Ask The Tech Guys 2024 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, what's the best keyboard for somebody who really likes to type?

0:00:05 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Mikah Sargent, and we answer a question about automating the silencing of that overly chatty group message.

0:00:14 - Leo Laporte
I hate it when that happens. Then Sam Abul-Samad will explain what the heck's going on over there at Tesla. It's our Mother's Day edition of Ask the Tech Guys. Next, it's our Mother's Day edition of Ask The Tech Guys, next.

0:00:27 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:33 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys, with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2024. Yay For Sunday, may 12th 2024. Exhaust Holes. Well hey, hey, hey. How are you today, Mikah Sargent?

0:00:51 - Mikah Sargent
good to see you it's good to see you too, Leo Laporte. Uh, I like your space socks thank you, constellations. I'm wearing the aurora borealis. Is that what that is?

0:01:02 - Leo Laporte
did you see the? Aurora, I did not uh it looked kind of like my jacket shirt combo.

0:01:07 - Mikah Sargent
I attempted to. I did as well, but we are far enough north.

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
It went down this far.

0:01:16 - Mikah Sargent
Many people saw it, especially with their astrophotography, and that's it there. A lot of people used night mode on the iPhone to capture it. That worked great. So many people got to see it. It was supposed to be that even last night there were opportunities to continue to see it. However, there's going to be tomorrow. That's what they say until Tuesday.

0:01:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, now, the only people who aren't happy about this are the farmers, because the John Deere company warned farmers that their GPS is in their combines, maybe, kerr fluggard, thanks to the mass coronal ejection that is striking the earth right now. So it does affect electronics. This is one of the worst ones we've had in a long time. Anyway, it's cool that we could see the Aurora, whether it's in the Northern hemisphere, the Borealis, or did you know? It's called the Australis. I did not Aurora Australis. Yeah, that's cool, and south and north right, and many people are seeing it, like in Tasmania they could see it, I hear. So that's really cool, but it also I don't think it affected affected. Did our computers have problems?

0:02:26 - Mikah Sargent
No, I didn't see anything like that I think we survived. I was able to use GPS. Just fine, I live in constant terror that at some point. It's not good on your heart.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
No, it's terrible, my ticker, constant terror. Oh man, I live in constant terror that somebody or something is going to happen and blow out our electronics. And then where will we be?

0:02:51 - Mikah Sargent
In a bad place.

0:02:52 - Leo Laporte
And there'll be no point for this podcast. I can tell you that right now, among other things, how can we help with your computer? We can't. It's fried, it's dead, jim.

0:03:00 - Mikah Sargent
How are you even talking to us right now?

0:03:02 - Leo Laporte
Yes, our Zoom would stop working Everything. We would be sitting in the dark.

0:03:06 - Mikah Sargent
Uh huh, twiddling our thumbs. I would be making socks for people and would be receiving like fruits and things and barter for socks. Yeah, I've got those skills. Good, that's good, you have a skill. Yeah, I got. I got a few skills I can use in our post-apocalyptic world.

0:03:21 - Leo Laporte
I could come to your house and tell you the news one by one.

0:03:26 - Mikah Sargent
I love that you go around and you get the news from places and then you shout it out to people.

0:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Julius Caesar has conquered gold. And then I come to your house and tell you that and you give me a nickel. Yeah, deal, actually, I don't want a nickel. Give me fruit. You're right, exactly, barter for food you want food and water.

So tomorrow is the beginning of the end. I got to tell you Skynet. We will all say, we will all look back and say, you know, may 13th, 2024, that was when the machines took over. Okay and okay, and that's. I'm missing a lot. I'm glad you're telling me the news, leo. This is you see, I'm come to your house, I will have a nickel for you. Tell you the news um chat. Uh, open, ai's having an event we're going to cover. I'll stream it. Uh, 10 am. Can you come in, john or somebody? Okay, 10 am pacific time to announce something? Oh, yes, that's right now's right Now. We thought, oh, must be chat GPT-5. That's the next one. They're working on it. They've been calling it Coily Chat GPT-2, but we think that's what it is. But no, oh, oh, oh, I know, I know it's going to be search. No, no, not going to be search. Sam Altman, ceo, tweeted it is neither search nor chat GPT-5, but it is something that will terrify you, I don't think he said that.

0:04:45 - Mikah Sargent
He did not say that, he definitely did not say that. He did say it was going to be big, yeah, but isn't that his job to say?

0:04:54 - Leo Laporte
Here's the thing I think is going on. It's interesting. We'll find out tomorrow. Bloomberg reported that Apple is very close to finalizing the deal that will put chat GPT on your phone. The other rumor concurrent rumor with that is that. So Apple made a deal open AI put it on your phone. The other rumor is that that's what they're going to announce tomorrow is her.

0:05:22 - Mikah Sargent
Really yeah, you think so.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
They're going to claim it's's. So remember the movie, her spike jones, amazing movie which was prescient as we look back on it. Uh about, uh, uh, joaquin phoenix, who was a sad little man with no girlfriend. His girlfriend left. Him was a, his job was writing right, all right, love letters or something. You know, letters for people. They had ais, they used ais and he finally got lonely and he got an ai put in his ear who sounded just like scarlett johansson and was just as cute and played with him and took him out. And they did, did? They did have a physical appearance? I didn't know, no, no, no, but her voice was cute.

0:06:03 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I see okay, she had a cute voice oh, cute voice.

0:06:07 - Leo Laporte
Uh, she did. She had that little catch in her voice. She did. Oh yeah, it's a great movie, it's worth watching. Yeah, definitely watch it. And I'm spoiling it completely. He falls in love with her. I mean that's, I guess, spoiler, and then I won't tell you what happens at the end. But that's her. And when I say her, that's, I think that's what Sam Altman is going to pitch tomorrow.

0:06:26 - Mikah Sargent
I would like to read the tweet directly, not GPT five, not a search engine. But we've been hard at work on some new stuff. We think people will love feels like magic to me.

0:06:40 - Leo Laporte
Her. That's very happily, by the way, apple says we think you will love this and it feels like magic all the time. Yeah, her's magic. Her felt like magic for sure, and the rumors that have been going around is people you know in the know from people who know but won't say who they are that it's a chat bot of some kind.

0:06:57 - Mikah Sargent
That's interesting to me because, as we have demonstrated on this show before, chatgp has the conversations yeah watch, I'm going to talk to this is google's gemini and gemini.

0:07:08 - Leo Laporte
What should I ask? Oh yeah, give me a synopsis of the movie her by spike jones. Oh, that's no good, it didn't't speak. Sometimes it speaks, sometimes it doesn't. A sensitive and soulful man earns a living by writing personal letters for other people Left heartbroken after his marriage ends. I think we nailed this. Joaquin Phoenix becomes fascinated with a new operating system which reportedly develops into an intuitive and unique entity in its own right. It reads all his stuff and can synopsize it. It can help him do all the things that he does. Now, that's obviously chat. Gpt isn't to that point, but I think what this will be is chat GPT-4 connected to the web.

0:07:57 - Caller
Oh, it's so it's like search, but the problem with chat GPT-4, as we see today is.

0:08:01 - Leo Laporte
It's like search, oh dear. But the problem with ChatGPT4, as we see today, is its knowledge stopped at the point that they stopped training. That's true. So I'm going to guess that's what they're going to do. Though friends initially, the relationship soon deepens into love. He meets Samantha, whose bright voice reveals a sensitive, playful personality. She's cute, she's cute, she's cute. I was hoping you would tell me, gemini, you would speak to me. Sometimes Gemini speaks, sometimes not. Why is it? Sometimes you speak the answer and sometimes you don't?

0:08:41 - Mikah Sargent
I was going to say because you have mute on you nitwit. I was going to say because you have mute on you, nitwit.

0:08:47 - Leo Laporte
There are many reasons why someone might not respond to a question, not someone you, Gemini. What a coy answer. Gemini, can you talk to me? Talk to me, gemini. You're being coy now, aren't you? Is it Gemini or Gemina? All right, it used to talk to me. Chat GPT will talk to me. In fact, I made it, you can see, I made it my action button on the iPhone, because it's really handy actually to be able to say you know how old is Fred Astaire? Things like that, really old actually. The other day I was asking oh, what's the name of the guy who's saying blue, sweet, hooked on a ceiling, hooked on the ceiling, hooked on a feeling ceiling. So I'm watching Eurovision. That was weird.

0:09:45 - Mikah Sargent
Al.

0:09:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm watching Eurovision yesterday. Congratulations to the winners. And they started off because it's in Malmo, sweden. Oh, they started off with the most famous Swedish singer of the 60s, who was the group Blue Sweet, but it was a guy named Bjorn Ski. His name is spelled Skifs, but you don't say any of the letterss.

0:10:08 - Mikah Sargent
Who was the group blue? Sweet, but it was a guy named bjorn ski. His name is spelled skeeves, but you don't say any of the letters at the end.

0:10:11 - Leo Laporte
Let me see. Let me just see, if, if, because it pronounced it correctly how old is bjorn skiffs? Bjorn weaves is 77 years old weaves. Weaves spelled skiffs, but it's pronounced.

0:10:23 - Caller
But see, she said yeah, I tricked you to talk loud you did aha, how about you?

0:10:30 - Leo Laporte
you got gut. It looks pretty good for 77 and he sang very well. Uh, do you remember that song? You wouldn't hooked on a feeling.

0:10:38 - Mikah Sargent
I'm hooked, it's yeah of course I remember that song.

0:10:41 - Leo Laporte
I mean remember it as in when I, when it first came out.

0:10:42 - Mikah Sargent
No, but I have remember that song Ooga ooga ooga chukka. I mean remember it as in when it first came out. No, but I have heard that song plenty. There's also a rumor that they are working on integrating calls with ChatGPT. On which end, my end or your end Exactly? And I'm wondering is it just an integration with Zoom or something, or is it they're doing with zoom or something, or is it they're doing their own calls? I don't know. We'll find out tomorrow.

0:11:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so we'll cover that. 10 am we're gonna watch the live stream together. Jeff Jarvis will join me and it'll be fun. John will be running the board or somebody. Well, somebody will be here. We have to wake people up. What time is it again? 10 am, okay, civic 1 pm eastern. Uh, that would be 18, 1700 utc live. Uh, we go, you go to TWiT, go to youtube.com/TWiT and you can watch it live, right, yep, do we stream that, john?

0:11:35 - Mikah Sargent
and the direct link is yeah, let's stream it. youtube.com/twit, slash live. Oh, we'll take you directly to our live stream specifically okay, what else is going on?

0:11:46 - Leo Laporte
what?

0:11:47 - Mikah Sargent
is uh, did you buy an ipad? Uh, yes, we're suckers. We bought an ipad.

0:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I bought one too, we both bought one.

0:11:54 - Mikah Sargent
You bought the 11 inch. I did get the 11 inch and, yes, I got the pro. I did get I. I know I'm sure you got at least a terabyte. You have have to, right? Well, yeah, this is what I'm saying. You have to. You got at least a terabyte, so you have the best RAM. You have the best processor.

0:12:12 - Leo Laporte
It's eight gigs of RAM, unless you get one or two terabytes. And then it's also a bind chip, what they call a bind chip. You know that's when they they make the chip. Chips are not perfect always. And then they test it and they have bins for different speeds, that it's capable, and so forth. And our best guess is this new node that TSMC is using to make these chips, the 3NE node. It has some flaws defects, because anything under a terabyte memory on the iPad Pro will be only three. What is it? Three performance cores.

0:12:47 - Mikah Sargent
I think, oh, I think it's just one.

0:12:49 - Leo Laporte
It's one less, yeah one fewer, so I think it's three instead of four. You get two, I'm sorry, efficiency cores. You get two performance cores and three or four efficiency cores.

0:13:00 - Mikah Sargent
So you're telling me, I'm guessing from your demeanor, from your mean, that you did not get, Because when I ordered as I always do when it comes to Apple products as quickly as I possibly could it had not yet been revealed that the so you got canceled. It's not too late. It's too late to get it on the day of, though, and that's I want to make sure that we can get it on the day of and do a review, so you did the same thing, john.

0:13:26 - Leo Laporte
So here's the thing. I don't think it's going to make any difference at all, because you know why? Because it's iPadOS. It's iPadOS. This is an overpowered beast designed for nothing that is out now, and it'll be good because we can compare.

0:13:38 - Mikah Sargent
If there's some way we can show the difference between the two, I want to see if that yeah you say there's, as we said, it's not going to make a difference. I don't think it will. It will be nice for us to go. Here's the one instance where it actually does make a difference.

0:13:51 - Leo Laporte
So it's not so, even though you're getting, it's not about the amount of storage you're. You're getting a little more storage. You're getting a terabyte or two terabytes at a great cost, by the way. Yeah, but one of the reasons that price goes up so much is because you're also getting double the RAM and you're getting an extra efficiency core. You're getting the unbinned, the full chip. So we'll see, we'll see, we shall see. It's crazy expensive. I also bought the aluminum keyboard, the new keyboard and the new pen three, which I never use, my pencil because I'm not an artist. But we're going to try it, we're going to test it and you know you can always return it and you know that's what you should do.

0:14:29 - Mikah Sargent
What I'm planning on doing is, after they play with it and then return it and get a terabyte, get a terabyte.

0:14:35 - Leo Laporte
I didn't go for two because it was. It was a thousand bucks more. It was crazy expensive.

0:14:39 - Mikah Sargent
And the big reason for that is we have talked about this a lot on different shows we really do feel like this is the hardware product that Apple is making. This is the hardware level that Apple is making all of its generative AI stuff for, yes, so it'll be important for us to have at least one M4 device to be able to test what Apple is working on in terms of that. So, yeah, I would like to eventually swap that out for one.

0:15:04 - Leo Laporte
That's a you may have gathered from our conversation so far that we are ai bullish we are ai bullish.

0:15:11 - Mikah Sargent
That is a great if you've engraved it.

0:15:14 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I mean, who would want one that says jammer b loves bacon? I don't, I don't think you can return.

0:15:21 - Mikah Sargent
Wait, is that? Is that what the B is for Jam or bacon? I never knew. Slonina is some sort of Eastern European word for bacon. That is a good question, though I have never tried. Well, I don't engrave, but I engraved mine.

0:15:41 - Leo Laporte
Why Hands off my iPad?

0:15:44 - Mikah Sargent
But you could just like put a sticker on it or something I know why did I engrave it.

0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. You can't return it. It's free to engrave, yeah it is free to engrave please do it so that you can't do that, so you can't return, I don't know uh you can return. You know I could take the guts out.

0:16:01 - Mikah Sargent
You could ask gemini, can I return an engraved iPad?

0:16:09 - Leo Laporte
Is it possible to return an engraved iPad? Yes, you can't exchange it in store, but you can return it within 14 days. So it's okay, they just buff it out. The only exchange exceptions are personalized items such as. I got both. I got both answers. You pick this one's from apple. That's this one's from a chat gpt. You take your pick. Ai says you can.

0:16:42 - Caller
Apple says what are you crazy?

0:16:43 - Caller
no I don't know.

0:16:43 - Leo Laporte
You want to see it. You want to see it. See this I don't know why it does this underliner thing. Yes, read that to me you can return a scarlet, an engraved ipad to apple, but you can't exchange it in store. And then this is well, now, this is education. The only exchange exceptions are personalized. Maybe you can't exchange it, but you can return it.

0:17:06 - Mikah Sargent
Because there's that 14-day. Yeah, I bet you can. What would happen if you got an engraved one and then there was something wrong with it? You should still be able to.

0:17:16 - Leo Laporte
It says if the device is engraved by Apple, its trade-in value will not be impacted. And that's because all they do is sandblast the back. That's a good point.

0:17:23 - Mikah Sargent
So their engraving process is a little bit easy to un-engrave right, they use a stapler, just staple a piece of paper 888-724-2884.

0:17:36 - Leo Laporte
No, that's not my Bitcoin wallet, although it could be. It is, in fact, our phone number If you want to call in and ask a question, make a comment, make a suggestion. 888-724-2884. If you want us to see your beautiful face, you can use zoom. Just go to call.twit.tv and zoom us. That way we can put you in the stargate over here. You can also email. In fact, we have some voicemails and we have some emails today which we will get to that email for future reference.

atg.twit.tv, and I should mention, we do this show and this is why we have a big clock here on Happy Mother's Day Sunday, between roughly 11 am and 2 pm Pacific time. So if you're listening at that time, you can call and get your answer live. Otherwise, you'll have to leave a message, if that all makes sense. Mashedpotato in our Club Twit Discord chat says you can exchange it for a withering, scornful look. Yeah, sure, you can exchange it, no problem. Yeah, a little. Anyway. Yeah, we'll have those for review.

We're doing a weird thing. I should mention this. We're scheduling wise. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Not only were you doing the OpenAI event tomorrow, tuesday, we're doing Google IO. It's really interesting that OpenAI scheduled their event the day before, right before. Both of them will be about AI, of course, as will Apple's WWDC, so what we're going to do is flip-flop this week in Google and MacBreak Weekly. So Tuesday in MacBreak Weekly's place, starting at 10 am, right after iOS. Today we will go to the keynote of Google IO. Jeff Jarvis will be joining me, and I'm not sure Paris couldn't make it. We'll have a third and then we'll do the normal security now at its normal time, 1.30 pm Pacific.

Wednesday it'll be flip-flopped, and I realize this is a good thing, because my iPad is supposed to come Wednesday. Yeah, oh, so yeah, after Windows Weekly, I'm going to hop in the car, run home and stand there waiting for FedEx until about 1.50, and then I'm going to hop in the car and drive back and say I didn't get it, just a little heads up. That's what I'll be doing on Wednesday. Maybe it'll come in the morning. Usually it comes in today, almost always right. If yours comes early, let me know.

0:20:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'll let you know You're going to be on.

0:20:04 - Leo Laporte
MacBreak Weekly that day.

0:20:06 - Mikah Sargent
Are you On Wednesday? Maybe not, I think you've got it booked but I just made it. Do you want to come on MacBreak, we can talk about that later.

0:20:16 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, you want to play with your iPad? I am excited. It's very thin. Yeah, do not bend it. Don't.

0:20:23 - Mikah Sargent
Don't Jerry rigs everything Do not, or actually you bend it so no one else does. I guess Somebody's got to right.

0:20:30 - Leo Laporte
I guess. Do not blend or bend. Do not blend it. I'm very excited because of this, I think, and Joe, who's a photographer in our club, TWiT, who is a street photographer, is also very excited. We both think it'll be the ideal photography companion, with that brilliant screen, all that processing power.

A lot of people still use Lightroom on the iPad. I am increasingly enamored of the other iOS-specific apps like Darkroom, affinity, photo. I think Darkroom is my favorite now, so I think I could do everything I could do, including Camera Raw from my cameras. I have the app that goes with the camera. It can import right to the iPad. I use iPhotos to keep track of all my photos. That's my digital asset management, and then I can use. I'll be able to use Darkroom. I'm thinking this is going to be my one-stop shop, for I will no longer need a mac for photo, and that's what I'm hoping. Anyway, we'll see. You need your lightroom presets and darkroom. Joe says, yeah, make some new presets, make some new presets. Um, all right, should we do a call? What should we do? Are we done with the news? I think we're done, yeah we're good with I did mention.

I'll peripherally, but I'll say it again. I think both mike and I certainly I won't speak for you I am uh bullish on ai. I don't think ai is going to become skynet, I don't think it's going to become smarter than us.

0:21:55 - Mikah Sargent
I think it's going to become the ideal companion to humanity, that's where I would like to see it be and I think that I'm mostly bullish on it. I am concerned about how quickly rather I want to have us quickly teach people the AI literacy that needs to take place. That's where any concern that I have lies is making sure that people know. That's where any concern that I have lies is making sure that people know. On Tech News Weekly, I had Amanda Silberling on and Amanda had written an article for Tech Crunch about the Met Gala AI.

0:22:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Katy Perry and Rihanna, and they looked really good.

0:22:38 - Mikah Sargent
They did look good. Neither of them were there. Rihanna had the flu. Does it matter? It matters that people thought it was real. Does that matter? Yes, because that is one example of something that is you're right. It's frivolous, it does not matter. Why does it not matter?

0:22:54 - Leo Laporte
if they had joe biden in a flower?

0:22:56 - Mikah Sargent
yes, that's what I'm saying, but you would then know it was a deep fake. Well, yes, but joe biden doing something else that is that's my concern is well, that will happen, people, yeah, we're gonna. Else, that is that's my concern is Well, that will happen, people, yeah, we're going to see that I want. What I'm saying is I really hope that we work on educating people to have skepticism filters. That's what I want have skepticism filters, and I'm encouraging it as much as possible.

0:23:19 - Leo Laporte
And I, but I do think that we are going to see amazing things from AI and it's going to be a very interesting next few years and maybe we will also be able to use ai to quickly say this is ai right, you know I may well be.

0:23:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they're trying to do that so that we know.

0:23:34 - Leo Laporte
And I also think I was jesting a little bit that tomorrow is going to be the day we say, but I do think tomorrow is potentially open. Ai is really doing some amazing stuff. Potentially theentially, the next big stage We'll see.

0:23:46 - Mikah Sargent
I mean, did you take a walk on a beach with somebody? Not saying nothing To tell you what's being announced tomorrow.

0:23:52 - Leo Laporte
No, I didn't. I am hopeful that AI. Honestly, I'll be honest.

0:23:59 - Caller
Can I be?

0:23:59 - Leo Laporte
honest. Please be honest, and then. I'd like to take the guy in the shades, especially because I have another caller lined up, right, oh, you have a color.

0:24:05 - Mikah Sargent
But I'm okay. But I know that he can't stay looking at a at a screen for too long, is the thing? Yeah?

0:24:11 - Leo Laporte
that's okay, we can either we'll get to you soon. Yeah, mr, very soon man, um, and you can look away for the time being, just listen and we'll talk to you. Um, I do hope. I do feel that we have screwed things up somewhat. Okay, we humans, and it wouldn't be a bad thing. Oh boy, oh boy, where is he?

0:24:33 - Mikah Sargent
going with this.

0:24:35 - Leo Laporte
If an AI could actually part of the reasons we screw things up. I know exactly what you're talking about. Part of the reasons we screw things up is because of our limbic system, our nervous system, our emotions, right? Would it be interesting I know exactly what you're talking about of the problems that we are, for irrational reasons, I think, having difficulty solving, including war, famine, pollution, those kinds of things. We've done a lot to dirty our nests and I think maybe I'm not saying I want AI to control us, but maybe with the help of AI we can be better.

0:25:23 - Mikah Sargent
You are talking about the future invented by probably a number of things, but Neil Shusterman's Scythe is all about how AI gets to a place. It's called the thundercloud because it's bigger than the cloud, which is kind of goofy, but it gets to a place where basically all knowledge is known, meaning that the AI is capable of understanding how to solve world hunger, how to end world crises how to do this, how to do that.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
This is a good example, because we know how to solve world hunger. There is more than enough food produced in the world. It's a distribution problem. Right, there's more than enough food produced in the world and part of the problem is humans getting in the way. Getting in the way, getting in the way. Most of the problem is the humans getting in the way, so I just maybe it's. This is kind of a pathetic, but I admit to it. I feel like we've not done such a great job, maybe with the help of AI not taking over not running the world we could be better stewards have you read all of Bobiverse that exists.

Yes, I have read all of it. So then you are all of Bobaverse that exists. Yes, I have read all of the existing Bobaverse. I want to be a von Neumann probe in my old age.

0:26:31 - Mikah Sargent
But you may recall the group who hand over control to an AI, which is interesting.

0:26:37 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I won't go into detail because I don't want to spoil it. It's a wonderful series. It does, in fact, get into some more deep concepts. Um, I am loving hyperion right now, uh, which is another classics hugo award-winning sci-fi uh book, and uh, it also has uh, it's, it also has what they call the all thing, which is an ai uh that in certain areas of the universe, is running things. The all thing. And and what's really interesting is, the all thing is a democracy, because people join it and then all they do the whole time is vote, like I think, on everything I think you should do this, I think you should do this, and then the all thing combines the votes.

At least that's my understanding of it. Anyway, I'm not through with it yet. All right, so let's take our first call of the day right after a word from our sponsor we're just big teases here.

We're gonna take our first call as soon as I tell you how we hire here at TWiT. It's not how we found you, Mikah. We found you because you were always on the shows all the time. We thought we should give this guy something to do. We thought this guy is really good and we would love to have him work with us is what we thought Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

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There are lots of other things that ZipRecruiter does to make you stand out from the crowd. Amp up your hiring performance with ZipRecruiter and find the best fast. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For us it's usually within the first hour. I kid you not. It's amazing. Just go to our exclusive web address right now to try zip recruiter for free. That's ziprecruiter.com/twit. Again, ziprecruiter.com/twit. ZipRecruiter: the smartest way to hire. Thank you, zip recruiter, for supporting. Ask the tech. Guys takes two to answer your question. Let's bring our first caller in, John Ashley. Actually it takes three. John has to bring it in.

0:30:09 - John Ashley
That's true. I have to push a couple buttons here and call her. You're on air now You're on the air.

0:30:15 - Leo Laporte
Hi, what's your first name? Where are you calling from? On your first name.

0:30:21 - Caller
Chris from Clark Colorado, how you doing hey.

0:30:26 - Leo Laporte
Hi Colorado, how you doing.

0:30:28 - Caller
Hey Chris, what can we do for you? Well, first I got to say I'm glad you guys have a commercial in between, you know your deep philosophical discussion and my question, because that's going to be a tough act to follow. But I'm a Club Twit member so I'm not used to commercials, so it'll be interesting for the Club Twit folks that see, you know.

0:30:45 - Caller
You're going to be right up against the AI on that one.

0:30:50 - Caller
So how do I make my screen brighter? No, I'm just kidding.

0:30:54 - Leo Laporte
By the way, you mock it, but that's exactly one of the things Microsoft said oh, look what Copilot can do. And it was how do I turn on dark mode or no, I'm sorry, it was just turn on dark mode and turn off dark mode. To me that's not the most useful thing for an AI, but fine, microsoft must know what they're doing.

0:31:14 - Caller
So what can we do for you?

0:31:15 - Leo Laporte
Chris, that's the question.

0:31:17 - Caller
Well, first I've got a tip. I listened to last week's Ask the Tech Guy and one of the things. I'm a cybersecurity guy and I teach cybersecurity for home users and such Awesome. And one of the things I recommend for people that have iPhones and potentially iPads and all that is for setting up a pin. Go into the settings and turn on the alphanumeric keyboard Very smart and then you could put four numbers, whatever, and then followed by any letter.

0:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Even a letter, would make it so much better, wouldn't it? Because there's only nine digits, or ten, I guess. If you include zero, there's only 10 digits, and so it's much smaller. The alphabet's 26 plus.

0:32:01 - Caller
Most bad guys are expecting numbers only right, right, yeah, I mean, as soon as somebody opens it up and sees this keyboard in front of them, they're 26 plus most bad guys are expecting numbers only Right, right, yeah, I mean, as soon as somebody opens it up and sees this keyboard in front of them, they're you know, they're going to go.

Oh, let's steal a different phone, oh yeah, and then when the cop is telling you to put in your password, you say I'm just so nervous and keep that fingering it until it just erases. That's exactly right.

0:32:26 - Leo Laporte
So you go to settings, you go to security and password options, right? Is that where we do this yes and then, oh, no, actually.

0:32:36 - Caller
Yeah, you'll have to enter in your current.

0:32:41 - Leo Laporte
That didn't do it for me. Oh, I went to the wrong place. There we go. There we go. There we go. This is one thing I have to knock apple for. I. I can't find anything in the settings ever. I'm just gonna try um pin. How about pin code?

0:32:59 - Mikah Sargent
no, it's uh settings face id and passcode.

0:33:03 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you Settings. There you go, settings, face ID and passcode, and then it'll prompt you to type in your passcode, which mine is only six digits, so don't look so when I but six digits. Even that, the, the, the law enforcement can't force you to enter those. But if you don't, or if you're worried about law enforcement, turn off face unlock, right, uh, I have it.

0:33:27 - Mikah Sargent
I I'm not worried, so I I keep face id on, but then you also can yeah, if you press all three buttons at once on the side, that will automatically disable it temporarily.

0:33:38 - Leo Laporte
Once you're in there, you choose change passcode and then change it from uh, well, again, from whatever the current one is now, and then when it says enter here, you can show this now, I'm not doing anything secret now, when you could start with the six digits. But there's this options thing and that's what you want. You can do four. Oh, I can't believe they still allow four to drop to four, I think if you choose that shame, shame, there might be some limitations.

0:34:04 - Mikah Sargent
I can't shame, oh no, I guess shame shame, shame.

0:34:08 - Leo Laporte
Don't use four. Six is minimum because four is only there's a. It's just too easy to guess, right? Although if you turn on that, 10 tries and you're done.

Yeah, that helps, be hard to guess 10 000 unless your password is zero, zero, zero, zero's the problem A lot of people have. It's really interesting. I saw a graph of passcodes, numbers, and there's this, so it shows it's a scatterplot of all the different passcodes there are thousands that people have used. Somehow they got them. I'll find this. I think it was on Reddit, but there's a solid line on 20, 20 and then 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. A lot of people just use the year of their birth. There's these solid. There's these really clear indicators that people are repeating numbers, doing certain things.

0:35:00 - Mikah Sargent
That make it easier to crack. Yeah, so that's what they start with. Start with right.

0:35:04 - Leo Laporte
If you're doing one of those automated systems, you start with the ones that are easy so you could do four digit, six digit custom numeric code, which means I guess I can make as long as I want and then custom. And then this is so smart apple, so smart. It says for the next 72 hours, you can use your previous passcode to reset your news passcode if you forget it.

0:35:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, how many times have you done that? Yeah, and what's great too, is because I recently changed mine and when I typed in my old passcode, it prompted me and said do you remember that you just recently updated this? So it let me know. Hey, you fool, you were typing in the old one that you're not using anymore, which was nice, because then I go oh right, I'm using that new one now.

0:35:50 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, chris, is that why you called in, or you just wanted to pass that along?

0:35:54 - Caller
No, the reason I called was I listened to Security Now last Tuesday and when you guys were talking about the VPN stuff, I mean, when Steve started off, he's like, yeah, it's not that much of a problem. And the more he started talking and you even picked up on it, it's like wait, wait, wait wait a minute.

Now Steve probably never gets out and he isn't like the rest of us that goes to libraries, coffee shops and you know every other public VPN on the planet, so he isn't too worried. But the more I dug into it, I reread the article, I reread his notes. I actually re-listened to it.

0:36:31 - Leo Laporte
I was like this is a big deal, he said it's not a problem if you don't use an open Wi-Fi access spot like a coffee shop a library, an airport, so we should. This is really good, chris. I'm glad you brought this up. It comes down to something called option 121, which is, in all it's, part of the VPN specification, and I don't, chris, you read it and you studied it, so I didn't really understand why this needs to exist. It has something to do with enterprise and being able to change the routing table right.

0:37:04 - Caller
Right, yeah, and that was the confusing part. So I know enough to be dangerous. But you know, I'm staring at routing tables going. This is Greek to me and I'm actually diving in trying to understand.

But the ability to change the routing table simply means a bad guy using option 121 can route your traffic unencrypted through his computer and then onto the vp right the way yeah, the way I understood it was that the the bad guy can make it so that certain ip addresses would go through a vpn ie the vpn, so the vpn would go through the normal route and be happy. And you're thinking that everything's happy, but then select, and that and that's one of the things is, I don't know how they pick you know all the other IPs need to go through the bad DHCP and the bad router. So first I have a suggestion for Club Twit members, or if you could just con Steve into becoming a member and you know, getting some posts from us, because I refuse to go on Twitter.

But I mean it's kind of like he just left us hanging and everything I'm reading, even with Brian on Brian Krebs and everything is there's some mitigations, but I mean two thoughts I had was first, if, if we could read I downloaded something that lets me look at the routing table on my iPhone and again, it's great to me. But if, if somebody could give a little quick tutorial, if we could con Steve into saying, hey, this is what a routing table looks like and here's how you could tell if your traffic is going through a bad guy's router versus your VPNs router router, you know, that'd be one thing.

0:38:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if something like I think what's going to happen is VPNs. So here's the thing this option 121 is needed by enterprises and this is why Microsoft will never turn it off. Android has it turned off. Android is not vulnerable to this attack. Iphones are, windows is, mac is, I think, what you're going to see. There's two possibilities. One is VPN. I think this will be the first thing that'll happen. Vpn providers are going to have to address this, and so they're going to do something to disable option 121, to say no, no, you can't reroute our traffic. I don't think Microsoft will ever turn it off, because you know Microsoft's not going to turn off something that businesses use ever, because it would just be it would cause too much trouble, so it's going to require the VPN services to respond. So that's the thing, is to look carefully for VPN services that respond to this, that turn off option 121 or somehow prevent the routing table from being changed so that you are secure In the meanwhile. I don't know what you do.

0:39:58 - Caller
Yeah, the only thoughts I had. And again, I don't know if Steve could answer this. If you just put a bug in his ear, I'm hoping there's a bunch of folks that are there.

0:40:05 - Leo Laporte
There's no known mitigation, because it's not it's a feature.

0:40:11 - Caller
Well, yeah, but okay, so we understand it's a feature of DHCP. But how do we on our end take a look and see if the bad guys got us? The worst case was it was kind of ironic that right after that you guys had in your last week's Ask the Tech guys, you talked about a travel router and I'm like, oh, you know, that might do the trick, because then my DHCP is going to be my travel router and then I don't care whatever stream of traffic is going through the bad guys. By that time my VPN will have a secure connection. So, you know, for the uber paranoid of us that are, you know, running the nuclear codes while we're in libraries, I'll just pull out my travel router. I guess I don't know, but it would just be nice if, yeah, I would hope that the VPN software providers do something. But if there were some way that we could tell if one of the bad guys used the earplugs.

0:41:06 - Leo Laporte
That's a great idea. I'll ask Steve on Tuesday. That's a great idea. You're right, steve, I guess because Steve doesn't go out much just really didn't recognize the severity of the problem and said it's not a problem when he does go out.

0:41:22 - Caller
He he's enjoying life and not stuck in his phone like some of us, exactly.

0:41:28 - Leo Laporte
But some of us have to use open Wi-Fi access points and for those of us and it's a relatively, I think, non-trivial attack that can easily be, you know, created for script kitties and others to use. So I think it is a bigger threat than Steve really acknowledged. But we shall see. Yeah, we shall see.

0:41:50 - Caller
I mean the good news is reading through Krebs' article. I mean they did point out that if you're using you know bank websites and we've talked about this on other security podcasts was you know you're using HTTPS everywhere? And so most of your stuff's going to be protected, so right.

0:42:06 - Leo Laporte
So even if you're going through a bad guy's router, you're probably in good shape, yeah if stuff is encrypted, even if it's going through the VPN, if it's encrypted before it gets to the VPN, you're fine.

0:42:18 - Caller
Right. The way I understand it is that the bad guys can say no, your traffic's not going to go through the encrypted VPN tunnel, it's going to go through my routerencrypted and then out, and so that's exactly why that's a problem.

0:42:30 - Leo Laporte
But if it's HTTPS, it doesn't change anything. I think that may also be why Steve was more sanguine about it, because most traffic now is HTTPS, is TLS based, so it's already encrypted before it even hits the VPN. Yeah Right, so yeah, I know this. I'm glad you brought it up, chris. I forgot to talk more about this. I'll read Brian's. I haven't read Brian's article about it yet. Brian's good, so I will. I will check what he has to say about it. I'm still looking for the most common Pin numbers. Oh, yeah, here it is. So most to least common pin numbers. So this line is people using their birth year. This is a scatterplot of 3.4 million pin numbers from multiple data breaches. This scale is the first two digits. That's the second two digits. So if the first two digits are 20, then you're getting the second. Two digits are birth year. I mean it's really fascinating. Here's 1, 2, 3, 4. Here's 4, 3, 2, 1. The brighter the dot, the more people are using it, obviously.

0:43:45 - Caller
And then people using the same two pairs like one one, one one in the middle, two, two two, two, three, three, three, three, four, four, four, four.

0:43:53 - Leo Laporte
Don't do that, because these are, yeah, these bright dots are the ones the bad guys are going to try right away. Isn't that fascinating?

0:44:01 - Caller
wow, it's really uh, I just switched between your birthday and mike's birthday. That's it, use ours.

0:44:08 - Leo Laporte
No, don't use a birthday, birth year, year. First of all, you shouldn't be using four digits. That's part of the problem. Right now, six digits would be a lot better, but still people are using four digits and this is part of the problem and, unfortunately, a lot of banks. My bank pin is four digits. Your bank card right.

A lot of companies are still using four digits because they know people are not going to remember more than four digits. So use four random digits. That's basically the rule, or as random as you can remember, I guess 11, 58.

0:44:38 - Mikah Sargent
That'd be good, that'd be good, they're 11 also good, that'd be good, because I wasn't born then chris, it's a pleasure talking to you, thank you for being in the club. Thank you so much for your support and for the great tip we appreciate it.

0:44:52 - Leo Laporte
Have a great day. All right, take care. Yeah, I'm glad I found this graph because it really it shows you.

0:44:57 - Mikah Sargent
We're heard, we're heard creatures, we, we operate in a herd and we like simplicity and it's hard to remember.

0:45:04 - Leo Laporte
This is the problem with passwords and passcodes and pins. It's hard to remember. This is the problem with passwords and passcodes and pins.

0:45:07 - Mikah Sargent
It's hard to remember, hard to remember and frustrating when you forget Right. I believe it is time for our car guy, but before then, before we get to our car guy, we are going to take a break.

0:45:21 - Leo Laporte
So bad, so bad. Hey, I only have 60 seconds for this one. It's quick. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Wix Studio. I have one minute 60 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises, so listen carefully. Here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less.

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0:46:50 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know Dreamweaver. I did use Dreamweaver. Yes, yeah, uh, we've come. So far. Yeah, we really have those days uh, it's thank goodness hand coding all that html and css. Yeah, I mean, I've made flash websites even.

0:47:04 - Leo Laporte
I think people got into this with myspace, yeah, was because you could do your backgrounds or Neopets. You could do your make custom and you'd learn html. And then that's exactly what I did, yeah, yeah, that's what I figured. Sam Abuelsamid is a principal researcher at guide house insights. He hosts the wonderful podcast all about automotive technology called Wheel Bearings. It's a good name, wheelbearings.media. He's also my car guy. We talk to Sam every month on the show. Hi Sam, hello Sam, hello gentlemen, how are you today? I see the northern lights. Were you able to see them in Ypsilanti?

0:47:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, I actually drove about 20 minutes out of town to a very dark place, to a place called, a place called Pickerel Lake, uh, which is a place that we love to go in the uh in the summertime. Um, take the dogs out there and uh go paddle boarding, and Daisy loves to ride around on my paddle board on Pickerel Lake. So that this is a shot I took on a Friday night of uh of the Northern Lights over Pickerel Lake.

0:48:10 - Leo Laporte
I never thought I would see the Northern Lights and I still won't. I haven't seen them in many years.

0:48:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
I was. I mean, you know, I know a lot of my friends in the Bay Area did see them.

0:48:24 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Reddit's full of photos from the Bay Area, even from Petaluma and Santa Rosa, of the lights. So it's just I could. I went out See, I can't tell if that's northern lights or just a pretty sky.

0:48:38 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, when it's, you know, 11 o'clock at night, you know that's, that's usually a sign of northern lights.

0:48:42 - Leo Laporte
And they're not. Are they moving or no?

0:48:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah, they moving or no? Oh yeah, yeah, you can. Okay, yeah, it's like waves in the sky, uh, like sheets of light it's. It's pretty wild to see it's, and when you, the further north you go, the more it looks like that. I was fortunate enough in the 1990s to spend quite a few winters in um in northern sweden doing cold weather development on on uh traction control and abs systems. And you know we were about, you know 50 miles from the Arctic Circle and so there, you know you would see them most nights. You know you could go outside and you'd just see these sheets of green light shimmering in the sky. It was pretty wild.

0:49:22 - Leo Laporte
So, sam, I got to ask you, yeah, what the hell's going on at Tesla?

0:49:29 - Sam Abuelsamid
Elon Musk is completely insane. That's as simple as that. He is now fired. He is a petty and spiteful man that you know just does whatever whim comes into his brain.

0:49:41 - Leo Laporte
So there's no logical explanation for firing 500 people, the entire supercharger team, the crown jewel, by the way, of the Tesla Automotive Network because everybody knows people don't want to buy an electric vehicle unless it's easy to charge it. And Elon knew that from the beginning and built this incredible supercharger network. And then, grasping defeat from the jaws of victory, every car company says okay, fine, fine, elon, you win, we're going to use your next charging solution. And elon starts to make money because cars are starting to use a supercharger network. And then he gets mad at the woman running it and fires the whole team. Is that an accurate description that?

0:50:23 - Sam Abuelsamid
is? That is that is my understanding. Uh, you know, when they announced, you know that they were going to lay off more than 10% of their global staff about three weeks ago, the head of the supercharger team whose name escapes me right now, or actually she was in charge of all charging, so superchargers and destination chargers pushed back on Elon and said we need more staff, we can't fire as many people as you want me to. And so he said okay, you're fired. And then he proceeded to fire the entire team instead of just firing a portion of the team.

0:50:55 - Leo Laporte
Just to prove that he was right. Tanucci is her name, by the way. Yes, yeah.

0:50:59 - Sam Abuelsamid
Just to prove that he was right? Well, to prove that he's the boss and what he tells people to do is what they must do, and if you don't like it, tough, you're out of here.

0:51:09 - Leo Laporte
But he didn't stop there, did he, Because he's laying off other teams too.

0:51:15 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh yeah, he apparently laid off the entire new product team.

0:51:21 - Leo Laporte
They aren't designing any more new cars.

0:51:26 - Sam Abuelsamid
It depends on which hour of the day you ask him. At one point in the day they've canceled the planned low-cost $25,000 EV, but then on their earnings call last week, he said that yeah, we'll be introducing a lower-cost vehicle early in 2025. Yeah, we'll be introducing a lower cost vehicle early in 2025, but it's based on our current products, which probably means it's just a further decontented Model 3 or Model Y that maybe they can sell for $30,000, or at least claim that they're going to offer a $30,000 version but never actually sell one at that price point.

0:52:06 - Leo Laporte
And incidentally, you may say well, this doesn't affect me, I'm never going to buy a Tesla, who cares? But we have said the US government and taxpayers have subsidized this company from day one.

0:52:22 - Sam Abuelsamid
I'm just it's, it's stunning.

0:52:28 - Leo Laporte
The arrogance and stupidity of this man is seems to have. Oh and, by the way, they decided to pay him $50 billion Wait that went through.

0:52:34 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, not exactly the board wants to. Well, he told the board you must pay me $50 billion, and since the board is made up of just his friends and his brother that have never provided any real corporate governance in that company, you know they said OK, fine, and. But you know it has to be approved by shareholders. So the same pay package that they put out in 2018, that was struck down by a judge earlier this year, voided by a judge, will now be going up for a shareholder vote again next month. Yeah, I'm less convinced of that this time. All right, you know it may not, it may not pass this time, because you know, people's attitudes towards Musk are very different today.

0:53:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't think he's worth what we thought he was worth.

0:53:25 - Sam Abuelsamid
That was why they paid him so much, rich Otto, especially since he's a especially since he was why they paid him so much, rich Otto, especially since he's a part-time CEO, right? Why would you make a part-timer who's also got half a dozen other companies that he is either CEO or de facto CEO of? Why would you pay him that much money?

0:53:48 - Leo Laporte
Rebecca Tanucci gone. Hr executive Ali Arabalo gone. Public policy executive Rohan Patel gone. These are all recent people quitting Drew Baglino, former senior vice president of power, train and energy engineering, but the one that's really kind of setting the world on fire this is from Futurism is Rich Otto, who nicely named O-T-T-O, though not U-T-O.

He's the head of product launches. He left after seven years and wrote a scathing post he's since deleted on LinkedIn. Oh, why did he delete it? Well, we got it. It's okay. Futurism made a copy. It's a company I love. He wrote and it has given me so much, but it has also taken its pound of flesh. Great companies are made up of equal parts great people and great products, and the latter are only possible when its people are thriving. The recent layoffs are rocking the company and its morale, have thrown out this harmony out of balance. It's hard to see the long game. It was time for him to make a change, so he's one of many executives leaving the sinking ship. The real question is at this point, would you buy a Tesla? No, seems like it's a risky proposition.

0:55:00 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, I mean, tesla is not going to go out of business anytime soon. You know we're not talking about Fisker here. You know Fisker is going to be bankrupt momentarily. Probably within the next month they will declare bankruptcy and it's unlikely that anyone will step up to buy them or save them. And there are other EV startups that are in equally precarious positions. So Tesla has a lot of cash in the bank. They are still profitable. Yes, their sales are down, their revenues are down and their profits are down, but so are all EV sales right?

I mean, there is kind of a no, not everybody, no, all right, no, it feels like there's a crisis in electric vehicles in the US.

I think the crisis is overblown. You know the rate of growth has declined, you know, in large part because you know prices were still too high. People were concerned about the charging networks and you know interest rates are high and you know affordability is a problem. That's true. But you know there are quite a few manufacturers whose EV sales are up. Ford's EV sales were up significantly in the first quarter.

I see Mach-Es everywhere now, everywhere, very popular. And you know Hyundai Motor Group, hyundai, kia and Genesis. Their sales are doing great. Bmw is doing great, you know. So there are a bunch of manufacturers who are doing quite well with their EVs. You know Tesla, just you know. I mean Tesla still sells more EVs than anybody. They're just not selling as many as they were and they are in no imminent danger of going bankrupt. So I mean, if you really feel like you want a Tesla and you know you don't mind giving your money to somebody as scummy as Elon Musk, then you know you can. You don't mind giving your money to somebody as scummy as Elon Musk, then you know you're fine. You know they're to the to the degree that Tesla has ever provided particularly good customer support. They will probably continue to do so.

You've never been a Tesla fan, I know you know I, I have, I've, I have been a fan of what Tesla has done to promote EVs as a viable consumer product that you know are a good solution for a lot of people. You know, to prove that, you know, I mean, they have done more to prove that. You know EVs are more than glorified golf carts than anybody. They've also done an amazing job, you know, building out an EV charging infrastructure better than anybody else. They've done a vastly better job at that than Volkswagen did with Electrify America, that's true, or EVgo or anybody else.

0:57:37 - Leo Laporte
That's why it's stunning that they would fire that team. Yeah, I don't get that. That's what blows my mind. You could be a success and fail in this.

0:57:46 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, I mean my issue is with the way Elon treats his employees. I also have an issue with his political leanings in the last few years and also my biggest issue has always been their approach to automated driving, which I think has been reckless and irresponsible, Although I heard a rumor that he's going to have to put LIDAR in now that he's like.

0:58:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, he doesn't like LIDAR. That's why he's FSD has done so well, I think.

0:58:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
It's, it's, yeah, I mean that's. That's a big part of why FSD doesn't will never really work as as well as they've claimed. You know, in the first quarter Tesla was the biggest customer of Luminar, a LiDAR company. They bought, they bought two million dollars worth of LiDAR sensors, which works out at about a thousand dollars a pop. For those iris sensors works out to about 2000 sensors. That's not a lot.

In the past, you know, I mean, tesla has been, you know, from time to time has been buying Luminar LiDAR sensors. You know, in small batches from time to time, that they use for what's known as ground truth testing. So even if you're doing a camera only system, you know, for testing purposes, what you want to have is another verifiable method of measuring the accuracy of your image detection algorithms, and so they call that ground truth. You know something an active sensor that can actually measure everything which cameras cannot do. And so they have. They've not, they've acknowledged that they've used that. You know Elon now claims that they no longer need to do that. So it's not clear why they're buying these sensors, but we'll, we'll see, you know, in the coming months. My guess is that they're what they may be considering, you know is using it for this robo taxi that they're supposed to unveil in August, which you know will be a dedicated purpose built robo taxi.

0:59:50 - Leo Laporte
But you know we'll. I didn't want to hijack your piece with this Elon thing. I just thought I'd ask you. No, it's fine, I apologize Because it's just, it stuns me. I mean, the Cybertruck was a perfect example of an executive leading his company down the rosy path to failure. Now they did get a boost because biden, the biden administration, says they're going to put a hundred percent tariff on chinese evs.

1:00:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
That's a big boost for american ev makers, right well, they haven't officially said that that is what's reported to be coming. Oh, I thought that was supposed to be an announcement. No, there's reports that they're going to announce that on Tuesday, and so we'll see.

1:00:32 - Leo Laporte
We'll see how that plays out, but that would be good for American EV manufacturers, I think yeah, potentially. They already have these subsidies.

1:00:40 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, well, depending on how it plays out, if you look at the history of the auto industry over the last 40, 50 years, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s, there was a lot of moves towards protectionism against Japanese manufacturers. Yeah, that was. And well, well, I mean the result was that Honda opened a factory in Ohio, right, toyota opened factories in Kentucky and now all of those manufacturers build the 75 to 80 percent of the cars that they sell in North America are built here and in fact Toyota's you know Toyota Camry's built in Kentucky have more US domestic content than any of the quote unquote domestic brands. You know for General Motors or Stellantis.

1:01:30 - Mikah Sargent
So you know it's you know it wasn't something new. Every time you're on, I appreciate that.

1:01:36 - Sam Abuelsamid
So you know, we'll see, you know I, I'm pretty sure that you know. If the Chinese brands want to do business in the U? S and depending on how this, how these tariffs are structured, you know we'll probably see them. You know building factories in the US, mexico and perhaps even Canada to build vehicles in North America for sale here.

1:02:00 - Leo Laporte
Do we want Chinese EVs? Are they good?

1:02:04 - Sam Abuelsamid
The ones I've driven are really good. Yeah, you know the. You know one of the things to keep in mind. You know there's there's a you know there's a lot of discussion about. You know some of the Chinese EVs that are available at really low prices in China. There's a lot of good things about those cars, but right now those cars probably do not meet US crash safety standards as they're built today, so they would have to be modified to meet those.

And also a lot of the low-cost Chinese EVs tend to have much shorter ranges. Part of the reason why they're lower cost is they use smaller battery capacities and so they typically don't have have a range of maybe 100 to 120 miles at most, which what we've seen so far from US consumers is they're not particularly interested in EVs with such a short range. You know they sell in very limited numbers With such a short range. You know they sell in very limited numbers, and I think until we have a lot more public charging infrastructure available everywhere that is reliable, it's unlikely that you'll get many American consumers to actually buy such short range EVs. So that means that they're going to have to offer EVs with longer ranges, which they do make.

You know, and I've driven a number of them. You know the Zeekr 001 is a fantastic car, the, you know, the Xiaopeng P7, the, you know, and there's others as well that are really good cars and, you know, with some modifications to meet US crash safety standards they could probably do quite well here. They, you know, they're not going to be $13,000 cars, but they, you know, they could probably be very competitive.

1:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Is this what you wanted to talk about?

1:04:01 - Sam Abuelsamid
To be honest, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about. Good, all right, I'll give you a subject to camp on.

1:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean it, what I wanted to talk about. Good, all right, I'll give you a subject to camp on, yeah, just fascinating.

There's a player as long as we're talking about. There's one other thing elon has been banging a drum on. That's driving me nuts. Uh, he's for some reason. Maybe this is just, maybe he's, I don't know. Maybe he has business associates, associations with russia, I'm not sure. But he's decided to say, wrongly, that Signal has security flaws and is promoting Telegram, which is not encrypted for most of its transactions. You have to specifically choose to encrypt and even then it's a roll your own encryption that we are not sure is completely secure, whereas we know there is no vulnerability in signal that hasn't been fixed long ago. The signal is reliable and is a good choice, the only choice, really for strong encryption. Well, maybe not the only choice, but the one I would suggest for strong encryption, and why Elon is lying about it is unclear to me, except that it is-.

1:05:07 - Sam Abuelsamid
He's been saying a lot of positive things over the last couple of years about russia and vladimir.

1:05:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's somehow so because this is echoing the the rhetoric coming out of telegram uh, which was invented by pavel durov. They called him the mark zuckerberg of russia. Now it's unclear how much uh durov uh likes russia, because they forced him to sell his facebook clone uh to the russian government and he left the country. He lives in dubai now, but there's no, no one, no expert who will say in fact, matthew green, uh, one of our favorite cryptographers from johns hopkins, just had a long TWiTter thread on this no expert will say telegram is secure and in signal is not. Signal is secure and for elon to imply that it's not to a very large audience on TWiTter is very, very disappointing. And uh, it's just one more reason to suspect this guy. I don't know what he's up to. I don't understand he's. He seems to be a little out of control. I guess that's the nicest way to put it.

1:06:12 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, that's, he definitely is. But you know, even despite the, you know some of the challenges, like firing the entire charging team. You know there are. You know the charging network is not going to be shut down anytime soon, I hope, although you can never be sure but the supercharger network directly with an adapter and the expectation is that other manufacturers over the next several months will roll out similar updates. Now, without support on the Tesla side, it's not clear if and when that's actually going to happen, but hopefully that will continue to move forward, continue to have some software support there and EV drivers will have more options for reliable charging going forward. Elon has said in the last few days that they do plan to spend something like five hundred million dollars on continuing to expand and upgrade the supercharger network. So we'll see if that actually comes to fruition. But you know it's there's a lot of uncertainty, but you know I wouldn't panic just yet panic.

1:07:51 - Leo Laporte
Just yet, samable samad wheel bearings dot media is the place to go for his great wheel bearings podcast with robbie and nicole and of course, uh, he is a principal researcher at guide house insights. I read uh many quotes from you in the ars technica piece about elon and that's what made me think I better. I better ask sam about.

1:08:07 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, jonathan's a friend of mine, so he reached out to me for that one. It was a great. It was a great piece.

1:08:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I recommend it. Jonathan Gitlin does great work at ours. He does, everybody at ours is fantastic. We love ours and we love you. Thank you, sam.

1:08:20 - Sam Abuelsamid
Thank you, sam, thank you, gentlemen have, and I will talk to you in a couple hours, leo on.

1:08:25 - Leo Laporte
Twitter. Oh well, even better. Maybe we'll bring this up again, Sure.

1:08:30 - Sam Abuelsamid
Prepare yourself.

1:08:32 - Leo Laporte
Yet again I apologize for not knowing. I often forget who's going to be on. They tell me. Well, it's different audiences for the shows too, and they tell me Tuesday and by Sunday it's gone. So good, I'll see you in a few.

1:08:46 - Sam Abuelsamid
I'll see you in a few. Thanks, sam, I'll talk to you guys later.

1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
Bye, love having Sam on Twitter. Yeah, here's the Matthew Green tweetstorm and he's pretty irate, frankly, about this campaign to undermine Signal. Matthew tweets Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure, with assistance from Elon Musk. The goal seems to be get activists to switch away from encrypted signal to mostly unencrypted telegram. Uh, you can read, you know the entire thread if you want. Uh on x.

But the point is look, signals open source. Telegram is not. Telegram is unencrypted by default. Uh, which means you know most of the people who switch to telegram is not. Telegram is unencrypted by default. Uh, which means you know most of the people who switch to telegram, thinking they're getting a safer messaging platform, will actually be much less safe. Uh, so it you know. He says finally, it's it's not weird for a ceo to say my product is better than your product, but when the claim is about security and critically quote you've made a deliberate decision not to add security for most users, which is what Telegram and Dourif have done then it starts to feel like malice or propaganda. We also we all, we were talking about this. We have to all develop a very, very high intuition for what is propaganda, what is AI? What is not real? And it's not having somebody tell you something is fake.

1:10:21 - Mikah Sargent
You have to genuinely investigate and learn, have curiosity at the very least. Skepticism is good in those instances. I mean, I'm completely, I've been fully moved into some sort of cynical camp where genuinely everything I read I automatically assume it's just fake. And then I go and I do my due diligence.

1:10:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, you see, and I stumbled into these mistakes. Sam caught me in the mistake. I have been reading stories that I thought said that the administration had agreed to 100% tariffs on Chinese vehicles. That was just a rumor, and that's. The other problem is that many, many rumors are published these days as if they're so, and I really try most of the time not to repeat rumors unless I say specifically it is rumored. They say, you know, but it sometimes. I fall into that trap too.

1:11:11 - Mikah Sargent
So well, yeah, it can all kind of get gummed up after a while and you're pulling apart well, I read so many headlines.

1:11:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm just constantly scanning for stories, so, anyway, I apologize. I did not realize that was merely a rumor. We'll find out on tuesday right about when the ai starts to take over, so that's going to be great. Also a rumor we'll find out on Tuesday right about when the AI starts to take over, so that's going to be great. Also a rumor. Oh yeah, that's a rumor. All right, finally, finally, after long awaited. Well, we're going to pause for a station identification and then we're going to talk to the guy in the sunglasses. You're watching as the tech guys that. There's Mikah Sargent, I'm Leo Laporte, and now into the Stargate with our next caller. Happy Mother's Day, by the way, what did you do for your mom?

1:11:58 - Mikah Sargent
I sent her, my grandma and my sister all care packages Because they're all mothers. Yeah, they're all mothers. Aw, that's sweet. I got some goodies in the mail. I sent a few texts. Nice, that's great.

1:12:11 - Leo Laporte
Hello Jason, hello Dark Stranger Jason.

1:12:14 - Caller
Hey, how are you all doing?

1:12:15 - Leo Laporte
Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Jason. Thank you for your patience.

1:12:18 - Caller
No, you have a show to run, I understand.

1:12:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, I heard something.

1:12:24 - Caller
How can we help? Well, first I want to say I'm a club TWiT member. I told you before that I listened to the uh, a lot of the old shows. I want y'all guys to stay on there because, um, I like to uh. You know I'm I'm limited in what I could do, so listening to things really helps. Uh occupy me, so I'm listening to uh, so I've been listening to. I started back on episode one and I'm going up that way, so I had one. Not why I called, but I was just curious. If I think I'm around 380, 390. What has happened to Shuby the guy?

1:13:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, shuby, yeah, Shuby's doing great. So Shuby was, I think, our first intern. Wow, I'm amazed that you remember that he was such a cute kid. He was, I think, 16 or 17 when he started with Twitback in the cottage days. He is now. Let me see if I can find he's done very well. By the way, Finished his college education. I try to remember. He emails me from time to time. I'm trying to remember what he was doing. Last time he was working in marketing for one of the companies we advertise and I just can't remember the name of it. But even if I did, I shouldn't say but Shuboby is successful, he's smart, he's doing really well. Uh, I'm so pleased you asked about him. One of my favorite, I could say it. He's a developer evangelist at twilio, I believe that's. That's who. That's shooby.

1:14:05 - Caller
Um, I was looking that's good to hear that he succeeded.

1:14:09 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Smart, smart kid and I just he was. He couldn't drive, so he would get the bus up from San Jose all the way up to Petaluma. It was like a two-hour bus ride and I remember one day he missed the bus and he was kind of freaked out and so I gave him a ride home all the way to San Jose and back. Yes, it's about two hours. Uh, this kid was so dedicated and you know he had such a good work ethic he's done very well. So thank you for asking about Shuby. We love Shuby. Every once in a while I'll hear from him, yeah.

1:14:41 - Caller
Well, the reason I called I wanted to tell you thank you for one of your sponsors that, uh, delete me, delete me. I work in criminal justice. I've done different things for like 33 years now and I Google myself every once in a while that's scary, isn't it?

Well, I get death threats sometimes and threats, and so one day I Googled myself a few months ago and, like, the second thing that came up when I clicked on it was my address, my age, my phone number and, um, um, a satellite map of my apartment complex right there. And and it was like you've got to be kidding me. So I had, uh, I'd heard you talk about the sponsor a few times and I thought you know what. I think now is the time to do it. So, um, I joined that and between them and cleaning up a few things on my own, uh, you know, now you don't, you can't find anything about me.

1:15:41 - Caller
Um, wow, that's great.

1:15:44 - Caller
That sponsor. Really, I really was a little skeptical. Uh, cause you got to join for a year, but it's just in the first. You get four updates, I think, every quarter and within the first. You know I'm still waiting on the second quarter update to come at the end of this month. But yeah, they've taken everything down. So that's what I was calling to let you know that, uh, that sponsor really did a good job.

1:16:11 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad to hear that I um you know we we were pretty careful about picking sponsors. I'm almost always try to make it a sponsor we use in this case delete me something Lisa used for a couple of years to really do the same thing.

Uh, I uh, you know I'm always very careful, but we can't vet everybody. So it's nice to get, uh, some feedback that it worked for you, and I'm so sorry that there was so much personal information about you on the net. You know it's going to leak back in though, right, which?

1:16:41 - Mikah Sargent
is what's great about our sponsor.

1:16:43 - Caller
You mentioned that, uh, cause I kind of thought about you know, do I need to stay with them or not? But on a past show you said it would just come back in.

1:16:50 - Leo Laporte
You're never done. Yeah, this stuff is terrible.

1:16:53 - Caller
It's probably an ongoing battle. It totally is. Between that and you can on Google, they let you enter your information and they notify you when your stuff comes up, because Delete Me took some stuff down but it still showed up in a google search and you see the first sentence or two. But when you would click on it then it's not there. But uh, you would still see part of it. So I took, I took care of that part myself, but, um, yeah, their service is really great and uh, and in my field I really need it because, uh, you know, I was shocked.

It's like right there even a picture of the apartment complex, entrance with the pool and everything, uh, with you know, with my apartment number and and the phone number, and it was like that's crazy.

1:17:41 - Leo Laporte
So that's awesome, awesome, so glad that it's worked.

1:18:11 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome, awesome, so glad that it's from Consumer Reports, a completely free app that comes from this nonprofit organization, and I found it great again as a supplement, because, where Delete Me goes through and has removed the addresses, the phone numbers, that kind of thing from all of those different kind of data brokers, what permission slip does is it goes into some of the businesses that exist online, and so if you're no longer part of, say you know, for years you had a Starbucks account and maybe you no longer use Starbucks anymore, they may still have your information. Consumer reports can act on your behalf to get that removed from there. For some reason, home Depot and Lowe's those stores are some of the biggest data grabbers Really, yeah, don't know why, but they are, and so Consumer Reports has helped me remove my information from them, and so, yeah, I found that as a great again, it's a supplement yeah, it's called permission slip by CR and it has been really awesome.

I get notifications like once a week saying hey, here are five more that we auto submitted to these companies. And what when it? In the cases where these companies sometimes will have policies where it says that someone can't act on your behalf and so you'll get an email from that company saying we didn't delete any of your information, Ha, but then you have access to that company so you can go through and do the process yourself. So I've been able to find places that I didn't even realize had my information because of Consumer Reports permission.

1:19:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm downloading it right now. That's a great tip.

1:19:48 - Caller
Well, thanks for that tip. Yeah, I'm going to get that after myself.

1:19:51 - Leo Laporte
It's an endless process and all I can say every time this comes up is Congress, get off your behind and act on a comprehensive data privacy law in the United States. We are the last developed nation not to have one, and it's appalling developed nation not to have one, and it's appalling. But it really makes me question, frankly, the integrity of congress that they don't want to do it. It just seems like a natural. All right, I'll get off I did.

1:20:19 - Mikah Sargent
I'm curious. Um, I got a notification on TWiTter, uh, from someone who mentioned that they were disappointed about the oled iPads because they wouldn't be able to use the OLED iPads because of eye sensitivity, and it made me want to ask you, jason, because I remember you talking to us before. For those who are listening and not watching, if you were watching, you would see Jason currently looks like the Hulk. He's very green right now, the Hulk, actually I should say the cool Hulk, because he's also wearing sunglasses. All of that is to protect, if I remember correctly, you from migraines that you get from light sensitivity, correct?

1:20:59 - Caller
Correct the last time, and I've seen other neurologists too. There's a speculation it could be a seizure and not a migraine, but it's academic because they still can't solve it same symptoms.

Yeah yes, uh, lights bother me and, uh, you know I'm using a samsung s9 phone and I have a duplicate samsung s9 phone. I think they have oled screens. I have the blue light filter on, I mentioned last time. Everybody kind of looks like the simpsons. It's turned up all the way, but I have the same brightness, the same everything and my backup phone. I figured, because this one's cracked, I can't even use the same phone, um, only this one works, and even then I can't use it for very long. So, um, yeah, I I'm limited in what devices I can use. Uh, I can't watch TV very long. I still have an old Sony um HD 40 inch TV because, um, none of the new ones work for me. The 4k it, it's like it's too much detail for my brain, on top of being bright. So, yeah, it's a pain.

1:22:13 - Leo Laporte
My daughter. It's LEDs and so LED backlights are bad and we're hoping that OLEDs will not be bad. She has not had a problem with OLED screens but again, everybody's different and it depends what it is. But yeah, the flickering I think it is on LEDs that gives her a migraine. It's a painless migraine, but it's got all the other symptoms oh, it's got the aura, yeah, it's got the aura.

1:22:37 - Caller
Well, you know, one light may not bother me one day and the next day it bothers me, so I don't really know what the deal is. It's hard to track down the source.

1:22:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm know what. It's hard to track down the source.

1:22:47 - Caller
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm glad you buy your daughter. Did you buy your daughter that, uh, a light lamp I told you about that's the green thing that's I've got in front of me.

1:22:54 - Leo Laporte
I did I offered it to her, she wouldn't buy it. I mean, she wouldn't take it. Okay, she's found a way, she's fine. Um, you know she's found a way to live and I you know that's everybody's got to find their way to make it. She knows that I would gladly support her with whatever she needs. I sent her the lamp. I said let me get you this, and she said no, no, no, no. She travels pretty light. She doesn't want a lot of stuff, so I think that's part of it.

1:23:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah. She's not big into a bunch of tech from her comedy routines.

1:23:25 - Leo Laporte
She's kind of tech she. Uh, I did say you know the new iPads are going to be OLED and she showed this much interest.

1:23:33 - Caller
It's so funny.

1:23:33 - Leo Laporte
Neither of my kids both millennials are interested in iPads at all. No interest at all. And uh, and, even though Henry uses computers to do video editing, he doesn't even really understand how they work either. Every once in a while he'll call me up. He calls a Type C charger. He has a funny word for it. It's like my mom, wow really. It's like it skips a generation.

1:23:59 - Mikah Sargent
That's so funny.

1:24:01 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, hey, chris, it's great to talk to you, jason. Jason, I'm sorry. I'm so glad that you can work, even with your disability. I think that's really great, um, and I'm sorry we kept you on hold so long.

1:24:13 - Caller
No, it's fine, I appreciate you putting me on and thank you and have a good day.

1:24:16 - Leo Laporte
Great tips.

1:24:17 - Mikah Sargent
Thanks so much.

1:24:19 - Leo Laporte
Bye-bye. Nice to know we have a sponsor that does the job. Yeah, it's always good to hear yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know is harold saying are you sure he's your son? I pretty sure he's celebrating mother's day today, so I'm pretty sure too you have.

1:24:34 - Mikah Sargent
You kind of have two options, at least anecdotally, it seems there are two options when it comes to sort of family. You either go the way of your parent, or you go the complete opposite, or or really far away from what the irony is they're both performers. Yeah, yeah, so there's an aspect of you and the one thing.

1:24:52 - Leo Laporte
I said to them always was whatever you do, don't get into, you know, showbiz in any way, shape or form.

1:25:01 - Mikah Sargent
And they said, and that's exactly what the opposite of what you say, father? Because you are my father and I'm not going to listen.

1:25:14 - Leo Laporte
I want to be an influencer, oh God. All right, let's take a little. What should we do?

1:25:16 - Mikah Sargent
let's take a call. Let's do an email. Let's do a voicemail. Let's do something. Do something, all right. Let's do another call, all right. Call john ashley. Remember star six to unmute yourself. Do you know the pitches? No, do you know? Hello, can? No, do you? Hello, can you hear me? Hello, what's your name and where are you calling from?

1:25:34 - Caller
Patrick, I'm calling from Los Angeles, california. Hi Patrick, welcome. What can we do for you? I wanted to say I've been watching the show for a while, leo. I've seen you with the screensavers. You're so wonderful. Oh, thank you. I wanted to Wi-Fi my house. It seems to be on one side of the house I get Internet and the other side I don't, and I was wondering like is there a stronger?

1:26:09 - Caller
router that you can recommend.

1:26:11 - Leo Laporte
What are you using right?

1:26:12 - Caller
now, maybe some other system? How are you doing it right now? Right now I just have one router. It's a Belkin router. It's older so it needs to be updated. So I was wondering, like, what you can recommend. The house is like 7,000 square feet. Oh, it's huge. Okay, yes, so is it all, is it?

1:26:32 - Leo Laporte
all one level or is it multi, multi-level, multi-level, okay. And is the construction older or newer? Older, okay. Older houses have more trouble with wi-fi because they're not wood and drywall. They sometimes have other materials, including metal, which is the worst, in the wall, you know, if you have plaster, a lot of times they put a grid up and they plaster over the grid. There's older houses that have horse hair in the wall. There's all sorts of materials that are not friendly to Wi-Fi. But on a house that big you certainly one router is not going to do the job. You know, the folks who make the plume router had a great metaphor. I've mentioned it before. They said it's like a lamp. You wouldn't try to read in the bedroom from a lamp in your living room. And Wi-Fi, even though it's not visible, is the same kind of electromagnetic radiation. You need to create pools of Wi-Fi all over the house. You love your Eero, is that?

1:27:29 - Mikah Sargent
still a recommendation you think yeah, I have yet to stop recommending the Eero as a system for having.

1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
Wi-Fi around the home. Amazon bought this company a few years ago. They were a sponsor, as many of our sponsors. They sponsor ads. Get picked up by Wi-Fi and stop advertising by.

1:27:48 - Mikah Sargent
Amazon by Amazon by Amazon. Yeah, Stop advertising.

1:27:50 - Leo Laporte
It happens every freaking time, but I think they really make good stuff. They were one of the first to do what's called mesh Wi-Fi and the reason this is a good way to go. You have the single router. Sometimes people try to use extenders like they'll take the router and then they'll extend it. You know, a hundred feet and then another hundred feet and then another hundred feet. The problem with extenders is every extender cuts it in half because they are not duplex. They can't both send and receive at this end and talk to the main router. So half the time they're talking to the main router, half the time they're talking to your computer, they literally cut the speed in half.

Mesh does not work that way. Mesh has a separate radio frequency for talking to the router and can talk at the same time to your computer. So they are, in theory, the full speed. And in fact that's probably your experience, right? Yes, exactly, uh, each you buy a euro base station and then you buy a beacon and you can have many beacons. It really depends on the number and the configuration of the house and the square footage of the house. Uh, you want to kind of, if you can get them as close to line of sight as possible. That's often not possible.

1:29:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and it's been my experience because so in my home it's three stories and the floor is kind of like the basement and entryway and then the living space, and then the bedrooms are on the third floor and I have the router actually currently on the third floor because that's where my home office is, and then I have a beacon on the second floor and a beacon on the first floor and they don't have line of sight but because they're able to communicate, through the floor.

1:29:39 - Leo Laporte
They get enough of a signal.

1:29:41 - Mikah Sargent
And so they're able to communicate. And what's great too about Eero is that they do offer pretty good deals on multi-pack packages, so you can kind of you know you pay one lump sum and you're able to spread that Wi-Fi throughout your whole home.

1:29:57 - Leo Laporte
And they still sell. You know, the base Eero's that they did in the very early days, the Eero's all the way up to the newest Eero, the Eero Max 7, which just came out, which is going to to use and, as you can see, is quite expensive. Holy camoly, our most advanced wi-fi system ever is also our most expensive. At 1700 that's a three pack. Yeah, you get a base station and two beacons, don't you, don't?

1:30:21 - Mikah Sargent
need that no you don't.

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean, unless you okay, look, if you've got a lot of money and you want a lot of speed, okay, but you don't have to go with that. I think the Euro 6 is probably, I agree, or the Euro Pro 6. What do you have? That's what I have the Euro Pro 6. Okay, so this is $400. You get a base station and a couple of beacons.

1:30:42 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't look like it makes a distinction between the no so this actually, and that's because they are not beacons, they are also full-on, so each of them is a base. Yeah, each of them can serve as a base station. Yeah, uh, but in this case they each one serves as the base station. The other two serve as extenders. But, yeah, each one could technically be a base.

1:31:00 - Leo Laporte
So this is expensive there's one other expense you should be aware of, and that's called ero plus. You don't have to buy Eero Plus, you do not. It's $99 a year, but it gives you some very nice security features.

1:31:13 - Mikah Sargent
If you've got kids, it has protection, yeah, and you get sort of network level ad blocking if you want that. You get dynamic DNS. You also get one password. Get a password. I love that. It's got a password manager for free. A? Um, very rarely do I ever use it, but uh, once in a blue moon I'll download malware bytes and just do a scan of my mac. So if you have actually works on windows as well, it's virus protection stuff and those are all included as part of the subscription.

1:31:47 - Leo Laporte
So there are other many other companies that make mesh systems. There's the vlop Linksys, there's the Orbi from Netgear and they're. They all are fine. I would. I don't recommend the ubiquities or the Google Wi-Fi. Our experience with those is they've. They're not ideal, but I think the Eero is the still the kind of the king of the hill on all this. Uh, they were. They were the first.

In fact, they were a kickstarter when they yeah they first started way back when, uh, and then they've had great success because they make a good product. So you know you're talking three or four hundred dollars, depending on how many beacons you need um, I guess they're not beacons anymore how many stations you need, and the nice thing is you can buy a couple, see how far that gets you and then buy another one if you need.

1:32:29 - Mikah Sargent
And the nice thing is, you can buy a couple, see how far that gets you and then buy another one if you need to get even to the other side of the house even farther and I don't know if you are. But if you happen to be an Amazon Echo user, it's kind of cool because you can also use the newer generations of Amazon Echoes as beacons themselves. Amazon has an integration that allows those to serve as Wi-Fi access points. So that's just an added benefit if you happen to be an Echo user. But I know those people are few and far between these days. Yeah.

1:32:58 - Leo Laporte
Does that help? Anything else you'd like to know?

1:33:02 - Caller
No, that sounds wonderful and thank you. You probably saved me hours and days of research and I'd probably get the wrong thing anyway. Thank you so much.

1:33:11 - Leo Laporte
Right on. Hey, it's great to talk to you.

Good luck. Thanks for watching all these years. I appreciate it. We're going to keep doing it. By the way, I am determined, even though it looks like it's hard to say, looks like we're going to probably have to close the studio at the end of the year just because it's very expensive to run it and send everybody a home. We'll hope to keep most of the staff and do shows from my home and then have editors at their home and so forth. They'll save us a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and, honestly, we can't spend money we don't have.

Now. I would like to keep the studio, I would like to grow the network, but it all comes down to two things Advertisers, and we're working as hard as we can to sell these shows. But you, the club members and we are so grateful to our club members who have helped us so much but we need a few more. If Lisa tells me the numbers and I go, oh God. And then she says it's okay, If we've got 5% of our audience, that's all we need to join the club, we would be financially solvent.

We would be go, go, go. So right now it's about a little less than 2%. So we've got a little ways to go. So if you watch more, all I ask if you watch more than one of our shows a week, I'll give you a freebie if you don't watch more than one a week, but if you watch one show a week, fine. Two shows a week, join the club. It's seven bucks a month. There are real benefits ad-free versions of all the shows, lots of extra content. Okay, the thing we did on Saturday or Friday wasn't that fun, oh, but people liked it.

We got a couple hundred people watching us watch a movie in our house and people were saying it was interesting. The thing about the club, and the Discord especially, is it's a group of people who are smart, interesting people that you get to hang out with Not just us, but everybody, and that makes it so cool. That's a community and I love that part part. So join the community. Seven bucks a month, cheaper than a country club and a lot more fun. Twittv slash club TWiT if you'd like to know more. That's all. That's all I gots to say. Mr uh, john ashley, which which way should I go here? How about another caller?

Let's please, please, please. Hello caller, what's your first name and what city are you calling from? This is Mike from Long Island. Man, you sound good. Mike, you sound so good. Are you a professional broadcaster? No, I'm just on my iPhone. That is a great sound. Yeah, it's rich. It sounds much better than a phone. Well, it's nice to meet you, Mike. What can we do for you?

1:35:59 - Caller
My primary question is probably best for Andy and Akko, but hopefully you guys can help out.

1:36:04 - Mikah Sargent
If it's about opera, I've got nothing for you. No, no, no, no can help out. If it's about opera, I've got nothing for you.

1:36:08 - Caller
No, no, no, no. You may know that comiXology got absorbed into the Borg of Kindle. Yeah, so I have between books and comic books. I must have 7,000 or 8,000 distinct entities in there within the blob of the Kindle app. Is there any way to separate out into collections, categories, something like that?

1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
I think there is Of course there is I'm not sure what you mean. I mean so do you ever use the Kindle app on your computer? Never. I have quite a few. Let me see what they call them actually Collections, oh yeah, yeah, that's kind of what I'm looking for, yeah.

So I have quite a few collections. It's not showing up. It's interesting. Let me use the Kindle Classic app. They have two apps, just like Lightroom. There's Kindle and Kindle classic and for some reason, they they continue to offer both. I'm not sure. Let me launch the kindle classic app and see yeah, so it's not showing up on the regular kindle app, but it definitely shows up on the kindle classics app on the left hand side. I don't know why it's not. Yeah, oh, support is ending october 31st 2023. Screw you all. Right, so well, let me show you on the kindle classic. Anyway, there's collections.

I can press plus, make a new collection, and I can say comics, for instance. I'm sure you're going to be much more granular. You're going to say dc, marvel, etc. Of course, and then you're going to say DC, marvel, et cetera. Sure, and then you're going to find your comics and you're going to move them. Here's one by hand. Yeah, by hand. Well, that's a good question. Can you do it more flexibly? So you're aware of this, but you want a better way to do this.

1:38:24 - Caller
If there is one, it doesn't sound like it is. They haven't put a lot of tlc into this.

1:38:29 - Caller
it is very disappointing they absorbed it, yeah yeah yeah, and I'm not even seeing in.

1:38:36 - Leo Laporte
You're right, it is a better question for andy. Andy has mentioned a new comic book reader that he uses and I'm trying to remember. Have you seen him talk about it? On mac break week? I have a. Let me go back. Let me go to MVW picks. Oh, the website, okay, so they're also saying yeah. In fact, that's one of the reasons, I think, that they're deprecating the apps. Is they really want you to use readamazoncom, which is Kindle on the website and that has also all of the? Yeah, this looks just like Kindle classic, isn't that funny? So let me see if I can, you can you can show this. Can I select one way would be like can I select my right? Like shift click kind of app is required. Go away you, amazon. Have I told you I hate you? All right, oh, it's loading this. I don't want to load it. I was just wondering if I could shift, click and select multiple things. Let's see Where's my comics. Oh well, I don't. There's the Watchmen. That's a comic. Can I now see it's opening at each time.

1:39:48 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I'm not even seeing anywhere to. If I did create a collection where that would show up here. Why is this so bad?

1:39:56 - Leo Laporte
why is this so bad, amazon um it would appear like it's not possible. You can just go to amazoncom, go to your account and manage your books, comics etc. There joe is saying so, not readamazoncom, but just your basic amazon account. This is, uh, that's interesting, but that is only for stuff you've purchased on amazon. Did comic books all come from comiXology and Amazon and I?

1:40:28 - Mikah Sargent
am able to select. Let's see. I'll choose comics. So where are you doing that? So I clicked on that link that Joe provided in the Discord, that exact link, Okay. And then from there I just clicked on books and I was able to see my digital content. Okay.

1:40:48 - Leo Laporte
So we can put this link in the show notes. Oh, I see where. Yeah, you can. If you go to digital content, you can see what you've purchased.

1:40:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and then once you go there, if you look in the top, uh, you can then select individuals and you can say you have that. Add to collections. Add to collections.

1:41:04 - Leo Laporte
So that does make it a little bit simpler. You still have to kind of click. I wonder if I can do a yeah, shift.

1:41:12 - Caller
I can't imagine clicking every single issue. I know I don't blame you.

1:41:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's just really not, not ideal. Can I do a? It'd be nice if you could do a search. Chunky comic reader for ios and perfect viewer for android. Thank you, lee. Um, we're just looking at the uh at the club TWiT. Um, this is. This is not modern. No, not a modern way to manage a collection, but unfortunately, and this is okay. So if people say, well, what's wrong with Amazon, this is a perfect example of a company being very nice to customers, right up to the point where they don't have to be, and as soon as they own Comixology and all the all the means of distributing this stuff, then they don't have to worry about it. They're going to assign the programmers somewhere else, because where are you going to go? What are you going to do? We need it. We need a solution. Comixology was so good. Now here's the same. The problem also, though, is going to be you've got these, you purchased them, so you've got them in there. Oh, I think he recommended panels as well, right?

1:42:41 - Mikah Sargent
I remember panels. Yeah, I think he remembered panels Because it had the auto read function when it zoomed properly or something like that.

1:42:48 - Leo Laporte
Are you on mac or windows?

1:42:52 - Caller
um, well, I was really looking to do this on kindle, so that, well, kindle on my ipad kindle on your ipad.

1:42:59 - Leo Laporte
Hey, at least it's in beautiful color. Yeah, um so panels is a comic reader on the ipad as well but in for.

1:43:09 - Mikah Sargent
But if you bought them with Comixology, aren't they going to have DRM?

1:43:12 - Leo Laporte
If you can export them as CBR, cbz, which is a typical comic stuff it actually can read. Wow, this is actually very impressive. It supports something called OPDS, which is a library. This is good. Which is a library. This is this is good. It supports cbr, which is, I think, the comic book reader. Uh, cbz, cb7, pdf, epub, so you might be able to get it out of. You know what? If you can't, here's the deal downloads here it comes calibra, okay, or caliber it it's.

It's kind of a play on words. Uh, the Caliber ebook program, the L I, b R E stands for free, right Cause it's an open source, free program. Uh, ebook manager, and it will take the copy protection off of anything. Move it, you have to get an extension. But they're widely available. It's easy to figure it out. That's how I, for instance.

The reason I know this is I just moved all my Amazon books to Kobo because I got a Kobo reader and I wanted all my Amazon books on here. Calibre did it. Calibre did it painlessly. It lets you do all the collection stuff you want to do and manage it and then maybe export it to another reader. I don't know if they have a version for iOS of Calibre. I probably don't.

This is a wonderful program and it's open source and it's free, don't? This is a wonderful program and it's open source and it's free, so you can strip out copy protection maybe then export it as a CBR and read it in a better reader, and maybe a reader that would do a better job. Drm is the issue. That's the issue. So Cal issue. So caliber still can, because I know I just did move all my stuff, copy protected stuff from amazon's kindle library. I bought it don't give me a hard time and I moved it over to kobo what a reader you want if you actually paid hard money for it yeah, yeah, I mean, I support, I support the authors.

I'm reading, of course, exactly. It's been purchased, like many of these books, and you're not sharing it with other people. I bought twice Hyperion. I bought both the Audible version and the.

1:45:36 - Mikah Sargent
Kindle version. I almost always end up buying both versions.

1:45:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I often like to read it and listen to it at the same time. I'll do that too sometimes.

1:45:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you know so.

1:45:49 - Leo Laporte
Whisper sync there's. It's painful, yeah it's not, but there's a way to do it, I think.

1:45:54 - Mikah Sargent
It's involved. But if you you know you've got your travel pillow and if you've got the time, Were you napping while you were waiting to get on?

1:46:01 - Leo Laporte
Tell the truth, no, no, it's just convenience.

1:46:05 - Mikah Sargent
It's comfy, I don't blame you. Yeah, I was on a flight a while ago and I thought I should get a travel pillow and then I would walk past the store every time. No, I don't need one.

1:46:19 - Leo Laporte
Every time I'd get on a new flight, I was like why did I not get a travel pillow? The sad thing is I end up buying one every trip because I always forget it or lose it, anyway. So panels, which Andy did recommend and is available on the iPad, does have very good organizational capabilities Because, as anybody who reads comics knows, that's part of the fun, isn't it? That's a big thing, right? So it has library organization, intuitive tools for easy navigation. They say it actually looks pretty great. Navigation. They say it actually looks pretty great.

So you could use Calibre, put it on your Dropbox, import it from the Dropbox into your iPad or use iCloud Drive whatever drive you want to use, and that sounds like a good way to do this, and I do remember Andy recommending this. I will ask him on Wednesday, though. Remember, macbreak Weekly is Wednesday this week because of the Google IO conference. Let's see in-app purchases. I wish they would just say how much it's going to be. You know, just tell me how much is it going to be. Don't they say that anywhere. Here it is, it's free to use. You can subscribe for $12 a year. That seems like a good deal. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, I think they might even have a universal price so you don't have to subscribe.

There are others. I see Comic Book Viewer, mangastormcbr, dark Horse Comics, but I do remember Andy saying he liked panels and I. The reviews are very positive for this and it has the collection capability, um, so that's worth, uh, worth it. That's what you want to do. So export it from amazon using calibra, put it you know it's gonna be cbr, I think is the comic book reader form, and you can then import it. Put it in you know it's going to be CBR, I think is the comic book reader form, and you can then import it. Put it on a cloud and import it. Okay, let us know how it works out, okay, okay.

I will do what so, how many comic books? Oh, thousands. And and what is your? What is your preferred flavor? Ooh, preferred flavor.

1:48:29 - Caller
These days there's not that much new content that comes out that I like, but when they reprint the older stuff or reprint All-time, favorite Pick one. Anyone Believe it or not. I'm a fan of the really old stuff the Justice Society, not the Justice League. It's the stuff you grew up with.

1:48:48 - Leo Laporte
I'm a fan of the really old stuff the Justice Society, not the Justice League. There you go. It's the stuff you grew up with. I'm going to guess Absolutely, of course. Yeah, that's the stuff we all love. I love Crazy Cat. He throws a brick. No, I'm just kidding, that was from the 30s. Ignatz threw the brick. Ignatz, you know See.

1:49:11 - Caller
He knows ignats through the brick ignats, you know. See, he knows.

1:49:12 - Mikah Sargent
He knows ignats in the brick and mike is sitting there saying what are these guys talking about? I'm just google searching it, then I'll be really crazy.

1:49:16 - Leo Laporte
That was awesome I grew up, let me think, uh, yeah, it was dc. I was a batman, superman kind of guy and I really liked the dc stuff yeah but then I just showed one of my favorite all time in fact. Uh, amy webb says it's the greatest novel ever written, which is the Watchman, and that is fairly modern yeah. No, I love Watchman. That's great stuff, it's amazing.

Yeah, anyway, there you go. Okay, hey, thanks for the question. You've given me a project. You got a little project. You know I was so impressed with how Calibra worked. I did need to download a copy protection removal extension, but the documentation even tells you what to get or you can Google it and find it. It's very straightforward. It's an extension. You need two extensions. Takes the copy protection off.

I was able to move hundreds of titles in practically no time over to this cobra, uh, cobra, cobo libra. Although they should have called it the cobra. They kind of yeah, I kind of missed the boat, didn't they? Let me go to my, um, my library. I, I now I have to say I foolishly I don't know why I did this put every one of them on the Kobo, but it's got so much space that I basically put 140, it says 143 books on here, every book ever. You know what's cool. Here's a book, for instance Infinite Jest I've been carrying around, weighs about 20 pounds. I've been carrying this sucker around. Now I can just have it in here and pretend to read it and you've gotten to the second page.

1:50:53 - Mikah Sargent
Good for you.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, I've gotten a little farther. And why is the text so big? I better fix that right away. That's ginormous, are you revealing. Ginormous.

1:51:02 - Mikah Sargent
No, I don't read it like that. I don't want to wake lisa up. I it casts less light, right? I heard um steve gibson say that he reads in uh, with a what was it? Black background with a sepia text. What do you what?

1:51:24 - Leo Laporte
I think you want the most contrast you can get.

1:51:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, maybe he said a white background with sepia text, but I know the text was sepia. I thought interesting.

1:51:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm liking this color, Cobra Might as well.

1:51:36 - Mikah Sargent
They should have called it Cobra.

1:51:38 - Leo Laporte
Because you can see the color covers. That's kind of nice, but it's not a great color for comics. It's a little washed out right. This is a French comic book. I don't know why I have a French comic book, but I do.

1:51:55 - Mikah Sargent
I know I was. When I looked at that I thought can he read all that? That's cool.

1:51:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's good practice. Palais de l'Ombrière. I can't understand it, but I can read it. Thank, I can't understand it, but I can read it. Thank you for the call. We appreciate it. Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Take care. Thanks so much You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys that there's Mikah Sargent. Hello that there's Leo.

1:52:18 - Mikah Sargent
Laporte. I don't know why we always go. It's because that there right, that there, that there.

1:52:23 - Leo Laporte
It can't be that here. That here is Leo Laporte would not make a lot of sense. This here, this here. This here is Leo Laporte. So what should I? Can I reach back and stretch my limb, Stretch your arms? In Tai Chi we call this crane drying its wings. Oh, I like that. Okay, I love. Tai Chi is fun because they have crazy fun names for all the moves, like oh, and I was.

1:52:53 - Mikah Sargent
I was just going back through the wheel of time, and one of the things I love is the sword stances. Oh, yeah, and great sword stance. The names they have for them, yes, wild it's. That's very much like traipses through, uh, for through the foreground or something.

1:53:08 - Leo Laporte
It's a mnemonic because it helps you remember it. Uh, this is from claudia. Hi, claudia, she ends it with help, so I guess we better. We'll do our best. I would like to silence an ios message group from midnight to 9 am on weekends. Yeah, me too. I'm able to create a focus on ios that allows me to silence multiple people from midnight to 9 am. This works if the message came from one of them, but if the message came from that same person from the message group, ah, doesn't work. So she can silence individuals in focus, but the group's still doing it. I know I can silence a group by selecting hide alerts from the group, but I want this to happen automatically from midnight to 9 am. So this is the question from Claudia Is there a way to silence messages that come from a group for a specific time range? Mikah Sargent. Ios Today host.

1:54:07 - Mikah Sargent
I am double checking that this is still not a feature and the answer is this is still not a feature. It is a great question and I believe it seems limiting.

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's the thing you'd want to do.

1:54:21 - Mikah Sargent
You should be. It would be nice if you could take a group message and say look, from this time to this time, don't let those group messages come through. I will say just in general you can turn on from 12 to nine, do not disturb. And then those group messages won't come through and you can instead say hey, from 12 to nine, I'm only allowing certain people through. So you have the choice to say in your focus filters you can say I want it so that everybody but these people can talk to me, or the reverse, that only these people can talk to me. So you don't necessarily have to like what I guess.

What I'm trying to argue is that if you don't want to get notifications from a group chat from midnight to nine, because maybe that's when you sleep, it's probably not a good idea to let most messages come through from midnight to nine. Right, you're trying to sleep. So if there are particular people in your life that you want to make sure can still get through during those times, just set that focus filter and say you know, aunt Claudia can talk to me from midnight to nine because she needs to be able to, but you're probably trying to make it so that most people can't get in touch over text that way. So I think it's even though you can't, just because you know, looked in shortcuts to double check and you can't turn off a group message alert specifically, but can't you just turn off all alerts?

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that's what I'm, that's what I'm saying Turn it all off. You should do yeah.

1:55:59 - Mikah Sargent
Because you can turn off all alerts. But you can tell the system I want all alerts off, but my husband, my wife, you know this person or somebody rings twice or someone.

1:56:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, If someone calls twice they get to get through.

1:56:12 - Mikah Sargent
So, yeah, that's what I suggest you do instead, don't don't? I mean, maybe one day that's a feature that Apple will add. In shortcuts they add features all the time, but for now that's probably.

1:56:22 - Leo Laporte
I used to let family members get through, you know emergency. But then my daughter called me in the early wee hours of the morning. She said oh, I thought you'd be silenced. I didn't. So it was like a not for you. I'm not, but now I am okay was it?

1:56:37 - Mikah Sargent
was it as an intention that you would see the missed call? Yeah, and then okay, or?

1:56:41 - Leo Laporte
she'd leave a message.

1:56:42 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, got it yeah, she does that all the time, call. Anyway.

1:56:45 - Leo Laporte
She just called now she knows I'm doing a show but she, I think, I think she figures well. Maybe a, maybe he got fired, and b, if he didn't. I can leave a message.

1:56:55 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know what she's interesting, not a texter. That's interesting, she doesn't like texting.

1:57:01 - Leo Laporte
She says, uh, she'll do it, she doesn't like it. So I saw, I saw the call, I said what's up, you got a problem one more reason not for me to not. She said I wanted to wish him a happy Mother's Day and I thought, well, oh, how nice. Well, here it is. She said oh, I finally memorized Sunday, tuesday, wednesday. Yes, thank you, dear, I love my daughter. You know what your kids you'll never know, but maybe you will, I will. You're going to have kids, yes, good.

1:57:30 - Mikah Sargent
You will know. But I'm going to tell them don't call me, no, I'm just kidding.

1:57:34 - Leo Laporte
You'll do things for your kids you would never do for any other human in the world. Yeah, and that's one of them. John Ashley, you're like a son to me. What should I do now?

1:57:54 - Mikah Sargent
He says son to me. What should?

1:57:55 - Leo Laporte
I do. Now he says, no, no, take it back. I'm gonna pick up on it. I was gonna put you in my will, but I guess not now. Who should we? Who should we? Oh, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Press on, who? Ah?

1:58:11 - Caller
you're on first. You're on my friend. You are, what's your?

1:58:14 - Leo Laporte
first name and where you call it there he is.

1:58:16 - Caller
Oh, there, he is michael stevenson. I'm in bonnie lake most of the time, but now I'm in phoenix. Remember I called I do back when you first started and I took you on a video tour out there of Bonnie Lake Beautiful Bonnie Lake.

1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
You decided it was too cool up there and you wanted some heat. Well, how do you know where I am? You said you're in Phoenix. Oh did I? Yeah, no, I read your mind, I guess Okay.

1:58:47 - Caller
Now that I've complicated my life by having two homes that I go back and forth from you, lucky fella. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I have. So I have remote PC on all my devices so I can go back and forth between the devices. I have Very smart, I can go back and forth between my phone files or if I have software at home that I don't have down here now. I'm a Windows guy okay, so I use that.

But I've had cases down here in Phoenix where, where my routers and or the Cox cable boxes, they go go offline. So I need to. If I was here, I would go unplug them and plug them back in Right, and kind of vice versa. If I'm in, uh, if I'm down here and something's going wrong, you know, with my house internet of things and Bonnie Lake, you know, if the internet goes down I haveo, by the way, it works great uh, I, you know, if I was home I would go unplug and then I would reboot, correct, yes, um, so there are things now that I've never heard you guys ever ever talk about. It's called a automatic rebooter for routers. Oh, keep connect router rebooter. Yes, it monitors your connectivity and resets them. Have you ever bought. So can you buy one of those, leo, and check that out? This is what I do too.

2:00:19 - Mikah Sargent
I say, leo, will you buy one and let me? I have heard of these, I mean I'm trying to remember.

2:00:23 - Leo Laporte
uh, I wonder if uh stacy or somebody had one of these. They're not expensive, they're 50 bucks.

2:00:30 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, I'm looking at some here in the search box of our favorite company based in Seattle, and if you type in router restart plug, that's what I typed in. Yeah, because I didn't do it because I wanted to talk to you guys first, and this was way back last year, because I did not want to complicate it. I didn't want to you guys first, and this was way back last year, because I did not want to complicate it. I didn't want to make things worse. You know, sometimes, sometimes, see, I'm a gadget guy and you don't have to buy gadgets, you know, to complicate your life more because then they put work.

2:01:03 - Leo Laporte
Trust me, trust me, trust me. So I'm looking at the reviews on this. Of course, on their own page, all the reviews are very positive, but Amazon also sells them, and so I'm looking at the reviews. They're 4.4 out of 5. But there are a handful of one-star reviews. Did not work as expected. No interface to plug unless you pay for it. Sounds like everybody is complaining. It's complaining because you have to subscribe of course, yeah, but but but just like.

2:01:40 - Caller
Just like you guys are saying, if we want great service and we want great shows and content like you, we now need to pay. I should, I should buy, you know we need to do that.

2:01:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree, and I don't. I doubt it's very expensive. Now, this is one issue that you should keep in mind. It's 2.4 gigahertz only oh and I'm seeing what I'm seeing one review that says this doesn't work with five gigahertz routers. But yeah, I mean you're going to have, but you've got dual.

2:02:16 - Caller
It's only power. I mean, it's only power, yeah, but in theory it's only power on, power off. But I guess it's hooked into the Internet.

2:02:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so it's my understanding.

2:02:28 - Caller
And then when it's sent. Go ahead yeah go ahead.

2:02:29 - Mikah Sargent
I was just going to say the way that it's supposed to work is it sits there connected to the network and the moment that it loses its wi-fi connection, then it turns off. So as long as you have a dual band router and you connect it to the 2.4 gigahertz portion of your router, this will be fine. This will. This will work.

2:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they uh the. The review that I read said that you need to have different names for 2.4 and 5. Oh, is it one of those?

2:02:55 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I hope that's Okay.

2:02:57 - Caller
The other thing that you're doing, research, the other thing that I've had happen down here in Phoenix, because it's a brand new modern home, and if there's any electricians in the portal or in the chat room, all of the breakers, they all seem to pop occasionally because they're so sensitive that they don't want somebody like me to get electrocuted. You know as I'm trying to do something. Yeah, so they pop all the time. Oh, that's annoying. Well, the ones. It's very annoying because if it pops on something like your refrigerator here in the kitchen, in the main kitchen, it pops, and I'm not here. Guess what? Everything melts, oh, no, right. And also a problem is that your sprinkler system timer box is on a breaker Right and if that pops, guess what? You don't get any water to all your investment plans.

2:03:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, you ought to do what my dad did. You just get yourself a copper penny and you put it across the few. No, I probably shouldn't do that Well well, but.

2:04:07 - Caller
But. But there is a, so, there is a. So. But you're gonna say there is a fix because it was, because it was under warranty. I had the electrician or the company come out on a trouble ticket. Yeah, they shouldn't. And the guy, yeah, no, well, and he says they do, um, and we can't fix them. You know, with the current code, oh wow building code.

So he said so. He said wink, wink, if you'll go to the local big box store and get an old fashioned 20 amp breaker an old fashioned one that doesn't have a pigtail for a GFI or doesn't have any of that, just get an old fashioned one for $8. I'll be happy to put it in for you.

2:04:49 - Caller
Oh, that's nice.

2:04:51 - Caller
But the thing I got was so from Amazon there are power monitors. You know that do the same thing. So you plug it into the same kind of duplex plug that you have your refrigerator on and this box is on. It hooks up to your wi-fi and the minute that the power goes out on that plug, it sends you a text and an email. Nice, and I bought that. Yeah, very nice, I bought it. It works and the brand name is spool s-p-o-o-l and they're on amazon and and it's worked flawlessly, because I hooked it up and tested about 30 different times. Plug it in and then I would unplug it and I would get a text and email.

So if anybody's looking for a flawless go ahead.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
Here's another recommendation. This comes from Leviton. It's the Leviton Load Center. It has optional smart circuit breakers that you can remotely turn on and off from anywhere, so you'd have whole control of your home. Now, yeah, which is great, because sometimes maybe you do want to cut the circuit on stuff. Uh, this would give you full control and, by the way, this would also reboot your router as well as everything else connected to that breaker, but maybe that's. The solution is to put this I'm making my notes now.

2:06:17 - Caller
So, anyway, yeah, so I've been. You know, I've been listening to you guys forever, not not in this mode, but on KFI every Saturday and Sunday, and everything else you did, and so, and I am going to sign up as a P1 or whatever you call it. Yes, Mr. Club Twit yes, yeah, because I don't think you need a studio actually, I don't think we do either.

2:06:42 - Leo Laporte
I think we can get away without it.

2:06:44 - Caller
Yeah, I'm almost like in your studio right now. All right, yeah.

2:06:48 - Caller
Now well, I'm almost like in your studio right now, aren't I?

2:06:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, everything's changed. Remember, I started Twit 19 years ago and everything has changed, and so what we did at the time was basically build a small like a local TV radio station sort of thing, except instead of a tower and a transmitter we had the Internet. But we don't even need to do this anymore. You even see it now on cnn. Nobody comes into the studio anymore. Everybody's sitting at home on their zoom so you watch that um you know.

2:07:17 - Caller
On the nfl draft. I noticed everybody was doing it, they're all in their living room yeah, well, in a four, uh, in a four square, six square on the screen, yeah, and I don't even think that background was their background.

2:07:30 - Caller
Isn't it?

2:07:30 - Caller
amazing. Yes, yeah, no, no, it's. It's actually great, and I'm doing this on a Samsung. Fold four oh, I love that Cause it just sits up over, yeah, well yeah, yeah and and uh, I've got a Cox wireless router because I haven't gone to Aero yet down here. And it's working perfectly. There's no problem.

2:07:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, look, how good you look and sound. I know Well, it's amazing Out of curiosity. I have a question. I'll use your studio, that's right.

2:08:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly, we can use your studio. You mentioned that you've got that great system where, if the breaker trips, well, if the, the refrigerator basically goes out, you get a text. If you're in your other house, what do you do about that? Do you buy a plane ticket and get there before the the steak falls? What do you?

2:08:17 - Caller
do. Well, what people do is they, do they, they? There are people. So see that little box back there.

I don't know if you can see it well, we see you I see your refrigerator yeah, so anyway, up up there is a box. Yeah, it's there, that's in the power with a green light, but no, there are. There are people in these communities who, for five bucks a month, they'll come by and they'll flush toilets and, uh and do and do all that, come in and check and then, um, if you, if you forget to change your address on your ammo on the Amazon deliveries, like it's happened, like, uh, they'll come and put them in the garage and so, uh, um and so, and that's a great service, and so you know where there's a need for things, there's people that'll create little side hustles and you Venmo them and so, yeah, they'll come in and flush toilets and check things out. Yeah, so anyway. So, anyway, thank you guys. Thank you, I've been on your, appreciate it on your zoom, thanks. Thanks for going long. All right before take care.

2:09:36 - Leo Laporte
Okay, seven, three, hey, uh, I like this. I want to put this in my house the smarter energy management. You replace the circuit breakers.

2:09:45 - Mikah Sargent
I am so in your house that I have not seen you get one of these yet. I so you know about this. Yeah, and the reason why is because there's a guy who works at apple in on the home team. Yeah, and he did a whole new install upgrade to his home and this is one of the things that he got these are smart switches, really control their gfi's.

2:10:03 - Leo Laporte
So they will. You know, trip, but you can. You can use your phone to to turn it back on again or test it, and you can see all of your power usage.

2:10:12 - Mikah Sargent
Look at this. It's really neat how it works. Oh, I'm putting this in. Except, what's going to happen is somebody in the house is going to end up being the biggest power consumer. I will know who it is. Yes, I will know. Oh, that's what's taken up the most.

2:10:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is great. This is well. You know, we already have solar, we have batteries. Uh, I think this is uh, yeah, it's a really cool thing. It's leviton, and look at that. You know the evs. They take up a lot of power too, so you can get a notification. This is great. All right, and leviton's a very well-known brand for this stuff. We probably have a Leviton circuit breaker.

2:10:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Leviton's great Box already. They make awesome, awesome. Yeah, the.

2:10:56 - Leo Laporte
Modern Load Center. All right, I will check this out and you can replace those circuits one by one. I'm not going to do it myself. No, god, no, you know the? It's very dangerous, very dangerous. Yes, last night the charging cable from the EV charger got stuck in my wife's car. We couldn't get it out and lock the car Couldn't get it out, it was locked in. So I went and I got a screwdriver. I thought, and I'm going to just stick that screwdriver in the port there where you plug in the power and I could probably release that lever. No, I didn't do that, but I came this close. You thought about it. Oh my god. I thought, yeah, I'm not ready to get toasted yet oh, my word, I would have been hosting TWiT this.

2:11:42 - Mikah Sargent
You would have been, it would have been me uh, yeah, here a little pile of ashes grim.

2:11:47 - Leo Laporte
That's grim, put them here or somewhere. Let's do one more, just one more, one more email call. I got an email. Do you have any video voicemails? No video. Okay, any voicemails. I have voicemails. I'll do a voicemail and I'll do an email. We'll split the difference All right. You start Do this, you just put the screwdriver in and you can. Kind of this is.

2:12:14 - Caller
Ann in Antioch Hi. Ann I have a question about keyboards. What would be the keyboard on the market today? That would be most like using an IBM Selectric typewriter. Right now I'm using a red tactile and I'm making all kinds of a mistake. So I'm thinking maybe, no wait, I'm using a red linear, maybe I should be using a brown tactile.

2:12:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the switches. Can you help me?

2:12:39 - Caller
Yes, I'm an expert typist. I've been, you know, a secretary and I typed 135 or something words a minute. I just can't get accuracy on these. What do you call these? Come with the computers hate those they got some kind of a plastic sheet across them yeah um synthetic, or I can't think of the word. But anyway, can you help me? They're called keyboard. I don't make all these mistakes all the time yeah thank you well it's.

2:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Unfortunately we only have a couple of hours because I could spend literally the rest of the day talking about keyboards.

You too, John Ashley, I know you're into this stuff. So the Selectric look nothing's going to feel like a Selectric. Those are. They feel so good, right?

Ibm, when they first put out computers, used something called a buckling spring keyboard. And you can. You know, I have a Northgate at home, I mean, I have one and they've they're pretty close because they have. They have little springs in the switches. So all keyboards are just switches, right, a bunch of switches, and they have little springs, that kind of give, and that's the clickety clack. And if you go, you know, if you uh go to the airport and you try to get a new ticket, you'll hear those. It feels like they're doing work.

I'll tell you my current personal favorite, for so there's a couple of things that are involved here. One is travel how long you press the key, and modern keyboards have almost no travel. Then Then they also have plastic dome switches underneath them that are soft and mushy. So there's very little travel and there's very little tactile feedback when you hit it. Now you're already into the different switches, and that's good. That means you can replace, you know, a keyboard. I know Benito's also into this, aren't you? You're into good keyboards too, with different switches. Benito and I both have Keycrons right, benito, and so do you, john, and so do you, john, ashley. Okay, the only person who doesn't hear is this guy.

2:14:39 - Caller
I have a Keychron, then I have a keyboard that I bought from a Singaporean company.

2:14:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, but all of us would say Keychron For the budget? Yes, yeah, I mean, they're not cheap, they're not budget, they're a couple hundred bucks. No, the Keychrons are about $100 nowadays. Well, it depends what you get. So one of the things that's good about the Keychron is they're heavy metal bases, so they are rigid surfaces.

You can choose the switches. They have a lot of travel in the keys and if you look at this, this looks like the keyboard. You know, a real keyboard with a lot of movement. You can choose. They have a variety, they have wired, they have wireless. This is a full-size layout. They have smaller layouts depending on what you want, and they have a broad variety of mechanical switches. Now, this is the hard part. Yeah, which one is? How do you know what to switch, what switch to pick? You want the loudest clickiest, most movement possible, probably, right, that's like candy from here. They're very tasty, they taste like yeah, uh, I, I, you know, this is just getting you started. Now they do have, thank goodness, a very good buying guide that will tell you the different layouts. They'll tell you a little bit about the switches. Um, they even have, I think, an audio recording of what the switches sound like, which is not okay.

2:16:05 - Mikah Sargent
That's not going to completely, it's good for people who speak into microphones for a living. It's uh, it's going to sell.

2:16:11 - Leo Laporte
They don't they don't use. They use a newer. A couple couple of companies for the switches gateron and kyle um, but most people who are into keyboards, by the way, the next place you're going to go is reddit r slash keyboards, because then you'll find a whole bunch of people talking about which is which and all of this stuff. Gatoron, I think the gatoron north pole 2.0 gold-plated switch is the very best it's got exhaust, exhaust holes.

2:16:46 - Caller
By the way, it's mechanical, so do I. It's not just keyboards, mechanical.

2:16:50 - Leo Laporte
Yes, oh, good point. Oh, slash our mechanical keyboards, okay, if you do go to reddit, that's, that's the place you want to go. Um, you could just search for keyboards and you'd find it pretty quickly. So, but I, I think we're pretty happy with keychron. There are many, many brands nowadays that specialize in keyboards. The main, I think the main thing, is the keyboards that come with all computers these days are those short travel dome switch, soft touch keyboards. Just don't get that, anything that anybody's offering a mechanical keyboard with long travel keys and switches, you're going to be happy. I use the Browns, I believe. What did she say? She had the blue, the red, red, red. Um, reds are supposed to be pretty clicky. I don't know. I don't know.

2:17:37 - Mikah Sargent
Um I I just know if I get into this and I'm going to get too into it. That's why I have avoided getting into it.

2:17:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, the key prices have gone down quite a bit. Yeah, you can easily, but I have now actually can. Can somebody hand me the key chron I have over here? This has a. This is. These are a little quieter because I didn't want a big loud, you'll burn 50 calories just bringing it over it's heavy and this is a 70 keyboard. I think it's smaller, so it doesn't have a thank you, but you know it doesn't have a number key but you could see, I mean look at that and listen you could hurt somebody with that thing.

I just hurt myself you can hear the clicking in fact you can hear if you listen carefully.

There's a. There's like two clicks. There's the, the switch click and then when it hits bottom, and so you can choose how it feels when it hits bottom, how this is, how loud the switch is. There's a lot of things that you can do. This is a not. I've been very, very happy. You will be as accurate and here comes, as you were with your selectric. What now? Which one is this? The singapore one? No, this is key. It's also a key. People customize what keys are on it.

Uh, they're called macha macha colored keys, and the return key has a picture of mount fuji at sunset.

2:18:54 - Mikah Sargent
So I don't know what kind of crazy person I'm gonna feel. They're very.

2:18:58 - Leo Laporte
These are quiet I don't like these as much.

2:19:01 - Caller
You want quiet it's make sure that I don't make too much noise on type in there's a good, there's good.

2:19:06 - Leo Laporte
Travel on it. See which one you like.

2:19:10 - Caller
Oh yeah, I like the.

2:19:11 - Leo Laporte
I like Clicky, yeah, I like.

2:19:14 - Mikah Sargent
Clicky, not if I'm, but this is a great for on the air. Yeah, yeah.

2:19:17 - Caller
I had bought like a hundred count of those switches and I took out the ones that came in them originally and then put in new ones, and they came pre-lubed so they're even quieter.

2:19:26 - Leo Laporte
He's fallen down the hole.

2:19:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yep pre-lubed so even quieter. He's fallen down the hole. Yep, I don't want to end up like John.

2:19:32 - Leo Laporte
We've lost him, John Ashley.

2:19:38 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, so if I'm not a PC gamer, then maybe it doesn't matter as much.

2:19:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, this isn't for gaming, is it? This is for work. You've got your gaming one at home. This is for work. This is also for work. I really like this keyboard here. Go ahead, you can play with it.

2:19:51 - Mikah Sargent
I'll just sit this in my lap. It's a little heavy.

2:19:54 - Leo Laporte
But you want it heavy because you don't want it slipping and sliding around. I think it needs dusting Well it's probably dusting. Sorry, should I know this I?

2:20:00 - Mikah Sargent
spit a lot.

2:20:01 - Leo Laporte
Okay, never mind Someone this has Bluetooth or wired. You have to decide that too. One of the things that I like about these Bluetooth is they can be tied to three different computers, so there's a little switch. Actually, it's just function key one, two or three and you can switch which computer you're connected to. I like Keychron K-E-Y-C-H-R-O-N. That's probably what I would recommend, but that's just the beginning of your keyboard journey. What I would recommend, uh, but that's just the beginning of your keyboard journey. Good luck, you have a lot, but you're going to be very happy. Get the clickiest, heaviest medalist one you can get. That's what I would say.

2:20:39 - Mikah Sargent
I have a think a q3 I bet you could mod an ibm selectric to be a keyboard. I bet you can totally do that. Who is it? Uh, do there used to be a Twitter account, but I can't remember the name now. Yeah, it's the the person would always that's going to be a lot more expensive.

2:20:55 - Leo Laporte
Make doom run on a selectric. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, you are wonderful. I didn't get to this email, but don't worry, we'll get to it next time. Oh God, don't worry, we'll get to it next time. Oh god, I'm glad we didn't get to this. Ian wants to know how to merge his google workspace email with the free gmail. I'll put that one back on the bottom. Yeah, thank you everybody for being here. We do ask the tech guys. Sundays from two to five east coast time, that's 11 to two our time. Uh, you can watch us do it live on youtube. Youtubecom slash TWiT, slash live. See, I learned nice. I learned from you. I love it.

2:21:32 - Mikah Sargent
I learned things uh, you can teach, never mind, are you?

2:21:37 - Leo Laporte
gonna call me an old dog. You were. You were gonna call me an old dog, that's okay see, I've learned tricks, that's okay, I'm just gonna lie here and fart well, that's because you have exhaust holes.

2:21:49 - Mikah Sargent
How can they reach us? Oh, I don't know. 888-724-2884 is the phone number you could use to communicate with us during the show, but also whenever we're not recording. That's how you leave voicemails, atg@twit.v is the email. Uh, you can send in photo. No, no video, audio or text to ask us questions there. And, as I believe Leo mentioned, call.twit.tv is how you get in touch during the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:22:19 - Leo Laporte
We really appreciate it. Thanks to Mikah Sargent. He'll be back on Tech News Weekly on Thursday, iOS Today on Tuesdays and, of course, here every Sunday. I will be on in just a few minutes with Sam Abuelsamid and our panel for this week in tech. Have a wonderful dare I say it, a great Geek Week. Bye-bye.

2:22:37 - Mikah Sargent
See you next time.