Ask the Tech Guys 2035 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.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte Coming up. It's a visit from the GizWiz. He's going to explain to me why I shouldn't be using sponges and show me a great brush.

00:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And I am Micah Sargent, and we talk to a listener who wants to know about whether a budget NAS is a good idea.

00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then should you use a VPN if you're visiting China? All that's next on Ask the Tech Guys VPN. If you're visiting China, all that's next on Ask the Tech Guys Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:33 - Micah (Caller)
This is Twit.

00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Ask the Tech Guys, with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2035, recorded July 28th 2024, from attic to basement. Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you? It's good to see you, leo.

00:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
LePort here, micah Sargent here.

00:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time to ask the tech guys, that's us Tech guy one, tech guy, two here to answer your questions at 888-724-2884.

01:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is the phone number that you can call while we are live on air and in doing so, you will become a part of the Zoom room. If you are brought up on air, you'll need to hit star six on your headset to unmute yourself, and that will allow you to communicate with us. But that's just one of many ways you can actually get in touch with us. You can also email us atg at twittv to get in touch. You can send text, you can send audio, you can send video or, while we're live on air, you can also head to at wait. What is the URL? Usually I see it on the screen.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, techguylabscom works.

01:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, oh, you mean calltv, calltv yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the zoom, calltwittv.

01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah um, coming up. Dick d bartolo, mad's maddest writer, with some gizmos and gadgets for us. And it's time for a photo review with chris marquart. I did not submit any photos. I feel guilty. I feel guilty if I submit photos.

02:05 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You don't want to outshine the competition?

02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's not that I'll outshine the competition. It's that Chris might feel obligated to mention me, and I don't want that to happen. So I'm just going to Family employees of twittv and their family and friends. There you go. That's all there is to it. We do the show every sunday from 2 to 5 pm east coast time. It's 11 am to 2 pm pacific time, 1800 utc. The reason I mentioned that is you can watch us live now on every possible venue.

02:38
We started with youtube, youtubecom slash twitch live. We're on twitchtv now twitchtv slash twit. We are on xcom. We twit slash live. We're on Twitchtv now Twitchtv slash twit. We are on Xcom. We are on LinkedIn, we are on Facebook and we are on Kik and we are on Discord. If you're in the club Seven streams and just pick the one that speaks to you, I guess. Plus, we have chat in all of those or many of those. Not all of them have. Plus, we have chat in all of those or many of those. Not all of them have chat, but we have chat in those that do and we see that chat in front of us in a special merged chat that only the tech guys have access to. We talked about putting it in the Discord and people got upset and I don't know what the deal is, but at some point I think the merged chat should be visible to all, maybe like a channel.

03:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, a channel, we'll figure it out.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what's the news across the nation? The news across the nation. I guess I have to. I keep forgetting to bring my laptop in, so I have to now look at it on my little teensy, weensy phone.

03:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There was a story from Krebs on security. I saw that. What do you think? Yeah, so basically there are some processes in place that help to make sure that there isn't tomfoolery going on in Google Workspace when you create a Google Workspace account. And so what you would do is you would create a Google Workspace account, say you know would do is you would create a Google Workspace account, say you know, for us here at Twit and someone could come along and create an account and impersonate that domain holder. Who would do that? Crooks, according to Krebs. Krebs calls them crooks.

04:19
Yeah, interesting use there crooks.

04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he doesn't want to use hackers anymore, which I kind of honor that, because a hacker is somebody who messes with computers. Not necessarily evilly Crooks is a good word Bad people.

04:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And so they're bypassing basically the protection, which is that you have to log in first in order to do that. So the email verification process that's required to create that Google Workspace account is what the crooks bypassed. Here's the quote In the last few weeks, we identified a small-scale abuse campaign whereby bad actors there it is circumvented the email verification step in our account creation flow.

04:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem is if you call them bad actors people think of Nicolas Cage, so it's not a good term either. Crooks is good.

05:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
These users could then be used to gain access to third-party applications using sign-in with Google. So if you can imagine, then any site that has sign-in with Google me crook at twittv is able to gain access to that and appear as though I am an employee of Twit, which you are. Oh, that's right, Nevermind.

05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that doesn't quite work, does it? There is a little bit of a. There was a story it's kind of an interesting story, I don't know what to think about it About the AI security being used in Olympics. You watch the Olympics? Did you watch the opening? I no, I'll be honest. Oh, you got to watch them. They're crazy, crazy. Bloomberg Law Olympics AI security stokes backlash over mass surveillance. But if you're going to use AI security anywhere, that seems like a good place where you have millions of people all over the city. You don't know what's going on where. It's one of the most, according to Bloomberg, public and controversial rollouts ever of algorithmic video surveillance.

06:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's a public place, though, right.

06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's illegal. Video cameras around the city watch millions of visitors to detect weapons or people moving against the crowds. That's always a sign that means going the wrong way. Among other things, it could be seen as precursors to an attack. Security personnel will then decide whether to notify authorities, including local and the wrong way. Among other things, that could be seen as precursors to an attack. Security personnel will then decide whether to notify authorities, including local and national police. The french lawmakers call the tool a security measure, of course, aimed at shielding the multi-week event from violence.

06:38
Privacy advocates have sounded alarms. I think it makes sense. Yeah, sometimes I feel like privacy advocates want a perfect world. Yeah, yeah, and in a perfect world, you're right, you could, uh, you could go about your business and no one would know. But when you're in public, especially, uh, of such a vulnerable event as the olympics, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with that. Of course, what they're going to say is well, the problem with ai surveillance is false positives, uh, that it might identify somebody who's just walking home which is against the direction of the crowd, but then this is the thing they hand that over to, that's when the humans get involved humans decide that, uh, as long as here's, I think, as always with ai, the problem is always humans.

07:22
As long as the humans know that the ai is just you know an ai and isn't you know, don't arrest that guy immediately because the ai said so right, use your human judgment, then I don't think you have so much of a problem. Yeah, uh, anyway. So that's um, that's going to be in the news, I imagine.

07:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Imagine, of all places you could use this, the two I would say you have to are Taylor Swift concert and the Olympics that we have seen issues where humans aren't receiving enough training and thereby aren't given enough understanding of what AI is actually doing in these situations, which is where that overreach can sometimes happen.

08:16
An example of this that's on a far less dire scale is that a number of freelance writers were fired because they were writing their pieces and submitting them to these big kind of freelance companies that hire writers for different things, and they were scanned at the company to see if they were written by AI, and the tool was saying 87% human, 23% AI, and what the people who were doing the scanning thought that meant is that 87% of the piece was written by humans and 23% of the piece was written by AI, when in fact, what it was saying is that it's 87% confident that it was written by a human, with 23% confidence that it was written by AI, and that small misunderstanding led to a lot of people several people being fired without any consideration or sort of follow-up with those people, because it was a misunderstanding of the tool.

09:24
So I do think that it is important that, if these tools are being used, that they're being properly trained on what the AI is indicating when it's indicating something, and you know we don't have that behind the scenes. Look at exactly how this is being used, unfortunately.

09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rusty Bone says I wish I could go through one day without hearing that name Taylor Swift. Okay, okay, just calm down, it's going to be okay.

09:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You'll be fine. It's going to be okay. Did Taylor Swift hurt you? I think?

09:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I think he's got a. Maybe he was an old boyfriend, I don't know there was another one.

09:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's probably what it is. The last album was written about Rusty Bones, that song, Iron Oxide all about rusty bones. So the other way that the Olympics are using AI is actually. I talked with Emily Joy Belbis on Tech News Weekly about this. She wrote it up for PCMag. They Google partnered with. Is it NBC that does? Yeahed with NBC the Peacock, the Peacock to do Gemini it's. It's almost like built in integrated advertising, because some of the commentators will be occasionally going to Gemini to ask questions about different things that are going on.

10:49
That's risky, isn't it? Because you could end up with egg on your face. You could absolutely end up with egg on your face, so this could be competitor life history.

10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know he used to be a president of the Czech Republic before he became an Olympian.

11:05 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It could also be what does lane assignment? How does that impact a swim race or something like?

11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that. It's just nonsense. Don't use AI for that.

11:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But they will be, so you should look for Gemini to get mentions, as always the issue is humans, not the AI.

11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's what we do with AI, the value we as, not the AI. I agree, it's what we do with AI, the value we ascribe to the information we get from AI. And this actually was something early AI researchers, people like Timnit Gebru, were worried about was well, it's coming out of a computer, so people are going to give it more authority than they should Like. Oh, it can't be wrong, it's the computer. But I think by now we've learned the computer, even without AI, makes plenty of mistakes. It's not a miss. All right, that's the news across the nation. There's much more. And if you like tech news, well, we have the shows for you, of course, this week at Tech coming up later today, micah's Tech News Weekly every Thursday, and really all of our shows cover tech news. Mac break weekly windows weekly this week in google as security. Now it's all about tech news. But the uh, the kind of the all over tech news show coming up later this afternoon. Uh, the phone number again 888-724-2884. Rush to the phones right now.

12:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Jump to the phones.

12:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right now we're about 30 minutes out from our first of two guests, Dickie D Bartolo. Let me do a little break right now. What do you think, John, or should we do a call first? We have many things to do today and I don't know where to start, I wouldn't mind a break.

12:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'll be honest.

12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know what what that's? Because you are focused on your mental health and you understand that it's important. People you know, they know that they've got a. You know exercise and eat right and stuff. But I think we treat mental health as like some special thing or even a weakness. If you say you know what, I need a nap or I need a break or I want to just take or take a little time out for myself, that's healthy, that's right, that's something you should do and, as we know, more than ever in these modern times, we need a little help from time to time. I'm talking better help. Our sponsor for this segment of Ask the Tech Guys. No shame in asking for help. I think it's a very good thing to do.

13:29
What do you do when you get caught up wishing this seems very common with younger people these days your life looked like someone else's. It wasn't until I got older that I realized I don't want my life to look like someone else's. But what I, and what I tell my kids and I would tell you too, is never judge your insides, because you know what's going on inside you with someone else's outsides. What you're seeing on Instagram is their outsides, and often carefully cultivated. You don't know what's going on inside, so don't get caught up wishing you're like somebody else. Comparison is the thief of joy. It's easy to envy other people's lives. It might look like they have it all together on their Insta, but in reality, they probably don't. They may be in worse shape than you are. Here's the deal. It's really helpful to talk to somebody who's smart about this, who has emotional intelligence, and get their take on it Therapy. They call it therapy, but really it's a trusted partner that can help you focus on what you want instead of what others have, so that you can start living your best life. When I go to my therapist, I feel like it's a chance to get a coaching session where he's going to tell me I'm going to say, does this make sense? I'm thinking this, and he's going to tell me, you know? I'm going to say is this, does this make sense? I'm thinking this, and he's going to tell me, no, that's not, or yes, it is. It's really valuable. It's a mirror, but it's a smart mirror. It's not AI, and that's why I love BetterHelp.

14:57
Betterhelp makes this possible for many people who haven't, in the past, used therapy for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's too expensive, too inconvenient or too embarrassing. It doesn't have to be BetterHelp online, so it's very convenient. You schedule as you want. It's entirely designed to be convenient and flexible. The price is right, suited to your schedule. Here's what happens You're going to go to betterhelpcom slash ATG and fill out a little questionnaire that's just to help you get matched with a licensed it's important, a licensed therapist.

15:35
Anybody can say they're a therapist, but you want to go to trust me, you want to go to a licensed therapist and, oh, this is really important. You're shopping. Don't feel like you'll hurt their feelings if you say you know this isn't a good match. And there is never a charge to switch therapists at BetterHelp. It's a really good idea. And something I always tell people is they're not going to get their feelings hurt. You're shopping for somebody who matches your point of view, who you're going to be able to listen to, who's going to give you the advice, the support, the counseling you need. Stop comparing, start focusing.

16:10
Betterhelpcom slash A-T-G. Go there today. You'll get 10% off your first month. It makes me so sad that people, especially young people, think, oh, I could never do that. You should, you must. It's really great and it's easy and affordable and convenient.

16:28
Now, thanks to BetterHelp, b-e-t-t-e-r-h-e-l-p, betterhelp Helpcom slash A-T-G. I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's really, really valuable, I think. Yeah, every member of my family has a therapist. Everybody I know has a therapist. It's a life coach. You need it. Betterhelpcom slash ATG. Dick DeBartolo should have a therapist, but he's just crazy on his own. So we'll talk to him in about 20 minutes, but let's get some calls or questions in. We have email, we have voicemail and we have calls. What do you want to do? First, john? There's a call, brett. Let's try him. He's got his hand raised. You got your hand up. Let's put you in the Stargate and talk to our first call of the day. Eric says nobody I know has a therapist. Eric, I'm so sorry. Sorry to hear that, but I think it's cultural. I really do and I think you know. We want to fix that. We want to fix that. Hello, press Star 6.

17:44 - Bredt (Caller)
No.

17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Brett. Are you there, Brett? Yes, I'm 6. No, Brett, are you there, Brett? Yes, I'm here. Hi, Brett, Hi welcome. Where are you calling from? Fort Worth Texas, Love it when the West begins.

17:55 - Bredt (Caller)
Yes, that's right.

17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you ever been to Del Frisco's? Yes, I have. How about Billy Bob's, texas? Yes, I have. That's my entire knowledge of Fort Worth. In a nutshell, that's a good combination. That's great. Two of my favorite places in the world to go. They actually have a rodeo inside the bar at Billy Bob's. That's cool. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, that's right. What can we do for you, brett?

18:20 - Bredt (Caller)
So we are traveling to China in the fall.

18:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How exciting it's a vacation yeah.

18:28 - Bredt (Caller)
Mainly for photography and immersing the culture. I've always wanted to go to several of the places there, but anyway. So I needed a new laptop and I needed something lightweight, so I bought myself one of the Yoga Slim 7X. Oh, you got the new one, did you get? Yeah, I got it loaded with the 32 gigabytes and a terabyte, uh hard drive, so it's great it is.

18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is the new copilot plus pc. But paul really loves it. He just did a review of it.

18:56 - Bredt (Caller)
It's the one I kind of drool over, except, except except I've now started loading my software on it and you know, paul reviewed it and he said he noticed that Google Drive didn't work. And I thought, yeah, I use Google Drive but I can work around that. But I get to the point of my VPN. I use ExpressVPN and it won't load because of the ARM64 architecture. We contacted them and the guy I chatted with he couldn't say whether, if or when they're going to do an update and if they do, when it would be. So that's really got me concerned, because that's one of the pieces of software I really need. So I guess I'm looking for options. I mean, first of all, if you guys know any insight about if they're planning an update to.

19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ARM64. Absolutely so. This is, as Paul probably pointed out, a lot of drivers, low-level stuff. The anti-cheat mechanisms in some games don't work yet, because you're making a big shift. You're making a shift from Intel to ARM, and while Microsoft did a really good job with creating a compatibility tool and it works fine with higher-level programs, it doesn't work so well with drivers. Drivers have to be rewritten because they talk directly to the hardware, and so a VPN is a very good example. There may be VPNs that do now work with ARM, but all of them had to be updated, so it's a race between all the VPNpns to see which one's going to work best, uh, or first with arm. I know express vpn are. Who's a sponsor of ours. I know that they are working on an arm version. I don't know when it'll be available. So that's yeah, and you want to use it in china? You may. Actually, I would be nervous about using it in China. Anyway, I should mention that.

21:07 - Bredt (Caller)
Well, you know, one of the contacts I have there said that I do need a VPN because I can't get on Facebook or Instagram or any of the social media.

21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here's my attitude on that Don't yeah, they block those, you know American social sites. That's why you need a VPN to do it. I think my attitude towards this and, by the way, when I was in China in 2009, they were already blocking all these things and I chose not to go around it because I felt like that was hostile to and for the two reasons you might not want to be, you want to be a good guest, but also you don't want to attract attention the chinese communist party and the chinese police. Uh, I would just defer any use of facebook, instagram, twitter, any blocked social networks, till you are outside of china. How long you're going to be there? Three weeks, yeah, that's. You can live without facebook for three weeks, can't you?

22:09 - Bredt (Caller)
well, it's not that I need to. It's part of my photography is to post the pictures.

22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I understand that. So I I used a workaround at the time called posterous, which is gone, but I was able to email pictures to facebook and and they would get posted. They had a or actually it was to my blog. That's one thing you might do is have a personal blog which won't be blocked, um, and post there. Uh, you want to post every day onto Facebook.

22:40
I understand your desire to do that. Um, I think it's it's, think it's both rude and risky. Is my attitude? Not that I think the Chinese Communist Party is good and fine and well and anything like that, but do you want to go into a nation and be a dissident? I wouldn't. I would wait till you leave and then you could speak freely. Um, but you know they block vpns. They uh, block. They've got both. Uh, they got apple to remove all the vpns from the app store there. They don't like vpns because people they don't want their people using ender rounds. Now I was told and I think it's probably still true that as a tourist it's not going to cause problems, because they understand you want to and they're really more concerned about their own people. But at the same time, I feel like you're drawing attention unnecessarily. I would say either create a blog that you can post to that's not blocked, obviously, don't use blogspot. Google isn't, doesn't participate in china, um, and and then, and then I mean yeah that's when are?

23:54
you going good in october?

23:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
yeah see, I don't know if expressvpn will have an update by then somebody in the chat had kind of a good idea you could simulate the, simulate the trip that you've taken. When you get back you just post daily for three weeks. If that's part of the sort of shtick of what you do. You're back and you slowly release those photos. If that's part of kind of your art, the way that you do it.

24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I would. Also, I use a program called Polar Steps. Let me log into my Polar Steps, because it's a really, and I don't know if it's blocked in China, but I would guess not. It's a traveler's diary that automatically logs your location. Let me see if we have posts from China. Yeah, we sure do. That automatically logs your, even from North Korea maybe, logs your trip and then you post photos from it. So this is for our last trip to the Mediterranean. It does a log of each day. It puts a map on the screen. People can log in, you know, go in and see it and you can see and you can write little text that goes along with it. It's quite a nice platform and I don't know. I would have to investigate. But is it legal to use this in China? I would bet it is, and I certainly see some Polar Steps out of China. I think I do. Let's see.

25:29
Now I'm looking at my own stuff. Let's just look at the general activity cloud and see, because this is a. I don't know people, I want everybody. Oh well, this also has some guides to different places, which is really fun. Let me see what it's got in China. Nothing in the great northwest of Canada. No guides here yet, huh, so maybe where am I? Oh, there we are. Oh yeah, they've got some guides. Oh yeah, they've got. They've got some guides. Let's see if they've got Beijing. Maybe not, so I don't know. It might be, might not be blocked, but I I don't know.

26:16
I love this app for a photo diary. You can share it. It's like a social network, so you share it with your friends, share it with other people. Uh, it will also do this completely automatically, so you don't have to do anything to share the pictures or share your trip. You could just do it automatically. This is called Polar Steps and it's a really fun little app that may be just as a short stop until you get home. Let's see. It looks like there are people, maybe not. Maybe it is blocked in china. You know, maybe it is blocked in china. I can't tell. Oh, that's china. Oh, maybe these are my steps. Oh, that's what it is. This is when I was in china. I didn't post any pictures. Um, the GPS will for sure work. The pictures may. I think it will work, they'll upload. I just feel like I wouldn't try too hard to bypass their restrictions. Are you going with a tour group or are you going on your own?

27:26
I'm going solo just I'd hate to dig in and yeah, I mean you're gonna have a look at. The people are amazing, the culture is amazing, the history is in. Is the longest history at anywhere else in the world? Exactly, it's an amazing, amazing place. What cities are you?

27:45 - Bredt (Caller)
going to Flying into Beijing, then going to Xi'an and then down to Zhangjiajie Guilin and then out through Singapore. Wonderful.

27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're going to love the food by the way, guilin has incredible dumplings. Of course, you're going to see the terracotta warriors in Xi'an. It's a trip of a lifetime. I would not try to get around the restrictions of the local authorities at that point. I would wait until you get home. Try something like Polar Steps.

28:17
There are a number of really good travel diary apps that you can use. Put the pictures there. The nice thing is now they're all in order, you're writing your notes and when you get home, you've got all that information. You can, three weeks later, you can post it on instagram and facebook. How about that? Okay, fair enough, I will check. I will call expressvpn on monday and ask them what their plans are.

28:40
Uh, everybody knows. You know fortnight doesn't work on uh on uh arm either. Everybody knows, and that's because of the anti-cheats. Everybody knows you know fortnite doesn't work on uh on uh arm either. Everybody knows, and that's because of the anti-cheats. Everybody knows that there are these small issues, but they'll all get fixed. I believe that's just minor. This is the future of windows. In fact, I I just ordered uh. I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping it would come this week, but it's not going to come till august. Now the uh developer version of that from fromcomm, the Snapdragon X Elite. Very similar to what you have on your Lenovo, but it's a NUC and I can't wait to play with that. It's going to be a lot of fun.

29:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Someone did suggest quickly, if you have hot spot on your phone, you could turn on the VPN on your phone and tether your Lenovo Yoga Elite to it. If you decide to go the breaking the law route.

29:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't Remember. You're a guest in their country and this is their policy.

29:32 - Bredt (Caller)
No, you're right, Leo. You know the guy that I spoke with was, you know he's a, he's a citizen there and he, the way he talked about it, was well, for me it would be, for him it would be no, no, but you know you're a, you're a tourist, you know, and every all the tourists have that on their devices.

29:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so yeah, that may be the case. I I don't have recent experience so I don't know but fair enough.

29:58
Yeah, I understand yeah, I certainly wouldn't want to take a chance. You don't want to get stuck there, that's true. Right, you want to come back with those pictures? That's right Now. Remember this was 2009,. So this was 15 years ago. But I experienced nothing but friendliness and positive. We got in line in Beijing to see Chairman Mao's tomb. It was a long line, it was. The only thing that took a little cultural getting used to was that they don't the Chinese don't really believe in queuing, you know, and so we're standing in the line and people are pushing by us and because they just don't, it's not culture, different culture Brits queue, chinese do not. So just be aware of it and keep moving, you'll get in there. Uh, it was really funny.

30:51 - Bredt (Caller)
Good, I you know I've got a smug mug. Uh site put it on smug mug, perfect, yeah, and then I can just send link, a link out and uh have, maybe have my wife posted on all my pictures of China are on SmugMug still and they're public.

31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, leocamera, if you want to go see those. Yeah, if you have SmugMug, you're a serious photographer. What's your gear? What are you going to bring?

31:15 - Bredt (Caller)
I've got a Nikon Z8. Nice yes.

31:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And several lenses. We've talked before, I think yes.

31:23 - Bredt (Caller)
Well, I went on the cruise. Oh, I know you.

31:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You took all those great. I still have your bear salmon picture in my office.

31:32 - Bredt (Caller)
Oh, I know who you are. You're a great photographer. You're more than.

31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is no amateur. This is a really talented photographer, thank you. And you had the Z8 then. They were beautiful shots.

31:47 - Bredt (Caller)
Actually actually had a z9 and okay, they can't. The z8 is everything that z9 is, but smaller, small, yeah, yeah, and so I I, for the type of travel photography I do, very nice to get a smaller camera yeah, a little small.

32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you're not going to bring those long lenses you had in Alaska, I hope no. No, that would also mark you as somebody that maybe should get extra attention. You want to be discreet a little bit, I think.

32:14 - Bredt (Caller)
If it doesn't fit in my backpack, which all that probably wouldn't.

32:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We went to the Forbidden Palace and all that stuff and and took pictures everywhere there was. You know there were as many chinese tourists because they come from all over the country to beijing and xi'an to see these things. Uh, everybody's very friendly. You're gonna have the best food you've ever had in your life. My son still I took my son, I see still says I'll never forget that it's the best food ever. Um, it's just gonna be so much fun for you. Have a great trip. Thank you very much. Our pleasure. Yes, I should get his bear picture. It's a beautiful picture of a bear and salmon in Alaska that he took on our twit cruise. I thought he sounded familiar. Dick D Bartolo is coming up in just a little bit. Let's do one email. Wait a minute, they put them in the back of the mailbox.

33:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wow, that's impressive. Get a little feisty.

33:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't mess with the mailbox. Ok, here we go. Hey, baba Louie, sorry, sorry. Synology now asks for backing up iPhone photos. Sasha wants to know she's an orange. Love the show, Leanne Micah. I've been listening to Leo since his first day on KFI. That was back in 2004. Oh, it's a he.

33:42
My wife and I have an Apple. Actually, I don't know if it's a he. Sasha could be either. Right? Yeah, my wife and I have an Apple One subscription with two terabytes of storage. Me too, me too, everybody. Yeah, most of our recent photos are there. A couple of years ago I backed up my wife's old white MacBook photos to Google Photos. Google Photos has also been backing up her iPhone photos. I like that belt and suspenders. I still need to get the MacBook photos into the cloud the iCloud. I think I can figure that out. Here's my dilemma. I don't see a reason for paying yearly for both iCloud and Google One Storage to back up our photos. As our photo library gets bigger, it's going to get costlier. So I was thinking keep the Apple subscription and get a Synology NAS. Not going to save you a lot of money Up front?

34:27
the NAS- is going to cost you a thousand bucks or more, because you got to get the box and all the hard drives. But it's local. That's what I do. It's a local backup, it's nice. What's the benefit of two bay versus four bay? Two gigs of RAM versus four gigs? What do you recommend for just backing up photos? So, uh, I think you want more drives, not not fewer drives.

34:47
If you have two bay, you don't have as many choices of raid as you do if you have four bay or five bay. I have a five bay synology. The advantage of that is a drive can die, two drives can die with five bays if you set it this way and and you could still put a new drive and it'll rebuild the RAID and you haven't lost anything. So for like really serious backup, that's nice. Ram is less important. You can add a little. It depends on which one you get, but you can add RAM on some of them and you can add storage, cache storage, fast SSD cache storage on some of them. The difference in levels of Synology is the amount of RAM, the amount of storage, but also, more importantly, the processor. If you're just storing photos, don't worry about it. The problem is, as you use your Synology, you might start to say oh, you know what I'd really like to do. I'd like to put all my movies on there and watch them everywhere in the house using Plex, and suddenly you wish you had a better processor.

35:51 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Absolutely.

35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and I just did this. You might want to install Home Assistant on it, right, and have it run the whole house and turn things on and off. Oh, now you need a better processor. So you're right, for photos is not very demanding, as long as that's all you ever do. Don't worry about the amount of ram or even the processor speed.

36:09
Synology has a bunch of ios apps. Some have terrible reviews. Yeah, don't use their apps. Ds file, ds photos I don't want to launch you photos. One has five, four, five, five stars.

36:18
Do not, I would say, use any of their apps. One of the reasons they get downrated is they. They change them and they cancel some, and you know the photos app was memories. They went through a whole bunch of stuff. Don't do any of that. Just use it for backup, and for that you can just use Synology Drive, which is your backup app. Or I use Sync Thing, which I run on the Synology and I run on all my machines and it synchronizes to the Synology from every machine I have. I don't have to, it's completely automatic. I don't have to think about it. I would not use their apps.

36:49
By the way, if you start using their apps now, you do want more processor because they're going to do things like face recognition. They do that on the drive. So if you want the capabilities of Apple's photos or Google Photos, you know they have apps to kind of duplicate those capabilities. They're not as good and they use processor on the Synology. So now you need a better Synology. I'd stay away from the apps. Just use it for backup. That's all you really want it for. You're using Apple Photos for all of that other stuff, the face recognition and all that stuff and there are third-party apps. People are making good stuff.

37:26
The Synology is definitely the way to go for a network attached storage and for people who say what are you talking about? We're talking about a big it looks like a big USB hard drive. It has one difference it goes on the network and is visible from all the machines on the network. You can even make it visible on the public network and that way you now have kind of a centralized backup system. It's basically a computer without a keyboard, mouse and monitor. That's the synology, nas.

37:52
I hope that helps, sasha, and I sorry if I misgendered you. Uh, all right, it has become noon o'clock. It has become noon. It has become noon o'clock, which means it has become time for dick di bartolo. Right after we take this breath of fresh air, you're watching as the tech guys micah sergeant and leo laporte time for dickie d hello. Dick di bartolo, mad magazine's maddest Mattest Writer and our GizWiz. How are you, dick? I'm good. How are you? I'm great, great. Every month we talk to Dick. Of course, he does a weekly show with Chad Johnson at gizwiztv. His website is gizwizbiz because he's our gizmo lizard In two weeks, GizWiz 2000.

38:44 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, I have to record something.

38:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got your email. I'm sorry. You know what? Mike and I will record something right after the show for you.

38:52 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
That'll be perfect. And also, you were mentioning napping earlier.

38:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

38:59 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
I do something. It's hard to do but I do it. It's called double napping.

39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You take two naps at the same time.

39:06 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Well, yes, you do this after you go to bed. Yeah, during your sleep, you take a nap. You take a nap. I wish, I wish I could. Oh man, I'd love that. It's hard to do and also sometimes the dreams people from one dream get into the other.

39:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's so confusing. Yeah, I don't do it that much yeah oh I would love to advance technique. Lisa and I use a napping program called paziz. Did we ever tell you about paziz? B-z-i-z-z. You use it, john, it was on the GizWiz. We talked about it. So Dick just doesn't remember, maybe because he's sleeping so much I was sleeping during that. But it's a wonderful little sleep and I always know when Lisa's doing a pizziz, because I hear now close your eyes.

40:03 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
It plays music.

40:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it gives you uh, affirmations while you're sleeping, and then it's, it's. You could set the alarm for 20 minutes or 30 minutes so you don't sleep too much, because the worst thing about the nap is to take a five hour nap. You know, just kind of yeah then it's a.

40:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Five hours is not a nap.

40:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I call that nap roulette, where you just go to sleep, you don't set an see how long you'll sleep for and unfortunately, sometimes I wake up and it's the next day. Dick, do you have a gizmo or a gadget? I?

40:33 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
have two, I have one. That's over $1,000. Okay, there is. There is an event in the city every summer called Sweet Sweet. It's a toy event and there is a company. Years ago we did one of their robots, Robotson. Oh, yeah, yeah yeah, not to be confused with.

40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robitussin, you wouldn't take Robotson for a cough.

40:56 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
No, no, robotson has this new transformer. I sent a little bit of video there that you might see.

41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, john has it, let's see it. Oh, okay, it's Super Megatron. You didn't mention, it's a transformer.

41:11 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, yeah, so this guy, maybe John, can just go to the transformation when he goes from a tank to I think it's about at one. Right, there is good.

41:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am Megatron and I am a tank, just go back a touch Go back so he can turn back into a tank.

41:33 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
He will do that. So he has 36 servo motors, oh wow.

41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is going to cost a lot of money, holy cow.

41:45 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Leo at the toy show. The guy said here, hold it, it's about 14 pounds, wow, wow. It is unbelievably interesting and good looking. Yeah, this is for you know, this is not for kids.

42:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well it is, though, but I guess there are adults now who like Transformers.

42:07 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, it's big, oh, and I love the programming. You can either program it through your computer or your phone, or you can just take him, put him in different poses and then he'll learn to do that. He's got a giant mace. There he goes, here he goes, whoa.

42:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's turning into a tank. Folding in, so I'm putting this on my front door, that's so cool. And when somebody rings the doorbell, I'm going to have it open up and turn into Megatron and it'll say you rang Wow.

42:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is pretty cool.

42:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is every kid's dream toy. How much? Yeah, $1,000.

42:43 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
A little more $1,199. Okay, who is this for?

42:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not for us, not for us. It's for kids who never grew up, or no, adults who never grew up.

42:55 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
It's for adults who never Exactly, exactly.

42:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because they're smart, because Transformers now, the people who grew up with Transformers are adults. Look at this. Now it's the people who grew up with transformers are adults.

43:09 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
look at this, this is so cool, it's all so big, it's like two. It's a foot tall, foot and a half. Oh yeah, wow, and the original guy, he's just a thousand bucks, that's the guy.

43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, he's taller than you, isn't he just a bit the top?

43:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
of your hat transforming to him just a bit.

43:27 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Yeah, that's the, that's the nine, this is the six, six hundred and ninety nine dollar guy and you just talk to him and he does things. He turns into a truck yeah exactly, that's exactly exactly the truck on the front.

43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, you know it's about time somebody said oh, screw the cost, we're going to make a child's toy.

43:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
An actual Transformer.

43:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is perfect. That is everything you ever wanted, and too bad if you can't afford it Because we're going to make it. That's kind of apt.

43:58 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, just watch this, just watch this.

43:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's turning into a dinosaur.

44:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Ah, turning into a dinosaur, that's super cool. See, that is cool Because that's what they looked like in the show when they transformed, and so getting to actually see it in real life is pretty neat. Yeah, they just went all out. That's pretty cool.

44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robitussin is the name of the company.

44:16 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
No RoboSend I wish them the best. Robosendcom Dot com. Now I have something at the other end of the spectrum.

44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is for, by the way, the same parents who will buy their kids a miniature Porsche to drive around the living room Same people.

44:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, you can get it for $100 a month for 12 months as well.

44:33 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
They're not buying this on installment, then you'll never miss it, you'll never miss the money. Wow, all right. I have a little guy here that is the three-in-one brush. Okay, for some reason he looks like an alligator, okay, oh, but you have this kind of a brush, which was great. I have a Conair hair cutter and I could never get the hairs out from under the blades, and in the instructions book it said just remove the two screws to clean under the blades. They don't tell you the blades are spring loaded, yeah it's a nightmare to undo right.

45:18
And when you've done that, Michael, when the second screw lets go, everything goes. The hair is gone, yeah.

45:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The hair is gone, but so is the spring.

45:30 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
So is the spring and several pieces. Anyway, this was good for cleaning that out. I did this on Gizwit. Someone in the chat room said this little guy is great for cleaning under your nails. The little brush is for the thermos, the threads in the thermos. Now this, it's the Swiss.

45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Army brush.

45:51 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Yes, three of them for five bucks on Amazon.

45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a lip brush? The one that's the alligator? What do you do with it? This?

46:01 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
is also for cleaning. Sticking in the side of a can where you can't get anything out. You can slide it down the ridge and then clean. This is like for a thermos.

46:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The screw, yeah, the screw. Ridges, oh yeah, yes, you know that always has grunge in it yeah.

46:19 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Right. So if you can't afford the robot, then this transformer is great.

46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I must be something wrong with my housekeeping, I've never felt the need to have a variety of brushes.

46:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Really, is that because someone else has a variety of brushes for you?

46:35 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Maybe that's, and he wonders why people in the studio are saying thank God he's moving into it.

46:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just use a sponge for everything. Oh, I don't use sponges. You don't use sponges at all. No sponges, gross me out, because they hold bacteria. Yeah.

46:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I use brushes.

46:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do brushes not?

46:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
hold bacteria Not as much, okay, not as much. Can you microwave a brush? You can't.

46:57 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Okay, I guess you can microwave a sponge.

46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do frequently.

47:00 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
That's good. Oh, that's good. That's good to know. Yeah.

47:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I wouldn't do it for an hour. Two minutes is plenty, just get it steamy.

47:12 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Yeah, I did that once. And then someone said you know that sponge cake that you were making in the microwave. Didn't taste very good Terrible texture.

47:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's cool. Okay, so that's $5 on Amazon. It's just like. For three of them. For three of them, yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I need some brushes, maybe. So I have a long, thin brush for brushing.

47:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I love a good straw brush.

47:38 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Straw brush oh yeah, we'll save that. Of course, this is not good for that, okay.

47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, gracious one on our YouTube says you know, bacteria is on everything. It's true, it's true. It's true, it's everywhere. You couldn't live without bacteria. Sorry, best not to think of it Is that it, dick? Yeah, two things. I mean, I don't want to be ungrateful, not a bad that's.

48:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
More than enough. No, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, that's plenty yeah.

48:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I do think we should tell people about the what the heck?

48:10 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
is it?

48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
contest we're playing for Mad Magazine. I'm reaching back here to see if I can. There it is. We're playing for this Mad Magazine.

48:22 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Look it is we're playing for this mad magazine. Look, I even have it autographed, which is nice you'll be playing for the next issue, which is out in about 10 days.

48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, the summer bummer issue is already. That was the august issue. In 10 days we'll get the new one. And and what is a picture of? Do you know? I know what it is, don't you do? Yes, don't say it out loud, because there are six mad magazines autographed for the right answer. Of course there's 12 for the wrong. Yeah, I don't actually know what it is you do? Yes, don't say it out loud, because there are six Mad Magazine's autographs for the right answer. Of course there's 12 for the wrong answer.

48:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I don't actually know what it is. If we show it on screen, then I will say what I think it is.

48:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have my laptop with me, so normally I would have this up and showing it, but John's scrambling right now. He also has a video he wants to show right now. He also has a video he wants to show.

49:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There we go, gizwizbiz, click that red button that says what the heck is that? So this is obviously, obviously a stamp for the jack ona playing card. You know that they have that hat oh, you know what?

49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's very good yeah so they just stamp it on the black and they put it on the playing card jack thank you that is an excellent either that, or it's a thing you put in your closet to hold all your brushes. That's my brush brush hook. Uh, anyway, both those answers could garner you a sign. Yeah, magazine that that the 12 funniest, best wrong answers are winners as well. And we we have to the end of August Of the next month.

49:44 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
So get on over there. You know, lee, I was watching you and Lisa yesterday and it dawned on me, were you using binoculars? Yes, okay, when you and I started, you were in the attic doing the show.

49:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've gone from the attic to the attic Wow, but I call this one my retirement attic.

50:04 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, okay, okay, Okay.

50:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you're right, it's actually a little nicer than the attic I started with. But the attic I started with did have a sink in it.

50:14 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, and a tub. I remember you saying that.

50:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a tub. There was a full bathroom on the other side. Anyway, this one does not no sink, but it is a little more roomy. And, yeah, we're going to be closing the studio in a little more than two weeks, I think. So this is kind of the beginning of the end. I'm going to have to take my entire collection. I've already moved my copies of Good Days and Mad, your book about Mad Magazine. Oh, thank you for doing that. Those are already in the new studio. Oh, I wouldn't lose those, and I have a complete collection of autographed Mad Magazines as well to be saved. Yeah, so it is kind of the beginning of the end, dick, but I will see you up in the attic.

50:58 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, no, absolutely.

50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bring your brushes.

51:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Up on the rooftop, dickie calls, and don't forget that video so you can be part of show 2000.

51:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh, we got to do that. Yes, congratulations, gizwiz TV, the 2000th GizWiz episode. Great work, unbelievable. How many a week. You do one a week. Yeah, many, you do one a week yeah, we do one a week.

51:23 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
You and I was doing one, one a day.

51:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to do one a day, two years, yeah, so that's why you got so many. How?

51:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
did you ever have enough content to do that? It was incredible.

51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do five in a row at one oh you know. I can prove that here. There we are. Oh my gosh, look at you, dick Torn. This is on BitGravity. Look at those headphones. What episode is this? 981 through 985. Do you have the Colleen reel? Is that what?

51:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
that is.

51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was still only streamed video.

51:59 - Sasha (Caller)
The produced version was still audio only that's right.

52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this the reason there's videos. We put this on big gravity so people could watch as we were doing it, but we were already almost a thousand episodes in when we did this. That's kind of remarkable. Look how young. Look how young we both look. Oh, my gosh yeah, let's watch this little segment here, okay it was really cute.

52:23 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
It's so cute because colleen had never built.

52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's brilliant, uh, technology person, but she never built studios before. So initially I think she perhaps was unclear on some of the concept involved in the recording facility. But she's quickly, she's learned very quickly.

52:38 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Yeah, yes she's gone on. Oh so let me. So you're looking at the resume and you go, so let me get this straight you never built a television studio before and yet you applied for this job. That's exactly right.

52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And not only that, I gave it to her without any really interview at all. I just said come in, you're hired, get to work.

52:55 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Oh, I would have asked to see two or three studios. You already built.

52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was very lucky, let's put it that way.

53:01 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
I lucked out.

53:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As with pretty much everybody I've hired here, except for Jammer B, he's terrible. Yeah, oh, that's why you wanted to play it Now I know. Oh, oh, oh, that's how long John has been working for us. John is retiring with the closing of the studio. He's going to move up to the pacific northwest and become a. Uh, I think he's going to be on the deadliest catch as you become a congratulations.

53:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I look forward to watching you. Coincidentally, today marks five years of me being here at twitch.

53:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No no, no, my friend, that five years went by like that. I know Just Holy cow. Yeah, oh, I'm so sorry If I had known that. I would have brought a cake or something.

53:49 - Bredt (Caller)
A cake I couldn't eat. Oh, I didn't even know.

53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I would have brought something loaded with carbs so I could eat it and gluten and gluten no, I yeah very exciting, dick. You and I've been doing the show together for almost 20 years.

54:05 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Well, if you include the screensavers, yeah, almost 30 years yeah, a long time, 25 years.

54:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, yeah, amazing you're. You're a dear friend and I love you dearly and you and dennis are part of the family, and we're just so thrilled we could do this. Everybody go to gizwiztv and watch the 2000th episode of the Gizwiz.

54:27 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
On.

54:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
August 8th. On August 8th and congratulations. Yeah, Thank you.

54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, Dickie D.

54:32
Okay, buddy, take care Bye-bye, Take care, bye gizwizbiz is the website, and I am hoping that dick will come up into the attic not in person, although he could if he's out here but, uh, but, but come on and do. The whole idea of closing the studio is not a negative, right? I think people think, oh, it's kind of the end of the line and I'm joking around when I say it's my retirement attic and all that, but what it really is is trying to rethink what we're doing. If we don't need advertisers and with your help as members of club twit, we won't uh, then we don't have to do shows.

55:11
I think we'll always do shows, both because we seem to still have advertisers, but also because that makes it easy for you, on a commute or whatever, to listen to a show about Macs or Windows or Twitter or iOS today. But I think that more and more, I feel like the strength of what we have here is the community, is a group of people like Dick, like you, like our wonderful viewers, like Rusty Bones, viewers like rusty bones, uh, that we can make something that is a little more amorphous, less of a discreet show and more of a just hey, let's turn it on and have some fun, and I hope Dick will be a part of that too, cause that would be a lot of fun where he just kind of comes on and I say what you been up to, I'm doing, episode 3000.

55:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And here's some weird quirky thing I found that you should check out.

56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We started in a way. We started that way, Although at the time it was really about shows. That's all I knew was. You know, shows have beginning, middles and ends. I don't want to have a beginning, middle and end. I just want to kind of like we did yesterday with Lisa and I we just turn on the cameras and we talk and then, you know, I guess it's still a show, but I want it to be more, uh, more a community meeting, a get together, kind of like what alex lindsey does with office hours. You're watching.

56:26
Ask the tech guys. I guess I should at this point say if you would like to join the club. It would really help us towards this goal. It's just seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You still get the shows. You also get access the Discord, which is where all of this is going to be happening. You get special events. You get all the live streams Seven bucks a month, and it really helps us a lot in our attempt to break free of the boundaries of broadcast television into something different of broadcast television, into something different.

57:00
Twittv, slash club, twit. We would love to have you. Shall we do. What should we do now, john, you want to do another call? I should do another email. I got a whole stack here. Let's do an email real quick, because I do have this stack of emails and I would like to get through them all. This one is from Dieter Dieter. Hello Dieter Dieter. Hello Leo and Micah from the beautiful Colorado Springs. Ah, long time listener, first time emailer. Thank you for such a great show, dieter. Thank you, aw, that's very sweet.

57:37
You've spoken a few times about running parallels and how well the Apple M series processors run Windows. I know, however, that it won't run everything a PC. Could some high-end simulators and games, for instance Take a few minutes to discuss what the limitations are and how we can determine if a piece of Windows-based software will or will not run on Parallels without having to buy it and try it? Maybe limit it to the M3 if it gets complicated? No, it's not about the processor. It's kind of similar to that call we had earlier where the guy had the new Windows running on Snapdragon laptop.

58:06
When you run Windows in Parallels and, by the way, you could do it in other emulators as well now, but Parallels was the first You're running Windows on ARM. You don't run an emulated version of Intel Windows. You run that version of Windows that is designed for ARM processors. That way it isn't such a heavy lift. It's one of the reasons why, john, you have your hand raised. Ah, look, the same family. In fact, they fact, they're trying basically they're trying to make an m series processor.

59:02
That's so what you're saying is it's going to become more likely that applications will be able to run yes, in parallels and this, exactly the stuff that does not run on the copilot plus pcs, will not run on windows, on arm, on mac. So Fortnite, expressvpn, you know all the driver level stuff. Actually it might run better, believe it or not on Parallels, because Parallels does some emulation stuff, especially with low level hardware. But I suspect it's going to be a very similar set of applications and, just as you say, it's going to get better.

59:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, so it's probably sounds like what a person would need to do is look at whatever software they're going to get and if it says it runs Windows on ARM, or if it says something, if it mentions ARM architecture, then it is more than likely that it will run on the Mac in Parallels or some other emulator.

59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly.

59:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If it doesn't say that there could be a chance, but it's far less likely.

01:00:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so it wouldn't be worth trying In the early days some of the Microsoft apps, like the calculator, wouldn't run, like Microsoft hadn't gotten all of its stuff working well in Windows Unarmed. But now they have a very good Intel emulator in Windows Unarmed. That's the Windows you're running on the Mac. I would say it's very comparable on the Mac. I would say it's very comparable, not in speed necessarily because, remember, you're still not running on direct hardware, you're running on a kind of an intermediary, but it's pretty close. Actually, honestly, it ran better until these new Copilot Plus PCs and the new Qualcoms came out. It ran better on a Mac than it would run on a Windows machine. So I would say that it would run on a Windows machine. So I would say, while there's no easy way to know if it'll run there probably somebody has a database somewhere of what'll run and what won't run I would say it's now. It's almost fully compatible with Windows, except for that very low level stuff like VPNs.

01:00:57
I'm extremely happy with it. I left my laptop at home. I have an M3 and I left it at home. I'm extremely happy with it. I I left my laptop at home. I have an M3, uh, and I left it at home, but I have windows running on it and it's my windows machine. It works perfectly. Yeah, yeah.

01:01:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Have you come across any software that you haven't been able to use with it? No, nothing. Yeah, you haven't run into any limitations yet.

01:01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but I haven't tried to run Fortnite or VPN, but but uh, I would say most of the stuff that you're running is going to work just fine. There's a question?

01:01:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you are, because, okay, so the Mac is the hardware and the Mac has a card in it. Yeah, and you are running ExpressVPN on your Mac side of things when you're emulating. Oh, that'll work fine. I wonder if that's still going to be going through the VPN.

01:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Because technically it's pulling from the other Mac. Yeah, the network connection is still protected by the VPN. It doesn't go around it. So, yeah, I think if you want a Mac and you want to run an Apple Silicon Mac which you shouldn't get an Intel Mac at this point you might say but there's no boot camp. That was the nice thing about the Intel Macs. You might say but there's no boot camp. That was the nice thing about the Intel Max is you could run Windows Direct on the machine. In boot camp. You can't do that anymore. You have to run it in emulation. But when you're emulating on the same processor architecture, there's not such a penalty. So I think it's quite a good way to run. Now, if you want a game it is the case you should probably get a Windows machine. If you want a game or a Linux machine now with Proton is pretty accurate, pretty compatible or just get an Xbox or a PlayStation 5. Yeah, that works too.

01:02:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Is your gaming machine in your?

01:02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
attic? Yes, it is, and I was playing Valheim just the other night, very happily in Linux. John, let's take a call. I see a couple of people there in our lobby at our calltwittv Zoom. We also have a phone line open for you at 888-724-2884.

01:02:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Welcome back, Jim.

01:02:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, can you hear me? I hear you great. How are you? Our sound guy from the Hollywood Hills.

01:03:05 - Jim (Caller)
Yes, thanks for taking it. I've been trying to get through for a couple of weeks. I sent you some emails. I figured you're just busy with the move.

01:03:14
I have a strange monster of a problem. No matter how many times I kill it, it keeps coming back. Oh, uh, several weeks ago I tried to open the word file of my book. All I got was the little blue uh whirligig for a second and then nothing. Uh-oh uh. I tried it on a smaller file. Same problem.

01:03:36
Now I'm used to having this if I do a system restore, a lot of my apps stop working. I have to go into settings, installed apps and they've got the reset repair and that fixes them. Well, word isn't quite like that. It had an offline quickie and an online download and reinstall. Neither of them worked. I then looked online for various fixes. Nothing of those worked.

01:04:07
Somebody said it could be a recent update. So I went back, uninstalled the most recent update and it opened fine. Oh, interesting, yeah. Then I tried to use it and although the small files ran fine, the big file wouldn't even scroll without stalling. At that point I was pretty frustrated. It was late. I shut off the computer and the next day when I opened the computer out of curiosity. I tried it and was back to working normally. So I said, okay, it was the problem with the update. I turned off the, I postponed all the updates so it wouldn't reinstall, was going along very happily and then one day I tried to open and it froze again and I said, oh well, it can't be obviously the update. Uh, but remembering what happened last time, I simply restarted the computer and then it worked and so went along fine for a while and, uh, then it froze up on me again I just think you've gotten your book too big at this point to really use oh no, these, these are any word.

01:05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, any files at all, anywhere, anywhere. It's not just the big file doesn't.

01:05:32 - Jim (Caller)
No, it doesn't matter if it's just a doc, a doc x, a doc m, it's the word program. I know now why you don't like Windows.

01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I really don't like Word, yeah exactly, although you have to use it For most publishers. That's the way. Even my books, I had to write them in Word. I usually would write them in some other thing and then put them in Word. But I'm wondering if it sounds like it's weird that it comes and goes. Yeah, that's the, but it sounds like there is something corrupted. You know, word loads a bunch of things as it starts up, including a normal template file, right?

01:06:10 - Jim (Caller)
Now remember I have completely uninstalled and reinstalled a brand-new copy of Word.

01:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but that wouldn't necessarily delete the cache. Ah, okay, so that, just that does fix the program. But the program is saving, is storing other stuff, including various template files and things. I feel, like some of those, it's weird that it comes and goes. I mean, obviously it should only break or not break. It shouldn't, it shouldn't. An intermittent problem is the worst kind because you can't say well, what's causing it. I don't know. Yeah, I.

01:06:52 - Jim (Caller)
I thought that I had found another solution for it. I had just copied a website, you know, by highlighting everything in blue and clicking copy and then paste it into a new Word file. And it crashed when I tried to do that. So I said oh, maybe I did that the last time it trashed. So I shut off the machine, rebooted it started. It never tried to do that again and it still froze up on me.

01:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So on Windows you have what's called an app data folder and you can represent it, I think, with percent app data percent. So usually it's under users, your username, app data. So usually it's under users, your username, app data. And you'll see as you dig down in the local folder there should be a Microsoft Word folder. There may also be a temp folder. There may be an unsaved files folder in your office.

01:07:54
All of these are cached and may not, I think are not in fact deleted when you uninstall and reinstall. So I suspect somewhere in there is something that's maybe damaged. So I would go into your app data folder. You can actually, I think, enter, hit the command key and type cd app data percent. I think you can go directly there. That's it. I'll find it, yeah, yeah, you'll find it, yeah. And then look at the office. There's both an office subfolder and a Word subfolder. Look what's in there, look at the dates of what's in there. Maybe you know you can, the next time you decide to reinstall Word you can delete that whole thing and start over. But I'm gonna guess and it's not unusual that a program, because you've reinstalled a program, which means it's it's intact at this point, but it's still loading in cached files from the past and I I suspect that something in there is damaged.

01:08:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, if you have trouble finding all of those different places, there's an application that I recommend for both Mac and for Windows. On the Windows side it's called CleanMyPC, for Mac, paul, and they have an uninstaller that doesn't just do the typical uninstall process but it sort of finds the little octopus tentacles from every program that's reaching out and it deletes everything as well. So if you look up clean my pc, mac all, then you'll be able to find that and and try that out. That's if you have trouble finding all of the places here's my here's my law.

01:09:29 - Jim (Caller)
The larger issue, I think, jim, is this giant book yeah, but it's, it's all my small I understand, but your book is so big that when you load it in it's corrupting stuff, it's, it's, it's taking up.

01:09:42 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
You see what?

01:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm saying it's taking up so much memory that stuff's getting damaged and I think it's really hard to work on a 2 000 page document and word it's just not designed to do that yeah as I did say in one of my emails.

01:09:58 - Jim (Caller)
Excuse me, um, I did try the Libra office. Oh yeah, what did you think of it? Well, it works very quickly. Unfortunately, it has so jumbled the format of my book that fixing all 2,000 pages is daunting, yeah, but who knows, I may wind up having to do that.

01:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm trying to think.

01:10:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Could you export it from Word as rich text format instead of DocX?

01:10:31 - Jim (Caller)
Oh, I tried that. Oh, you did Changing it. That didn't make any difference. Oh, that's too bad yeah.

01:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, word is very proprietary, Word is its own and Microsoft really wants to keep it that way. And even though people have reversed engineers that reverse engineered the doc and doc X files formats, they're not perfect and obviously LibreOffice, which can read those files, isn't reading it, isn't reading it in its entirety. It's missing some of the stuff that Microsoft has stuck in there to make it more proprietary. It's too bad because labor office it's interesting. It does handle that size well. That's good to know.

01:11:11 - Jim (Caller)
I think, word.

01:11:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is your problem really? It's just not designed for something For people who don't know. Jim's writing an amazing book that I want to support you in this because this book is going to be incredible about his life as a recordist, as a sound guy on movies in Hollywood, on some of the best movies.

01:11:29 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, that book has been put on hold by memoirs this 2000,. That's a thousand pages. The 2001 is this how to be a mixer?

01:11:39 - Micah (Caller)
Yes, Even more important.

01:11:41 - Bredt (Caller)
Yeah.

01:11:41 - Jim (Caller)
And so much of it for young guys and gals that spend all their time on the phone and video games. They're not connected to the real world.

01:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a literal gray beard to teach you how to do sound mixing.

01:11:54 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, you get a flat tire. And then what do you do? They don't know how to change it flat. A flat tire. And then what do you do? They don't know how to change it. And if they do, they find out the little oem lug wrench is too short to break loose the rusted lug nuts and it's not like a grip or an electrician. They got a bunch of one.

01:12:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that going to be in the book problem? Are you putting that in the book? How to change a tire? I thought he was. I put all oh yeah, that's part of the job if you can't get to the shoot on time.

01:12:23 - Jim (Caller)
And if you've got a quarter tank of gas and you park on a hill, you're in trouble there.

01:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell us what's so? One of the things Jim does when he calls, he puts up pictures from his career. What is this picture of?

01:12:36 - Jim (Caller)
That's the pilot for Babylon 5. I love it, and the Police Academy hat that I'm wearing is from Police Academy 4.5. Did you?

01:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do the sound for the guy who does all the, michael Winslow.

01:12:54 - Jim (Caller)
Oh, he's amazing, he really does do that Wow.

01:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's amazing.

01:12:59 - Jim (Caller)
He told us a story. He was flying somewheres and you know the little uh, boing, boing for the stewardess. He started making that and driving them crazy and when they caught him they sort of dressed him up like a stewardess and made him serve drinks and stuff to the other passengers at least they had a good sense of humor about it, that's hysterical.

01:13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so, uh, you can find there. There's a lot of youtube video of uh. Is it carl winslow? What's his name? Michael michael winslow. There's a lot of youtube uh video of him if you want to see the amazing stuff he does and this is the guy who put it on tape.

01:13:43 - Sasha (Caller)
Yeah, hey, it's a pleasure.

01:13:45 - Bredt (Caller)
Once again jim tape I am I am so sorry.

01:13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will go back and look at my emails. You're right, I've been so nuts with this studio adjustment that I haven't paid attention to anything else. But I will go back and look at the emails and I see what I can do.

01:13:59 - Jim (Caller)
Thank you, jim great to talk to you, not a a problem, always a pleasure, it is, it's always a pleasure.

01:14:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know who Michael Winslow is. You saw those. Oh yeah, absolutely Of course he's legendary Coming up. We're going to do a little photo review with our good friend Chris Marquart on Ask the Tech Guys, micah Sargent, leo Laporte and your calls coming up at 888-724-2884. Who should we talk to? John, you get to be in charge here.

01:14:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, can you raise your hand?

01:14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if you're on a cell phone, raise your hand if you have a question, are they on the Zoom?

01:14:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All you need to do is hit the little hand icon in the bottom of the Zoom interface.

01:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We say this because sometimes people go into the Zoom just to listen, just to hang out, yeah, just to see what's going on. Carl Winslow is from Family Matters. That's a different one. Okay, yes, old chap digger. He says. Says a great idea for audience engagement drag queen story tech hour. That could be fun. I'm, I'm game. I don't know if I'd look good in a dress, though I we might have to get somebody else to to do that I.

01:15:15
I look pretty good in it, you look what was that thing you were on. Ha, some sort of a nereid or something.

01:15:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, a sea harpy or something.

01:15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you were quite lovely. I don't know what gender you were. I don't know if that was a drag queen exactly. It was on its way to being yeah, but it was more like a sea creature cream.

01:15:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I mean, have you seen how drag queens dress? That's true, they wear all sorts of things. That's true, that's true, alright, maybe we should go to email while we wait for people to raise their hands. Raise your hand.

01:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you want to be on and if you would like to be on, this would be a good time to go to calltwittv on your phone's browser or dial 888-724-2884. This is from doug in sydney, ohio. Hi doug, happy twit club supporter. Yes, thank you. With a simple question when apple adopts rcs, will I be able to see those messages in my iMessage app on my Mac?

01:16:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes.

01:16:21 - Bredt (Caller)
That's a good question.

01:16:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I had a few little caveats there. Yes, you will be able to, but only if you use text message forwarding. It is a setting on your iPhone. On your iPhone, you go into settings, you go into messages and there's an option that says text message forwarding, and that's already existed. You can already see green bubble messages on your Mac.

01:16:44
Your Mac needs to be logged into the same iCloud account as your phone, and I believe that iMessages in the cloud needs to be turned on for this feature to work at this point. But essentially what happens is on your phone you're getting those text messages coming in and then Apple uses the iMessage server to forward those along to your Mac so they'll show up at the same time. And when you send a message on your Mac to a green bubble, then it uses your phone's account to actually send that message to the person with whom you're communicating. So it actually becomes a little bit simpler with RCS, given the way that that transports over the network instead of being SMS or MMS, which is its own little pocket, but instead it's data. So it's going to become even easier to be able to see RCS messages.

01:17:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People think the color of the bubble had to do whether it was an Android person, but it's not. It has to do with the method of transport.

01:17:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Exactly. You could end up having a green bubble with an iPhone person if they don't have iMessage turned on or if they're out of range of cellular data.

01:17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've moved to iOS 18, ipados 18, sequoia because the public betas came out. I tried. You know it's one of those things, you can't have just one. I tried it on my phone and then tried it on my. That's slowly my whole system, because I'm actually loving all these features. One of the features is RCS on the iPhone. I texted my daughter, who has an Android phone, and she was so excited. She said, dad, you got an Android. I said, no, I got iOS 18. So it is a green bubble.

01:18:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
My brother it's funny that you mentioned that because I didn't expect somebody not really in tech to be excited about it. But my brother, who's not in tech, he had asked me what are some of the cool features, because I'm planning on joining the public beta. He usually does and I mentioned a few and then later that day he got back to me and he was like wait, I can send normal messages to an Android user. Now I said, yeah, you can. I didn't think you'd be excited about that, but yeah, you can and the images look good and you get delivered. That's the big thing I like. I know that it got delivered.

01:18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You like to see, it was red.

01:18:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, even if they don't have red receipts turned on, that's fine, but then I can see that it actually got to the phone.

01:18:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that's only necessary, because it so often doesn't.

01:18:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, then that's always been my concern. Do I need to break this text message up into multiple texts because it might not get there? Is it going to arrive out of order? Are the photos going to be super?

01:19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, so this is a boom for people with mixed families. Indeed, we can all talk once again.

01:19:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Talk together, uh I see a hand up. Yeah, I think there's actually somebody waiting for us in the in the room. Uh, what's your name and from where are?

01:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you. There we go. Look at it, there you go. What's your first name?

01:19:20 - Sasha (Caller)
how you doing. My name is peter. I'm calling from troy, new york beautiful troy, new york.

01:19:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, peter, yeah, welcome great.

01:19:29 - Sasha (Caller)
Hey, I've never called your show before but, leo, I've been following you since the days of tech tv.

01:19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, thank you, I really appreciate it. Uh, I just keep. I'm like the Energizer bunny, I just keep going and going. Somebody said in one of the Discord, or actually I think it was probably Twitch what is this with these boomers? They just don't stop talking. I guess it peter. Well, and just one thing, micah, since leo forgot congratulations on your work anniversary, oh yeah, thank you, holy cow. I guess if I followed you on linkedin I wouldn't know that's the only way I knew.

01:20:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, no, I'm kidding, I have a calendar event, but five years I should, we got it.

01:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is the fifth anniversary gem? Is it paper?

01:20:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's always paper. It's always paper, or?

01:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a clock, I don't know. It's like come on, really, I'll give you a clock, I've got a few.

01:20:29 - Dick Debartolo (Guest)
Thank you.

01:20:31 - Sasha (Caller)
What I was calling for was I have an old Windows home server. I don't know if you remember those from quite a few years ago, I do, and it was Paul Theriot's favorite thing in. They did, but anyway, mine suddenly stopped working about oh, eight years ago.

01:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and Microsoft broke it on purpose.

01:20:57 - Sasha (Caller)
I think so, because it won't. It won't boot up. In other words, it turns on but it won't boot into the system anymore, and I've tried multiple times to fix that. My thing is I was silly back then, of course oh, that's my backup, that's where all my stuff is. So, guess what? I have tons of stuff mostly family photos on there.

01:21:16
I don't want to get them off the drives when I'm so nervous as to how to do that and I'm sure you've had this question before but I just don't know the best way to do to get that stuff off.

01:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow.

01:21:33 - Sasha (Caller)
So you can't boot it at all. No, so it turns on and everything. But you know, in order to boot it up, there was a convoluted way of you had to hook up a pc locally to the um, to the network cable, and you would work on booting it up that way. But that just isn't working anymore.

01:21:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're gonna have to open it up and take out the hard drive is what I think right right.

01:21:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're kind of wondering what's the process for that yeah, no, I can take them out.

01:22:04 - Sasha (Caller)
That's not a big deal. I'm very technical that way. But how do I get the data off? You know I don't, I'm not.

01:22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm hoping it's just normally formatted and that when you, you know, put it in a USB enclosure or one of you know some sort of enclosure that you can then mount, that you will see a normal file structure and that it's somewhere in there there's going to be all the videos and movies and all the stuff that you've recorded. I'm hoping. I'm hoping that would be the case too, but I'm just so nervous I don't know, I don't know, off the top of my head, it's harmless to take it out.

01:22:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I was going to say, doing it in the first place is going to be fine.

01:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Especially if you put it in a USB enclosure and you mount it that way, because it might be a little risky putting on a SATA connection, be a little risky putting on a sata uh connection and it might. Then I don't know, the pc might then say oh, that's my machine or whatever my hard drive sure so I'll have to.

01:22:56
I'll have to purchase a usb enclosure because I don't have one anymore so, yeah, the ones I always recommend for this kind of thing come from newer tech, and the reason is it's a bare bones, uh, usb connector. It's actually really. It's a they call it their universal drive adapter. It's a very handy tool here. I'll, uh, I'll I'm still on the, still on the stream in here. Let me see if I can find a website that shows this. It's just, it's a simple little thing. It's not.

01:23:31
You wouldn't use it for long-term purposes. Oh, of course not. Somebody's selling this on eBay, but it just. It has all the connections for various hard drives and turns it into a USB drive which you can then plug in. You can get it new on Amazon. I wouldn't go and get it on eBay. And what was the name of it? Again, it's from a company called Neuertech N-E-W-E-R-T-E-C-H. They're a universal drive adapter. Every geek should have one of these, because it's not unusual for you to have a drive that's in something that died and you want to take the drive out temporarily. It's not for long term, but temporarily connected.

01:24:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Less than $30 on Amazon.

01:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, now you could get a more expensive USB enclosure that you put it in and you close it up and then you can use it as an external drive. But I think before you do that, just have this thing, just see if you can see it. Yeah, and.

01:24:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'll give you a little suggestion based on personal experience. I had a network-attached storage device that went kaput, and this was in the before times, when I just bought a single hard drive. That was a network-attached storage, so I didn't have RAID, I didn't have all the magic, and when it went kaput I took it out. I had to actually quite literally like break plastic clips, because it was never intended to be used this way. So I sort of got it out of the plastic enclosure, plugged it in with the enclosure that I had.

01:25:01
Plugged it into a Mac, nothing would show up. I plugged it into a Windows machine, nothing would show up. And so what I ended up doing was I took the Linux machine that I had and I was able to put it on there and it did mount and I was able to get the files off of it. So if you were, for some horrible reason, to run into a problem where you couldn't get it while you're, you know, booting it and rather attaching it to Windows, mounting it on Windows. Linux is always there as a backup. It worked for me just fine.

01:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because it could see all different file systems. The only problem you'd have and I don't think the Windows Media Server this is the newer tech on Amazon, it's $28. You see, it provides power, because some drives like these this is a laptop 2.5-inch drive you get both data and power on a single connector. So this really has both connectors. It provides power and then you can connect it right up into your machine temporarily again. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure the Windows Media Server just has one hard drive right. It doesn't have multiple drives in it.

01:26:07 - Sasha (Caller)
I'd actually put another one in, so it has two hard drives, but they're not rated.

01:26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a lot of storage. Yeah, exactly.

01:26:15 - Sasha (Caller)
I don't believe they're rated at all. Yeah.

01:26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me and remind me, peter. On Wednesday I'll ask Paul, because Paul loved this thing and maybe he has some suggestions. He had an HP Windows Media Server and he just thought it was the best thing ever. Yeah, it was very angry.

01:26:31 - Sasha (Caller)
Yeah, that's what mine is too. It's an HP one.

01:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, paul probably still has his. I'll ask him how he got the stuff off of it. He was mad, in fact. Remember, microsoft actually removed it from the installation. So if you upgraded from Windows 7 to whatever it was, windows 8, it would actually take it out. It deleted the program. It did, in fact.

01:26:54
And we talked a lot about that on Windows Weekly and I guess we figured out that Microsoft's telemetry told them no one ever turns this on so we can take it out. But they forgot about Peter from Troy, new York. By the way, you live in a beautiful home. You obviously are a little bit in the woods. What a view you have such a beautiful view. Oh, it is a beautiful. Is this your lab?

01:27:18 - Sasha (Caller)
um, one could call it that. My wife calls it my mess.

01:27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's what my wife calls my lab, or or my nest, or uh, she has all sorts of awful names for it. Yeah, that looks like a very beautiful place to work. Lots of sun. How nice, yep, how nice. Great Thanks, peter. Thank you, nice to meet you after all this time.

01:27:41 - Sasha (Caller)
Nice speaking to you and good luck with your retirement office.

01:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you'll see me in my AMS. It is a mess, by the way.

01:27:55 - Sasha (Caller)
I saw that yesterday. Yeah, I watched. Yeah, yeah, well, you saw it.

01:27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you said so yeah, I saw the view. It's like a, it's like a kid's room. I should put a sign on it said no grown-ups allowed or something. But uh, it's, it's mine and that's that's all that matters. Thanks, peter take care have a great. Really, really great to talk to you. 88, 88, 88, 88. I don't know why I'm saying the number 88.

01:28:18
Those are some numbers 88, 87, 24, attg, one Club, twip member budget. And ask question from Dustin in vancouver, british columbia. Hi dustin, hi micah and leo using an old mac mini as a local plex server. What do we tell you? That's what happens, right time machine target and apple content cash for my home. Well, it died on me. I'm sorry. After years of running 24, 7 I could fix it, but I think you know it's 13 years old. I should move on now on the market for a nas and I would like to spend under 250 usd which could do all those things. He's looking on three at the moment the one base analogy ds120j that's, uh, under 250 without the disc right. The Buffalo Link Station why are you laughing? It's just that name, buffalo, yeah.

01:29:15
And the WD MyCloud. Home Can't recommend the MyCloud. I just had too many issues, breaches and stuff Breaches problems. So really it's cheap because WD Western Digital makes the drives right. It's just a way for them to sell drives. It might be fine. I mean, I know a lot. Part of the reason you hear so many bad things about it is so many people have it.

01:29:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's probably the most common.

01:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They call them JBODs just a bunch of disks. It's four terabytes, so price is right. Right, that includes a drive. The reason we always talk about Synology is not price. But the software is really good and the capabilities are really good. But I'm not sure I would recommend a single bay Synology.

01:30:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, don't do single bay. That's what I was just talking about. The first one I ever got was single bay. It's what I was just talking about. The first one I ever got was single bay. It's all I could afford at the time, and that was as much as it was helpful while it worked. When it stopped working, it was bad, because I didn't have access to it.

01:30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would take advantage of the mass market for Western Digital's my Cloud Home. I mean, they sell them in big box stores, they sell them everywhere. And do get it from a big box store. I'm sure Vancouver has a Best Buyer or Costco or something like that. Well, the reason, at least in the US and I think this is true in Canada the reason you get it from a Costco or Sam's Club or Price Club is because of their excellent return policy. A lot of times on technology they're just completely lenient. They'll take anything back after even a few months.

01:30:54
So if you get the Western Digital at a big box store, the price is going to be low and then you're going to have the option to bring it back. Find out what the return policy is. I think that's probably going to be your best bang for your buck. I think that's good advice. Yeah, when they work, work, they work fine. Um, there's nothing. I've had them, there's nothing wrong with them, and that it is going to be the least expensive. Now, plex server time machine target it'll work as a time machine con yeah, I know it works this time machine.

01:31:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I know you can install plex on it, you can.

01:31:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, so there you go, so you should be good to go yeah uh, we love nasa's, but they are not the low-cost leader by any means. You don't want to save on a nas, you want to spend on this that's the investment.

01:31:41
Yeah, sorry to say that's. That's the investment. Um, I guess more emails. We don't have any voicemails today. We we're about five minutes out from Mr Mock. We have a little more time for Chris. Oh, okay, let me do one and then we'll do Chris. Rotate SSD drives to prevent deterioration of data. Jacob asks From Gothenburg, sweden. Hi Jakob, hi Leo and Micah, long-time viewer, club Twit member in Sweden, right on Nice. Hi Leo and Micah, longtime viewer, club Twit member in Sweden, right on Nice. Love that, thank you. We're very grateful, especially to our Club Twit members overseas, because I know it's a little more difficult.

01:32:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, usually with every single monthly payment they're getting charged extra because of international processing fees. So sorry, the fact that you do that is really very kind.

01:32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've heard that with SSD storage or USB stick stick storage, the data will deteriorate over time and to prevent this or refresh the data, it's good to rewrite the disk as in copy the data another drive, write it back to the disk. No, I do not. I copy all my digital photos and other data to two external ssd drives, as I don't want cloud storage for a variety of reasons. How often do I need to do this? What is a good practice? Prevent data loss? Is it enough to copy the data another driving back often do I need to do this? What is a good practice to prevent data loss? Is it enough to copy the data to another drive and back, or do you need to format the drive and refresh the sector so they hold a full charge again? The problem with SSD wear is not that it gets weak and then you can format it and make it better, it's that it wears out. It literally wears out and won't hold a charge anymore. All modern SSD devices have a lot of ability to avoid this using something called wear leveling, where they're careful to write evenly across the whole disk and then a lot of redundant excess capacity so that if a cell fails they can move it. I would not worry about doing this copying and restoring at all. I wouldn't do that. Modern SSDs are as reliable as spinning drives, in fact, in my experience, more reliable than spinning drives. The one thing that you probably are thinking of when you think of this, or you're trying to trigger, is there's a trick that you do with SSDs that has to do with reallocating space that was formerly used but isn't used again, and it's called and the name is just off the tip of my tongue. But anyway, you don't have to worry about that. Modern operating systems do it automatically. Modern drives do it automatically. In the early days of SSDs you had to manually trigger this rewrite. You don't have to do that automatically. In the early days of SSDs you had to manually trigger this rewrite. You don't have to do that anymore. So I think you're going to be just fine, trimming. Thank you very much, eric Trimming. So trim is built into Linux, windows and Mac. It's done automatically. You don't have to think about it. For a while, the trick to trim a hard drive on Windows was to optimize. Now you don't need to optimize SSDs. There's zero seek time to every sector on the SSD, so it need never be optimized, but it turned out. If you didn't optimize, you ran disk optimizer on an SSD in Windows, it would trim it. I don't think you even have to do that anymore, so I think you're good. I don't think you even have to do that anymore, so I think you're good. I think you're good, you know, just have a backup right. All hard drives fail. Now it is true that USB storage is a different kind of it's NAND, but it's a different kind of perhaps less robust NAND than an SSD. Get good USB cards and sticks and if you want to make sure that the card or stick that you bought from Amazon actually holds what it says it did, steve Gibson has a program called Validrive that actually will look and make sure that your drive has enough, has as much storage as it claims, which isn't always the case.

01:35:30
You're watching, ask the Tech Guys Micah Sargent, leo Laporte, chris Marquardt coming up, photo guy Chris Marquardt joins us from the Viewfinder Villa and he's always a welcome sight here. The author of some wonderful books on film photography, wide angle photography, a great photographer in his own right. You'll find him at discoverthetopfloorcom. You'll also find his great expeditions there, and every month he gives us an assignment and in that assignment we have four weeks to take pictures. What was the? I forgot the assignment. What was the assignment this week, this month?

01:36:08 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Weathered.

01:36:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The last assignment was weathered, weathered my brain must be weathered because I completely forgot that was the. I don't even remember that.

01:36:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, did you get any submissions?

01:36:20 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Loads. This time around we have. I think we have a winner. We are now at around 40 submissions.

01:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, this is on the Flickr group called the Tech Guy 40.

01:36:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
People said I'll have weathered things to show.

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently weathered, really spoke to people, so Chris is going to pick three that he likes a lot.

01:36:40 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Yeah, if you leave things out long enough, they get weathered. It happens, it's all around us. I'm weathered, yes me too.

01:36:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He's been left on the sun for a long time.

01:36:52 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Yes, have. Yes, me too. He's been like for a long time. Yes, exactly, exactly, and we? We have so many awesome photos. This time around it was even harder than usual to uh to pick a few, because there's so many wow photos.

01:36:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I love a good, rusty photo. I'm not gonna lie to you, I like weathering.

01:37:03 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
I love this just this whole, this whole genre of urban exploration where people seek out places that are derelict, that are lost, that are given up and everything is like plants are growing through the cracks and that kind of stuff. It touches something in people. So I have chosen three photos. First one by Thomas B old rusty Ford, an old Ford truck in a state of arrested decay in Bodie State Park in Bodie, California.

01:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, is that beautiful. Now, this is more than just a weathered hut. This is a beautiful astrophotography.

01:37:48 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
So we're looking at a night shot. The Milky Way is there, there's an old barn or building and this old fort and they they're both lit by the moon and this is this is. This is a technically challenging photo. I mean, you have to have a tripod, you have to have a long exposure, you need to be prepared for when the when the milky way is up in the direction, you can't have a lot of stray light. So this is a very very good photo.

01:38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This takes a lot of planning and thinking yeah, this would be great wallpaper. So you can't make it too long of an exposure, because the stars will streak, so it has to be long enough, though, to get that light in.

01:38:35 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Well, the trick is, if you have to expose longer and we're talking 15, 20 seconds max with these kind of photos, otherwise, as you said, you get star streaks the trick is to maybe take two photos, make it a composite. I'm not saying that Thomas has done that, but that would be one method to kind of counter that.

01:38:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so you really you need to know what you're doing. This is a beautiful shot from Bodie, california.

01:39:07 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Well done, all right, well done, all right, well done. Second one is by Abdul Mukit Path Toward the Setting Sun. He writes an old path between a. By the way, I'm so happy that these pictures don't just have names, they have a description. So he writes an old path between a field at my home. Spent so much time in my childhood around here, but not sure I ever noticed as beautiful as this. It was better maintained once, but I love it all the more now.

01:39:36
And it's taken on his Pixel 8 on his phone With no edits even Wow, here we go, and so it's an old weather path. It's overgrown with trees, but what I love about it is the direction of the light. If you look at where the sun is, he's shooting straight into the sun. Now the sun is a bit covered up by the leaves, but, um, that gives you this, these beautiful shadows coming at you from behind everything. Even I like leaves and blades of grass are a bit translucent. So these light up in that, in that light, because they're lit from behind, um, and, and the sun also gives you a spot to go towards. Right, don't go to the light, or maybe you do in this case. So it's it's, it's beautiful, very beautiful, yeah, stunning. And then, last but not least, by jane mcfarland, eerie weathering. What we're seeing here, it's black and white. I love that style yeah so it's black and white.

01:40:39
You see, like it's a tree, a couple of trees and some water and some of the roots are growing into the water and it's a lot of dark in this photo. Like um, the shed, there's lots, lots is in the shadow, the water is black and you have light, but I'd say it's probably half of the pixels are almost black in this photo, but still that doesn't just take away light, it adds to the mood. It makes this a really interesting photo.

01:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lots to explore here great choice to do that, too, in black and white. Yeah, really nice images. Wow, those are gorgeous. Thank you to all of the people who submitted, and if you want to see all of the images you can you just go to flickrcom and look for the tech guy group. You should be a member of the group so you could participate in our photo assignments. Um, you'll know you're there because my face is there, and you'll also see something like 11 or 12,000 members. It's a very, very big group. We're very proud of it, and it is time to go to the fishbowl once again.

01:41:44 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Here's the fishbowl and, of course, lots of little snippets of paper. Oh is a good one, this is a really good one. Hypnotic, hypnotic hypnotic.

01:41:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, hypnotic, that's fun hypnotic.

01:42:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what does that mean? Well, it means you got four weeks to take a picture of something hypnotic. Whatever that means to you, right? It could be, uh, it's hypnotic. It could be, uh, I don't know what could it be. It could be, you could be.

01:42:19
You are getting sleepy, whatever that means to you and that's the point is we don't tell you you have to figure that out. If you find something once a week, if you find something you really like you can once a week upload to our flickr group, make sure you tag it tg hypnotic for tech guy hypnotic or tech guys hypnotic, tg hypnotic. And flickr lets you tag. In fact that's a big part of what the flickr ethos is, is you tag your stuff to make it easy to search for it. Find it tg hypnotic. You can have other too, but make sure you have that one. Our wonderful moderator, renee Silverman, who has run this group for many, many years. Thank you, renee. We'll welcome you to the group if you're not already a member. We'll accept your photo and put it in the pool for all those other photos. And Chris, in a month, will come and judge. He will be the judge and jury.

01:43:12 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
But not the executioner. 40 submissions to beat, that's amazing 40,. We can do even better. That is really great.

01:43:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wowza.

01:43:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chris, of course, hosts wonderful photo expeditions. He's got an Eastern European one coming up, I think. Discover the Top Floor is the place to find out when are we going to Bhutan.

01:43:31 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
I am actively working on that right now. We are possibly talking mid to fall next year. Oh how exciting. If you're really interested, I can keep a space for you.

01:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I am. We're doing a Mississippi River cruise in the fall of 2025. But I think it's. I don't know the date, but the chances of it not. You know, we'll see. We're still planning. So give me your dates, I'll give you the dates that you shouldn't do it on, but then I'm committed, aren't I?

01:44:04 - Sasha (Caller)
Yeah, yeah, then, I have to go.

01:44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see. Yeah, then I have to go. Let's see, mississippi River Cruise is September 26th Sorry, 28th through October 11th of next year, yeah so, but I mean, if you go to Bhutan two weeks later, I'm not sure I can afford to do the Mississippi River Cruise and go to Bhutan. You know, I have a job here, even if I am in the attic.

01:44:33 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
I got a job to do here. Thank you, we'll figure it out.

01:44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bhutan is the happiest place on earth and it's really a wonderful place to go take pictures.

01:44:40 - Chris Marquardt (Guest)
Yes, it is the kingdom of the thunder dragon.

01:44:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, thank you, chris Marquardt. Discoverthetopfloorcom. Everybody Bye-bye, take care, quark.

01:44:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Discoverthetopfloorcom everybody Bye-bye, take care.

01:44:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bye-bye, it's hypnotic, just like that. That was perfect. The tech guy Stargate is hypnotic, johnny Drain the emails.

01:45:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We're down to our last email.

01:45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We cannot use this as a crutch much longer. Call us, we need some calls. 888-724-2884. Here is Eleazar from doesn't say where. Bitwarden Argon 2 settings. Hello Leon and Micah, I was trying to switch from PBKDF2 to Argon 2, but didn't go through with it when I got to the settings. So let's first explain what we're talking about.

01:45:37
Let's start there. When you use a password manager, one of the ways a password manager keeps you secure, you know it stores all your passwords that it makes in a big blob, an encrypted blob. But it does something extra to make those passwords even more unrecoverable and especially to make the master password unrecoverable it salts them, it hashes them and salts them. The PBKDF2 stands for password key derivative function. I don't know what the B stands for, but key derivative function is. I don't know what the P, the B stands for, but key derivative function is the idea. It's something that you run a password through a few times to make it impossible to brute force and then you use the resulting hash instead of the password. So, if you think about it, when I log into my password manager I type a password let's say monkey123. And then, instead of storing monkey123, what it does is it processes it, it hashes it and salts it and comes up with a token, a number that represents the end result of that hashing and processing. That number is then what it will use from then on. It doesn't store monkey123. All it does is the next time I log in is it takes monkey123, runs it through the same process. It's a one-way process, by the way Comes up with that token and sees if it matches the token, it's got in its storage. If it does, it lets you in. That's actually the best practice for storing passwords.

01:47:09
Don't store the passwords in the clear. Store them in a way that you can derive it again. So it's deterministic. It's not like encryption. It will be the same each time you run it through it, but it's one way. So if somebody gets that hash, they can't figure out what the password was from it. So it's a great way of keeping a symmetric password secret, because you can't figure it out even if you get the password store.

01:47:36
So there are many ways to do this. The most common most password managers use it is PBKDF2. However, there are issues with that hashing and so as time goes by, the number of times you've run it through has gone up. Initially, in the early days, you might do it one or two times through the key derivative function. Now we recommend two million times. The problem is that takes CPU cycles. So the reason we can recommend those big numbers is because you have a lot of processors so you can chew on it for a while and you really don't notice it. Same thing when they're decoding the passwords from your password vault. It's pretty quick. It only runs it once, by the way. It runs it to match the master password and then it decrypts the vault. So it's really on the master password, but PBKDF2 is not what we call memory hard. The vault. So it's really on the master password. So the the, but it's not. Pbktf2 is not what we call memory hard so it. That's why you have to do it so many times. It's not perfect. There are other ways of doing it that are memory hard. Steve Gibson has mentioned both S-Crypt and Argon2. And so I'll continue now with Eliezer's question. I've been switching my PBKTF2 settings every time. Steve Gibson recommends an increase of iterations, but I guess I must have missed his recommendations for the Argon 2 option. So because it's memory hard, it's a whole different thing.

01:49:03
There are parameters to Argon 2. When you turn on Argon 2, and you can do this in Bitwarden, it's actually a really great story bitwarden's open source. One of our listeners, quexin to security, now heard steve talking about s? Crypt and argon 2 and actually took it on himself to write implementations for bitwarden of both. So cool and he's, and you submit it with what's called a pull request. So he submitted a pull request to Bitward and they said wow, thank you, they assessed both. They said we don't want to confuse people, we're going to adopt Argon 2. So they took Quexon's implementation. They may have modified it, I'm not sure, but they took Quexon's implementation and implemented it. So it is now instead of and it is preferable, if you have the choice to PBKDF2, it is memory hard, so it's a much better choice.

01:49:52
But I understand why you're asking this question, eliezer, because when you click the button that says turn on Argon 2 in Bitwarden I think there's something like four or five or six parameters. It's a lot. And you go oh, steve never said anything about that. The default parameters are the recommended parameters. Just say okay, you don't need to turn that up. I asked Steve says the same thing. They're well chosen, those are actually the parameters recommended by the group. That kind of oversees all of this. And it's perfectly good parameters. You could, without harming yourself, modify them, but I would just leave them. So he says should I just use the default? Yes, use the default and keep listening. Security now. And if it comes around that there is a time I don't anticipate this happening where you need to modify those argon 2 parameters. Uh, we will let you know, but right now the default settings are well chosen, they're correct and I would stick with that and it's really great. It's a really nice story. We should mention Bitwarden is a sponsor, but it's a very nice story, so that's the advantage of having an open source product.

01:51:05
If you ask me, on we go with the show. I see a hand raised, our main man, micah. From our main man Micah, our airplane geek. Hi, micah, join us on. Ask the Tech Guys Come on into this Stargate. Hello boys, hello.

01:51:25
Thank you for responding to our call, our call for help, if it were.

01:51:29 - Micah (Caller)
You said you were stuck and I'm only here to help. Thank you, that's the kind of guy I am. Bless you, sir.

01:51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Could you believe what happened with Delta last week?

01:51:38 - Micah (Caller)
Speaking of airplanes, what a mess, what a terrible mess, and you want to know what the worst part of that is in terms of the way it looks. Delta's CEO decided, while it was still in process, to go to the Olympics, and he flew to Paris.

01:51:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, his flight was okay.

01:51:56 - Sasha (Caller)
He could have taken a few people with him.

01:51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, on his private jet, no doubt, wow.

01:52:02 - Micah (Caller)
It was a real mess. A good friend of mine flies for Delta and he told me that at one point he was sitting in the pilot. He was called into work and he was sitting in the pilot's lounge all day because they had no place to put him. They were trying to put everything all together.

01:52:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because all their scheduling software was borked as well. Right, terrible, terrible thing.

01:52:23 - Micah (Caller)
But you notice, southwest didn't have a problem. I guess Windows 3.1 wasn't affected.

01:52:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Now that is and you know this perfectly well, Micah You're giving me the chance to debunk that story. You know why Southwest wasn't affected, nor was JetBlue.

01:52:37 - Micah (Caller)
They don't use CrowdStrike, that's all I know, I know, but it's a great joke isn't it?

01:52:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a wonderful joke, it kind of. It's interesting We've mentioned it on the shows because it's actually an example of how journalism standards have kind of gone downhill a little bit. This appeared first as a joke tweet some years ago saying that uh, southwest scheduling software looked like, looked like it was written in windows 95 and then somehow got a life of its own and was spread by other people. And as usual when you play telephone, you've ever played that game as a kid as it keeps going through iterations, it got wilder and wilder and wilder and finally Tom's Hardware of all supposedly reputable blogs said yeah, they were running Windows 3.1 and that's why they didn't get bit. No, by the way, southwest never debunked this, as far as I know. But no, they're not running Windows 3.1. They just don't use CrowdStrike.

01:53:38 - Micah (Caller)
You know, what's fascinating from an aviation perspective on this story is that when you're dealing with aviation, when you're dealing with airlines, when you're dealing with flying, you never have any one object that has a single point of failure. That's true, and this certainly had a single point of failure. No kidding, there's always backup systems, but this apparently didn't. So it's a good thing they weren't in the air at the time, I suppose, but it makes no sense. Well, I'm not as expert on the subject as you, but I don't. You know, if your show isn't going to go on the air because your computer crashed, what are you going to do? You have another computer that's all set to run and you can do it, you know.

01:54:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So why isn't this kind of thing backed up in case of an emergency like this? It is a difficult, you know, and I'll be honest, I like Delta, I've always enjoyed flying Delta, and there are places like Atlanta that you pretty much have to use Delta to get to. But boy, this is just unaccountable. This is just not good yeah.

01:54:37 - Micah (Caller)
No, I completely agree with you. Delta is a very good airline to fly from my perspective. They have great personnel. You know, I love the flight attendants, love the pilots. In terms of US carriers, the and the big four, they are the cream of the crap, absolutely the best of the worst okay, who's your favorite carrier? Oh, you know I I really can't say that usually the the european and the asian carriers are very good. Singapore is wonderful, lufthansa is great.

01:55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always fly Lufthansa when I'm going into Germany.

01:55:14 - Micah (Caller)
Emirates would be absolutely fabulous. I flew Emirates once. Everybody always mentions Emirates.

01:55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've flown Emirates business class. It's nice.

01:55:22 - Micah (Caller)
But you didn't fly in first class where you could take a shower. They didn't have showers.

01:55:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to Dubai for a TED Talk, and they flew me in business class. It was very nice, but I didn't have a shower. No, I can say I've gone on it, though, and that was all I cared about. I've had that experience once now.

01:55:40 - Micah (Caller)
Very high-quality service. Yeah, yeah, but I'm calling. You may recall, I called in two weeks ago and this is really a follow-up call to that. I was having trouble with my Shure MV88 lightning microphone.

01:55:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh yeah.

01:55:54 - Micah (Caller)
I had to get it to work with USB-C, and so you guys helped me find the adapter that I needed, the short jack. I can get a dongle, but the short jack made by a company called Turbrand, I believe, and I got it Got it from Amazon and it works with microphones. It's ATOTG on the go, works with microphones, works with headphones. Does not work with the Shure MV88. Absolutely not recognized. And again, the only thing I can find that works with it is the Apple USB-C to lightning dongle. The dongle works, you know, with a little cable in between, but none of these jacks, even the one that you know we I can't remember who it was in the chat room that was so helpful and found it Even the one that's supposed to work with microphones is not recognized by that microphone.

01:56:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, at least it was relatively cheap. I am sorry that it doesn't work though.

01:56:47 - Micah (Caller)
That is Didn't know if you had any ideas as to why. I just can't figure out why it wouldn't. If it works with other mics, this particular mic is not recognized at all.

01:56:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple puts proprietary circuitry into all of its lightning connectors and that circuitry is necessary for decoding and encoding audio. Circuitry is necessary for decoding and encoding audio and apparently there is no third party that wants to pay the fee for that lightning. So you said it works with other microphones.

01:57:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Do you test it with something else? And it worked?

01:57:26 - Micah (Caller)
My ATR 2100 here that you see me speaking on right now, which is, you know, USB.

01:57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's not lightning, it's just pure USB.

01:57:35 - Micah (Caller)
It's a pure USB, but it did work with that. And what's interesting or maybe perhaps telling is that I use this microphone with my iPhone as well, with lightning, and the only lightning adapter that works with that is the Apple camera adapter. That's lightning to USB-A.

01:57:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have kept my Apple camera adapter because I just know, even though I don't think I have any more lightning devices. Well, no, my AirPods are the last lightning device that I have. You know, it's funny, after you called, I found my mv88. I have it still, but I guess I won't be using it well, you can get the, the lightning dongle, yeah I guess you know and and you know they're only you you can find them for 12 and 13 dollars.

01:58:25 - Micah (Caller)
They're not terribly terribly expensive and it will still work and i'm'm going to hang on to it. There are certain situations when you need a unidirectional, or rather an omnidirectional or an adjustable condenser microphone for recording when you're in a conference room, when you're doing with a group of people. So I will hang on to the microphone and I will hang on to the dongle, but was hoping to find an easier way to use it. Yeah, that's a shame.

01:58:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one in any of our chats, and we have many now. Yeah, even it was funny.

01:58:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Someone followed up on twitter and shared something with me for you, and it was the ports were the wrong way. They said oh, I've got the solution for micah.

01:59:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, it wasn't I think that I really think that nobody, that no, there's not enough of a market for a third party to go to Apple and say we'd like to license the lightning at this point connector, yeah, and that's all there is. I mean, they figure, well, apple makes one. If somebody really wants it, they'll get it from Apple. I would contact Sure and say what are you going to do with this?

01:59:23 - Micah (Caller)
And what they say they said, and even on their website they say you have to use this Apple dongle. And even on their website they say you have to use this Apple dongle. And they suggest you know they showed some kind of tape to use, actually hairpiece tape to tape it on together. You know it's very inelegant, but it works, yeah, but it never comes off.

01:59:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, this stuff really is tough. I use it to keep my hairpiece in place. It's very effective.

01:59:48 - Micah (Caller)
Well, I'm sorry that you are my final hope, obi wan, and I'm sorry you guys couldn't.

01:59:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I'm sorry, you failed you and I apologize.

01:59:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I apologize, no one's making it it's nice to hear from you it is good to chat yeah, I always like I want to.

02:00:02 - Micah (Caller)
I want to ask micah one aviation question, and that is when are we going to get you on a plane traveling somewhere? Um?

02:00:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I don't know what keeps you from doing it. I don't think he's afraid. No, no, I'm not afraid at all, it's the money.

02:00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have.

02:00:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I just went to Memphis, not too long ago. Oh, I didn't know, that. Yeah, did you go for the ribs? No, I was there, st Jude. Oh, you did that for the replay FM. Yeah, I was there, st Jude. Oh, you did that for the replay FM. Yeah, so yeah, I travel on planes. I just don't like spending money on planes. He's cheap. And let me tell you.

02:00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I respect that. We pay him a fine salary. He's not underpaid or anything, I'm fine. He's saving up for a house or something. Yeah, I'm not sure what.

02:00:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's not. I'm saving up for my own plane I like to.

02:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like to travel. Not everybody likes to travel, but I love to travel, so usually the planes aren't the highlight, but you know they're, they're fun, that's the other thing.

02:00:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, planes, sorry, hey, not the planes, it's the airports, if you could.

02:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was just going to say go out the door and get in a plane right now wouldn't be so bad.

02:01:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's true, yeah I am flying very anxious traveler in terms of not not being on the plane. I'm not afraid of that part, but I have. I get there so much earlier, I gotta make. I hate, um, I don't like layovers if I can avoid those, so then that automatically makes it cost more money. So it just starts to add up and add up and add up and it's like my youth.

02:01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know I used to travel a lot for work and have racked up many a mile for tech, tv and ZD, but I'm glad I don't have to do too much of that anymore and actually I'm the same way and we talked about this on the Airplane Geeks.

02:01:41 - Micah (Caller)
Most of us who love to fly feel the same way. We love to fly, we love being in the aircraft, we hate getting there airports the whole airport experience is truly miserable and it doesn't need to be. For example, I mentioned singapore airlines, singapore airport, as johnny will say, oh amazing.

02:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was really disappointed. We had planned to go through it on our way back home, uh, from dubai and and uh I'm, we missed the flight oh yeah we were sitting there eating dinner, enjoying life. Then we went to the airport the next morning. They said your flight was last night, what are you doing here? And we had a book on an entirely new flight that did not go through Singapore. But I was very disappointed. I was looking forward to a layover in Singapore. You would have enjoyed it. Yeah, it's supposed to be beautiful.

02:02:23 - Micah (Caller)
Well look thank you very, very much for for taking my call. As you know, I'm a long-time caller, first-time listener.

02:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We love you. Micah airplane geeks podcast. Everybody should listen to it if you love airplanes. Thank you so much. Thanks, have a great day, take care.

02:02:38
Dewey finster, in our twitch chat, asked an interesting question and when are you going to do a uh technology tour of the new attic studio? Yeah, leo, and as soon as it's done I will, but I'll tell you what we're using right now some of the new attic studio. Yeah, leo, and as soon as it's done I will, but I'll tell you what we're using right now, some of the equipment that we're going to be using right now. We started with it. I can't wait to show people this because I was really impressed. Corsair, which bought the elgato brand, remember, makes a game, a I guess it's for twitch streamers probably a table called the creator platform six. That's a big table, but what we liked about it is it has affordances for rigging. It has some bars across the top and the bottom and all this stuff, and it comes with all sorts of attachments. I put the pegboards on the side and I can attach all sorts of stuff. So it's designed to hang lights and cameras from and I can attach all sorts of stuff. So it's designed to hang lights and cameras from. We have two Elgato key lights as the primary lighting. We have some other basically clone versions of the Elgato key light from a company called DASNY. I bought those when Elgato was. You know they were out of stock for a long time, so I have a couple of those for fills. We have a lot of the leftover studio lighting for color splashes and stuff like that. We use a lot of LED, colorful LED lighting we still do that's that green behind me from Discos and so some of those have lived on in the new studio. So that's the lighting, I believe.

02:04:12
The cameras we've decided on thanks to input from Alex Lindsay, who uses these in his office the Sony FX30 cinema cameras. These are APS-C sensors. I have a lot of Sony lenses, so it's kind of a natural fit. We'll have three of those one for the single, one for a two-shot, and then if somebody like Micah comes to visit me in the attic, we'll have a dedicated camera for them. So that's the three.

02:04:39
We're also going to use a Sony I think it's an M100, for the you know, look at this shot. We always have a. We call it an over the shoulder shot. In this case it won't be. It'll be kind of in front of me on an arm, uh, shot, the microphones will be still the hile pr40s we're big fans of the hiles. Um, oh, I should stay with the cameras before I go to audio. Uh, those cameras will all be hooked into an atem mini extreme, that's their eight port black magic hardware switcher. Uh, that's kind of cool because, uh, it'll allow me we're going to use zoom iso as we use now.

02:05:16
Continue to zoom iso for everybody. It usually just be me by myself in a zoom iso call with micah and everybody else. We're going to do that. And, um, uh, then switch it. We'll have producers slash technical directors in their homes doing the switching using Ecamm software running on a Mac in the cloud at Mac Stadium. Wow, they have two gigabits up and down at Mac Stadium, so we'll have lots of bandwidth to them. So the Zoom call will then be piped to mac stadium, the, and back down to the td who will switch it in the cloud, which is going to be interesting. That's for the big shows. We'll be using that. So that's zoom plus, uh, ecam for the. For the club shows. We'll be using restream. We're using that right now for the streaming, uh chat rooms, the live streams. We'll use that for any ad hoc streams.

02:06:11
If I decide to spin it up, the main camera my single has an Elgato prompter on it. I'm not a fan of teleprompters at all, but I wanted a way to be able to look at the camera and see the Zoom call. So I won't have a script in there, but I will have the Zoom call that I'm in on there so I could see everybody in the Zoom call. I also have two monitors left and right one with the output, the program, the switched program of the Zoom call, so I could see what you're seeing at home. The other with the chat room with all the different chats going on, so I could see those as well. When we have Restream, by the way, one of the nice things about Restream is I can pull a chat comment from all of those sources and put it actually on the screen. So those will be nicely interactive. That's going to be a lot of fun.

02:06:55
Audio chain will stay with these uh high lpr 40 microphones. They're going to be going into a road podcaster duo, which is a two microphone mixer. We decided on that because I like fader pots. We do have some sound devices stuff that probably has better preamps, but these Rhodes are pretty good. They have revolution preamps. I think they'll be fine. We'll see. If not, we'll switch and they have lots of lights. They're colorful, so that's a lot of fun. So that's kind of an overall.

02:07:26
I will have two, have uh, two Mac minis, one running zoom we want to have that be dedicated just running zoom, uh, run running the uh restream and the chat, uh. And then I have a windows, that wind snapdragon windows machine uh as well. If I need an extra machine I'm not sure exactly what I'll be using that for I'll be using my Mac laptop as my main computer uh, because it's smaller than the Lenovo that I currently use for Twit, and that will be. So. I can see the rundown It'll be right below the main camera, but I can also show screenshots from that and using the ATEM I can switch over to any screen the chat screen, it'll be the Zoom screen and any computer that I want to switch to. So that's kind of how it all is. It's a very compact setting and a table. I think it's going to work well. We'll see. Basically, I'm a Twitch streamer now, yeah.

02:08:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He just doesn't have all the LED lights behind him. I might, though we're not sure. I can't wait for the confetti to get installed.

02:08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to be a Twitch streamer, but I think that's kind of where we're headed. Now we also have another announcement. I'm going to let Micah do the duty on this one, because I'm not happy about it, but it's something we have to do.

02:08:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, we are making a bit of a change. Ask the Tech Guys is going to pivot.

02:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be honest with you. We can't get anybody to buy it because they think, oh, that's going to be old people watching that. And there was the same reason we couldn't. I left the radio show. They couldn't get anybody to buy it because they decided that's an old audience, we don't want them. And since advertisers won't buy it, the audience isn't huge. You can see, we struggle to get calls. I think it's not working.

02:09:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and it's current format, and so we'd like to keep the show going in a way, and that way is with yours truly answering a specific question or a specific kind of theme of questions, because we do get repeat questions or questions that kind of surround a specific topic theme of questions, because we do get repeat questions or questions that kind of surround a specific topic. So what you will see going forward and this is in a couple of weeks is a change in the format of the show. Someone sends an email. We're keeping the phone number for now. Someone calls and leaves a voicemail. Someone sends in video asking a question. I will take the time to answer that question in full and complete, and it will give us the opportunity my opportunity to do some research beforehand. So we'll have kind of a full answer without a lot of the song and dance that we've come to enjoy on this show, but maybe that our advertisers did not enjoy on this show. So it will still be around.

02:10:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I will still be here to do the show. We're not going to do it live like we do it. That is correct. It's not going to be on Sunday afternoon. It'll be more like you, will you do the recording live?

02:10:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So, starting out, we're going to do the recording live, okay, good, yeah, okay, and we'll see how that continues on as we go Throughout, continues on as we go through. Throughout the rest of this year, you can still count on us being live on Sundays Me at the same time, at the same time.

02:10:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, ok, I won't be there, no, but but Michael will, I will be in my studio doing live. I'm also going to say this I'm going to probably answer questions, yes.

02:10:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And that's the great thing, part of this format is to have ad hoc content. And what this means. I mean it's still as it stands. Ask the Tech Guys, because if there's a question about home theater, I will ask Scott Wilkinson if he will come on and answer that question for us, and when it's a question about Linux, who else but Mr Linux over here to help us out with that? So there will be opportunities for everyone to continue to be on it, I suspect.

02:11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so Mike and I are going to continue to be the main staff hosts for the new Twit. I suspect one of the big things about the new Twit will be just kind of ad hoc, turn on the camera streams. Unknown yet what's going to happen to those. Will we package those up? I think we will, but I don't know. The main point is that we can just do that at any time ad hoc. So if I see an interesting question, you know, or I want to show off some new technology, we're going to rename Ascitech.

02:11:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
as to hands-on tech, Eventually, not, yet I don't know if that's happening yet.

02:11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, lisa wanted to do that, but I don't know if that's the case, mainly because we don't want to pigeonhole it Right.

02:11:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's going to be also the opportunity to do reviews of products and talk about that kind of thing. So you're going to be able to expect more from the show, but in a much, much smaller package, so it won't be a two-hour show.

02:12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there'll still be a show. There'll still be something on the feed. You want to maintain that subscription at techguylabscom and you'll be getting Micah Now next week. Micah is not going to be here.

02:12:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm going to be doing it alone. He's going to be doing the show, but the final episode.

02:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, after that it'll be Micah and then. But again, I think we're going to end up putting out more content, not less. But it will just be in a different I of you involving more back and forth. You know, I could see us doing an hour just with chris marquardt, you know, uh, that's what, the freedom to do that. Uh, once we're kind of out from under this advertising model, uh, I think that'll be a better, a better way to do it. But that's uh, unfortunately, part of the changes we're having to make. We're closing the studio in two weeks.

02:12:51
Jammer B is retiring. I'm going to be very sorry to lose John, who's been with us since practically the beginning. I'll be up in my attic. Micah will be in his. Whatever the opposite, I'll be in a basement. He's going to be in his basement. Yeah Well, that's good. The highs and the lows. Yeah Well, that's good, the highs and the lows. But we're happy to say the rest of the team, at least for now, is going to stay intact. We're hoping we can continue to do that. This is all part of the new mode of shows. It's different now. Podcasting is changing and we've always been on the cutting edge of what's going on, so we want to continue to do that, so, and there is room for a wacky gadget guy absolutely I, you, you saw, I'm always buying things that dickie d has suggested for my uh niece, she.

02:13:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
She should, I don't know be best friends with dickie d, because she's there. He's the reason she gets so many great things.

02:13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So my day on Sunday will just be Twit, you'll be doing Ask the Tech Guy, I'll just be doing Twit. Tuesdays we will still continue with MacBreak Weekly Security. Now. Wednesdays will still be Windows Weekly and Twig Are you going to continue with Tech News Weekly?

02:14:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Tech News Weekly is still continuing on. How about iOS today? That continues. Ios today still continuing on.

02:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the shows that we do in the club, like Home Theater Geeks, will continue as well. So, I'm hands on Mac. You're going to still do hands on Mac Still doing hands on Mac, hands on Windows with Paul Theriot. So we're not closing down, no, we're evolving and we are shutting the studio down.

02:14:24
The studio is $8,000 or $9,000 a month. The PG&E bill is more than $5,000 a month, yeah. So even if we can't get out of the rent, we think we might be able to. We have at least through the fall of 2026. But even if we can't get out of the lease, we can at least get out of the PG&E bill. And that's $5,000 a month. That's a significant amount of money. And it's not just that. There's insurance, there's a lot of things that we have to pay for having a studio. So all of that's going to go away. Uh, apple announcers will continue to do. Uh, we're going to do the pixel. Uh, announcement in two weeks. Um, it'll actually be easier for us to do those because we'll just be in our homes uh, doing them. Um, I think it's's. I don't think it's going to change, uh, as in a bad way. I think it's going to change in a good and interesting way. At least, that's my hope, I think so too.

02:15:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I feel very yeah, if you are thinking about this, we're feeling very positive about it. I'm really actually excited about getting to spend more time on individual questions and getting a good answer instead of just a what we can give, yeah, in the moment, kind of a thing.

02:15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's eight or nine thousand, not eighty. Nine thousand a month, it's eight. I think it's eight or nine thousand dollars a month for the rent, the lease, but that's just part of the total monthly cost of the studio. Yeah, this is going to be a positive change and I might be in my jammies, but you won't know because I'll put a nice shirt on.

02:15:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Good, you'll always know that, and we'll always still be wearing wacky socks. You just won't see them all the time, that's right. Unless we get enough sock checks in the chat.

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we can do it. There you go. My desk goes up and down so I can lower it and stuff. I don't think I can get it that low. Thank you everybody for watching. Ask the Tech Guys.

02:16:22
Tune in next week, for Leo's final episode Ever will be from 2 to 5 pm Eastern 11 am to 2 pm Pacific 1800 UTC. We'll stream it live, as we always do, on YouTube, twitch, kik, facebook, linkedin. You know all of the Xcom, all the usual places, of course, for our wonderful club members. By the way, if the club weren't here, we would be turning out the lights in two weeks and going home. So thank you in all seriousness, thank you to the club members who make it possible for us to continue doing what we do. If you're not yet a club member, please join twittv slash club twit. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on Ask the Tech Guys. Bye-bye, you won't be here.

02:17:05 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He'll see you next time.