Ask The Tech Guys 2008 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, and names may be incorrect at times.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. Leo Laporte on this side. coming up in just a bit what was that giant exploding object over Berlin yesterday? We've got film at noon.

0:00:11 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Mikah Sargent, and we also talked to Chris Markwart. He gives us an answer to a strange puzzle of red turning green in photos and then one of us bought a Vision Pro on Friday.

0:00:24 - Leo Laporte
Can you guess which one? You'll find out next on Ask the Tech Guys. This show is brought to you by Cisco Maraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind. Experience the ease and efficiency of Maraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Maraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization. Maraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely, wherever your team is. Let Cisco Maraki's 24-7 available support help your organization's remote, on-site and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit marakisiscocom. Slash twitter.

0:01:14 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, Episode 2008. Recorded Sunday, january 21st 2024. Tim Cook's Folly. Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Ecamm, the leading live streaming and video production studio. Built for Mac, we all use it here. In fact, micah uses it for iOS today, along with Rosemary. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, ecamm is here to elevate your video production from streaming and recording to podcasting and presenting.

Ecamm Live is your all-in-one video tool. Perfect for simplifying your workflow. Ecamm Live includes support for multiple cameras. Screen sharing plus the live camera switcher lets you direct your shows in real time. You see Mikah do it when he says let's look at the, the iPhone, or let's look at us, or let's move in around, let's look at my desk. Stand out from the crowd with high quality video. You can add logos, titles, lower thirds and graphics Really everything we do here with a big, expensive setup you could do very affordably with Ecamm. Drop in video clips, bring on interview guests, use a green screen so much more. Join the thousands of worldwide entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters like us, educators, musicians and other Mac users who rely on Ecamm Live daily. Get one month free when you subscribe to any of Ecamm's plans. Visit ecamm.com/twit. Use a promo code TWiT at checkout. ecamm.com/twit. Well, hey, hey, hey, it's time. Sorry, didn't mean to wake you.

Time for ask the tech guys that there's Mikah Sargent. And that there is Leo Laporte back from the Arctic blast. That was New England, holy cow it snowed. It's snowed. It got down to like I think it was 11 degrees when I was flying away.

Just in time, just in time. Yeah, anyway, I have sympathy because most of our audiences in the Arctic chill right now, except for those of you in Australia in which Kais is sweltering on. Anyway, I was visiting my mom, had a wonderful trip, but I'm back. While I was there it's actually perfect timing because the Apple Vision Pro Ordering was Friday morning. Yes, 5am hour time, california time, but 8am Rhode Island time. I got up, I went to the site there was no delay, by the way, site was working fine. They said scan your face. I did that. Then they said give us your prescription. I did that. Then they said give us $3,500. And I said whoa. By the way, the case for it is $200.

I am just so annoyed that the case is a separate purchase and it's plastic and it's 200 dollars, I'm sure it's a very fine.

0:04:24 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I'm sure it's great case, beautifully designed.

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm calling it from now on Cook's Folly. You ordered one though.

0:04:32 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, you got through the process, we ordered one. Yeah, I went through the process, scanned your face, easy peasy, the only thing that I was talking a little bit about before the show. The only thing that was difficult was because I decided to document the process and was trying to kind of explain how things were working. I opted for pickup because I wanted to go through that process as well, and in doing so I had the first option available. But by the time I hit next, after kind of explaining where I was, that appointment was gone. So then I went back, the next appointment was gone, so I finally was able to get one for 11.30 am. Good thing is that's actually February 2nd On that Friday. So yeah, it's still day one, that's okay. But it was just kind of scary there seeing those appointments disappeared.

0:05:15 - Leo Laporte
You put up a video, yeah we have a video out. Did you go back to?

0:05:19 - Mikah Sargent
bed. I did go back to bed afterward. Yes, I had to crawl back into bed and try to fall asleep because it was very early. But yeah, the process was kind of what. I was surprising that it was so easy, that the store opened quite quickly and the whole scan and everything worked just fine. If you had gone to the website and did the process, did the pre-order, what would happen is a little QR code would pop up and you had to scan that QR code on a device that had the ability Face ID, essentially to do the proper measurements, and we all got different measurements based on our faces. It wasn't some sort of gimmicky thing.

0:05:59 - Leo Laporte
It's just like the registering for Face ID, where you turn your head and you go around like that and you do it twice and they're not. I mean honestly, it's not precisely measuring your head, because they have a limited, they just yeah well, I think he's a large. Exactly so it's kind of a little bit of the light she looks.

0:06:17 - Mikah Sargent
self has several different numbers. You know 28 to like 39 or 40 or something, and I was a 35. But as far as the band 35 long exactly. As far as the band goes, though, there are fewer options there, so I'm curious to see if, when I go in in person, they measure me again, and if they end up swapping out a light seal to see if one fits better.

0:06:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, we'll find out a week from Friday, absolutely, and then you're gonna. I just I really I still stand by my initial reaction that this is Tim Cook's folly and that it will be a flop out of the box, and I just couldn't. I thought I don't. You're going to return it, I think. I think we decided that's, rather than pay all that money and keep it Right. You're going to have a month with I think you get a month with it and you can return it two weeks maybe.

0:07:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we're going to well, regardless of how long we have it, we will be doing as much as we possibly can. Yeah, to show you all what it does, how it works, what you can do, etc.

0:07:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, first of all, there already are some little dissenters out there, namely Spotify, netflix and YouTube. Now, interestingly, Spotify and Netflix are two of the people who really resent Apple's 30% charge. Yeah, and I have a feeling this is the the chickens coming home to roost, as my old grandpa would say, and maybe in your town, st Joe Missouri they say that too, the chickens come home to roost because Apple has been kind of spitting on people and now they get a chance to spit back.

But honestly, I feel like this is an indicator of how much difficulty Apple's going to get pushing this through. They have not made a lot of friends with developers. They have not made a lot of friends with these big companies and the big companies are saying, yeah, fine, now Disney's doing it, there'll be Disney content.

0:08:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yes.

0:08:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:08:18 - Mikah Sargent
Disney they. I mean, hey, if you've got someone on the board, yeah.

0:08:21 - Leo Laporte
I think it helps. You know, disney and Apple have a very tight relationship and, of course, steve Jobs was one of the biggest shareholders of Disney because they bought Pixar. So I have a feeling, well, we'll see, we'll watch, but you will see, of course, glowing reviews we already have from select people who got to try it on last week and the week before. Notice, though, that Apple made them sit down. It's pretty clear that Apple sees this as something you sit right now You're not standing and moving around, also bugs me.

I feel like you know. And then everybody says well, Leo, you've got to understand. This is the first iPhone, this is the precursor to what is to come. Fine, when that comes out, I'll buy it. But it's like here buy this car with square wheels. Now, eventually we're going to have round wheels and you're going to love it, but in order to get there, you have to buy square wheels. Yeah, no, so that's just me. And for those of you who bought it and I have talked to a number of people who are very excited Alex Lindsay, Jason Snow will buy one. You're going to buy one. I'm going to let you play with it. Just to me. I guess why I'm saying this is for the vast majority of you, who will never own this device. Don't feel bad, You're going to see glowing. Oh, my God, the world has changed. It's the new era of spatial computing.

0:09:49 - Mikah Sargent
It's not. So to clarify, though, did you end up buying it? No, of course not. Okay, so you went through the process and then you stopped. I got this close and I said what am I doing? Got it, got it. That was not immediately clear to me, so that is interesting.

0:10:02 - Leo Laporte
I stopped Got it. I've been skeptical. As everybody knows, I'm probably the chief anti-vision pro guy. I've been skeptical all along. I don't think people want to put a computer on their face Either way. One of the things some of the people including Marques Brownlee who got to sit in the couch try it noted was it's pretty heavy.

This is without the battery pack in it, you know, but they took the battery pack out so it wouldn't be quite so heavy. But remember you're going to be, and also unlike the Oculus, which is the same weight, by the way, but the weight is all in the computing thing, the front part, and it doesn't. The bands don't kind of take the weight off.

0:10:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, joe Enister said that the band that goes across the top of the forehead helped, but still there was heaviness. I don't. Yeah, we're just not there yet in terms of a device that doesn't feel like something you're strapping to your face, as you're pointing out, and so this is absolutely not a product for everybody. But I think, as far as you know, this is the good thing. Right, we have to have these conversations and we have to look at what's good about it, what's bad about it. Yeah, I encourage you to buy one. I think it's great that you bought one.

And well, in the fact that what we're doing is showing a completely new product category for this company, so we kind of needed to be able to cover it.

0:11:16 - Leo Laporte
Look, I bought the first iPhone, I waited in line for hours to get it. I bought an Apple Watch immediately, even though it took a few generations before it was really great. This one, I just don't get it. I don't, I think. To me it looks like Apple put so much money into it over so many years. I bet you there were people inside of Apple said we can't release this effect. This is the rumor and that Tim Cook said no, we're gonna have you seen this budget, we're gonna.

And I think it's Tim Cook's folly. I really don't think this is a hit product Now. Apple's had non hit products before. Remember the iPod Hi-Fi. Steve Jobs said I'm selling all my stereo equipment. It's so good that it's very important. Somebody I think it was John Gruber, somebody said Apple is a company. They're not your buddy. Yeah, they don't love you, brent Simmons. Brent Simmons, they love your money and they're a company and they're gonna do what they can to become as rich as possible. They've done very well so far and I know there are quite a few Apple stockholders, shareholders, who are yelling at me right now saying please don't just shut up. Enough said I just want I don't want anybody to feel bad because they're not going to get to do it. I want you to kind of prepare yourself for the glowing reviews. But I also know, because of YouTube, there will be also people going oh, this thing's awful, wait for the YouTube's. You know the Apple Vision Pro is the worst product in decades, kind of things.

0:12:48 - Mikah Sargent
Look how easy it is to break.

0:12:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go. Somebody will put it in a blender. Oh my God, please don't put it in a blender. I'm not. I commend Apple for putting the investment in, for really trying and putting together an amazing product. I mean, there's no doubt that technology is cool.

0:13:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the technology is cool. I'm not looking forward to seeing your scary eyes, I know. Actually, that's the only way I'm going to be doing shows while I have no one is going to have scary eyes.

0:13:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm I'm very skeptical, I'm very skeptical. They are sold out right. You can't get one.

0:13:20 - Mikah Sargent
No, you yeah, last I checked you could still pre-order one, I don't know how, when would you get it? Yeah, that's the thing. I don't know how far out it is because unfortunately you have to go through the pre-order scanning process to see yeah, that's no mistake. But I know someone who waited until was it later that same day or was it the day after? Yeah. Later, the same day, and the pre-order window had been, or the pickup window had been, pushed by two days.

0:13:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so I think if you go now, it will say not available. That would be interesting. Remember they had this is hard to make and they had a limited number. We don't know how many. It was speculated that the first tranche would be about 100,000 and ultimately, over the year they'd do half a million, which is not very many. I mean they send. They sell something like a hundred million iPhones a year. So we'll watch with interest. We'll watch with interest. Just prepare yourself. There'll be very positive reviews from, probably, people you trust.

0:14:17 - Mikah Sargent
There'll be very negative reviews from YouTubers neither of which are real People you trust and you see.

0:14:24 - Leo Laporte
That's why you need us right, because Mike is going to do it. We'll give a level headed. Absolutely we're not trying to, we're not link bait.

0:14:31 - Mikah Sargent
We don't want to talk that way. My job is not. Honestly, I feel it's not simply to talk about why you should buy this or why you should not buy this. It's to show you how to use it, how it's used, what it does, and that's, you know, my primary goal.

0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Give you the information to decide for yourself whether you should buy it or not. You know whether you want it. I have a friend who's been working in virtual reality for 30 years. Gary, of course, immediately ran and bought it because he's a true believer and he wants to. You know he's already working on a pro and an app for it, so I didn't know Gary Oldman was into.

Gary Oldman loves this stuff. No, not that Gary Watch with interest, but don't pay the interest, he says. Oh clever. All right, what else was that? What else happened while I was gone?

0:15:17 - Mikah Sargent
Oh Lordy, well, you were talking. I don't know. Do we want to talk more about Apple? I was just going to say the I got one.

0:15:23 - Leo Laporte
Um, microsoft got hacked again, oh yes, by the Russians. The Ruskies, the same ones who did the solar winds attack Microsoft's in other words, a nation state Russia. Microsoft announced the beginning in November of 2023,. The threat actor, russia, used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production production test tenant account Okay, thank you and gave gain a foothold and then use the account's permissions to access a very small percentage of wait for it. Microsoft corporate email accounts in a very small percentage, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal and other functions, and X-FilT traded some emails and attached documents, but it was a very small percentage, which is that is the case. It was the right percentage.

0:16:20 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly, the leadership is a small percentage of the company, oh my.

0:16:25 - Leo Laporte
God, I almost don't know. First of all, I'm glad they revealed this. I think they legally have to I'm not sure but I'm glad they were upfront about it. But this does not speak well to the Microsoft ecosystem. No, no, the attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft's products or services. This is all from Microsoft. By the way I'm reading from the Verge this is Tom Warren, who's a great cover of Windows was not a result of vulnerability Microsoft products or services. To date, there's no evidence, says Microsoft, that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production system source code or AI systems. Just to us, just to, just to such an Adela's email, that's all.

0:17:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's, and it was a password spray attack, which means you're putting in a bunch of usernames and passwords to try and find one that goes that. That, to me, suggests that it's people who are not being mindful of their online, their threat model, and that's not good.

0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
It was a legacy non-production test tenant account. So there yeah.

0:17:34 - Mikah Sargent
So that's the place where we use monkey one, two, three as our password and it's fine they gained a foothold and then use the account's permissions.

0:17:41 - Leo Laporte
So account okay. You could say it was a legacy non-production test tenant account. But if it had permissions, exactly access the entire email stack at corporate.

0:17:52 - Mikah Sargent
I don't care if it's a punch card computer. If it has the ability to gain access to modern systems, it's still a problem, Wow.

0:18:01 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's enough. I you know we're an equal opportunity offender and I just want to make sure you understand who else do we complain about today?

Sports Illustrated. What a tragedy. You would think of all the magazines in the world that Sports Illustrated would have a future, right? Right, I mean, sports, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. The swimsuit issue they got a little bit of trouble. The, the, so it's a weird structure. The company that owns Sports Illustrated had a 10 year agreement. That's authentic brands group. I don't know how they got it it used to be time time Inc, but anyway they got it somehow. And 10 years ago, let another company, originally known as the Maven but now known as the arena group, were to run it.

0:18:51 - Mikah Sargent
So one company owned it, but one company owns it, but another company manages it, the higher company got it Like a property manager Weird.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
They were operating and publishing it. They got in trouble. Remember, the CEO had to quit because they were using AI to generate some articles. That's right. The arena folks paid $45 million for the right to do so. Authentic brands group retained commercial rights for things like a Sports Illustrated branded hotel in Michigan. Oh, yeah, Glad you kept the rights to that.

Anyway, mass layoffs on Friday uh, devastating. Some of the biggest names in sports writing are gone. Uh, I think on it, you know. And then, oh, they had the grace to say to some of them well, uh, you're not fired, but we're, and you're probably going to have a job for three months. Geez, how graceful is that. They did this on a 10 minute zoom call, Of course, Seven minutes, Sorry. Uh, we will continue to produce the Sports Illustrated, Listen to this brand and online content until the situation is fully resolved. In other words, one of the great magazines.

Another one, by the way, many, many have died. Another one is dying. It's sad Used to be that if you were a, uh, an athlete and you got on the cover of Sports Illustrated, it was the both the simultaneously the biggest honor of your life and the biggest jinx of your life because so many athletes. But you know what. They say that about corporate headquarters too. When they build the fancy corporate headquarters, it's the beginning of the end. It's because you're at the peak and when you're at the top of the heat.

There's only one way to go Yep Is down. So, anyway, I'm sad about that, but what, what, what? Mejia and I mentioned this. This is really an ongoing bloodbath in media in general. Yep, and we've talked about this before Uh, podcast, or you would think podcasts to be the next thing. Oh, no, we're the old thing too. And so, uh, what's happening is it's happening faster and faster. These cycles are going faster and faster. Uh, it's one of the reasons we have come to you again and again, and I want to come to you one more time and beg you, please, to join our club, because the finance financing that comes from club twid is keeping us afloat at this point. And, uh, it is a bleak year. As we continue to look at your ad, sales are dwindling. Everybody's going to YouTube, frankly, and Google and Facebook, where they know more about you, and Spotify.

0:21:19 - Mikah Sargent
Can I address something here? I think it's really important. Um, when you are are joining club twit, we talk about you know these great perks that you get, but one of the main things that happens when you join club twit is that you are supporting twit in general and you're making sure that we can keep doing what we do. And I want to make this very clear when you join club twit, you are helping me. You're helping john ashley behind the td desk over there. You're helping john slanina. You're helping all of the folks who work here. I've seen some sentiment, uh, because, leo, you've mentioned a few times on different shows. I have a new car a new car and

0:21:58 - Mikah Sargent
there's a misunderstanding my mom, right.

0:22:01 - Mikah Sargent
And so I just want to make that clear that this is not lining Leo's pockets.

0:22:04 - Leo Laporte
Those purchases made himself for much of last year. We, we didn't at least I didn't get paid. Right the owner the way any business works when you're not a, you don't have investors, is you? We have Lisa and I jointly own the company, and if there's any surplus, we get it. If there's no surplus, we get nothing. And we got nothing.

Uh, I, I think I got paid a little bit this year so far, but we'll see. Um, so mostly what I'm spending is my savings, exactly, but what we don't. So I don't feel like you're. You're subsidizing my lifestyle. You're not. Um, uh, you're subsidizing Mikah's lifestyle. Seven bucks a month, it's not much.

What you're really doing, though, is you're, is you're keeping the content flowing, and we want to keep making content. Uh, but we, we, you know, if we lose money, we can't. So we've, we had to lay off some of our most beloved employees. That broke. My heart still breaks my heart. We had to cancel shows. We don't want to do that anymore. Seven bucks a month, twittv, slash club, twit. That's all, and I'd really love to get right now we're, uh, we're about 11,000 members, which is less than 2% of our audience. Uh, we would love to get to 5% of our audience, because then we wouldn't have to worry, we could do everything we want. Um, anyway, thank you for saying that. I appreciate that we want to keep Lily in the farmer's dog Right we want to make sure she doesn't have to eat that dry compressed cable.

No dog should have to. All right, genius adult producer. Oh, you almost said it.

0:23:35 - John Ashley
I do want to let you know real quick that we also have on Ed Noon today, rod Pyle, rod Pyle Spaceman. He actually wants to talk about a little meteor that went over Over our heads. Yeah, just like that, just like that. Yeah, there was a meteor that flew over Berlin just a few hours ago. He wants to talk about that. Just a few hours ago. Yeah, yikes, okay. And then Chris Marquardt at one.

0:23:57 - Leo Laporte
Yay, Photo Guy with his review assignment review. Yeah, we got a big show, so why am I talking? I'm in gas and in gas and I apologize. Who should we talk to here?

0:24:07 - John Ashley
I'm going to pick up. Where is it? I hope to call this now. I see a Brian Morris that has their hand raised, so I'm going to pick up on you, brian. Hi, brian.

0:24:17 - Leo Laporte
Come on down. Come on down. Brian's been relaxing during the beginning of this show. I noticed Very relaxed.

0:24:25 - Mikah Sargent
All right, brian, you've been brought over to the Zoom or invited to join the Zoom room Once you get there.

0:24:33 - Caller
Okay, super, can you guys hear?

0:24:35 - Leo Laporte
me. Okay, yeah, where are you calling from Brian?

0:24:37 - Caller
I'm calling from your former stomping ground on the very chilly Upper West Side of Manhattan.

0:24:41 - Leo Laporte
Nice, first time at Snowden, two years. How did you like it?

0:24:47 - Caller
Well, the kids made me sort of run out and grab the sleds from storage. It's fun. It's like a day long affair just to dust those off, but they certainly enjoyed themselves.

0:24:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's nice, and then I've reigned in and got icy and it's awful. But hey, that's life in the big city, as they say. What can we do for you?

0:25:07 - Caller
Yeah, I just had a question about a recent laptop purchase. My daughter was at middle school. She was very excited about getting her first computer Nice and she's very into the Apple ecosystem up here in Manhattan. She got the phone, she got the watch, she got the pencil she's pretty much fully so of course it had to be a Mac. I wasn't so happy about that. You've seen that I think actually the Upper West Side Apple Store was the last store that Steve Jobs had designed. It's just sort of impeccably designed, like all of their stores. So we went over there and ultimately settled she does some photography, so she really wanted to get the SD card reader. So she didn't really want to get the MacBook Air, so we kind of moved to the Pro and ultimately your daughter is no fool Dad.

I have to have it as he is, and in fact I got her SD card reader and also she was a speaker. She listened to the speakers and she's like the speakers are better.

0:26:12 - Leo Laporte
They're really good. Yeah, she's right. Yeah, yeah.

0:26:16 - Caller
So, honestly, what we said or ultimately settled on, you know, is watching the pricing right before the holidays and we were able to get, even though the M3 had just come out. We were able to get an M2 Pro chip for a few hundred dollars off, perfect With a good amount of memory, 16 gigs, and that's way more performance than she would really need. And I think in some respects she kind of told me the memory bandwidth on the M2 Pro chip is faster than on mine.

0:26:42 - Leo Laporte
You've got to give her credit for doing her research.

0:26:45 - Caller
Yeah, she really did. So. Here's where things get interesting. So she had an honor desk for just a couple of days and then she kind of opened up the lid and lo and behold, nothing was on there. She promises, she swears that nothing ever happened. She just had an honor desk for just a few days. The screen started to blink out and then a sort of magic, sort of spider web crack started to appear here within the panel.

0:27:10 - Leo Laporte
That's a manufacturing defect.

0:27:13 - Caller
Apple should actually replace that and she was just sort of beside herself.

0:27:16 - Caller
Oh yeah, Really yeah, yeah.

0:27:21 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of latency.

0:27:22 - Caller
Yes, so we brought it back over, leo. Yeah, yeah, sorry, can you hear me? Okay, so we brought it back over to you know where we had purchased it the retailer here that everyone tends to go to, b&h photo, which we usually go to.

0:27:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you didn't get it from Apple, you got it from B&H.

0:27:38 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, because B&H actually had it on sale. You know what I mean. They had a deal. They had it back within a week to B&H. B&h inspected it and said hey guys, you know, this was a physical impact and so you owned this. And I had another friend of mine who you know was in the tech industry and he said I think you just bought yourself a very expensive Mac Mini is what he kind of told me.

So, anyway, she was sort of upset about it, but the store gets sort of better. So luckily we had bought AppleCare. Oh okay, oh okay. So instead of you know watching $1,500 plus go down the tubes, we brought it into the Apple store on the Upper West Side and said no problem, we'll put it through. They sent it out on Monday. We had it back on Thursday or Friday. Change the panel and we're sort of back in business.

So, anyway, I guess there's two points. One is I think no one would ever think that you really should buy AppleCare at the point of sale, you know, even when you're within the return period, because sometimes you're unaware. You know the vendor. You know you're not going to be able to get it. You know the vendors that are making these things for Apple Foxconn, deep into China somewhere, and every once in a while they're popping these things out. Things like this apparently can happen. So I guess the question is now that it's been sort of repaired, is there anything that we sort of need to be concerned about? Going forward Just as an ant, you know, is it pretty much as good as new?

0:29:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, they. Just one of the things Apple does when they replace and fix is they replace. I mean, they don't. They don't take a soldering iron and get in there and fix it, they just take the whole unit out and they replace it. You may even have a brand new laptop, who knows, depending on how it, how it, worked out. That's why you buy AppleCare and, by the way, apple could do the same thing that you know if you get AppleCare plus, they have a repair policy, even for accidental damage like that. But I really think you're you were right on.

0:29:31 - Mikah Sargent
that's a manufacturing, yeah, it happened that quickly and that you know it swears up and down and nothing happened. I would also just recommend so the sort of give, what it's, the, the, the amount of space between the keyboard and the kind of rest of the, the chassis and the display when it's closed, is very, very, very small. And so there were some folks who for some reason installed on their Max screen protectors. This tended to be people who wanted those kind of privacy screen protectors where if you view at it from an angle, you can't see what's on the screen. So totally understandable, doctors, offices, things like that. But those were actually causing cracks in some cases because of the small amount of space.

0:30:20 - Leo Laporte
So when you close it, even a millimeter more thickness in the screen, you close it and then pressure in one place?

0:30:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly. So if what I would recommend is just going forward, something that I always do, is I just and I'm again, this was probably manufacturing air, but in terms of just making sure that display is safe, going forward, I always look to see if there are any crumbs or anything on the chassis before I close it, and if there are, then I just brush it off and that just helps me make sure that that little bit of area between there.

0:30:50 - Leo Laporte
Almost always are. Because I eat. This is my breakfast near it right in front of it.

In fact, the last one I ruined by hitting a cup of coffee and spilling it right into the thing, and I did not have Apple care and it needed a motherboard replacement. Without Apple care, the guy said there's not a chance in hell. It will cost you more to fix this. So I know I do now buy Apple care. I resent it, as always. You know these extended warranties I resent because I know there's a big profit center.

But Apple's unique in the fact that they really do kind of replace stuff that they don't even probably have to be in. H, is it? I buy stuff. I buy most of my camera gear from B and H. They're fine, but they're a normal retailer and so they're going to do what a normal retailer does, which is say, oh, you dropped nickel and dime, essentially, yeah, and that's how they can have $300 less on the laptop, because you know they're basically not taking as much profit. I don't think that means you should only buy from Apple, right. I mean, if it's convenient I would, but it does mean you should always get Apple care plus, right.

I get Apple care plus and everything Yep.

0:31:53 - Mikah Sargent
And that's the vision. Pro yes, because this is why I've hundred dollars. I didn't. I didn't get that one, I got the per month because, oh yeah, we're going to be going back. I don't want to have it drop and break and then we're out that amount of money, oh good.

0:32:08 - Leo Laporte
So see, this man is a. He's a good man. Well, you're a good dad, and I think that that's a great laptop that could well last her through high school. So that's the good news. Yeah, yeah, that's what we're hoping for.

0:32:20 - Caller
But I think I think the message is you know, sometimes in life you kind of get what you pay for. But I think when it comes to sort of high end Apple gear, you know, unless you're willing to take a risk of you know sort of catastrophes and they can kind of happen within days or hours after open, unboxing these things especially just sort of pay the extra couple hundred bucks for the warranty and and then just kind of sleep well at night knowing that even if something does happen like that, let them change. Because you know, I did see the repair bill on that and I think a new screen, if I didn't have the Apple care, was going to be like 900 bucks, yeah yeah, for a new display. So it's just sort of, you know, the notion of walking around, the notion of walking around with something like that that's, you know, is going to incur that level of cost is, is, is, is a Right.

0:33:00 - Leo Laporte
If you're buying a laptop for a teenager, you better get it Invest in your investment, but I don't blame her.

I think that sounds exactly like a manufacturing defect, not something she did. I agree, I agree. And the problem is B&H is never going to say that. B&h is always going to say, yeah, sorry, you bought it, you buy it, you know it's, you broke it somehow. What did you do? But Apple, because Apple cares about their reputation so much, they tend to be pretty good even if you don't have Apple care. But you really do want to get Apple care because then they, then they treat you like they were.

0:33:29 - Mikah Sargent
It's a whole different experience. I remember going into a store at one point and I was having a trouble. I was having trouble with my device and I sat there and I was explaining everything to the person and then the person looked on my account and said oh, you've got Apple care plus, we'll take it. Here's a new one. They don't?

0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they didn't really need to make so much money, in my opinion, on Apple care plus that they don't hesitate to continue your, your, your, your Customership. They want your, they want your, they want your business and and they want you to buy Apple care plus. So you just did a nice ad for Apple care. Hey, you're a good dad, though.

I think, you got your daughter a very nice machine. You were smart to get the M2, not the M3. The M2 pro is going to go for a long time with that great fast memory bandwidth.

0:34:18 - Mikah Sargent
She's a sharpie. You're a deep trouble, dad. I gotta tell you your daughter sounds awesome, Clearly her stuff.

0:34:25 - Leo Laporte
It's DDR5. I need to have.

0:34:28 - Caller
I mean, I mean even in the Apple store. She kind of knew where within the store, there was a secret drawer where all the watches come out from.

0:34:35 - Chris Marquardt
Oh my gosh.

0:34:37 - Caller
One of the salespeople said, oh, I'm going to go over that table. And she said oh, you mean the one with the secret hidden drawer. Oh my goodness, and he kind of looked at her like how old are you?

0:34:45 - Leo Laporte
You are 11. You got a smart one, that's incredible. Wow, congratulations. Well job, well done, dad. And are you a PC guy? Is that why you didn't want to buy a Mac?

0:34:58 - Caller
Well, I think that, um, I guess, I guess, at the end of the day, um, you know, look, we've always we've had kind of some of both for various different applications and reasons, and I guess the idea was you know, for, for you know, just a general purpose machine. Um, you know, you're going to have to pay a premium for that Apple experience. So the idea was, I could probably have gotten her a reasonable laptop, you know, probably for under $1,000, a really nice machine in a PC, in a PC world. But then once you move into the sort of high end Apple and in terms of sort of build quality, I mean, build quality is not anything but some of these defects, like you can see, it can really happen in any product, regardless of the sort of label on there. So, so that was really the gut instinct, was to try to steer her towards the PC, but with all the integration and her phone.

0:35:45 - Caller
Oh, don't get a PC?

0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, don't get a PC, it wasn't going to work for her, a PC is a good choice for the office.

0:35:50 - Leo Laporte
It's a good choice for somewhere where you have an IT guy. It's not a great choice for a 11 year old.

0:35:57 - Leo Laporte
I know it's more expensive but this will last longer.

0:35:59 - Leo Laporte
It's a quality device. You're getting your good. You're not getting your. You're not getting your a Fisher price computer. You're getting your real computer.

0:36:06 - Caller
And I can continue to be reminded to pay that Apple care $99 a month, $99 a year and perfect, yeah, so I'll.

0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
I just, I always just buy it outright. I shouldn't. You're right, you did the right thing by doing the month to month, but I just don't like a monthly, another monthly, yeah, no, that's fair. It ends up being the same cost. Hey, nice to talk to you.

0:36:25 - Caller
Nice. Thanks so much, guys, really appreciate it. Thoughts on that. I would sleep well at night. It's good, it's good. We got a few minutes before the spaceman joins us.

0:36:38 - Leo Laporte
I want to hear about this meteor that just flew over Berlin. Talk about breaking news, this just in, but why don't we do a quick email before before then what?

0:36:48 - Mikah Sargent
It exploded over Berlin. It did.

0:36:51 - Leo Laporte
Holy cow, we got video of it. Oh my God, this just in Film at noon. Stephen who's who's at hotmailcom? In fact, what it still has as his signature. He hasn't changed it yet. Get outlook for Android.

0:37:10 - Mikah Sargent
So, stephen, let's move you off a hotmail please.

0:37:16 - Leo Laporte
I mean, the free outlook is pretty good, but do change the signature to your name. I'm trying to keep my Google storage limit below 15 gigs because I'm cheap and I wanted to remove most of my photos to an external hard drive. Oh Lord, after reading about takeout, it says it separates the metadata to a JSON file and it becomes difficult to match up the date and time the photo is taken. Is that true? That is true? Why did it do?

that it is so, on the one hand, I commend Google for for not being Hotel California, not being a Roche motel that you can check in, but you just can't get out. That was the idea of Google takeout back in the day when it was created by I think it was Brian Fitzpatrick. He said you know, you got to have a way to get out of this, and Google back in the day was not so evil. And so they said, yeah, that's good thinking. We're going to create takeout. Takeout in theory, let you get all of your Google data out of your Google account, including your Google photos. Having done this, I know what a pain it is. I actually use a variety of tools, like XIF tool and a variety of things to get the dates back, because you can't get the dates back, to get that information back. But it's a. It's a lot of work. I had to hand write some scripts and stuff.

So I'm going to recommend a former sponsor of ours called Milio my L I O. It's free on one computer, so put it on one desktop. You do want a desktop for this and then do the Google takeout. The other thing Google does with Google takeout is they don't let you have the whole thing. You have to do a little gigabyte files I had, because I have so many photos I know I think I had 11 to gigabyte files to process. Milio, though which and this is worth it, even if you had to pay for it, but this is for free imports it and then puts it in the Milio photos database. From there you can export it, you can put it in Apple photos or whatever you want, but it will do the right thing. It will take it in. It takes a little while. It has to process it. It might even take a day or two. Just you know. Let it run, because it's then going to reassign the names. It also dedupes if you have duplicates, which is a very handy thing.

I really like this program. They were a sponsor. I think they're coming back. They just take a little break, so I should mention that. But if you can, that's probably the easiest way to do. It is use Milio. Import it imports from a variety of places, including your Google takeout. Actually, they'll walk you through the takeout, the whole process and import it, and I, as I remember, they get the dates right. No, that's not it, that's something else, yeah, cause it's.

0:39:54 - Mikah Sargent
If I remember correctly, it doesn't even really use takeout it, it just goes directly to the photos?

0:39:58 - Leo Laporte
No, no, it uses takeout. Oh, it does. Yeah, it does, it's own photos library that it does that way. Yeah, this is, and this is the problem is getting it out of takeout. But it will import takeout the other way to do it and I have a somewhere I have a whole thing on having how I got this stuff out of Google takeout. I have a script and stuff. It was complicated. I had to do a lot of trial and error. Have you ever done?

0:40:25 - Mikah Sargent
this yeah, Using takeout but not not re-syncing my metadata afterward. No, Okay.

0:40:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, too complicated this. Take a screenshot of this. So this, this, literally, that's a, that's a shell script for file in star, unzip the file and to attempt folder Okay, so you do that and then you go to the temp, then you remove I remove the JSON files. You fix up the creation date to match the X. If so, this is critical. The JSON file is not necessary if you use a camera that stores the creation date in the X. If if you didn't, then you really want to use my Leo. But what I did is I use a program called J head, j, h, e, a, d. Now this is on a Mac. I think some of this is also available on Windows and DOS, and I, j had moved it into folders, so folders based on. So this was a very this is somebody's crazy script. X if J peg manipulation tool. You'll get an idea of how geeky this is from the website.

0:41:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, look at it, it's plain text.

0:41:31 - Leo Laporte
It's a text thing. So this is the first thing. Is is J head and, oh look, it has a Windows, linux and OS 10.

0:41:39 - Mikah Sargent
So that's good. Oh, it's not on homebrew. No.

0:41:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, it might be, but it's open source so it's very easy. It doesn't look like it's on homebrew, maybe it is. So J H, e, a, d. And then I use this X if tool and equally geeky, ridiculous program by Phil Harvey, also open source, also free. Look at this. Just as bad as the J head, right, this is also cross platform. So this, this is hysterical. I'm sorry if I'm going to hammer your, your site, phil. He says it's F if X. If toolorg goes down, it's because of the crappy dream, oh it's thing which disables unlimited traffic website If a single bot hammers a site with a moderate load. Here's an alternate page on source forage. Let's hope we don't kill this page, but you can download this.

I use J head and X if tool to kind of get all the metadata, metadata right and all of this stuff. It. Both of them are kind of you. The it's. This supports every file type. You probably could do everything you want in X if tool or get my Leo, which would make it a lot easier.

J head is in homebrew, thank you, that's nice. I don't think you have to use both. J head is for J pegs and, by the way, your, your Google photos are all J pegs. So this is J pegs to get the X if data and to, and you can create folders with it and move them into the folders. You can apply the X if data to the photo.

I believe the and, by the way, it's important that it's not the modification date, it's the creation date, because that's you want to you, because the creation date once, once you get in takeout, is now Google's date, whatever date you did this. So you're going to then go to the X if, which is that metadata that's stored into a photo by your camera, and it'll say the creation date. You take that creation date and you make it the creation date of the file. J head will do that. X if tool would do that. X if tool is a Pearl library. Give me some idea what we're talking. Very geeky, but yeah, you can do it. Now I want to go to space, but first I have to get the pile pile. This is the pile of rod piles.

0:43:56 - John Ashley
But also we take a quick break before we do this?

0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
We want to take a look at your inner space. So everybody together with me, before we go to outer space. All right, you feel better, are you better? I'm centered.

0:44:14 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, it's my second move in Tai Chi.

0:44:19 - Leo Laporte
You know I'm a little stalled because I went back east so I missed move three and four. I figured, so I got to get caught up in my Tai Chi. I only know one move. It's a great move. Rod pile, the author of amazing stories, the author of interplanetary robots, the true stories of space Exploitation, I actually want to ask you a question about that. Look at this blueprint for a battle star. You know which one we're talking about, but we you know, out of respect for George Lucas.

0:44:45 - Mikah Sargent
Look at the vision pro on that guy.

0:44:48 - Leo Laporte
Hey, that's pretty good. You know, it cracks me up as Apple's vision pro ads which have a bunch of people putting on helmets like Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and data, and they should get this guy Rod pile to do it too.

0:45:01 - Leo Laporte
Rod Pyle. Chief of Ad Astra magazine, Hello Rod.

0:45:06 - Rod Pyle
I'm wearing my anti-Bolide glasses today.

0:45:09 - Leo Laporte
What's a Bolide?

0:45:11 - Rod Pyle
Bolides and exploding meteorite.

0:45:13 - Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle
Okay, let's take these off so I can see you guys. It works a little too well. Yeah, rod is the host of this week in space on the Twitter podcast and that work along with Terek Malik from spacecom. We are well. How are you?

Good, we got a lot of stuff today, so whatever you got time for, Well, first thing I want to ask you, I think and we should really pour one out, I guess for what did they? What in battle star Galactica? What was the thing that they said in battle star Galactica? Remember that? I can't remember.

But anyway for the ingenuity helicopter which was sent to Mars to explore Mars. It's a drone. And it was sent and they thought, well, maybe we'll get four or five flights out of it. I can't remember what they thought. Just a handful of flights out of it, right? Five, yeah, five flights, literally a handful. How many did they get?

0:46:06 - Rod Pyle
Well, they just finished 72, and that 72nd flight was a pop-up because they had had some communications issues in prior flights and they said, okay, let's just do a quick jump to make sure we can still talk to it. And there's a couple of different accounts rattling around but it looks like it landed out of line of sight. But prior to setting down they had lost communications again but managed to reacquire them by telling the rover okay, just sit and listen, don't do anything else, just sit and listen, don't interfere with yourself. And it regained contact. And this is after 72 flights. And let's not forget the perseverance. Rover is running on two radiation hardened power PC 750s processors which were baseline in 1997. So talk about compact code and UNIX, right?

0:46:56 - Leo Laporte
So is Ingenuity. Back then I thought we would lose contact.

0:47:00 - Rod Pyle
No, it's back. They're still troubleshooting, but so far it's flown 128 minutes total of all the flights and over 11 miles. And I think the reason that it goes out of line of sight, of course, is because of the scouting ahead of the rover Right, but they do try to keep calm, so continuous.

0:47:18 - Leo Laporte
I thought we were pouring one out for good. But poor went out just to the success of Ingenuity. And so say we all.

0:47:25 - Mikah Sargent
So say we all.

0:47:27 - Rod Pyle
Well, and we're seeing, you know, with this recent launch of the United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket in the Peregrine Lunar Lander, which was a private company funded by NASA called Astrobotic, and it didn't make it right. It malfunctioned out of the way to the moon. So we're kind of seeing, you know, the kind of malfunctions we had in the early 1960s in the private sector and other countries. Not many people have managed to land on the moon, but it just reminds us how hard this is and for this little machine to run this long. Admittedly they had $80 million to spend on it, but it's just astonishing.

0:48:03 - Leo Laporte
But that's just a tiny amount. That's how much they spent on the overpass down the road here I mean that's like NASA's coffee creamer budget. Yeah, I mean just wonderful, wonderful, all right. So I just want to mention that I thought that we'd lost it for good. I can't believe they got it back. That's incredible. What a story. We did lose VEGIR, though, right, voyager 1, I think we lost.

0:48:26 - Rod Pyle
It had a problem. They're still talking to it, so it's not completely gone. But let's bear in mind you know this thing does data recording when we uplink commands to it on real to real tape.

0:48:39 - Leo Laporte
That's been running for over a few years, yeah, and it is the most distant manmade object from our Earth at this point.

0:48:47 - Rod Pyle
Many, many light years away.

0:48:50 - Leo Laporte
So wow.

0:48:50 - Rod Pyle
Getting out of the interstellar space. So it's an amazing story and still has maneuvering fuel after all these years and thrusters that work. So there's two of them, though. I mean there's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. I wish Voyager 2 was this reliable. Yeah, your.

0:49:01 - Leo Laporte
Jaguar wasn't this reliable when it came from the factory, my friend. Well, yes, so OK. So what else besides obsolete space gear that's still running?

0:49:14 - Rod Pyle
OK, let's talk about this, this, this meteorite over Germany. So nice video. We have video Drop on Berlin that isn't from a B17.

0:49:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:49:19 - Rod Pyle
It is.

0:49:24 - Leo Laporte
It is a meteorite, because it fell to earth.

0:49:28 - Rod Pyle
Right. So the question? It's about three feet across, and what's interesting about this one is it was actually spotted by somebody over at SETI, presumably with a radio dish just before it came in.

0:49:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's so cool.

0:49:43 - Rod Pyle
And that's a shooting star.

0:49:44 - Leo Laporte
It's just a shooting star, rod, let's not get excited. It's a big shooting star.

0:49:48 - Rod Pyle
It's a big one you got to rock three feet across you probably want to step aside? Yeah, roughly, and, as I said, it was unusual that it was found just minutes before it came in, because that usually doesn't happen. So the question now is did it impact? So when you see those flashes, that means things are coming apart. So sometimes they explode completely, which is bullied. Sometimes they somebody wrote discord, a shooting star, you mean Alex Baldwin? Well, that's harsh.

0:50:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, too soon, my friend. Oh, that was Dr Mom, dr Mom.

0:50:23 - Rod Pyle
Finger shake at.

0:50:24 - Leo Laporte
Dr Mom.

0:50:25 - Rod Pyle
Well, no, that was a good joke, so you know there's a gas bubble in there or a loose piece on it or something. You'll see it start to fragment.

0:50:32 - Leo Laporte
I had a gas bubble the other night. That was a star. Oh, that's a difference. Yeah but, you did a different kind I didn't break up. Oh, you may have flamed, we don't know.

0:50:40 - Rod Pyle
But the question is did it come in? And I guess there's snow there now, so they're going to have to wait until it melts away to go look for it, but hopefully we'll find some pieces of it. That's really cool.

0:50:51 - Mikah Sargent
When you said this, you said this doesn't happen too often. You mean that usually it is spotted long before the four minutes? No, usually it's not spotted at all, got it.

0:51:01 - Rod Pyle
So if you go out, there are probably six major meteor showers per year, two of them prominent. This wasn't part of one of them, as far as I know, and that's because these are trails of asteroids and comets that have long past mostly comets that have long past gone past Earth's orbit and they leave this kind of bank of gravel and junk behind them. So every time the Earth goes through that in predictable times of the year, you'll get meteor showers. So if you go out to a very dark place, you can see maybe one every minute or two. They're not like this for the most part, but every now and then you see a big one like this and it's pretty exciting. And they come in a different color. Sometimes they're just green. If there's a certain kind of metal in it, there'll be other colors. So that's something fun to do.

0:51:46 - Leo Laporte
We actually are in the Gamma Ursa Minorids right now and we'll be in the Alpha Centaurids in a week or so. Those are little ones. Those are little ones. It's what is it? The Perseids?

0:51:58 - Mikah Sargent
is the one, those Alpha Centaurids. They're so small, there's no Perseids in the Geminids.

0:52:03 - Rod Pyle
Perseids are in August, Summer yeah summer, geminids are in December, which is a lousy time to go outside, and I saw I may have said this before on the show, but in 1966, when I was about a young Yelper, I saw the Leonid shower, which was the 33-year cycle it's named after me, it'll come in. Yeah, it'll come in like barnstorms.

That's Temple Tuttle, that's the yeah, right, and there was thousands of them that came in that night. Wow, it was one big burst and I ran inside to wake up my parents and they said that's nice honey, and went back to sleep. But I thought it was exciting.

0:52:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I was very lucky to see that. Those Philistines, oh my goodness. But other news, yes.

0:52:44 - Rod Pyle
We finally. Last week we finally got the news of Artemis delays. So they had a press conference. They announced it quietly the Friday before, as they will often do, and they had Bill Nelson, nasa administrator, and other front rankers from NASA and a rep from SpaceX and a couple of others on their press conference and they said, well, okay, so we're finally going to admit it.

The Artemis 2 Lunar flyby will be delayed, not in 2024, but at least till December 25. And Artemis 3, the landing, at least till 2026, no month given. And, as we've discussed before, there's a few problems with that. We don't have a lunar EVA capable suit. We haven't built one since the 1970s. So we're working on that with Axiom Space Company and, critically, we don't yet have a lunar lander this ready, because Elon's got to fly those starships, because the starship is what's supposed to get us down lunar surface, and we've only flown two of them and they both exploded. So, working on that, and nobody I know in the community believed these dates and originally it was supposed to be out around 2028. But the Trump administration said no, we want it in 24, because we'll still be in office, not quite. So it's official now and they've got a little more time. And, leo, you remember this, in the Apollo years, if you were paying attention, then we had live delays then too.

0:54:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, we did say three times as much money. Well, I didn't say it, but JFK did say before this decade is out, and he did it in 1961. And they made it, yeah, yeah so delays are not. And gosh, I remember sitting watching Uncle Walter fill three hours during a hold on Gemini. But several year delays, maybe a little order of magnitude, a little different, don't you think?

0:54:36 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, but we're spending a lot less dough. Oh OK, so it's still expensive. And again, would you probably suppose that what you're saying.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
They went to B&H photos to get their rocket instead of getting it from the Apple store.

0:54:49 - Rod Pyle
No, apple care on these guys and SLS is a big part of that expense. There's other hot centers of where the costs are and there's a lot of criticism. Ok, but we did. Officer Inspector General has.

0:55:03 - Leo Laporte
We did do this 50 years ago.

0:55:06 - Rod Pyle
Right, yes, but we did it. Yeah, and it was a mad dash and entirely, but I'm just saying that 50 years ago, we were able to do it then.

0:55:14 - Mikah Sargent
We were able to do this more than 50 now, but like you pointed out, many of the people who designed the suit are now dead, and so they don't have all of the knowledge, even that we had, for how to build a space suit and also bring it up to code of the modern day right? I remember us talking about that a little bit.

0:55:36 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, to some extent. Now you can always go into a museum and reverse engineer one. There's plenty of them around. But you're right, I mean, there's a big loss of brain trust over the years, not just for space suits. We're for everything from throttleable rocket engines to well, not navigation?

0:55:51 - Leo Laporte
Is it a? Do you feel it's a shame that we didn't, when we knew it and had the ability to do it, pursue this and actually make a moon base and all that? Or?

0:56:01 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, I mean I would have liked to have seen something along the lines of the Apple show for all mankind, except without the Russians getting there first. I know, could we have, though?

0:56:10 - Leo Laporte
I mean I also remember that this was spamming a can. I mean, the computers were primitive, everything was very primitive and I think we don't really understand how you know, like by a thread this whole thing hung and it's kind of a miracle that it's there.

0:56:24 - Rod Pyle
It's a really good point, and the further we get, from it, the more amazed I am that it all worked. To give it a little technology then, because transistors were about what? Seven, eight years old when the first lunar missions were heading out. Right, but we could have, you know, they had a lot of. So NASA had a lot of plans that don't get a lot of coverage. I cover them some in some of my books, but for lunar lander cargo versions, for lunar lander semi-permanent base versions, we just lost the will to do it. Well, yeah, politically, I think you know this was a geopolitical struggle, do you think?

0:56:57 - Leo Laporte
somebody in the chat room, newman, is saying that we're doing it safer this time. Is that the case? We're more cautious.

0:57:02 - Rod Pyle
Well, we hope so. Yeah, I think they're doing more testing, although there was plenty of testing back in Apollo, but we're doing more testing. There's more work being put up upfront because we don't want to hurt anybody. And NASA's more risk-adversed in the use of it Now. What'll be interesting is, of course, the Chinese have said very publicly hey, we're going to the moon too, first with robots and with people. They've already succeeded with robots. It'll be interesting to see what level of risk there will lead to take.

0:57:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's not forget that the reason NASA had unlimited funding for JFK was we were in a race with Russia. So in some ways, competition isn't necessarily a bad thing, Right?

0:57:40 - Rod Pyle
I mean if you and we were almost on a war footing with Apollo, you know. But it was very, you know, originally that program was meant to be sustainable. As it turned out, because they got in a hurry, it was really not so, while we could have done a lot more with the Saturn V Lunar Module, command Module, all that, it wasn't designed for long-term use. So we built a bunch of them, we used most of them, if you were still sitting in museums because those flights got canceled, because Nixon got bored with space, I guess, and the geopolitical mandate kind of went away. So you're right, I mean, it's really a matter of willpower, just wanting to do it and put the money at it. We're spending a lot less this time.

0:58:15 - Mikah Sargent
You started to say something about China in the 60s.

0:58:19 - Rod Pyle
No, I was just saying Russia in the 60s, we don't know. You know they had a lunar effort. They denied it for a long time because it didn't work. But what would have been interesting to see, had they tried to send cosmonauts to the moon, is how much risk they would have taken. Got it Because we were more risk-adverse than them back in the time, in some people's opinion, some researchers, certainly. What we saw is their stuff was a little more primitive and kind of rough and ready than ours, but we were taking a lot of risks. I mean, there were a couple of flights of Polo-8, notably where had one rocket engine failed which is one of the back of the service module, part of that Command Module spacecraft cluster. Had that thing not worked, polo-8 would not have come home. So there were some single points of failure that were pretty scary. Trying to avoid that. This time we're going to have multiple spacecraft out there and a few years we'll have the lunar gateway orbiting the moon. So there'll be a space station there you can go to if you have an emergency and you're in the right orbit. But it's a lot to do and you hear something.

You see a clickbait article like NASA can't figure out how to build a space suit. Well, they got lots of space suits. What they don't have is suits that can walk around the lunar surface. And let's remember, those Apollo suits were designed to be used once for a couple of days on the moon, and that's it. Moon dust is nasty. There's no weather there because there's no atmosphere, so that grits really sharp, so you get a little bit too much grit in your glove seal or your helmet seal. So they're trying to design these things to last a long time because they want to go there and stick around. This time that makes sense.

0:59:51 - Mikah Sargent
Okay. By the way, Mikah.

0:59:54 - Rod Pyle
Yes, that earlier shot of you in the Sailors cap what I missed that. You guys put it up. He had a knit cap on. It was a picture of him getting the.

1:00:03 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, what I was waking up in the morning, oh yeah.

1:00:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was when you were, I grow up and start to binge a mid-button.

1:00:10 - Rod Pyle
I want to look like you I finally arrived.

1:00:13 - Leo Laporte
You want to grow up. I decided aging is not for me. But it does, as my wife will say again and again, repeat the alternative.

1:00:22 - Rod Pyle
Right. Well, we're seasoned right. Yeah, that's what they say about guys are age season.

1:00:27 - Mikah Sargent
The alternative of aging is dying. Is that the implication there?

1:00:31 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, that's the point. Yes, it's a lousy choice, unless they're going to shoot me up in a rocket to re-enter gloriously. I don't want to eat, oh there's another story.

1:00:41 - Leo Laporte
I feel so bad for Gene Roddenberry and Isaac. Was it Isaac Asimov?

1:00:48 - Rod Pyle
Major Barrett. There's some other Star Trek people I don't know. There's Arthus C.

1:00:52 - Leo Laporte
Clarke was on there Arthur C Clarke this was thinking of their ashes were, and this was a little bit of a strange thing. In fact, there's quite a few complaints about it. A private business was launching them to the moon to leave their ashes there, and some Native American tribes were objecting because the moon was a holy place for them. You don't just throw people's ashes on the moon. In any event, it's a moot point because the rocket has now they had a propellant leak. It couldn't get out of orbit, and then it's now de-orbited in the most spectacular way. And well, yeah, it went out in this big loop and then came back and re-edited over, if you want to do that with my ashes.

That's cool. Scatter them over the entire face of the earth.

1:01:34 - Rod Pyle
And you know lots of sympathy to the indigenous tribes because they've had you know we haven't had the best history of compliance with their desires in the past. But yeah, but in this case, NASA's response was look, this is a private company, we're just funding the rocket. We don't have any control over them. You could, if you needed to, somebody could intervene, but let's not forget that there's six Apollo lunar module landing stages sitting around the moon. Before those astronauts left, they tossed out cameras. They tossed out bits of clothing.

1:02:06 - Leo Laporte
We've already desecrated those.

1:02:08 - Rod Pyle
They tossed out little bags of poop, so there's stuff already on the moon that you would consider to be desecration. I think this was just a matter. What they didn't say in the complaint was just don't commercialize it. There was also some of those remains were also put up, I believe, in the rocket fairing. So some of them did successfully go out into deep space and will continue going on.

The ones, you're right, the ones on the lander came back to earth, but you know they still went to space and they came back and burned up in a spectacular fashion. So I guess that's something, yeah.

1:02:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they have more ashes to try again. By the way, it was just a small number.

1:02:42 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, these are little teeny, teeny samples and bits of DNA that went up. Just one thought about this. I got a question from somebody the other day, online, you know, talking about this failed Peregrine lander and this was to be the first commercial lander on the moon, so it was inexpensive. It was a piece of repurposed hardware. I think the whole thing was 30 or 50 million dollars, which in those terms is pretty cheap, without the launch.

1:03:07 - Leo Laporte
The launch was provided, but as Leo always go wherever lunch is provided. By the way, that is to me the first thing.

1:03:15 - Rod Pyle
I look for A launch, oh, ok yes, we had the surveyor program which sent, I think, seven landers to the moon. Five made it so as far back as 1965, we were already landing robots on the moon, we being the US, the Soviet Union as well at some point. But you know, we spent the equivalent of about five billion of twenty twenty four dollars doing that because we were on this war footing and this competition with the Soviet Union. So the question is now can you do it cheaper if you're a private company, using some off the shelf software, hardware and with the assistance of NASA? So yeah, we did it before. We did it five times. The surveyors were basically there to land and say, yes, it's safe to land on the moon and here's what it's like down here. So send on your astronauts. And a couple of years later we did.

1:04:05 - Leo Laporte
But you have to remember we hold everything we didn't know, for instance, if the lunar dust was so deep that you would just step out of the lander and sink away and never to be seen again.

1:04:16 - Rod Pyle
I mean, it was a lot of unknowns we had to figure out there was a guy I think it was Caltech Thomas Gold who was absolutely convinced two things one, that the lunar lander would sink under 10 feet of dust to disappear, which nobody took very seriously except him, but it was a concern. The other one was that lunar dust would combust. The second, it was exposed to oxygen inside the lunar module and it didn't. But Buzz Aldrin did say it smelled like unpowder.

1:04:41 - Leo Laporte
So that's interesting. Oh yeah, All right, Mr Chair, so yeah if you decide you want to go up.

1:04:47 - Rod Pyle
By the way, leo, when your time comes, the starting price for having your ashes launched is $13,000.

1:04:52 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's actually not bad. That's not terrible.

1:04:55 - Rod Pyle
I mean a good coffin will cost you that. A four apple headsets will cost you that. This is a better deal, right? A better view, that's for sure, and you won't leave it on Leo's yard sale table at the end of the day, oh.

1:05:09 - Leo Laporte
That would be so sad if five years from now, this is. Leo on the conference room table.

1:05:14 - Rod Pyle
Oh, I thought you bet a few by that time.

1:05:16 - Mikah Sargent
Oh you, oh me, your ashes, oh no, oh yeah, that's heartbreak.

1:05:20 - Leo Laporte
That's the final garage sale. That's the last one Closing time.

1:05:25 - Rod Pyle
If you need it to cremains, you have to earn it. Get it, sorry, rod.

Pile, I guess with that, if you like jokes like that, you'll love this week in space, by the way, oh oh, Before I forget, yes, yeah, on January 24th or 29th which one's a Friday we have on January, sorry, February 23rd we have Pam Melroy, who is the deputy director of NASA the number two Wow Coming on this week in space to talk about, among other things, the Artemis delays and what the plans are for that program. So that's a big honor for us and I'm going to be very excited to have her there. No kidding, she's a really great interview.

1:06:05 - Mikah Sargent
The second in charge at NASA is coming on your show. Wow, that's incredible. That's good. So February 23rd did you say?

1:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Third February 23rd. All right, yeah, wow, that's exciting.

1:06:20 - Mikah Sargent
Keep mentioning that.

1:06:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we got to keep plugging that one. That's a biggie. Yeah, friday, february 23rd. Mr.

1:06:27 - Rod Pyle
Someday we'll get Leo on there.

1:06:29 - Leo Laporte
Have I not been on your show.

1:06:31 - Rod Pyle
You haven't because you're going to be on once, but you had a Friday, I think, a standing Friday conflict.

1:06:36 - Mikah Sargent
And every time he wants to come on he wants to talk about how the moon landing was faked. So we really don't want him there.

1:06:41 - Rod Pyle
I love talking about that, you kidding. When I get on coast to coast with our friend George Nury, it comes up the second hour. Every time We'll get Adam Curry for you.

1:06:49 - Leo Laporte
He's on the horn. He believes, he thinks that there is a secret space, space on the far side of the moon, that our military that's a.

1:06:58 - Rod Pyle
Nazi set up in 1946. You bet Because, why not?

1:07:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is what's great about conspiracy theories they're hard to disprove, Right? Yes?

1:07:07 - Rod Pyle
they are. And to become an expert, you don't even need a PhD, you don't even know nothing.

1:07:11 - Leo Laporte
Websites- yeah, thank you so much, rod Pyle, this week in space and, of course, go to spaceis. What is the address? Issorg For spacecom, international Space Society.

1:07:26 - Rod Pyle
Oh, national Space Society, it's nssorg, nssorg.

1:07:30 - Leo Laporte
I got it wrong completely. There it is. Thank you, sir, it's on the screen. Spacenssorg. Subscribe to Ad Astra. Thanks so much. Thank you, mr Pyle. I won't play the Space Force theme. Just because of you. Just because of you. What do you want to do now, mr Producer man?

1:07:50 - John Ashley
Ooh, that's second. You almost said boy producer. No.

1:07:54 - Leo Laporte
I didn't hear it. No, ok, I didn't do it.

1:08:00 - John Ashley
So there's a couple of phone callers. I actually want to pick up on it, but here's the thing I don't know who to pick up on. So I thought of a genius idea and this is how my generation kind does these things, how we can figure this out. Let's go on TikTok.

1:08:14 - John Ashley
No.

1:08:15 - John Ashley
See, we like to decide to hang on by chance.

1:08:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're going to spin the saver, amazing wheel. Spin the wheel All right. This is Picker Wheel? Yes, I'm surprised these are still around. This was a very popular amongst people in my generation and the answer is LA Five, number five.

1:08:36 - John Ashley
Oh hey.

1:08:37 - Leo Laporte
I only see four, that's great.

1:08:39 - Mikah Sargent
What is that? Picker Wheel? Oh, I see five. I see Picker Wheel, picker Wheel.

1:08:43 - John Ashley
OK, I'm going to pick up on number five.

1:08:45 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing what technology has brought us oh yes, oh, it's four now.

1:08:49 - John Ashley
Ok, well, four, Four, you win.

1:08:50 - Mikah Sargent
Even in the death of Flash Animation.

1:08:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's still Picker Wheel.

1:08:54 - Mikah Sargent
Hello caller, if you are a caller, please press star six to unmute yourself.

1:09:01 - Leo Laporte
Ok, that was Picker Wheelcom, by the way. Oh, good to know. Yeah, sponsored by Picker.

1:09:05 - Caller
Wheel. Hi, good afternoon. This is Roy from Southern Indiana. Hi, Roy from Southern Indiana. Hey, I just feel like I won a huge prize. Thanks for spinning the wheel and picking me. You did.

1:09:17 - Leo Laporte
You did it. You saw there was confetti and everything this is exciting.

1:09:22 - Caller
Long time listener and I've got a super quick question. Sure. I am looking for some video monitors for work. We'd like to be able to fit it out in our waiting area to show some of our different services, our menu and things like that. Do you have any simple solutions for what we're trying to do?

1:09:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, a television would be your best bet. You could go for what TCL or High Sense are two good looking but still inexpensive options and, depending on what you're trying to display to them, you could go the route of an Apple TV, which you would then air play the content to.

1:10:03 - Leo Laporte
I think many of these. There is an app called a display menu on the Apple TV in the Mac App Store, but I think having a Mac to do this in the background would be better Is kind of overkill. It might be better to have a Raspberry Pi. Yeah, just an inexpensive computer. No, john's disagreeing John. You have like 20 Raspberry Pis Running in the background in your home. A lot of extra work, ok.

1:10:29 - Caller
I mean if they have a skilled IT guy to do that, just to get it working.

1:10:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, tell us what. So is this information available on a website, for example? And you're just trying to display that? Is this something that could be just created as a JPEG that you could just display on the TV? Yeah, how much do you have to change it? Yeah, how much does it need to be changed? How dynamic should it need to be?

1:10:50 - Caller
Yeah, so we have a lot of JPEG images. We provide personal care assistance primarily for aging adults, so we would like to have some of our different overviews of our service training, some information on some of the services that our care professionals offer and just maybe some testimonials that we have cycling through yeah.

1:11:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah. So in this case you could use something like PowerPoint or Keynote on a Mac to display this stuff and just have it basically running.

1:11:25 - Leo Laporte
You probably could get an old Mac mini, an old Intel-based Mac mini, almost as cheaply as you can get a Raspberry Pi these days, and then attach that to a screen and you write cheap TV would be fine, anything with HDMI in would be fine. And so in effect, you're just having a running slideshow on there. The advantage of doing it that way is you could use Apple's Keynote. It's very easy to modify, it's very easy to create.

1:11:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, as you get more testimonials, maybe you want to update it with new stuff. That's so the pharmacy that I go to they've got a slideshow that plays, that has images of oh, get your medicine in the mail instead of coming here and annoying us. And here's a nice testimonial, and oh, this is the person you call to tell us that we've done such a great job, and it just kind of cycles through and that is, there's a little PC that's hooked up to it on the back and it's just a PowerPoint that's playing. So, yeah, basically you would do the same thing here. You would have a little computer of some sort and you would just connect it via HDMI to this and then basically, depending on how many of these you wanted let's say you had three televisions you could use what's called, and it's essentially a duplicator, so you would have the one PC.

1:12:39 - Caller
Oh, to split it to the various TVs To split it to all three of the televisions and it would play through, instead of having to have one for each one.

1:12:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So John, who worked at the Cal State LA, said he showed that to me. He showed it to me so I can read it. He replaced a $20,000, very expensive custom LED display with just a big TV and a PowerPoint. And this was 25 years ago. So, really honestly, you could do it. Any cheap computer could do it. A NUC, one of those little small computers like that. Do you have a budget for this?

1:13:17 - Caller
No, I mean, the budget that we had honestly was for some static display signs with neon, and I think I'm going to come in significantly under. So I think we were quoted $10,000 for that.

1:13:30 - John Ashley
Oh yeah, I just didn't know this was so much.

1:13:32 - Mikah Sargent
You could do for $500. This would be so much less expensive.

1:13:36 - Caller
OK, so it depends on how big a screen you want. Is there any way to load it onto a thumb drive, so that way it could be kind of foolproof if I wanted to cascade this to the other offices, ok, so this is another thing you could do.

1:13:51 - Leo Laporte
In fact, one of our chatters in the Discord is mentioning this, and this is absolutely true. When you create a slideshow, either keynote or PowerPoint, you can create an MP4 video. Now it's done. You can't modify it, but it will play, it will rotate, it'll show videos, it'll do whatever All the stuff that you did in the PowerPoint or the keynote. Save it out.

That you could put on a USB key, and many TVs these days can play, can play it. You just plug it into the USB port and it'll say oh, I see a video there. It might have a menu interface. You press the button and then that video is just going to keep playing until Windows crashes, which is probably every four, five minutes. No, no, this isn't running Windows, this is running the TV's operating system. So that's what I would. That's a great idea. So make a thumb drive Copy that again and again, and again. You can bring it to every TV. If these, in fact your displays in the offices, may already have a little USB slot or an SD card slot that they can play. That there's very common in TVs maybe less so now, but it was very common in TVs a few years ago that they would have a little SD card slot that you could put an SD in and it would just play a slideshow. Yeah, your photos, whatever you want to. Yeah, so you may even have those TVs already. I would go around the offices and look.

1:15:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and if you need to check whether the television will play something back, you could go to a big box store. If you end up needing to get new TVs, you go to a big box store and try it out. Cheap TV.

1:15:17 - Leo Laporte
Yep USB slot. That way you just you go home, you make a perfect PowerPoint, you put it on the thumb drive as a video file, an MP4 file. That's easy. Yeah, that's probably the best way to do this Agreed, then you don't have to have a dedicated computer for it. The TV's just playing it on its own.

1:15:35 - Caller
Wow, thank you so very much. It's been such a pleasure, and thank you again for everything that you guys both do and a huge Twit fan, so thank you very much.

1:15:45 - Leo Laporte
Hey, it's great to talk to you.

1:15:47 - Caller
Thank you.

1:15:48 - Leo Laporte
And you know what Thanks for the work you do. I know it's hard to work with elders, but they need that care desperately. I know this because I was just with my mom for a week. She's in a memory care unit because she has Alzheimer's and you really see how hard the AIDS work, how committed they are to the older people and it's important to the older people because they're confused, they don't know what's going on, and their families too. We can't be there 100% of the time, so thank you, it's important work.

1:16:16 - Caller
Thank you.

1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
Take care. Wow, that went really well. Did you see that this spinner wheel has money, more features than just a simple spinner wheel? Look at the tools. Here you got a picker wheel, a team picker wheel yes, no picker wheel a number picker wheel, a letter picker wheel. Country what's the country picker? Oh, look, pick a country.

1:16:40 - John Ashley
Spin countries. I have made a terrible mistake.

1:16:43 - Mikah Sargent
This is, if you do, the UN probably yeah date picker wheel.

1:16:46 - Leo Laporte
Image picker wheel. This is fantastic, Ooh, an image picker wheel.

1:16:51 - Mikah Sargent
Well, yeah, should we. One person could be, a hot dog. The other person could be a tanker.

1:16:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's upload some images we could see and then you can. Basically that means you could spin anything, you spin it and there it goes Round and round. She goes when she stops and it makes a lot of noise.

1:17:05 - John Ashley
You have to play the noise you have to.

1:17:07 - Leo Laporte
That's not asking this is better than Wheel of Fortune. Who's going to win? Yellow, red, yellow, blue, blue, blue? Oh, Whoever did this is cracked. They do have ads on it. I'm undermining them by running an ad blocker, but there are ads on it, but still. This is fantastic. I wonder. I'm looking for the person's name. You have all of the. How did you find this? This is great, John, or people your age all know about this, right?

1:17:39 - John Ashley
Yeah, a lot of Twitch streamers use this tool because oh, this is a Twitch streamer tool, of course.

1:17:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, twitch laid off another bunch of people this week and there was a story, I guess was it the New York Times saying that insiders say Twitch never did it right, they never understood their creators and they never had the technology they needed to succeed. Youtube's eating their lunch?

1:18:06 - John Ashley
I think yeah a little bit, just a say.

1:18:08 - Leo Laporte
Just a touch. Yeah, well, we're on. Are we on Twitch? Still, I think we are. No, we're just on YouTube, just on YouTube. Okay, Never mind.

1:18:16 - John Ashley
Forget about it. Well, you know what we can't forget about, though.

1:18:21 - Leo Laporte
Time to take a.

1:18:21 - John Ashley
Well, no, it's not a break, it's our daily moment of zen Ready, because YouTube TV does this.

1:18:28 - Leo Laporte
They have fish jumping in the streams and then the berries and stuff, but we're just going to go. I like that. It's very relaxing. We are watching Ask the Tech Guys, micah Sergeant and Leo Laporte and Taking Calls. We didn't mention this at the beginning of the show. You just are so smart. If you're watching the video, you can read the screen. 888-724-2884 is our phone number. When we're live, you can get right on the air, but if you're not, if we're not you can leave a voicemail. We appreciate those. You can also email atatg at twittv video voicemail. I saw somebody sent John a very long video, john.

1:19:09 - John Ashley
Oh, a very long way. Huh, a very long video. I'm cutting it down. Yes, you mean this video right here.

1:19:13 - Caller
Hi Leo and Mikah. I'm Jason and I'm calling in from West Sussex in England. I'm a massive fan of the Twit network and been listening to you for years, in fact, and a member of the Cloud as well, thank you. So I have a fiber connection which is directly connected to my house. It comes with a fairly standard ISP stroke wireless router. As I always do, I use my own network on top and in this case it's a mesh router.

I've got a fairly standard setup, so one mesh node is plugged in directly via ethernet to the ISP router and then by default what it does. It creates a network in what's called router mode and that gives me a lot of functionality directly in the tender app as well, so I can things like speed testing and get a sense of the bandwidth per device and so on. There's also another setting called the AP, or I think it's access point. When I'm in that mode it works great still, but I do some of those features on the mesh network. So my question is what should I do and what's in the best interest of the network? Does being in router mode limit the performance of the network? Are the clients that sat underneath it on that network? Are they having to work harder to resolve ISP IP addresses, et cetera? Love the show. Keep up the good work and thanks again.

1:20:31 - Leo Laporte
Thank you so much. Thanks. Mike D in the Discord says you know, british people sound so much smarter. He should be hosting this show and then we could be just the dumb American saying what should I do with my router? So they call it a router. By the way, in the UK and Australia they call it a router. We call it a router here in the United States, but it's the same thing.

It's a device that distributes network connectivity to a variety of devices. In the earliest days you need this because your internet service provider gives you one internet address, one IP address, and then you have more than one device on there. They can't all have the same address, but the internet doesn't work if devices aren't unique. So that's what the router or router does. It routes the traffic. It says ah, you local PC 192.168.1.100 are having a conversation over our public address with a website. Every time that website says information in it goes to the router, which then routes it or routes it right to the PC that started the conversation, and does this with all the different devices. So it's a really clever way of having multiple devices on a single IP address. But the router is a computer. It has to keep track of the conversations. It'll say oh yeah, you were talking, oh yeah, you're talking. Oh, wait a minute, I got this for you, this is for you, so it's to. It is a fairly busy switchboard. Yes, a switchboard, it's actually a better analogy. It's like a switchboard. The calls are coming in and says oh this is for you, micah, and it hands it off.

So what you don't want is two routers on one system, and that's kind of what he has, because the ISP provided cable modems I'm sorry, fiber modem, slash router. That's a good that. That'll do all of that work, as will your mesh system. So the mesh system has a setting. I kind of like the word bridge mode, but they call it what did they call it? Mesh mode? No, anyway, they basically they have a setting that says don't do any routing, just be an antenna, just be a radio, okay, and somebody else will do the routing. You don't have to think about that, you just have to sit there passively and, and, and, and, you know, be a transmitter receiver. You can also probably in the ISPs router there's probably a setting in there very deep saying go into bridge mode, don't do any routing, just interpret the incoming fiber, send it through the ethernet to my mesh device which will do the routing. You can use either one, but don't use both. Correct, they call that double net. You don't want double net.

1:23:07 - Mikah Sargent
You don't want a double net.

1:23:10 - Leo Laporte
So the question is, which should you use? And that's up to you. You can use either one If it's easy for you to turn the ISP router into bridge mode. It sounds like you like the features of your mesh route, right, so that's what I would do. I would say to the mesh route, I would say to the ISP router no, no, don't do any routing, just be a modem, a modem, and then let the mesh router do all the work. You probably do that with your era.

1:23:33 - Mikah Sargent
That is what I used to do. Now I have my own modem that I installed. But yeah, whenever I had the modem plus router that was given to me by the ISP, I turned off all the router functionality. It just served as the modem. My router was done with the euro and everything else. Now that I have my own modem, it is just a modem, so it can only be a modem, and so the routing all happens from the erode advice.

1:23:55 - Leo Laporte
So the other question he said is well, does this affect my speed? Certainly, double netting would. The router does slow things down because it's doing work, but it is a purpose built computer. I mean, it's not the fastest process in the world, but it just does one thing who you know? It has a table. Who's who's talking to who? Who? Okay, you, okay, okay, so it's able to do that pretty efficiently.

Routers generally don't slow things down appreciably. Yes, technically there is a slowdown as it routes, but it's not. It's not a million. It may be, though, that one or the other of your routers you have to is faster than the other. So you can experiment If you like the features of the mesh.

Keep the mesh, unless if it's really slow and you get 90% of the features from the ISPs router, than use the ISPs router. They shouldn't be too much of a performance difference. If you have a good mesh router, you're probably that's going to have a better processor in it because it's doing more stuff than the ISPs. In general, I do what you do. I get rid of the ISP gear because you're often paying them rent for that, which ends up being more expensive by my own gear and get good gear. That's dumb.

Yes, I agreed, you know, just a simple Motorola router. It's a little different with a fiber provider, because that's a more complicated device. So it may be that you have to use their terminator box, their ONT. If that's the case, you know, just just use your mesh, turn it up, put that in bridge mode and use your mesh. Don't use both. That's the main thing, and you can actually do that. But there is then there's some slowdown and then there's also some duplication of effort, but there's also some confusion. Confusion is the big thing. Yeah, because you're doing network address translation, that's what then that is on both devices. You don't want to do that.

1:25:39 - Mikah Sargent
Good question. Yeah, that's really a common I think thing and you could see all the edit points Now.

1:25:44 - Leo Laporte
did you do the edit, John, or did he do the edit? He did the edit.

1:25:48 - John Ashley
I asked him to edit it down just for our sake, because it was a three minute plus question. As much as I love video questions, we love our listeners.

1:25:56 - Leo Laporte
Try to keep them under. Actually, 30 seconds is ideal and I think if you think about it you can almost always get it down shorter. You could easily have said I have a fiber modem and I have a mesh router. I'm wondering which should I? Which should do the routing?

1:26:10 - Mikah Sargent
Is it going to slow me down? I like the features.

1:26:12 - Leo Laporte
You can do it pretty quickly. So, yeah, we do like that. We really. I like seeing you in your attic suite.

1:26:18 - John Ashley
It was lovely. He had a very nice, very nice setup up there.

1:26:21 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Sometimes people live in their mom's basement, sometimes they live in their mom's attic. And sometimes sometimes that's their own house.

1:26:32 - Mikah Sargent
It's just like it up. They just like it upstairs.

1:26:34 - Leo Laporte
Chris Cappicella, who was the former chief marketing officer at Microsoft, always used to call us from his attic, but I don't think it was his mother's, probably not, no, I would assume no. Who else should we talk?

1:26:49 - John Ashley
to. I am going to pick up. I'm assuming it's not Daniel Hower, but I'm sure they'll tell us their name when I pick up on them.

1:26:55 - Leo Laporte
Okay, and coming up, by the way, chris Markwart, with our photo review. Very clean.

1:27:02 - John Ashley
Clean. And also I forgot to mention there's actually a question that was addressed to Chris that he's going to answer for us after even better.

1:27:10 - Leo Laporte
It's not just two tech guys, we're all tech people, all of us in our heart. You know, it's probably true that anybody who's watching any of our shows at this point is a tech person. Pretty techie, Right. Most people would not think to say well, I have two routers, what should I use?

1:27:25 - Mikah Sargent
That's right. Yeah, that is that's you're right. That's a very technical question. Can you plug it in? Go ahead, Call her. Is this a phone call? Okay, Star six to unmute yourself. Star six eight eight seven, two, four.

1:27:40 - Leo Laporte
There we go. Hello, what's your first name? Where are you calling from?

1:27:44 - Caller
It was Dan. I'm calling from North Oregon coast.

1:27:48 - Leo Laporte
Beautiful Welcome Dan.

1:27:51 - Caller
Thank you. Quick question I've had a media server on my PC for years with no problem. I don't know if it was because I'm an update or whatever, but now I'm losing my media server on startup of my PC. I'll reset the network adapter and it will come back. Then it will disappear again and I can't figure out how to which?

1:28:16 - Leo Laporte
which media server are you using? Who's what software?

1:28:21 - Caller
I've tried different ones to see if it was the software. I'm using Me's Mo now, but I've used different servers and it's. It's this thing, as far as so it's a.

1:28:31 - Leo Laporte
It's a network. It's a network issue. Obviously not a, not a software software issue.

1:28:37 - Caller
Well, somehow it's almost like the permissions for the server disappear after I do the reset the network adapter, and I can't figure out how to on.

1:28:47 - Mikah Sargent
You're saying reset the network adapter. Are you talking about your, the one that's connected to the device itself? Are you talking about resetting your router?

1:28:58 - Caller
Yeah, okay, the windows 11 reset the network adapter and windows 11.

1:29:04 - Leo Laporte
And why and why you started doing that just to see if you could get the media server working. Is that why you do that?

1:29:11 - Caller
Yeah, that's looking, trying to troubleshoot on YouTube and Google. That was one of the things that was recommended and that worked, but then it will disappear.

1:29:22 - Leo Laporte
So when you say disappear, you're on other machines and you're looking for your media server and you can't see it.

1:29:27 - Caller
Exactly Okay, I'll see it right after I reset the network adapter, and then a couple of minutes later it'll and I'll be able to play throughout the house, and then a couple of minutes later it'll disappear, and then I'll have to reset the adapter to get it on for a little bit.

1:29:42 - Leo Laporte
Interesting, but resetting the adapter works. Probably what you're doing when you're resetting the adapter is you are. I wonder if it's. Does that restart the server or is it reassigning IP addresses? One thing you want to make sure is that no other machine in your house has the same IP address. Remember we were talking about the routers. The reason the router works is because it assigns local IP addresses to every single device in your house. Typically it's 192.168. Usually one, something, sometimes 10. Apple ones used to do 10., but usually it's 192. Make sure there's and you, by the way, a good network system will say hey, there's another IP address here, but maybe it's not. Make sure you're not duplicating. What I would suggest probably the best thing to do is that machine that is your media server, give it a static IP address. Do you know how to do that?

I could figure it out, it's in the network settings Got it and, by the way, this is usually when you get in trouble is when you give it a static, because in theory, the router is going to keep track of all that and not duplicate. That's one of the reasons double net can be problematic. It's also it could also be that the machine's not doing the right thing. So what I usually do in a case like this it's not a bad idea. You'd want you kind of want a static IP address for a media server so that all the machines know where to go.

Make it high enough so that it's out of reach of the. You know, if you have 50 devices and your routers are signing 10, 198.192.168.1.1 through 50, make it 60,. Make it just out of the range. You don't want to make it too high because there may be a limit. It may not be able to go more than .255. Well, I know it can't go more than 255. So that might be one issue to look at. Just try a static IP address, an IP address that you know nobody else is using, and then Would Windows update have done something?

1:31:57 - Caller
Because it was working fine and I haven't installed anything, it just.

1:32:01 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know Windows, you only have one router, right? You don't have two routers.

1:32:08 - Rod Pyle
Right.

1:32:09 - Leo Laporte
That's one that's worked for years. Yeah, so it's all been very stable and all of a sudden, along comes a Windows update. You're running Windows 11?.

1:32:17 - Caller
Yes.

1:32:20 - Leo Laporte
I don't think. I'm trying to think if there's anything in Windows update that could have done that.

1:32:25 - Mikah Sargent
Did you? There was one thing that I'm seeing fly by here that could possibly be it. Could you know? Whenever you're resetting the network settings, then that is kind of restarting everything. Everything's logged and running. But we've talked before about power management being an issue for closing down some things. Could that be a?

1:32:43 - Leo Laporte
factor here Could be. Yeah, sometimes network cards will go to sleep mode. So make sure you disable sleep on the network card. That'll be in the device driver interface. That that has been a problem in the past. By the way, when you do a, give it a static address, do that in your router. Say I'm going to assign, I want you to assign, you know 1.200 to this machine always, and that way it will never change. The reason I come up with that is because resetting the network card is going to go probably go through that whole process again and get a new IP address Of course.

1:33:17 - Caller
So when you reset the network, when you reset the network adapter, you have to restart the machine too.

1:33:22 - Leo Laporte
So it's uh, that may be back on after the restart. Okay, that may be telling then, uh, it may not be the resetting the network adapter, maybe rebooting machine. Have you tried just rebooting?

1:33:32 - Caller
Yeah.

1:33:33 - Leo Laporte
That doesn't. That doesn't work. Okay, that's interesting. I'm wondering, wondering what's going on. This is a tough one. It does sound like it could be that the network, it's not a network card. Probably it's on the motherboard, I imagine. Yeah, the interface Is it? Yes, it's not a dedicated network card. I wonder if it's failing in some way, I would, uh, rebooting. So it's not rebooting, it's simply resetting the network card, exactly. Um, you know, that's read that's redoing the whole DHCP thing, probably. How about if you reboot the router, does that fix it? That's a good question, yeah.

1:34:15 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't fix it.

1:34:16 - Caller
I've tried that too. I've tried, uh, going back to a restore point, I've tried re-balling uh my server.

1:34:25 - Leo Laporte
You know I have to. I have to look at Windows update most recent. It was the most recent patch, Tuesday.

1:34:33 - Caller
Um, it might have happened after my restore, but I got a uhNET update and, uh, a bit big one in another Microsoft update.

1:34:42 - Leo Laporte
Despite its name, net has nothing to do with networking.

1:34:47 - Mikah Sargent
That's an interesting thought that could the firewall on the machine.

1:34:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, is there a firewall? Yeah, windows firewall, could it?

1:34:57 - Mikah Sargent
be blocking other machines from seeing it, and so when the network thing first happens, the firewall hasn't yet sort of filtered it out. That's why you're seeing it elsewhere, and then the firewall kicks in.

1:35:09 - Leo Laporte
Hmm, Do you have any uh device? You know the ideal way to run a Windows media server of any media server is to run it on a NAS or some machine that is kind of standalone, that can be left on and so forth, Cause you have to keep that computer on all the time to keep the media server, Exactly. Um, so that might be. Another option is to look for a media serving piece of hardware. Nasses are very typically used for this.

1:35:35 - Caller
Oh, maybe I'll try my laptop then.

1:35:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, just see if that works. Um, if you had a network attached storage, if you go out and you get a, a Synology, you can get an inexpensive Synology. It has more storage for your media files, which is nice, and then it runs the media servers, uh, on your network for you and you just leave it on. It's always on. I think that's a better way to go than a standalone computer. Yeah.

1:36:00 - Caller
This is soft. We fixed your problem, of course, but I got to get my media server back because I got to find out, uh, on Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck died or not. Oh sh.

1:36:13 - Leo Laporte
So uh gosh, now I'm feeling sad. Uh, make sure your driver's up to date. It could be that the windows update changed, updated the driver, so you did a restore. That's interesting. Restore can confuse things too, I'll be honest, I don't. I used to recommend system restore all the time and my experience with windows system restore is very checkered. Uh so it felt bad.

1:36:40 - Caller
It felt bad to do it, but I was desperate.

1:36:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, and that's, and in theory that's the whole idea. I'm rolling back to a known good setup. Didn't fix it, though I would look and make sure you've got the latest. So, because the network card is on the motherboard, what you really want to do is go to the motherboard manufacturer or the computer manufacturer, if it's, if it's a PC that was prebuilt, and download the firmware, the latest drivers for the motherboard, and that may be also a fix. So who made the computer?

1:37:12 - Caller
MSI is the motherboard, okay.

1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so go to MSI, they'll have motherboard. Uh, it's not the BIOS update, but it's a motherboard up. Uh, sometimes they call it firmware, but it's a motherboard software. It's the drivers and that's what's the interface to your network card. And that could also be messed up. So I would definitely check that.

1:37:32 - Caller
We'll do. Yeah, thank you very much.

1:37:35 - Leo Laporte
There's some thoughts, there's some places you can go. Check your network cable. You know all of that stuff too. It's funny because we always end up kind of trying all these draconian solutions and sometimes it's really just a bad. It does end up being something it's so simple, right, just a bad cable. I feel your pain, though these kinds of things are really annoying.

1:37:54 - Mikah Sargent
It's frustrating. It worked and now it doesn't. Why is that the case?

1:37:58 - Leo Laporte
Windows is the case. That's a statement that applies to Windows. It worked, Now it doesn't. Now it works differently. Microsoft just can't sit still, can they? Oh, and here's it from Mike D in our Discord. He says he's suggesting running and this is from the command line ipconfig slash. All Just to see. You have to know what that means, what you're getting the output means, but it'll tell you if that card is running and, if it's, if it's, if the server is running and all of that. So maybe that's something to look at. All right, we are going to talk to our photo guy in just a moment. You're watching. Ask the Tech guys, Hold on.

1:38:42 - John Ashley
Hold on Before. We need to figure out. We need to take a moment of Zen, a moment of Zen. Shall we do a moment of Zen, or there's some other options. We need new toy for Lily, oh, or I get Apple.

1:38:54 - Leo Laporte
Spin the spinning wheel the most expensive.

1:38:58 - John Ashley
Little do we know.

1:38:59 - Mikah Sargent
It's actually loaded it.

1:39:00 - Leo Laporte
Can you load it? Can you pre-preselect? Because I swear I will abide by whatever this comes of.

1:39:08 - Mikah Sargent
Moment of Zen.

1:39:09 - Leo Laporte
It's a moment of Zen. That was your moment of Zen. All right, now we go to our favorite photographer, chris Markwart, for his famous monthly segment, our review. The assignment this week was clean. Hello, mr Markwart. Moin moin, moin, moin, moin moin. Good to be back.

1:39:32 - Chris Marquardt
It's great to see you. We will have I promise we will have a moment of Zen in this photo segment. Oh, I like it.

1:39:41 - Leo Laporte
I predict that. So each month, chris joins us and gives us a word, a subject, a topic to go, a whole idea. It's not really a competition, it's get you to go out and take a picture, to get some photos. You know what I've really realized, chris, of late, and it partly it's because Apple added this journal app to the iPhone. Is that really? I record my life in pictures? If my camera is always with me and my iPhone and I kind of remind myself when I'm talking to my mom, take a picture, I actually shot quite a bit of video with her, all right.

When I'm out with my sister and my nephew for a meal, take a picture Out of the food. The food can be in it. It's incidental, but of us, and that ends up going in my journal because it really is. And it really came home to me when mom and I sat down, I went and I got all of her photo albums and we started going through them and it was fun for me and it was great for her. She's she's got early stages of Alzheimer's, so she's got some memory issues, but she remembers every detail. So, yeah, there's my friend, we were doing it, and so I realized that that is the record of our lives that we're keeping. Now. That is really valuable.

1:40:52 - Chris Marquardt
Picture says more than a thousand words. It's not. That's not an empty phrase.

1:40:55 - Leo Laporte
There's so much information packed into each single photo, so this assignment gives you a chance to go out, take pictures around this topic. We ask you to upload them to our Flickr group. Boy, it's a popular group. We've been doing this for almost 20 years now, right?

1:41:12 - Chris Marquardt
14,000 people in the group. Wow, it's just great.

1:41:15 - Leo Laporte
And I hope you're. I hope you're a member and join If you don't. If you aren't yet at, flickr is free, join it and then we can you can participate in these assignments. So, uh, chris, did you get some good photo submissions?

1:41:30 - Chris Marquardt
Yes, we did. We got um not just 15, but then it was the busy Christmas time and so on.

1:41:38 - Leo Laporte
So plus it's hard to find something clean.

1:41:41 - John Ashley
Very true very true.

1:41:43 - Chris Marquardt
But, but some really good ones among them. Let me let me start this off with the first one I selected, which is by Demi Lente, often here on the show with great photos. Um, it's a hotel bathroom mirror, light and a soap bar on the sink. Wow, pretty simple. Here's your clean photo it's. It's one of those if you know how to how to see light and this is a very diffuse light you see no hard shadows it makes it a very, very pleasing picture to look at. Then it's tone in tone because of the color of the light and the soap bar and and it's a macro, which means you you're really close. So it's partially out of focus, partially in focus. Um, yeah, it hits the spot.

1:42:26 - Leo Laporte
Hits the spot, shot with a Canon uh 5D Mark 4. So a very, very fancy camera, but you could have done this with a fancy camera.

1:42:34 - Chris Marquardt
Yeah, I mean, you can take a picture like this with your smartphone.

1:42:37 - Leo Laporte
switch to the telephoto camera in your smartphone and you will get something very, by the way, it's making me hungry, even though I know it's soap. If something about it, it's kind of cheesy, it looks delicious for some reason it does.

1:42:50 - Chris Marquardt
Okay, um, are you ready? Here comes your moment of Zen. The next photo by, by a user, 20 March 1989, and it's it's titled pure, clean, sound. It's a bronze meditation, chimes and uh.

1:43:06 - Leo Laporte
I can hear it, I can. It's such a good picture. I can almost hear it, Can't you?

1:43:10 - Chris Marquardt
Yeah Well well, well, look, look what I, what I found here from one of my my photo tours from Tibet. It's a. It's a meditation chime, and the reason I chose this photo is because the sound of these things is so clean. Listen to this. I hope it transfers to the, to the compression here. But listen to this, wow, I love that. It's one of these. It's one of these, almost like angelic sounds, very, very pure.

1:43:38 - Leo Laporte
I love that I have a at home a meditation bowl that I can strike uh when I want to start meditating and it's just the whole idea is to kind of trigger that Uh, and when you hear it and they and they really sustain for a long, long time. It's a beautiful and this also.

1:43:53 - Chris Marquardt
This also shows you that if you know the recipient of a photo, you can make a better photo that chimes with them, literally chimes with them, because because a photo is always docks with the experiences of the recipient. So this was one of these cases.

1:44:12 - Leo Laporte
Beautiful shot, love it. I love the macro shots.

1:44:15 - John Ashley
Me too.

1:44:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, wow.

1:44:18 - Chris Marquardt
And then, last but not least, a shot by Ron Hikes 816. Insectarium.

1:44:28 - Leo Laporte
Very different. This is very different.

1:44:32 - Chris Marquardt
It's a, so it's a museum of sorts and it's a whole bunch of really nice colorful beetles on a display and they are arranged in a pattern I think we call this nolling. Very like, laid out in an almost regular pattern, very clean, very shiny bugs, so very like. It's pleasing to look at. It's outstanding Nice mix of colors, wow.

1:45:05 - Leo Laporte
Nolling, I wonder it's an Instagram trend of taking stuff and laying it out?

1:45:10 - Caller
Oh, really, laying out objects at right angles, but I wonder if it's-.

1:45:14 - Chris Marquardt
Look it up K-N-O-L-L-L-N-G. Well, I wonder if it's named for Thomas Knoll, who was one of the creators of Photoshop, who also had a-.

1:45:20 - Leo Laporte
I think it goes Low CD.

1:45:23 - Chris Marquardt
It goes back to a catalog of a I think it was a furniture manufacturer or someone laid out a catalog, a chamber, a catalog.

1:45:32 - Leo Laporte
It was a janitor at Frank Geary's furniture fabrication shop Wow, andrew Cromolo. He used to arrange his displace tools at right angles on all surfaces. Called it nolling similar to noll furniture. Wow, wow. It's got a kind of OCD feel to it, but I love this it's very satisfying to look at yeah. I love this picture of Beatles, perfectly laid out, organized neatly. This is these are other things, nold, so that they kind of all fit together like a puzzle. Wow, that's wild. I love that. So thank you for the Nold Beatles shells.

1:46:17 - Chris Marquardt
Yeah, that's too cool. Well, thanks to everyone who participated. Yay, great stuff here, great stuff. Wow, yeah Well, you know this means it's time to go to the fishbowl, the fishbowl Time to go to the fishbowl and to the fishbowl of adjectives and pull one out, oops, ah, I like this one, it is sparkling.

1:46:45 - Leo Laporte
Sparkling so you could reuse those Beatles actually, but don't the whole idea. Is you gotta?

1:46:51 - Caller
take new pictures.

1:46:53 - Leo Laporte
Many things sparkle. You can even have somebody's smile as a sparkling smile, but we aren't gonna tell you what sparkling. You find something that sparkles. Take an image. You can upload as many as one a week. We're gonna give you four weeks to do this. When you find something you like, tag it TGSparkling for Tech Guys Sparkling and upload it to flickercom. That's where you can tag it. And once you've done that, submit it to the group. Renee Silverman, the moderator, and the Tech Guy group will accept your photo. We'll say thank you, wonderful job, and we'll add it to the pool and then Chris will, next month, find something wonderful to say about it, because Chris is always a nice guy.

Some beautiful stuff. We had some fun pictures in here, that's by the way. I encourage you during the month to go to the Tech Guy group on Flickr and look at the images people are uploading Comment. One of the things that's great about Flickr is you can talk about other people's photos and give them constructive comments. Often I just say, wow, I really like that one. That's beautiful. So so many nice images up there. Chris, what's going on with you? I have all of Chris's books. He did a wonderful book on wide-angle photography film photography he has I think you still offer this for free to people who sign up for your newsletter A really great video series on how to organize your photos using Lightroom, but it would work with anything about how to go through your photos. A thousand photos in an hour.

1:48:32 - Chris Marquardt
The thing you wanna look for is a one-hour 1000pxcom, which is a website which lets you download for free by now, an e-book that helps you plow through a whole lot of pictures in a short time.

1:48:45 - Leo Laporte
It's a wonderful methodology.

1:48:48 - Chris Marquardt
Yeah, it works with all sorts of software. It's built on Lightroom, but you can transfer this to almost anything else.

1:48:56 - Mikah Sargent
And I know that we have a question for you. Oh, it was addressed to you specifically.

1:49:02 - Chris Marquardt
Let's do it. I'd be happy to, so let me.

1:49:10 - Mikah Sargent
John, do you have it or is?

1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
Chris having it. Yeah, how are we?

1:49:12 - Mikah Sargent
pulling that up.

1:49:13 - John Ashley
I sent it to you, chris, but it was a recent email, sorry, so you can read it.

1:49:19 - Leo Laporte
Do you have it there for you, Chris I?

1:49:20 - Chris Marquardt
can read it. So it is actually a question by Demi Lente, who every now and then gets an entry here in the oh, which one was hers thing? Well, Demi Lente, it turns out is not her, it's a team, it's a couple. Oh Nice.

1:49:39 - Mikah Sargent
We can refer to them as. Were they the soap couple. They were the soap couple.

1:49:43 - Chris Marquardt
They were the soap couple. Yes, they were, and they have an issue with a photo that is. I'm just trying to bring it up here on the screen.

1:49:54 - John Ashley
I can have a myside, chris, we got it. We can show it there, it is All right.

1:49:58 - Chris Marquardt
so they have taken a photo with Pixel 8 and they edit their photos in Darktable, which is like Lightroom, but open source. Love Darktable, yeah.

1:50:09 - Leo Laporte
And this looks like a heart right.

1:50:11 - Chris Marquardt
It's a heart. It's a heart made from. Looks like drops of sword, glass beads of swords and after exporting this, if you scroll down, there is an attachment. What's the?

1:50:26 - Caller
world.

1:50:27 - Chris Marquardt
And the picture in the Wait in the Lightroom app in the Lightroom app, in the preview. There it looks green and I was trying to find out what that is. I have an educated guess and it has probably has to do with color management.

1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
So these were when you Were the original items red yes, they were, yes, they were, and then they turned into In Lightroom, so they're probably shooting. I noticed they shoot with a Canon 5D, right? Oh no, this was Pixel 8. Yeah, well then.

1:51:00 - Chris Marquardt
I don't know, this was Pixel 8.

1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
Because if you shot, raw so well, look at that, that's terrible.

1:51:05 - Chris Marquardt
My guess is it has to do with color spaces and just to give you the quick, like half minute, idea about what that is, a picture is just a bunch of numbers if you look into the file. So you need a color profile to let the computer know how to interpret this number. Is this red, is this green, is this blue? It's a bit like if you speed and the officer says you were going 50, it could be miles per hour or kilometers per hour. Right, you need the reference and the color space is the reference. And on export from dark table, I believe it is possible to assign a color space and I feel that possibly that hasn't been assigned. Best bet is, if you don't know what color space to assign, use sRGB. Look for these letters. Srgb is kind of the least common denominator that works almost everywhere, and I have a suspicion that there was no color space assigned on export. And then the app the Flickr app has to guess Is it kilometers, is it miles, is it centimeters, is it inches? And that probably confused it.

1:52:27 - Leo Laporte
That's just my quick guess here. I'm looking at my Pixel 8 in the camera app to see if you can tell it what color space to use. Srgb is the kind of lingua franca, but sometimes people, especially using Adobe Lightroom, will use Adobe's color space. Oh, you're taking picture.

1:52:45 - Chris Marquardt
I don't think the Pixel 8 color space matters here because they imported that into dark table on their Mac Dark table. It gets mangled in some other color way and then it gets exported from there and then the Flickr app seems to have an issue. So I would look in dark table and see if it's possible to explicitly tell it what color space to use Does.

1:53:08 - Leo Laporte
JPEG, first guess. So if they took it with the camera phone, which probably saved as a JPEG, does JPEG like? Is it part of the data? They exit the color space right.

1:53:22 - Chris Marquardt
The color space is it's, as JPEG can have multiple different color spaces, so it's marked in the metadata.

1:53:29 - Leo Laporte
It is part of the metadata, so color space, these images and yeah. So that's another thing you could do is look at the metadata of the photo the variety of ways to do that and see what color space is indicated. Yeah, I would check that. That's a really interesting question. Yeah, it could also be it got corrupted at some point. It's funny because when you look at the floor, the floor is also green, so there's a green cast to everything.

1:53:55 - Chris Marquardt
It's almost to me. It looks as if the red channel or the trans just is completely recolored.

1:54:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, very interesting. It's a pretty thick photo. Thank you, demi Lente. Isn't that a cute thing to do as a couple? Yeah, I love that.

1:54:11 - Chris Marquardt
Lisa, why is Demi Lente? It's Spanish for, from my lens, demi Lente.

1:54:20 - Leo Laporte
Wow, what a fun thing to do is a couple, actually we kind of do, but I can't. I've tried to convince Lisa this she to let me take the pictures and she could do the retouching. She's so good at the post-processing and I hate it. I also hate the post-processing.

But she won't do it. She said no, I'm not you, you've you've Pressing that shutter button. She likes to take the pictures too. We love taking pictures. It's so much fun. We'll go out and take pictures of sparkling things and and we will look for your photos on our flicker group and in a month Chris will come back. Any big projects Coming up, any, any workshops you got planned. Do you want to plug Rick? Chris?

1:55:01 - Chris Marquardt
Well, I'm looking to go back to the East East European Side on a on a photo road trip, as I did last year. Details about that are coming up, and I'm also I've just started working on a new book, so that is my big project right now.

1:55:18 - Leo Laporte
Very good. What's the book gonna be, can you tell us Not yet. His books are great. I highly recommend all his books. Discover the top floor calm is the place to find out what Chris is up to and, of course, you can follow him on a flicker as well, because he's a great photographer. Thank you, chris. Mark Wart, thank you. See you next month. See you next month. Discover the top floor calm. Bye, bye, all right, let's do another call, or? Or should I do an email, or should I do a voicemail? So many choices. Do you want to do a voicemail?

1:55:46 - Mikah Sargent
Smell 8887242884 if you call us during the week, basically when we're not doing the show. That is how you leave a voicemail for us. Hi, this is Jim.

1:55:58 - Leo Laporte
Jimman, jim, oh hi Mac.

1:56:05 - Caller
It's Jim Mac hi, this is Jim Hi. Jim pigeon forage Tennessee.

1:56:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh home of.

1:56:10 - Caller
Dollywood. Okay, it is Android 12. Yeah, I have an s10 plus nice, and I recently switched from straight talk Verizon, which is a Walmart, to the new vision. Verizon is a, and I can no longer use Any of the third-party texting apps. I was a big fan of textra, but now the only one that works for me is this Samsung texting app, which I don't particularly care for. Yeah, I've been with tech support Through vision and I've been on Try to read everything I can. I cannot figure out why it does not want to work.

I know why, vision and apparently they don't understand it either. Visible I thought maybe you guys might. So thank you so much for the great work. I love listening. Thank you.

1:57:02 - Leo Laporte
Say hi to Dolly Um. Textra is an SMS app. I used it for a long time. There are a lot of, so this, this is the problem. We are entering a new era.

Sms Was the old school way of sending text messages. It used actually the voice channel, didn't use data. You use the voice channel to communicate. It's still the fallback for Apple's messages, for Android's messages, because it's the lowest common denominator. But increasingly SMS is going away.

Phone companies don't want to support SMS. It's a separate server. What they want you to do is use data for messaging. Data is what what's app uses, what Facebook messenger uses and, for the most part, what Apple's messages use and what Google and Samsung's messages use. They want to do this over data. They don't want to do it on SMS. The only reason they have SMS capability is to fall back. In case your recipient this is why you got blue bubbles and green bubbles your recipient doesn't support these data form of messaging, they'll fall back to SMS. Sms has lots of problems. It's insecure, it can't display images. For that you have to use MMS, and on and on and on. So textra was a replacement SMS app in the early days of Android. The problem is visible. I'm guessing. I don't know. I should check. The visible website is a data. It's. It's Verizon's low cost entry and the reason it's low cost. One of the reasons is it's data only.

Phone calls or data Texting is data there, I bet you. There is no SMS support. That's why it won't work and, surprising, the visible's reps don't know this. But really, what you have to do is use a messaging app that uses data, which is most of the messaging apps. You could use Samsung's, you can use Google's, you can use signal, you can use Facebook messenger, you can use WhatsApp. All of those can be used as your messaging app on your Android device, and all of them have SMS. But the problem is, you know you can't use SMS invisible. I'm pretty sure this is the case, so it's just and so a program like texture, which is an SMS program, won't work at all because it's not using data at all. You need to only use messengers that use data. This is, you know. This is kind of the future.

1:59:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's wild.

1:59:35 - Leo Laporte
You know SMS works. On visible it's they must have an SMS backhaul. So somebody has Said that instead you could use a Program called Q K SMS, q K SMS. I don't know if that's better or not. I honestly think that visible is, is is read, is Verizon's attempt to get rid of all these legacy technologies. So Somebody's saying that he's using SMS. They may have a way of making that work, but I remember when Verizon announced visible. You know they have unlimited data, right? They really they want you to use visible because it's just data. It's just data it's. Let me see if, under their help, if they talk about SMS at all. The problem with these companies is they don't. They don't. They're not gonna say yeah, nothing. They know their search doesn't even enter, it doesn't even work.

2:00:44 - Mikah Sargent
You can't, you can't search. That sounds about right. That is how these companies are. These, oh my goodness. The support on them is always.

2:00:52 - Leo Laporte
I remember when Verizon and the only reason I'm thinking this is I remember when Verizon announced it and the reason they have unlimited data in the reason they did this is they wanted it's gonna be a little bit less capable, but they wanted to go move to the future technologies. All data all the time, even for Voice calls right and you know that's, that's an improvement. It is an improvement, it's the future. If you have 5g, there's no reason for you to use these backhaul. Take these old backhaul technologies.

2:01:17 - Mikah Sargent
You know I can't find it here, somebody saying he is yeah but it was also on an iPhone and we don't know about the difference between the two in terms of right.

2:01:27 - Leo Laporte
How remember? This is not Verizon, this is visible. Yeah, this is Verizon's data only.

2:01:32 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, so Joe, who says Specifically that Joe uses visible, but uses visible with an iPhone and did not have trouble sending messages?

2:01:41 - Leo Laporte
No, because it's mostly messages. Yeah, yeah, so we. It's not gonna be a problem going forward, unless you have other friends with really old phones. Eventually, sms is history. Google is replacing it and it took a while. The carriers took a while, but the Google is starting to replace this with our CS. You'll hear a lot about our CS rich communication services, and that is a replacement for SMS that is both secure, encrypted. It's a. All of these database ones are much, much better than SMS. Sms is a nightmare. It's insecure.

2:02:14 - Mikah Sargent
It's terrible, yeah, and it wasn't. I think it wasn't intended to last as long as it did, frankly, yeah.

2:02:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't yeah, okay, I don't know.

2:02:26 - Mikah Sargent
This is the thing, though I actually, when I set up With one of these kind of carriers, I had to wait a couple of weeks actually, for it to start working. There was a bunch of stuff in the background that they didn't do properly, I guess, and it's hard to get in touch with anyone because you are paying so little and so they cut costs on support, and so you're left trying to type into a search field that doesn't even let you go into. So it could be a number of things At fault here.

2:03:00 - Leo Laporte
I yeah, I'm just going through the visible support you might call. Well, he said he called visible and they couldn't help him.

2:03:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you could try resetting the network settings.

2:03:17 - Leo Laporte
Here we go, email to text message with visible no. Well, that's, I'm just guessing. That seems to be the issue. In my opinion, that seems to be the issue.

2:03:33 - Caller
Here's solved. Messaging and visible.

2:03:36 - Leo Laporte
Text messaging yeah, but this is.

2:03:39 - Mikah Sargent
This is something else if any of our listeners use visible on an Android device, write us Let us know how you got it working. If you got it working, otherwise, we have to proceed with the, with the information we have. Yeah, yeah, if we had an endless budget, sign up for visible and try to do it.

2:04:08 - Leo Laporte
I used to do that. That's why I have so many phone carriers. I used to sign up for everything. I'm seeing other people having similar service. I'm also seeing people complaining about customer service if it's a complex issue.

2:04:32 - Mikah Sargent
I think this is the. This is the new thing. I just heard about how, more so than ever, these companies are relying on People who are part of the quote-unquote community to do. Yeah, and in fact, somebody was trying to get help with the Sony PlayStation Network and Three of the people they talked to were just other players who had agreed to be support people.

2:04:58 - Leo Laporte
They do come to think of it.

They do want to. Text messaging must work, because so many banks use SMS for their true, and this is this is why we have a real problem with it. They use SMS for their two-factor, so you this would be potentially an issue. I'm gonna guess what's going on is that Visible has a SMS gateway into data. That that's how they're handling this, and it may be up and down. I'm seeing that the support people are saying restart your phone, switch in and out of airplane mode, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It sounds like this may be a coming in, a problem that comes and goes with visible, which means they might be having trouble with their gateway. I'll give you this link to the visible community support page. It doesn't seem like it's too helpful. Other people, even on iPhones, are having trouble sending SMS messages, so I'm gonna guess they have a gateway that allows them to do SMS. The whole idea of visible was let's not do yeah, you got it. Let's not do these old technologies like 3g and and SMS. Let's let's move to the future, which is LTE and Data, all data all I think we have time for should I do an email.

2:06:28 - Mikah Sargent
I'm gonna do an email.

2:06:29 - Leo Laporte
I think we have time for an email. I really want to try to keep up with these. There's so many of them. Oh, it's hard to ATG. At Twitter TV, jeff asks about satellite Internet. Do you think SpaceX internet is the future for cell phones? Now Amazon's getting into the business satellite internet what's your opinion? You know this comes up because T-Mobile has announced that they are going to, in some cases, use SpaceX for connectivity. Now they're doing it as a trial right now. Uh, possible, the space is extremely expensive for home internet. It's more than a hundred dollars a month and you have to buy a bunch of equipment. Obviously, if your carrier is doing it, you don't have to buy any equipment. But I'm wondering maybe the maybe there's excess capacity and the carriers are able to make deals with Starlink. I don't know if there's anything wrong with Starlink in the way to using it that way. Right, if you didn't have the expense, I think Starlink could be a good solution.

2:07:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we know that Apple has a deal with Satellite infrastructure that's for emergencies.

Yes, yes, so basically what? What a point I'm getting out here is that these Systems are for emergencies. They're not as high-powered, they don't send as much data, and Eventually, that's not what this is Correct, I know, but here's the point that I try to get to. So, with that, apple has eaten the cost up front, but eventually we know that Apple's going to start charging for that, and so if something that's not as high-powered as this is going to end up costing us in the end, I feel like this could end up being something where you know it gets added to the bill. So I don't want this to be the case, except in an edge case where you needed to here's T-mobile's a video.

2:08:11 - Leo Laporte
They point out that millions of acres in the US are outside of cell coverage 20%, oh wow. So what T-mobile wants to do is use SpaceX Starlink to provide connectivity in those areas. I love this idea because I would love to be able to use, you know, my cell phone on a boat and in a wilderness, and so forth. This is a currently in trial, so watch, we'll watch with interest. We will potentially. Will it work? Yes, absolutely, it's a great idea, but it's I. You know they're there, as always. You know, you'll just have to see the. You know T-mobile has just started doing this. So we'll watch with interest. I don't think there's any reason not to right if it's there and the biggest issue is and.

I'm curious how they're solving this. You've got to have a satellite receiver, your phone and, as you know, with the Satellite emergency coverage on the iPhone, you have to hold it.

You have to wait clear line yeah, do all sorts of things. So I mean, I guess we are building satellite receivers into phones. The SpaceX or the Starlink receiver right now is this big, but they are. They say we can shrink it. We're shrinking it. So a lot of, a lot of technical advances have to happen before this becomes An improvement. And even then, t-mobile isn't using this where they have cell towers, only where they don't have cell towers. Okay, starlink direct to sell is the idea and, and you know you'll see more and more people using it, we'll get more reviews. You can go to direct starlinkcom. Thank you, scooter X, for that link to find out what Starlink is telling the phone companies.

2:09:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was gonna say this is what's I Given the proprietor of this company, you. I don't believe anything, gonna take it with a grain of salt.

2:09:56 - Leo Laporte
Texting starts in 2024, voice and data starts in 2025 and IOT see that's interesting to for IOT. Yeah, in 2025. It's a way for Starlink to make a little more money.

2:10:11 - Mikah Sargent
Or the chiefs playing today. I Just saw Patrick Mohones, or whatever his name is yes, they are.

2:10:19 - Leo Laporte
there's this thing called sport ball we are going to oh, you're from that area, I was a speed, are they?

2:10:27 - Chris Marquardt
playing against you people are you?

2:10:29 - Leo Laporte
they're not playing against my people now, they will be playing against the Buffalo people. Oh, but Buffalo chips. But our people, the San Francisco Vaders vaders, did in fact win last night in a very difficult game again. They almost lost the Green Bay Packers and you know our house no, it was the back.

Yes, you know what's sad for the Packers and Michael, our son, who's a major Packers fan, is that we keep beating the Packers in the playoffs is the fourth time in a row, oh, and I've been sitting next to him for most of those games. I did not get to sit next to him for this one. So we will watch with interest, but we will be, you know, playing the the NFC playoffs Against probably one of the winners of a game today. I don't, I was gonna say probably who, but We'll just have to wait and see. Right now and yes, your boy Patrick will be playing are you get into it If the, just for my mom's sake.

2:11:33 - Mikah Sargent
Your mom's a chief's fan.

2:11:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. So Chiefs are having a hard time. I thought I heard this year Patrick is One of the great quarterbacks, a franchise player, but he's been having a rough time last few games. Hey, we are out of time. I speaking of time. Did we do all our ads and everything, yep? We had enough moments of Zen, yep, and now Is it time to spin the dial. This is a sermon if we will see what happens next?

2:12:04 - Mikah Sargent
what could happen? What if it lands on the line? What happens then?

2:12:08 - Leo Laporte
It's time to end the show. Oh, thank you for joining us on. Ask the tech guys. We do it every Sunday. We're out about 11 am Pacific, 11, 11 technically Pacific, but that would be about what 2 pm Eastern time till about 430 Eastern time. You can watch us do it live, because we turn on the live stream on YouTube YouTube comm slash twit when the show begins. We'll turn it off as soon as the show is over. Twitter is coming up, so we'll turn it back on again in a few minutes. You can also watch a show at your leisure, and that's really the main point of the show. We have versions available at the website twittv slash atg or go to tech guy labs Dot com. We continue to pay for that fine name. You also can get it a copy of it in your favorite podcast player.

Not too late to take the survey. I do want to encourage people to do that. We want to make sure that every show gets well represented in our annual survey, twittv slash survey 24. We've shortened it, just take you a few minutes, but it's the best way we have of getting to know you. We have no other way of knowing anything about you. So if you can take the survey. That'll help us know what you like, what you want, make better shows for you. Of course, it also helps us sell advertising, because they want to know well who's watching. We really don't know what else. Do join the club, and boy, we thank all of our Highly discerning club twit members. Yeah, the best, the best of us.

2:13:36 - Mikah Sargent
We keep seeing people joining and we'd love to have you be part of that Movement, yep.

2:13:41 - Leo Laporte
It is a movement, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Thank you all. Mike, a sergeant will be back with tech news weekly if you're in the club, of course. He and rosemary do iOS today and next Sunday right here. Right here, as you ask the tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte. Mikah, sergeant, go out and have yourself a great geek week.

2:14:05 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of club twit, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only two ninety nine a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater geekatude.