on our table and that will be a lot. That's always a lot of fun because, robert, he's a priest right, so he goes around and he wears his collar sample please. So people are well, of course, whatever you'd like, father Uh. So he gets a lot of interesting stuff that he brings back and he's very good taste, so he always picks something of great interest. So, uh, we'll have CES coverage, but don't expect any great changes.

One other thing I wanted to mention before we get into the questions um, uh is the passing of a kind of a legend in the technology industry. Uh, his name is Nicholas. I don't know if anybody knows that name programmers will because he created nine programming languages Holy moly, uh. But most importantly, pascal. He was the creator of one of the early and most important uh programming languages. Pascal passed away on New Year's Day. He was almost 90. Uh and uh, he is very important, I think, to anybody who is a programmer or uses software, which would be all of us.

Pascal was one of the early languages on the Mac in the very earliest days of the Mac, you, most people used Pascal, but it was also a great teaching language. So a lot of people learned it in school. Uh, people will remember turbo Pascal, which was how a Philip Conn and Borland got started. It was a very, very fast Pascal compiler. Um Algal, which was his first language, or one of his first languages, is the inspiration for almost all computer languages out there. Very, very much. Uh, the inspiration of it. Uh, Ma, he didn't.

Later did modular and you might remember that name. He, he worked at Xerox park. Uh, briefly, he also, uh, you know, created an operating system which, uh, nobody ever used, called Oberon. Um, anyway, uh, uh, brilliant guy, a legend, very influential in the computer industry. And, uh, pascal was absolutely one of the first languages Most of us learn. Niklaus Viert passed away at the age of 89 this week. Uh, any, I, you know what I like to. I, I know, I know obituaries are kind of not, you know, they're kind of bringing it down a little bit, but I like to recognize these computer Absolutely. We're in the era now where many of the really early guys are, are fairly old, and it's good to recognize their accomplishments.

0:13:45 - Mikah Sargent
Um, we wouldn't be where we are today without their contributions.

0:13:48 - Leo Laporte
It's really true. Any stories catch your eye this week yeah.

0:13:52 - Mikah Sargent
I, I did want to quickly mention, um, if you were part of the battery gate settlement, that was, uh, the series of iPhones iPhone six, six, plus six, s, uh, seven, and the iPhone SE, the first generation. Um, that was Apple uh, having a setting, basically that when, once the battery aged enough that the performance wasn't as good as it once was, what Apple would do is throttle the operating system, meaning that it would kind of slow down some of the performance in the interest of keeping the phone running for longer and making sure that it's still worked and that you could use it. Because if that setting was not turned on, you would have an issue where sometimes your phone would just shut off and you know, choosing between those two, you'd want to have the phone that keeps working. Um, unfortunately, because of the way that worked and because it wasn't immediately apparent that that's what Apple was doing, it wasn't until afterward that they kind of added a setting that let you turn it on or turn it off.

Uh, there was a? Uh, a class action lawsuit, and so that settlement, um, was agreed upon in March of 2020. Uh, apple agreed to pay $500 million in the settlement and you had until October 6th of 2020 to file for your claim in the lawsuit Uh as it's too late if you say hey, I want that 92 bucks for too late.

If you want it, yeah uh, but those of you who did file you should be on the lookout. Uh, the first folks have been getting their payouts of $92.17. That's actually surprised yeah. Usually these payouts are like $4 a piece.

0:15:30 - Leo Laporte
Um, I was one of the class action lawsuit against a snack called pop chips. I heard of that and I won, and they won and I got a free bag of pop chips. So pretty much that's that's my standard for class action. Loss is basically get a bag of pop chips, congratulations.

0:15:49 - Mikah Sargent
I can't remember the biggest settlement I got, but it was maybe $12 at the most, so I was kind of surprised at $92.17. That is really large, and so would you say that was all that in the bag of chips all that in the bag of chips. What is happening today? Um, and for folks who had maybe an iPhone six and iPhone seven and iPhone SE, and uh I think it's $92 for each one.

0:16:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could file a claim that starts to add up.

0:16:15 - Mikah Sargent
That's almost a new iPhone Now some people could have made as much as $1,000, is what I saw. So, but again, you had to do it.

0:16:25 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

0:16:25 - Mikah Sargent
This, yeah, this is only us letting you know. Be on the lookout for your payments If you did file the claim. You check, son, it's in the mail. I forgot if.

0:16:33 - Leo Laporte
I filed a claim.

0:16:34 - Mikah Sargent
I can't remember if I did either. Cause I did on all See cause, yeah, I usually don't go through the trouble of filing the claims, cause it's not worth it. You get a bag of pop chips.

0:16:42 - Leo Laporte
Do you think I feel bad? Is it wrong for me to kind of feel bad for Apple? I don't think so. The the. The real question is did Apple do this maliciously to force you to buy a new phone Right, which is no or did they slow it down because they wanted to preserve what was left of your dying battery?

0:16:57 - Mikah Sargent
Right and honestly. When Apple did that cause remember this went to a settlement, it did not go through all the way and when Apple agreed to pay the $500 million settlement, they continued to deny any wrongdoing in in this.

0:17:10 - Leo Laporte
It's hard to feel sorry for a three trillion Exactly, but I kind of do, I don't know. I think they did the right thing.

0:17:16 - Mikah Sargent
I think they did the right thing. Exactly they didn't do it maliciously.

0:17:19 - Leo Laporte
They don't need to push people to upgrade their iPhone.

0:17:21 - Mikah Sargent
Right, exactly, I'm with you. I'm with you on that, yeah.

0:17:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be a tough year. 2024 is going to be a tough year for Apple, for all the big tech companies. Both Europe and the US are looking hard at all their practices and I have a feeling we're going to see a lot of action.

0:17:37 - Mikah Sargent
It's ramped up, yeah, apparently, we talked about that a little bit on tech news weekly as well, and I think Apple, you know, has been focused a lot on the EU, but now the US is also looking and going okay, it's, it's going to be an interesting year for that, absolutely yeah.

0:17:56 - Leo Laporte
Let's see. Well, as long as we're talking refunds, Logan Paul has promised refunds for those of you who foolishly bought into his crypto zoo NFT animal collection, but he's not going to give you the money if you sue him.

0:18:13 - Mikah Sargent
Wait. So is it like a sign you have to sign to say I won't sue you, or is it one of these? If you tell me on Twitter, on X, that you won't sue me, then I'll give you your money back.

0:18:21 - Leo Laporte
He's personally committing more than $2.3 million, which shows you, by the way, how much money there is to be made as a YouTube influencer. $2.3 million to buy back the NFTs purchased through crypto zoo. Your claims have to be submitted online to February 8th.

0:18:36 - Leo Laporte
I never made any money from the project. In fact, the opposite is true. I was highly disappointed that game was not delivered. Okay, fine, it was a game.

0:18:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't, I don't understand.

0:18:50 - Leo Laporte
So there was a very well known crypto game called crypto kitties, where you would breed kitties. You'd buy a couple of kitties, you'd breed a new kind of kitty and then you could sell it. The idea, of course, it's all it's all a con game based on your greed right?

0:19:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to buy these kitties, I'm going to breed them and I'm going to make a million dollars.

0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
So it was the same thing. You would buy a base egg or a base animal, breed that animal and then create a hybrid that was also an NFT that you then could sell to the next sucker and make and profit. They are not going to buy the hybrids, they're only going to buy the base animals.

0:19:30 - Leo Laporte
So any NFTs that Paul, in his sole discretion, denims ineligible and will not be returned.

0:19:39 - Mikah Sargent
His sole discretion, my sole discretion.

0:19:41 - Leo Laporte
It's just like okay, so I've received one of them, Sorry.

0:19:44 - Leo Laporte
Don't sue me, man. Anyway, it's kind of. I thought I, since we're talking about, yeah, that's that there's an apple and logan ball.

0:19:55 - Mikah Sargent
Did you see that huge write up? I wish I could remember from who it came. It was about web three being everything this year, because web three was going to solve the problem. I saw that right up.

0:20:10 - Leo Laporte
It was by the guy who invented web three and is the venture capitalist who's invested most of the money into, into web three.

It was a VC and I've forgotten his name, but yeah, no, I actually I bookmarked that as well, because it's kind of funny to see them. It's very much like every all these other things. Web three is kind of a a a, a blockchain based web, and the investors in it are desperate to get you to buy into this concept, cause otherwise they're left like Logan Paul holding the bag. It was a you know his, his, his website is AVC because he's a VC. Actually, it's Mark Andreessen who really, I think, did the the biggest investments in web three and his company, andreessen.

0:20:59 - Mikah Sargent
Horowitz Fred Wilson.

0:21:00 - Leo Laporte
Fred Wilson, that sort of his. His company is very much promoting it as well. I wouldn't. I don't see a need for web three. I'm not sure what problem it solves. I agree, yeah.

0:21:10 - Mikah Sargent
Let's wait for web four.

0:21:11 - Leo Laporte
What do you say?

0:21:12 - Mikah Sargent
Woo, web four or even web 3.2. Oh, that'll be good. So crashes many times.

0:21:20 - Leo Laporte
We have. We have wasted enough of your time with our top news stories of the week. I like doing this, though Me too. We used to always do this on the tech guy show, the. I call it the Sunday sermon, but now it's Hallelujah. Now it's. It's more like the Sunday marathon. Mr John Ashley, who should we? We don't have any calls in the zoom. Oh, we have calls. Oh, I see, I'm not going to pick up Dirk digler If you don't mind.

0:21:51 - Mikah Sargent
I am going to pick up one person Should.

0:21:54 - Leo Laporte
I do a Google search or points no, don't do it Okay.

0:21:57 - Leo Laporte
Plates for obscure references. Who would we want to start with? Wireless caller. Wireless caller, so we're going to pick you up. You press star six, is that right? Yes, that is correct. And then you'll be unmuted. And then you can announce in bold, staccato voice your name first name in city.

0:22:22 - Caller
Welcome. Can you hear me? Leo and Mikah.

0:22:24 - Leo Laporte
Beautifully done. What's your first name and where are you calling from?

0:22:27 - Caller
Oh, Jay from Wapa Caneta, Ohio. Jay from Wapa Caneta Hi Jay, you know our most famous former residents of Wapa Caneta.

0:22:40 - Leo Laporte
Anybody guess? I know the name, is it Lou Gehrig?

0:22:45 - Caller
No more famous than that. More famous than Lou.

0:22:48 - Leo Laporte
Gehrig, lou Gehrig. It's got to be Calvin Coolidge, absolutely.

0:22:53 - Caller
Nope, nope. Very historical. Somebody in Zimbabwe would know this name. I don't know. You're going to kick yourself, leo, it's Neil Armstrong. I am going to kick myself.

0:23:13 - Leo Laporte
The great Neil Armstrong. Yeah, first man on the moon there you go. I love Neil Armstrong. He was eventually your senator from Ohio. So I should have known that You're right. If this were John Glenn, I just lost double John Glenn. I was John Glenn. I know what am I saying.

0:23:32 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is a trivia call he became a professor.

0:23:34 - Leo Laporte
He never became a politician. Bulley points for him.

0:23:38 - Caller
Yeah, good old Neil Armstrong, wapa Caneta.

0:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Ohio. How cool, that's really cool. Have you been in the museum there?

0:23:46 - Caller
Oh, absolutely yeah, Sure yeah, the 50th anniversary. Big dealings here in Wapa Caneta were not very big, but gosh, it was just a great time.

0:23:58 - Leo Laporte
I'm strong Museum, currently closed for construction. They're renovating the lobby. He is, you're right, he's more famous. In my mind he's also up there with Magellan and he's a great explorers. Uh, vasco de Gama, I mean he really that he deserves a lot of credit for being it. I mean, when we look back at hindsight, that was a very brave thing to do to go up in that Tim Kahn with the most primitive 1969 technology.

0:24:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that bravery, my goodness, yeah Well what can we do?

0:24:31 - Caller
for you sir, and what he did to overcome and everything is just amazing how he approached that.

0:24:37 - Leo Laporte
Really an inspiration and he never. And Humble, he never. You know, he didn't, he didn't buy a mansion or anything. He was a very humble, real person who, yeah, and I think he you know his the very bad movie that Damon Chazelle Damon Chazelle made about him, I think, didn't do him justice, first on the moon. But there is a. There are some much better movies about Apollo 11 that you should watch, not that one.

0:25:05 - Caller
Right? What can I do for you, right? So my question for you is I, I keep an event or a journal for every day. Just write it down, you know, in a calendar. And I've done it for years and years and years. I brought mine. I'd like to. What's that? Oh, I brought mine today.

0:25:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and here's the pen and the paper.

0:25:33 - Caller
Awesome, yeah, awesome, well, what, what? What I'd like to do is put it in like a document, word document form, yeah, so that you know I can share it with people. And I'm wondering is there a way I can use? And I'm on my phone right now with my earbuds. I got an Android Google uh six pro, can I, can I use my phone to transcribe it into a document? How good's your handwriting? And not not use like a headphones or not a microphone, but use my phone.

0:26:07 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, you might speak it into oh, you want to speak it.

0:26:10 - Leo Laporte
Yes, oh yes, and you want to transcribe it, yes.

0:26:16 - Caller
Yeah, just speak it in there and make it a document. Word document.

0:26:19 - Leo Laporte
Android does that really really well with the built in voice recorder on. Uh, you have a pixel. Yes, sir, oh, you're in luck because now eventually these uh Google capabilities will filter down to the other manufacturers. But right now the pixel has a very good voice transcription capability built right into its voice recorder. You could turn on the transcription, you could talk into it, you could uh. You know, I wish they had an action button like app does cause. Then you would just push the button and be like a voice recorder and it would automatically get transcribed.

But it's a very simple thing to do. You launch the voice recorder, you turn on transcription. It'll transcribe as you speak, so you can you know. If you want, you can look at it. Here's what I use it for. I record Jeopardy, but I don't record the show. I record me answering Jeopardy and then later I go through it to see how, how well I did I score myself. So, and, and that's just right on the phone. It's a very easy thing to do. It does a great job with transcription. Um, you're set. That's built into the.

0:27:24 - Caller
Android phone. Okay, but my, my question is can I, can I do that into my computer on a Word document, not just on my phone? Oh, you want to do it on on the desktop as?

0:27:35 - Leo Laporte
well.

0:27:35 - Caller
To the computer. Well, here's what I would do. I would use utilizing the phone.

0:27:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I would use your phone, I would have it do on the phone and then it's a text document which you can then email, move to your copy, paste whatever to your computer and then put in a Word document If you, if you really want to. I know, you know I still annoys me when I get Word documents from companies and stuff. It's like that is not, that's a, it's a proprietary, it is an ex. I mean the Microsoft says no, no, our format's not proprietary, it's proprietary and so really you can read it if you have pages, but it's not going to be the same. I think Word is a bad choice. I think send it out as a text file is the best, because everybody can read that and if you really want formatting. There's other choices.

Yeah, but so you'll get that file on your phone, and then you can easily transport it anywhere you want.

0:28:23 - Caller
Sure, can I. Can I ask something else? Sure, of course. So, in that same regard, you know I've got my journals, you know, probably since 1998 or so. So, and what I'd like to do and, and I love Excel spreadsheets. Now, I'm not saying this is what I want to do, but the concept is, if I had, if you think about a spreadsheet, the first column, let's say, would be 1998. And then the first row below that would be like January one. The next row would be January two, january three, and then the second column would be 1999. January one, january two, january three, all the way down, yeah, and all the way across for all the years. So I could look from, you know, january one of 98 to 99, just right across.

0:29:19 - Leo Laporte
What do you want in the cells? I think I said you would in the spreadsheet. Yeah, that's easy, but what do you want to put?

0:29:23 - Caller
the cells. Well, I don't my journal. You want the text from your journal, or that day, would you? Would you? Yeah, but maybe not a spreadsheet. I guess that's not probably gonna work in a spreadsheet, I guess. Well, no, you could cook, or do you want to? Do something else or another program.

0:29:38 - Leo Laporte
No, you could do it. So of course you know, if you use Excel, it's very easy to generate those headings and all of that stuff, the cells is the real trick, do you? If you wanted, if your handwriting was very good, you could optical character recognition it, you could OCR it and it would then give you-.

0:29:54 - Caller
Oh lord, my handwriting is bad. Nobody's handwriting.

0:29:57 - Leo Laporte
Is that good? I'll be honest with you. So what you want to do, then, is put a picture of each page.

0:30:01 - Caller
Yes, oh, but you can't sort that though you can't like filter or search it. No, no.

0:30:08 - Mikah Sargent
You'd have to do the hard work of going back and either typing it out or you could use the transcribe feature again and start reading back your journals.

0:30:18 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna show you the program I use for this, by the way, which I really like and it's free, it's open source, it's called LogSeq L-O-G-S-E-Q and by default it does a daily journal and it's completely searchable. You can actually, if you want, create a whiteboard, flashcards it will also give you, and this is kind of what I think you're thinking about. This is the graph view of every day and I could see which day links to which other days. So it is kind of what you want to do with a spreadsheet, only even smarter, I think, and it lets you but just visually to see the day next to the day next to the next year's day.

0:30:58 - Caller
Next year's day you can just see what it's called. You could also organize it that way.

0:31:02 - Leo Laporte
You can absolutely organize it that way. Okay, I think it's better than a spreadsheet for this. You could put images in. What I would do, what you could do, the easiest thing, would put an image in and then put a few keywords. So you're manually still doing this, but you're going and you're gonna say a few keywords so it's searchable. So, like this is the day I got married, this is the day I bought a new car, this is the day I decided to stop eating trans fats or whatever, and then you could just put in the keywords on this.

One of the things I like about Log Seek it's called. They do something called back links. If you do a number sign in a word, it creates a page of all the references to that word. So now I have a page called trans fats which has all the references to that page. Or you can put it in a wiki style double brackets new, let's see, I'll do autos. So I wanna have every reference to autos. And then in fact, I do have a few pages if I click that, that in my thing refer to autos. So and I can also do a search. But so I could search for autos or search for trans fats, and then you'd be able to do it as well.

So it's a very this is a great program. It's free. I pay. I give them on their Patreon a few bucks a month so I can synchronize across everything. Runs on iOS, android, mac, windows and Linux it has. And it's private. There's no centralized storage. You store it all locally and what I really like is you store it in plain text markdown files. So those files, even if this company it's not a company if this product goes away, those files will be readable by dozens of other markdown compatible programs.

0:32:44 - Caller
So this is, this is-. Will you have links in it? Then show notes.

0:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we'll put LogSec in the show notes. I think it's just LogSec, logseq. I'm sorry, secueorg, let me look just real quick, but it is. It is a it'scom, logseqseqcom, and it's designed. This is a whole category of note taking apps.

I talk about this a lot.

They call them personal knowledge management systems, or PKMSs, and the theory, the reason people have started taking to do this, is if you put all your stuff in a blob that is somehow indexed and interlinked, it helps you generate new ideas by saying well, you know, let me like, for instance, take notes on the books you read, let me see all the books that talk about death and some ideas different authors have had, and it would help you then create some new ideas around that. That's the whole point of journaling, isn't it of keeping all of these logs is kind of taking your history and getting some understanding from this in aggregate, and so this really is what these PKMSs are all about is helping you do that, and I think that, for my money, nothing. Logseqseq is the best. I think it's really good. There are a lot of other choices. A lot of people use something called obsidian, you know, and then Apple has recently and I think Bravo to. Apple added journals to iOS, starting in iOS 17.2. But what's more important than the fact that they have that app?

0:34:16 - Mikah Sargent
Are the integrations that it has with other journaling apps? So that you can be prompted based on the activities that you have on your apps.

0:34:24 - Leo Laporte
It has an API. So, for instance, the journaling app I really like and use all the time, which is on iOS and Android and also as a web interface, is called Day One. It's owned by the folks who do WordPress automatic, and what Day One will do is it notices everything you've played, every picture you've taken, every place you've gone, so anytime you wanna and this is using also Apple's API. So anytime you wanna add something, you can look at the suggestions. I don't know if you have the over the shoulder shot. There it is. Oh, let me do that again, what I just did. So let's say, I wanna add a new entry, I do plus, and then there's this button and this is using Apple's API. So this is using the journaling suggestions API.

It sees places I've been, people I've talked to, exercises I've done, walks I've done, and so you could pick any of those and say, oh yeah, let me talk a little bit more about this restaurant I just ate at, or you know, and so it really is a nice way you can also put in and I've put in prompts for things I wanna record like a gratitude journal. I like to keep track of things I'm grateful for, so I can actually have it prompt me you can add prompts and says that say every evening okay, write down three things you're grateful for today. This is a really nice practice, I think. Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna go digital, so that's called day one. It's available on your Android phone and that's not free, but Android will I'm sure, copy Apple and do this kind of, because your phone is keeping track of everything you're doing, right?

0:36:01 - Mikah Sargent
So, yeah, so use it. Yeah, I love it Use it, take advantage of it.

0:36:04 - Leo Laporte
It's a really nice thing to be able to say Do you think that?

0:36:09 - Caller
using one of these systems. Can I talk into it to transcribe by past events? Yes, you can, Okay.

0:36:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in fact that'd be an easy way to go back through your journal, and actually what you could really do is with paper journals is just open the phone and say, okay, January 5th 1969. We're getting ready for Apollo 11 launch. We're all excited about Neil, our hometown boy, going to the moon, and you transcribed it. You'll do a better job than any OCR could do. Absolutely yep.

0:36:43 - Mikah Sargent
I'm a big fan of these systems. Well, I appreciate it.

0:36:45 - Leo Laporte
That's the only negative is that I have 15 of them. I do there's something about.

0:36:50 - Caller
That's the problem. There's so many choices, so many things out there, and you don't want to have too many because you don't want to figure out. Where did I put it?

0:36:56 - Leo Laporte
But one of the reasons I still use a paper journal is there's something about the physical process of handwriting that's so valuable.

So what I actually do is I take a picture of these pages, put them in day one Nice, so at least I have them there and, yeah, that works out pretty well. Day one and many other journaling apps also have OCR, and even a little bit of OCR is good because it gives you some indexes right. It may not get it right, but at least it's gonna have some Few keywords that might pick up on Sure.

Hey, thanks for the call. Great question why? Thank you, and thanks for the trivia. I appreciate it, it's gonna be a question for us. Now I gotta go visit the museum, the Armstrong Museum.

0:37:33 - Caller
Yeah, and then check out the tower, the temple of tolerance. You would love that.

0:37:37 - Leo Laporte
The temple of tolerance. You go to that temple of tolerance, wow.

0:37:40 - Caller
Temple of tolerance, wow. Wapakoneta's got some stuff going on in the world. Wow, yeah, not much, mr Not much.

0:37:49 - Leo Laporte
I'm a fan of tolerance, so if there's a temple, I'll join it. That's awesome.

0:37:54 - Caller
Hey, nice to meet you, you'll enjoy that.

0:37:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:37:56 - Caller
Thank you, thank you. Thank you for my call. I appreciate it.

0:38:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here's an article about the temple of tolerance on roadsideamericacom An artist hippy enclave, but it's not. It's in the backyard of a suburban home.

0:38:13 - Mikah Sargent
There's no bullying.

0:38:14 - Leo Laporte
No bullying in the temple of tolerance.

0:38:17 - Mikah Sargent
There are wedge between human beings.

0:38:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's. You know what I love and in fact, sometimes it'd be fun to drive all over America and see these, Like the Watts Towers, like the temple of tolerance, A place where a single human has said I am going to build something that will outlast me. You know, I'm going to build my own cathedral.

It's kind of cool. Yeah, all right, we took a lot of time to do that. Let me take a break, cause I know Scott Wilkinson is waiting in the wings and I want to hear what he has to say about the TVs that we will see this week at CES. That should be very interesting. Our show today brought to you and when I say brought to you, I mean quite literally Brought to you by Cachefly. If you download our shows, you're downloading them from Cachefly, our content delivery network, or CDN.

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These guys are innovators. A lot of other CDNs copy them. Cachefly's got the engineers, the talent, the brains to do it right, delivering rich media content up to 159% faster than other major CDNs. Join Cachefly, the world's fastest CDN. We're such happy partners of Cachefly. Jump start your journey with Cachefly with a complimentary first month, or give it a whirl with a free, free five terabyte account. Just go to cachefly.com/twit. As I always say, bandwidth for Ask The Tech Guys brought to you by Cachefly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com/twit. Thank you, Cachefly. Scott Wilkinson is on the horn with us, our home theater geek. Host of the home theater geeks show in our club. Hello, scotty.

0:41:08 - Scott Wilkinson
Hello Leo, hello Mikah.

0:41:10 - Leo Laporte
I have a very important question for you.

0:41:13 - Scott Wilkinson
Yes.

0:41:13 - Leo Laporte
Have you ever played the Darth Vader March on the tuba?

0:41:21 - Scott Wilkinson
I personally have not. I bet it would be so funny, but it would be great.

0:41:26 - Leo Laporte
It would be a little more. Who needs a tuba?

0:41:30 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.

0:41:31 - Leo Laporte
That'd be awesome.

0:41:34 - Scott Wilkinson
For Scott Even better, arrange it for a group of tubas. Oh my golly.

0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
Now we're talking that's got to exist somewhere. I'm gonna have to say it's got to exist somewhere. I mean, that's such an obvious thing to do. So I say that because my socks featured Darth Vader, today the 49ers version, because the 49ers.

0:41:52 - Scott Wilkinson
We have?

0:41:54 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so we are big Niners fans at the Little Port House. So, scott, have you have your pedometer all oiled up and ready to go.

0:42:02 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh no, I'm not going to see you this year. That'll be the first time in how long? Well, I, well, I didn't go during the pandemic, of course, oh yeah, and I haven't been since, because you know the COVID's still out there. Yeah, it's getting worse, and that worse.

0:42:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and RSV is still out there. Yeah, my mom's nursing home. Everybody got COVID except my mom. I was, oh man, wow, lucky her. Good for her.

0:42:33 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.

0:42:33 - Leo Laporte
The good news is now, with Pax Lovett, even these seniors usually do fine. I mean, they can survive it, but still Yikes.

0:42:43 - Scott Wilkinson
I would rather not get it in the first place. Let's not get it in the first place. Thank you very much, so I decided not to go. However, my good friend Mike Heiss is going and he is going to come on to the podcast my podcast after the show Wonderful and talk about everything he saw there.

0:43:06 - Leo Laporte
What do you expect? I remember a few years ago and it was funny because you would come on the radio show saying I can't tell you, but there's gonna be a big advance. Yeah, tvs and we were talking at that time about QD, oled, correct, which is to this day the best TV technology you can buy in the stores.

0:43:26 - Scott Wilkinson
Best flat panel TV technology available, yeah, yeah.

0:43:29 - Leo Laporte
Anything like that this year.

0:43:31 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, nothing revolutionary like that. We're gonna see evolution of QD OLED, certainly. I expect. We now are in the second generation from Samsung and Sony and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see the third generation introduced. Okay, what would make it better? Better processing? Oh yeah, that's already really good.

0:44:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we should mention that your TV is really a multiple thing of components and it's basically a computer. Of course there's the panel, and we talk about QD, oled or OLED or LCD or LED. That's the panel technology. But in order to put something up on that screen, you have to have a computer built into the television, yep, and so there's a processor, there's RAM and there's software, and that makes a big difference, right?

0:44:25 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh yeah, huge difference. Huge difference. It's really the whole ball game other than the panel technology itself, and Sony generally has the edge on processor technology. Samsung's no slouch. Lg is no slouch. They're all really really good. I expect to see also from LG. I haven't seen anything to indicate that LG is going to introduce a QD OLED Now they might, I don't know, I don't have tomorrow actually they're banking on conventional OLED.

Interesting, and I did see a press release that was issued before the show that said you know, their newest generation of OLED is going to increase brightness and, you know, make OLED closer to LCD. In that respect, they have a new technology, new as of last year, called micro lens array, mla, which puts tiny little lenses in front of the OLED sub pixels and increases brightness that way. Along with processing, but we'll see the next generation of processing. One thing that we'll certainly see, that you will not be surprised about, is the predominance of AI.

0:45:55 - Mikah Sargent
I'm so glad you're talking about this because just on Thursday I had the opportunity to talk about the new TVs that Roku is coming out with, and one of the big features they're talking about is the use of AI for individual picture quality for what you're watching. So every time you watch some new content, that the picture is tuned specifically for that, and I had to know what you think about this, because this feels like it could be as bad as that motion smoothing feature that we all end up turning off on our parents' televisions.

0:46:34 - Scott Wilkinson
I wouldn't be surprised if I myself would turn it off. How does it work?

0:46:40 - Mikah Sargent
What is it aimed at?

0:46:42 - Scott Wilkinson
doing Well, it's analyzing the image on the screen at any given moment and it's automatically adjusting color brightness, contrast, all this stuff to supposedly optimize the picture quality. The TCL is talking. I think Roku is making their own now. Oh yeah, well, they all have AI processors now TCL, lg, samsung, sony, roku.

0:47:17 - Leo Laporte
Should anybody consider a Roku TV? It sounds like kind of a well, who makes them first of all? I guess.

0:47:23 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think anybody knows. It's a mystery. You know it could be that. Well, it's undoubtedly one of the Chinese companies, so it could be Hisense or TCL, that's what I would guess.

0:47:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean TCL offers Roku TVs.

0:47:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was gonna guess it was probably TCL and they just kind of did a little swap there with. Let me ask ChatGbt who makes Roku TVs? You ask ChatGbt and I'll continue to ask Scott. Good idea.

I'm kind of let me give you my cynical take on this, please. I think because we know that a lot of television manufacturers subsidize the cost of the television through ad tracking or through watch tracking. Essentially, you're seeing what content you're viewing. I think that this AI stuff is one more reason to either trick or convince people into connecting their television to the internet. Keeping that connection going, because they're talking about how not only is it analyzing the actual picture that's coming through, but there's talk of like metadata that it's picking up on. It's picking up on what's being sensed to say what kind of content this is, and the only way that can happen is if there's a connection there. So I really think it's just more of an opportunity to keep you connected to the internet, instead of doing what we always suggest here, which is don't connect your smart TV to the internet?

0:48:50 - Scott Wilkinson
Correct, in fact, mike Heis. I was talking to him before he left today to go to CES and he was saying that there's a pretty big push to move away from the term smart TV to the term C TV, for connected TV. This is going to be a big push in the industry for people to connect exactly what you're talking about to connect their TV to the internet, not only for, you know, apps like Netflix and what have you, but, as you say, to utilize AI in the cloud, even maybe, but certainly, to monitor what you're doing In order, to quote, unquote optimize your experience, exactly, yeah, but what it really is is optimizing their data collection.

0:49:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, did Chad GPT have an answer for you, leo? No.

0:49:54 - Leo Laporte
No, in fact, unfortunately, if you search or search for who makes Roku TVs, they'll give you all the people who make TVs with Roku's built in as far as I can tell, no one has speculated on. I imagine it would just be a little detective work to figure out where you know what?

0:50:12 - Scott Wilkinson
Mike's there? He's on the ground and he's undoubtedly going to go see Roku TVs. If they are there, like in a booth or something, I would ask him to sleuth around.

0:50:23 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't really matter who makes them. I guess the issue is are these good TVs, right? Are they less expensive? They have a pro line, irregular line. Are they less expensive?

0:50:31 - Scott Wilkinson
Yes, well, the pro line is new this year, right.

0:50:35 - Leo Laporte
That's the one so called smart with this AI business?

0:50:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I think they're a fifth They've got now pro series, as well as their Roku quote unquote regular series.

0:50:49 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, roku plus and Roku select the other two brand other two series. The pro series will come in 55, 65 and 75 inches. Pricing has not yet been announced but there have been some rumors that that perhaps even the 75 inches going to be in the $1500 which is very inexpensive compared to the other guys.

0:51:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah. And maybe one of the ways they make up the made, the make up the difference in profit, is by spying on you and selling that information at data, exactly, exactly, but you know maybe that's worth it to you. Maybe you don't care, I don't, I don't care, and maybe, if you don't care, that's not a bad thing. You could also buy these TVs and not connect them, although then there's no, you wouldn't buy Roku TV without.

0:51:34 - Mikah Sargent
I'm more curious to see if Roku will continue to partner with other companies and have a TCL, roku TV or a high. This is a very good question.

0:51:45 - Scott Wilkinson
It's, and Mike will tell us. Yeah, I'd love to hear that Rumors that TCL may may be kind of moving away from that, at least in their top end.

0:51:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Wired says, according to our discord who a little research from Joe that both TCL and high sense make the Roku TVs, which would kind of make sense that makes sense to. Chinese.

0:52:07 - Mikah Sargent
If Roku's willing to pay more to TCL and high sense, then you know to get their branding on the front instead of beside. That makes perfect sense.

0:52:16 - Leo Laporte
Our good friend Roberto Baldwin writes in Wired that it's a result of a partnership between the Roku people and the major TV manufacturers TCL and high sense. So Roberto probably knows yeah, this is the last year, when they first announced it, of course, actually wait a minute, oh no, no, this is for 2014.

0:52:39 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's. That must have been the TCL Roku TV. That's the other right.

0:52:44 - Leo Laporte
Never mind Forget that that's see, this is why the chat GPT can't give me a good answer either.

0:52:49 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, right.

0:52:49 - Mikah Sargent
We don't know. I think it's what it boils down to 10 year old information.

0:52:53 - Leo Laporte
Really all that matters is is it worth buying?

0:52:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I have to say I'm still a fan of getting.

0:52:59 - Leo Laporte
I have the Samsung QD OLED absolutely best screen, really gorgeous. Oh yeah, my LG OLED, still a very, very nice screen. I think those two companies and their OLEDs are still probably the way to, and so a throw Sony in, of course. Throw Sony into the mix, you've got the scratch.

0:53:15 - Scott Wilkinson
They have less of the market for some reason, but they make an excellent TV that typically wins the the annual flat TV shootout, the value electronics.

0:53:28 - Leo Laporte
So, in other words, it's going to be another one of those CES and they're more common than not in which there's nothing really huge to announce, but just incremental improvements.

0:53:40 - Scott Wilkinson
Correct. That's that's what I'm expecting. Now, who knows, maybe we'll be surprised. Tomorrow is the big press conference day, starting at 8 am with LG, and.

0:53:50 - Leo Laporte
I don't know I'm going to. If Mike is not in our discord yet I see him all the time. I used to see him all the time in the IRC I will send him a complimentary club membership because we would like to get him into our club discord so that you can talk with club members about what he's seeing and so forth. Yes, so I'll send you the information and you can please do, and I'll forward it on to him.

0:54:10 - Scott Wilkinson
Thank you, we're going to be recording that show shortly after he gets back for for broadcast. It'll probably be two parts. I mean, ces is a big show, obviously, as you know, yeah, so we're going to split it into two parts. There isn't that much generally. There isn't that much audio news at the show.

0:54:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, I got an email from Denon saying you'd love our new AV receiver, and then I saw it was $6000 and so, whoa, I closed the tab quick before. I got to it. So there are people still making high end audio components, I guess.

0:54:47 - Scott Wilkinson
It's true, it's true, but I don't know if you remember, some years ago, the Venetian hotel hosted several floors of high end audio. That's right. It's all gone, not anymore. Huh, not anymore. It's gone, it's. There's nothing like that there anymore. You could thank Apple and it's white earbuds for that.

0:55:06 - Leo Laporte
There's a whole generation that. That's the state of the art in Hi-Fi and they're perfectly happy with that, and so I imagine the market for so-called high fidelity components is dwindling. Yeah, yeah, and you know what? We're all getting our music on our phones these days, and it's true, it ain't bad. I gotta say it ain't bad.

0:55:26 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, if you have a good enough earbuds, yeah, and the higher end earbuds from almost all the manufacturers actually sound pretty good.

0:55:36 - Leo Laporte
What do you listen to for headphones these days?

0:55:39 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, when I'm out walking, I listen to a pair of one more, the numeral one, and then M-O-R-E true wireless earbuds, they're called. They actually have the brand or the model name Stylish. Oh, but I love one more earbuds. In any event, they're great price for performance, aren't they? Great price for performance?

Absolutely right, so, and they, I think they still make some wired ones, but you know, phones these days no longer have a wired output. Right, I mean, you can. You can get a dongle that plugs into the charging port of a phone and converts it into audio, so you can do it that way. But these one more true wireless earbuds are great.

0:56:28 - Leo Laporte
I finally gave in and just went with the AirPods and AirPods pros, you know, because they're fine.

They're not the best sound, but the ecosystem is so complete in the adaptive sound and the transparency and the noise cancellation and working with easily with the iPhone and stuff. Just make it like I know. Unfortunately they get you every time. Scott Wilkinson Watch Home Theater Geeks in our club. If you're not a club member, this is a great chance to join club twit for seven dollars a month. You get that show. You get it. Mike has hands on Macintosh. We do a lot of club only exclusives. You also get, of course, iOS today.

All iOS. Today. You also get all of our other shows ad free and it's seven bucks a month plus the Discord. There's so many benefits and it helps us immensely. Twittv slash club Twit. Thank you, scott, I'm looking forward to your new year Darth Vader March on the tuba, not the Vuvuzela, though. No, just the tuba, not the Vuvuzela.

0:57:28 - Scott Wilkinson
No, please, oh man.

0:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Your illustration from one of our AI AI tools.

0:57:35 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh wow, look at that.

0:57:37 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what the he's got a samurai, yeah. So that's cuz samurai.

0:57:41 - Mikah Sargent
Open AI won't generate Darth Vader, specifically because of copyright. So copyright Of course. This is a tall, imposing figure wearing futuristic dark armor.

0:57:54 - Scott Wilkinson
Somewhat like playing a tuba. Man I love that. The force is so awesome.

0:58:01 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, scott Wilkinson.

0:58:02 - Mikah Sargent
Home Theater Geek Thanks so much.

0:58:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you did that. Yeah, oh, I didn't see the name. So if you ask it for Darth Vader, it won't give you anything.

0:58:13 - Mikah Sargent
In fact, I one time got in trouble, so to speak, because I kept trying to get it to generate Shrek things and then finally it said, no, I'm not gonna do it. And then I tried to change it. I was like can you generate a green ogre? And it says it quite literally, said back to me it doesn't matter how you word it, I'm not going to generate a Shrek say chat.

0:58:33 - Leo Laporte
GPT is not smart?

0:58:36 - Mikah Sargent
AGI here we come. I kind of got a little scared at that point. It's like closed tab.

0:58:42 - Leo Laporte
We're watching you, Sargent, oh dear, knock it off, it doesn't matter how you word it.

0:58:47 - Leo Laporte
Knock it off. You can ask for it any way you want to. I'm not gonna give it to you 8887242884 is the phone number.

0:58:56 - Leo Laporte
Lines are open. Now Please, mr John Ashley, producer man, pick us another caller, how about?

0:59:03 - Mikah Sargent
an email. Oh, I forgot, we have atg@twit.tv Full box of emails, let me open one and see this comes.

0:59:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is from John Matthews. Long one, long one. Should I read the whole thing? Three paragraphs. Dear Leo and Mikah, I have a question. You have probably already addressed the past episode, because I can't believe I'm the only one with this problem. You're not. My father passed away a couple of years ago, left behind a Samsung tablet I would like to give to my daughter. Problem is when I try to restore it. Google now wants to verify it with a phone number or previous email account, which I don't have passwords to. He's searched the web and he finds links to paid products to unlock it. He says I'm Larry for paying for one of those and I don't blame you. I think you're probably right now too. Is there a free way to do this? He says. I understand Google does this to prevent theft, as does Apple, I think Apple. I'm surprised that Google does it too. I would imagine Apple's even more draconian. You have to have a death certificate.

1:00:07 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it gets a very proof of purchase. And yeah, and not only that, but in many cases it depends on who you talk to and if the person has indicated in some way that they are willing to give up the device, right, like that they've got a legacy contact in place or something like that oh, if you had a legacy contact.

1:00:26 - Leo Laporte
So I did do that.

1:00:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that is what makes it more likely, because that's kind of your pre consent. I don't know how to do it with.

1:00:33 - Leo Laporte
Android. I haven't ever encountered this.

1:00:35 - Mikah Sargent
I think that you are smart and wise to have not paid for a service, because I cannot speak to any of them working I honestly, the thing that I hate about questions like this is the because the answer that we have to give in many cases, which is it's all about how things should have been done or what way it could have been.

1:00:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but this was years ago Exactly, and so there's nothing that, yeah, there's nothing to do. So, if I think you should be able to factory, this is the thing Apple prevents, because Apple does this whole thing, where they make sure you have to activate a iPad with an Apple account and you can't reset it without access to that, correct?

1:01:19 - Mikah Sargent
That's why they have you turn off Find my iPhone, because that is essentially the switch that says keep this locked. And so if you ever have traded in an iPhone, you know that they will have told you hundreds of times to turn off Find my iPhone. That disables activation lock and makes it possible for that device to be restarted, refreshed, renewed with someone new yeah, but yes, with Samsung Tablet, I don't know.

1:01:45 - Leo Laporte
There are ways to hard reset Samsung Tablets, and I think that this would mean if see, presumably it's locked, right, so he doesn't know the numbers to get into it. And if you knew the numbers, then you would just go to settings and you do factory reset and you'd be able to reuse it. But maybe this is locked, in which case you need the hard reset, which includes reinstallation of everything, including, I think, the firmware. Looks like you do have to be able to factory using Android recovery. This is from Samsung's own page, so I will put this in the show notes Samsung Tablet hard resets carried out when the settings need to be altered due to impromptu functioning.

The thing is really dead. You press the power button, you hold it to switch it off, volume up at home button, home buttons and you hold them for some time and you wait for the Samsung logo to appear and then you release the buttons. Then you get into Android recovery. Did you see that from ScooterX? Okay, scooterx is a link to how to get a Google account recovery. I don't think what he's trying to do. He did mention Google, but I think what he just wants to do is get the tablet wiped so he can give it to his daughter. If you want to get the Google account, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

1:03:12 - Mikah Sargent
But if you can get access to the email where this code is being sent, or whatever, and it's tied to the Google account. That would be helpful.

1:03:20 - Leo Laporte
It's unclear from the email. He says I want to pass it on to my daughter and he's trying to do a factory reset, which tells me he doesn't care about the Google account. That's a separate matter. You should be able to reset that Samsung device from the Android recovery screen, in other words, without logging in, and then you can wipe the data, a factory reset it. I don't think you'd have to re-log into any accounts. I think you could just now basically have a brand new tablet.

Let me put this link into our show notes. This is actually from a website called techcultedcom. I'm not familiar with it, dorothy, I'm sorry, betty Torres, but I will put this in our show notes, and I think that that's the hard reset, and I think the hard reset should work. It doesn't work on an Apple because in order to reuse that tablet, you have to log into the same Apple account that bought it. That's why, when that happens, what you do is you go to Apple with the death certificate and the receipt and you say see, I own it, this person's passed, and then Apple can actually bypass their protections. The activation lock is probably there for a good reason, but it causes a significant number of headaches for people Cause, especially cause somebody's just passed you don't really want. Let me do another one. That was fun. One more Do you mind I?

1:04:44 - Mikah Sargent
don't mind.

1:04:44 - Leo Laporte
Come on let me do it.

1:04:46 - Mikah Sargent
I don't make the follow calls for saying Really you like this haircut.

1:04:49 - Leo Laporte
I do. I feel like I look like that guy in Piki Blinders, like I'm going to throw my hat with it.

1:04:54 - Caller
That's a good thing, it's a good look.

1:04:55 - Mikah Sargent
That is a very good look. That's a look. Yeah, you want to look like that guy in Piki. Blinders, you want to look like Cillian Murphy in that show. Yes, Fresh fly yeah.

1:05:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, but it's like I got all this hair on top and then nothing on the side. It's still good, it's a good look. It's a good look okay. Yeah, you know, this is a promise. I'm not, I'm an old guy, I'm not stylish, so I have to trust you. Young guys. Yeah, I promise. Oh, from Matt in Wisconsin, possible fishing attack. Oh, tweet, tweet, tweet. Hey guys, my folks call me. Oh, yeah, okay, I guarantee you it is. My folks call me about a questionable Facebook marketplace interaction.

1:05:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh no.

1:05:33 - Leo Laporte
Don't do it. They had that I'd like some advice on. Maybe your listeners could benefit as well. They listed an item, okay, so they were selling. Okay, someone responded right away from the interested party that they sent them a verification code to prove they were not scammers. Okay, they responded the right way. They were interested. Then they received a message that they had sent from the interested party, that they had sent them a verification code to prove they were not scammers. Unfortunately, oh so I'm sorry for me to understand this I think his parents they asked the parents to send them their Facebook verification code. Oh, unfortunately, they did so.

Now the scammer. I guess so I'm not sure exactly from Matt's prose they listed an item and someone responded right away that they were interested. Then they received a message from the interested party that they had sent them a verification code to prove they were not scammers. Ah, so they're saying I wanna buy your refrigerator, get ready, cause you're gonna get a verification code from me. Except it's not from them, it's from Facebook. Unfortunately, when they got the code his parents they gave it to the scammer. So what the scammer has done is it's kind of fairly clever is imply that that Facebook code really came from them and you could say okay, if you give it to us, their parents did that's a verification code, he says. I advise them to change every password immediately. Then they call a credit bureau and put a freeze on their credit. What other advice would you recommend? Or did I induce panic for nothing?

1:07:23 - Mikah Sargent
All right, well, let's walk this through. Wow, no, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Oh, okay, you found an article about it. Yeah, so what they're doing is they're going through Facebook Marketplace, where you've got typically less tech savvy people, right, and they are setting up a Google phone number and they're using that's how you reach me to buy my refrigerator. Yes, and because they don't want that number to be tied to them, the scammer they're having it sent to. They'd ask you for your phone number, leo. The code would be sent to your phone number. You would give them the code and now they can activate that Google voice number. It's tied to your phone number and any scams that they do will seem like they're coming from you.

1:08:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so they're not trying to get in your Facebook account. They're getting your phone number, the special phone number you set up. It's always a Google voice number.

1:08:17 - Mikah Sargent
According to Michelle Mason of the BBB, they're really doing is trying to get the Google voice number that you can retrieve from Google, get the code and then have access to that. What that means is, at a minimum, they could use your number that is associated with your account to pull other scams.

1:08:30 - Leo Laporte
Job one is discontinue that number, mm-hmm. Just throw it out and let's see if you've used that number for anything else. You'll want to change that verification number. Chances are you haven't, right, because you set it up just for the Facebook, right, exactly. So really, what they're doing is they're getting a verified Google phone number that they can use to then scam other people. So you immediately want to disassociate yourself from that phone number, right, absolutely. And if Google has, they may have with Google voice. They may have a reporting mechanism that says this number has been used to scam me or as a scammer has this number, please put a red flag on it. That's the first thing.

It doesn't sound like, matt, you needed to change your passwords or put a credit freeze on. Not that those are harmful things to do, they're just time consuming. Changing your passwords is fine, as long as you use a password manager and you're not just changing it to something like your birth date. It's not a bad thing to put a credit freeze on your credit accounts. In fact, I recently bought a new car and they did a credit check on that. You probably you know and you ran an apartment or whatever. They're going to do a credit check. The credit freeze prevents those credit checks from happening. It also prevents anybody from applying for a credit card in that account. So TransUnion, experian and Equifax the big three, and there's a couple others, by the way all allow you and by law this is free to freeze that account, to say no, no, no, don't give anybody any information. They don't want to do this, by the way, because that's how they make money is by giving your information to credit card companies and others. That's how come you get all those solicitations in the mail. As soon as I froze my accounts. Nobody's offered me a credit card ever since. I don't understand why not. So it's harmless. It's free and harmless. It's a little time consuming, but it's harmless to freeze them. And unless you are and I bet your parents are older like I am and probably are not applying for credit very often, right? So then it's no harm, no foul to freeze it.

All of them are now, thanks to federal law, required to give you a fairly easy way to unfreeze it. You could do it permanently or temporarily. I'd recommend temporarily, say, unfreeze it. When I bought the car, I said unfreeze it for the next five days and then freeze it up again so that they were able to run a credit report and then get that information back, but after that it's frozen. So it's again frozen. There was only one company, transunion. I had a little trouble, or was it? No, I'm sorry, experian, I had a little trouble doing a temporary unfreeze. These guys really don't want you to do this. They hate this, but the federal law requires them to do this. So I think, especially since your parents are older, a credit freeze is not a bad thing to do. Just in general, I have a credit freeze on all my accounts.

1:11:31 - Mikah Sargent
I actually do, too, when I'm a youngster.

1:11:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you just have to remember that before you apply for rental or anything where they would do a credit check, yep, just remember to go back and that you unfreeze it temporarily. What I did is I asked the car salesman well, who do you use for the credit checks? He told me I unfroze that account temporarily and then now it's frozen again. So it's a little inconvenience. It's kind of like two factor authentication. So you haven't met, done anything wrong? No, it's okay.

1:11:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I've got some good news too. We'll link to this page. Google has a specific page to help you reclaim your voice number, so if someone else ends up taking your voice number, linking it to something else, you can get it back.

1:12:13 - Leo Laporte
There's a series of steps you take. We'll put that link on Google Voice on how to reclaim your voice number. So in this process they link their real number with a Google voice number and that's what you don't.

1:12:27 - Mikah Sargent
And then, yeah, if investigators were going through this, then they'd see that Google voice number. Reach out to Google, perhaps, and then find out oh, that's linked to Leo Laporte. Leo's the one that's been doing all these scams against people. No, he got scammed when he was trying to sell his old vehicle on Facebook Marketplace.

1:12:46 - Leo Laporte
So that's Google Voice help. You could show the screen there. We'll put this help note into the show notes. That's really interesting.

1:12:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because this is a multi-level going on. They're so good out there at tricking you.

1:13:01 - Leo Laporte
They really are In a variety of fashions, and good on you, matt, for helping your folks. And good on them, by the way, for reaching out to you. For reaching out to you because I think sometimes people are embarrassed, absolutely. They think they've been hacked and they kind of don't want to tell anybody. And if you have a technically sophisticated person in your family, tell them. And, of course, because you're watching the show, you're that person.

1:13:23 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, if you are the technically sophisticated person, think about what we just said and tell your folks, tell your friends, tell them, hey, I'm not ever going to judge you. If you let, you can come to me. It happens to people, it's okay. Tell them when it happened to you. Yeah, exactly, that is a great way to do it.

1:13:40 - Leo Laporte
Gosh, you know, this thing happened to me and I almost responded. The big one now? I just got a text message this morning. The big one now is, of course, these text messages that imply you know somebody? Hi, you free this weekend to have dinner. Now it's me, leo. Yeah, well, it's an area code. I'm not, you know, this is the problem. It could be, but it's a number that is not in my phone book and it's an area code I didn't recognize. So what I would do if you have an iPhone, is report junk and then what it'll do is it'll delete it and it'll report it not only to your Apple but to your carrier, and they will probably make that phone number unusable.

It's kind of a sad story because these people who are doing these it's called pig butchering. The people who are doing this are often themselves victims in countries where it's not well enforced, like Myanmar. They get these compounds, these dormitories, they get trick people into going there for a job, take away their passports, basically lock them in, and then their job is scamming people until they can figure a way to get out. It's really terrible. So everybody's a victim in this one. Don't respond. There's no point in responding. Just report it as junk, if you can. Even that doesn't make a difference, by the way, because they have lots of numbers. They move through numbers quickly. That's one of the reasons this scam happened. All right, let's take a little tiny, teeny, weeny pause for reflection and then let's continue on with another question I'm gonna pick up on a phone caller.

1:15:18 - Mikah Sargent
Phone caller don't forget to hit star six so that you can unmute yourself as you are brought live onto the air US holiday sales online in the month between November 1st and the end of the year 22,.

1:15:35 - Leo Laporte
sorry, $222 billion. That's up 5%. I wonder how they know that they make it up. Hi what's your name and where you're calling from. Adobe does this. This is John. Hi, John, I'm Texas hey. John welcome, I'm Texas. What's up?

1:15:53 - Caller
All right, I just wanted to say how are you doing today?

1:15:57 - Leo Laporte
Good start. Did you have a question?

1:16:00 - Caller
I just wanted to say yes. I wanted to say that, if I ask, are you familiar with a target pregnancy scandal that happened a few years?

1:16:09 - Leo Laporte
back. Yes, actually it's not really a scandal, but it's an eye opener. Young woman who had not informed her family that she was pregnant started getting solicitations from companies for things that a pregnant person would want, like baby furniture and diapers. It turns out target because they're able to remember when you get a target card. Why do they give you a discount at any of these stores? It's because then they can attach your phone number.

They can attach your phone number to your purchases and I guess she was looking. She didn't even have to be buying these things. By the way, apparently, in many of these stores, cameras are watching you and AI has just made this better. This happened years ago, but AI has just made it better and they noticed she might have wandered down the diaper aisle and lingered. Now here's a person, here's a young woman with no children lingering in the diaper aisle. Maybe she's gonna have a baby Either that or she knows somebody. So this is called data analytics. Target's not the only company that does that. In fact, I would say every company does this Predictive analytics. It was.

The story was told in a book called the Power of Habit and it was also in the New York Times. It's a fairly old story, but I think that it's really mostly good, helpful for you to understand that people can watch everything you do. Remember we were talking about that Cox Media Group website. They took down. They put up for a few days and they took down immediately. That implied that they could listen to your private conversations and then target you with advertisements. There's some question about how effective that system was, but it resonated with people because they thought I knew that Alexa was listening to me. I knew my Google home was listening to me. I know, but they don't need to listen to your conversations. That's actually kind of a hard way to do it. They just need to look at what you're doing.

1:18:14 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, it's all behavioral based, and it's when there's another person in your house that because I've got a lot of privacy protections in place, but there's another person in my house that doesn't have all of this extra tech that I put in place to stop cookies and all this other stuff. And it's funny because the conversations we have and then I will be scrolling through Instagram and see ads based on something that they had said yeah, my daughter did the same thing.

1:18:38 - Leo Laporte
She said I was talking to somebody about guinea pigs and all of a sudden I see ads for guinea pigs. It's not the conversation.

1:18:43 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly exactly. It's the behavior. It's the behavior. You're somewhere. At some point you looked up something.

1:18:49 - Leo Laporte
We forget Uh-huh. First of all, it's not just looking up things. There's all sorts of things we do, absolutely Literally. Going slower in the diaper aisle is an input. And the thing is, this was a long time ago. This was before we had these powerful AI capabilities and data recording capabilities and cameras everywhere. Now it's trivial.

Why do you think Amazon built a store where you walk in, you give them your handprint, you walk in, pick up stuff and go Well, yeah, it's convenient, we did it for the user. No, they did it because you can go into a store and they could see everything you pick up, look at, even stop to look at. Exactly Because if you have cameras and sensors everywhere, that is hugely valuable information. It's being collected about us all the time. There are companies, many of them, literally more than 100 companies in the US alone that buy this information from TV manufacturers. Why do you think Roku has a camera in the TV and a microphone in the remote control? This information is valuable. They sell it on to data brokers, who aggregate it that's really when it becomes really valuable and sell it on.

Now you may say, well, golly, we ought to stop this. And I think we ought to stop it too, and I think the United States Congress ought to do something about this. Except every time they think about it, the CIA, the FBI and the NSA come to them and say gentlemen and ladies, please considered law enforcement. They buy this information from data brokers and they use it in law enforcement. There will never be, I'm now convinced, a law in the United States to prohibit this kind of collection of information and sale to data brokers, because it helps law enforcement and law enforcement has a rightly so very powerful lobby in Congress.

Will the EU perhaps do something about this? They've been a lot more aggressive about privacy. I don't know if it'll help us in the US, but it is important to remember. You're constantly giving them information. Just by going into a store, you're giving them information. When you get one of those supermarket cards, you're giving information and the decision that you have to make is am I getting enough savings at Safeway or Target by having that card to justify what I know is happening, which is they now know everything I ever bought from?

1:21:10 - Scott Wilkinson
them.

1:21:11 - Leo Laporte
And they sell it on and they've connected it to me. So, whatever you do, don't slow down in the diaper aisle. Who's next?

1:21:20 - Mikah Sargent
Um, let's get this going. Got some more phone calls. Here Hmm, one second All right, here we go. Next caller. Remember to press star six to unmute yourself.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
Hey guys, can you hear me? Ah, yes, what's your first name? Where are you calling from?

1:21:48 - Caller
I am Rob by it and some uh back of it.

1:21:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, just up the road a piece, Hi Rob.

1:21:55 - Caller
Yeah, hi, are you excited about, are you?

1:21:58 - Leo Laporte
excited about the billionaires buying up big chunks of Solano County so they can turn it into their private utopia. Are you excited about that?

1:22:08 - Caller
I mean, we're hearing a lot of that out here. You know, I sort of think it'd be a good idea, hey it's under the armor. So I don't, I think.

1:22:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's who's making money on it Right there by the land from farmers. Yeah.

1:22:22 - Caller
Yeah, yeah. So I can't really say I'm not in their shoes, but it seems like a sort of a good idea to me. I'm not against it.

1:22:31 - Leo Laporte
If they want to, why not? I would move in, wouldn't you?

1:22:36 - Caller
Uh yeah, some fucking is going to be really nice.

1:22:38 - Leo Laporte
With utopia is it's only one letter different from dystopia, so maybe, maybe three letters, that's two letters more than one, three, two. Anyway, it's a few letters different. What can we do for you, sir?

1:22:51 - Caller
Yes, Well, I'm hoping you can help me. I've got this dilemma here there's there's four components to it. I've got a PC and an iPhone and Outlook. I don't use the cloud and I've been using iTunes to synchronize the Outlook calendar and contacts with my iPhone and it stopped working and I've tried all sorts of stuff to debug it.

1:23:20 - Leo Laporte
Rather than fixing you were using iTunes on your computer and it.

1:23:23 - Mikah Sargent
Let you sync your Outlook calendar.

1:23:28 - Caller
Yeah, easily, yeah, that's up until a certain point yeah, they stopped supporting that.

1:23:35 - Leo Laporte
Ha ha ha.

1:23:36 - Caller
Wow, it was working fine for a long time and then two updates ago. So I just stopped.

1:23:43 - Leo Laporte
So, really, what you want to do is you want to have an Outlook calendar that is synchronizing between your computer, your Windows computer and your iPhone.

1:23:52 - Caller
Yeah.

1:23:53 - Mikah Sargent
But you don't want the cloud.

1:23:55 - Caller
Or just give up Outlook. Yeah, I don't want the cloud involved because I was a counselor and I have people's names on there oh, privacy. But I'm thinking maybe I could drop Outlook and do a PC app on my desktop that has contacts, that has calendar, and then a similar thing that I can sync on my iPhone. That will synchronize more easily Now.

1:24:21 - Leo Laporte
I get why you were doing this. Yeah, no, this all makes sense. So you have private information in your calendar that you don't want any big tech entity to see, but you do want to be able to synchronize, which means the synchronization can't go through the cloud, which, by the way, it's doing right now, I think, with Outlook, but, moxnix, we won't worry about that. Your Outlook calendar is, I believe, synchronized up to your Microsoft account, unless you're not using a Microsoft account. Anyway, you want a calendar app that's private, that's local only, and that you can then connect your phone Like the old days with a Palm Pilot, where you would dock the pilot, you push the button and it would copy it all down in the Palm Pilot and then you'd be at need to be synchronized, and that is really a nice thing to have. I mean, what would be a third party?

1:25:13 - Caller
that.

1:25:13 - Leo Laporte
That'd be wonderful. Yeah, that was the good old days.

1:25:17 - Mikah Sargent
I honestly this is, I'm having trouble thinking of anything off the top of my head.

1:25:22 - Leo Laporte
You know I don't use Windows enough. I want a local only Windows calendar program. Almost everything is now in the cloud, and that's the problem.

1:25:33 - Caller
And a contact program too. Yeah, yeah.

1:25:36 - Leo Laporte
Of course, that's a really interesting question. You can sync Outlook without logging into a Microsoft account, but that that does not seem like. Outlook is going to constantly be trying to get you to use OneDrive, and it's not worth it to do that. And same thing with a Google calendar. So what we want is a standalone calendar app for Windows and one that will synchronize to the phone manually via a computer. I mean, mozilla's Thunderbird has contacts, true, true, I understand that.

Actually, I respect your desire to do this, because I suspect there's a lot of therapists, attorneys, physicians who are actually probably violating HIPAA because they're keeping this information in the cloud, and you have to be very careful. Hipaa requires certain privacy things. Let's see Wow, I am, I am, I am, this is, this is clearly there should be a market for this. Here's, there was. There's one way I know you could do this, and that is to use a local NAS, a network attached storage device, by basically making your own cloud.

So there's software called NextCloud or you can use I use Synology. Synology has a calendar and address book program which you could then, so you're storing it. You're, in fact, making your own cloud, you're storing it on a box in your closet. That is a hard drive that you could then use on your iPhone. You can synchronize with your iPhone and your Windows machine. It would be I think that's the best way to do it with NextCloud or a Synology which has its own apps. Then it's never sent to the cloud, so there's no risk of it ever kind of exfiltrating. Almost every calendar program I know of uses Syncing that's online, right.

Yeah, it uses a cloud, whether it's Google and and you know mostly Google. Now, the problem with doing this is it's expensive. You have to buy this hardware, but there are easy ways to do it, if it depends on how sophisticated you are. For instance, you could run NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi with a small storage device. Let me let me show you the program NextCloud. This is an open source, basically cloud that runs locally on-prem. Now you could go on cloud with it. But don't right, that's exactly what you don't want to do. This was originally created as I think it was called own cloud, and then they forked off of it. Now I'm a little worried because it looks like NextCloud has now gone commercial, which would be kind of too bad. Let me let me see what own cloud is up to. These are local cloud solutions. Yeah, so in effect, it's not the same thing as when we say the cloud right, yeah, so local.

1:29:10 - Mikah Sargent
Well, a cloud is just a computer. It's a computer, it's a computer, it's a local.

1:29:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, a cloud is just a computer somewhere. Yeah, you don't want to use somebody else's computer somewhere, you want to use your computer somewhere.

1:29:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I'm just trying to get the words to sing to you yeah, yeah.

1:29:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, cloud kind of implies that it's in the on the internet.

1:29:29 - Mikah Sargent
This is, in fact, not on the internet. This is something you have. You actually have control over.

1:29:33 - Leo Laporte
It looks like both NextCloud and own cloud have been purchased by larger companies, which is kite networks. Now, on zone cloud, nextcloud is owned by somebody. This is kind of annoying.

1:29:47 - Mikah Sargent
How about you? You did say well, this is probably something you considered. You said you were a counselor. Not currently are because recently retired.

1:29:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Maybe this is the opportunity to start a new calendar that takes a calendar that you have put it somewhere local, yeah, if you know, if you no longer have this requirement for privacy, the world would be a little easier for you. I have to know that, now that you mentioned this, I have to ask my therapist where do you?

1:30:18 - Mikah Sargent
store all your information. I bet you most therapists maybe they just say appointment with client. They don't have, you know, our name in it, or whatever.

1:30:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, my therapist uses an online billing system, so I get charged and pay. It pay automatically online, so I know all of that information is on the internet. So you have to trust the companies that you're using, that they provide security and nowadays we know that that's, you know, often a false promise because so many breaches. This is a really good question. It really is. If you can get a palm pilot, I think you're sick. The problem is that the Apple device Apple's moved more and more away from connecting to anything. In fact, we've for a long time talked about the rumor they're going to just get rid of ports entirely and do it all wirelessly, and so the easiest way for Apple to do that and the most profitable, is for you to use iCloud.

1:31:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, but you can. So if you had existed in the Apple ecosystem, this would actually have been a little bit simpler, because Apple does have these on my iPhone, on my iPad, on my Mac accounts that don't sync anywhere, but because you're trying to keep the calendar that's on your Windows machine in sync with your calendar that's on your iPhone. That's what makes it difficult to do this without involving the web somehow.

1:31:40 - Caller
You know you stomp us. Well, I suppose Apple is pretty secure.

1:31:45 - Leo Laporte
Shall I trust them? Yes, but the problem is Windows.

1:31:50 - Mikah Sargent
And also, according to what I was reading, apple does not. Apple specifies that iCloud is not HIPAA compliant because it would have to go through a whole process to gain that HIPAA compliance.

1:32:04 - Leo Laporte
And so there are very few cloud providers that are.

1:32:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it just does yeah, it says Now you're not bound by HIPAA.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
I don't think. Maybe I don't know. I don't know if psychotherapists or therapists or counselors are, but certainly yeah, we are, you are okay. So, and even if you weren't, that's a good higher standard than you would want to aspire to.

1:32:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, just to have that standard?

1:32:23 - Leo Laporte
yep, yeah Boy. That's a great question. It's a very good question. I think the only way that I can be sure that you could do this is with your own hardware. Get a Raspberry Pi with a hard drive or some inexpensive. There are a lot of inexpensive cloud appliances and the idea let me just give you a couple of names. The idea is you're storing it locally and synchronizing to it locally, so it never hits the cloud ever. A lot of companies make these little inexpensive devices that you can plug into your network If the account.

1:33:01 - Mikah Sargent
If the Microsoft account is Office 365 or Microsoft 365 Enterprise, it is HIPAA compliant Enterprise yeah. Well, it says Office 365 or Enterprise yeah, so you would have to have the Office 365 subscription at the very least for that to be HIPAA compliant, and then there's probably some hoops to jump through.

1:33:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely, and my concern would be to be easy to accidentally make it Undo what you've done. I think you want to buy a little device that you just it used to be a lot of these. This is all kind of old fashioned because everybody just says, well, fine, we're going to use the cloud, but there used to be. You could buy a lot of little devices you'd plug into your network and then would have software running on them that could do your calendar and contacts and it's network based and you would use. There is a standard. The good news is there's a standard for this called CalDAV and CardDAV. Dav and CardDAV and CalDAV are standard ways of synchronizing calendars and contacts, and so most of these appliances have CalDAV, carddav compliant end points that you then your iPhone, which also supports CalDAV and CardDAV, could log into and synchronize with your phone, would think I'm synchronizing with the cloud, but what it's really doing is synchronizing with a hard drive and your closet.

I'm gonna have to do some research on. There's so many of these, or there used to be so many of these I don't know what's out there right now. Anybody have a good suggestion for a, let's say, under a hundred dollar cloud device. That would be the way to do it. Now they're still trying to provide you with Microsoft compatible, hipaa compatible solutions in the Discord. I'm pretty sure such a thing. There are plenty of ways to do this, but with your own hardware. Are you willing to do your own hardware? How committed are you to this?

1:35:04 - Caller
I'm not sure I'm not that familiar with NASS. What kind of software would I run on it that I could?

1:35:17 - Leo Laporte
All these NASS would have a. Yeah, all these NASS would have a this is a very common usage would have an address book and a calendar piece of software that you could use Some of them you don't and then there'd be a synchronization.

And then you'd synchronize and so it would give you a URL that you would put in your calendar on your iPhone and your calendar and your outlook calendar that you would synchronize with and it would be stored locally. That's one of the ways I think of doing it. Everybody in the Discord says, unless you're super hardcore, just use Microsoft Office. If you're an Microsoft 365 subscriber, you're compliant. We've got this. This is from the HIPAA Journal as iCloud HIPAA compliant new, most aren't. And then I could.

1:36:11 - Mikah Sargent
Then you could do the syncing between and, then I could synchronize Office 365 with the iPhone. Yes, absolutely yeah, you would log in, you could actually have Microsoft offers Outlook for the iPhone?

1:36:22 - Leo Laporte
Yep, you could, yeah, If you wanted to keep using Outlook.

1:36:24 - Mikah Sargent
You can, and that's free on the iPhone, yeah, or you can set it up with your you know iPhone's mail app. All of that would be possible, Yep.

1:36:34 - Caller
Hmm, so I'll put an article here.

1:36:37 - Leo Laporte
This is this is from skiffcom how to make Outlook or Google calendars private. That talks about using privacy settings to make sure that you're still trusting Microsoft or Google or Apple. You know to do this right, but you can. In all of these cases, you could do privacy. Oh, I see why. This is on a website called Skiff Calendar. They offer a secure calendar program with end-to-end encryption. That would be the way to do it. So this is skifcom. That would be the way to do it. Great, yeah, yeah, skiff. They're probably playing. Yeah, privacy first, end-to-end encrypted email, but they also offer end-to-end encrypted calendars and address books. I guess you could use something like Proton Mail. There are a lot of these encryption email providers. You know I use Fastmail for my calendar, but it isn't HIPAA compliant. But if you went to somebody who is encryption-based like Proton Mail, yeah, my therapist was using that Proton Not Proton, but was using an encrypted thing.

1:37:46 - Mikah Sargent
So I always had to go to the site and log in in order to get the email.

1:37:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a little annoying, yeah, but it's private and.

1:37:52 - Mikah Sargent
I think, that's really important.

1:37:53 - Leo Laporte
I think I honor you for considering the privacy of your clients. That's a really good thing.

1:38:01 - Caller
Yeah, thanks, yeah, good question, and thanks for your time. I really gave you a curve ball here.

1:38:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, you didn't. This is something I think everybody should think about. To be honest, more and more we're gonna really think about how much of our this is what this show's been about today, all day. How much of our information do we wanna give to the big tech. You know my decision. The point is it should be. It should be an explicit decision. My decision is I'll let them have it, I don't care. So what if I get ads? And I'm gonna get ads anyway, you know, and I don't think I'm gonna be the subject of an investigation by that federal arm of the US government. But so and I'm not a Chinese dissident so you have to consider your threat level. Some people just wanna be private because they rightly so. They just say I deserve privacy and you have to respect that Absolutely. For me it's too hard. Probably is for you too right.

1:38:56 - Caller
Yeah.

1:38:57 - Leo Laporte
This is, you know, the world we live in now. We're not private anymore. It's interesting. Privacy in some respects is a modern concept. You know, in the middle ages we all slept in the same room together. There was no privacy. You can imagine, Just think, you know, use your imagination. There was no privacy. Yeah, 23 and me. They have my spit, Of course.

1:39:23 - Caller
Yeah, of course the doctors at those days were drilling holes in people's calls.

1:39:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there was no medicine either. Yeah, by the way, trapanning works. Don't, don't knock it, you know. Hey, thanks for the call. Really good question. I don't know how much we helped you, but we these are the issues that you have to solve. Yeah, I think probably I would use Microsoft 365 and just keep doing that and use outlook on your phone and then make sure you look into the settings that make it private. That's probably the easiest thing to do. Yeah, Agreed. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting conundrum. All right, mr John Ashley, producer man.

1:40:06 - Mikah Sargent
Let's do a ooh, a voicemail. Oh, Ooh I remember those Go ahead. Call us 8887242884 during the week. You can leave a voicemail like the one we're about to hear and we'll answer your question.

1:40:19 - Caller
Hey tech guys. This is Will from the Woodlands, Texas. Hi Will. I have a Pixel 5, which I thoroughly love, and I just got to notice that I will be getting Android 14. Woohoo, my question is does that mean Google will be supporting my phone for one more year? Please let me know and I'll be listening to the show. Thank you, and have a wonderful day.

1:40:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it does. Yeah, yeah, which is a surprise because that's a pretty old version of the Pixel.

1:40:51 - Mikah Sargent
Pixel 5, yeah.

1:40:53 - Leo Laporte
Let's see Pixel updates 5, 5A, 4A. Let's see you are gonna guaranteed Android version updates on the 5 till October of last year. So that's an interesting question. Really, the version Android version updates aren't the ones you care most about. Those are feature updates. What you care most about is security updates, and that is patches that will make that phone secure. So they're guaranteed, or did guarantee, three years from when the device first became available in the Google store in the US. Now the good news is Google has upped that number. Yeah clearly.

I think seven years now. But you bought it back, you know, Before they said 2018. So they said October 2023. The fact that they gave you that's a really interesting question.

1:41:47 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, I wonder if maybe you have a Pixel 5A, but if you don't, this is just they're saying Google is saying we guarantee it until this date, but hey, maybe they're continuing to do it even after that date.

1:41:58 - Leo Laporte
It's just not guaranteed. I'm gonna get updates till 2030 on my Pixel 7.

1:42:03 - Mikah Sargent
I will. That's pretty impressive.

1:42:06 - Leo Laporte
So that's the new rule on Google's phones is seven years, and I honor them for that, because that's ridiculous. The Apple has never said how long they'll honor iOS, but they keep it going pretty pretty for pretty long time. It's hard. The reason is it's just hard for a company to take all of these different devices and keep them up to date. I'm really puzzled. The fact that you got Android 14 means they have gone beyond the date they promised. I would guess that you're gonna continue to get security updates. Now you'll know. In fact, you would know by now. I don't know when you left the voicemail, but the January Pixel update went out last week. So if you have the January update, good news. Yeah, I think you're gonna continue to get them, buddy.

1:42:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, just not guaranteed at this point.

1:42:52 - Leo Laporte
And then yeah, I think that's really. That's the thing. They're out of the goodness of their own heart. They're giving you updates. I would just keep an eye Every month. You should get an update every usually the first week of the month. You should always check and if the day you stop getting updates, I mean I give them a couple of weeks. But if you get to the middle of the month and you haven't gotten an update for that month on a Pixel phone, you're probably not gonna get one. And now we know that their good will has expired and it's time for a new phone. The good news is, in a couple of months, you're gonna be able to see the 8A, which probably be a great choice, and they still sell the 7A, which is also a great choice. These are inexpensive upgrades, absolutely, that are better even than your Pixel 5.

1:43:34 - Mikah Sargent
And the trade-in stuff. Yeah, that's great.

1:43:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here we go. Let's see what somebody in the Discord has found a link.

1:43:42 - Mikah Sargent
Love it when they do that. Thank you, Discord. Thank you as well. It's ScooterX, ScooterX. Of course it's.

1:43:46 - Leo Laporte
ScooterX, it's always ScooterX, always the X-Man. Google Pixel Update for 2024. We have provided the monthly soft app for 2024, all supported devices running Android 14. So that's good. Now there's two Weasel words here supported devices and running Android 14. You got halfway there, so yeah, and there it is. Yeah, they're pushing it out.

1:44:14 - Mikah Sargent
See, I wonder if you've got the 5A. He's got the 5A, don't you think yeah?

1:44:17 - Leo Laporte
the fact that you got it means you probably have a 5A. That's interesting.

1:44:23 - Mikah Sargent
And 5A, yeah, goes till August of this year, so you got till August, yeah, so not quite a year but yeah, almost a year.

1:44:31 - Leo Laporte
Let's do another one, or should wait a minute, let's. I can't remember. Do we have to do anything? Let's do one more pause.

1:44:39 - Scott Wilkinson
Okay, that's a good pause, good job.

1:44:43 - Leo Laporte
It's the pause that refreshes For people watching the video version of this show, the. You know this. Nothing happens. But if you're listening to the audio version of the show, sometimes an ad will be inserted against your will. It could be painful, so Just good, I warned you. Now, what do you want to do, boy? I want to pick. Oh sorry, producer man, I tried, I tried. Producer man, john Ashley, I'm gonna pick up on another phone.

1:45:11 - Mikah Sargent
Here we go to the phone. He says I'm a man. Oh, what is that? That's a reference for sure, look at that little kitty. Is this star six? Douglas is kitty hi.

1:45:21 - Leo Laporte
Douglas. Star six to unmute Star six to unmute oh.

1:45:31 - Mikah Sargent
Dear caller, once you've joined, remember to press star six.

1:45:34 - Leo Laporte
Eight, eight, eight, seven to four. Two, eight, eight, four.

1:45:43 - Mikah Sargent
Sometimes the caller has said no, ah, welcome.

1:45:47 - Caller
What's your name and where are you?

1:45:48 - Mikah Sargent
calling from.

1:45:50 - Caller
The fumbling fingers. Paul from Columbus Ohio.

1:45:53 - Leo Laporte
Hi fumbling fingers, paul from Columbus Ohio. Welcome, Paul. What's up?

1:46:00 - Caller
Well, this is a little weird, but what's new? I'm trying to help a friend out and she's not the greatest person on the computer. She had a PC that died and I was trying to talk her into getting a Chromebook, or at least a Chromebook because she's got a good night monitor. But she hadn't heard of it before and nobody in her family ever heard of it before. And I said, yeah, do they listen to as much of this tech stuff and read stuff like I do? Probably not, but anyway, I'm surprised.

1:46:31 - Leo Laporte
I think the Chromebook. I would have thought the Chromebook would have been better brand recognition, but I guess not Okay. Yeah, but she's heard of Google. Right, she heard of Google. Yeah, exactly, I'll say. Do I say is this from Google? Yeah, if you've heard of Google, yeah, that'll help.

1:46:44 - Caller
Yeah, right, so she bought a, an iPad 9 Referred that's not a bad choice.

1:46:53 - Leo Laporte
That's a good choice.

1:46:55 - Caller
Yeah, and so what I'm trying to so unfortunately so was 64 Gigabytes, but what I thought she could do would be to run or like she wants them to write a letter or Email or something. She can do that directly from my iPad on the Google mail. Or if she wanted something like words, you could use a Google Whatever their doc thing. Yeah, we call them Google Docs. Yeah, google box, I guess, and it's still in the cloud. She's not going to be using up that Right.

1:47:29 - Leo Laporte
I think on the iPad, that's, I know, on the Mac. It's true of Apple's own word processor pages, which she should like a lot. It's a beautiful word processor on on the Mac. It stores it in the cloud. Does it do that on the iPad as well? You have the choice. You could turn it on, yeah. So yeah, she can actually much like a Google Chromebook Store all of her work in iCloud. Now she may have to buy more iCloud storage After a while, because Apple only gives you a small amount to begin with. I think five gigabytes right by the way, I think you also use like it good.

1:48:02 - Caller
good, I Was gonna say, can you use a thumb drive or some external memory?

1:48:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh.

1:48:09 - Mikah Sargent
Not on that iPad no on the ninth gen. Yeah, you it. Well, you could, but you'd have to buy a special dongle for it. So what you do is there is a lightning to Goodness.

1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
I can't think of what the exact thing is a camera, camera, camera which gives you a USB port and then you can, you can. I wouldn't recommend this is gonna be too complicated for her 64 gigs is more than you think. I, unless she's doing photos on there, she's gonna have plenty of room for word documents.

1:48:41 - Mikah Sargent
And even if she is doing photos, if you've got the iCloud storage.

1:48:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if she, I think in general, if I would let her just use it. If at some point she says I am running out of space, then you say, okay, let's buy you and it's not expensive. 200 gigabytes on iCloud, I think it's. How much is 200 gigabytes? I think it's. It's inexpensive 299. Yeah, it's a couple bucks a month. And then and and you tell her, by the way, this is great because it's backed up, it's safe, even if you lose your iPad, you won't lose your documents, etc.

1:49:14 - Caller
Okay, so she can use the pages and yeah, keep it simple, like pages.

1:49:21 - Leo Laporte
And you might. If you want to turn into more of a computing experience, she can get a keyboard for that. I don't know if the eye, if that iPad, has a case with a keyboard.

1:49:30 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah it does.

1:49:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and then and then it's really just like a laptop, and, honestly, an iPad and a Chromebook are comparable in security. You're not. That's good. Both of them are much better than Windows, which and this is the sad thing is most people like her. That's all they've ever heard of, and so they just get another Windows PC, and that's really the worst possible choice for her.

1:49:55 - Caller
Just what she was gonna do. I'd like her out of that. Yeah, thank you.

1:50:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, an iPad's a good choice. I think a preferred iPad that's a good choice. Actually, she did a good job.

1:50:06 - Caller
What about connecting there, the connecting the iPad to her existing large monitor? Like I said, the nice Dell with about 27 inches, I think with the.

1:50:16 - Mikah Sargent
With this one it's gonna be just as complicated to try to connect it. Once again, there is a special adapter, but it will require it has to have power connected to it. It's called the lightning digital AV adapter and so you have to plug in power to it and then HDMI comes out of it and then you plug it in and it's not. Arguably it doesn't add much to the experience. I almost feel it's not worth you know, fudzing about with. I know that that then means yes, the monitor is not being used, which is kind of a bummer, but it's. I find it's more trouble than it's worth because you still need to tap on the screen that is the iPad. You know what I mean. So you'd have to be looking back and forth between the two screens. It doesn't let you create a second display, it is just mirroring the display of the iPad itself. So, yeah, it's almost not worth it to to again deal with she.

1:51:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean I understand she says, well, I got this beautiful one and I can't use it, but she may be very happy with the iPad. I mean honestly, for money. Many people Even that smaller iPad is really fine.

1:51:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, in fact, I think Apple has sold so many of these ninth generation iPads. I've had so many friends and family members tell me they've gotten this ninth gen iPad over the over the holiday season. It's a really good iPad. It's still within like Apple is still selling this iPad, so it's still got a long support life left. And yeah, you've got multiple choices for accessories. We'll include. I've posted some links. We'll include a link to that smart keyboard that Leo is talking about. That lets you if you wanted to use an external keyboard with it. But yeah, this is still very powerful as a device smart keyboard.

1:52:07 - Leo Laporte
It's expensive it's 159 bucks. Which but it, but it, then it. Then now you've got a basically a laptop, right?

1:52:17 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, and you don't have to get this fancy Smart keyboard.

1:52:20 - Leo Laporte
You can spend less money and just get any Bluetooth keyboard. Yeah, that's true with that and get a little stand and the. In effect, if you put it on a stand so that it's raised up, she might say, oh, that's nice, that works. That's like a monitor, yeah, and then has a little Bluetooth keyboard, no mouse. Unfortunately it's all touch. I think in the longer people get used to touch and then they, then they prefer it. But initially it might be a source of.

1:52:45 - Caller
Confusion. What was the brand I know you put up with?

1:52:47 - Leo Laporte
the apples. The apple makes. This is apples. Smart keyboard for the end, get the one for the ninth generation. So apple makes it. It's a little stand, lets you. You know, tilt it up. You can have the keyboard underneath, you can have the keyboard on top.

1:53:02 - Mikah Sargent
It's a yeah, this is, this is by far the best solution, just because, yeah, it's made by the company. But, as Leo pointed out, if you found a Bluetooth keyboard from any brand and you connected it using the Bluetooth settings in the iPad, you can get a Bluetooth keyboard for $12. Yep. If price make sure it doesn't require a dongle for the Bluetooth connection. That's all.

1:53:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the thing. This keyboard is a cover as well, and that is I mean. That's how I do it I like that. Yeah, I think it's a good way all in one. It's just expensive.

1:53:38 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, okay, super.

1:53:41 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I think you know what I appreciate she did, that she did in some ways the the a better thing, as long as she's comfortable with. You know, the problem with iPad is it's iOS. Now somebody's used an iPhone, they'll feel very comfortable with it. But if they use they only use the standard computers. It might be initially a little bit odd to them. It's not like a state.

1:54:01 - Caller
No, she does other, she's got an SE.

1:54:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, perfect, oh so she knows, she already knows how to you think you couldn't get it the iPad's just a big iPhone, right? She already knows how to use it. That's what I told her. Yeah, yeah.

1:54:14 - Caller
I think that was a good choice From Apple also, so that's that'll be great, she'll be good. Thank you, gentlemen. Hey, thanks, have a great day.

1:54:25 - Leo Laporte
Our second call from Ohio. That's nice, it's Ohio day, ohio. On the ask the tech guy show. Remember we are on Sundays from 2 to 5 pm Eastern time, 11 to2 Pacific. So if you want to call us live, call between those hours, those that three hour window. But you can always call that phone number in the week and leave us a voicemail. 88724 2884. Much like this one.

1:54:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, sorry about that wake up, boy genius.

1:55:01 - Caller
Hi Leo and Mikah. My name is John from Indianapolis. A couple months ago I made the switch from AT&T to Mint mobile very good Love it.

I love paying a smaller bill. However, in the last month and a half I am getting spam calls like crazy. Upwards of 20 to 30 calls a day Holy, so I'm not answering my phone at all anymore. I called mint and they said they are not part of using stir shaken. Uh, they're not. So I'm looking for advice on what I can do to get these mint or the Calls to stop. Mint suggests changing my cell phone number. However, I've had the number for over 20 years. I'd rather not change it. I've tried Robo killer. That did nothing, so hopefully you guys can give me some help.

1:55:44 - Mikah Sargent
Indianapolis, Ohio, of course.

1:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right. So, uh, we should mention mint's the sponsor. Yes, and we like him because it is a very low cost sponsor, but apparently they do not block spam calls. Now they're gonna have to. By the way, incidentally, mint is being in the process of being acquired by T-Mobile. At that point they will block spam calls. They'll be on the. They're on the T-Mobile network, now that is. I don't understand how they're not a part of stir shaken. I thought they were required to be by now.

1:56:14 - Mikah Sargent
That that doesn't make sense. But, um, I, while while Leo's looking, I want to talk a little bit about Uh using Robo killer, because there are some there. There are a lot of settings that are involved with making Robo killer work, and I also. I ended up having an issue and had to switch to a different one when I was using Robo killer. But one thing that people I've noticed, if they use this, forget to do is that on your iPhone, you need to launch the settings app, you need to tap on phone and you need to scroll down until you see a setting called silence unknown callers. Uh, you need to then turn on silence unknown callers.

1:56:50 - Leo Laporte
I do that anyway. Now that's problematic because, like my doctor, calls from an unknown number, so some people are not going to get through right.

1:56:57 - Mikah Sargent
If you were expecting a call, you got to toggle that off, but that that setting actually has to be on in order for those blockers to actually work in the first place, so you need to make sure that's on. If you're using Robo killer, um, I recommend Haya h I y a. If you're using and you've had trouble with Robo killer like I did, um, it is another service that does that and, uh, I had success being able to block the callers. Um.

1:57:22 - Leo Laporte
It is interesting, though, this what I thought they were legally required to. You know, the FCC Said that even small providers with small, fewer than 100,000 subscribers Were required to use this stir shaken framework, which is, by the way, a spam blocking framework Uh, as of last of 2022. So I don't know how mint mobile is not Uh required to do that. Let me, let me just look Uh this up.

1:57:50 - Mikah Sargent
Oh Uh, it looks like maybe on June 30th they closed a loophole, so I think by now, yeah, I wonder if the person was just not, because, yeah, I saw that the deadline was yeah. June 30th 2022 For non-facilities.

1:58:11 - Leo Laporte
Um providers, yeah this is a reddit post. Let's look at what wired says here. Yeah, this, so this is a protocol. What stirred and shaken does is it's a dual protocol. Um, stir, one of them, I can't remember which, I think stir is run on the end of the originating Calling company. Your phone company, shaken on the other end, stir authenticates the caller. It says yes, we own this phone number, it's coming from our network. Shaken, on the other end, says, uh, I'm not going to accept any calls that aren't authenticated. Is this one authenticated? And so it's a handshake between your phone company and the originating callers phone company to make sure that it's a call coming. It's not a spoofed number, it's a call coming from within their network.

Now the reason that works is spammers don't want to use real phone numbers. They don't want to be traceable, so they're never going to use an authenticated phone number. They use made up phone numbers. So I am surprised that it doesn't work on landlines. It only applies in the us. He may be getting Calls from outside the us. They try to. They're trying to shut down that bottleneck. Is that loophole rather as well?

Um, gaoli, I, uh, oh, let's see. Here's a. Here's a response from mint mobile FCC response from mint mobile. Let's see what they say. That's kind of a shocker that they don't support that. Um, this is from august 3rd, so this is of 2022. This is in response to that june requirement, back when mint mobile was not part of team mobile. Uh, I don't. I, you know. Yeah, that's a lot to read. This is data retention. Um, that's this not. This is not germane, I don't think so. I, it bothers me that they're not supporting it, but I'm not. I have not had that experience so, having had a mint mobile line for years, so I'm not sure why he's getting that. I just don't know. Uh, so use that tool, that one that you mentioned. Does that work? Well, haya, works, haya.

2:00:31 - Mikah Sargent
Haya H-I-Y-A. Um works quite well. It is unfortunate, as we've pointed out, that um when, yeah, for whatever reason they're saying, they're not using that.

2:00:42 - Leo Laporte
I think they are by now. I think they have to be Uh. So I'm not sure why you're getting 20 calls a day. That is absolutely a problem.

2:00:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and it means whatever you said. You switched from atm t and it wasn't happening there and your phone number is the same that you've had for years, so something had to have changed on switching to mint mobile, where it mint is not protecting In the way that AT&T was make sure you add your number to the do not call database.

2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
That is a minor use, but at least it helps a little bit. Um, and then I guess you can use Haya. Yeah, boy, that is a problem. I mean, I have to admit I I have. For the same reason maybe I am getting that many calls because I've always used that High calls from unknown numbers. I don't want to if I don't know you. I don't want to hear from you.

I don't know you, I don't know you and in fact, you know, I think, one of the reasons maybe people aren't Paying too much attention this is who takes phone calls anymore. Exactly Now that I have a fade, I, that's all it takes. I have moved on. Uh, and then if you had a pixel? Uh, you're right, joe's pointing out in our discord, if you have a pixel, there's some call screening features in the pixel Are fantastic.

2:01:53 - Mikah Sargent
Well, an iphone has a new one too. A new call? Oh good, it's a live voicemail, see.

2:01:58 - Leo Laporte
this is why I should be listening to ios today. If you're a member of club twit only seven dollars a month. Twitter dv slash club twit you can hear the brand new ios today. You've changed it a little bit.

2:02:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it's a little bit shorter. Um and it. We've shaken up some. We've shaken and stirred some of the uh, the different segments and we're going to be doing a really cool new thing. I've already reached out to some app developers. App developers are going to be coming on the show on occasion and quite literally, telling us about their app, walking us through, showing how the developer who made the app will show us how to best use the app. So I think it's going to be a great opportunity for folks, uh, to see their favorite apps, actually buy it from the creators who made them and how to use them, how to to make the most of them. So that's looking forward to that.

2:02:45 - Leo Laporte
That is fantastic. Club twit is, of course, the best way to support what we do and as we go into the new year, with so many exciting new technologies coming on, especially ai apples, vision pro later this month, uh, we have a job to do and I think, uh, we do a pretty good job of covering these technologies without fear or favor. We are very careful about being honest, high integrity. We don't have investments in these companies and and I think you can trust our judgment, so I think it's really important that we keep going. We'd love to have you be part of our growing community. Club twit keeps us alive, keeps us creating great content for you. At seven bucks a month. You can pay more if you want. There are family plans, there are corporate plans to twittv slash club twit. Of course, you get into our discord too, which we talk about a lot. That's a really nice community. Uh, who should we do next, mr Senior Show producer man.

2:03:46 - Mikah Sargent
All right, uh, I know douglas.

2:03:47 - Leo Laporte
George douglas really wants to get in. He's waving, he's pointing, he's pushing his kitty out of the way he's. We've talked to douglas before so, douglas, you should know we try to get new callers on first, but we we're gonna welcome douglas on because he's been sitting there all show very patiently patting his kitty. Hello douglas.

2:04:07 - Caller
Hello, loki left.

2:04:09 - Leo Laporte
That's your kitty's name, loki. Do you have other marvel comic universe kitties?

2:04:15 - Caller
No well, we now we have um, we have um um linux, starbuck and chewy. So this is um. Just to let you know, this is Uh, this is linux. Oh yeah, so she's a. She was astray and she looks like uh Talk, so I named her linux.

2:04:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm a fan of black and whites.

2:04:37 - Caller
We have two black and whites at home we love so um, I was gonna Uh, with all your other comments on the privacy. Um, the phrase I tell people is every world, everywhere you leak, the world holds a bucket.

2:04:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so that's a very good phrase. I like that.

2:04:55 - Caller
The um the one that I? Um, I really did not. I'm still not sure if it was just a coincidence or If it was real. Um, my wife has a brain tumor and she had a biopsy surgery and um Three days after the biopsy surgery, we got a call from someone selling pre funeral, pre planning. Oh my god, oh my goodness.

2:05:22 - Leo Laporte
I hope that's a terrible.

2:05:24 - Caller
I hope it was a coincidence, yeah, but I mean I think funeral pre planning is a good idea. But I was kind of questioning why somebody was calling me about.

2:05:32 - Leo Laporte
I have to admit, hospitals are kind of notorious for selling your information on Uh. When you have a baby, all of a sudden you get all these solicitations and it's because the hospital yeah told everybody you had a baby.

2:05:45 - Caller
Yeah, I, and I don't know how they find stuff out, because, I mean, we had a grocery store that we went to and when you checked in they would give you coupons and, um, right after my wife became pregnant, we started getting baby coupons. I don't know how, somehow they know. Yeah, well, the interesting thing is, um, I have a walmart account and when I go on my walmart account, everything I've purchased in the store is listed, because they linked my credit card that's right that I used in the store with the credit card I used online. They have a list of everything I bought. Anyway, that wasn't really the reason.

2:06:18 - Leo Laporte
It's not in my business, but uh is, how's, what's the prognosis for your wife? Is she doing okay?

2:06:22 - Caller
Um, she's had the tumor since 1999. Uh, she had a ventricular shunt put in, um, which drains fluid from her brain. The tumor hasn't changed in 24 years. Oh, that's good, um, and. But the problem is she also came Down with MS. Oh, I'm sorry. And uh, she was okay for several years. The last two years it's gotten worse and now she's in a nursing home.

2:06:44 - Leo Laporte
That's a really tough one. I uh, I know all about that and uh.

2:06:47 - Caller
So we went through. I went through like eight months of trying to get Medicaid approved and, yeah, provided over almost almost a thousand documents. I gave more information to get Medicaid than I did to get my national security. Of course you did. Of course you did that.

2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
So, um, anyway, hey, um, best wishes to you, lots of hugs and love. Uh, that's a, that's a, that's a tough one.

2:07:07 - Caller
So that's not the reason I called, but anyway, um, I was listed. I just finished listening to this week's episode of Uh your uh, security, oh, mac.

2:07:17 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I was gonna say security now because I thought, doug, you'd be really interested In what steve said about the after flaw.

2:07:24 - Caller
I um I watch steve, yeah, um, sometimes I don't want to because it makes me scared.

2:07:28 - Mikah Sargent
It's terrifying fair enough.

2:07:30 - Caller
Yeah, I, um, and I'm always preaching to my friends that alexa is not really listening to you, but they don't believe it. No, um, but anyway, um, it was kind of interesting. You were talking about the internet archive, um, and there's a few things I really like on the internet archive. Um, uh, the one thing is, um, they have a lot of old tv shows and stuff.

Absolutely, yeah, the one in particular is um, A show it was on in the late 70s Um that not a lot of people have heard of. It was. It started Andy Griffith, and it was called Salvage. Oh don't know that. The thing is that you can catch the intro.

2:08:18 - Leo Laporte
they got all the episodes here on 438,000 TV episodes, 24 of Salvage with Andy Griffith.

2:08:26 - Caller
They have all the episodes on here, but the premise of the original movie I don't know how YouTube plays over the ZoonConnect, don't? Okay, you can find it here on YouTube, the intro. So basically the premise of the original movie was that he's a junk dealer and he wants to go to the moon and get stuff from the NASA landings and sell it. Oh my God, which now would be illegal because they're considered heritage, world heritage sites.

2:09:00 - Leo Laporte
Right, I was just like what a great concept for a TV show.

2:09:05 - Caller
Yeah, and then they have some clips from the end of the movie where he brings the rocket back and he's landing it vertically and I kind of wondered if Elon Musk ever saw the show.

2:09:14 - Leo Laporte
Let me just show you a couple of frames from this, because the one on internet archive has been AI enhanced and it looks like it's been AI enhanced. Andy Griffith looks like AI Andy Griffith. Yeah, that's weird, but remember this was probably a 400 line scan from NTSC, so in order to get this to look high quality, they had to put it through some processing. Wow, that's wild, but you know what an interesting premise for a TV show.

2:09:45 - Caller
Yeah, I was like maybe like 14 years old and I loved it.

2:09:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember it, but what a great idea.

2:09:49 - Caller
A lot of people don't remember it, but it's really cool. The guys on this week in space remembered it? Of course they would Actually. Yeah, you know, it's just such an interesting show. And then there was one episode where they were rescuing a bomber that he flew in World War Two and they picked up this guy who was on the island, who thought World War Two was still going on, and they convinced it Anyway. So they're about to land in Tokyo and he turns around to him and he goes one question you sure Japan lose war?

2:10:23 - Leo Laporte
That's a little joke based on the fact that after World War Two, in a couple of locales they found months later Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over.

2:10:33 - Caller
There was one guy was like in the 60s yeah.

2:10:36 - Leo Laporte
They had to hide in the jungle.

2:10:39 - Caller
They had to bring his commanding officer out, wow, to get him to surrender, wow, but it was it was it was. It was a really cool show. Yeah, the, the but Selfage.

2:10:50 - Leo Laporte
I don't. I don't know if I want to watch this AI version, but I have to tell you the you're never going to see this on Netflix or anywhere else, because it was so low quality that nobody would watch it, and they couldn't if Netflix would get complaints if they showed it. So shows like this are probably lost forever, except for the fact that the internet archive exists, and thank God, yeah, I donate monthly to the internet archive.

2:11:14 - Caller
Yeah, Then there was. There was always the famous Star Wars holiday special.

2:11:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, which, which George Lucas desperately tried to bury.

2:11:22 - Caller
But he wishes he could find every copy in.

2:11:25 - Leo Laporte
It will live forever. It was notorious. It was notorious.

2:11:29 - Caller
Yeah, the best. The best quote about the Star Wars holiday special was from her, and this was at the time it was shown. One reviewer said it was like it was written by cocaine, not by somebody on cocaine, no Joe, cocaine itself.

2:11:43 - Mikah Sargent
A bag of cocaine.

2:11:44 - Caller
That's actually a pretty good quote, you know, and it was. It was funny because around the time of the elect the last presidential election, mark Hamill tweeted after one of the debates. Mark Hamill says this is the worst television I've ever seen and I was part of the Star Wars holiday special. It was good old Mark Hamill. I love it. I keep wondering, though, with Disney wanting to get you know.

2:12:13 - Leo Laporte
It should be on Disney plus. Let's come on Next Christmas. Let's re-release it Next life next life day. Yeah, next life That'll be better.

2:12:22 - Caller
Yeah Well, the funny thing is, when I was, I was just at Disney and I bought a life day ornament that they sell.

2:12:30 - Leo Laporte
So remind me. This is because they don't want to say Christmas, they call it life day.

2:12:34 - Caller
It was a ho. It wasn't even Christmas. It's a wookie holiday and, like the first, the first 30 minutes of the show are completely in wookie.

2:12:46 - Leo Laporte
Wow, nobody speaks all in wookie. That's not much of a concession to the English speaking audience, is it?

2:12:52 - Caller
Yeah. And then at the end, carrie Fisher. At the end, carrie Fisher sings yeah, also not not a good idea. Yeah, yeah and his, his, um uh, chewbacca's father's name is itchy Itchy Baca.

2:13:10 - Caller
It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure talking to you.

2:13:13 - Caller
His son's name. His son's name is lumpy and he was actually in some of the extended universe.

2:13:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, uh see, I've always thought and I know you'll get some hate for this Star Wars is a children's show. It's a children's movie and this just confirms it with lumpy and itchy.

2:13:32 - Caller
Yeah, what I thought was funny was when I was in sophomore. In college I was in an English class and the teacher starts describing the certain type of story yeah, and she goes there's, there's, there's a, there's a. There's a farm boy who's going out with a, with a pirate and a wizard rescue, to rescue a princess from a, from a, from a dark night. And she says what does it sound like? And I'm thinking to myself this sounds like Star Wars. Yeah, and she it's Star Wars.

2:13:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it's also every you know epic story ever told yeah, it's a classic hero story.

2:14:06 - Caller
but it's just funny. Classic hero's journey yeah, you know, that's what the one, one of the characters from the movie, said. Well, we might as well have been flying around in a pirate ship, but anyway, I just want. I didn't really have a question. I just wanted to share that was on internet archive and um. I love the.

2:14:21 - Caller
I love the internet archive and it's a pleasure talking to you, thank you for joining us Happy happy new year.

2:14:28 - Caller
Happy new year Club twit member. Thank you, we know we appreciate it. We're very grateful. Yeah, yeah.

2:14:34 - Leo Laporte
One more thing have you taken the survey yet? No, I have not. Don't feel guilty. There's no pressure, but twittv slash survey 24.

2:14:42 - Caller
It's just, I didn't know the survey without yet, I'm sure you've done it in years past.

2:14:47 - Leo Laporte
We do this every year. It's really the only way we can ever know anything about our audience. We've we've shortened it considerably this year, so it shouldn't take you very long. We, you know, look at, we want to know are you married?

2:14:59 - Caller
I'll have to go and take a look at that I ain't?

2:15:02 - Leo Laporte
um, I'm already 8% done, so it's, it's very easy. This year, twittv slash survey 24. It's uh, we, we try to get a significant portion of our audience to take this, because then it helps us both understand what we're doing and how it fits your needs, but also tele-advertisers. Well, our audiences between the ages 43%, between the ages of 18 and 24, whatever it is. And then that way they feel a little better. They don't have way above that. They don't have to spy on you in the art and the dikera.

2:15:35 - Caller
I'm turning 58 next week. Happy birthday, um. So one question for, for, for, um, for Martin, I'm not Martin Um.

2:15:43 - Leo Laporte
Mikah, Mikah, Mikah. We used to. We used to have a guy named Martin Sergeant.

2:15:46 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking my way. So, um, do I need to resubscribe to iOS today now that the change, or will it automatic? I was. It was described on the on the yeah, you will, If, yeah, if.

2:15:58 - Mikah Sargent
to get the club twit version of iOS today, you have to resubstant. I'm already under.

2:16:02 - Caller
I'm already under the club twit version.

2:16:04 - Mikah Sargent
Oh then, no, then you're, good Okay.

2:16:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, so yeah, there is no, the the uh, public iOS feed. You probably put something on there. Resubscribe Exactly, and we did that as well.

2:16:16 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, so that's still there. It's still active, but in order to see new shows then you need to go into your club twit membership and subscribe.

2:16:25 - Caller
As long as I'm subscribed into the club, twit I don't have to again Okay.

2:16:28 - Mikah Sargent
Then you're good to go. We appreciate your support. Yes, thank you so much.

2:16:32 - Caller
Yeah, I try to. I I put a. Um, I put a thing about iOS today on my, on my blog which I don't know about. Oh, I appreciate that. That was a couple of months ago when you were begging for support.

2:16:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

2:16:45 - Caller
Well, thank you, my blog, which probably I mean it's running on AWS, but it's themindoffurgcom.

2:16:53 - Leo Laporte
And you're a Ferg, of course. Yeah, f-e-r-g I I.

2:16:57 - Caller
I post different things. I have posted a bunch of things for shortcuts iOS shortcuts.

2:17:03 - Mikah Sargent
Oh nice.

2:17:04 - Caller
Um, um we'll have to check out Some video editing stuff and yeah, I try to.

2:17:08 - Leo Laporte
So when you got when you got your security clearance. What was that for?

2:17:13 - Caller
Uh, that was back like 30, almost over 30 years ago. I was working on um. I was working on the Trident 2 guidance system. Oh, wow, Um, and it was just. It wasn't just, it was the low level security clearance, but still they looked at everything. Um, I did think it was funny. When I was coming out of college, I interviewed for a position that required a top secret clearance and they gave me the paperwork and they wanted to know every organization I had belonged to for the past 15 years. Wow, I was 22.

2:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Since you were seven Sure, why wouldn't?

2:17:46 - Caller
they Um, yeah, and then I joke with people, though after I left that company I went to work for a company that made um, a computer telephony card, where it called Dialogic, and um, so I said, I went from helping people, I went from working on guidance system for nuclear weapons to helping some people make auto dialers.

2:18:07 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I want to let you know that, uh, I'm getting a certificate warning on your site. It says their certificate is for dub dub dub the mind of Fergcom. Uh, there's not valid for dub dub dub, it's only valid for the mind of Fergcom.

2:18:20 - Caller
Now I know I use. I use less and Crip, so maybe I need to fix something.

2:18:24 - Leo Laporte
Just make sure that it supports both uh dub dub dub and not dub dub dub dub, but probably probably just a simple um, yeah, yeah, it's an easy thing, it's an easy thing to do, yep, so thank you hey. I never go to dub, dub, dub, dub yeah right, exactly, and look at this Support one of my favorite podcasts.

2:18:42 - Caller
Thank you so much. That's very thank you for doing that.

2:18:45 - Leo Laporte
We really appreciate it.

2:18:47 - Caller
No problem, I don't really post enough on there, but I try.

2:18:50 - Leo Laporte
Everyone on the blog says that, by the way. I just want to point out that's the universe.

2:18:54 - Caller
I had to write more. I wound up having to. It got shut down for a while and I found out it got a. It caught a virus. I don't know, I was running Drupal. I'm running Drupal still, but I had to update it. I found out it had a virus when I started backing it up and, um, uh, microsoft, um Defender started flagging some files that I was down with.

2:19:15 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, it's a. It's a challenge running a website. You got to keep up to date all the time.

2:19:21 - Caller
Hey, it's a pleasure talking to you.

2:19:22 - Leo Laporte
We got to run because I got a show to do. But thank you, oh, thanks so much. By the way, if you haven't listened to security now yet from last Tuesday do? Steve Gibson talks about the big Apple C V E's. There were three or four of them that the folks at Kaspersky figured out had been used to hack the phones of Kaspersky employees.

Uh, apple has patched it since, but Steve's conclusions, after looking at the various exploits, uh, were that this was actually a backdoor built into the iPhone and, in all likelihood, uh, built into the iPhone at the behest of and provided to a U S? Uh agency, probably the NSA. So, uh, I mean, we don't know for sure. Apple, of course, is not addressing it. It has been patched, that's the good news. But it is an interesting story and it and it raises the question Was Apple forced to put a backdoor in the iPhone for the last four or five years by a U S security agency? And you know, we don't know for sure, but my conclusion is yes, that that seems to be the case. That seems the most obvious case.

Steve agrees, listen to it. It's a very interesting show and we'll talk about that on the Tuesday on Mac break, weekly. You will be back for iOS today and for tech news weekly on Thursday, indeed, and next Sunday for ask the tech guys, as will I. Good, you're not going to be alone. Uh, thank you all for joining us. Yes, thanks so much, Mikah Sargent and Leo LaPorte, and we'll see you next time on ask the tech guys. Bye, bye.

2:21:04 - Jonathan Bennett
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but the game console, cell phones and maybe even the machine on your desk. You already knew all that. What you may not know is that TWiT now has a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux pro, a burgeoning sysad man or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club TWiT discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club Twit exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club TWiT member yet. Well go to twit.tv/clubtwit and sign up. Hope to see you there.