Ask The Tech Guys 2016 Transcript

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0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Ask the Tech Guys. Leo Laporte is on vacation, but I, Mikah Sargent, have a great show planned for you. I start off the show by talking about a family friend who faced off against a scam and won, so I provide some tips about how you too, can win against the scams and make sure your family does as well. Then we've got some great questions. Someone calls in to ask about what version of Linux they should put on an old MacBook. We talk about the changes that have come to the Apple Watch and how it's left us with frustration, how to capture the upcoming eclipse with an iPhone or other smartphone, and why in the world would a VPN block the connection of CarPlay if I'm plugging in with a USB cord Plus, Rod Pyle Spaceman joins us to talk all about the latest test flight and, of course, I've got some questions for him, and Chris Marquardt shares the responses to the modern assignment as well as provides some tips on how to crop your photos. It's all that coming up on Ask the Tech Guys.

0:01:11 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:01:19 - Mikah Sargent
This is Ask the Tech Guys this week with Mikah Sargent, Episode 2016,. Recorded Sunday, march 17th 2024. The Space Alchemist.

This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by FastMail, a leader in email privacy for more than 20 years. Make email better. FastMail is moving email forward with new internet standards and open source innovations that power many other email services. FastMail's quick settings lets you choose new themes, switch between light and dark modes, change text size, generate masked email addresses, auto-save contacts, set default reminders and more. Add or buy a domain. Through FastMail. They will set all of the records up for you, so it works immediately. You pay for free email with your privacy. At FastMail. Your data stays yours and you get better productivity features for as little as $3 a month. It's easy to download your old emails data and import it into your new FastMail inbox. And remember, fast Mail has better spam filters and absolutely no ads. FastMail also works with password managers like our sponsor, bitwarden and OnePassword. And don't forget to download the FastMail app to get the most out of your email. FastMail is the better email service quality it's worth paying for. Try FastMail now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. That's fastmail.com/twit. Thank you, FastMail, for sponsoring this week's episode of Ask the Tech Guys.

It's time for Ask the Tech Guys this week with just Mikah Sargent. That's right, leo Laporte is on vacation, so I am here. Let me just cross out the S and ask the tech guy this week. I am excited to be joined today by both Rod Pyle Spaceman and Chris Marquardt photo man, at noon and one respectively. But because it is not those times yet, we of course have the start of the show Now. You probably are familiar with the show and if you're not, well welcome. I'm glad you're here.

This is a show where we take your questions and do our best to answer them. Now, it's not a what is it? Deer abbey or chicken soup for the soul situation. We typically don't answer questions that aren't related to tech, but we will gladly take your tech questions. So if you have those, you can get in touch and we do our best to help out.

There are multiple ways to get in touch with us. You can head to calltwittv. That's the URL, the URL that you can go to on either your phone or your computer and that will take you to a Zoom room. In that Zoom room you will hang out, and it's important that you do something for us. Either from again, from your phone, from your computer, you look on the screen and you find this little icon of a hand, or you find the text that says raise hand and you click on that. That lets us know that you do in fact have a question that you want to ask, and so we know to bring you up on stage to have your question answered. Because we do have some fun folks who like to just hang out in the Zoom, which is totally fine. You're free to do that. But that way we can kind of separate those who are just there to hang out and those who are there to have their question answered. So remember to hit that raise hand button.

The other way you can get in touch with us is 888-724-2884. If you're outside of the US, you'll want to put a one in front of that, so 1-888-724-2884. That's also 888-724-8TTG. By calling that number you'll also secretly be brought into a Zoom meeting where you'll hang out as well. And if you're brought on stage to ask your question, you'll need to hit asterisk or star and then six to unmute yourself so that you are able to ask your question. The other way to get in touch with us much simpler ATG at twittv. That's the email where you can send your text, you can send audio, you can send video. All of those work at ATG at twittv. Oh and, by the way, if you call that number, 888-724-2884, during the week while we're not on air, you can leave a voicemail for us. We've got several voicemails in the pool waiting to be answered, and so that is another way to get in touch. Basically, we want to make sure that you have every possibility of being able to reach us so that we can answer your question.

I should also mention that, as we record this show honestly didn't realize it Today is St Patrick's Day. I'm sorry Patrick, who I adore. I don't think he's a saint, but I'll have to check in and see about his miracles. He's performed. He certainly performs miracles here at twit. That's Patrick De La Hante, but my socks have some green in them, so that works, and my watch strap is green so no one can pinch me. So ha, happy St Patrick's Day to those of you who celebrate in whatever way. That means, I don't know, dying things. Green seems to be typical. I think Chicago. I don't know if they do it anymore. It's probably like a natural disaster sort of situation or something, but I know different places will try to use dyes to make their water green and whatnot.

Anywho, I want to get into the show this week because a family friend of mine recently faced an interesting attempt at getting access to her information and it was a moment of triumph because quickly this friend said no. I know that this is not real, but I have to say that it was relatively sophisticated in the multi-level aspect of the attempt. So I kind of want to explain the story. Family friend, who we will call Meg.

Meg received a call from a number and in the caller ID the number came up as Verizon, capital V E R I Z O, n, all capital letters. And interestingly, when Verizon support calls, the word Verizon and the word support also show up in all capital letters. So there's the first thing. Clever enough to realize that the number is the first thing, clever enough to realize that they need to make it so that it's all capital letters. And they were calling saying that there were some issues that they needed to figure out, some security concerns that were going on, and, luckily, the way that Meg quickly realized something was going on was that the hackers mentioned the payment platform, the payment sending service, zell, and as soon as that happened, meg's hackles went up and said no, no, no, no, no, this isn't real. However, once Meg hung up because basically they said Zell and she said beep they called back two more times and after they couldn't get in touch with Meg who, I should mention, yes, is indeed a Verizon subscriber they called Meg's husband, who also has a Verizon phone At the me.

In the meantime, verizon itself, verizon support, ended up closing down the account and the phone line because of a security issue, and when this happened, they claimed that they knew that there was going to be a potential breach that was going to cause issues. These were the hackers that were saying this and saying it was part of the process, it was a security measure and that all they needed to do to get everything reactivated was to use Zell to send a payment. Luckily, the husband was near and had already heard from Meg that this was going on. The husband also didn't follow through.

Meg hung up the phone, as I mentioned, with the hackers called Verizon and once again, as I mentioned, they showed up as Verizon support. But they also showed up on Meg's phone with a tiny little check mark next to the name. So to the left of Verizon support was a little check box. That is an actually legitimate way that iPhones and now many Android devices are using to show you when you are to help kind of confirm that you're speaking to who you think you were speaking to, and so this kind of went on. They did a good job in the whole process of saying, hey, we don't need you to provide any identifying information over the phone. You should never provide identifying information over the phone. All they needed Meg to do was just confirm information they already had.

This is the part that freaked me out a little bit. According to Meg, they knew the amount and the date of Meg's last payment to Verizon. They knew the last four digits of the card and they knew the last four digits of the card used to make the payments. So again, what they said was hello, this is Verizon supporter. Whomever, we've detected a security breach with your account and we don't want you to give us any identifying information of the phone. A Verizon support member will never ask for that. Instead, please just confirm that the information we have about you is accurate. Here is the amount of your last payment. Is that correct? Here are the last four digits of the cards used to make the payment. Is that correct? Here's the date on which you made the payment. Is that correct? But despite providing that information, then they went on to talk about Zell blah, blah blah, where Meg said no, no, no.

I told Meg that Meg should change her email password immediately, because the fact that they had that information meant likely meant one of two things One that these hackers did. I shouldn't call them hackers, because it's not necessarily that they hacked. Perhaps they just these social engineers, these bad actors right, that's what we kind of call them these days. They either socially engineered a Verizon support member to get this information, or, two, they had access to Meg's email or Meg's husband's email to get this information. Because I couldn't find a way for me to go online, for example, because sometimes online platforms will have simpler ways to access your bill without needing to log in. Xfinity is one example of that. So you only need to have a little bit of information and then they will give you your bill. You don't need to worry about logging in. So I tried to find something like that for Verizon, where maybe you only needed a password, or you only needed the phone number and the last four digits of the social security number, for example. I couldn't find anything like that, so it led me to believe that it probably was again either social engineering or it was an attempt at, you know, gaining access to the email.

Now, on top of that, the security team that were the hackers said that Meg should change her password immediately and that there was going to be a request coming through to change the password, right, and so what was going to happen was basically what they did, was they went online, they tried to change Meg's password, go through the forgot my password process and trigger that six digit code being sent that then Meg would authenticate, which would then give them access to be able to get into the account. Obviously, meg said no, no, no, no, no, I'm not doing that, and from there did not follow through with any of the rest of it. But I think, as is always the case, it's important to be aware of the different methods by which these bad actors are attempting to gain access to accounts, and the fact that they had some of that information and went as far as to do the thing where they said now listen, you should never hand over your personal information over the phone, and so we are just going to confirm this to you and have you confirm back. That was a pretty clever means of kind of trying to lull them into a false sense of security, right? Make them feel like they were, that this was a person who was safe and that they were trying to help Meg through everything. So good on Meg, of course, for seeing that. Oh, we'll get this corrected right away. You just need to send more money because your payment wasn't fully processed, or whatever. So here's how you go about doing that.

But for everyone out there, there are a couple of tips and tricks that I will provide. First and foremost, it's incredibly important that and we've talked about this, steve Gibson and I spoke about this on security now there are, with the means of access that we have now, it is safer and better to add a two-factor authentication step, some sort of two-factor step, to your account and provide even more of a means of security. Turn on those security features, make sure they're there, set those pins, do all of that and do what Meg did in the situation, which was despite the fact that this group was trying to kind of get Meg worried and concerned and this is a security breach, and oh no, and you start to kind of let your guard down because you're just trying to fix things as quickly as possible. Meg still had some hackles up and said, okay, I don't know if this is true, I don't know if this is the case. So any way that you can go about, because those of you who are watching this show, who are listening to the show probably not something that you have as an issue yourself, right, you're the ones that are teaching your friends and family in many cases about it, and so this is a great opportunity to kind of talk about another scam and kind of be aware of that scam.

Now I want to point out a couple of pages.

The FTC Federal Trade Commission has a great sort of portal on their website called Consumer Alerts, and the Consumer Alerts page here let me go full screen here is constantly coming out with new information about different types of scams, of hacks, of all sorts of stuff and what you need to do to keep yourself protected.

Now these go between just kind of general bits of advice, like planning a spring break getaway don't let scammers clip your wings. So do your research. Don't sign or pay until you have specific details. Don't pay with gift cards or cryptocurrency before you travel. Those are kind of you know, for some people obvious, for some people maybe not, but then they also have specific situations, like a charity that was a cancer charity scam, and let me see there was one recently where there was a group that was in trouble for doing for kind of oh, here we go. The FTC says that H&R block pressures people into overpaying for tax prep. So in this case they are giving that alert that H&R block might be in trouble soon for actually pressuring people into overpaying for tax preparation. So check out that consumerftcgov page to learn more. Alrighty, that's my quick little story to kick us off for today, and I think we will hear from Leo for a moment before we continue on with the rest of the show.

0:18:41 - Leo Laporte
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0:19:55 - Mikah Sargent
Alright, we are back with Ask the Tech Guys. I am Mikah Sargent, hosting this week. As you know, this is the show where we take your tech questions, live on air and do our best to answer them, while we because typically the show when Leo is here doesn't start until 11-11, we start a little bit early, so we'll wait for those calls to come pouring in. While we do that, I will head to the email questions and see what we've got there. We've got Rod Pyle Spaceman coming up at noon and Chris Marquardt, our photographer, extraordinaire, after that, alrighty. So in my email bin the first question comes in from Mark, who writes in with the email subject you have helped me before. Now I have a different problem. It says Mikah, I am in a nursing home. I have a list of podcasts I like to listen to at night. The problem is each one of them is a different volume. Some come on very loud. Yours, generally, is the right volume level. Hey, that's good to hear. Burke is celebrating behind the scenes. I am running a Windows machine with the built-in sound card. Is there any way I can have all these come up at the same level as I go from podcast to podcast? Is there a program I should be using to build the list. It is a real tech audio card on the motherboard. Thanks again, I look forward to hearing from you Now, mark, as you know, I am primarily a Mac user, and there is a great program on the Mac that would do just this.

It's a program called SoundSource, and with SoundSource, you are able to set specific audio filters that will for any type of output. So, for example, I could set audio filters for the output of my Mac speakers, or if you were listening with headphones, then that and you could set up an equalizer, you could set up a normalizer, you could set up a leveler, essentially, and what all of those tools can do is process the audio coming in such that when it's output, it all is coming, it's all normalized and sounds the same. So I reached out to the wonderful folks of ClubTWIT, twittertv, and asked the Windows users amongst us for their suggestions for a tool similar to SoundSource, and I got some interesting suggestions just a couple and so I thought I would talk about those and then the option that I came up with, because, actually, before I get there, I do want to mention there is one very complicated way of doing this and this is the way that I don't think is entirely tenable and is not necessarily a situation that I think would work for you, but it is possible to use a tool, because I've actually had to do this before we. I used to work at a company where our the video content that we created with audio was at one point just online, and then we had a distribution deal where it started appearing on cable TV, and because it appeared on cable TV, it had to follow certain rules from the FCC, including a certain loudness level, and in order to make that happen, we basically had to create a whole workflow where the audio would be processed through this system that properly brought up the volume and normalized the volume as was necessary, and I'm using kind of loose terms here, because you know the volume and gain and all of that. The important thing to understand is sort of the way that the audio comes across when based on its loudness, and so there is a way and it's a tool that I have in my back pocket that I sometimes pull out to use Adobe Audition to basically keep an eye on a specific folder or folder directory and to, anytime audio pops up in that folder, run certain filters on it so you could, if you wanted to go through this very complicated process every time a podcast got downloaded to your machine. Adobe Audition could then automatically filter it, but then that requires a subscription to Adobe Adobe Audition.

There are some open source tools, but I'm not sure if they have that ability to go, and you know watch a specific file or folder, and so that's very complicated. Instead, I thought let's not act on the files directly, let's do something like what SoundSource does, which is acting on the audio output, and there is a tool called Equalizer APO, and Equalizer APO is a parametric and graphic equalizer for Windows that has more than just parametric and graphic equalization options. So in this case you would be able to use this tool to set up a number of filters that would tell the system when you're playing audio. I want it to all come across sounding like this and the person who recommended Equalizer APO, which you can get from SourceForge, they recommended that you also install a plugin for Equalizer APO called Peace Equalizer, and this provides a GUI, a graphical user interface for the APO tool. So Equalizer APO on its own is kind of complicated, kind of difficult to maybe make adjustments to. With Peace Equalizer. This helps to also bring that out.

There was another tool that was recommended called Ear Trumpet, and you may hear other folks recommend Ear Trumpet. But Ear Trumpet is a tool that lets you individually adjust the. It's great, it's very clever, very easy, it's in the Windows Store and it lets you adjust the audio of individual applications. But, mark, your problem is not wanting to adjust the volume of individual applications. You need to go one level deeper and say I want all of my audio to sound the same across the different devices, and so I recommend a tool called Boom 3D. Boom 3D is a tool made by Global Delights. It's at globaldelightscom and I used to have this application for my Mac. They have since come out with a version for Windows, and Boom 3D is a lot like the sound source tool in that it gives you the ability to add filters to the audio so that you can equalize it. So that is going to be my final recommendation Boom 3D, to basically take whatever podcast it is that you're listening to, kind of send the audio through this application and then output it so that it all comes across at the same volume.

There are now a few suggestions in the Discord that are popping up, and so I do want to take a look at those. This is whenever we've got two hosts, then one person can kind of scrub through what's available, because one of the things that I asked folks is please don't just do a Google search for best tools to do this or best tools to do that. I wanted to have people who've had an actual experience with these tools, because of course, I can do that Google search myself and had done that leading up to it. But I am seeing thank you to one, brian, who shared a link from Stack Exchange, and there's a person 12 years and 10 months ago who basically asked for the same thing, and someone in 2014 suggested this. It says this is an old post, but I found a proper solution for those with Windows Using control excuse me under control panel, hardware and sound and then sound.

Right click your audio device, select properties enhancements, then turn on the option loudness equalization. You can also change the release time by clicking settings inside the properties enhancements tab. The release times determine how long the computer waits before raising a quiet sound or lowering a loud sound. The shortest setting is instantaneous, while the longest takes one minute before the computer adjusts the volume. So that was again in October 17th of 2014.

I can't confirm right now if that is still available, but if it is, windows has a built-in tool for doing this loudness equalization. Then you wouldn't need to use a third party tool. And then I'll quickly mention one other tool that folks shared, a free and open source tool called Wale W-A-L-E, which cleverly stands for Windows Audio Loudness Equalizer, which does the same thing. It is going to look at the different applications. So, in this case, whatever tool you're using to listen to your podcasts and provide equalization based on your target peak level.

So now that I've seen this tool, I think I'm going to start with Wale Windows Audio Loudness Equalizer and the suggestion control panel hardware and sound, sound properties enhancements, loudness equalization as the suggestions for what to try first, whether those don't work. Then check out Boom3D as an option that you can try it out for free. Then you'll need to pay for it after that. But yes, this is why I love, love, love our listeners who are here with me to help answer some of these questions. John, it looks like we've got someone calling. Yeah, I was about to say we could probably pick up on this caller. Let's do that right now. Caller, you are being brought on air in order to speak with us. You will need to hit asterisk or star six to unmute yourself.

0:31:20 - Caller
Hello, hello.

0:31:22 - Mikah Sargent
What's your name and where are you calling from? I'm calling from Portland. Oregon. My name is JR. Hi JR, nice, to have you on the show.

0:31:31 - Caller
Thank you how. My problem is I have a 2011 Mac book that is no longer supported. I want to put Linux on it. What can I do and which one would be best for someone who knows Windows and Mac pretty fluently?

0:31:52 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, so you are wanting to take for anyone who may have had trouble hearing that it's a 2011 Mac that is obviously out of service wanting to install Linux on it and is curious about what flavor of Linux they should use, given their experience with both Mac and Windows, mac OS and Windows operating systems. I am going to turn to the chat a little bit for the Linux flavor question, because there are many flavor out there. Of course, this ends up being a personal question. I'm a particular fan of Pop OS, but for people who are, shall we say, power users, they're not super into Pop OS. Personally, I like it because it is as a Mac user. One of the things I like about the Mac is that it's for a creative professional, and Pop OS kind of goes down that route of still being a tool for creative professionals. So video editing, audio editing, photography, that kind of thing. I should also mention.

Scooterx points out a suggestion that we often give, which is that, although your Mac is technically out of support, you can use a tool that makes it possible for you to install more recent versions of Mac OS. It's a tool called Open Core Legacy Patcher. I just wanted to point that out because we have suggested this for quite a while. At this point, from everybody who's installed it, we have not heard back that, oh, I hate this. It's awful, it doesn't work. If you don't want to leave Mac OS, you may check out Open Core Legacy Patcher. Of course, running a more modern operating system on a machine that's a little bit older, you will have some slowdowns. That's why I could understand why you wanted to use something like Linux.

There is a listener in our chat who suggests that Zorin Z-O-R-I-N, which is based on Ubuntu or Ubuntu, excuse me is an option for those who know Windows and Mac OS. If you are comfortable and familiar with those two operating systems. This is yeah, yeah, yeah. As I'm looking at it, it does give you that feel of Windows first and foremost, I would say, and Mac OS secondarily. It has the ability to switch between different grids and views. It seems to be pretty lightweight from what I'm reading here, but I think between those, those are some good options for you Zorin OS, which is available at zorincom, or Open Core Legacy Patcher, which is a way to continue to run Mac OS on that Mac. That's a little outdated at this point, a little long in the tooth. Thank you, those are both good options.

Awesome. Well, you'll have to let us know how it goes. We'd love to hear it and, of course, if you have any issues with Linux, you can always give us a call back. We love talking about Linux here, and especially so do our listeners who hang out in the chat, and, as I mentioned, pop OS is always a backup if those fail you. As a person who is not super Linux-versed, I have found that Pop OS is great for that.

0:35:39 - Caller
So yeah, I'm not into command line at all, I barely yeah, I'm not into command line, stuff is not my forte.

0:35:47 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Yeah, Well then I think those options we provided are going to be the best way to go about it. Yeah, Leo would probably be suggesting some more complicated contraptions. So I feel you there. I feel you there. Good question and thanks for the call. No problem. Love the show. Thanks, guys, thanks so much. Bye-bye, all right, is that another call? Yeah, you want to pick them up? Yeah, yeah, let's go for that other call. Remember caller star six to unmute yourself when you are brought on air. One second on that.

0:36:32 - Chris Marquardt
All right, you should be in caller.

0:36:34 - Mikah Sargent
Already caller. Once you've hit star six to unmute yourself. Let us know your name and from whence you hail and we will see what we can do. Hey, this is Tim in Minnesota. Hi, Tim from Minnesota, Welcome.

0:36:50 - Caller
Hey, club split number here, so I should probably be able to find this on your great show, ios Weekly, why not? You haven't got the archives on that yet. I'm hoping you can answer this equally today. It's an iPhone question. Okay, I think it's software related.

On the camera, I have a 13 pro and I think that should still be pretty good for taking nice pictures. And my issue is when I'm out at night I try to take a picture and there's any colored lights, like traffic signals or signs or anything else, the white light and I guess is at the heart of the lights overtakes the color of the light and I only get a slight tint of like the actual color of any lighted fixture that I'm shooting. So it'll be like a blue light. But in my picture the center of that blue light is overtaken by the white brightness of the light and it just has like a slight blue change around the sides. And I just wondered is there software? Is there a setting in the software that I could change? And I'm going to make the color and the scene show up in my photo Gotcha.

0:38:09 - Mikah Sargent
So to clarify, to make sure I'm understanding you you go out at night and you, just as an example, you happen to stop by a traffic signal and the light is red. Currently. You take a photo of that red light and when you look at the photo on your phone, you expect that the light is going to show up red on your phone, but instead the light is showing up white in the center with maybe kind of a red ring around the outside because it's, as a photographer would say, blown out.

0:38:44 - Caller
Yeah, exactly, I just get the halo of the color that I start with my naked eye and even through the phone finder the end photo is not looking like what I'm seeing Now. I've tried different settings in the camera. I've gone to white left exposure on automatic. Usually you will set it to like a three setting and then I have to hold it still until it finishes. And I've even read that the only way to really get rid of that is to shoot it in video in 60 frame format. It doesn't kind of work very well either. It's just still bleached out All the colors. When I'm looking at the light, I'm only seeing the center brightness mostly, just with the halo of the tint of the color that I'm seeing. So I just wonder maybe my camera is defective or there's a lot of settings inside the software to change the camera? I just wondered what you would recommend. No-transcript, or just, maybe iPhones aren't good for shooting this kind of thing and I maybe need like a real, real good camera.

0:39:51 - Mikah Sargent
So, yeah, this is a great question. Yeah, I absolutely love this question because it is. I think a lot of people use their cameras, their phone cameras, and they take a lot of photos, right, and they end up being unhappy with some of them, but they're just kind of false to the wayside and they don't necessarily pay attention to it. But there's always, you know, opportunities to help with this, and so one thing that could be going on is that because the phone is using, given that it's a newer device, it has the ability to kind of keep the shutter open longer, particularly in low light situations. And when it's keeping that shutter open longer, it's possible that because it's letting in more light, that's kind of getting it overblown. And so I do wonder if turning off the night shift setting would be helpful to kind of capture the photo as you are wanting to see it. There is, let me see, in camera when I launch the camera and I tap.

I'm trying to remember where this is now because it moves. Unfortunately, I don't remember off the top of my head where night shift settings are available. So let me actually look that up really quick to disable night shift, because this is what I'm thinking, or not? Night shift. Night shift is the, the controlling the color right Con, you got me inspired by this. So night shift is controlling the color, the white balance of the screen.

But the tool that I'm thinking of is sort of the night photography on the iPhone, so it's called night mode and again what it's doing is kind of taking these very low light photos and a little icon pops up that appears in the top left corner of the screen and if you're only listening, not watching, I'll kind of describe. But basically, in the top left corner of the viewfinder a little yellow pill shows up and it has a duration. It's typically one, two or three seconds and there's kind of a little moon icon next to it and that the seconds corresponds to how long you're meant to hold your phone still while you take a photo, and during that time it tries to keep the shutter open while also tracking the movement that you were doing, those light movements you're doing with the phone while you're trying to hold it still, and then combines all of that to make a photograph, and I'm wondering if that's interfering, and so any at any time you are able to tap on that little pill to turn it off, which will then keep night shift turned off I keep calling it night shift which will then keep night mode turned off, which should, in theory, let you take a photo as you're seeing it on your view screen. The second thing I'm going to suggest on top of maybe turning because it's not in every case that you're going to want to do this right this is when you're specifically taking photos of lighting, or kind of trying to make a moody photo that has lighting in it. I understand that you would probably want night mode turned on if you are taking a photo of a person in it, and it's a pretty dark room, but you want to capture as much light as possible, so there are reasons to have it on and off.

Another suggestion that I have, though, is, on your phone, under the settings app, under photos options, there is a section called HDR, high Dynamic Range, and that setting shows View Full HDR, and what that does is when you are looking at photos that have a very high dynamic range in the photos app. It will adjust the screen so that it shows you that full dynamic range, and you may think this is counterintuitive if I'm telling you to turn this off because you're not getting the best, most wonderful view of the photo, but it's been my experience, anecdotally, that every person who I've told to turn off this feature, or who has been told to turn off this feature, ends up liking the look of their photos a lot more without that high dynamic range version turned on, because it does kind of it sort of takes a photo that exists within a smaller range with all of the colors and the exposure and everything, and it sort of stretches it out and can make things look pretty severe, and so it could be something as simple as that. So there are two options that I have for you One, try toggling off night mode when you go to take a photo and then, two, consider toggling off the view full HDR setting in the photos settings on your phone, if it's. If that doesn't solve it, at that point I would suggest reaching out to Apple support and seeing if it's possible that the camera is defective. I doubt that that's what's going on, particularly if you've seen some other people complaining about it, but it is.

It's a potential, and then there's always also the option of using a third party app. We have I test lots of camera apps on on iOS today, as you mentioned, and so there are many out there. Halide, which is H-A-L-I-D-E, is the app I would suggest you consider using, because it's been my experience that it does a good job of making it so that the photo, or that the view that you're seeing on the view screen is the same as the photo that ends up being captured itself. And look, there's going to be a lot of tinkering you can do with that app. There are lots of options for adjusting white balance, adjusting exposure, of making changes to focus, of all of that stuff. But if you do use a third party camera app sometimes you do, as you mentioned there are more fiddly controls that exist with the camera that aren't exposed in the default camera app. So that's an opportunity potentially for you to be able to get that photo that you're after, because, yeah, you should be able to take a photo at night of a really pretty blue light and have it show up as blue, not white, with a blue outline around it. That's not what you were seeing. That's not what the camera shows you that it is seeing, and so for it to not appear that way in the photos app afterwards is very frustrating and I totally feel that.

Hey, thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thank you for your call, and best of luck and happy photo taking. Wish you all the best. Great, I'll see you next time then I want, yes, yes, thank you for. Thank you for listening to iOS today, appreciate it, and for being a club Twitter member, also twittv slash club Twitter to those of you who are interested in signing up. Alrighty folks, we are just around the corner from having our first of two guests today, rod Pyle, so I thought I'd head back to the emails real quick. We got a question in again. You can email us at G at Twitter TV, a question in from Jason, who writes with the subject wireless carplay adapters. It says Hello, leo and Mikah love the show.

I have a couple of questions about wireless carplay adapters. Both cars we own have wired Apple CarPlay and we'd love to make them wireless. I've seen adapters out there from companies like car link it that people have used with mixed success. Are these adapters safe to use? Is there any chance of them damaging my phone or the car stereo? What type of data access do they have to my phone? Why aren't bigger name manufacturers making these adapters? I'd feel a lot better buying one from Belkin or even Apple. With reports of future iPhones being portless, you'd think this would be an issue Apple was interested in solving.

Thanks for all the great content. I'm a satisfied Club Twit member, and this again is from Jason from Rockford. Jason, this is a fantastic question and I will have to be honest with you that I cannot answer all of these questions with 100% certain certainty to your or my satisfaction. But what I can do is answer to the best of my ability. So let's start with are these adapters safe to use the car link? It is an option for third party wireless CarPlay and I've got a link somewhere. There we go. This is a little device that you plug into your, your actual car, and then from here the car link kit will let you connect to it as the CarPlay device and then it kind of passes all that information through to your car so that it can properly do wireless CarPlay. Now I will say this I know a number of people who sort of are tech podcasters who use these. I know a number of Apple journalists who use these. I know quite a few folks who are just everyday folks who use these devices specifically from car link it.

To ask if they are safe to use, I would say that they are generally safe to use. What I mean by that is, frankly, everything that you touch and everything that you, you know, interact with is not with 100% certainty safe to use. There's every chance that the iPhone that you get could be defective. Right, you could get, you could buy, an iPad and it has a bad battery and then it's not safe to use. So I'm not going to give this the sort of full 100%. There's never going to be an issue. But anecdotally speaking and from reviews that I've read about this, this thing is safe to use.

Is there any chance of it damaging your phone or the car stereo? There's very little chance of it damaging your phone or the car stereo. For one, with your phone, it's just that Wi-Fi access point that's taking place there and then for your car, it's just passing along that information to the car. What type of data access does it have to my phone? Anything that's CarPlay related, but keep in mind that this device itself is not connected to the internet. So that's the kind of cool thing about CarPlay is that CarPlay is either wired or wirelessly. It is taking. It is all from the phone, it's not from your, your car. So it's not as if you are. You get in your car and your car has Android's version of CarPlay. I can't think of what it's called Android Auto and CarPlay is like built into your car and when you plug in your phone it activates it. No, your phone is actually projecting the CarPlay experience to the screen of your entertainment system, so everything's coming from the phone.

This device doesn't have any kind of access to you know what's out there. It is only providing the means of connecting to your car to give it that access. So technically there's a chance that it could be taking the like, the audio choices that you're making and saving them to the car, link it and then I don't know if it somehow gained access to the internet in again in some way that I can't think of. Then it could pass that information along. But from everything that I understand about it, from every person who's ever reviewed it and from as long as it's been on the market, that's never been the case. So I'm answering these questions, you know, in good faith because I understand that concern, but I don't think that that concern is necessary Now. This is the great question that you have.

Next, why aren't bigger name manufacturers making these adapters? This is where I go into theory mode, not Siri mode, but theory mode. My theory is that Apple and Perhaps some of the other competitors or some of the other companies out there that already make different adapters and and and car tools, may have kind of agreements with these car manufacturers, because, think about this, if there are, let's say, there's a company called, there's a car manufacturer called BCW and BCW makes cars right and there's a model of a BCW that has wired carplay and then there's that same model that has a better trim, that has wireless carplay. Why would BCW want Apple to provide a way that would cost less money to make that BCW with wired carplay wireless? That's not. That's not good business for BCW, and Apple of course needs to have a good relationship with BCW so that carplay is still provided as an option within the vehicle. Because, as you know, apple carplay is not available in all cars and we've heard from a number of car manufacturers who have slowly started to remove Carplay from their cars, remove the access to carplay from their cars.

So that's my hunch for why Apple doesn't give you a wireless carplay adapter and then Belkin. It could be just marketing Understanding. It could be because Belkin also, as I mentioned, makes Other tools that you can use in the car. So maybe they've got agreements, who knows? But again, that's just a hunch for why they don't. I agree with you that it'd be great if Belkin or Apple made those. And oh and that's the other thing that I just thought of is that third-party head units have carplay built into them. In many cases you can buy third-party head units. Belkin Offers a lot of times fit kits and other things that work with those third-party head units. So again, it's that thing of if Belkin starts offering a tool that Drops out the market for third-party head units, those companies aren't necessarily going to want to do business with Belkin, because now Belkin's more of a competitor instead of a partner. So that's, it's Capitalism, is my hunch for why there aren't bigger name manufacturers.

Now, as far as all of that goes, I do recommend the car link it. There are some others that people recommend, but I have not heard as many good things as often as I have. When it comes to the car link it Option, there is this, the site that you can go to the car link at site. I recommend ordering these from Amazon. It's just I don't know the return policy for the First-party site that they're sold on. I don't know anything about that, but with Amazon it's easy to buy, get it in two days and Also to do returns if you decide you don't like it. There's a 3.0 version of 4.0 version and I believe it now goes up to 5.0. I recommend 4 or 5.0 as your car link it option. They work with both Android Auto and Car play as the means of connecting to your vehicle and I got to tell you, as a person who has Wireless car play, it's so handy to just be able to get into your car, never even have to pull out your phone and have it Automatically connect to car play.

So, jason, a fantastic question. Frankly, and Hopefully I've done a good job of answering those questions to the best of our ability. Here again, you know there are some caveats there. All right, have we connected with our With with our caller? Well, before we get to that, let me take a quick break so I can tell you about Wix Studio. Who are bringing you this episode of? Ask the tech guys now.

I've only got one minute to tell you about Wix Studio, so let me get into it. It's the web platform for agencies and enterprises, and here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less On studio adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI. Expand Wix Studios pre-made solutions with back end and front end APIs. Generate code and troubleshoot bugs with a built-in AI code assistant. Switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages. That means fonts, layouts, colors all in a click. Add no code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. Start a design library. Package your code and UI and reusable full-stack apps. Oh, and one more big one deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. Times up, but the list keeps going.

We love Wix Studio. We love that it's such a full service tool that is great for both developers and designers that you can customize as much as you want. So step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com/sutdio or click on the link on the show page to find out more. All right, with that we are back to the show, and that means it's time for Rodpile Spaceman. I really want a nice echo effect for that. I just think it would sound so good. Sorry, that's not. That's not in the budget.

Dang it, we got up the budget here. Rod. Welcome to the show. Rod. How you doing, thanks, how are you? I'm good, oh, I am peachy keen, so happy to get to talk to you about space stuff. I gotta tell you you're making me more of a space enthusiast than I ever have been, so I always appreciate getting chat with you.

0:58:40 - Rod Pyle
This was like our conversations with aunt, who used to go on and on and on about how much more important throwing a little bag of air around was than spaceflight. You know, like aunt, come on, he still writes me every now and then saying I'm still not into space. But well, that was kind of interesting. I yeah it's all accomplishments.

0:59:03 - Mikah Sargent
It's not even necessarily that I Find anything else more more important. I just, I don't know, for some reason I never got the space bug, so to speak, but maybe it's because it just feels so distant from me.

0:59:17 - Rod Pyle
Well, I think it's also partly a function of when we were born. You know, because I'm a crusty old man, I got to see the Apollo program happen, which was incredibly exciting when you were young. The shuttle was going up and it was going on orbit and they were starting to build the space station. But I think it was a little less Magical in a way, yeah, I think you're probably right about that.

0:59:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely.

0:59:38 - Rod Pyle
By the way, I pardoned the background. Here I'm rejiggering the studio, which is a little tiny room, so it's kind of a mess, oh.

0:59:46 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I didn't notice, so you know, that's because it's so cluttered all the time.

0:59:52 - Rod Pyle
So, by the way, do you drive a?

0:59:53 - Mikah Sargent
BCW. I do not drive a BCW, Okay.

0:59:57 - Rod Pyle
I have the one of those $90 wireless carplay displays. Wait, carplay is Apple right? Yes, that kind of works but, as I think you were alluding to, every time you get in the car you got to hook it up it hijacks the audio. So then you have to punch around all these settings and Chinese to figure out how to get it back onto the main speakers, and it's no fun. But yeah, so having a 2017 Jaguar with electronics from the 19th century and vacuum tubes, I think it's just miserable. I mean, it takes, it takes my my GPS display a good 20 seconds to update every time I try to move.

1:00:37 - Mikah Sargent
No way, oh it's awful. Yeah, that does not sound fun at all.

1:00:41 - Rod Pyle
No, so I like your discussion, your solutions. We're gonna have to go back and listen to it more depth because I got to do something. This is just driving me bats.

1:00:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that would that would it be rather frustrating, for sure. So tell us what's going on in space these days, my friend.

1:00:56 - Rod Pyle
So we got two big stories and a third, if we end up having time, of course. The, the one everybody was watching this week was the Starship test flight number three and fingers crossed, you know, come on, elon Space X guys, let's go. And it did launch successfully. All 33 engines lit up. It didn't destroy the launch pad. So, second successful time with that Tested this new hot staging system they have where they start the upper stage engines before releasing the lower stage, which hasn't been done much in the US, just a couple of ICBMs back in the 60s, russians. It is successfully. So that worked, which is good. They did separate, they staged and the upper stage continued on. To quote orbital speeds, which is not quite getting into orbit. They did a bunch of tests while they were coasting above the earth. They opened a little payload bay door that they've designed for the thing and, critically, they tested, we think, what's called in-flight fuel transfer, which is moving fuel from one tank to another while you're hurtling along an orbit. Because they need to Figure that out to be able to make this thing, do lunar landings for NASA in a couple of years. However, the lower stage did not quite make it back to its. It's so-called soft landing in the ocean that they were planning. It broke up about 1,500 feet above the ocean, which is fine, I mean it. It fulfilled this mission. It was a success. The upper stage started rolling around and that means that the heat shield was not properly oriented towards the air as it was coming back down. It broke up high up in space. So there's still a lot of work to do. So the the the big question now is how many flights can they do this year and next year To try and work out the bugs in this thing? Because before they can put astronauts on it and send them to the lunar surface With the Artemis program, they got to do at least one. Maybe fingers cross to robotic landings there to make sure the thing works. So the big snag here is getting the FAA to give them permission to launch more frequently, because they got a bunch of these things standing On a row ready to go. So it's a little bit of a gut churner.

Here's the reentry footage. We'd never seen this before. You can see the plasma building up in the lower end there. Wow, looking good for a while. Then it started to roll a bit, which you know. They've modeled this thing to death and the computers, but you really don't know until you fly it. Oh, I want to start a roll. It Just turned into a torch, yeah, so, wow, so it was exciting. But at the same time it's like come on, you guys, come on, we've done. We've done a lot of this to stuff, at least once before. Now. In this case, this is all new. You know, this whole reusability, come back and fly it again. Thing other than the shuttle is kind of new. You can see it starting to to Really get get hot now and the bottom end is starting to melt and then pretty soon the camera goes away and that's the end of it. So it was a conditional success, which is good.

1:03:56 - Mikah Sargent
This is so. You talked before about how, when we went to the moon, it was basically a blank check, and now Private companies in many cases are working to make this happen, but it's far from a blank check. Yeah, do you think that if If it was blank check today, we would be Further along at this point? Like what, what would a blank check provide today, given that we have, you know, the the shoulders of giants to stand on right?

1:04:38 - Rod Pyle
That's a really good question and I think you know if there was more money being thrown at it, on the one hand you could say, well, obviously things would move faster because we've already mastered this technology in the past. We could do it again. On the other hand, we are throwing not as much as we did in Apollo, but we're throwing a lot of money at Boeing to build the SLS and it took them, depending on how you look at it, between 10 and 20 years to actually Recreate a slightly less capable version of Saturn 5, which was developed in about five years. And you know it's really expensive. It's going to be something like four billion a flight. So I Don't know that more money is really the question. Now.

Starship has been developed primarily with Elon's money and I suspect it would be a little further along if he hadn't bought that certain social media outlet which is kind of a waste of energy and time. But okay, just opinion. So you know it's kind of amazing that it works at all. But he does now have a couple billion from NASA to to fiddle with as part of this lunar landed program. But when you look at what they spent on the Apollo program in today's dollars, it's probably no edging up towards hundred eighty two hundred billion bucks. So, yeah, this is a lot cheaper and I'll be impressed. We make it by 2029. And, of course, if you're in Congress, your big concern is yes, but the Chinese will get there possibly by 2029.

1:06:09 - Mikah Sargent
And my question for them, although it's an unpopular sentiment as well we were there a long time ago with the rush, but there is a rush apparently so that's interesting because I was gonna ask too if you felt like Things were a little bit more what lackadaisical this time around, because there isn't that sort of space race Mandate, and that maybe it didn't feel like hurrah hurrah, we're trying to beat the other countries, but it sounds like Congress wise. There is a little bit of that. Do you think that they feel that in these private companies, as much as if it was NASA as a whole doing it, that maybe that hurrah hurrah sort of sentiment would come back? I just, yeah, it's almost like I know this is a hard thing to do, but if you could be a space alchemist, what Ingredients, what ingredients are missing to turn this lead into gold?

This time? Is there just less, yeah, overall Excitement about it and that's what's maybe play. You know, maybe the the one person whose job it is to put those rivets in is just maybe five seconds slower it putting the rivets in and it's all just so. You know, everybody's kind of got that. Okay, we'll get to it. That didn't happen in the past.

1:07:22 - Rod Pyle
Well. So it's interesting, the you interview people from the 1960s that worked on these things, the first base race, and to a person they will tell you it was a mission. It was like being in the military. You know, we had to get this done. We had to make now. Of course, back then we had a martyred president. Right, president Kennedy has assassinated in 1963, a year after finalizing the Apollo decision. So if you don't get this thing done by the end of 1969, not only does the Soviet Union win this base race, but you've let down this martyred president.

So that was a very powerful motivator which kept people from the opposite party, even though some of them really wanted to shutting down the program. Now, you know, I think if you're a private company and you're smart, you use this, this competition, as a lever. You say, yeah, we can't let them get there first. Now, is there any validity to that point of view? On the one hand, it's raw nationalism, and the Chinese are very nationalistic about what they're doing too. So that goes for both sides.

On the other hand, there is concern by people who study the stuff that whoever reaches the Resource rich areas of the moon in this case we think the South Pole first kind of gets to set the rules, and we don't want to be locked out of a debate about who gets to use the water on the South Pole. So that's really the big motivator. Now you could conceivably claim that you stake to Put a stake in the ground with robots there, but symbolically it seems to be important for a lot of people, including Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, to get people there. So yeah, I've long had kind of a theory in the back of my mind that at some point in the meeting of the UN this Chinese delegation was gonna come up and hand this little faded white flag over the US delegation and say hey, you guys left this on the moon in 1969. We thought we'd bring it back for you, but that hasn't happened yet.

1:09:17 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, so Sorry, I just I there's. It's all very it's a big conversation. Yeah, it is exactly that's. That's what it was done to. It is a big conversation. What? What are the different goals, kind of right now, that are Sort of agreed upon from NASA and everybody who's doing? How much of it is Just commercial space travel? How much of it is getting satellites into orbit? How much of it is actually trying to go to the moon? Is there still talk about visiting more or like trying to colonize Mars? What are the current Overall targets and goals that are sort of actively and realistically being worked on?

1:10:09 - Rod Pyle
So it depends on who you ask, of course, fair and us. So we had Pam Melroy, who's the deputy administrator of NASA, on the this week of space podcast a few weeks ago and she was pretty frank and she said look, you know, our goal on the human spaceflight side is to get people back on the moon and Start learning more about the moon and using the resources of the moon to help us get to Mars, which is the big target. Now one could ask why Mars is so important when it's so far away and such a hostile place to be. But then you get into this, this mixed discussion of, on the one side of a SpaceX saying well, we have to have a backup for civilization and there's a real, there's an actual business model for going to Mars, which I think is pretty weak.

On the other hand, you have the more philosophical discussion of you know, we want to go beyond the next mountain and into the next frontier and all that Never matter how much it costs. And, of course, how much it costs a big discussion. If you ask SpaceX, it's under a hundred billion. If you asked friends of mine who have studied the various plans for going to Mars over the decades, it's about a trillion. So no, so that's the human spaceflight part. But but more to the point, in immediate terms, we want to get privately funded or Co-funded between private industry and NASA replacements up to the space station, because that's gonna be coming down in about seven, six or seven years, because it's old, you know, it's gonna be 30 years old.

1:11:35 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry, sorry, sorry, wait, yeah, huh. So wait, the whole Duck and cover, son, the whole space station is coming. I've always I don't okay, see, I do like space. I just forget to pay attention because I the space station is the coolest thing to me. I like, wow, if I could, it's amazing station, wow. So what you're saying is, in six to seven years, there's a plan that the whole space station needs to come back to earth so that they can what? Put a new one up there or so they can take the one that exists and make it better and then put it back up there.

1:12:10 - Rod Pyle
No, no. So they're gonna, as I understand it, although the plans are still in flux they're gonna take the modules off, one or two at a time, send them back down. The atmosphere will a burn up because it's it's done. I mean it's it's old. More than half their time up there now is spent on maintenance and repair, so these things just wear out. You know, I mean, as big as it is, it's very lightly built because it has to be to fly. So blue origin, which is Jeff Bezos's Amazon Co-company, and Axiom space and a couple of others are working on these small, independently Built, privately built Replacements that'll go up flying tandem with the space station. We hope for a couple of years, and then, when it's time to take the old space station apart, these things will become. They're smaller, logical replacements.

1:12:57 - Mikah Sargent
That's depressing to me, though, that it has to be private instead of. That's so well, so capitalistic. That makes me a lot cheaper, oh.

1:13:06 - Rod Pyle
So, by NASA's own estimates, working with SpaceX to save them between 60 and 90 percent on On, for instance, flying people up the space station. So when you look at it from that point of view, it's like, well, yeah, this makes a lot of sense, we just wish it would move a little faster. But because they are working, you know, with fewer resources, because you're right. I mean, back in the 60s, nasa really went full bore on this, along with the US government, and the price was no object. I was giving a talk down in Ecuador two weeks ago and somebody asked me how many times did they have to test the Saturn 5 engines before they stopped blowing up? And the answer was over 3600. Wow, and that's expensive, you know. I do have another story I'd like to go to.

1:13:49 - Mikah Sargent
We've got plenty of time, but before I do, actually, I am like not to be sort of sappy, wide-eyed and rose-tinted shades, but there's always this aspect for me of despite the fact that we've all, despite whatever's going on down here, knowing that up there in that space station, well and you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, if this is not currently the case, but at least for a while you had European, american, russian and maybe Chinese, no, chinese but Japanese and other Asian countries.

So many people from so many places in the world all cooperating together to stay alive on this space station. If it goes private, is that going to go away?

1:14:35 - Rod Pyle
Well, I don't know. So I did another talk about a year ago about multiculturalism at this Pan-Arab summit and it's a really interesting question, so I think the thing that impresses me the most. So we had our first bit of international spaceflight cooperation back in 1975 when an Apollo capsule, a Soyuz capsule linked up and the American crew and the Russian crew shook hands and smiled and ate some borscht out of a tube all day, literally. Then space station comes along first, crews go up in 2020, it's international from the start and the, in theory anyway, the Russian side because the Russians built a lot of the hardware is sovereign property and the American side is sovereign property and everybody else kinds of shares. Throughout this conflict in Ukraine, which is an awful thing, even though we're not at all happy with the Russian government, the two mission controls are still cooperating properly and the crews are cooperating properly. So you're right, I mean it's a really wonderful kind of shining example of what we can do when we untie our shoelaces and get out of our own way. But you know, will that happen with the private stations? Plans are, I believe, for that to be the case.

Now, on top of this, we have this thing called the Artemis Accords, which is this international agreement to cooperate in the American Moon Program, and of course, the Chinese and the Russians, very quickly after that, said no, no, we have our own accord. You should come sign these, but so far, 36 countries assigned on to the American Artemis Accords, the idea being that there will be multinational cooperation on this Moon Program. How that's going to be done is not yet clear because, let's face it, if you're, you know Zimbabwe, you may not have a lot to contribute, except for a certain amount of human capital and brain power, you know, but in terms of hard technology and big budgets it's going to be a far reach. So we don't really know. And part of why I was in Ecuador was to talk to them about the Artemis Accords, because they signed about a year ago and you know they're kind of wondering okay, how can we really roll in on this and have a meaningful impact? And that's a good question. That was having trouble answering for them. Yeah, so, so anyway, I don't think using rose-colored glasses. I think that's a really valid point of view.

And, you know, multiculturalism, as we do move further out and have more countries cooperating, is going to become a more important conversation because, you know, let's look at the Antarctic. You've got different countries in these different bases. They come together at the South Pole to work together and then they retreat to their sovereign territories, if you will, so where you when. Once you go back to your base, you can eat the food you want and talk in the language you like and observe religious practices the way you see fit, and all that when people are of different backgrounds and cultures are forced to be together for a seven-month transit in a very small spacecraft to two Mars and then live there for at least a year before they come home. Yeah, it's a little more friction.

So, yeah, that's a good discussion we're going to have to have, and soon.

1:17:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, all right, tell us about your other story.

1:17:46 - Rod Pyle
Okay. So apologies to people that already listened to the this Week in Space podcast, but it was so exciting I couldn't help myself. So our old friend Pascal Lee, who's a planetary scientist with the Ames Research Center, nasa's Field Center up in Northern California and the SETI Institute, who has been laboring for decades on different. He writes papers about landing space, landing zones on Mars and geology of Mars, and this has been his career. He's a few years younger than me. He's studying Mars. So when we were up in the Arctic about a year and a half ago watching him scroll through Mars porn on his computer for hours and hours and hours. So what are you looking for?

1:18:25 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry to clarify for those listening Mars porn just means photos of Mars.

1:18:31 - Rod Pyle
Okay, sorry, yeah, so groovy pictures from orbit, you know, and there's, there's hundreds of thousands of them. So he continued doing this and about a year ago discovered this old glacier formation near the equator. Now is that world shaking? Not really, but it's pretty cool because we always assume they'd be a higher latitudes. That was neat. But in the process of doing that, he and his associates, in one afternoon about six weeks ago, realized that this glacier was part of a larger formation that was one of the largest volcanoes they had ever seen on Mars.

Now we haven't really found a new geological feature of any scope on Mars since Mariner 9 over to the planet 1971 and set back the first clear pictures. So it's kind of a big deal. This thing's the size of Wisconsin at its base, whoa, it's about 30,000 feet high. But the weird part is it's been sitting there in plain sight for decades and nobody spotted it until Pascal did. And I said how did they miss it? You know, I mean, you know, tens of thousands of people have poured all these images. And he said well, it's really worn and beaten up and glaciers slid down the side and chewed it up. So it's like one of those things where you have to stand back 10 feet to spot it.

Oh look, there's a ring there. I see it and I think we've got an image to put up, if John can grab it. Yeah, so when you see the elevations in that picture on the right sorry for those listening on audio it just looks like a. It actually looks like a big bird dropping on Mars.

1:20:08 - Mikah Sargent
It does yeah.

1:20:09 - Rod Pyle
But you can kind of see where that white circle is and then as you move out from there, you go oh, that's kind of a concentric thing. What makes it confusing is it's in this area called labyrinthus noctis, that's really torn up and full of valleys, and that's on the edge of Alice marinara, which is the biggest canyon in the solar system, and so on and so forth. So there's a lot going on there. So the eye is kind of popping around looking at this whole visual mess, but then you kind of squint and you defocus a bit and you go hey, that's a circle. So I just thought this was the coolest story, because it's like how often does this happen? Well, kind of like never.

So the upshot of this is you know why is it important? Well, it makes for a great landing zone for the future because it's parts of it are at the right elevation. You can't be too high because your parachutes won't slow you down enough. You can't be too low, so you want to be at a certain, within a certain range of elevation. And it's near the equator, which is easier to get to, and there's a lot of interesting stuff there because you've got all these cuts into the surface, mostly water, erosion and glaciers. So you can walk over to any rock wall and go oh, look at all those layers. Hey, there's a dinosaur femur in there. Wouldn't that be a great one, wow.

1:21:20 - Mikah Sargent
So that's cool.

1:21:22 - Rod Pyle
There's. There's, we think, also probably subsurface size deposits. So you've got water to drink, which is good. And one of the neatest things is is if this area is still thermally active, so if there's still a magma chamber under here keeping it warm, and if there's lava tubes and caves and overhangs and scarps and so forth, there's a better than than than fainting chance that there could be kind of a warmer, steamier environment inside one of these caves, because you've got water, ice and heat, and where you've got water, ice and heat, you have a water vapor, and where you have water vapor, you might have life. So if you're going to find microbial critters on Mars, this would be a good place to look, maybe. So that was the part that I liked the most. It's like oh, this is where we might finally find our Mars trilobites Wow.

1:22:12 - Mikah Sargent
That is very cool. Oh, that's that's exciting and again just the idea that you know that was missed and you've got to. There's got to be loads of that. In fact, I remember reading a story just recently here on earth about somebody looking into the ocean and finding a human, a big seamount right. Yeah, yeah yeah, it was like a human constructed wall thing that had been missed, just because.

1:22:40 - Rod Pyle
Oh, that's something else. Okay, there was a story recently, I think was off the coast of Northern California. They found this seamount. That was huge, you know, coming up to within, I don't know a quarter mile the surface or something. Nobody has spotted it before. It's like, well, how do you miss these things? You know, and in this case I think part of it, it's the romantic in me.

But here's the solo operator. He's been working in parallel with, but kind of outside of, nasa for years. I mean, they cooperated in this Arctic base, but he's, you know, he works for himself and for the SETI Institute and you know, I've watched him sit there and look at this stuff for hours and hours very devoted guy. So it's kind of like, you know, in the 1950s sci-fi movies with the old guy in his garage building his moon rocket, you know. And to discover this thing, sort of solo, he was working with a couple of associates, but essentially you know the two person team. You just don't hear that much anymore. You hear about banks of AI and there were 100 people working thousands of hours. And then here's this guy who says, hey, look, there's a big volcano sitting there. So I just enjoyed that a lot.

And finally, poor Voyager 1, 15 billion miles from Earth, gets confused, start sending backs gibberish and trash messages to NASA. Mind you, it takes over 22 hours for a radio signal to go one way, but we're getting very worried that we might be about to lose it. Now, you know it's coming up on 50 years old in a couple of years, so it's not like it hasn't done its work, but we get attached to these things sentimentally, right. So it was sending back all these these messed up messages that didn't make a lot of sense. And it's got three computers on board that work. It's still using a tape drive for data retrieval. Wow, half inch of tape. Can you imagine magnetic tape scraping, scraping back and forth over a head for almost 50 years? That's so working.

1:24:35 - Mikah Sargent
Incredible that it's still working.

1:24:37 - Rod Pyle
I was better than the eight track and my old Sunbeam outline. So they were kind of they being the JPL folks were kind of like, well, this, you know, we may be reaching mission end here. And bear in mind, you know this program has been up there so long at this point, literally mission controls, a couple of banquet tables, a couple of old Sunwork stations and maybe 12 people. So it's not like you've got mission control. You know it's like mission control with just a few people there. But they did, finally, on March 1, they were able to send a message up to kind of poke it and say hey, wake up. And they got back at least one message that they think is a computer response saying Okay, I'm doing a memory evaluation, I'll let you know. D fragging.

I guess, I mean, I think it was before D fragging. This was built in like 1976. Oh, so this is more like a.

1:25:30 - Mikah Sargent
Please wait while I blow on the tape.

1:25:34 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, I think please wait while I, while I pour ice water on my process.

1:25:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't know.

1:25:40 - Rod Pyle
I mean just let me die.

We didn't even have, I don't think back then, standard chipsets, right. Everything was kind of bespoke right. And in particular because they're passing past Jupiter and Saturn, before they went out to interstellar space they were hit these really radiation saturated regimes, so everything had to be shielded under little metal caps and thin sheets of lead and so forth. And in fact, but certainly before it launched, I was talking to one of the managers on the program years ago. You said, not too long before these things are supposed to take off, one of his assistants walked in and said we have a problem. And he said what? And he said all this wiring in here and the radiation is going to cause a major problem with static electricity. It's going to short out the electricity. What would you do?

1:26:28 - Mikah Sargent
What would I do? Yeah, I was worried about static electricity. Yeah, I don't I mean as a human. The way to get rid of static electricity is to like, touch or ground myself. I guess. Yeah, yeah. What do you do in space?

1:26:45 - Rod Pyle
Well, so they have this potential. You know 30 million dollar problem on redesigning the probe. But John Cassani, who's a brilliant engineer, who was in charge with that point, said okay, don't talk to anybody. Go down to Ralph's, buy some Reynolds wrap, bring it up and wrap all the cable.

1:27:02 - Mikah Sargent
No way, that's all it took, so for about a dollar 35, they saved the program. That's beautiful, pretty cool. God, I wish that happened more often.

1:27:12 - Rod Pyle
You know I love that. So yeah, where'd your one? Don't leave us yet.

1:27:19 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, it's still going Good for it. Good for it. Well, we'll see. You will see how things shape up. Fingers crossed, rod Pyle always a pleasure. I was just telling some people about how they are working to redesign or, I guess, kind of truly remake, the spacesuits for this thing, and you know I'm eagerly awaiting more on that. You are, of course, the author of Space 2.0, the co-host of this Week in Space right here on the Twitter network, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra, and you can be found at spacenssorg. Anything you want to plug before we say goodbye to you for today.

1:28:04 - Rod Pyle
I just think the last few episodes of this Week in Space have been such fun. We had Alan Stern on, who was the chief scientist on the New Horizons mission out to Pluto and recently flew in Virgin Galactic, so now he's an astronaut, quote, unquote. We had, as I said, pam Elroy, who's like number two at NASA, on. That was a big feather in our cap. And then more recently we had Pascal talking about his pet volcano. So we're just having such a good time there. Oh, and I posted on Facebook this morning my life with Twists has had a seismic shift. I don't know how many of the episodes you've seen, but I love to give Tarek grief about his chair, because he's got this really cool Star Trek chair that was given to him because he's the editor-in-chief of Spacecom, which I don't have. But the wheels kept falling out and he's not the most mechanically inclined guy. So he fell out of the chair about three times in mid-episode over the year and unfortunately he finally, at my urging, ordered a new seat base and fixed it.

So I have to find something else to chip on, that's work that is hard to do.

1:29:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's just find the do thing to pick on.

1:29:19 - Rod Pyle
Well, I'm trying to sort of. You and Leo are so kind to each other. I thought you know I got up the stakes a little bit. So, by the way, how is this vacation going?

1:29:26 - Mikah Sargent
I just see the Instagram so far so far, it seems to be going so good. I don't think any of us have received any more details than anyone else, so we're all just taking it in via Instagram as well from time to time, but they're still still having fun enjoying interesting. What is that Gastro? What is that called? Yes, molecular gastronomy. Yeah, molecular gastronomy stuff.

1:29:53 - Rod Pyle
So yeah, watching them try and figure out. What is the game with the drink with the bubble. Are you trying to drink it without popping the bubble?

1:30:00 - Mikah Sargent
I think it's supposed to be. It's sort of like a smoky it's probably a mez mezcal based margarita, and so it seems that what they're doing is they're putting some smokiness inside of a bubble, so you literally are supposed to pop it and have it kind of go into your senses before you drink the beverage. Yeah, it's like ooh, if it's vaporized alcohol, that's scary. We have Burke behind the scenes writing vaporized alcohol question mark. If it is oof, open flame moment. Yeah, exactly. Well, rod Pyle, thank you so much for being here, thank you for this week in space and we'll see you again soon.

1:30:42 - Rod Pyle
Thanks, Take care pal.

1:30:44 - Mikah Sargent
Bye-bye. Alrighty, should we take another break, or should we head into more questions? Let's do one more question. We haven't done a voicemail yet. I would love to do a voicemail. All right, let me get that.

1:31:01 - Caller
Hello Leo and Mikah. This is Mike from Charlotte, north Carolina, proud community member. I'm reaching out to you all today for a quick question or inquiry and I hope you all can give me a little insight and guidance. My question's about Apple Watch.

I've had every single version of the Apple Watch over the years. I've loved it. At some point it became the kind of device that if I ever dropped it or it broke I would probably just go buy another one the next day. So I couldn't be happier with it as a personal device that I've used for many years. But I have to say, after the latest major refresh of the operating system, I'm continually frustrated with it, and it's strange because I used to be delighted with it every day. So I'm just wondering if you all have had equal frustration with the software, particularly with the remapping of buttons and the moving of things that used to be muscle memory, because I'm finding myself less delighted with something I used to love. So look forward to your thoughts and comments and appreciate the show, love the show and a proud member of the community. Bye bye.

1:32:07 - Mikah Sargent
This is such a great question because it gives me an opportunity to air my grievances. Mike, you're not alone. Not only are you not alone as far as I am concerned, but you are also not alone as far as almost everyone who I've talked to as an Apple Watch feels as well. For folks who don't know, it used to be that you could swipe up from the bottom, for example, on your Apple Watch to access some of the kind of quick options for its essentially control panel on your Apple Watch. These are the options to ping your phone, to turn on or off notifications, to put the Apple Watch into silence mode, to change the current focus mode. They moved that to pressing the side button to activate that, which also meant that accessing different aspects of the Apple Watch have changed as well. So now when you swipe up from the bottom of the phone, it goes into this sort of glanceable widget screen, and that just wasn't the case before, before you swiped up to access that information, because that muscle memory has existed since almost the beginning of the Apple Watch.

That is why some people are frustrated, because for me and Mike and many others, yes indeed, it is frustrating that the muscle memory we have had for so long has changed. And so when you're not really putting all of your cognition into the moment and looking at your Apple Watch with all awareness and hitting the side button, knowing that that's going to bring up control center as opposed to how it used to work, you end up going into a different menu than you meant to, and that's frustrating. So it's just a little bit of frustration, but those little frustrations add up over time and when someone feels like they have control over a situation and they feel like they have knowledge of a situation, and then that control is taken from them, that knowledge shifts. People don't want to feel that way. It's frustrating, it is confusing and it causes some level of consternation. And so that is the case here.

Totally understand, particularly because, yes, as someone in the chat has pointed out, people hate change, people will. I've heard plenty of people say I love change, to thrive and change. Change is great, but thousands and thousands and thousands of years of being human beings has taught us to see change as something that is dangerous to us, and so, because of that, I don't care. If people say they love change. They're lying. People may claim they love change and they may adapt to change quickly, but change is, at our very base, just something that we have to adapt to and we have to handle, and so it may take longer for others and it is a frustrating thing nonetheless. And so, no, the watch has not been around for thousands of years, but our instincts to avoid change and to see change as something that's dangerous to us, that's been around for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

So, anyway, my point is, mike, you're not alone. That is something that a lot of people experience, both anecdotally and in you know, from the complaints that I see too, which I suppose are anecdotal in their own way. Yes, I feel the same way. I hope that it is the case that Apple is listening and is considering making a change here. Otherwise, I think we have to get used to this new way of doing it. I think my problem is I don't access those menus enough regularly for the muscle memory to click into place, and so over the course of having the every single model of Apple Watch during that period, I would have accessed the menu enough in this one way that it's locked in, and then now I have to, I probably going to need to have enough Apple Watches in this new way for me to be able to get it. Yeah, I don't lose my iPhone enough, but I know that if I did, then pinging my iPhone would be the thing that would cause me to, you know, form that new muscle memory.

So, mike, thank you for your question. There let's go. There's actually someone hanging out in the Zoom call. We want to try to pick up on. Excellent, let's pick up on our Zoom caller. Remember you can head to what is it atgtwittv is the URL that you can go to to have your question asked and answered. Welcome to the call caller. What's your name and from where are you calling?

1:37:30 - Caller
How you doing, Mikah. It's Jeff from New City, New York. How's everything going?

1:37:34 - Mikah Sargent
Hi, Jeff. Things are going well here. I hope they're going well for you as well. How can we help you?

1:37:40 - Caller
Good question. I might have gotten the answer but I didn't have a chance to listen last week. That's a my to-do list, but with the upcoming clips coming, do you recommend, how do we recommend we capture that on film or a picture with our iPhones, or actually the other camera this time? You know my son's excited and stuff like that.

1:37:59 - Mikah Sargent
Okay. So, yes, you're looking to capture the eclipse with your iPhone, and how to go about doing that. This is a great question. So there are some different apps that exist out there, including an app in the App Store called SolarSnap, and SolarSnap is specifically created to help you take a photo of an eclipse, and it has a little tool that you buy from the EclipseGlassescom website. So, on the eclipseglassescom website, which is one place that folks go to get eclipse glasses, there is a little filter that you can buy, and that filter, let's see, is SolarSnap Eclipse app goes over the top of the camera, providing the necessary filter that you would need to be able to take a photo of, or video of, the eclipse. Looks like it's available for $17 on the on the store.

I would, though, even just getting something like this, getting the proper kind of filter and using a using the standard camera app. It's more about having that filter right, because that's going to let you let the camera actually properly capture the eclipse without it being completely blown out. We had to call or call in earlier about it, so, as long as you have the necessary equipment, I kind of wish that we still had Rod Pyle on the line, as Rod has suggested in the past, where to get eclipse glasses from, and I wish I could remember. Maybe somebody in the chat will remind me where Rod has suggested you buy your eclipse glasses so regular glasses for it.

1:39:59 - Caller
I know, warby Parker, the store is having free, by the way, april 1st to the 8th for us to wear, but I was, you know. Thank you for the filter. Yeah, they're offering it. If you walk into the store, they're giving away a pair from April 1st to the 8th. But I thank you for answering the question with the app because I want to put a filter on my phone, right. But I appreciate that. Thank you, yeah.

1:40:20 - Mikah Sargent
So SolarSnap, which again it's you know it's specifically designed so it's got built-in zoom, exposure and focus options so you can really dial it in and they're all right there in the app, as opposed to kind of being all around the place, and so you can quickly and easily do that capturing that you need to do and then, paired with the filter that's necessary to properly capture it, You're good to go. And I'm being told on Android one, Brian says there's an app called Pinhole Solar Eclipse which can help as well. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

Yeah, and good luck capturing the eclipse. All right, want to head back to email? Yeah, all right, cool. So this email comes in from Judy, who has the subject Mac question, and it says I used to be able to provide remote tech support for my friends from my Mac via the messages app. I would go Session heading, I would pick ask to share screen. After recent OS updates, though, I can't do that anymore. I get a message that says the person isn't available, even if he or she is sitting and waiting for the prompt. Any tips or resources? So this is a great question.

Yeah, it is a possibility, and don't show my screen just yet, but I'm going to pull up the Messages app here in just a moment and I will pull up a specific message and then. Okay, so now you can show my. Well, hold on one sec. Yes, you can show my screen. So in the and can you zoom in, cause I don't have that. I don't know how Leo does that on his, but in the Messages app I hit the I icon, the more information icon in the top right corner, and then I click the share button and I have the option to invite to share my screen or ask to share screen. In this case, if I ask to share screen, I'm asking the other person to share their macOS screen, and if I choose invite to share my screen, then I'm giving the other person the ability to access my screen. This is a great feature if you are trying to provide tech support to someone remotely. Now, judy seems to be having issues where it is saying that the person isn't available, and so this is what Apple says to do. It says, if you, if the share button is dimmed or you get that issue of the person isn't available, make sure that the person you're trying to share with is signed into iCloud using the same Apple ID that they use to sign into Messages. So the iCloud account on the Mac and the Messages app need to be signed into the same thing. If they can't sign into iCloud and Messages using the same Apple ID, then you, judy, need to open your contacts app and make sure your contact card for that person includes both Apple IDs the one they use to sign into iCloud and the one they use in Messages and then try sharing again.

Now here's what's great. If you are unable to get this working over the Messages app, you can also use FaceTime to share screens with someone. So you would open the FaceTime app, you would call them and then from there you will see the option to share screen. And so that might whatever wherever it might not be working in Messages for whatever reason, it could be that FaceTime because by that point you will have already made that contact will kind of trigger the ability to share your screens. And then there's also the option to use a tool on the Mac called Screen Sharing. And so if you hold down the Command button on your Mac and hit Space Bar and you type in Screen Space Sharing, you will see a specific Screen Sharing app pop up, and then, once you've got that app open, we can show this. You would hit the plus icon and you would type in the person's Apple ID. Or if it's local on your local area network, then you type in their host name. So in your case you would tap in the Apple ID and click Connect. That would also trigger a Screen Sharing feature, because technically that is what Messages is doing is it's using Screen Sharing to go about sharing the two screens.

Now if at that point you are still seeing errors for being able to provide tech support, there is a chance that the person on the other end does not have the proper settings on their device that provides for Screen Sharing, and so with that I'm trying to remember, because of course this is all moved around, it is under let's see, okay, so on your Mac you would launch the System Settings app. Excuse, me, on their Mac they would launch the System Settings app and they would click on Sharing near the bottom. And then they need to make sure that Screen Sharing is turned on under Content and Media. If Screen Sharing is not turned on, then they are not able to share. Let me bring that down just a little bit. Then they are not able to share their screen. So Screen Sharing needs to be turned on under the Sharing menu within general in order for Screen Sharing to work and it's possible that it did work. At one point they did an update. It got toggled off somehow and so then it wasn't accessed and that's why you're no longer able to have them over availability. If all of that fails and you're still not able to gain access, it's very possible that some VPN or proxy is coming into play here. So make sure that they don't have one of those settings turned on that could be blocking access between the two devices. You could also check their firewall settings as well, but start with FaceTime as that secondary option and, of course, also making sure that their iCloud stuff is in there as well.

I'm sorry, I'm confused by that question or by that statement, yzf donor. So we've got a listener in the Discord saying that Screen Sharing is different from Sharing Screen. Perhaps that's the case. Anyway, screen Sharing is able to be accessed. Oh, this is for VNC. Gotcha, thank you. Yes, vnc is a third-party application that can be used to also provide this support if you are having issues with the built-in functionality that comes with macOS. Thank you, yzf donor, for the suggestion of a third-party application if you need it. John, why don't we go back to voicemails? Oh, let me see what you said to me. All right, let's take a quick break.

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1:50:22 - Caller
Hey Leo and Mikah, I really hope you guys can help me. I'm in a bind. I got a Google Nest Wi-Fi point. I have one already. I'm trying to hook this one up. All the setup goes great until it says waiting for final bytes of setup to complete. It won't do anything, it just says the operation timed out and couldn't be completed. If you guys can please help me, that would be great. Thank you so much. I'm really in desperate need of help and I know you guys are the only one that can Thank you. Have a great day.

1:50:57 - Mikah Sargent
So this is an interesting question. That sorry one sec. This is an interesting question and I appreciate you calling it up because it's something that I learned. A lot of people end up having a problem with. So this is, luckily, when a lot of people have an issue with something, then we are able to see how other people have solved it and what is going on. So great that you've had a great time and you've had the different types of individual Wi-Fi routers around your home and that you're trying to kind of improve the functionality by adding more. But you are running into an issue where, for some reason, it's not letting you add the new pox to your setup right. So there are a number of troubleshooting steps that we are going to suggest that you go through.

So when you do set this up, if you are on an iPhone, then you want to make sure that there are a few settings that are disabled on this iPhone. First and foremost, do not have a VPN turned on. If you have a VPN turned on or connected, then it is going to potentially cause an issue. You also don't want to have Apple iCloud Private Relay turned on, and this one, if you are an iCloud Plus subscriber, is a little bit harder to find where you go, so I want to show on my iPhone what we do. We launch the Settings app and we go into Wi-Fi and then, next to Twit Office, which is the Wi-Fi that I'm currently connected to, I need to hit the little I information icon and then, underneath these settings, I will see an option that says Limit IP Address Tracking. That needs to be turned off. This is the equivalent to iCloud Private Relay, but they give it a different name whenever you do it per Wi-Fi address. So even if you have it turned off and you have iCloud Plus and you have it turned off from the iCloud Plus menu, it may still be enabled for that specific Wi-Fi account. You need to have iCloud Private Relay turned off. Then make sure that the Google Home app has been granted permission for local network access On the iPhone. To do that, we go into the Settings app, we choose Privacy and Security, we go down to Local Network and then we look for the app here which would be the Google Home app.

I don't have it on this device and we make sure that that is toggled on. That needs to be toggled on in order for the device to be able to do so Now. After that, you need to make sure that the following settings are disabled as well. Again, this can be temporary Make sure that you don't have a proxy set and then also make sure that you don't have Private IP address set. So again, well, I guess I'll show that as well, because that was in that same menu. So we'll go into Wi-Fi, we'll go into the I for information and then, under Private Wi-Fi address, you can see that I currently have that turned on. I would want to toggle that off and then reconnect to the Wi-Fi network Again before doing this process. It is likely, because that is turned on by default. It is likely that is turned on and that could be causing your issue.

One more thing that you want to do Apparently, ipv6 can cause some issues when you're trying to set up new Nest Wi-Fi pucks. So you want to go into your Google Nest settings and you want to turn off IPv6 settings at first, once it's been connected. Then you can turn it on afterwards. So, again, ipv6 may be causing an issue. Now, if disabling Apple iCloud Private Relay, turning off VPNs, making sure the device has local network access, making sure that you're not connected via proxy, that you've turned off limit IP address tracking, as we showed earlier, and that you don't have private IP address turned on and you also have IPv6 turned off. If none of that works, try a different device to connect with. So if an iPhone doesn't work, try an iPad. Some people have had success with that. If iOS doesn't work and you have an Android device, try it from an Android device. Keeping in mind the same thing. You don't want to have Mac address randomization turned on. And then, if none of that works, I've got one other suggestion for you Get rid of your Nest Wi-Fi and switch to a different brand, because the number of times we've heard about Nest Wi-Fi specifically having problems on this show and the fact that people have to do ridiculous things like in order to make sure it's using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi instead of 5 GHz Wi-Fi to connect local devices that are smart home devices, having to literally put themselves between two walls on the device so that 5 GHz can't even to the device. There's just a bunch of silly stuff that you have to do that you don't get with other router options. So those are some suggestions for what you can do and hopefully I'd love to hear back from you that one of those options worked for you and that, lo and behold, you have it working.

Speaking of VPNs as we were, we did get an email from Brett, who's from Fort Worth, texas. The subject of the email is VPN blocking Apple CarPlay. This is Leo slash Mikah. I recently was having a problem with my Apple CarPlay in my car. I would plug in my iPhone via the USB connection but CarPlay would not start up like it normally did. Long story short, when I went to my local Apple Genius bar, the guy said to try it with my VPN ExpressVPN who happens to be a sponsor of the network turned off. I did and it worked. The question is why would my VPN block my car from seeing my phone connected via a USB cable? Thanks, brett Brett. This is a fantastic question and it's one that's a little confusing.

So CarPlay is a Wi-Fi audio streaming system, and CarPlay is made up of multiple systems that all work together. You've got the Wi-Fi audio streaming, you have the initial connection that takes place between your car or your third party aftermarket head unit and your phone, and then you have the UI that is again projected from the device to the head unit, and again this comes back to me saying that I can't with all certainty tell you exactly for sure, 100%, what's happening, but understanding that CarPlay is built as a Wi-Fi audio streaming service that projects a UI to your car's infotainment system, my guess is, when you connect over USB, there are a couple of things that are happening. One, your car is providing power to the phone and, two, it's using that connection to send over any audio output that you're doing. But, three, it's also needing to send over the UI. And because CarPlay is built on this Wi-Fi streaming service, where you're basically creating a local Wi-Fi connection, my guess is that what's happening is, when you plug in your phone over USB, along with providing power to the phone, it's also doing kind of a kind of turning the phone into a Wi-Fi tethering spot. Because, as you know, you can take a phone, an Android phone or an iPhone, a smartphone and you can plug it into your computer at your PC and you can use that phone as a Wi-Fi device for your computer, right for your PC. So my guess is that, because it's sort of creating a Wi-Fi session, even over USB, where it's tethered, your VPN is filtering out the network communication that is coming from CarPlay Because, again, a lot of people think that CarPlay is something that exists in your car and your phone is simply this sort of like unlock key that opens up CarPlay in your car, and that's not the case.

Again, carplay and the entire UI user interface is being projected from the phone. So when the phone is trying to send that information to the car, my guess is that the VPN is keeping that from happening to properly make that connection, and that is why it's not showing up and why the VPN has to be disabled. So that's the best I can do. It's simply a hunch Based on what I understand about how CarPlay works specifically and how that is projected into your car. And again, once again, I've seen this a number of times. This is the recommendation so many times and it works every time. Turn off your VPN and then suddenly CarPlay works. If I ever get the opportunity to talk to a CarPlay engineer specifically and get the low down on why that's the case, by gosh, by golly, I will absolutely report back with that information. All right, let's go to a voicemail or go to Chris Marquardt, who's ready.

Oh my gosh, it's one. I didn't realize it was one. Wow, the time just keeps flying by, folks. It is time for the photo man himself, chris Marquardt. Welcome back to the show, chris. Hey, mike, good to see you. Good to see you too, and I apologize for the delay there. Just time just flies by when answering questions. All good, thank you for being here All good.

2:02:06 - Chris Marquardt
I was watching very curiously and you'd think that companies would have figured out how to properly handle Wi-Fi by 2024. You'd think Right.

2:02:14 - Mikah Sargent
Jeez, louise, what's going on? We'll get our answer one day, but it's good to have you on the show and, of course, you come to us once a month with a project, so to speak, an opportunity to take new photographs based on a word and remind us what the word was that you drew out of the bowl.

2:02:39 - Chris Marquardt
The word that we drew out of the fishbowl last month was modern. So what we were looking for are, well, pictures of modern things, or modern looking photos, and this time around we also have a first, which is that we have one AI-generated photo, and we opened that. Well, we opened this up, I think, two months ago, just as an additional option, and I'm really happy to see someone take us up on that. But making photos is is a creative endeavor, and if you fiddle around at a prom to make it exactly what you want to, then that, I think, counts too. So I've done a drawing out of the one submitted and let's just dive in there.

First photo by Gerald Wiley, and he submitted something that is well, I'll let you be the judge. Is it something modern? Doesn't look like it. It's two rulers. It's a macro shot. That's so cool. It's a very close up. I'm just a fan of macro photography in general because you get to see details. You get to see things in an interesting new way, and here it's a very well composed photo because it's very orderly, very parallel, the angle. I like everything about it. So, probably not modern rulers. They look quite used, but then, on the other hand, it has a modern feel to it just because of how it's composed. So that's the first one. Second one is and that's not the AI photo. Second one is also not the AI photo One here.

2:04:26 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I love that Mid-century modern. That's fantastic. Those chairs are so cool so mid-century modern furniture.

2:04:35 - Chris Marquardt
These chairs, these colorful chairs out in front of the shop, probably were modern back in the 60s. I guess maybe.

2:04:48 - Mikah Sargent
You're like maybe even then they weren't that modern.

2:04:51 - Chris Marquardt
But yeah, but then of course things come back and it's an idea of modern. I like the way it's colorful. Also like one specific thing about the composition of the photo, because it's a very busy picture, right, you see lots of things in there the storefronts, the signs, this umbrella back there, lots of writing, lots of colors, but it still has a tidy feeling and the reason is because the photographer kept thinking it's parallel. If you look at the vertical lines in the building, they are parallel to the edge of the frame and that gives the whole thing a bit of a tidy feeling. If you tilt the camera back or forward, then those lines will be all wonky and it will look more like a snapshot and this one looks more like a deliberate photo because of that.

2:05:40 - Mikah Sargent
Can I ask you something and maybe this isn't something that you would do, so feel free to say no. So I always struggle when it comes to cropping photos and feeling like either I've cropped in too much or I've not cropped enough, and knowing what seems to be sort of acceptable and agreed upon when it comes to cropping out things that are or aren't in the photo. So if we can go to that photo, for example, there on the right of the photograph and, john, can you show it? There In the very back there's that sign that says like Mariner or Barner or something. Sorry, there's the red sort of roof thing and I can't read the text.

That's a bit distracting, isn't it? Yes, not only is it distracting, but it's kind of cut off in the photo. Right, it's not the whole thing, it's just a part of it. So what do you recommend? Because you talk about and it's so true the way that it's parallel, that gives it a clean look, but the cropping kind of leaves me wondering, kind of what's behind, and then I end up with a situation where I'm going well, now I wish the photo was three times taller so I could show the whole build you know what I mean and the bottom of those legs are cut off in the chair and I'm going should the full legs of the chair be in there. How do you make choices when it comes to cropping?

2:07:01 - Chris Marquardt
Well, it's your first impulse very often to go really wide angles, or you have everything in there, and then you let the viewer make the choice of what is interesting in the photo. But then, of course, you end up with lots of things in the photo. So let me give you a method. There's a method for cropping a photo that works wonders for me, and I call this the inside out crop. You know, like in your software, how you draw a frame to crop into something.

Now imagine you start with a very tiny crop window on top of what you think is like the most important thing in the photo, right? So in case of this photo, you would put the crop right on those chairs. And then, because those are kind of important, right, yeah, absolutely. But then what you do is you set it up in a way that you don't see the outside, so you only see black on the outside and the chairs. And now what you do is you pull out to one side, you open it up a bit, you crop from the inside out and you open it up to the point where you say, yeah, that's still important, that's still important. And then something creeps into the picture, and that might be the umbrella and you go ah, I don't like that. And you go back in and you do this into all the four directions. You open up the photo and this tends to give you photos that are more like focused on the important thing in the picture without having too many distracting things in there. So inside out crop.

You can do this on your phone as well. So just crop in really tight and then open it up in all directions, bit by bit, until you are happy, and as soon as you're unhappy because you added something to the photo that is superfluous, just back it up a bit and you have your crop.

2:08:51 - Mikah Sargent
I love that. That's a fantastic tip. Thank you.

2:08:54 - Chris Marquardt
Works out almost all the time and you tend to lose a lot of your photo. But then today's cameras have, like, decent resolution, so not a big deal.

2:09:05 - Mikah Sargent
Definitely All right, all right, is it time. Last one, last one, oh yeah, so one more photo. Yes, the AI photo Woo.

2:09:13 - Chris Marquardt
Which, again, I'm strictly speaking. It's not a photo, but it is a picture, and Vibica Freeze submitted that taken with Firefly, which is the AI system built into Photoshop. It says a modern red car speeding in a street with modern shops either side. I think that was the prompt, and isn't it modern? It is very modern. It's also very dramatic. So we're looking at a night shot, we're looking at the car coming at the camera. Almost you can see the speed lines. So everything is a bit like. Well, it's dramatic. I like one detail that Vibica Freeze added there, and it also showcases one thing that a lot of these AI systems still have issues with. If I zoom in on the license plate, it says La.

2:10:13 - Caller
Proat. It says La Proat La Proat.

2:10:15 - Chris Marquardt
Probably it said La Port. Oh, that's funny.

2:10:20 - Mikah Sargent
And, of course, as you zoom in, that's when it starts to feel a little less real. Right, that strange emblem on the front of the car.

2:10:29 - Chris Marquardt
Oh, it's a non-existent car. This brand needs to be invented. It's not existent. It's a very pretty car. It's just the idea of a car, but hey, why not? Gives you it's more like a painterly kind of thing going on here. You can see this in the weird like almost collapsing storefronts and window fronts. They look very wonky, but then again it's, I guess, an artistic representation of what that could have been. So there you go, three photos. Thank you very much everyone who participated. Great stuff. Let's draw another one for the next month.

2:11:11 - Mikah Sargent
Here is the fish bowl, fish bowl time. I'm gonna get a drum, a real drum.

2:11:17 - Chris Marquardt
Yeah, I don't have one here. You're doing a good job, thank you.

2:11:22 - Mikah Sargent
Powerful, powerful.

2:11:26 - Chris Marquardt
Ooh, powerful. So let me maybe give one or two little tips about what that could be, because powerful sounds a bit abstract, right? So I think of course you can shoot something powerful for this assignment, like, I mean, that's in the eye of the beholder, something that you think is powerful. But then, I think, also try to think powerful photo in itself, like powerful lighting, for example, very dramatic lighting, dramatic contrasts, or powerful angles and perspective. You shoot something from a I don't know, from a low angle that can make the subject appear larger, more imposing, more powerful.

2:12:11 - Mikah Sargent
So that would be kind of a few ideas, a few hints how to approach powerful here we go Beautiful, and if you would like to submit your photo for consideration, well, you can do that over on flickrcom. You find the Tech Guy group. You'll know you found the right one when you see the one that's got more than 14,000 members. Join that group and then submit your photo. Remind me, what is the tag for the regular version and then the AI version?

2:12:46 - Chris Marquardt
So we added TG in front. So it's TG powerful for the regular one and TG powerful AI for the artificial intelligence one.

2:12:55 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful, so those can go there Again for consideration before we see Chris Marquardt again, where those photos will be selected. Now, remember these need to be new photos, either generated or taken. Powerful photos taken or generated, and the idea is to get out there, get some photos and share them with the group. Chris Marquardt, if folks want to keep up with what you're doing where what's the website, they should go to, and if there's anything you wanna plug, now's the time for that as well.

2:13:29 - Chris Marquardt
The best place is always discoverthetopfloorcom. That's where I have my workshops, where you'll find things to everything else I do, so that's the place to go.

2:13:40 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful. Well, chris, I wanna thank you so much for your time today, for that fantastic tip about cropping from the inside out, and for always providing us with some fun new photos to look at when you join us. Thank you so much.

2:13:55 - Chris Marquardt
Thanks, Mikah.

2:13:57 - Mikah Sargent
Alrighty, folks, before we go, I think I've got time for one more question. Do we wanna do an email or a voicemail, john, before we say goodbye, why don't you flip the coin? Okay, I flipped the coin and it landed on tails, which means it's a voicemail. So let's hear the voicemail.

2:14:17 - Caller
Hey Leo and Mikah. This is Abe Martinez from Oklahoma, latin Oklahoma. My question is regarding a syncing of Apple Notes. When I switched from my iPhone 14 to iPhone 15 Pro Max, I did the whole device switch and transferred all my files or everything. I was supposed to copy everything like the old phone. But only recently did I notice that on my notes some of my PDF files on my notes didn't sync over. So when I was looking for my health insurance card it wasn't there, it just had the note, but it was missing the PDF file. So I was wondering if you could help me out with that.

2:15:10 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so this is. I heard this and when I first heard the voicemail because I listened to it before the show I thought oh no, that's not good. Obviously that you don't have all of the stuff that you've put inside of your notes, in your notes that you've upgraded phones, you've switched to a new phone, all of that stuff should have been updated, uploaded to iCloud and then brought back down to your local device. So I have a few thoughts on what's going on here. First and foremost, in the Settings app on your iPhone, you want to scroll down to the Notes section, which is in the kind of built-in apps that you have on your iPhone, and you want to make sure and this is the case, unfortunately, for the previous iPhone that you had look and see if you have on my iPhone account toggled on. If you do, then it's likely that you had the on my iPhone account toggled on on your last device and the on my iPhone account is a local account that does not get uploaded to iCloud. So it is possible that some of the notes that you created, if you had that turned on, were just local to that device and therefore did not sync via iCloud to the new device. Secondarily, you want to check your default account option, because if you are logged into your Gmail accounts or any other kind of mail account that you might have, what you might not know is that many of those accounts support a notes functionality of some sort that syncs as part of your login. And so with default account, you can choose iCloud. But for me, I can also choose any of my two accounts or my fast mail account sponsor the show as one of the options, because they too are able to sync notes. So check to make sure that the default account is set to iCloud. And then you also want to check if you have syncing turned on in your iCloud settings. So with that you would go to the settings app, you would tap on your Apple ID banner at the top of the screen and then you would choose iCloud in that settings page and then, under apps using iCloud, tap show all and make sure that notes is toggled on.

One thing you can do is you can consider toggling this setting off and back on again to see if it just simply didn't pull a sync. But before I do that, before you do that, I would recommend that on a PC of some sort, be it a Windows machine or a Mac, go to iCloudcom, log in, go to the notes app on iCloudcom and see if you can find that PDF stored there, because it's often the case that the online iCloud account is closer to what iCloud in the cloud actually is storing, and that is often the place where you go to restore things that are not available elsewhere, and so it could be that that shows up there when you didn't have that functionality otherwise, or rather didn't have that file otherwise locally on your device, and, in fact, if I remember correctly, there is a yes, a data recovery option, and so it could possibly be that you can go. So you go to iCloudcom and you go to the data recovery section and you choose restore files. Now, this typically, is only restoring stuff in iCloud Drive, but it's just something to try just to check if you can get it from there as well, because, technically, those PDFs are being stored as files as part of your overall iCloud plan. The last thing I'll suggest, though, is that you consider having another place that you're also storing these files, particularly PDFs, even if it's just maybe in your iCloud Drive documents folder, not just in the notes section, just to have a backup, in case this ever happens again.

But yeah, my concern is especially if you upgraded phones and you traded in the old one. You no longer have the old one and it was an on my iPhone account. Unfortunately, that stuff is not retrievable at this point unless you did a local backup of the phone and not an iCloud backup of the phone. But it sounds like you did an iCloud backup and so that could be an issue. I in almost every case have that on my iPhone, on my iPad, on my Mac local account thing turned off because I want everything to sync. I want it to all be available across all of my devices. That's only if there's ever a device that you go. The stuff that I create here I just want to be stored here and nowhere else. That that I think is worth having on. Otherwise, I think that's worth turning off instead. So, abe, thank you for calling and I wish you the best of luck with your Apple Notes syncing Folks. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Ask the Tech guys.

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