Ask The Tech Guys 2023 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte. Coming up. Scott Wilkinson, Sony's just announced its new TVs and you won't believe what they did.

0:00:10 - Mikah Sargent
And I am Mikah Sargent and we answer a question about what you do if you've got a lot of HDMI cables and you're trying to figure out which are old and which are new.

0:00:18 - Leo Laporte
And then we'll figure out what happens. If you can't run Safari to fix Safari on your Mac. It's all coming up. Next, on Ask the Tech Guys.

0:00:30 - Caller
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:39 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2023 for Sunday, may 5th 2024 Choco Tacos for cinco de mayo. Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today? It's time for Ask The Tech Guys. It's indeed time, Mikah Sargent. The handsome one is Mikah Sargent and leo laporte, you're the one who can, the fat one, you can say it.

0:01:04 - Mikah Sargent
Look at you, so you, your leg, you see how your knee and your uh foot are parallel. Yeah, I, I don't have that flexibility in my hips. You can't do this, I can't do that directly this is.

0:01:16 - Leo Laporte
I remember reading an Ian Fleming James Bond novel.

0:01:20 - Mikah Sargent
This is how englishman sits well, I like sitting like that, but my knee doesn't go quite down as far as your stars. You have to. I'm very impressed with your. I can't bring, I don't have any. Your hip flexors are very flexible.

0:01:32 - Leo Laporte
It's not that they can't go any other way. Inflexible. Hello, this is the show where you answer your computer questions Somehow 888-724-2884. For now, 888-724-2884.

0:01:45 - Mikah Sargent
For some reason that sounded weird, but it was correct. I know, isn't it? Yeah, weird 888-724. That's what it was 724. It was weird, cadence. I said it wrong. No, no, it was correct, it was just strange. That's the phone number that you could call during the show. If you do call that phone number, you will have the opportunity to be brought up on stage. When you do, there's a little key word that you need not keyword keys that you need to hit. It's star six, asterisk six. That will let you unmute yourself for the call. There are other ways you can get in touch with us. You can also email us, atg at TWiTtv with video audio text and we will answer those questions. Or you can also pull up on your phone or your computer a low url call, a low all your l-i-l.

Uh, apostrophe, uh, it is. That is not the url. The url is callTWiTchtv. When you go there, yes, you'll be brought to a zoom room.

0:02:42 - Leo Laporte
A zoom room, and very important I like how he talks funny when he does that. It's so funny.

0:02:47 - Mikah Sargent
You'll need to look at the bottom of your screen. Yes, for a little hand, yes, and you want to press that hand to let us know that you actually have a question. So those are the ways you can get in touch Interesting. Please do get in touch and tell us about how you work on your hip flexors, so I can make them a little bit better.

0:03:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm happy to say that if you ever thought you might want to use Arc, the browser that is now available for Windows users. Do you even know what I'm talking about? Yeah, oh you do.

0:03:21 - Mikah Sargent
Of course I use Arc. Oh, you do. Yeah, it's great on the Mac.

0:03:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it's starting to get, uh, better and better on windows. I like it for us because it has kind of a frameless view, which I really like, so you don't see any of the browser cruft just a page. And these days, honestly, uh, I think most websites are really kind of designed not to be kind of stand-alone like an app. Almost like an app exactly Right, just an app that you don't ever mess with. Sites are super powerful these days. Well, that's one way to put it. They're super powerful, yeah so that's cool.

0:03:59 - Mikah Sargent
I know people were excited, those of us who've been having the browser company's Arc browser for some time on the Mac.

0:04:04 - Leo Laporte
It's a really nice browser.

0:04:05 - Mikah Sargent
It's based on chrome yeah, it is a chromium base. Uh, it is. It's a different take, I think, on a browser and I like the kind of different profile system that it has. That was one that got me into it early on. I always end up just going back to safari because I'm a creature of habit. But arc is super cool and I do feel like if I, if I would just sit with it for more than a week, I would probably stick to it. I just I ended up, you know, going back to my, my regular haunts.

0:04:35 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, on windows I don't think you really get the full. Oh really, it's not quite the same. You know why it's written in a language that is was originally designed for apple swift. Oh, it is open source, so in theory you could develop in swift for other platforms, but I am not convinced it works.

0:04:53 - Mikah Sargent
That's well, that's not not not ideal.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
I guess that's why it took a while to get over to windows it is, and it's probably why it will never appear on lin, but I like it. That's all I can say. I'm just saying that. If you wanted it, you could try it. The browser company, Arccom or Net, I can't remember.

0:05:14 - Mikah Sargent
One of them, try one of them.

0:05:17 - Leo Laporte
One of the reasons I was thinking about this is because I read a very funny Australian blog from Takehi called the Heat Death of the Internet Came out last month. You want to order from a local restaurant but you need to download a third-party delivery app. Even though you plan to pick it up yourself, the prices and menu on the app are different from what you saw in the window. When you download a second app, the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly. It says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant. You order in person. You mention hey, your website has the wrong number. The woman behind the counter says yeah, we have to contact the company, design the site for changes. It's going to cost them, but since most people order in the app anyway, who cares? You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube, but first you have to sit through an ad, then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself, then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends it queues up a new trailer with a new ad at the start of it.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There's no origin, the photos on the page look weird, the hands are disfigured. I wonder why there's no image credit, and on and on and on. I think this guy kind of nailed it. Yeah, the internet. What's wrong, folks? It's gone downhill, it's all cruft. A billionaire got mad, bought your favorite social media site, ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad. Bought the magazine site you like to read on your lunch break. Shut it down quickly. A third billionaire did what they do best bought the app you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

Anyway, on and on, it's a grumpy old man blog post, shouting at the clouds, but with a lot of accuracy frankly well, and one of the reasons I brought this up is, for the first time ever on TWiT Last Sunday, every panelist Well, there were three of them, so me, amy Webb and Kevin Rose. But we all agreed Google's starting to suck and the Internet's kind of go and maybe Google's reflecting. That was the thought. Well, maybe it's not Google's fault, maybe he's just reflecting what's out there, what's going on kids.

0:07:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't. I don't like searching via Google these days. It's so full of nonsense and then scrolling through and it sort of separates it into these strange pages with these little side scrollers in between. I just want my normal Google back.

0:07:41 - Leo Laporte
I want my Google back. And then they banned TikTok. Apple had a bad quarter.

0:07:52 - Caller
What is? A bad quarter for Apple.

0:07:52 - Leo Laporte
Those are words you're not going to hear out of my mouth. Well, okay, so this is how Tim Cook put it, which is a little tell. Today, apple is reporting revenue of $90.8 billion Revenue. That's good for the March quarter, that's three months. $30 billion a month, and this is where he gave it away the tell An all-time revenue record in services. In services, yeah, you know, apple doesn't have many bad quarters. They didn't lose money. Their revenue was down 4% Earnings. Let me see what they were down. All they said was record earnings in services.

During the quarter, we were thrilled to launch Apple Vision Pro and show the world the potential of spatial computing unlocks. The world went okay, call me when it's done. Thanks to very high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, our active base of devices has reached an all-time high. Yeah, because if you sold one more device than you had previously, that would be an all-time high. That's the problem. These are all fudge words, weasel words.

Apple did announce, though, $110 billion share purchase program. Now let me tell you why Apple stockholders love this. Because it makes the number of shares in public go down. They bought them back, so, in effect, your piece of the pie got bigger. Smaller because it makes the number of shares in public go down. They bought them back. So in effect, your piece of the pie got bigger. Smaller number of pieces means your piece got bigger. Good news for Apple shareholders. But it's $110 billion.

Apple did not put into growing their business, inventing new stuff, hiring more employees. It really has one purpose only, which is to buoy up the stock, the stock price, and of course that's important for Apple for employee retention. I don't think it's a good thing for the way. It used to be illegal, you know, to do stock repurchases Really. Yeah, cash dividend of a quarter per share, that's good. That's an increase of 4%, you know. I mean, given our confidence in apple's future, says luca mestri, apple cfo, our boy, has authorized 110 billion dollars for share repurchases. That is, that is all. And and the stock dividend. All is an attempt to keep the stock high. I wonder how the stock did. Actually, I didn't check. I don't care about stock. That's not the point to me. The stock high. I wonder how the stock did. Actually, I didn't check. I don't care about stock. That's not the point To me. The point is is the company doing well?

Now, one of the reasons Apple had a very good quarter for services is that Google is giving them and this comes under services a lot of money. We found out thanks to the ongoing antitrust lawsuit which closed, by the way, this week, which wrapped up with final arguments. The Department of Justice suing Alphabet came out and Discovery Alphabet. Last year I'm sorry, two years ago, 2022 paid Apple we thought it was 11 billion, maybe 13, 20 billion dollars to keep using or to make the default search on the safari on the iphone. Google, google, that's more than a bit. That's a more, almost two billion a month. A how much is it worth? And b what are you afraid of? Google competition, what are you afraid of? If google's so great, such a great search engine, why do you have to pay apple 20 billion dollars a year to default to google and what would they default to? By the way, what's the choice? Ping?

0:11:33 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, I guess, I don't know I well, and we've seen uh in the eu, where it is now presented to you which default search engine you choose. Yeah, that's interesting. That there is an increase for a number of other search engines. Oh really, yeah, I think it was DuckDuckGo specifically who called it out, that they saw quite a jump.

0:11:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, they would, because they're one of the search engines.

0:11:56 - Mikah Sargent
Right, they're one of the search engines and they're one of the smaller ones, so seeing any jump was quite a bit Right.

0:12:04 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the news. I'm sorry, it's grim news. It's like everything's terrible. There was one good bit of news.

0:12:10 - Mikah Sargent
Oh good, what it was that finally we can hear Universal Music Group on TikTok, again TikTok and Universal Just in the nick of time UMG. You did it. They got over their tiff and have come to an agreement so that TikTok users can once again attach music to their, to their ticks. I don't know what do they call their talks? What do they call them Posts, posts, yeah.

0:12:37 - Leo Laporte
So there's a couple of theories about why this is. One is TikTok finally gave them enough money, right, yeah, ok, uh. Tiktok finally gave them enough money, right, yeah, okay, uh. The other is that universal music group said whoa, the sales of our albums and artists has plummeted without the plugs they're getting on tiktok, maybe it's worth it to come back to the table, and we, I don't know, maybe someday we'll know, somebody will do some research and give us some information as to why they finally signed a deal. They really acted like no, no, we're never.

yeah, it did seem like it was like that's it, it's over and honestly it could be if tiktok. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen to tiktok, but I don't think it's going to be the dominant force it was, do you?

0:13:19 - Mikah Sargent
know, I well, I think that who's going to buy them? It needs yeah, that's what's going to say it. It needs yeah, that's what I was going to say it needs to. This this time, right now, needs to exist long enough for people to really feel that panic and move off of the platform. And when that fully happens, then yeah it's not going to be.

0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, we saw it with my space. When I'm, when the, when the mice, the rats desert the sinking ship, they go or they make a decision, they go all at once. You know, my space just cratered. So I don't know, I, I, I bite dance, says we're going to, we're going to go to court. If we can get the law of return, we will, but if we can't, then we're closing where that's by and that might just be political. You know, jockeying, I don't know.

0:14:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I was reading that piece that you linked to from the Washington Post talking about the group behind the TikTok ban. That's kind of interesting, that's. Yeah, I don't know if we have time to go into all of that, but I think that that's something that people should check out. It's called the tech billionaires who helped ban TikTok want to write AI rules for Trump, and it talks about Jacob Helberg, who at one point was not very well known but is now kind of shaking hands with the top brass in Washington and was instrumental in creating the law that was signed by President Biden, calling for the forced sale of, because he really cares deeply about our privacy and security of our national conversation and wants to make sure the Chinese government does not propagandize our youth Right.

No, I don't think that's what it's about.

0:14:52 - Leo Laporte
I think it has a little more to do with the fact that Instagram from Meta and YouTube's shorts are direct copies of TikTok and would be the immediate benefit yeah, the benefit beneficiaries of TikTok demise, because everybody would just say, okay, fine, we'll move to Instagram Reels. That's what my son did. He's a TikTok influencer. He just moved to Instagram.

0:15:14 - Mikah Sargent
Which both happen to be based in the US. Yeah, and when you've got a nationalistic viewpoint, then it's more than that.

0:15:20 - Leo Laporte
Meta and Google, both pour lots of money into Congress. Yeah, and I really think that what Heidelberg is is is actually a lobbyist, and he is lobbying for Meta and Google and American big tech, saying you know, get these, get these Chinese interlopers out of here. We would like to take over. I don't know, you know, will will it be as good as TikTok? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. Probably not Right, sadly, yeah, all right.

0:15:51 - Mikah Sargent
All right, let's do something We've got 20 minutes before we have Scott Wilkinson on.

0:15:57 - Leo Laporte
Exciting Home theater geek we call him. He will be doing his thing. Whatever that thing is, it's your thing, do what you want to do. But meanwhile I think this would be a good time for me to talk about our fine sponsor, stamps.com. I've known these guys for so long. I love stamps.com. We've been using stamps.com. How long have we been using stamps.com? At least 10 years long have we been using stamps.com. At least 10 years here in this, in the offices. You know.

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All you got to do is remember TWiT t-w-i-t now, what would you like to do, mr Producer man, it's so good to have John Ashley in the saddle yeehaw, I have a phone caller right here, I threw him on that. Hey, phone caller tell us your first name and your first name and where you're calling from. I was looking at that. Oh wow, name and your first name and where you're calling from. What are you looking?

0:19:46 - Mikah Sargent
at I was looking at that.

0:19:47 - Caller
Bob in Haines, Alaska.

0:19:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, in Haines, alaska. Wow, what's your first name? Rob? Yes, hi, rob Bob. Oh, bob, bob. What can we do for you today?

0:20:00 - Caller
Well, I blame Windows too.

0:20:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh man, yeah, you know, that's why we started late. Windows had decided to update on my laptop. And you know how long that can be.

0:20:13 - Caller
Yeah Well, I've been using Linux for the last couple of years partly because of that.

0:20:19 - Leo Laporte
I have to say Linux has gotten to the point where it really is, I think, very similar to Windows. Yeah, it's a learning curve, but in terms of functionality it's absolutely great. Okay, yes, go ahead. I'm sorry enough of the ad. What's your question?

0:20:33 - Caller
I actually think the functionality is better. I mean, there's a lot of things that you can do on Linux that you could never do on Windows. I agree, so I actually prefer it. I'm with you. I got a question for you, Especially now that we've got 4G service. Here in Haines they upgraded last summer from 3G to 4G cellular service. Wow Went from 500 kilobits, 1 megabit service up to 30 or 40 megabits. That's a big improvement. That's nice. I use. It's an amazing improvement. Yes, I use unlimited full-speed hotspots that I get with an AT&T business plan for my internet service For your business.

I well, I have a business, but I use it mostly for personal, Okay.

0:21:20 - Leo Laporte
We won't tell AT&T okay, actually, they don't care, you're paying more, they don't care, you're paying for it, you get it, that's true.

0:21:29 - Caller
But it's also cost less than what it would cost, for fiber. Fiber is $80 a month here, wow, and they want $3,000 to install it. Whoa Well, I have to run 300 feet of conduit. That's the cost. Yeah, yeah, well, I have to run 300 feet of conduit. That's the cost. Yeah, yeah, I have been told, because I use Hotspot, that I cannot have a Wi-Fi network. I use the Hotspot, obviously going to the computer, but I cannot, for example, use Chromecast. I at one time, a couple of years ago or last year year, was able to figure out a way to use a wireless printer and scanner, but now, for some reason, I I changed something and it no longer works. So can I have a wifi hotspot? Can I have a wifi network with a hotspot?

0:22:19 - Leo Laporte
You can, but you can't use. It sounds like it's an AT&T limitation, so you're using their hotspot device.

0:22:28 - Caller
No, I'm using my cell phone.

0:22:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're using your cell phone. Ah, there's the problem. There's the problem. Yeah, if you were able to get a router, so they make 4G routers, that then can become a Wi-Fi hotspot. It's basically two radios in one device one, the cellular radio, sent and received to the cell network, and, sitting next to it, a Wi-Fi transceiver sending and receiving Wi-Fi, but doing that from your phone, because your phone is in effect doing that.

0:23:03 - Caller
Well, let me ask you this question phone, because your phone is this question. I was told by geek squad um that if I had a, a second device of a, that gear ac 750 that's right. That's what I was, just oh range I could, because it has a separate ssid that I could use that as my Wi-Fi network and hook it up to the hotspot off of my cell phone. Is that correct?

0:23:34 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting, I guess because it's a range extender. It is specifically looking for a Wi-Fi network to extend, so it would in theory. I'm trying to figure out why they said range extender specifically.

0:23:46 - Leo Laporte
So because you don't want a router, right, because the phone's gonna. Phone's gonna do that. But is it? No, it's not that's exactly what the phone doesn't do is route so with the rain?

yeah, I don't know if range extender would route yeah, you actually, they're close, but what you want is a router because, uh, the phone is not going to do any routing, that's why you can't have Wi-Fi. The phone says, yeah, I'll connect you to the Internet, this one thing. But I'm not going to be a router and it may be a limitation on AT&T although I think you can trick.

At&t probably, but AT&T almost always. These cell companies say and by the way, one device please. They will sell though I know AT&T will and most other carriers will sell a device that would let you do this, which is basically a 4G device that is then a Wi-Fi router.

0:24:42 - Mikah Sargent
I think that's the better option, because here's the thing even if you were able to trick the system into letting you do that for a while, there's going to come a time where they're going to catch on and they're going to stop and then set, and so doing it the legitimate way, uh, by just getting one of the wi-fi router hotspot deals from.

0:25:05 - Leo Laporte
It might be what the Geek Squad was thinking, burke or Burke says is that the range extender connects to your phone and then it still only has one IP address, but then that connects to a Wi-Fi router. No, that's not going to work. I don't think that's a way to do it. I think you want a home internet gateway, Do they? T-mobile and Verizon sell these right now. At&t has not yet joined this, but fray, but soon will. T-mobile started it. And what these are? They're separate accounts. They're internet accounts that then connect to the LTE. They may not want you to, because it sounds like, living in the beautiful great Northwest, they may not have enough bandwidth up there to have a lot of people using a lot of bandwidth. Oh look, at&t has just started selling it. Look at that. At&t Internet Wireless Home Internet. At&t Internet Home Wireless Home Internet. At&t Internet Wireless Home Internet Seems like that's a lot of internet.

0:26:13 - Caller
Anyway, they do offer it now. Yeah, I actually looked into that. The problem with that is having two cell phone bills.

0:26:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to cost you.

0:26:21 - Caller
Yeah, yeah.

0:26:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you want to share your cell phone?

0:26:31 - Caller
I mean I can already get you know, I can get 10 devices on the hotspot. But the problem is, I guess that's a hotspot network, not a wi-fi network, kind of like you said right, oh, that's nice.

0:26:42 - Leo Laporte
they let you have 10, so they let you have 10 devices. So they let you have 10 devices. Yeah, but what you want to do? Things like Chromecast, which really want to look for a Wi-Fi signal, so Chromecast.

0:26:52 - Caller
Right Chromecast and also, more important than that is, use a wireless printer or scanner. Right, it tells me I have to turn the hotspot off in order to do that, which then I don't have any internet.

0:27:04 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting. Who tells you that? The printer or the phone? The phone, yeah. They don't want you to do that, that's why. So the AT&T internet air, which is the same thing as Verizon and T-Mobile sell now, is 35 bucks a month. That's more than you want to spend.

0:27:27 - Caller
Well, I didn't know it was that cheap. Uh, well, I could probably do that. Yeah, because I mean the you know, like I said, it's a little over 100 a month for for fiber and that's only 10 megabits per second.

0:27:36 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, and then you can turn the hot spotting off on your phone, which you're probably paying extra for.

0:27:41 - Caller
I would guess. Well. Well, I'm paying 79 a month for unlimited full-speed hotspots.

0:27:49 - Leo Laporte
But look on the bill because it's not unlimited hotspotting. Usually you have unlimited phone. There are some grandfather didn't play.

0:28:00 - Caller
No, it's unlimited full-speed hotspot. Unlimited full-speed, you know what? That's a pretty good deal, yeah.

0:28:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's why I donpot Unlimited full-speed. You know what? That's a pretty good deal, yeah.

0:28:07 - Caller
Yeah, yeah. That's why I don't want to get rid of it.

0:28:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's a toughie.

0:28:13 - Leo Laporte
The other thing you could use is a travel router, and a travel router is designed. It's basically got two Wi-Fis in it. It's designed to get on the hotel Wi-Fi. In this case the hotel would be your hotspot, the hotel Wi-Fi, and then become a Wi-Fi router for all the devices in your house. So I think that's what you want is what's called a travel router. Netgear makes them, a lot of companies make them, and you can see why it would work Because it's designed to take a single internet connection and turn that into Wi-Fi, and so most routers don't have two Wi-Fis. They have Ethernet and a Wi-Fi, but you can't get Ethernet out of your phone easily. I don't think so. I think a travel router is what you want. The Netgear is quite good. There's quite a few companies that make these. I think that's probably the best way to go. Let me see if the Discord is showing one from Beryl.

I'm not familiar with this. Oh, you know what I like about this? It's from GL-iNet. Thank you, serial Barber. What I like about this is it uses open wrt, which is a very nice open source. Um wi-fi software barrel. Oh, isn't this cute? It's wi-fi six, two. So now it's not. You know you're gonna have to buy something. It's probably not that cheap, but the idea is it'll get on your hotspot. Anything you buy, make sure they have a return policy Because, remember, at&t does not want you to do this, so they're going to try to detect anything like this that you're doing. But what's nice?

0:29:58 - Caller
about it. Why would AT&T not like that? Because the only thing I would be doing is wirelessly hooking a computer up to a printer Because they want you to buy their residential home internet.

0:30:10 - Leo Laporte
That's why, oh okay, they're also concerned and I understand this about bandwidth use. It's one thing if one device is on their 4G network using that bandwidth, it's another thing if 5, 10, 20, 30 devices are on there.

0:30:23 - Caller
They're really concerned about that. They already allow me 10. Yeah, 30 devices are on there. They're really concerned about that.

0:30:25 - Leo Laporte
They already allow me 10. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting, I don't know. Let me just see what this, what this? Let's see. Travel router, the barrel. There are other companies. Oh yeah, it's expensive. It's 129 bucks. Oh no, wait a minute, here's a. Why is this one? Yeah, no, this is 79. I'm sorry, this is the travel router. It's pocket sized, but make sure you get and there's one that's 69, so make sure you get one that's returnable, so that if it doesn't work and like I said, now it looks like, oh, they even wait a. Here's one for $40. That'd be fine. Well, that's a regular router. Get it on the website gl-inet and look at all the different things they offer. I think you want a travel router.

0:31:18 - Caller
If you have a few minutes. I got another question about a Google phone.

0:31:21 - Mikah Sargent
Sure, we've got three minutes.

0:31:26 - Caller
I know today Scott wants to start as close to noon as possible. Okay, it's a Motorola Edge Plus 2023. Ever since I bought it, I can say okay, gee, and I had to say it four times before it would respond. Now, in the last six months or so, I can say it 30, 40, 50 times and it doesn't respond. In order to get it to start responding again, I either have to retrain it or reboot the phone, and then it'll work for maybe an hour or so and then it goes back to. You know, taking many, many, many, many times for it to respond. It sounds like it's getting busy. I talked to somebody at Google.

0:32:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what'd they say?

0:32:03 - Caller
Busy, busy, it sounds like it's doing other things and Motorola didn't have the answer.

0:32:08 - Leo Laporte
Remember, when you restart it, you're killing all the background processes. I wonder if something else is going on. That it is listening to the mic, Remember it has to listen to the microphone.

0:32:19 - Mikah Sargent
Also did they suggest a device restore, not just a reset. Maybe that'll do it. Yeah, did anyone suggest a device?

0:32:26 - Caller
restore. I completely wiped, I completely did a. I think that's what I did. I completely wiped everything off the phone yeah, and it still does it, like I said, for over an hour, maybe an hour and went back to yeah, that's hysterical Before I reinstalled any other apps or anything.

0:32:41 - Mikah Sargent
And one other question I have for you, before we look at like busyness, have you placed any calls on it or recorded any video on it and listened to how the microphone is or is not picking up audio? In other words, is it possible that there's damage to the microphone such that it's not hearing you say the phrase like it is supposed to?

0:33:04 - Caller
you say the phrase like it is supposed to, I can actually click on the microphone and ask Google something.

0:33:10 - Leo Laporte
And it hears you.

0:33:11 - Caller
Okay, gee, it doesn't work.

0:33:13 - Leo Laporte
So it might also and this is a long shot, but it's from our Discord, but I think it's true you might want to retrain the voice model, so delete it and start over again yeah, I said it did that.

0:33:25 - Caller
Done that it works for a short period of time and then stops working again.

0:33:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you already said that. Alright, no idea, yeah, no idea, okay. I'm not sure why that would be, that's very weird, it keeps getting corrupted. It really sounds to me like yeah, like no, like something else is using the microphone or it's busy doing something and so it's not hearing you.

Oh, the little process that would normally be open, because when you trigger it when you push the button on the search thing and say it, it works right. It's only when you're saying Correct, yeah, it's not listening. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not listening.

0:34:08 - Caller
Well, yeah, it's like it's going into some kind of deep sleep or something. Yeah, it takes a while to wake up from yeah something else, I figure you know, on less expensive phones.

0:34:17 - Leo Laporte
it might well be that it's just gotten so busy doing what I don't know keeping track of the time that it's just not listening, because you can trigger it by pressing it.

0:34:30 - Mikah Sargent
The only other thing that you might try as just a troubleshooting step is to because I'm sure you've got lots of backups try restoring it to device, to factory settings, like you've done, I know, but don't do a restore of all of your apps and things, Just have it as as if you just that's what I did.

0:34:49 - Caller
I did a yeah, I did a restore and then I reinstalled all my apps. Yeah.

0:34:53 - Leo Laporte
Wow. So what the other thing is? Motorola may be killing the process that's listening to save battery life, and so you don't want it to, you don't want it to kill that oh, have you tried?

0:35:07 - Mikah Sargent
uh, does it. Does it have a replaceable battery?

0:35:11 - Leo Laporte
no uh, because, yeah, I was just thinking, if it's performances there's a website somebody in the chat room sent us to don't kill my app, dot com and uh, it says android manufacturers listed below prefer battery life over proper, proper functionality. Now I actually motorola is not on this list, but I think this might be that motorola is killing the process that's listening for your voice to save battery life. Motorola is not on here, which is interesting. Um, that's really weird, but Huawei, xiaomi, oneplus and Samsung all do that a lot, so I don't have off the top of my head, but keep listening, maybe somebody will come up with it. I appreciate the call we have to run.

0:35:58 - Caller
I'll get on Amazon and look for a travel router.

0:36:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, look for a travel router. There's cheap ones. Yeah, I have just made my. You know, I started using Google's Gemini voice assistant, which I like, and replaced the Google assistant. You can do that now if you pay for Gemini, and I made my action button be that, oh you're. So now I can talk to.

Gemini and say what is Mikah Sargent and where does he belong? Let's see what it says. Hey, I found you. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn't, so in this case it just gave me, uh, just did a search, a search, but that's kind of handy. Yeah, like I wanted to know. Uh, how old is jerry seinfeld?

0:36:40 - Caller
jerry seinfeld is 70 years old too old.

0:36:44 - Leo Laporte
Scott wilkinson, our home theater, geeky homes, hosts the home theater geek show uh every week on this network. If you are uh listening you, you can watch a video too if you're a member of the club. Hello, scott from santa cruz, california.

0:36:58 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey, Mikah, hi, welcome, what's up? Hey how you guys doing great doing well, thank you well, uh, just a quick note. I am uh back now, a few weeks from mexico, having seen the total solar. Oh, you went down, how nice was changed forever.

0:37:17 - Mikah Sargent
On that day, you opened up seven chakras yeah, well, you know, you know it.

0:37:24 - Scott Wilkinson
It was amazing, no question about it. First one I'd seen, um, but I mean, there were people on the tour that that this was their seventh one. They had been all over the world. I've seen it. It's great. I'm not going to go all over the world to see it.

0:37:41 - Mikah Sargent
Uh, I don't, I don't blame you. Uh, did you, were you there to take photos or did you just do kind of a glance at it with the proper protection?

0:37:51 - Scott Wilkinson
The proper protection? Absolutely no, I did not take photos. I wanted to experience it without worrying about, oh, the exposure and the what have you? There was a professional photographer there who got some amazing shots. Yeah, you can really get some amazing shots.

0:38:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can really get some beautiful shots. The problem is, everybody else is getting the same beautiful shots.

0:38:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's how I saw it. I saw the beautiful shots everybody took. Did you recharge your crystals and the no, but I did meditate under it.

0:38:17 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh nice, very nice.

0:38:18 - Leo Laporte
So that was good, that's very something happens that's very interesting when the sun goes out.

0:38:24 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's just by way of letting you know You're back.

0:38:30 - Mikah Sargent
Welcome back. I'm glad that you had safe and good travels.

0:38:34 - Scott Wilkinson
Thank you. Yes, what I wanted to talk about with regard to you know what we talk about here is that Sony just introduced their 2024 tv lineup. Ah, they didn't say anything at ces.

They said nothing. Wow ces about new tvs. Wow, but they did, uh, last month at an event, uh, at their at the sony picture studios in la. I didn go, but plenty of people I know did, and they all reported on it and I was a little concerned but expecting them to come out with a third generation of QD OLED. Right, leo, you got a Samsung QD OLED, I just bought a and you love it, and I just bought a Sony QD OLED 2023 model, second generation, and I thought, oh no, they're going to come out with a third generation and I will have Romo, as my wife terms it regret of missing out. But they didn't.

I was shocked. They didn't come out with a third generation. They're keeping the second generation in the line through 2024. What they did instead? Their flagship is now a mini led lcd tv. Oh, boring, and well, yes and no, um, it's. It's far brighter than everything, anything they've done before. And they made a point of saying look, we have a grading monitor, a professional grading monitor that gets up to 4,000 nits of peak brightness.

0:40:16 - Leo Laporte
It's funny because Sony has been selling those for years, but as OLEDs.

0:40:20 - Scott Wilkinson
Correct and it's now an LCD, so they now think LCD is as good as OLED. In other words, yes, well, it certainly gets brighter, there's no question about that. Well, it always has gotten brighter, it always has.

0:40:31 - Leo Laporte
It was always the blacks that we wanted with OLED.

0:40:34 - Scott Wilkinson
Correct, Correct. And I haven't seen this TV yet. I hope to soon and see how good the blacks are. It's mini-LED, so that means the backlight can get very dark and there are very many zones. There's like 300% more zones than their previous flagship LED, mini-LED LCD. So the shadowing behind the LCD panel, if you will, is much more precise and I'm sure it can get very dark. But the point is that if their consumer TV can get to 4,000 nits and a movie is mastered at 4,000 nits, then you don't need any tone mapping. You don't need the TV to roll off the brightness because it can't reach the same brightness as the coloring monitor that they used to make the movie in the first place. So this is what they're aiming at, I think.

0:41:38 - Leo Laporte
Their main purpose, or they've done the market research and they found out that everybody wants a bright tv, that nobody is. Look, the market for, you know, home theater experiences is much smaller, and I'm sure this is true than the market for let's watch it in our living room.

0:41:55 - Mikah Sargent
Let's watch it in the living room, yeah, where there's lots of lighting, because, yep, we all live in these little places that have just like direct light from the what east?

0:42:05 - Scott Wilkinson
uh, yeah and yeah interesting it's true, it's true, and, and I always say, if you are putting a tv in a very bright room with lots of ambient light, you're going to watch it during the day. Then, yeah, maybe you do want an lcd tv.

0:42:21 - Leo Laporte
I have to say the qd oled, for me, solves both problems, because it's an OLED yeah Beautiful blacks, high contrast, very, very high contrast ratio, and it's very bright.

0:42:33 - Scott Wilkinson
And it's very bright. And QD OLED does get brighter than conventional OLED, no question about it, and it maintains color saturation as you get brighter and brighter and brighter better than LCD does.

0:42:48 - Leo Laporte
That's the problem is, we don't really know why Sony did this. You know you're assuming they did it because they can suddenly make it as good as OLED or QD OLED, I'm thinking Sony, look like any other company, wants to maximize profits and they may have just decided that, you know, there's not a lot in it for us to make the best TV. We don't care if we win the shootout, let's just make the. Tv that's going to sell the best. And you know, if I were Sony, that's what I would do too.

0:43:16 - Mikah Sargent
Nits are a big marketing term right now, particularly for younger folks, if you think about the sort of game streaming space. All of those monitors, all talk about nits. Apple talks a lot about nits and all of its products. We've started to see Samsung and Google and all of the others who make Android phones talk about the nits of brightness. So, yeah, that is becoming such a buzzword that may very well be part of the reason.

0:43:41 - Leo Laporte
Here's a funny thing, because Apple, onuesday, is going to announce its new ipads, ipad pros with oled. We think really yes, which I?

0:43:51 - Mikah Sargent
think is very interesting. They'll still be talking about it is very interesting.

0:43:55 - Scott Wilkinson
An ipad with an oled screen, I like that.

0:43:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean I you sold me way back when on the quality of oled and when I want to watch on that blu-ray player. You also sold me on the best you know I'm watching dune and my dune 2. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. On the OLED and I think that's going to look the best.

0:44:25 - Scott Wilkinson
Yep, you sold me on that.

0:44:27 - Leo Laporte
Now, the reason I'm intrigued by what Apple's doing is because now you're going to have a tablet 12.9 or 11 inches, that will be the best screen in the house, yeah, or as good as anyway. The best screen in the house It'll be P3, I'm sure, because everything they do is P3 now. It'll be a great photography tool, for instance, great way to look at your grade, look at your photos, to process your photos. Is OLED more accurate? Not necessarily, not necessarily. So it really depends how it's calibrated.

0:45:03 - Scott Wilkinson
It depends on if it's calibrated correct, and any TV that can be calibrated to the specification that is well-defined, then it's going to be accurate.

0:45:13 - Leo Laporte
So an LCD can especially well backlit it can. So maybe Sony's saying look, this is accurate. We don't have the super high contrast ratio of OLED, but it's bright and that's what most people want is bright.

0:45:30 - Scott Wilkinson
Another feature that they touted brand new this year was something in the LCD called X-Wide Angle, which addresses really the main bugaboo of LCD TVs, which is, as you go off axis, the picture degrades yeah, it looks terrible, gets washed out, the contrast goes down um so, um your phone call, we got to get going because you got a call I got a phone call. No way I'm gonna decline it. Okay, talk to him later.

0:45:58 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it is somebody I know, so he'll he'll be fine not a robocall, not, I know you don't want to disappoint robocalls, because it just makes them mad.

0:46:10 - Scott Wilkinson
So they did introduce a new OLED, a regular OLED, not a QD OLED.

0:46:14 - Caller
And I will tell you.

0:46:15 - Scott Wilkinson
I just took delivery on a QD OLED and I'm getting it installed next week.

0:46:20 - Leo Laporte
I will be very Now. Did you get the Samsung? No, the Sony, you got the Sony. I'll be very interested what you think Now. You've seen my Samsung QD OLED. Yeah, I calibrated it, I know, thank you, and it really does look good, although I have to say when I put it in the calibrated mode it seems kind of dim. Those movie makers really like their movies dark. They do, that's true.

0:46:47 - Scott Wilkinson
Why is that? I don't know. I read one article recently that said because they can, yeah.

0:46:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess, yeah, yeah, but I agree with you.

0:46:59 - Scott Wilkinson
I agree with you. Many movie makers make their movies to look dark. When it's in calibrated mode, the tv's in calibrated mode, it does look dark, yeah and and almost a little desaturated too.

0:47:10 - Leo Laporte
That's the other thing, and that's why I think sony might have made this decision. Because what do they do in this on the showroom floor? They turn the brightness way up, and they do, and they pop the color like crazy because that's what people buy.

0:47:23 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know and I talk about this all the time that, uh, you know, you can't, you, you don't live in a showroom floor right, well, but also think about the, the people who are doing the color grading.

0:47:37 - Mikah Sargent
They're not doing it in a living room, in a normal house.

0:47:40 - Leo Laporte
They're doing it in those dark, dark spaces well, no, uh, when, uh, when scott came over, he did it in the living room. This is true I get a calibrator.

0:47:51 - Mikah Sargent
Come to your house I mean the movie makers, the people you asked why they do it in so dim. It's, yeah, the graders. They're probably doing it in a space in a dark room.

0:47:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, sure, that's correct.

0:48:00 - Caller
Yeah, that's correct, and they're probably using sony's oled displays to do it, which is interesting, correct, yeah All right, Scott.

0:48:08 - Scott Wilkinson
Anyway, it's good it's going to be good what's?

0:48:10 - Caller
coming up.

0:48:12 - Leo Laporte
Sorry. Yeah, report back on your new Sony. I'd be very curious. This I will do.

0:48:16 - Scott Wilkinson
I will do. This week on Home Theater. Geeks is a much more detailed accounting of the new Sony TVs Perfect.

0:48:26 - Leo Laporte
So if uh, accounting of the sony, the new sony, perfect. So if you want to know more home, subscribe to home theater geeks on your in your favorite podcast player and if you want to see the video, subscribe to club TWiT so you can see the video, but the audio is available to all.

Thank you, scott thank you very much you bet, have a great weekend, take care, bye-bye, bye-bye Our home theater guru, scott Wilkinson. All right, you have. You see, everybody has a different thing they want. You have a projection TV because you want it big and that's going to be not as bright, right, the contrast is not going to be as high, but it's big, but it makes up for it. Yeah, because it's big. Lisa's kind of mad at me, frankly, because I traded that the projection in for the QD OLED, which is only only 77 inches, and, uh, she wanted for the Super Bowl, she wanted big. So everybody has something different, uh, that they want yeah, it's all about preference, right, it absolutely is.

0:49:23 - Mikah Sargent
it absolutely is Preference and financial availability.

0:49:26 - Leo Laporte
I think oh well, Two big things. You can't forget that either. Absolutely not. All right, we're going to take a little break and when we come back, more of your calls 888, I don't remember 724-2884. It's something like that. Hey, it's something like that. Or you can use zoom on your phone and call dot TWiTchtv is the address our show today, brought to you by the great folks at Eufy. Oh, I love this effect, Mikah, you know more about it than I do because you installed the Eufy there.

It is so simple to install Three-in-one triple security, smart video lock how easy was it.

0:50:09 - Mikah Sargent
It was. I mean, you see in the video, if you're watching, it's just a screwdriver. A Phillips head screwdriver was all I needed to do the installation of the E330.

0:50:16 - Leo Laporte
Wow, very nice. And what I like about it is it is both a camera and a lock so you can see who's at your door ringing your doorbell, you can see who's coming and going and it has fingerprint recognition very fast. Point three, second fingerprint recognition unlocks within a second. It's very quick and that replaceable battery lasts up to four months Plus. You get a low battery notification before it runs out. And, my favorite part, if the battery does run out, it has a keyhole. Oh, hallelujah, I love it. You don't see the keyhole. It's very cleverly hidden. But if, for instance, you know your battery's dead or for whatever reason, you want to use a key look how fast that is. That's so cool. You you can just pry back. Not pry back, but pull back the little locks logo and unlock it by hand. I think that's a nice fallback, but you're never going to need it.

You can control your front door remotely through the Eufy VideoLock app. It includes passcode unlocking remote control. So here's Mikah. Burke wants in. Mikah just presses a button. He can unlock it and let Burke in. It's got two-way audio so you could talk to him, and it works great at night. Enhanced night vision means you can see it. Very easy to install and it has all the features you want.

And one that I think is really great no subscription fee. Love that. No subscription fee and your videos stay local, so you don't have to pay for storage. That's fantastic. Enjoy a worry-free experience, 18-month warranty, backed by Eufy's excellent, 24-7 professional customer service team. Get yours today. Eufy Video Lock on Amazon or go to eufy.com. Eufy is an Anchor brand. We know and love Anchor. They've done such a great job making great devices and I love it that there's no subscription and your videos are stored locally. Eufy E-U-F-Y Video Lock. We thank them so much for locking. Locking burke out, frankly, of the engineering room. Uh, good job, well done. All right, what should we do next? It's all in your capable hands. John Ashley. All right, I gotta bring in another phone caller. Oh, I like it.

Another wireless caller at 888-724-2884 star six to unmute hi guys, hey what's your first name and what city are you calling from?

0:52:56 - Caller
my name is camille. I'm calling pennsylvania. How you doing?

0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
well, it's great to talk to you. How are things in pa? Beautiful, the leaves are popping out, the birds are tweeting.

0:53:06 - Caller
It's great to talk to you. How are things in PA? Beautiful, the leaves are popping out, the birds are tweeting it's great.

0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
Spring is beautiful in Pennsylvania.

0:53:15 - Caller
I just wondered, Leo, I enjoy the shows and I just wondered if I heard you had mentioned that you were reading or rereading 1984. Yeah, and I wondered if you'd read the one for nowadays. That's from 2013,. Dave Eggers the circle.

0:53:29 - Leo Laporte
I love Dave Eggers and I have read the circle and it's it's kind of a Facebook, kind of a spooky Facebook, right.

0:53:38 - Caller
Oh, it's worse than Facebook. It's them all melded together.

0:53:41 - Leo Laporte
It's how it would be. Yeah, and it may be that way by now. Yeah, you love that book.

0:53:48 - Caller
I don't love it. It was actually not that good. The story is crazy. I didn't really love 1984 either.

0:53:54 - Leo Laporte
No, I guess you know the way. You don't, because they're kind of dystopian right and maybe it's scary. Yeah, eggers is a great novel.

0:54:03 - Caller
Let's just please not get Fahrenheit 451. Oh again, I never read any of his other books. That's a really interesting point, fahrenheit 451 is great. Now reread that one, and then look at Boston Dynamics spot the robotic dog. Yeah, anyway, I just wanted to tell you you have read the Circle Great. The movie's terrible.

0:54:27 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I haven't seen the movie.

0:54:28 - Caller
They made a movie out of it. Oh, it's crap, don't do it, it's bad. Is Anne Hathaway in there? They just butcher books. Is Anne Hathaway? It's Emma Watson.

0:54:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I think it's the girl from Harry Potter. Yeah, harry Potter girl, I started watching it and I hated it. It's terrible yeah.

0:54:44 - Caller
Yeah, it's an awful movie.

0:54:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so get the book, not the movie.

Don't do it. I'll tell you the 1984 that I'm quote reading. I'm actually listening to an Audible. Andrew Garfield plays Winston. They've dramatized it so it's a play and I really enjoy that. Sometimes Audible will do that with a classic book, and they did, I think, a very nice job. So of course I read and reread 1984 many times, but I thought, well, I wonder, you know, here we are, third, what is it 40 years later? I remember in 1984, we would say things like see, it's not 1984, but now here we are, 40 years later, and it could be getting a little bit closer to the edge of, I think, the circle's, probably closer to the possibilities than the 1984. Are you worried about a dystopia in the future? Do you feel like we're going in the wrong direction or do you think that? Are you a optimist, camille?

0:55:42 - Caller
I'm pretty much an optimist. I don't know. I wish. I wish there was a way to to have the choice in the circle.

0:55:48 - Leo Laporte
They don't give you the choice in the circle, that's the even the people that don't want it, or it's like you're forced so that stinks, but so my, my friend if we could have a choice my friend, rob reed, wrote a wonderful book kind of along the same uh lines, called year zero or no, I'm sorry it was after I don't know that one. Yeah, afteron is about a omniscient social network and an advertising network tied to it and in the initial scene guy comes in and the robot waitress brings him his beer. He said how did you know's? They know, because the social not only does the social network know what beer he wants, they know where he is at all times. It's a really dystopian, interesting novel. It's called after on and rob. Uh, for there's that other one. What's that? Okay?

0:56:47 - Caller
there's another one. I don't know the author, but it's the feed. Amazon made a show in the uk, I think about it. That's another where you're don't know the author, but it's the Feed. Amazon made a show in the UK, I think about it. That's another where you're always on and hooked in and people can share your memories.

0:56:57 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah.

0:56:58 - Caller
Yeah, I only watched, I think, the first episode, but I read the book and again, not a very good book and there's some creepy, creepy awful things in there.

0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
Are you a Black mirror fan? Have you watched black mirror?

0:57:11 - Caller
I actually I've only ever seen two episodes of black mirror and, uh, something with a bear where they made people relive the horrible things they did.

0:57:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm like that's enough for me, thank you it's another one where it's a look at what the future might hold, and it's aptly named black mirror. It's it's bleak, but uh, it's often very right on. In fact, there's an episode of so about social credit, where people yeah, that's the one.

0:57:37 - Caller
I've heard referenced a lot. That's worth watching.

0:57:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's on netflix. Hey, camille, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for calling.

0:57:44 - Caller
I appreciate it yeah, I'm gonna listen to some good recommendations and I love yeah, do do listen to it, Mikah, and I think I just want to say that episode that you had of this week in Google where Stacey was back in Paris, was there?

0:57:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh that was so much fun.

0:57:57 - Caller
And Mikah was. When you're on this, yeah, yeah.

0:58:00 - Leo Laporte
Mikah always adds to the show. We got to get him to come on every week. Um, all right, yeah, well, thank you.

0:58:06 - Caller
Well, hey guys, take care read some books.

0:58:09 - Caller
Yeah, that's a great class of library thank you, camille.

0:58:16 - Leo Laporte
Here's some happy news the Choco Taco is back. Are you happy? Klondike discontinued it a couple of years ago. Cold Stone Creamery, in honor of Cinco de Mayo, will make you a cold stone choco taco for one week. Ah, for one week only. I'll be going to cold stone after the show today to celebrate cinco de mayo.

0:58:43 - Mikah Sargent
Happy cinco de mayo happy cinco de mayo and see if there's good news in the world.

0:58:49 - Leo Laporte
Choco taco, choco, tacos back for one week only. Uh, yeah, uh. Berkeley burke is saying, uh, black mirror, and nails it every single time. I know that's kind of why it's kind of a depressing show. Um steve in san diego says the chosen is another good one. The chosen, you know, there's so much now dystopian TV that I'm getting a little depressed. I started watching Fallout. Talk about bleak. There's so much dystopian TV now. I guess our creatives in the world are kind of feeling the future and not liking it much. I don't know. 888-724-2884, give us a ring, let us talk to you, answer your. You can. You can make suggestions. We also like answering questions. We do. Do you have another question?

0:59:43 - Caller
I go reach behind me uh, yeah, if you want to do that for a question yeah, always like doing that while we prepare our next caller.

0:59:50 - Leo Laporte
Uh, images and files, and oh, we did this one. Oh, wait a minute, it's a, it's a comeback. Remember ronald last week said he asked about files within bit warden yeah, what was mentioned. So he was worried because in bit warden you can put your as I do put your passport, your driver's license, to show security number. But he says, when you export it from bit warden, it's just an image, an unencrypted image, on your hard drive. He does say that raises questions about the security protocol on the iPhone or iPad itself. Here's what he did.

I created the following Created a JPEG and PNG, stored them in Bitwarden. Then I opened one of them on my iPhone. As expected, I could find the file within the iphone files app. I then deleted the file, went to recent files, deleted it there. My question is is this a secure delete? So that was the issue that we kind of peripherally mentioned.

When you decrypt something, it's the same thing as if you exported your password vault into a text file, right? Yeah, you're moving from one password manager to another. Your entire password vault is now sitting on your hard drive unencrypted. Yeah, that's the worst state for it to be in right. But he wants to know on his iPhone, is it secure delete when he deletes it? I don't, or are they doing what other operating systems do with just renaming? He says I tried to research this but didn't come up with much. I'm going to guess that Apple. Ok, I'll tell you what I know, what I know the answer Because your entire iPhone is encrypted.

So everything on here is encrypted and it's only visible to you, just like Bitwarden. It's only visible to you because you did the unlock, whether it was a face ID, a password, a fingerprint or just your PIN. Until that is hit, everything on here is scrambled. Everything, including that image that was in your files. It all gets unlocked with the PIN. This is why we've talked about this in the past.

It's really important that you protect this. In fact, it's why we talked about that court case a couple of weeks ago where the judge ruled that the law enforcement could force a defendant to put his fingerprint on the phone and unlock it. The judge said that's no different than taking your fingerprint at the jail or taking a strand of your hair for DNA. It is not protected by the Fifth Amendment. It is not protected by your right not to incriminate yourself. This by itself is not an act of incrimination. By extension, nor would face ID be. They could just say unlock it and it would be unlocked.

So if you're concerned about all this, good to know, it's encrypted. But the thing to be worried about is how easily unencrypted it is. If you have, for instance, a four digit pin, that's only 10,000 possibilities that can be guessed or encrypted. I mean, that's why Apple has that only 10 guesses thing. You should turn that on Right, then it erases the phone. If you get it wrong 10 times, I would suggest you want six digits at least that's what Apple's standard is now, and you may want to turn all of that off.

If you really care about this, ronald, turn all of that off and say I only want my iPhone to be unlocked with a password. It's completely inconvenient, right, but it's secure, it's very secure and there's always this balance between security and convenience. So to reassure you, you don't need secure delete on an iPhone. In fact, if you were to and this is true of any encrypted disk, so if you've turned on FileVault on your Mac, bitlocker on your Windows machine, if you were to do the factory reset on your iPhone, you know, unlock it, factory reset. What that's done is taken away the encryption code. You don't have to erase the disk because all that's on there is encrypted bits. It looks like gobbledygook. It cannot be decrypted. It's strong encryption, so everything on here is safe until it's unlocked. Make it hard to unlock it would be my suggestion. And at the very least, don't use a four digit pin.

1:03:57 - Mikah Sargent
Turn on the 10 guess limit and you know I also recommend in the settings there's an option that USB connected to it cannot access it if it's locked. Love that.

1:04:10 - Leo Laporte
So lock it down. But the good news is it is you access it. If it's locked, love that. So lock it down. But the good news is it is you don't need secure delete. And the same thing on a Mac. If you've got FileVault which is the default now turned on, you don't need secure delete really, because unless you're logged in, it's gobbledygook, it's nonsense. That's why it takes so long these days to log into a Mac. I don't know if you've noticed that.

Yeah, shut down, it's decrypting, all right, good, that was a good question. I'm glad we could do the question. Great follow up. And again, just in case you didn't hear our answer last time, it's fine that Bitwarden stores. It's the same thing. It's stored in an encrypted vault, but in order to see it you have to decrypt it. So decrypt it in a safe way, right? Do a secure delete afterwards if you don't have an encrypted disk and so forth.

And really that's why you want to have a good password, you want to have a six-digit PIN. I mean, maybe don't use a face ID. Or if you're worried about law, the law, I don't know why you're worried about the law, but if you're worried about the law, then you probably don't want to use a fingerprint or a face id because, at least so far we believe, the courts believe that you are protected from by the fifth amendment, from self-incrimination. They can't get demand your password. That's something in your head that's protected. They can demand a thumbprint. They can force you to do face id. They cannot demand your password. That's something in your head that's protected. They can demand a thumbprint. They can force you to do face ID. They cannot demand your password. That is protected by the Fifth Amendment. All right, I have given you time to find us a phone caller.

1:05:43 - Caller
Wonderful. I am ready with this phone caller right here.

1:05:46 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, Hello phone caller. What's your name and from whence do you hail?

1:05:52 - Caller
Michelle and I am from Texas.

1:05:55 - Leo Laporte
Hi Michelle.

1:05:56 - Caller
Welcome, hi guys. I just want to tell you I watch you guys as much as I can and I love it.

1:06:02 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you.

1:06:02 - Caller
But I have a great question for you, Good, Okay.

1:06:09 - Leo Laporte
So my question I probably might have missed one of your episodes and I might have missed you talking about this, so I might have missed one of your episodes and I might have missed you talking about this, so if I did, I apologize. No, we like repeats because it saves us brain cycles.

1:06:17 - Caller
So just repeat away. I love it. Okay. So the AT&T and the security breach? Oh boy, oh yes, this is great. So my question is for years and years, and years how many years have we been told don't go clicking on everything, don't just go getting carried away and clicking unsecured links. How do you know if it's secure?

1:06:40 - Leo Laporte
But anyway, and you do all those things because you're a good person and you're secure, right. But you're wondering now what does it matter if these big companies are going to be so dopey?

1:06:55 - Caller
Because if you secured your AT&T account with a good password.

1:06:58 - Leo Laporte
You didn't click on links. You're doing all the right things and you know, in a way, I think you're right that we've been blaming the wrong people.

1:07:06 - Caller
Exactly so, listen, for 73 million accounts were breached. So the resolution for this is to send you an email that says click this link and sign up for your security, your extra security we're going to give you from Experian, one of the credit reporting agencies. So if you call Experian, then they're like well, you have to go to your email and click on that link and I'm like wait a minute. I'm like a minute. I'm like why would I do that when you know you've been told for years not to do that? 73 million people worse, worse, in your email.

1:07:41 - Leo Laporte
the bad guys we showed this on security now last week are sending out emails that are identical to the email from at&t yep, Yep. So I mean, I'm sure the AT&T link is safe to click on, but how do you know? How do you know? It's a real email, because the bad? Guy's email is a copy of the AT&T email in all respects except for one. The link goes to a bad guy's site where you enter your password. And now they got you Exactly.

1:08:12 - Caller
They got everything now, because this is experience talking. Now, you know, and I'm like, I call them and they're like well, you have to do this and I go. Well, I don't want to. I want to call you and I want you to set it up for me.

1:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Yes, they won't do that I already have that they won't do it, you have to do it online.

1:08:25 - Caller
No, that's right and I said well, first of all, thank you for this, for the offer to give, give me some free security, knowing that you're going to watch my account for me. I already have that. I already typed that.

1:08:39 - Leo Laporte
Good. So you listen to us when we say credit freeze on all three Experian, equifax and TransUnion. Credit freeze, yeah.

1:08:48 - Caller
Good, it's been done for years, perfect, and so they're not offering me to do anything that I've never done. I've already done this Right. The big companies are leaking my information, and that's why I had to do it in the first place. And then it just irritates me that they want to send out to 73 million people and tell you hey, we've reached all your information and you need to click here and sign up for this credit monitoring. Isn't that? You need to click here and sign up for this credit monitoring? Okay, well, I already had that in place and it didn't save me a bit. So what good is it?

1:09:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I see what you're saying, because even if you have those freezes in place and you're doing it yourself, your data still got leaked through AT&T, like you're already doing it. I understand, yeah, that's it.

1:09:28 - Leo Laporte
It's a little bit like closing the barn door after the horse is gone, isn't it?

1:09:34 - Caller
Exactly Now, and I have. I have another question about something similar to that which has to do with iPhone. So it's perfect, I'm not an iPhone fan, never have been. And then someone says, you know, not all millions of people can be wrong in the world. And I'm like, well, it is true.

1:09:49 - Leo Laporte
Cause, uh, cause the best steak is not at McDonald's, even though they sell a lot more beef Right. So just the number of the number of customers does not by itself make something better.

1:10:04 - Caller
No, Exactly so. I ordered this great iPhone with all this memory and all this stuff. I don't want to run out. I can't add any memory to it and I get it sent to me and I go, get ready to turn it on and guess what? What? You can't even activate your phone unless you have wi-fi. I didn't have wi-fi at the time I was using my phone. I don't think that's true. That's not true.

1:10:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh we you can activate it without wi-fi they.

1:10:29 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know when you did this, but yeah, they have. Basically, apple has a deal with carriers where you basically have a temporary connection to the carrier to do an activation for this specific reason.

1:10:41 - Leo Laporte
You have to have that. I mean, you can't do it without cellular. So if you're living somewhere in Texas that doesn't have a good cellular connection, then you would need Wi-Fi, you would definitely have this problem.

1:10:50 - Caller
No, I had cellular. I had cellular, but I didn't have a good cellular connection. Then you would need Wi-Fi. You would definitely have this problem. No, I had cellular. I had cellular, but I didn't have Wi-Fi. And at the time, two years ago, when I got it, it said I got an 11 Pro Max and so at that time when I went to turn it on, you couldn't do it without Wi-Fi. And then they wanted to give you an update every couple weeks, which is great. You do need Wi-Fi. You have to have Wi-Fi again.

1:11:11 - Leo Laporte
It'll do it over there that's the carriers because the carriers don't want to pay the bandwidth, so they want you to use your bandwidth to do it. But you can do it over a cell, can't you? You turn that on.

1:11:22 - Mikah Sargent
You have to turn that on Once you've got the activation in place and you've got your plan, then you can go into the settings and turn it on for the cellular service.

1:11:32 - Leo Laporte
What happens if it's an unlocked phone? What if she bought a phone that doesn't have associated to a carrier? It is unlocked and it was unlocked. Yeah.

1:11:38 - Caller
That's right, and it was unlocked, though I already had it unlocked and I already had service.

1:11:42 - Mikah Sargent
But, you can't I mean that's what wait, you had service.

1:11:46 - Caller
Yes, yes, I had current service with the company which was at the time, verizon. Yes, I did, with an unlocked phone just sent to me, brand new, and I couldn't even activate it because of the fact I didn't have Wi-Fi.

1:12:14 - Mikah Sargent
That's odd. That is not a behavior that I have experienced before, because I have. Uh, specifically, I remember one year I was living in Missouri at the time and I got my iPhone and I immediately wanted to get it turned on, install it and all that kind of stuff, and I was in the middle of nowhere, like I was so eager to get it turned on, that I had pulled over and I was working through and I was able yeah, I, I was able to update it or not update it, but I get it working right there and activate and everything on the cell network.

So I don't know what happened, that it was causing that issue, but that is for the people listening. That's not a typical.

1:12:45 - Leo Laporte
It's not normal it is. We're not saying that didn't happen, right it probably there was some circumstance. Apple for some reason wanted it to be on wi-fi, but that, I think, was unique to whatever was going on.

1:12:57 - Caller
Yeah, there, I'm not sure why maybe because I called apple and I called verizon, they both have the same answer. They said you have to have wi-fi and this is you had.

1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
I didn't have a plan. Was it a Verizon account that you pay up front, or was it a pay? Oh no.

1:13:16 - Caller
It's just a normal Verizon, a normal two-line account.

1:13:20 - Caller
You know, here's our problem we always have Wi-Fi, except you didn't in the car, I didn't, and it worked.

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
So I haven't really noticed whether it required Wi-Fi or not, but it's not supposed to. Let's put it that way whether it required a wife or not, but it's not supposed to. Let's put it that way it's not supposed to and they both said it was yeah, but also they.

1:13:36 - Mikah Sargent
The problem is sometimes support technicians are are giving answers without context, which is that it's going to work the best if you have wifi, but they just say to you well, you need wifi because that's an easier thing to say. So, yeah, I all I want to, and Leo explained it. We fully believe that this happened to you. This is not a gaslighting moment.

1:13:56 - Leo Laporte
It couldn't possibly have happened.

1:13:58 - Mikah Sargent
It's just that we have had the experience. We don't know why.

1:14:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we don't know why exactly that happened to you and there must have been something. Really Remember the activation for the phone and the whole issue for activation is to prevent stolen phones. This is relatively new. It's the activation lock and the idea is somebody can't just take a phone that fell off a truck and get it on the network. Apple is very, very finicky about activation and my guess is that they want to know that it's you activating it and my guess is there was something about your situation. I don't know that doesn't.

1:14:36 - Caller
I don't that they for some reason, they told me that I had to have my own wi-fi because I had to get it activated through wi-fi and I said I don't use wi-fi at home, I don't have a yeah, not everybody has wi-fi and that's part of the second caller today who doesn't have wi-fi.

1:14:51 - Leo Laporte
So I don't think that they and I do.

1:14:53 - Caller
Well, I have it now. I have it now. It doesn't. I had to get it because I was tired of hot spotting. Yeah, I wonder if it needed wi-fi for.

1:15:02 - Leo Laporte
So here's one scenario, uh, that maybe scooter x is suggesting um, if it's a brand new phone before you, you can activate it. Do you have to do an update to the phone? And if that's the case, they may not, because you hadn't yet activated on the network.

1:15:21 - Mikah Sargent
There was a new iPhone a few years ago. I remember where the cellular system did need an update, so it could have been specific to that model phone.

1:15:31 - Leo Laporte
Before you could do anything, you had to somehow get online and update the cellular. Updated cellular settings and then you could go ahead and everything would work. So it's got to be some weird scenario like that where oh, you know, yeah, go ahead.

1:15:46 - Caller
I'm sorry, no, no, no, no, no, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead, no, no, please. I think it had something to do with the fact that most people activate their phones standing right there at Verizon or AT&T or whoever. That's right, they're standing right there and a lot of people don't even know that, no matter what, they're going to give you a Google account so they can turn it on anyway. They don't even they make them for you.

1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
That's with Apple. They just make that for you. This is one of my P's with Apple. I don't want them to thank for me. You know, michelle, unfortunately we have to live, live in this highly imperfect world where these big companies like AT&T, verizon and Apple all are colluding to get you into the giant maw of consumerism and late stage capitalism. And anybody who doesn't want to be eaten is out of luck and and you're going to breach your information.

1:16:44 - Caller
Yeah, you're just pointing out the.

1:16:48 - Leo Laporte
This is the frustration, and this is why Cory Doctorow coined the term and shitification and why we talk about late stage capitalism and why, early in the show, I was complaining about Google, is that, unfortunately, these companies have gotten to the point. They've they've gone through the stage, which we all enjoyed, where they were giving stuff away right and left because they wanted to build a giant customer base. They're there. They got the giant customer base because they wanted to build a giant customer base. They're there. They got the giant customer base. Now they're up to one thing, and one thing only.

That's squeezing us for as much profit as they can get, because they've got us, they locked us in. We can't go anywhere else. It's an opportunity, I think, for somebody to come along and do something better. The problem is, unless you have billions of dollars of capitalization, you can't design an iPhone, you can't build a cellular network, you can't be AT&T. At&t is the only AT&T and we're out of luck.

You know, we live in a world now where these behemoths control everything. I, you know. I don't know how you feel about government. It's another behemoth, but right now it's. The only thing that can stop solve this is to is government regulation breaking them up, uh, trust, antitrust, action, that kind of thing. And I know a lot of people say, well, that's just going from the fire into the frying pan into the fire. That's not an improvement. Government is also the giant. So I don't know what you do except move out into the country. I hope you live somewhere beautiful in texas, and uh, I do. And uh, have a, have a water, have yeah. There you go, now you're set and just look out the beautiful countryside and say this will always be here. Yes, whatever this too shall pass, but the beautiful gulf will always be there god willing and the creek don't rise.

That's right hey, michelle, pleasure talking to you. I'm sorry to be. Thank you so much for your bearer of bad tidings. Enjoy your life. Yeah, with the death star all right, michelle, thank you.

1:18:47 - Caller
It's great to listening to you. All right, michelle. Thank you. It's great to talk to you.

1:18:52 - Leo Laporte
She went from AT&T to Verizon right. Actually, she's not an AT&T customer. This is the irony of it. It's only 7.4 million current AT&T customers. It's 65 million former AT&T customers, of which I am one.

1:19:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I just got one too from somebody else and I thought great love that. I wish I could remember who it was now.

1:19:17 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to be the grim reaper here. I want to be optimistic. You know, when we started doing this 20 years ago, it was exciting. It looked like the world was going to be a better place that you know. This was a chance to innovate and create. I want to be there again. That's one of the reasons I'm excited about ai, although I have to say i's going in the same direction even faster. So I don't know what the answer is.

1:19:41 - Mikah Sargent
Just enjoy, enjoy your friends and family.

1:19:44 - Leo Laporte
You have it the beautiful countryside as long as you've got it. Uh, got it. May the 4th be with you and happy Cinco de Mayo. Our show today, brought to you by I don't know what you do.

1:20:00 - Mikah Sargent
Happy Choco.

1:20:01 - Leo Laporte
Taco Day. Enjoy your Choco Taco and shut up.

1:20:04 - Mikah Sargent
I knew you were going to say that.

1:20:06 - Leo Laporte
I was going to say that that's why God gave us capitalism. So if there's no Choco taco available from one company, another one can steal it happen our show

today. Now I want a choco taco. I don't think I've ever had a choco taco I remember having Choco Tacos see, the irony is I how can you like I don't miss the mcrib either because I never had one, never had one? Yeah, I don't miss the McRib either, cause I never had one. I never had one, yeah, and I don't think I ever want to have one the problem with Choco Taco.

1:20:36 - Mikah Sargent
Let me tell you about the problem with Choco Taco, and then we'll take our little break, at least the one from wherever. Where were they from? Was it Dairy Queen? Yeah, wherever, choco, you buy them in the grocery store. Oh, that's right. They always the the taco shell always was stale.

1:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, stale.

1:20:53 - Mikah Sargent
Because it was slightly moist because of the ice cream, and so it didn't have a crisp to it, and so it was an unpleasant mouthfeel, and I'm hoping that for you, as a person who can consume wheat, that you will have a Choco Taco from Cold Stone that does not have the mushy shell, that it actually has a crunch to it.

1:21:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking that they probably are making those fresh every day. That's what I'm thinking At Cold Stone, I would hope right.

1:21:19 - Mikah Sargent
So I imagine it'll be better than the Choco Tacos you bought in the store. One would buy in the store.

1:21:25 - Leo Laporte
It's funny, Anthony Nielsen has published an AI image that looks exactly like I did last night. Oh yeah, because you went to the thing at the star Wars burlesque that I went to. I have that outfit.

1:21:38 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't I. I you said let me get out of here before they bring me up on stage, though.

1:21:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's exactly right. I didn't want anybody to see me in my costume.

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1:23:49 - John A
I can only think of Choco Tacos right now.

1:23:56 - Leo Laporte
You know what Call Cold Stump.

1:23:58 - Caller
Get to deliver them.

1:23:59 - Leo Laporte
I will run down Grab us. I guess you don't really want delivery ice cream.

1:24:04 - Caller
I will run down after the show. I will grab us Choco Tacos.

1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
Choco Tacos for all.

Actually if we could, we would give a choco taco to every single member of club TWiT, because they they deserve it, deserve it. They make the difference here. What a great community. We love you all. Club TWiT is only seven bucks a month, but you're joining a community of 12 well, I'm being optimistic someday 12 000. It's. Right now it's about 11,500. Incredible smart people, people who support what we do but also love to talk about all the things geeks love to talk about, from beer to cooking, to comic books, to coding. It's all there in our Discord. One of the best features, it's a clubhouse that's open 24-7. You also get ad-free versions of all the shows Shows like Mikah Sargent's Hands on Macintosh, which is available in audio to the public, available in audio and video to club members Seven bucks a month, and it really makes a difference, as far as we're concerned, to keeping this network running. TWiTtv slash club TWiT. Oh, you can order on, oh, but you have to go to cold stone to get it.

Yeah, it just lets you skip they don't bring it to you okay it's.

1:25:20 - Caller
It's about like 10 minute drive.

1:25:21 - Leo Laporte
It's not that bad it's right over there, yeah if, if we're all just thinking about that's terrible.

1:25:30 - Mikah Sargent
Uh, do we have something or someone or somehow to question and answer?

1:25:34 - Caller
Yes, we actually have a caller.

1:25:36 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, we have a caller, let's do it Cool 888-724-2884 is the phone number if you too would like to have your question answered live on air. Once you get connected and you press star six, give us your name and where you are calling from. I can't.

1:25:53 - Caller
Hi, this is Sarah from Saratoga, new York. Hey, hello.

1:25:57 - Leo Laporte
How are you Dara?

1:26:00 - Caller
Very well, I was thinking of you, leo, this past weekend. I just got back from Westerly Rhode Island. I'm driving through, I was thinking about your mom and your kids.

1:26:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, andy, anako's in that area also and out your mom and your kids. Yeah, andy and not goes in that area also and it's so beautiful isn't it especially this time of year, but so is saratoga. I love saratoga, it's a beautiful area, yeah, well you know, we have horses and everything we have um a nearby town that has hot springs like saratoga springs does, but it's in california.

So the guy, sam Brandon, who created the resort there decided to call the town Calistoga because it's the Saratoga of California. So I don't know what that means, but we don't have horses, so anyway, welcome.

1:26:51 - Caller
We've got a lot of them.

1:26:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know it's a beautiful area. What can we do for you?

1:26:56 - Caller
I just want to say I'm a happy Club TWiT member, thank you, and it is the best value of all my apps that I have. Thank you, lots of great content there.

1:27:05 - Leo Laporte
And we want to make more, and the Club TWiT members really make that possible. So thank you, I appreciate it.

1:27:12 - Caller
Yeah, I've been a fan of Leo. I've been a fan of yours since back in the Regis and Kathy Lee days. That's who I am. And, Mikah, you're a wonderful addition. All of your knowledge, all your shows are just the best.

1:27:22 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much. Those are great.

1:27:24 - Leo Laporte
He's my Kathy Lee. I'm Regis Well, I feel beautiful. I'm Regis, well, I feel beautiful. Yeah, no, maybe you're more like my Kelly. How about that? Okay, yeah, she's cuter. So what can we now?

1:27:42 - Caller
that we've really annoyed everybody. What can we do for you? Well, for the first time in the decade I'm buying a new iPhone and for the first time I'll have more data in my iCloud storage than I will on the hardware, on the phone. And I feel like I should know the answer to this what happens to that data, which I guess is mostly photos and music that I won't have on the phone? I know it'll stay secure in the iCloud, but is there like what kills first? The old stuff, the new stuff?

1:28:16 - Mikah Sargent
How does that work? This is a great question. I love this question because this is going to be common for a lot of people. So what Apple has done over time is A they've seen a lot of their users, a lot of their customers, complain about the fact that they're running out of storage space, and so over time they've introduced little technologies, kind of behind the scenes, that help to improve upon this experience, and it uses what they for a long time called machine learning. Now they are want to call it AI because everybody's calling it AI to more intelligently understand how you use your device and use that to determine what actually gets loaded onto your phone.

So when you get this new phone and you're kind of wondering, is it going to be older photos, is it going to be newer photos? Is it going to be older music, newer music? That's all going to depend on your behavior. But when you first get your new phone, what it's going to do is kind of set things to a default, particularly with your photos and videos. It's going to make available locally on your device smaller and I don't mean that in physical size, but in storage space size smaller versions of the photos and videos that you have that are stored in their original form on your cloud and then, as you go through and take photos, to add to that, those photos are going to start out as full size and they'll be local on your device. The videos will be as well, and, depending on how often you go back and look at them or if you are editing them, then the full version will be downloaded.

Your older photos are going to remain off of your device, with just smaller versions of those photos stored locally, but if at any point you go back and you scroll through and you look at a photo and you hit the edit button, then it's going to download the full version. But also, if you do something like you commonly go back and look at photos from a year ago and that's something that you regularly do the system can become aware of that and will make it so that those are going to be more available to you. The same thing applies to your music. You have the ability to go in and choose how your music is downloaded and stored locally versus streamed, and there are some settings that you can change. To say, I always want 16 gigabytes of the space that I have on my iPhone devoted to locally downloaded music versus what's stored in the cloud. So the short answer is it all depends on your behavior and, of course, the long answer was what I just gave you.

1:30:54 - Leo Laporte
I recently, you know, I've been fiddling around with different ways to handle my photography and I recently realized that really what I want to do, since I take pictures almost equally on a fancy camera and on my iPhone, I really want to store everything in photos, apple's photos. That's become like the default. In fact, the camera I use, its app, which I have on my phone and on my iPad, will automatically copy stuff to Apple photos. So of course now I have 60,000, 61,942 photos. Of course I don't want them all on my phone, but I do want the ability to kind of look at them and review them without having them take up all that space. So this is a perfect solution to me all that space. So this is a perfect solution to me. I import them into photos.

On devices where I have enough storage, I can keep the originals I know that iCloud will and then on devices like my phone, where I don't have enough storage, I still have access to all the pictures, but as thumbnails, as you mentioned, not in the full quality, unless I want to edit them, and then I can download them. So I have the picture here. I have the picture. I'm actually on Windows, on the web, and if I want to edit it. I can. Furthermore, what I really like is that it will allow me to edit it in another program. So there are a couple of really good iOS and macOS apps now. I tried Lightroom and I didn't want to spend the money for Adobe Lightroom, so I'm using something called Darkroom, which I really like on the Mac and iOS. It does everything I want. It integrates beautifully with Apple's photos, so I have kind of the best of both worlds.

The only negative is you have to pay for enough storage in iCloud, right, but iCloud's not super expensive, it's comparable to everybody else. So I have everything in iCloud, all the originals, enough to ever worry. And, by the way, my originals on this camera, 60 megapixels, 60 megabytes. They're giant, but it saves them all. So I have that. I never lose anything. I have, you know, copies on my computer at home, which has enough storage of the originals there as well. So now I have a backup and online and I can edit it anywhere, I can share it anywhere.

That really is a nice compromise, and I think it's a similar thing, as you said, with music I can have all my music, have it all available without keeping it all on my phone. So the only drawback is you got to pay for iCloud. Now I have an Apple One subscription which gives me two terabytes. That's probably enough. Yeah, and I like the other benefits of the Apple One subscription, but if you don't mind paying for enough storage in iCloud, I think it's the. It's a perfect solution and it's easy and you've got backup and if you need it, you can get it, because the originals are always available streaming both music and photos, very little fiddling that you have to do versus using a third party where it's got a little more, and this is why apple's in trouble, yeah, and why?

apple users love it? Because the ecosystem does lock you in, but it is as seamless as can be. And and I finally you know May 7th the new iPads are coming out. That's this Tuesday. You and I are going to get up at 7 am Eastern Pacific time to watch the video release, but I'm very interested because I think the iPad, especially with this new screen and the AI built in, might be the perfect photo processing solution. Instead of bringing a laptop, just bring that iPad automatically, copy everything from my camera into the iPad, have it stored in the cloud, even if, as I'm traveling, edit it in the iPad with a great screen so I really see what I'm using. I can use the pencil and use my hand. They're going to announce a new pencil too, which might even have some nice new features. I feel like that is a photographer's dream. Yeah, I feel like that is a photographer's dream. So, in a way, what I would say is you've got a really good situation, as long as you're willing to pay for the storage. Did that answer your question?

1:35:04 - Caller
I know we won't Absolutely. It was great information.

1:35:24 - Leo Laporte
I just cannot handle buying a terabyte or two terabytes when all I'm doing is holding data. So perfect answer Two terabytes is 10 bucks a month in the United States. That's more than enough. By the way, you probably depending on how many pictures see, I take a lot of pictures, but for $3 a month you can get 200 gigabytes. And then there's the Apple One subscription, which is what? Is it now 30?

1:35:48 - Mikah Sargent
I think it's $30 a month and you get a whole bunch of other stuff you get two terabytes. You get all this other stuff and you can share that with family too, which I do.

1:35:55 - Leo Laporte
That's what I do as well I would even be willing to pay for 30 bucks a month for six terabytes. That's probably more storage than anybody would ever need. Yeah, um, and so I think it's a really nice solution. Now, it doesn't help you if you're a Windows users or an Android user. It really is best if you're entirely in the warm bath of the Apple ecosystem, but then you never have to worry. One of the things that Apple was responding to is and I used to get calls like this on the radio show all the time I filled up my iPhone storage it's time to get another one. By the way, 10 years, it's time to get another one. But anyway, you don't have to. You just turn on that thing that says don't, you know, store them in the cloud? Here I'll show you. We'll go to. It's the iCloud settings, am I right?

1:36:48 - Mikah Sargent
You can find it in two places, or photos. I would go to the photos settings. Okay, am I right? You can find it in?

1:36:52 - Leo Laporte
two places, or photos. I would go to the photos settings. Okay, because it really is a great solution for everybody. Let me find photos. This is the bad thing you can never find what you want in the photos. There we go. So if you go to photos, you turn it on. Where is it? There it is. It's a little bright, so I'm going to darken it a little bit so you can see it. So you can see, I'm syncing the phone to iCloud Photos. Now I am using half a gigabyte or half a terabyte, but that means I still have a lot of room left, so maybe I could go with a smaller plan. They don't offer a one terabyte plan, unfortunately, and there it is. There's terabyte plan, unfortunately, um, and there it is. There's the syncing. But this is really what you want. You can choose between downloading and keeping originals on a device with unlimited storage. You know you might want to do that. Nowadays you can get an ipad or an iphone with a terabyte or more. Maybe you'd want to keep the originals.

1:37:45 - Mikah Sargent
Keep the originals on one that's what I was going to say. If you've got one device that has enough space, that is, what I recommend is having the originals on that one.

1:37:53 - Leo Laporte
And then I have optimized, which means it will only store kind of screen size copies which are pretty small, low res copies on the iPhone, unless I want to edit it.

So if I go, if I go into photos on the iPhone and this photo is not stored, this is too big a photo to store on the iPhone. But if I decide I want to edit it, it's going to download it and you see, that's, that's it's downloading, and said that, and now I have it and I can edit it, I can play with it if I want. So I have, in effect, the full copy here, even though it doesn't take up that much space until I really want the full copy. This is a raw photo, by the way, so this is every bit of it no compression, not losing any quality as you do with Google Photos. This is perfect. This is just what I want. Now I can play with it and adjust it and do all the things and if I want even more, I can edit it in darkroom, which I think is a wonderful editor. So I'm very happy.

1:38:53 - Mikah Sargent
Now I have an excuse to buy the new iPad. Somebody has to, so we can talk about it.

1:38:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think we'll get one for you too. Do you want the 11 or the 12?

1:39:00 - Mikah Sargent
We have to wait and see, don't we?

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, got to wait and see. We have to see what the options are. Is there a mini? You know we'll see. They are due to do the mini, update the mini. It's been three years but I don't think they are not this time. Anyway, um, all right, a little pause, just a reminder that you are watching. Ask the tech guys. That is Mikah Sargent, the cute one.

1:39:22 - Mikah Sargent
I am leo laporte, the old one the one that can bend his knee in a way that I can't.

1:39:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have very open hips. I can go even farther. You know what they call it in yoga what is? Is that the pigeon?

1:39:32 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, the pigeon.

1:39:33 - Leo Laporte
I'm not very good at pigeon.

1:39:34 - Mikah Sargent
I'm so good at pigeon and I've got lots of fulcrum to work with, but I can't pigeon very well.

1:39:38 - Leo Laporte
That's probably the problem. You got too much fulcrum.

1:39:40 - Mikah Sargent
That's what it is. Yeah, these muscles are very long on me. What should we do next, john? What should we do next?

1:39:45 - Leo Laporte
How about this voicemail right here?

1:39:55 - Caller
It's time for a voicemail. Hi, leo and Mikah. Hi, I've been a long listener for a long time, good, and I'm happy to reach out to you guys. Wonderful. My problem is that ever since I signed up for Sonoma, the latest Mac update Safari has rendered completely useless. It just keeps quitting on me the minute I start it up. I've searched all kinds of problems, forums, apple Store, you name it. I can't find a solution. Do you know what it is? Please help. Thank you, name it, I can find the solution, do you?

1:40:35 - Mikah Sargent
know, what it is, please help.

1:40:36 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, guys. You can't get Safari working, okay, so obviously this is unique to you, yeah definitely Not an everybody issue, otherwise you wouldn't have heard about it.

Otherwise headlines in the New York Times Safari stops working. But remember, when you're doing a big upgrade, like you did with Sonoma, you're upgrading the operating system. Things can happen. I often refer to it. As you know, changing the operating system on a running machine is just like pulling a tablecloth out and not having the silverware move Right. Most of the time you can do it, it's kind of a miracle. The silverware move right Most of the time you can do it. It's kind of a miracle that Apple and that Microsoft can do that. But every once in a while crash, something gets broken, and I think what got broken was Safari.

1:41:23 - Mikah Sargent
So the steps to fix this yeah, so essentially what you're going to need to do here. I thought in modern Mac OS you could just remove Safari and reinstall it, but I'm not seeing that as an option. The Safari app is only re-downloadable on iPhone, isn't that interesting? Yeah, so that's what they built that in.

1:41:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was going to suggest just kind of doing a refresh of Safari.

1:41:45 - Mikah Sargent
In this case, I think you just need to restore Mac OS, and you can. This is the cool thing about it Restoring, restoring mac os you're able to do without having to remove your files. It used to be, whenever you wanted to kind of refresh your computer, you had to remove everything from it and then put everything back on. You don't have to do that with modern mac os. So all you do is you go into mac os recovery mode. And here's the thing recovery mode is going to be different if you've got an Intel machine or an Apple Silicon machine.

So what we're going to do is point you to a page where you can see how to go into recovery mode on your Mac, as opposed to me listing all of those steps out. Once you're in recovery mode, you will see the option that says restore macOS on this computer. What that does, is it? Let's see? I want to use your metaphor. It cuts the tablecloth around everything that's on the table and lifts the tablecloth off, and then puts a new tablecloth down and sews it up around each of those little things that are sitting on the table.

Yes, that's what Mac os recovery does. And so all of your cups and your uh, I don't know chicken cuts, cuts, what is it? Katsugi, uh are all still. Uh, kachatori, whatever, are all still in place, all your files are still there, and then safari should work. If that doesn't work, then I would go for a full recovery, where you're removing the files here's.

1:43:12 - Leo Laporte
Here's one thing you might try before you even do that oh, that is yes so if you can't uninstall safari, what you can do is clear the cache, clear the history, clear the cookies. It's almost certain the problem with reinstalling the operating system is it's going to respect your existing data.

And it seems to me that it's almost certain that your existing data is causing the problem. So what you really want to do is clear all of its memory. Reset your Safari, so you want to remove installed extensions. You want to delete your browsing history. You want to get rid of your cookies uh. You might want to at some point forget your saved login names and passwords uh, and it's. And you want to get rid of autofill data. Now, unfortunately, apple removed this one click button. Okay, it would be nice if you could do that all in one click. You have to go through them individually, so I'm going to put this. This is a MacPaw makes, a really good tool that would also do this, but I don't want you to have to go out and buy something, but there is something called Clean my Mac that MacPaw makes.

1:44:23 - Mikah Sargent
By the way, Hands-On Mac has a great episode about it. You love it, right.

1:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things it would do, but you can do it manually. Macpaw has the article. You clear the history. Uh, you know you have to do this one by one. Clear the cache. Actually, the first thing I would do is clear the cache I don't know.

1:44:40 - Mikah Sargent
This is the problem, though I don't know that you're going to be able to clear the cache if you can't launch safari in the first place. Oh, we can't even get it running.

1:44:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, every time it tries to launch safari, it won't launch well, that's why you might want a third-party utility, or you go this is a little. You're in a I can't show it because I'm unfortunately on a Windows machine but you're going to go into your library. There are two places you have libraries. There's a local library under your name so for me it's Leo on my home directory and then there's a system library under system. Both of them will have, if they don't have, a Safari folder, they will have a Safari folder in the application support folder and you can delete that and that's where everything is stored. So you could just delete that, empty the trash and try it, and Safari may indeed launch. It's, in effect, resetting everything. Yeah, you did a thing called clean my Mac. It's good Actually, yeah.

1:45:40 - Mikah Sargent
It is. There are some tools we don't recommend and that's kind of why I had that episode, because there are folks who will go, oh, these all in one tools are crummy and it's true there are many that are. But clean my Mac 10 or clean actually, they call it clean mac x is genuinely a good tool, that this will do all of that.

1:45:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, um, the plugins, maybe that's the first thing that gets loaded.

1:45:57 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think you can hold down the shift, you can delete plugins without ever going in you.

1:46:02 - Leo Laporte
That's just a folder in your life if you go into the applications folder.

1:46:06 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, and you right click on safari, you can choose open package. I think is what it's called. Let me see I'll do it real quick. Uh, so you right click on Safari, you can choose open package. I think is what it's called. Let me see, I'll do it real quick. So you right click on Safari in your applications menu and you choose show package contents and then you can get into those resources like you were talking about and the other parts of it, so you could try removing some of the stuff there, there is.

1:46:30 - Leo Laporte
This is another way to do it without launching Safari and if you're comfortable with terminal some terminals.

There are a bunch of terminal commands, but I think really this is why you want this this good, really nice article from Mac Paw, in which they only give one little plug for clean my Mac, but you can do it all by hand how to reset Safari on a MacBook. And this is fairly new. This just came out a couple of weeks ago, so I'm going to send this. That's, by the way, one of the problems I've been finding lately with Apple solutions is there are some from 2015 and they don't have anything to do with Intel, with Apple. Silicon Mac or Sonoma.

They have to do with some, you know, ancient, relatively speaking. So this act is a as a recent article from Mac paw, and we'll put that in the show notes. Okay, thank you, john Ashley. Appreciate it, that's a good question yeah, great question.

1:47:24 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you and good luck.

1:47:27 - Leo Laporte
Yes, now what should we do? Let's all go get a Choco Taco. I'm serious.

1:47:36 - Caller
After the show I will go down to our Coleslaw Creamy. I will get Choco Tacos. I'll bring it back.

1:47:40 - Leo Laporte
Okay, on me, you can use our credit card. I'm buying for the whole club.

1:47:45 - Caller
I can wait. Editing the show can wait. This is more important.

1:47:49 - Mikah Sargent
He said you have to edit the show.

1:47:52 - Leo Laporte
Jammer B says wait away, this is more important. He said you have to edit the show. Jenner b says wait a minute, john ashley, you can't leave here. You've got a show to edit. Well, if, if, if, you'll know. If, Ask The Tech Guys is a little delayed on your feed, you'll know it'll just be delayed by an hour at most.

1:48:02 - Caller
Big deal an hour.

1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, okay anyway anyway, speaking has an ulterior motive, if you ask me we're talking about Choco Tacos. I'm craving a choco yes, you are, I could tell choco, tacos and yes, and I've never had.

1:48:15 - Mikah Sargent
We have another caller. Yeah, excellent. Look, I'm left out of the choco taco thing, what with my oh, you can't eat intolerance, my gluten intolerance.

1:48:24 - Leo Laporte
But what if?

1:48:25 - Mikah Sargent
they made it out of corn. If they made it out of corn, I could eat it. Excuse me, cold Stone, are your waffle cones made out of corn?

1:48:32 - Leo Laporte
No, I was watching a sci-fi movie last night because I was in the mood for Interstellar. I watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey and at the beginning you know the world is ending and the climate is ruined. There's blight, ruin all the crops. All I've got left is corn, and they don't. They don't dwell on it, but they're. They're showing a meal in the farmhouse.

1:48:56 - Mikah Sargent
Everything's made of corn and I thought, yeah, I don't know you're saying no, you don't want to save the wheat save the wheat.

1:49:05 - Leo Laporte
Someday, all the gluten intolerance folks will take away all our wheat corn. What's your first name and where are you calling from, and do you like corn? My name?

1:49:14 - Caller
is David. I'm calling from Davis, California, Davis.

1:49:17 - Leo Laporte
California. Hello, david, the home of UC Davis, where all the people who make wine in our area went to the UC Davis Viniculture School. What can we do for you? And coffee, and coffee, yes, we are.

1:49:33 - Caller
I had a question Is there much of a difference between the quality of different brands of SD cards? Because I noticed the price is quite different, huge difference Between like a SanDisk or Kiki.

1:49:43 - Leo Laporte
Huge difference. Yes, and in fact for a while there were even on Amazon a spate of counterfeit SanDisk and other cards and it turns out they weren't really counterfeit but the factory, when it shut down at night for the day, they'd go back in and they'd make really cruddy ones and they slapped a label on it. It's really a problem actually, so much so that our own yeah, I think I got one of them. Yeah, you might well have Our own Steve Gibson has written a little program which would work on SD cards as well as on USB sticks, called Valid Drive. He noticed that a lot of the USB sticks that he was buying on Amazon and from you know reputable sellers apparently were in fact mislabeled. They would say two terabytes and there'd be 128 kilobytes and so forth. So he has written a program called vali drive that will spot check any usb connected mass storage drive. I think would still work on sd cards to make sure you actually got everything you wanted. So that's problem number one is that yeah, there's a SanDisk Extreme. That's problem number one. Notice, it looks like a SanDisk Extreme but there's no word SanDisk on it. That's because it's counterfeit and Amazon sells them. These are all stuff he bought on Amazon 12 inexpensive 1 and 2 terabyte thumb drives, all of which were fraudulent, but you can test it with Validrive.

Now I will tell you what kind I buy, because I do buy. Let me just see what's in the camera today. I'm pretty sure it is SanDisk. There are a couple of well-known brands that photographers really like. Let me see what this one is here off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure it's sandisk. I like, I happen to like sandisk. Oh, this is lexar, and actually he's even better. So lexar is one of the brand names. Uh, I trust. Um, the problem really is, though. You know, this is a 256 gigabyte card that would maybe hold thousands of images, and if the card then is bad like if it's, and all of these cards die eventually, but if I think I've got a thousand images on here, I stick it in my computer and it's bad, that's going to make you cry. That's going to make you cry.

So, is this for your camera?

1:52:21 - Caller
no, it's a store mp3, so that's less of a that's less of a.

1:52:24 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know cause for crying because you presumably have a copy of it somewhere, um, but still, I would say get, get legit sand, sandisk or lexar. Um, I think they're good, I think they're fine. Make sure you get a legitimate one, which I would say. The problem is amazon does not mind having knockoffs, apparently, so you can never really be sure if you're getting it from the manufacturer. That's better. So I always look for ships from yep and sold by and you want to sold by sandisk. I always look for ships from and sold by and you want to sold by SanDisk ships from Amazon or ships from SanDisk and then you're much more likely to be okay. Valid drive, if you're concerned, is a great idea. Just to run it to see what you got, and I would really make sure that it is okay before you depend on it, cause that's a, you know you could also try the.

Amazon basics ones. Yeah, what was it? Was it okay? Is that like?

1:53:27 - Caller
uh, I think they're okay, I don't, I don't. I think they like maybe a major factory would make them.

1:53:32 - Leo Laporte
I might be more likely to trust that. Yeah, because it's going's got Amazon's name on it, right?

1:53:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and just reading and writing MP3s is a little bit less intensive than trying to put video or large films on it, camera cards yeah, you could also gasp go to a physical store and get you know if you're really concerned about knockoffs.

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
You might be less likely. Huh yeah, if you go to. About knockoffs, you might be less likely.

1:53:58 - Mikah Sargent
Huh yeah, If you go to a Best Buy, you might be less likely to.

1:54:01 - Leo Laporte
So this is a. This is a SanDisk, but it ships from and sold by Amazon. That's going to be better than the third party. You really don't want to get it from a third party because there's just no guarantee.

1:54:11 - Mikah Sargent
I find all of those low badges on there. They can get kind of confusing badges on there. They can get kind of confusing and I remember coming across a guide that sort of translated all of those for me.

1:54:22 - Leo Laporte
It's less important for MP3s. Right, it's really important for a camera, especially video, because video is. You need a lot of speed MP3s. You don't need much speed MP3 players. Take a gulp, play it, take a gulp, I see. So it's not. You don't have to. In fact, I would not necessarily get the fastest. Yeah, extreme pro, uhs2 memory cards, because you're not going to take advantage of that. Those, these are really for cameras, these high-end memory cards. And yeah, look at, look at all the insignias sandisk, extreme pro, 300 megabit bytes per second, that's good. Sdxc, that's the capacity. V92, u3, c10. I don't know, I don't know what all that stuff means, but you can check it. If you're buying for a camera, check your camera manual. It'll tell you the minimum that you can get. Oh, look at, isn't that nice? Microsoft is telling me that I could get a deal that one, that's only two.

1:55:22 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I shouldn't say only, but that is 256 gigabytes for 200 bucks, 200 bucks this is probably a very high-end flash memory card.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you wouldn't need this for mp3 players, absolutely not. So don't. Yeah, that's the other thing. If you spend 200 bucks, you want to make sure it's worth 200 bucks exactly. That is a lot of money to spend on some and you can get much, much cheaper ones uh than that, and I think you wouldn't need anything fancier for an mp3 player yes okay, all right, xandisk actually makes mp3 players because they know it uses memory.

It's a good, it's a good way for them to to stay, uh, to stay in the business. So they make actually very cheap mp3 players. I have quite a few of these, like the sandisk clip, um, that are that are fairly inexpensive. I wonder how much. This is just out of curiosity and they have some memory, but usually you add more. So this comes with eight gigabytes. But uh, you can add, uh, you can add an sd card, micro sd card, and make it more wow an mp3 player can you believe that?

so these are. These are actually more than I thought they were. They're 35 bucks, that's, that's more than they're worth anyway. Uh, yeah, I, good question. And if you're a photographer, that's something's more than they're worth anyway. Uh, yeah, good question. And if you're a photographer, that's something you really want to pay attention to. Mp3 player less important, I see. Okay, thanks for the question. Thank you so much. Yeah, so let's see what do we say?

1:56:51 - Mikah Sargent
lexar sandisk and uh, antpruitt suggested sony.

1:56:55 - Leo Laporte
He likes sony you know, and if you're getting them from a reliable uh retailer, just don't get it from a third party. Yeah, it's just no guarantee. And then, if you want to check these before you, uh, before you invest some time and effort into them, uh, use valid drive. That's a windows only tool, but it's a really cool idea.

1:57:14 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, not Linux.

1:57:16 - Leo Laporte
No, steve doesn't make stuff for Linux Well, or Mac. He's a very Windows focused guy.

1:57:21 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I missed that part. It's a Steve Gibson. Okay, got it. It's a.

1:57:24 - Leo Laporte
Steve Gibson joint All right, one more call, one more call.

1:57:28 - Caller
But one thing to know real quick, I knew it $10. $10? $, $10. $10?, $10 a piece For one singular chocolate.

1:57:37 - Leo Laporte
What the heck Boy they're really counting on? How much?

1:57:40 - Mikah Sargent
is what do they call it there? I want it, I want it more. Can you give me a big one? How about a larger scoop? What are the sizes at Cold Stone?

1:57:52 - Leo Laporte
What John?

1:57:53 - Caller
The offer is today. There's three people to buy it.

1:57:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so get it now. So I thought they were gonna offer for a week so it ends.

1:58:00 - Caller
The question is how many do we get?

1:58:04 - Leo Laporte
well, how many people are there? Benito, do you want a choco taco? Sure he does. John wants one, you want one you?

1:58:12 - Mikah Sargent
can have mine sebastian.

1:58:13 - Leo Laporte
So oh yeah, you can't have one so five. So five fifty dollars worth of Choco Tacos, and if I could get them to you in a reasonable amount of time, I would be buying 11,500 of them. But I just don't see how we could get it to you. Club members. I wish I could. I really do.

1:58:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, like it love it got to have it.

1:58:32 - Leo Laporte
You know what A membership? A whole month in Club TWiT is less than a Choco Taco that exactly 70%, 70% the cost of it.

1:58:40 - Mikah Sargent
Happy Cinco de Mayo, everybody, and may the 4th be with you, yeah.

1:58:45 - Caller
How about we wrap things up with one more email? All right, reaching back Reaching Hands.

1:58:52 - Leo Laporte
You know what? I'm going to take the whole stack and I want to reach back again just in case we get through them fast. It'd be nice to do like five in the next five minutes.

1:59:01 - Mikah Sargent
We try I will do it. I can do it, Okay. The answer to this one is no Banks with real 2FA.

1:59:06 - Leo Laporte
So I agree with you, john. This is a problem. My question about two-factor authentication my bank sends me a text message when I log in. Mine does too. They claim this is two-factor authentication. But we know he listens to steve gibson that sim jacking is a real thing. That's right. Um, why is it the banks don't offer real 2fa using an authenticator? It'd be even better if you could use your yubi key right for two-factor, or I'd even take pass keys, but no, you know why? Because banks have a lot of people my age that use them who don't understand.

1:59:47 - Mikah Sargent
That's exactly why.

1:59:49 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly why, so they understand, he says big fan of ZDTV in 98. Wow, john, thank you. I'm a real geek because of Leo, steve and everyone else at TWiT. Thank you for many years of technology, shows and education. Let's ask the audience does your bank allow you to use Google Authenticator or something like that? Nope, nope, nope, nope. I bank with USAA. They send me a text. Wait a minute. Okay, usaa and maybe some banks do this USAA has a USAA app and I can do two factors through the app. So it will then say I can send you a text message or you can open the app and approve this. And more and more I'm seeing that.

2:00:38 - Mikah Sargent
That would be preferable, that's true.

2:00:39 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't it? Yep? Now the problem is, as Steve has pointed out, the weakest link is always the fallback method. So if they offer a text message, the bad guy's going to say oh, that's fine, I have the phone right here. So they have to say you have to have a way of authentication, only with some better form. I think I'm believing usaa. Let me just try logging in. So it does face id, which is nice. So once I've approved it, I don't have to do anything but face id. I? I don't know. That's a good question.

2:01:18 - Caller
We'll try to find wells fargo has an option where you can use an rsa secure id device purchased perfect from wells fargo directly well, okay, uh, fidelity.

2:01:32 - Leo Laporte
Charles schwab and e-trade support the free semantic VIP mobile app. The real key, navy Federal has phone authentication. The real key is that they don't have a fallback to SMS right.

2:01:47 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry, the phone authentication thing cracks me up because I'm just imagining somebody calling you saying are you you?

2:01:50 - Leo Laporte
Hello? Well, schwab bugs me because one of their authentication methods is voice print. Oh, I don't think that's. I never turned that on because I thought, yeah, I don't know if that's safe. Um, banks app only offers fingerprint as a convenience. Yeah, it's the same as mine.

Yeah, in germany, says igor ackerman, our banks by law are forced to use other 2f means than ss sms. Most use a qr code in their app. That's good, that's good. I would expect that in germany, right? Uh, banks are archaic. It's a miracle you don't have to use the telegraph.

Says joe, ubiquity gear blocking alexa outbound. Says brian. Hi, leo, and Mikah club TWiT member. Thank you, I hear leo talking about Ubiquiti quite a bit. Yes, I'm going to take the plunge. Just bought a UniFi switch to solve a problem with a malfunctioning monoprice switch, ordered a three-pack to replace the rest, ordered an access point Wi-Fi conversion. Do you self-host your Ubiquiti system or do you let UniFi do it? I'm not sure what that means. Self udm rack mounted dream machine rack mounted poe switches, both from unit unify ubiquity. Um, are you talking about? I'm not sure what you're talking about. There is maybe you're talking about the way that and Synology does this too. To handle the problem with moving IP addresses. You can log in through unifycom, if I can show you right now, and that way I can manage this over the LAN. You can turn that off. If that's what you're talking about, I'm really not sure what you're talking about. I'm really not sure what you're talking about, so I don't know. I do not. Self-host.

2:03:49 - Mikah Sargent
Until you self-own.

2:03:50 - Leo Laporte
You can turn. Let's put it this way, you can turn that off. But the problem with doing that is you would only be able to log in if you're on the LAN. But you don't want WAN Generally, you don't want WAN administration. I left that turned on because I sometimes will show the setup here. Okay, then he wants to know how do I block outgoing Alexa traffic? I have three Ecobee thermostats with Alexa. Even though I've turned off Alexa in the app, I have no confidence. Short of cutting the microphone wires, any good router will let you block outbound requests to that ip address.

2:04:23 - Mikah Sargent
so you just have to figure out what server it's contacting okay, good, because I was going to say at first if you've got echo devices in your home, you don't want to block outbound traffic. But I understand now because it's just the thermostats he wants to stop. Very simple to do. Um, you do it on your hero. Yeah, just look at how to. How to do that. How do you do it? Just look it up.

2:04:41 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, uh, you have to figure out what probably it's not an ip address, but what the server name is and block the server name yeah, and I guess you could just look at.

2:04:50 - Mikah Sargent
If you look at what the ecobee thermostats specifically are sending out to, uh, it'll typically list the domains even not just ips, but the domains that they're talking to and look for any that have anything to do with amazon.

2:05:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, exactly, it'll be an aws server, but you don't want to block all the aws because some of them might be for the firmware for the ecobee for all sorts of things, yeah, buy, buy a really cheap echo and see what that talks to. And joe says he uses a third-party block list on next dns oh, there you go, which will block all alexa dns requests. I love it. He says I get quite a few and I don't even have any echo devices.

2:05:31 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, wow igor makes a good point. It will also block 90 of your apps if you block aws, don't block aws.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
Uh, robert, hi bob long time listener.

2:05:44 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I thought they said to you hi hi, bob, very confused drink.

2:05:48 - Leo Laporte
I have a collection of hdmi cables. Some are eight to ten years old and some brand new. How can I tell which are the newest and which ones are h 1.0 and should be thrown away? That's a great question. Does it say on the cable? I guess not If there's no print on the cable.

2:06:02 - Mikah Sargent
You need an HDMI cable tester. You just need to get a cat and have it sniff it, and if the cat runs away, then it's an old. I'm just kidding, I'm making this up. I like that though.

2:06:11 - Leo Laporte
Amazon does sell. I sell. I mean, this is hdmi tester. Yeah, it's 50 the hdmi. Oh, here's a less expensive one for 1999, it's. I like the box. They really put a lot of energy into the design of that box. Uh, so that would be one way to tell right. I don't know if you want to spend that kind of money to figure it out. What would be the other way to connect it to a 4k tv and a 4k source, like an apple tv or roku, and see what you get yeah, yeah, but that's harder.

2:06:45 - Mikah Sargent
I really think the tester would be the best way. I don't know, sort of $19 cable cutting it cutting open the cable sleeve and looking inside, I don't know.

2:06:53 - Caller
I mean you might as well, just buy new cables at that point probably what is your suggestion, john?

2:06:59 - Mikah Sargent
you might as well.

2:07:00 - Leo Laporte
Just buy new cables at that point probably.

2:07:03 - Mikah Sargent
What is your suggestion, john? I bought all new cables, all new cables. I bought all my old cables and threw them in the HDMI bin here. Nice, we have a bin.

2:07:08 - Leo Laporte
Just buy new cables and get rid of the old ones. Just Bob, bring us your old cables, We'll put them in the bin. Where does the bin end up? Back in storage?

2:07:14 - Caller
That's what we need, and in the meantime.

2:07:16 - Leo Laporte
We got all the HDMI 1.0 cables you could possibly want, I will train a cat to sniff they probably do smell differently. A cable sniffing. Did you get your HDMI cables at Monoprice, John?

2:07:27 - Mikah Sargent
Amazon. Yeah, I get mine from Cable Matters.

2:07:32 - Leo Laporte
That's my favorite cable maker. Windows Frustrations I agree with you. Matt, that's all we're good day from to willa hi ut. Is that right to?

2:07:44 - Mikah Sargent
willa. What's interesting is I guessed that was going to be utah without knowing that that's what came next. That's so weird. I don't know why.

2:07:51 - Leo Laporte
Anyway I'm having an issue with windows. That is just kind of annoying. I know leo hates windows and I get it kind of, but I thought I would see if there's anyone who would know what is happening. I have an msi gaming laptop and maybe you can solve this. You have an msi laptop that I use my daily driver. Every time it goes to sleep the windows button stops bringing up the start menu. But it's asleep, you mean that goes to sleep and then it wakes up and then Windows button doesn't work anymore. I don't know. I can still lock the PC with Win L, but I cannot access the start menu. I just have to lock and restart the PC and then the Windows. So in other words, the Windows key which normally will bring up the menu. That's kind of the way you want to do. Everything in windows is windows key and then start typing just stops working once it sleeps. I've even wiped windows. That didn't help. Oh no, anybody know why windows would start ignoring the windows key.

2:08:49 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe because it went to sleep cleaned, no one knows.

2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
By the way to, willa means tall woman in arabic, which is odd for a utah town name, um thank you.

2:09:08 - Mikah Sargent
Things, you, that make you go home to make you go home.

2:09:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, ilog sleep, uh. So my general answer to all sleep questions is this the computer is croggy, it just woke up I don't know what's going on, yet I need my I don't. I don't know what the answer is to this. That's bizarre. It sounds like it's not loading the key map and yet Windows L works. If you throw some ice water in it, which means it can see the Windows key.

2:09:48 - Mikah Sargent
That's very odd. Honestly, I don't know, it is really weird.

2:09:52 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I just locked my computer, but we did verify that it works. Golly.

2:10:03 - Caller
Okay, I see it from a forum. Start menu might be disabled.

2:10:06 - Leo Laporte
The start menu might be disabled. Yeah, you certainly can disable the start menu, but he says it works sometimes and not all the time. Intermittent it's intermittent. I would look at your settings. Your settings, I guess. I don't know what is. I hate ending with something we can't answer.

2:10:21 - Mikah Sargent
Let's do another one, one more, let's do it I don't like doing that, so it must have been a printer question encrypting a usb drive from matt love the show.

2:10:34 - Leo Laporte
I was recently trying to encrypt a usb drive using bitocker by right-clicking the drive. Notice, the feature was not present. I've used it before, but it had been there for a while. After some digging, I found out they removed this from home versions. Yeah, bitlocker, you want to have the pro version? Yeah, you didn't want to pay the 99 bucks. I figured then I'd zip the files with the drive and encrypt the zip file. That works fine. Uh, and I discovered this feature, too, was removed from home users.

2:11:01 - Mikah Sargent
Lovely, okay fair.

2:11:02 - Leo Laporte
So he says I've since used winrar to protect the compressed file. But I'm curious if I would upgrade to pro, would I need to be on a machine that also has pro to decrypt? No, no, only encrypt. Yeah, I may purchase a drive with a physical password to avoid decryption in the future. Or look at a program like Vera crypts, which will work. And if you download a like wins, what is it when zip? It has actually a pretty good encryption. Used to be not so reliable, but it has a pretty good encryption program and, yes, you could use that. So I think, I think you should not give microsoft your money just for that. Um, I think you. There are plenty of free third-party programs like vericrypt that will do that and do it very well.

2:11:53 - Mikah Sargent
Good, good answer found one we could finally, I, I, I hope that person who had the question about the HDMI cables gets back to us about using HDMI cable testers, because I just kind of want one, but I want to know what works first.

2:12:07 - Leo Laporte
Veracrypt is Joe's saying TrueCrypt. Yeah, unfortunately TrueCrypt is gone. Veracrypt is its spiritual successor V-E-R-A-C-R-Y-P-T. Free and open source. That also does full disk encryption and it's very strong encryption. Hey, yes, hey, it's for horses. We have finished this gleeful episode of Ask the Tech. Guys Started dystopian, but we've moved into glee. We moved to Choco. Tacos Thanks to Choco Tacos, we're happy again. I hope that's not trademarked or something Talk about in shitification.

2:12:40 - Mikah Sargent
$10 for a Choco Taco. They're big Choco Tacos, it's practically a Choco Burrito.

2:12:46 - Leo Laporte
We do this show every Sunday right around 11 pm Pacific time. Let's just do the top of the arc. I can't the minutes confuse me. 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. You can watch it live on YouTube. As soon as the show starts, we go live on YouTube, youtube.com/twit. If you're a club member, of course, you can always watch. We're on all the time in the club. We're chatting, we're doing all that stuff, so join the club. It's worth it. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available to all at techguylabs.com. You can also see the show notes there with links that we've mentioned during the show. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Ask the Tech Guys and, of course, the best way to get the show would be to go down to your local Choco Taco dealer. No, would be to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Thank you so much for joining us today. That's Mikah.

2:13:41 - Mikah Sargent
Sargent? I am indeed, and that is Leo Laporte.

2:13:44 - Leo Laporte
And we wish you a wonderful geek week. Bye-bye.