Ask The Tech Guys Episode 1963 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.
Leo Laporte & Mikah Sargent(00:00:00):
It's time for Ask The TEch Guys. Leo Laporte here coming up, I'm going to find out if you can game on a Chromebook. Acer says you can. I'm not gonna review. And I'm Mikah Sargent and I talk about security for renters. Plus a big change to our favorite password manager. Then Chris from Miami, calls in on four cups of coffee and falls flat on his face. It's all next <laugh> Unas, the Tech Guys Podcasts you love from people you trust. This, this is TWI tweet. This is Ask The Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leon LePort. Episode 1963 for Sunday, February 26th. 2023, always on top. Ask The Tech Guys is brought to you by Cachefly. Cachefly is the only CDN built for throughput. Delivering rich media content up to 10 times faster and traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other major CDNs. Learn how you can get your first month's free at cachefly.com.
(00:01:04):
Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise@quit.tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you Today? It's time for Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leola Ports. And I'm Mikah Sargent. Coming up today, we're gonna have a visit from our spaceman rod pile. Oh, ground control to Major Pile <laugh>. Jason Howell will join us to talk about how people are using chat G p T in some interesting ways. Money making money, money, money, money, money. And of course we're gonna answer your calls. We've got some video questions. I am gonna demonst demonstrate a new Acer Chromebook designed for gaming. Father Ro Robert talked about it after c e s on Twitter, but they sent one to us.
(00:02:02):
So I've been playing with it a little bit. I didn't know those two words could go together. Gaming, Chromebook Gaming. Gaming and Chromebook. That's interesting. Kind of does. I'll play the the hot new game. What's it called? Servants of the Forest or something. You're Survival Game. And you, I know you're gonna say it. What is it called? Pacman Suns. Suns of Sons of the Forest. Oh yeah. Cuz the Forest was an old game. And then they came out with a sequel called Sons. Have you played it yet? I want to, but no. When is Daughters of the Revolution coming out? <Laugh> later. That's my aunt. That's a secret. That's my Aunt Ginny. Then what else? Oh, I'm gonna show you the latest, greatest security feature our sponsor Bit Warden has added and how and how we should do it and, and what cautions you should consider before you do it. They've, they've moved away from pbk DF two to Argon two. Ooh, that one's easier to pronounce. At least. It's a lot, lot easier. That was a lot of letters. A lot of letters in the news. You talked to Mark Germond on Thursday. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:03:02):
Yeah. So mark Germond had a story over on Bloomberg talking about Apple finally getting to a place where now we could see a future in which apple Watch is able to track blood glucose. Huge. This is, this is very big because frankly, up to this point, it was moonshot for every company, meaning that it was one of these things that, oh, it'd be cool if we could do this, but there were no proofs of concept. There were no Google had what they claimed was a proof of concept with a a contact you'd put in your eye that would then use your tears to determine blood glucose. But they ended up shelving that project. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
They shelved it. I don't know if it didn't work or they just got tired of spending money. Well, and which is very
Mikah Sargent (00:03:45):
Google may very well be Yes, exactly. They they do that a
Leo Laporte (00:03:47):
Lot. You know, they're sharing desks now at Google. Are they really? Yeah. If you had a desk and you went home, I could use your desk and then when you'd come back and want it
Mikah Sargent (00:03:54):
Back, I used to work at a job where it was like that. How
Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
Broke do you have to be to do that? Google pretty broke. That sounds like Elon Musk's Twitter
Mikah Sargent (00:04:01):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
But, so there are 40 million, almost 40 million diabetics in the us Yes. 11% of the population. All of them. I mean, I do finger pricks. I've worn the, the glucose meter mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but all of them would love it if they could have continuous glucose monitoring in your watch
Mikah Sargent (00:04:18):
In a way that you don't, because even those ones, you were wrist invasive. You ha Or the Yeah. The arm. You have to replace them too every
Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
Two weeks. And they send a little, they're not non-invasive. Right. They do send a little filament <laugh> into your skin. It doesn't hurt, but it's still there and it's a little weird. It would be amazing. It would also be probably save lives.
Mikah Sargent (00:04:38):
Yes. And that, see, but that's the thing that makes this so difficult because a as we've gotten up to this point, think about the technologies that are in the Apple Watch now. We've got heart rate, we've got ECG, electrocardiogram, we've got blood oxygen, and all of these are little data points that Apple can share with us that we then use to kind of go from there. But when you think about blood glucose, this is something that could literally be life or death. If this is misreading my blood glucose levels and I need to make adjustments quickly, and I'm not in a place where I can do that, that could be life or death. And so I think that this is one that they, if they're gonna do it, they've gotta get it exactly right. Because with the ecg, with these other technologies, it's more been, oh, I was alerted to something that I wasn't aware of. I went to the doctor Right. And my life was saved. It doesn't work the same way with blood news.
Leo Laporte (00:05:31):
No, no, no. It's interesting. They've got a, it, it's come part of the Apple Exploratory Design group, which is a, basically an r and d group. Right. And they one
Mikah Sargent (00:05:41):
Of like four that they've got at
Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
The company, it's like a moonshot. And they think they've got some sort of laser ability. They, you know, all of this stuff, you know, even today, the Apple Watch shoots light into your mm-hmm. <Affirmative> wrists. That's why it doesn't work well with people with a lot of wrist hair or tattoos. It shoots light into your wrist and then measures
Mikah Sargent (00:06:00):
Various how it's absorbed and
Leo Laporte (00:06:01):
Yeah. Various how refracted features of your blood. And they think they can do it with blood glucoses, which it now, by the way, this has been going on for years. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we'll see. But I hope it's true.
Mikah Sargent (00:06:11):
Th and that's because there is a breakthrough here. First, there's a special chip that they've I they've partially acquired and partially have been working on. And instead of looking at the blood itself, they have figured out that if they look at what's called interstitial fluid, which I know <laugh>, no one likes that word fluid, but interstitial fluid is this substance that is good for looking at, for blood glucose. And when they shine those lasers, they shine those lights. And the way that the light refracts is what they can actually measure. They pop that into an algorithm, and then from there can determine blood glucose levels. What's also fascinating about this is this is, it's like levels of secrecy with the top secret group being the one working on AR and vr. Then you've got the one that's working on the car and in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down underground is this group that's working on blood glucose.
(00:07:03):
What they've done is they actually had a company nearby that doesn't outwardly have any ties to Apple. So that when they bring people in to have these tests done, the, the people know that they're taking part in these tests, but it's with this third party group. They don't know they're going to Apple and having these tests done. And so that's just to maintain that secrecy as they've been working on this. So definitely you should check out my interview with Mark Germond over on Tech News Weekly. Also read his piece because it goes into more depth about kind of the Yeah. Behind the scenes stuff with this,
Leo Laporte (00:07:33):
It's actually spec spectroscopy, which is kind of interesting. We use spectroscopy to see what elements there are in, in in asteroids. We've, we now know there's some interesting elements in that asteroid up there. What's it called? Ragner Rock, whatever. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Probably not Ragner Rock. That, that, that or in or in the Stars. And, and we can do it in your blood
Mikah Sargent (00:07:54):
Too. And when I was, when I was younger, I got to go into a lab with a scientist and we, he showed me all these different machines and one of them was light spectro spectroscopy machine. I took some saliva, put it in, you spin it around and break it into its component parts, and then using all these different materials to see what made up. And I remember even back then going, wouldn't it be so cool if you could just do this with something that would tell us? I, I think about nutrition, for example, I'm taking in foods throughout the day. If I had something you'd know immediately Yeah. That is actually going Yeah. The vitamins that I'm getting from it, all that kinda stuff. Yeah. I just think it's brilliant.
Leo Laporte (00:08:32):
It's true. It's, I guess they could go beyond glucose with this chip, so that would be very interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Supreme Court there, give us and take us away. Oof. There's good news and there's bad news and the bad news. The Supreme Court decided not to take the Wikipedia case suing the NSA for its global data collection. This case has been going on since 2015. Wikimedia Foundation, which is the parent company of Wikipedia sued, challenging the legality of their so-called upstream. You, we, we finally figured out thanks to Edward Snowden and other revelations that the NSA wasn't like getting into your Google account. There was just, they were just sitting out there in on the cloud and the internet watching stuff come and go outta your Google account. That upstream collection, that's all they needed. And they were doing it quite aggressively.
(00:09:21):
But the lower court had ruled that this was protected by the whatever they call it, the US Secrets Act, it would violate national security if this lawsuit were to go forward. The Supreme Court agreed. So, so I guess all that is, is an acknowledgement that you're getting spied on all the time. Yeah. <laugh> just so you know. Right. and it's warrantless and it has nothing to do with suspicion. It's just we're gonna collect everything we can and then we got it. And if we need it, we've got it. The other good news from the Supreme Court may be good news. I don't know. They're hearing, they heard two very important cases for the internet this week. The most important was on Tuesday. Gonzalez versus Google. The lawsuit says that Google's responsible for its algorithmic recommendations. And it ra in this case, it, they say it radicalized militants and caused the death of, sadly the death of their daughter in a Paris incident 2015.
(00:10:23):
But the real issue is section two 30, which protects us, protects our chatroom, protects comments you make in our discord, protects comments you're even making right now in our Zoom mm-hmm. <Affirmative> we can't get sued for those, only the person who posts them. That makes sense. The person who created the whatever it is, should be sued for. We also can't get sued for taking it down. And that's really important. Moderation is also protected by Section two 30. So this isn't going against the heart of Section two 30, but but they said what we want to do is slice off this idea of algorithmic recommendations and say that is, once you're doing that, you're going beyond Section two 30. You're actually publishing content on your own. They even debated whether a thumbnail of a video on, on YouTube is created by the content creator or Google.
(00:11:14):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's the hint, hint is the content creator. But they seem confused by that. As did I said, by the way, Google's attorney and Gonzalez attorney, it was a very interesting argument though. And we had Kathy Gillis who is an attorney who she was actually in the Supreme Court in the courtroom on Tuesday for those oral arguments. We had her on this week in Google on Wednesday. Wow. She had a lot of thoughts. Generally, it looks like the Justices wow. Surprising. Understand the consequences of chiseling away in any form of fashion. At section two 30, judge Kavanaugh said, that's really Congress's job, not ours. Judge Keg Justice Kagan was hysterical. She said, you don't have the nine greatest experts on the internet here, <laugh> admitting that. In fact, many of them admitted, we, we don't really understand this, but we gather any changes to this could be horrific for the internet, which is Right.
(00:12:08):
That's I'm glad, which is true. Kathy Gillis herself wrote an amicus brief protector one of many a flood of amicus briefs that the Supreme Court got to see saying that, including the EF F and others. So I think, you know, you can't always judge what the Supreme Court is gonna do for oral arguments, but I think it went I think it went pretty well. They showed that they realized that anything they would do would have great consequence, maybe unintended consequence. And I think they probably, I hope we'll find out maybe in June I hope they will leave this to Congress and that Congress will not do anything Uhhuh, because that's their specialty. Ladies and gentlemen. Very good at doing nothing. <Laugh>. That's us <laugh>. All right. Let's do you want to, do you wanna see what Bit Warden is up to Yeah, let's talk about that.
(00:12:55):
Okay. I wanna warn people that you shouldn't do this <laugh> until you're completely updated on Bit Warden. And you can see here I am getting the offer re restarts update version 2020 3.2 dot oh is ready to install. This is on the desktop application. Bit Warden, I should mention a sponsor. They're a password manager. And the only reason I bring this up is cuz a lot of you have moved to bit Warden after last passes fiasco. And there's a lot of interest. We talked a lot about it in what they call the password hashing. So your master password, of course, is what gets into the vault. Last pass bit Warden, none of the companies that do password management have access to your, your master password, but they have to have some way of validating it to unlock the vault. Right? Right. They have to, you type something in, they have to somehow validate that that's real.
(00:13:45):
So what they do is they take your password and they hash it, they modify it, they hash it, and they salt it. They mess it up in such a, in a one way process in such a way that they can verify that that is your correct password, but nobody having the hash can unlock your vault. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, does that make sense? The hashing algorithm they've been using, and almost everybody uses, is called P B K D F two seven words pbk D F two. And one of the problems LastPass had is they had set the iteration level for pbk DF two, the number of times it was hashed to a very low number initially one than 500 O osp. The security recommendation for the web folks, <laugh> said it should be much higher that you should have at least 300,000 iterations last pass. And bit Warden allow you to go up to 2 million.
(00:14:39):
The downside, of course, is it slows your machine down because it has to go through those hashing processes to unlock your fault. It has says, oh, here's the key typed, let's run it through it 2 million times. Now we know it's okay, but on modern machines, that's a second or two. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's not, it's not untenable. Nevertheless, pbk DF two is attackable. It can be brute forced, especially by these new modern attacks based on graphics cards, GPUs. So there's another way of doing it called Argon two. And this is one of the benefits Bit Warden has by being open source Argon two Weston, who has been co corresponding with Steve, among others, has taken it on himself to urge bit warden to write the code and then urge bit warden with what they call a poll request to add it to their open source.
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They've agreed. Wow. And so it's now available to you, but here's the catch. It's only available to you on 2020 3.2 fine. You won't be able to change it to Argon two unless you have that. But it will break anything that is not updated at 2020 3.2. That means your browser plugins your older Android devices. So you really, before you do this, you want to look for this note that I got from Bit Warden to update, make sure you're on 2020 3.2 and you want to do it everywhere. Okay? That's the most important thing. But once you've done that, once you've verified, you know, you can go into your bit Warden Vault and see, once you verified that, ah, I'm gonna letter my master password. No looking, oh, no looking. It's
Mikah Sargent (00:16:19):
P BK <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:16:22):
D Don't say that.
Mikah Sargent (00:16:24):
<Laugh> salt, Hank,
Leo Laporte (00:16:29):
Stop, stop, stop. Okay, now I'm in. Oh, I gotta enter it one more time. I'm gonna show you how you can change this algorithm one more time. And that's good, right? They, they, you want them to make you enter this password a bunch of times.
Mikah Sargent (00:16:42):
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
So no bad guy can do this.
(00:16:50):
Oops. It's such a long password. I made a very long password. By the way, if you have a very long, strong password, that's more important even than the hashing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So make sure you do that because even with a low iteration count on pbk DF two, if you have a good password, it's still gonna take a bad guy an untenable amount of time to crack it. This is even better. So now you can go look at my page again. This is the K D f, the key derivative algorithm. They even have a little, what the heck said <laugh>. You can go over here and you can read all about it if you, if you want. It's a Wikipedia article. No. The default, which for most password managers has always been P P D K D F two has now expanded to include Argon two. There is one password manager I should give him credit dash lane that supports Argon two.
(00:17:41):
Once you go to argon two, you're gonna see some suggested parameters. And this has confused a lot of people iterations, memory, parallelism. So I'm gonna point you to a very good, let me click this. A very good no, this is, yeah, Reddit thread from 12 days ago started by Padre talking about this. And Questin by the way, chimes in and explains what's going on. And, and, and the question was, well, what should I set these parameters to? I'll, I'll give you the shortcut. Okay. Just let them stay the way they are. It doesn't really matter at this point down the road, you might be able to turn 'em up and just like pbk df two higher numbers means slower hashing. So, but this speed should, this numb, these numbers should be acceptable for everybody once you change it though. And again, don't do this until you've verified that every version of Bit Warden you're using on all your stuff has been updated to 20 23, 2 or later.
Mikah Sargent (00:18:45):
Okay. Cuz you won't be able to get in otherwise.
Leo Laporte (00:18:48):
Yeah. That whatever device is using the older version will say, I don't know what argon is. What that what are you talk, what, what Check, what you talk about Willis. So this is in your, you have to do this on the web version of Bit Warden. You'll see it's in your account settings under your security. And it's the third tab in keys encryption, key settings, argon two I I would say you pr you know, if you've already updated your pbk DF two, I'd set mine at 2 million. The maximum you, there's no rush to do this. But I wanted to show people and let people know.
Mikah Sargent (00:19:19):
When does that slowdown that you're talking about happen? Like when should people be on the lookout for that? Is it every time I go to type in my password? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:19:27):
It's just the first time you open bit warden on your device. So you know, you have to open the vault to use it and sometimes it closes the vault. If you haven't used it in a while, those settings are up to you. Yeah. Every time you reopen the vault, it has to take your password every time you'd enter your password. In other words, you enter your password, it takes, your password, goes through those hashes, says thumbs up, downloads the vault, and now you have it. And that could take several seconds. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you've probably noticed that when you do it in your, in your browser and you log, log in for the first time Yep. To your password manager. That's what's going on. That chief delay, there's two parts of the delay. The chief delay is the hashing. The second part is it has to download the entire vault.
(00:20:10):
And that, you know, so in other words, it keeps the vault as an encrypted blob up there. They don't have the password. Only you have the password. Once you've entered the password on a client in bit warden or any password manager, it verifies it using these password derivative functions goes. Yeah, that's right. And it says, now bring down the vault. It might be doing that simultaneously. Bring down the vault and, and unencrypted. So good, good advice. Good to pay attention. Steve Gibson talked about it on Tuesday. I was very pleased to see that. It, it actually happened to Ston. Thank you. That's the kind of open source contribution that makes a difference in a lot of lives. It's kinda like a blood glucose monitor your watch. It can save a lot of people. So we want to put the word out now, the most important segment on the show every week. What is Ant having for lunch today? <Laugh> looks pretty good. Is that fried chicken? No sir.
Mikah Sargent (00:21:02):
This is, that says pizza, isn't it? Chicago?
Leo Laporte (00:21:04):
Deep Dish. Oh, Chicago baby. Mm mm And I noticed you took the mug that says I World's best Boss. So that's good. Am I not? Yes, you is.
Mikah Sargent (00:21:17):
<Laugh> is you. Oh, is you. Ain't the best boss.
Leo Laporte (00:21:21):
<Laugh>. I thought it was mine. But you know what, truthfully, it, it really is yours. <Laugh>. So, so we had a lot of people been waiting on hold. We should tell you call dot twi tv on your phone is easiest because you already, you know, you open your browser, you enter in the browser, call TWI tv. If you have Zoom, it'll launch it. If you don't, you can actually use the web version. We know your microphone and camera work on your phone. Right? Mostly. And and so's probably the easiest way to call, but I notice people mostly still use desktops to call us. You can also send us email, ask the tech guys@twit.tv and you can, if even better, you can send us a a, a video via email. That'd be really awesome. There was one thing I I did want to mention before we get to the call.
(00:22:04):
So let's cue up the calls. Raise your hand if you've got a question. I was in our forum and somebody B g o z. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, BG Oz, I'm guessing Big Oz. Big Oz had some help for Mark from last week. Remember Mark, who's an Australian, was coming to the US Oh yeah. Yeah. And wanted to know about what to do for a us sim. So BG oz in response to Mark's query about mobile usage while visiting the US just completed eight weeks. Ozzies do that. They come for a long time with the best mobile access in the last 10 years of travel, he is using Telstra at home. Overseas coverage would be very expensive. So after he said this time after hearing Rich tomorrow's experience, which I haven't heard, but apparently he used Mint, installed the Mint app while at home, downloaded and installed the Mint, EIM Mint are sponsor also.
(00:23:02):
Right. this enabled wifi calling on Mint under settings then allowed me to subscribe to the three month plan. This is actually I think what we talked about with Mark, right? Yeah. Three month plan activate the plan wall in Australia. He could still use the number on wifi even though Mint Works only in the us. So he is now got a Australian and a US number. Nice. He's got two sims. See he can put up to eight sims on an iPhone, which is eight eims on an iPhone. So in, in the US the Telstra number still worked. He could access all those six digit sign-on codes. Right? Good. Yes. The two factor codes. No costs no extra to access the Telstra number overseas. As long as you're doing it in wifi, right? That's the wifi calling. So wifi calling hotel, you're using that.
(00:23:48):
He says just be careful cuz if you leave the MIT mobile sim active in Australia because there's nobody no signal to pick up. It's gonna kill your battery as it searches and searches and searches. Got it. So thank you BG Oz. Thank you for that update. That's a good place to go. So he was saying we should have some way of, of signaling when we have an update from one of our questions, go to the TWIT forums twit.community. Leave it there for me. This is a great place. I check it every day. So it's a great place to leave those thoughts or comments. Twit.Community, it's free. I do have to approve all signups, but I did that pretty quickly. Yep. just like our masin on instance. I don't you could leave it on Masin. I don't think that's as good an idea.
(00:24:30):
Only because like Twitter, Mastodon Scrolls and Scrolls, maybe not like Twitter. Twitter <laugh> just fired on Saturday yesterday. 50 more engineers, they've stopped paying their Slack bill, which means there's no way of communicating. And their issue tracker Jira. Stop paying for that. It's just a it's just a mess. It's a mess. Yeah. <laugh> Twit Social is our Mastodon and it's actually, I think it's good if not better than than Twitter. It's a nicer place. The local timeline is all of our our regular listeners and I only approve your membership in our, in our twit social. If you can demonstrate that you listen to our shows. So just say, Mikah sent me <laugh>. There you go. You can even spell it with a C if you want. Yeah. But at least I'll know, you know, you're not some, some some normal person off the street. All right. I want to take some calls. Let's see. Let's do it. Ivan has his hand raised high. He's going, oh, oh, Mr. Kata. Mr. Kata. Mr. Kata. <laugh>. Mr. Qk. You know that, you know that reference. I only know it because of the Office <laugh>. Oh, okay. They reference it to the office. It's funny. I know a lot of references from the forties cuz of Mad Magazine. So, you know, you get this, it's derivative. Hey Ivan, welcome to ask the tech guys.
Caller 1 (00:25:47):
Hello Mikah. Thanks for taking my call.
Leo Laporte (00:25:49):
Our pleasure. Welcome.
Caller 1 (00:25:52):
I wanted to tell you one thing before I get into my question. Yes. Is I'm retiring something that I've used often with you and that is the moniker of Dev Null.
Leo Laporte (00:26:02):
Oh,
Caller 1 (00:26:04):
That was radio. I'm not gonna use it anymore.
Leo Laporte (00:26:07):
<Laugh>.
(00:26:08):
Well, it's not, it's, it's okay to do that because it, I don't own it. Dev Null was the character that I played on MSNBC's the site and it was a virtual character. And this is in 1995. So this is like the first time anybody in real time did a virtual character. So it had, would sit there and stare at a blue dot and I would talk to her. But Dev Null is, as you probably know, a Unix term. It means, you know, the, the bit bucket. So you're more than welcome to be Dev Null
Caller 1 (00:26:38):
<Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
But you can't be Chief Twit. There's only one Chief Twit
Caller 1 (00:26:43):
<Laugh>. He'll always be Devin Al Tomi.
Leo Laporte (00:26:46):
Aw, thank you. I don't do that voice anymore though. That was the most g grading annoying voice and I deeply regret choosing it at the time. Annoying.
Caller 1 (00:26:55):
It was a different era. It
Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
Was times were changed. What's up?
Caller 1 (00:27:00):
Okay, my question involves Linux. You got me going
Leo Laporte (00:27:06):
<Laugh>.
Caller 1 (00:27:09):
You got me going in that direction. And so I've decided to, you know, put well little I know into a dangerous situation. So Good. You know how
Leo Laporte (00:27:20):
No, that's good. Because that's how you learn, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Caller 1 (00:27:23):
Exactly. That's
Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
What exactly. If, if you just go within the same old ruts that you've gone your whole life, you'll never see the beautiful, you know, landscape. So you can use Windows in Mac and it probably should when you're, you know, in a, in a, you know, I have to crash out a report for business for your work or something. But playing at home have some fun branch out. Yeah. Tell me about, well, I
Caller 1 (00:27:43):
Have a home, I have a home network. I have oh eight or nine computers on it. Oh yeah, you're good. And I decided to turn one of the desktops into a Linux box, putting Linux Mint two 20.3 on it.
Leo Laporte (00:27:57):
Good choice.
Caller 1 (00:27:57):
And what I've been doing with that is, is using it as a Torrance download box and you know, other things as well. Sure.
Leo Laporte (00:28:07):
It's like a little service. But
Caller 1 (00:28:08):
I also, yeah. I also wanted to put, I have two physical drives, two additional physical drives in it, one's formatted N T F S, the other's formatted XT four. And what I wanted to do was to be able to connect those from like a Windows machine or a Mac machine that's on the network so that somebody can just drop files there to back up or, you know, anything like that. Or to play some off of it
Leo Laporte (00:28:38):
Within the, within the HO house or do you want to do it to the outside now?
Caller 1 (00:28:41):
Within the house? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:28:42):
Within the house. That's a lot safer and it's very risky to, very risky to allow people to drop files on your computer from outside.
Caller 1 (00:28:49):
Oh yeah. No, no. Wouldn't do that. Yeah. But I can't get, I can get the Linux part to recognize those other two drives. Right. But I can't get either Windows or Mac that are on the network to see either of those drives. They can see the Linux Drive. Huh. But they can't see the two that are also in that box.
Leo Laporte (00:29:11):
Huh. Interesting. So are you using some sort of file sharing like S M B on or samba on the Linnux box?
Caller 1 (00:29:24):
Yes. Okay. And turn that on.
Leo Laporte (00:29:25):
Okay. And they, so they can, it's interesting cuz they are able to see the Linux box, the, the internal drive. Fine. They can read and write to
Caller 1 (00:29:34):
It. Right. And can transfer files to it and back and forth.
Leo Laporte (00:29:37):
But these
Caller 1 (00:29:38):
Attached what I two
Leo Laporte (00:29:40):
And, and these, pardon me, attached, these attached drives are attached via U sb
Caller 1 (00:29:44):
No, they're internal.
Leo Laporte (00:29:45):
They're, they're inside the computer. Yeah, I think that, and I'm not sure what's going on, but I think you're gonna wanna look at your FS tab. Okay. Do you know what that is?
Caller 1 (00:29:56):
I have no idea.
Leo Laporte (00:29:57):
<Laugh> FS tab is a, is actually a plain text file. It's the file system and it describes all the drives on there. And I if you, if you be, you, you wanna might be read up on this, don't, don't just do this. Now this is where you could easily get into trouble. You can make machine non bootable, but read up a little bit on it. But you can, right now you can Cat slash Etsy slash fs tab and you can see what the settings are in there. And every single device will have a setting now. Yeah. I think Mint still uses this. There, there, there. This is kinda old school, but I suspect Mint still uses this. And at that point you'll see there is a difference somewhere in the settings for the drive they can see and those other two drives. And almost certainly it's in the sharing settings.
(00:30:49):
So I think that's something that I'm gonna leave to you. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Yeah, that's fine. But cuz I don't, I don't, I can't, you know, you'd have to show me your FS tab and all that stuff. Right. But that's a pointer in the direction that you wanna look at. And if you and that's what I need. Yeah, yeah. If you look at you know, one of the reasons I like Arch and Arch derivatives actually use Manjaro is the arch Wiki is the single best resource for Linux information. Even if you're not using Arch, you using Mint, which is a Debian derivative. But even then look at the arch Wiki for FS tab because it, it, it's amazing. It's got the most complete information and that's because people who use Arch are generally building their system software from scratch. You know, they, they put the kernel in and they put the different things in bit by bit. So they'll be a lot of extensive documentation on FS tab.
Caller 1 (00:31:46):
Okay. Thank you. That, that points me in a direction. And that's what I was really
Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
Yeah. That's the way Linux works. Right. In fact, in a way we're kinda like a user group. You would go to a Linux user group, a lug, and you would raise your hand and say, Hey, I'm doing this. And then somebody would stand up, some idiot like me would say, say, well I'll have you looked at the FS tab and then you Yeah, that's, it's a pointer. Ultimately it's best for you to figure it out. Cuz what a lot of us do, I do this too. I'm guilty of it is we is we go, we look up an article and we just copy it without knowing what the hell we're doing. Yeah. And that's when you can get a lot <laugh>, a lot of trouble <laugh>. You also wanna, yeah. So you wanna kinda understand it. On the other hand, I've done a lot of messing around with FS tab and I've broken my systems many times, so yeah, that's part of the, part of the fun Bruce FS tab.
Caller 1 (00:32:34):
One other quick Go
Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Caller 1 (00:32:36):
I was just gonna say one other quick question. Yes. coming from the predominantly Windows and Mac world, if I, you started me off on Pop os nice
Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
And
Caller 1 (00:32:47):
Very good and really enjoy it, but I've outgrown it and so I want to upgrade to make it another mint box or maybe even go with the arch linnux.
Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
What, when you say outgrown it, what does that mean?
Caller 1 (00:33:01):
Well, I just, I I find that it's locked down in some ways Yeah. Where you can't do things that Yeah. I want to do and, and you know, things that I've been able to do with the Mint that I couldn't even approach on right. On
Leo Laporte (00:33:16):
Os Right. So I would say you're a good candidate for Arch, especially since you have nine machines. Take one other machine, not the one you're using for Mint and and what you're gonna, you have another one and you're gonna go to the Arch Wiki and you're gonna go step by step and it you will fail a few times. The biggest problem I've had installing Arch is just u e f I e F five and and bios, you know, modern machines don't use BIOS anymore. They use U efi and it's kind of tricky setting that up. Once you get to that point, you'll build Arch from scratch. And what's great about it is you will learn things like FS tab, you will learn how all this stuff integrates and works, so you'll have a much deeper understanding. The other reason people use Arch is because there's absolute freedom.
(00:34:03):
You only install the thing you want. You don't have to install anything else. And if you want something new, you've got, you know, how you got there and you can do it again, the arch Wiki, here's the FS tab article in the Arch Wiki and here's what an FS tab looks like. And you're gonna see, and I suspect that the issue is gonna be in here some of the settings, but this is actually, look how good this Arch Wiki is. It, it talks about how an FS tab is configured, what those different columns mean. It gives you all sorts of useful stuff. And I think somewhere in there is gonna be something that will help you make those devices be seen by everything on the network. Oh, you can agree? Yeah. Almost, almost. You can almost doc almost duplicate the one that is working, you know, on the ones that aren't working mm-hmm. <Affirmative>
(00:34:51):
And that may Careful again, but this look how complete this is. Oh yeah. And this is why you should, you should actually be using Arch. I'm, I, you know, I, everybody who uses Linux, when you get to that, the point where you, I want more control should install Arch once, and then I just install manjaro, which is just an installer on top of Arch because I don't want to do that again. But yeah, absolutely. You will learn so much about the internals that you'll be much more confident. You'll be answering the questions, not me.
Caller 1 (00:35:20):
Well, okay, great.
Leo Laporte (00:35:21):
Pleasure to talk to
Caller 1 (00:35:22):
You. That's what I wanna do.
Leo Laporte (00:35:23):
It's so, where, where I forgot to ask, where are you calling from?
Caller 1 (00:35:27):
West coa, California. Nice. Southern California. Nice. That's great. Near Pasadena.
Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
Yeah, I know where it is. That's great. Hey, thank you for joining us on the asec guys. Thanks
Mikah Sargent (00:35:36):
So much.
Caller 1 (00:35:36):
Thank.
Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
Appreciate it. I'm sure I'll be back. <Laugh> anytime back. Hey Leo. I messed up my FS tab. <Laugh> Uhoh can't help you there. I really, I'm Justin, do you want to talk to us or you don't have your hand raised, but I love your, I love the hacker, the view. Yeah, the few and Justin's room is beautiful. So let me, lemme just pick up on Justin, even though he doesn't have his hand raised. We've been watching him hacking away at something for a while.
Caller 2 (00:36:08):
All right.
Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
Hey Justin, the
Mikah Sargent (00:36:09):
Sound. Hello, Justin.
Caller 2 (00:36:11):
Hey,
Leo Laporte (00:36:13):
Now you see why we think he's a hacker <laugh>. Actually, we had a better view of what you were hacking. Now is that, is that a background or is that really your house?
Caller 2 (00:36:23):
That's the house. Let
Leo Laporte (00:36:24):
Me, yeah. Behind you. There's a window to the outside. It's beautiful. Where do you live
Caller 2 (00:36:32):
In? Beautiful Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
Ah, is it snowy right now?
Caller 2 (00:36:39):
It's, we just got through a cold snap, so today's actually quite nice.
Leo Laporte (00:36:43):
Yeah. It's all
Caller 2 (00:36:44):
Week. Most mornings of us up. The conversion
Leo Laporte (00:36:49):
Friend of mine in a rock band that played there told me he is the coldest place he ever played in his life.
Mikah Sargent (00:36:57):
Winter peg. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
Winter peg. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:37:00):
Yeah. There we go. There, there for a second. Your audio changed, but you sound good
Caller 2 (00:37:03):
Again. Oh, sorry about that.
Leo Laporte (00:37:05):
No problem. How can we help?
Caller 2 (00:37:08):
All right. So I have a website for my photography and my music and I created it with Squarespace and I like the site as it is, but to keep this site up cost me about 350 bucks a year. Yikes. So I guess two questions. Where can I host my site for less and how can I transfer the content or most of it at least without starting from scratch?
Leo Laporte (00:37:35):
Yeah. Squarespace is expensive. They've got, they got 'em. Raise the money to pay for Adam Driver in the Super Bowl commercials, <laugh>. It's just not, it's not cheap. You certainly can rent a website for a lot less depending on how much you want to do it.
Mikah Sargent (00:37:48):
Exactly. Where's your,
Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
Where's
Mikah Sargent (00:37:49):
Your website? Yeah, so I will tell you my main website is hosted at Squarespace. It's been there for a long time, but I don't use a lot of those extra features that end up costing more. I had a friend recently who asked me this same question and he just wanted a one page site. And so I pointed him over to a site called card, c a r r d.co. Card mostly charges year annually and I think it's like $25 a year. But it sounds like if you're paying about $350 a year, you might be doing blogging or something on your site or selling products or something. What, what do you wanting?
Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
This is a, this is the name tells you what it is. It's like a calling card. It's a one page site. Yeah. And so that's why it's so cheap. And,
Mikah Sargent (00:38:33):
And the, the cool thing is though, there are different variations. So there's, it's scrollable if you want it to be. Oh, okay. But yes, for the most part. So
Leo Laporte (00:38:41):
You can make a long single page.
Mikah Sargent (00:38:42):
Yeah. You can do forms, you can do you know, little widgets and stuff like that. You can, you can make a full page with it. But
Leo Laporte (00:38:49):
$19 a year,
Mikah Sargent (00:38:50):
There you go. $19 a year. Wow. And that's what the custom domain, so you can have it with whatever domain you have. Nice. Justin the hacker.com or whatever it happens
Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
To be. Do you embed, do you put your music on the site for download and, and purchase and that kind of thing?
Caller 2 (00:39:05):
Not download and purchase. But I do have a player up there and I mean, it's already on all the streaming services. Yeah, you
Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
Can have an embedded SoundCloud player, whatever that
Caller 2 (00:39:15):
Would be Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:39:17):
So that's
Caller 2 (00:39:18):
My clicker link there as well. Okay. So but I don't use the site selling, like I have gone out to my Threadless page. So Squarespace isn't handling any commerce either. Maybe I've just, maybe my plan is wrong. That could be a Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:39:33):
I think you over block.
Mikah Sargent (00:39:34):
Yeah. Yeah. It does sound like you may have over, over purchased. Now depending on what you were trying to export that can get complicated. If it was just, if it was a blog you were trying to do, that's easier because you can get the r s s feed and then essentially import that RSS feed. So what if, if you do decide to make the change, I think your best bet is going to be some Google FU where you're looking at transfer Squarespace two blank and see what tools might be out there. Because it's not as simple as just going file save as, and then, you know, uploading, unless of course you were planning to host it on your own or, or do it, you know, completely from scratch. Now,
Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
If you're more sophisticated, there are places you can have very good sites for free, as long as you don't need, you know, modern sites, Squarespace, WordPress Google blog spot, all are set up in such a way that you have the formatting and design of the page, and then you have a database for the content. And they're basically a content engine that pulls the database in. So you write your posts in the, in the database, comments go in the database, and then the design pulls it in. And that's a much more complicated setup. That's, that's called a dynamic page. If you have a, what's a, a static page? My website, leo.fm is a static page. It's plain html. There's no database on the, it's just plain html if you're willing, if you wanna do that, then. And the chatroom's reminded me, you can do this GitHub, that even a free account at GitHub will host a site like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Actually my favorite would be look at CloudFlare. Cloudflare has, you know, paid tier, but CloudFlare has a free tier that's pretty amazing.
Mikah Sargent (00:41:18):
Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
For absolutely nothing. And it has DDoS protection, has a lot of the features of CloudFlare itself. But you're expected to be a little bit more sophisticated in how you do the site. Not necessarily hand coding it. I'm using a static generator, it's called Hugo. It's really great. You basically write your post and mark down, you run it through Hugo, Hugo knows your layout. You have a big long configuration file or files, themes and stuff. And then, then it makes static pages that load very fast cuz there's no database access once they're written. And that those static pages can be hosted on GitHub. In fact, the way I do it, I have a server over here that's just running Engine X and has the, the page there, but I also have mirror it on GitHub. I just do a GI push Oh, nice.
(00:42:07):
On my, on my page over here. And then you can go to, I think it's leo laporte.github.io And that's the entire, that's the page. It's static. And because, and GitHub will let you do that for free because it's not doing any work. It's just hosting some html. So it, it kind of all depends on how deep you want to get into this, what your needs are. The nice thing about Squarespace, WordPress and Blog Spot is they're easy. Anybody can set up a site. I would, I should throw in sites like Shopify or Sponsor Big Commerce you know wicks sites which allow you to sell stuff. That's why I asked if you sell stuff, because they make it very, very easy. My son is not a web guru. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But as a, I'm always impressed when I go to his site, I go, wow, that's a beautiful site. He says, yeah, Shopify. So and, and it's basically free cuz they take a commission on sales. Right. So it really depends on what you wanna do. This has become a very complicated thing. The most important thing to understand is this difference between dynamic and static. I think. Right. If you need dynamic, that's gonna be more expensive cuz they've got a database engine running in the background, but it's much more flexible.
Caller 2 (00:43:14):
Great. Yeah, no, that's pretty much, that's pretty much all I need.
Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
I think card is a great solution
Mikah Sargent (00:43:21):
Actually. It's, it's super, yeah. Super simple
Leo Laporte (00:43:23):
To set up. It's both easy and super
Mikah Sargent (00:43:25):
Cost effective.
Leo Laporte (00:43:26):
Cheap <laugh>. Somebody else said demo in our chat, in our chat room says format.com too, which I'm not familiar too. Yeah.
Caller 2 (00:43:34):
Com Yeah, it doesn't need to be complicated. It's pretty much just a landing page for Yeah. My different things. That's
Leo Laporte (00:43:39):
What part is, is, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's
Mikah Sargent (00:43:41):
Designed for that. It's mostly, for
Leo Laporte (00:43:42):
Most people that's all their website is, is just, here's where my stuff is. You
Mikah Sargent (00:43:45):
Know, as far as that part where you're talking about transferring it. Yeah, that I, it, it may, may or may not be as simple as you know, linking the two up or pointing it to a site. You may have to do some of the heavy lifting on your own there. Unfortunately,
Leo Laporte (00:44:00):
Aunt, you use Squarespace and aunt's saying he spends $400 a year, but you're using their commerce, you're selling prints and all that stuff through there. So that's worth it to you because, you know, you you, you make money off of it, I hope. And to write it off <laugh>, you can write it off. It's a tax deduction. Mine's
Mikah Sargent (00:44:17):
About two 40 a
Leo Laporte (00:44:18):
Year. Two 40. Wow. You know how much I pay for my site? Nothing <laugh>. But then I'm running it on this box over here. <Laugh>. And I guess if you include the cost of the studio Yeah. The electricity.
Mikah Sargent (00:44:29):
It's in there
Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
Somewhere in the box. It maybe is cheaper to use. Squarespace. <laugh>. <Laugh>. Hey it's nice to talk to you. I, I kind of jumped on you and I apologize you didn't have your hand raised, but I just had to see this. Beautiful. So is that behind you? Is that, is that the great outdoors or is that like a courtyard or? Mm,
Caller 2 (00:44:50):
This is a mural.
Leo Laporte (00:44:53):
Oh. Oh, you fooled me. You see, you should have said, oh yeah, that's my backyard. So you're in the basement now. I get it.
Caller 2 (00:45:00):
I'm in the basement
Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
Now. Yeah, I get it. There's no windows.
Caller 2 (00:45:02):
It's there's a lot of snow out there.
Leo Laporte (00:45:05):
Yeah, <laugh>. I know. Oh gosh. Hey, it's great to talk to you. Thanks you so much, chef for calling. I appreciate it, Justin.
Caller 2 (00:45:11):
Yeah, thanks so much. Take
Leo Laporte (00:45:12):
Care. Yeah, even though you didn't wanna be on, we made him be on <laugh>, our hacker friend. Justin do we have, when is Rod joining us so I can get an idea? 1230 one 30. 1230. 1230. So we got a half an hour to Rod. Should I go over and show this? I'd love to see this. Okay. I'm gaming Chromebook. Yeah. Who knew? Who knew? I knew. You knew. You knew about it. Padre brought it to us, but Ace Asia just sent it to us. I thought, well, let's try it out. All right. Now this my friends is a Chromebook, which is kind of amazing. Chromebooks. Traditionally we recommend them because they're inexpensive. This is not, it's more like 600 bucks. And they're very secure and very simple. Basically it's the Chrome browser in a, in a pc. But Acer has, has something else in mind.
(00:46:05):
This is the five 16 ge. And normally on the Chromebook, the things that, in order to make them inexpensive, the things you give up, you know, are a quality track pad, a quality keyboard, and most importantly a quality display. Well, this is a heck of a display. 25 60 by 1600. It's 120 hertz. So that's one of the things gamers want is a high refresh rate. It's one of the things typically you don't find in a Chromebook. It also has a gaming keyboard. You can't see it very well in the studio with multi-colored lights and its clothes and it shifts. And you can kind of give away that, that, that it's a gamer laptop because the a w sd keys are highlighted in white. Those are the keys you use for movement typically in a game. Not for me. I'm a lefty. I always remap it to the arrow keys.
(00:46:57):
But, so this is, for me, this is almost a little, a little right-Hander bias in, in my, in my opinion. You also get, they say very good speakers. They call 'em force canceling speakers. I would call them crap tinny speakers, but okay. You know, nomenclature, we can, we can disagree. It's interesting cuz we do have ethernet on this. In fact, there's a full-size e ethernet jack. Look at that. And it's 2.5 gigabits. So again, this is designed for somebody who wants to do not just hardcore gaming, but hardcore streaming gaming. Right. And that's the key on this. Even though this does have and you can get various processors in it. This does have an Intel I five processor. When you're gaming on this thing, you're not actually gaming on this thing. It's designed to use the cloud gaming services like Microsoft's Xbox or in, in this case, I'm gonna run GForce. Now, let me see. Is it not responding to my, my queries GForce Now is is kind of fun. Do you have this screen? Oh, you do. Look at that. You see it, but I don't because I am not mirroring. You're extended Now I'm gonna have to figure out how this thing works.
(00:48:17):
Battery life on it is amazing. Ethernet speed is amazing. The screen is amazing. I have to say it is very fast. I I am able to play games quite quickly. Here it is. Displays. Yay. Mirror built in display. Well, that wasn't so hard, Leo. Boy, you're not too bright, are you?
Mikah Sargent (00:48:40):
I mean, this is a pretty feature packed Chromebook, right? Well,
Leo Laporte (00:48:44):
I mean, it is. If I if one of the things I can do on this is launch Buntu. I put <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (00:48:51):
Of course
Leo Laporte (00:48:51):
I've got Eemax on it. I mean it's you know, you can, you can actually run Linux on Chromebooks these days. I Is
Mikah Sargent (00:48:58):
It a, like is it a, an official, is it a blessed Chromebook Leo with all this extra stuff? It always feels like it steps outside. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
No, it's a real legit, you know, Google approved Chromebook. Let me plug in. This is actually kind of cool that I could do this full size ethernet. Now I am on a 10. What, what is their, what is our switch here? Just one. Can we get a faster switch for Leo <laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:49:21):
Editors?
Leo Laporte (00:49:21):
Editors have the editors have the 10 gigabit. We don't here. So, but you know what, it's fine for streaming games like GForce now. So let's launch the GForce. Now, what did I say I was gonna play Sons of the
Mikah Sargent (00:49:34):
Forest <laugh>. Yeah. Daughters of Liberty
Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
<Laugh>. So this is gonna, this is loading on a, on a Nvidia R T X GPU in the cloud. You have to have the game on Steam for this particular game. So it'll let you connect with your steam account. It also lets you connect with your EA account, your good old games account. Should we play a little suns of the forest? Let's see, let's continue. So we don't just do it. Cut scene here. Of course,
Mikah Sargent (00:50:04):
The point of streaming gaming is most of the processing is happening on the other end. So can't, couldn't you just play this on a, a low Chromebook? You
Leo Laporte (00:50:11):
Can. And that was kind of the point of streaming. So where you get an advantage here is if you're playing the high end version of a game like this, which supports RTX graphics. Now I can use the RTX graphics, especially I guess I don't have a game saved, so I'll start a new game. Let's play peaceful, shall we? <Laugh>? This is a very, in my opinion, very hard survival game. Because if you're playing a high end game, you want high screen refresh rate. Got it. That's one area where you excel the 2.5 gigahertz ethernet. Another area where you might want that. If you're playing streaming gaming, of course, more bandwidth, lower latency is a good thing. I love it that there's an ethernet on here and a full size H G M I on here. They really designed this for a unique, I think a unique audience, frankly. It's it's, you're right, it's not the typical Chromebook audience, but what if you could get a gaming PC capable of RTX performance for 600 bucks? Yeah. It's also a great productivity tool. I mentioned you can be running Linux, but you can also be running Android applications. So this is a cut scene, so it's not a, it's not a great demonstration, but what's, what's the, okay, let me see if I can skip this actually.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:26):
Maybe sometimes a nice escape button. Let's just, oh yeah. It does seem like you're playing though.
Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
Yeah, it feels like I'm looking out the window.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:33):
Wow. Look at that. The shine on those headphones on the chair.
Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
Yeah, they're shiny. Is it's it's, it's somewhat pre-rendered I would guess. Cause I am, I'm able to look around a little bit. The plot of this is that you are stuck in a forest. Okay.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:50):
Oh, and you're the son of someone
Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
Presumably? No, the game is the son of someone. Oh, got it. Yeah. And <laugh>. And so we can look at our assignment. I love the name Virginia Puffin. I don't know who she is. But we, we've gotta find her. Of the puffins. Of the puffin play. Yes, she is. Of the buffs, Barbara and Edward Puffin. Ooh. Yes. They're wealthy and they've become lost. He's the CEO of Puff Comp.
Mikah Sargent (00:52:15):
And you are the son Puffin who's looking
Leo Laporte (00:52:18):
For No, I'm a soldier. I don't
Mikah Sargent (00:52:19):
Understand where the son
Leo Laporte (00:52:21):
Fisheye and Kelvin are going a searching for these guys. I guess we're gonna have to wait. And let's
Mikah Sargent (00:52:29):
See. So the goal is not to find the sun of the forest. I see.
Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
Okay. No, the, the game is the sun <laugh> fight demons. Oh. Obviously I've got problems.
Mikah Sargent (00:52:40):
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte (00:52:41):
Yeah. Oh. Uhoh, somebody shot us up. Oh, no, we're going down.
Mikah Sargent (00:52:48):
I know who shot you. You do? Yeah. I was the son of the forest <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:52:52):
Stop it. Just stop
Mikah Sargent (00:52:53):
It. I'm
Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
Sorry. There is a a lady in this game with three legs and three arms. What?
Mikah Sargent (00:52:59):
Oh, so it's kinda spooky. It's
Leo Laporte (00:53:00):
Spooky. It's creepy. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, he fell. Bye guys.
Mikah Sargent (00:53:04):
And there go Your meals. Ready to eat.
Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
Oh, I'm under, I'm under water. What am I gonna do?
Mikah Sargent (00:53:09):
Break the glass. Leo, break the glass.
Leo Laporte (00:53:11):
Really? Okay. Can I do it with, oh, oh, no, no. I can't help you, sir. Sorry. Can you go on the other side of the helicopter?
Mikah Sargent (00:53:19):
Hey, just try to
Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Go around. Oh, there he goes.
Mikah Sargent (00:53:21):
Oh. Oh. Now you, now you put your fist
Leo Laporte (00:53:23):
Down. Yeah. Now I try to break the window. You know, let's do it with my boots. That's the best way to do it. Me, e e I'm hitting e
Mikah Sargent (00:53:33):
Slam it. <Laugh>. E e
Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
E. Unlike, oh, there goes the door. I
Mikah Sargent (00:53:39):
Was fooled by that F four joke. Once at, at years
Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
And years ago, somebody in our chat room was giving out a dev null Linux tip that would erase your home directory. Don't listen to commands issued in the chat room. Okay? Yes, please. I beg of you, whatever you're doing.
Mikah Sargent (00:53:55):
Alright. Did you make it
Leo Laporte (00:53:56):
So, I don't know if you can hear the Aya made it. Hold on a second. It's loading. Oh, okay. You can hear the sound. Okay. Oh, it's coming through htm.
Mikah Sargent (00:54:03):
I, yeah, I can hear the sound. Sounds great. Oh, well, that's rude.
Leo Laporte (00:54:06):
Wait a minute. Hey, knock it off, buddy.
Mikah Sargent (00:54:08):
Hey, shiny jacket.
Leo Laporte (00:54:09):
Oh, that's the guy who shot us, I'm guessing. Oh. Oh.
Mikah Sargent (00:54:15):
Knocked out.
Leo Laporte (00:54:17):
So the audio coming out of the speakers, even though it looks like a Mac, you know, the Mac Pro speakers, MacBook Pro speakers are so good, so Rich. And these look like those,
Mikah Sargent (00:54:28):
But they're not. No, they don't sound like they
Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
Don't, but you know what? You're gonna wear headphones because you're a real gamer. Exactly. Who cares?
Mikah Sargent (00:54:35):
And for the price, I mean, that's great that there're speakers that it can. So
Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
Now we're, now we're playing. There's very little hesitation. You're able to run around. I'm sorry. I had a saved game, but obviously it wasn't saved properly. I'm supposed to look in all of these things and wander around, but this will give you an idea. It looks really good. Yeah. Yeah. It's using an RTX in the cloud. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is amazing. A Nvidia GPU in the cloud. Now you pay a lot for the monthly fee, but this, this Chromebook comes with a four month high end Nvidia GForce now subscription. So you can at least try it out and see if you, if you like it. I actually don't have the high end subscription at home. I'm fine without it. But this is 4K capable. And we're getting a four. This is a 4K screen high refresh rate. We're going up in the mountains. Really? I should have opened my inventory, taken out the the ax here in my emergency pack. Left mouse open. I guess I, oh, was that the right mouse? I guess I should have opened that sucker. Look what's in there. Oh, there's a, looks like a anyway, <laugh>. It's not gonna, it's not. I'm not gonna last long. Let's just put it that way. I didn't get the ax and the knife and all that stuff.
Mikah Sargent (00:55:58):
The shadows and the reflection are, look at that. Quite good.
Leo Laporte (00:56:00):
Okay. So for a gaming pc, this is good. Yeah. Impressed. If you have enough bandwidth and you're low enough latency, you certainly can play a high end game. This is a AAA title, brand new, very hot. They sold 2 million copies of this game last weekend. Very, very hot. Right now it's, it's, it's actually in beta. It's impressive. H DM I 2.1. Yes. So you go drive a nice 4K screen at a high refresh rate, wifi six E. So if you're not close to an ethernet port, you can at least get the high speed wifi on here. I think in, in general, this is a really nice system. It is. You know, I'll let you handle this a little bit. It feels a little cheesy. It's a plastic body. It looks aluminum. It's not oh, that's not a problem. This is brushed aluminum here, but, well, maybe it's plastic.
(00:56:50):
It's plastic. Ah, it's plastic. It also, like many Chromebooks, it feels a little light. I wouldn't say the track pad is as good as, I mean, look, I'm comparing it to a MacBook, so I probably shouldn't do that. It's not as good as a MacBook, but it's very good for a Chromebook keyboard has a little bounce. It's a little bit not ideal, but not terrible. This is certainly as good a Chromebook as you're gonna get, even for the thousand dollars models of Chromebooks. I would say this is comparable. Lots of speed with an I five. Now, of course, the 95 is gonna cost you more. You can get this up to of 1200 bucks easily. This is the Acer Chromebook five 16 ge. Remind me, does it have fans? Oh, it has fans. Many fans. Yeah. Yeah. It has to have fans because it's a Intel processor. <Laugh>,
(00:57:41):
Fair enough. <Laugh> the hinge is good. It's a nice looking device. If you, if you, if it's gaming that's on your mind. If that's what you wanna do, you can, it's a very nice gaming machine. But of course, it also does everything else a Chromebook does, including go to Starbucks. So, I don't, I don't know why, but some reason Google's decided, or maybe it's maybe, maybe this is an Acer thing. It's decided to put a Starbucks that is odd logo in my in my menu. I do have a Fast Mail logo probably cuz I logged in. It's a, you know, this is decent. And you, you have the Play Store, so you can, you can absolutely load Android stuff on here. In fact the GForce now is an app. It's, so one of the things that's changed a lot with, with Chromebooks is it runs apps.
(00:58:27):
This is an app. This is, this is not running in Chrome. And you see there's some other apps we can install, including Discord, peacock, hbo, O Max. I suspect an app running on a Chromebook is still pretty much not a standalone app. The Android apps certainly are, the Linux apps certainly are. But I would say, you know, if you're running an app, it's probably a Chrome app, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, remember those Chrome apps? Still pretty nice. And there's some, there's some fun things you could do. Lots of great, lots of great games in GForce now, or Xbox Cloud, or ea I'm gonna say thumbs up. If you want a Chromebook and you do wanna do some gaming, you're paying the price for a little gaming machine. But this is, this is pretty darn impressive. And so as Sons of the Forest, I'm gonna die any minute. Now. I know <laugh>, something
Mikah Sargent (00:59:20):
Falls out of the tree and just takes it off.
Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
So we thank Acer for sending us this. So I, cuz I was interested in, well, how good can a Chromebook be? And I'm, you know, I'm pretty impressed. But we're gonna send it back tomorrow, so thank you Acer for that. Shall we go on with more calls? Do we have a video call? This would be a good time to do that so I can walk over while we're listening to the video call. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:59:46):
A video call per hand per chance. Let's do it from the email.
Caller 3 (00:59:51):
Hi, my name is Jeremy and I'm recording this in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I'm switching over from Last Pass to Bit Warden and I have no problem exporting my vault from last pass into a CSV file to import it in. Bit Warden. But I also have password saved on Key Chain on my iPad and my iPhone. But Apple Support tells me without a Mac computer that I don't have, I only have a Windows computer that I can't ah, export all of my key path passwords to a CSV file all in one go. I have to airdrop them one at a time. And that's not good for me because I have a lot of passwords saved in key chain. I'm wondering if you can suggest an alternate method other than airdropping them one at a time. Thank you.
Leo Laporte (01:01:10):
That's a good question.
Mikah Sargent (01:01:11):
Yeah, it's a very good question. I am fairly certain that, and I'm looking yeah, iCloud for Windows. So,
Leo Laporte (01:01:18):
Ah,
Mikah Sargent (01:01:20):
Icloud for Windows 12.5 and maybe even be further along now than that has the keychain access. And so you will be able to export using iCloud for Windows. So just look up iCloud for Windows and we'll see what version it is at this point. It
Leo Laporte (01:01:40):
Does have, it looks like the Keychain app does have an export as well. I wonder
Mikah Sargent (01:01:47):
Though, the Keychain app itself does, but only on the Mac. You cannot do it with iPad
Leo Laporte (01:01:51):
Or with iPhone ic. Yeah. Only on the Mac. And he's got an iPad, so Yeah. So that's why you want to install iCloud for Windows, which actually is pretty good these days. Yeah, he does a lot of stuff. More than I really thought. It, it would given Apple's <laugh> feelings about Windows machines. Right. They're really supporting 'em quite well. Good.
Mikah Sargent (01:02:11):
So we will include a link to that application. It's available in the win in the Microsoft store. And you are able to use it to manage those iCloud passwords and get them moved over to your system.
Leo Laporte (01:02:24):
We should just for comparison, size comparison, put that next to your head.
Mikah Sargent (01:02:30):
<Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (01:02:31):
Just so you know
Mikah Sargent (01:02:31):
How to do Mic A Mikah for scale.
Leo Laporte (01:02:33):
It's a big, it's a 15 inch big laptop.
Mikah Sargent (01:02:35):
Yeah. When you, whenever you pulled it out and said this was a Chromebook, I thought, wait, that
Leo Laporte (01:02:38):
Yeah. That's quite, yeah. Quite large. Yeah. It is a, the game. GE stands for Gaming Edition. Acer makes other, I think Acer makes the best, frankly Chromebooks. They make other ones. Let me just check. I didn't, I didn't, I don't know exactly what the price is for this as equipped, cuz this is kind of, you know, they've put everything everything fancy into it. It goes all the way up to an I seven, which is kind of amazing. I wouldn't put an I seven in it cuz you're not gonna be doing anything com 16 inch. You're not gonna be doing anything. More, more needing more horsepower than what I was doing. No, it's only eight gigs of ram. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the internal graphics are Iris xe, but you're not relying on those again when you're streaming. It does have an unusually large hard drive 256 gigs for Chromebook. That's pretty good.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:30):
Yeah, cuz the whole li the whole conceit of Chromebook is typically that it's all stored in the cloud, right?
Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
I guess the model I have is 650 bucks. I thought it might be more. All right. So there you go. It it, it looks like you can't really add anything more to it.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:46):
And it's a nice fingerprint collector there on the top. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:03:50):
Hey so's my <crosstalk> here. And that's why mine's in a in a plastic case, somebody says it's like I have Eastern European Grandma syndrome, <laugh>. You know how they wrapped their, you put
Mikah Sargent (01:04:02):
Everything in plastic?
Leo Laporte (01:04:03):
Yeah. Yeah. They wrapped their sofas in plastic. Our show today brought to you, and I mean, brought to you literally by cash fly our c D N. Now, I gotta tell you, and we've learned this, you probably realize it yourself. You don't hang around if you press a button in the website. I just did this the other day. I was looking at a website, it took forever to load. I just, okay, fine. I don't need it that bad. A video doesn't load, boom, who cares? Right? Customers are not gonna hang around for your content to load. So don't give them a reason to leave. You can dramatically increase your sites and app speed over long distances globally, worldwide with Cachefly. We love Cachefly and so do 3,500 other clients in over 80 countries around the world. Organizations like us use Cachefly for scalability.
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Basically you design your own contract when you switch to Cash Lie. And we know it because we've been using Cash Life forever. We wouldn't have it any other way. Building trusted CDN relationships since 19 99, 24 years now, cash Flow continues to hold a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. Thank you. Cachefly. The only CDN built for throughput, delivering rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods. 30% faster than other major CDNs. Learn how you can get your first month free. C A c H E f l Y cash fly.com. You've heard me say it many times. Bandwidth for as the tech guys is provided by Cash. Fly at C A C H E F l y.com com. Com All right, who should we take next? Maxfield has had his hand up for some time. Let's get him on the line here. I think audio only. Hello Maxfield.
Caller 4 (01:08:26):
Hello?
Leo Laporte (01:08:27):
Hello. Where are you calling from?
Caller 4 (01:08:29):
East Bay. Not far at all.
Leo Laporte (01:08:31):
Oh, look, we can see him. Yay. Welcome you
Mikah Sargent (01:08:35):
To
Leo Laporte (01:08:35):
The show, east Bay. What can we do for you? Indeed?
Caller 4 (01:08:39):
Well, I I was tasked not long ago with taking family fi videos and photos and digitizing and making the modern, you know, some semblance of security beyond just having pieces of paper. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I thought, gee, YouTube is a great place to put video for free. Yes. and as it turns out this foolish decision <laugh> just kicked me in the butt. Oh no.
Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
Oh, no.
Caller 4 (01:09:09):
<Laugh>. Because it turns out some of these videos unbeknownst to me, feature miniature me and my siblings knew Naked. You know, that sort
Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
Of stuff, uhoh and and we know Google is fussy about that
Caller 4 (01:09:23):
Apparently. And so the question and so as a result, I'm, I'm locked out of my YouTube
Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
Oh.
Caller 4 (01:09:32):
The affiliated accounts for which were brand accounts that I'm affiliated. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:09:37):
You're, oh.
Caller 4 (01:09:39):
And all
Leo Laporte (01:09:40):
You can can do is appeal this.
(01:09:43):
Yeah. There was a we reported on it some months ago, a New York Times article about a guy who had a kid who had a rash. His doctor said, send me a picture of the rash. He did. But as you know, often with smartphones Google Photos backup gets it. And it did. And the picture was a nude child with a rash. And he lost his Google account. And the story is a sad story. I don't, I don't know if he ever got it back completely, but all you can do is appeal <laugh> and I and, and I'm so sorry this happened to you Maxville. That's terrible. Did you know that the videos had child nudity in it?
Caller 4 (01:10:29):
Not directly. No.
Mikah Sargent (01:10:30):
Yeah. Right. And so just a bunch of stuff thinking about it either, you know. Yeah. Whenever you're,
Caller 4 (01:10:33):
No, and that's, that's obviously not the intention here.
Mikah Sargent (01:10:38):
So what I'm seeing is when it, so it takes 24 hours before kind of, they, they give you a 24 hour cool down. And then it's saying when you try to log back into your Google account, you should see an option that says start appeal. Have you seen that option yet?
Caller 4 (01:10:55):
I have. And so far that the, the appeal process has given me the runaround. Okay. whether or not, you know, that's legitimate or not, I don't know to what extent there's a human there.
Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
Do you want to hear the story of the dad and what happened to him?
Caller 4 (01:11:12):
<Laugh>? I'm curious. Yeah. What, what's the
Leo Laporte (01:11:14):
Show? Let me this is from the New York Times, August 25th, 2022. It could actually be worse cuz not only did he lose the account, but Google referred it to the authorities. The sad thing is the police on review said, no problem, you're cleared. But for some reason Google didn't acknowledge that. And, you know, you understand they're very sensitive about Csam. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, that's, everybody's very nervous about that. Let's see, a severe violation. Mark who's in his forties, came to rely heavily on Google, synced appointments on calendar, probably not even as much as you did. You, you have business with the brand accounts. Yeah. That's bad news. His account had been disabled cuz of harmful content that was, quote, a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal. Did you get that warning?
Caller 4 (01:12:13):
Yeah. I, I got a legal, I got the, the child pornography
Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
Warning. Now prepare yourself because Google may then refer you to the police. Mark's Google's review team flagged a video and, and the San Francisco Police Department was, set the information and started to investigate him. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Now, the good news is the police are human. Yes. They're, they're not a python human beings. Exactly. So the police immediately said, oh, no, no. Yeah, of course. This is a picture you sent to the doctor and it's not child porno. But the problem is Google is using, you know, content ID and YouTube, which not, not notice notices, copyright stuff. They use something called photo D n a, which was created by Facebook originally. And it does the same thing for nudity. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So photo to the A flags it, Google will then, I'm sorry, not Facebook. Microsoft came up with this Facebook uses it it flags it and then it refers it to a human. The human apparently decided this was bad. The time says a human content moderator for Google would've reviewed the photo after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of Csam child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, locks the account, searches for other exploitative material, and as required by federal law, makes a report to the cyber tip line at ncmec, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. How, how long ago did this happen to you, Maxville?
Caller 4 (01:13:49):
This? so there was a, some, some time in between the fact that I uploaded, I uploaded about a year ago and I started getting emails saying, your, your account's been taken down only about a month ago. Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
So, but a month is enough time that if Nick Mick had decided to refer it to the authorities, you probably would know by now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I would think. But that's the, frankly, the larger at this point you know, I think NC Mick is probably smarter and said, oh yeah, that's just videos of him as a kid. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> big deal. Right. this is the problem. This is why Apple dropped at Csam scanning because of this false positive. So let's see. This was back in 2021. Mark got a letter from the S F P D saying you've been investigated as well as copies of the search warrant served on Google. And his I S P and investigator looked at his internet searches, his location history, his messages, and he document you, you know, you get in this system, it's a meat grinder.
(01:14:52):
Yeah. the search related to child exploitation videos had taken place in February within a week of the photos. So this is why I think you might be okay. The investigator Mark talked to the investigator, said the case is closed. I, the, the investigator said, I determined the incident did not meet the elements of a crime, no crime had occurred. That's what would almost certainly happen for you Maxfield, especially since they're older videos and, you know but that did not fix it with Google. Yep. Mark appealed his case to Google, again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago, as his account was being permanently deleted, he talked to a lawyer about suing Google how much it might cost. Mark says, probably not worth the $7,000. I would to told it would cost to do that. So, I mean, this has a, this is a sad story. This does not have a happy ending. I hope yours I
Mikah Sargent (01:15:47):
Think the biggest, I'm looking at Google's own support documentation and one of the situations where, because typically if your account is disabled or locked you are still able to go in and download your data from the site. Oh. However, if it involves child sexual abuse material, you are not able to go in and download your data. Have
Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
You gone to the Google takeout to see if you can get your date out of it?
Caller 4 (01:16:12):
That is my experience as well. Okay. Now, I have not been able to download.
Mikah Sargent (01:16:17):
My biggest suggestion for you is if, if you're, I don't know how any of this works, you know, behind the scenes having obviously not gone through the process, but if you are able to restart the appeal or try to, to figure out, cuz you said they're giving you the runaround on the appeal without clarity on what that means Exactly. Just try to follow through as much as possible.
Leo Laporte (01:16:41):
Assistance pays. Yeah, exactly. We've had that experience with Facebook and Google and, and other ones. You know, there, it's a big company with billions of users and it's very hard to kind of get through the process.
Mikah Sargent (01:16:53):
And you can't be the only one to have done this. This is, that's
Leo Laporte (01:16:56):
Very
Mikah Sargent (01:16:56):
Common. Yeah. To, to upload old photos and videos from your childhood. This poor
Leo Laporte (01:16:59):
Guy, mark, even though he was exonerated by the S F P D, the, this is the funny thing. The S F P D has all of his account, they downloaded everything and they saved, but he can't get it from them. He can't get Google to, to respond. But a police spokesman did say the department's eager to help him. So maybe your best bet is getting investigated and exonerated and they would have a copy of it. Oh my God. That's not a good solution at all. I am so sorry this happened to you, max. Yeah. This is awful. I don't, there's no, you know, we don't have a magic wand. We could wave and I don't know any, I mean, we know people at Google, but they, my experience, you know, people often write to me say, can you intercede with me with Facebook or Google or, and every, you know, I try, but they, they, they, they all say, oh, that's not my department. I can't help
Mikah Sargent (01:17:48):
You. Yeah, exactly. People you do know there, there don't do that.
Leo Laporte (01:17:51):
It's a big, that's a big company. A hundred thousand employees. Mark, are you, I you a trumpeter. I see the brass instruments behind you there,
Caller 4 (01:18:00):
There are some, some horns in the background. That is indeed. And then Sammy Davis Jr. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:18:05):
Nice. You
Mikah Sargent (01:18:05):
Bet. I would say too, your story is one that I wouldn't, I would imagine that some journalists might be interested in. So you may reach out to the virtue. I
Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
Would say that too. But the New York Times, that's
Mikah Sargent (01:18:18):
True. The New York Times
Leo Laporte (01:18:18):
Couldn't get it expose.
Mikah Sargent (01:18:20):
That's true. The New York Times couldn't get 'em to do it
Leo Laporte (01:18:21):
And nothing. And I don't know if you get, if your story's published in the New York Times and Google still doesn't respond, I think that's proof positive. They don't care. Yeah. I'm so sorry. This I'm, oh, this is a nightmare. What kind of, are you, what kind of music do you play?
Caller 4 (01:18:39):
How along the same, so 1930s and forties is really
Leo Laporte (01:18:42):
Sammy Davis style.
Caller 4 (01:18:44):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Big band.
Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
Can you play the Candy's? Can you play something for us,
Caller 4 (01:18:49):
<Laugh>? Oh, they're not, these aren't functional at the moment. Oh. Hence why they're on, on display rather than
Leo Laporte (01:18:56):
In use. Do you play in a band?
Caller 4 (01:18:59):
I fiddle around, so to speak. Nice. Yeah. Nice. I enjoy it.
Leo Laporte (01:19:04):
Nice. Maxville, I'm, I'm pleased to have met you and I'm sorry that Yeah, this has happened to you. I'm glad you called though, cuz people need to hear this.
Mikah Sargent (01:19:11):
Yes. Do not use YouTube as your, your video storage service. But you know, this kinda
Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Stuff, what I would, for instance, I did, I uploaded all my family videos to Google Photos. Uhhuh <affirmative>, not YouTube. Same problem, right? Yeah. Mark, this guy in the New York Times story, it was Google Photos, they scan all that stuff. If you're putting in the cloud with almost anybody, it's almost certainly getting scanned and there's a good reason they're liable.
Mikah Sargent (01:19:38):
Yes. That's why it's the liability.
Leo Laporte (01:19:39):
There's no section two 30 protecting them against Csam. So they're liable for anything that they store on their cloud. So they scan it all Apple does too. They scan the iCloud stuff. So golly,
Mikah Sargent (01:19:53):
Wow. That's this tough
Caller 4 (01:19:55):
<Laugh> that that answers the question. Is there an alternative? No cloud
Leo Laporte (01:19:59):
Solution? I would say no. Yeah. go ahead. Let me think about that. That's
Mikah Sargent (01:20:04):
Interesting question. Cause I'm thinking even Dropbox would
Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
Still Oh, they scan Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:20:07):
Scans.
Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
Everybody has this relationship with Nick, Mick because, and they've got this and almost everybody uses Photo dna. It's the same software. Microsoft developed it 20 years ago almost. And everybody uses it. So flash
Mikah Sargent (01:20:21):
Drives <laugh>. I gotta go back to the, gosh,
Leo Laporte (01:20:23):
Let me think. You know, I should contact Chris McCaskill over at Smug Mug and see Smug Mug's a great place. I store all my photos there. There may be some smaller providers that don't, you know, that don't scan. Smug mug hosts a lot of photographers, a lot of artists. They host stills mostly, but they also do video. That's where I put my family photos to share with family. But I, again, I can't promise, I I will over the week, I will send an email to mc the McCaskill's and see if, if they do, and if they say, cuz they may not want to admit it if they
Mikah Sargent (01:21:03):
Don't. Yeah. And this is a good point that people are saying in the chat. If you're hosting your own on a network, attach chronology that could be the place to, to keep it
Leo Laporte (01:21:12):
Technology.
Mikah Sargent (01:21:13):
Yeah. But I, I don't know. It, I, I would just, for me if I was specifically tasked with doing this, I would give everybody a cd, a flash drive or a cd Yeah. Or dvd, one of, depending on the family member and how tech savvy they were, they would get one of those
Leo Laporte (01:21:28):
Devices. This is, this is a new world. This is I don't blame you for not being prepared for
Mikah Sargent (01:21:32):
This one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's be clear. You, that was not a foolish thing that you did. Yeah. In, in, you know, making that happen that you had no expectation because it was a completely innocent thing that you did. So I hope that you're not beating yourself up too much about that part of it and in Yeah. But coming on the show screwed. Right. And coming on the show and talking about it though. Thank you. Because you have helped us warn all of the people who listen to the show,
Leo Laporte (01:21:54):
Some minor do the
Mikah Sargent (01:21:55):
Same
Leo Laporte (01:21:55):
Consolation, <laugh>. So sorry dude, max. Well thank you
Mikah Sargent (01:21:59):
Nonetheless.
Leo Laporte (01:21:59):
Thank you. And when we open the studio, I hope you'll come by and visit since you're so, so near indie. All right. Take care, sir. Thank you. Wow. That's just
Mikah Sargent (01:22:10):
Sad. That is sad.
Leo Laporte (01:22:12):
And I understand.
Mikah Sargent (01:22:13):
I get it from both. Like yeah, I understand why these companies are doing this and protecting themselves and you would rather have one that, that false positives a little bit more than misses. So I, I get why it, you know, it happened the way that it did, but they're re the appeal process should be a lot better than it is.
Leo Laporte (01:22:34):
And I really don't, you know thank you Raymond thought sent me a smug mug blog post. They store their stuff on Amazon s3. So even if smug mug didn't scan, I bet Amazon does. This is just like content ID on YouTube. It's just an automated process that's looking for, I you know what? We don't even know cuz it's not, it's not open. What is it looking for? They don't wanna tell anybody cuz they don't want bad guys to know
Mikah Sargent (01:23:03):
Exactly
Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
What not to do and that kind of thing. So I don't think Mike Bees asking about the OneDrive personal vault, which is an encrypted vault within your OneDrive. Yeah. I mean for sure if you encrypted it bef before you uploaded it, nobody can see into it. Right. But then you would have to give the password to everybody else. Yep. This is the problem. This system, I
Mikah Sargent (01:23:26):
Just don't think this Yeah. This is not where you're going to share videos of your family.
Leo Laporte (01:23:31):
But I just have to point out, this system doesn't stop csam either. Right. Because if you're spreading this, you know enough to re-encrypt, you know how to ha avoid this. I
Mikah Sargent (01:23:43):
But they don't wanna make it easier.
Leo Laporte (01:23:45):
No, I guess not. I guess not. And they're liable. Yep. And that's really, that's
Mikah Sargent (01:23:50):
Yeah. Yeah. They don't, they don't care about the rest of it. They just don't wanna be liable.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (01:23:53):
Is Mr. Pile in the house? In the house? Yes, he is. Oh, <laugh>, we gotta play. We can't play your song. So in your mind, everybody, if you would help us audience at home, just hum in your mind. Elton John's rocket man. Now <laugh>, because it's <laugh> in your mind. I'm here, not out loud, it's time for Rod Pile, our spaceman rod, of course longtime contributor on the tech guy. Actually not that long. You were our newest contributor editor-in-chief of Ad Astra, the official publication of the National Space society@spacedots.org. And the host of our wonderful show, which I'm loving more and more all the time this week in space. In fact, I don't think it's a secret rod, but we're gonna be able to see your smiling face on the show pretty soon. I'm sorry, <laugh>. Oh no, no. Course there will be, there will be no nudity on my show.
(01:24:57):
Oh, watch it. No, because we're scanning it order otherwise Yeah, we're, we're scanning it. And if it was a, a picture of me as a child, it would be a daguerre type and you wouldn't be able to see it. Anyway. <laugh>, there you go. The, this week in space shows is at TWI tv slash twists. Rod Pyle te Malik from space.com host the show. And we thought, you know, we've been trying to get all, and I think we've succeeded almost all of our s contributors Yeah. From the old show on with us from time to time. And once again, I was last <laugh>. Nope, I'm just kidding. Johnny. Just, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny Jet is last. Yep. There's one in one. Really? I got it before Johnny. Oh, <laugh>. I'm preening now. <Laugh>. Thank you. So Rod, what's up in space? I saw, I saw one funny thing I'm gonna ask you about Yeah.
(01:25:46):
Because we're all piling on Elon these days. He's got this Starship right, that he, that yeah. Spacex wants to launch, but this well, a bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. But there's been so many delays and stuff. Mushrooms were growing in the, in the cowling of the fuel is right. Yeah. Is that common? But it's humid. I, you know, it's humid down there. I mean, it's Florida. So he had mushroom Well no, this is in Boca Chica. Oh, it's Boca Chica. Okay. But it's, you know, similar latitude, similar temperature environment and humidity and stuff, but at least it's just mushrooms. You can go scrape those out with your hand, right? Mm-Hmm. On the other hand, when we were trying to get Starliner, Boeing's delivered to the iss s space capsule off last year. Instead they had rusted valves from that environment.
(01:26:34):
Oh. Now you'd think, you'd think that years, years, decades of working on spacecraft down at the Cape would tell you, okay, don't use, you know, cold iron or pot metal <laugh> oxidized. I'm exaggerating. I grant you, you'd think it's all aluminum or titanium or something. Right? Well, or or at least something oxidation proof. Yeah. Right. You know, because those valves gotta, gotta twist round for the thing to take spray it with the rust, the rustoleum, rustoleum rustoleum. Yeah. So, or you know, smear it with, with Crisco or something. Anyway. Yeah. There's gotta be a way. That's what I do. But, but they're, they're planning to launch next on next too much. So, so we got what <laugh>, wait a minute. What, sorry, go ahead. Sorry. It's a Crisco joke. Okay. Yeah. So, so yeah, so, so that's good. They're, they're getting going. Starship you know, there's been a lot of delays.
(01:27:26):
Part of it is just that it's really complicated. Part of it, maybe I suppose we could, prognosticate might have something to do with Twitter. Although, you know, Gwen Shotwell is the president of SpaceX and she really runs the show there. Yeah. So Elon does, his thing comes and goes. He's got, you know, how many bajillion companies to deal with now <laugh>. So, so Gwen keeps running. So they really are moving fast. Part of the delay was the FAA hanging them up in terms of permitting and licensing to let them go. So they had a bunch of hurdles they had to clear, it took many months. And then finally they said, okay, you can launch, but you gotta do these 71 things before you do so. So it, but I mean, it's stuff like road closures and environmental interactions and, you know, you gotta do it only on these certain days, not on holiday weekends and all that, because there's a few people living down there and my sympathy to them.
(01:28:20):
But, you know, being a space guy, I'm kinda like, yeah, I feel bad for you, but I wanna see the rock and go. So we're, we're expecting this quarter for that February 20. So they're off mushrooms. They say they're gonna launch the next crew dragon, right? The crew start, yeah. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. So that's crew six. That's their sixth flight up the is ss. And at a very good time, because as you'll recall, we had the so's ms 22 capsule up there, which got another leak hit by a meteor and vetted out all its coolant. And then the progress, which is the cargo version, the uncured cargo version that delivers stuff went up just a short while ago and it sprung a kind of leak. Mm-Hmm. And they said <affirmative> another meteor strike, which reminded me of that moment at red October when, what's his name, looks at the, at Alec Baldwin or at the, at the Russian ambassador and says, Dimitri, you've lost another Russian submarine <laugh>, you've got another meteorite on your another up.
(01:29:20):
How are the meteors missing the space station? But they're hitting that little tiny capsule. So I don't know. We'll see. You know, they gotta get it back. So on the brake is the brake side. They make it with tin foil. So there's no rust <laugh>. True. Right. Well there you go. You cruel, harsh man. <Laugh>. So and then they, they the Russians launched the MS 23 soyus, which does take a crewe, but they launched it empty. So now they have a lifeboat up there and they can bring back damage one without people in it. So there's no risk. And at least get a look at it and maybe, possibly tell us what they found was wrong. Thank goodness. So yeah, so now we, we have, as of today, we have enough spacecraft up there to bring everybody home if something goes wrong, which is very good.
(01:30:02):
And then the but, but it's just gonna be on standby. The two cosmonauts, the American astronauts that we're gonna come back on, the one that sprung a leak are gonna end up staying a year instead of six months. So it, it kind of screws up the rotations, but at least they can get back onto 'em. Schedule. I know you've talked to astronauts a lot is that when they hear that news, it seems like the guys, you know, you were gonna stay six months, did you pack some extra underwear? Cause it's gonna be a year. <Laugh> is, is, are they ex glad to hear it or sad to hear it because there's also some physiological side effects? Yeah, I think most of them welcome it because the, the adventure if you will, and the ability to continue contributing. Cause I mean these guys are the truest or true believers, right?
(01:30:45):
Yeah. Outweighs the risks. But as you say, especially for men, there's some issues for women. There are different issues. You know, the radiation can affect what your what, what happens to you? Well, I'll get there. Okay. Radiation could affect reproductive system and so forth, but the radiation isn't very high. The altar of the iss S cuz magnetosphere blocks a lot of it for men. So we've got this thing with atrac cranial pressure that we know, right? Yeah. The fluids redistribute. You feel like you got a head cold all the time. I had can't last, can't taste anything. I had such a headache. Yeah. And so that's why they, they ate so much sriracha and, and chili peppers up there try to didn't taste something. Are you choking? No <laugh> because sriracha is like in huge demand because otherwise they can't taste much God. Cause their heads all stopped up.
(01:31:32):
But because of that pressure, we think for some reason the eyes begin to defocus and the vision starts to go. So you can correct it with glasses, but it does distort the eyeball for some reason. It happens to men and almost never to women. Hmm. Huh So once again, Leo, you can tell Lisa that she is in fact superior. Yes. Well, she knows that. I don't have to tell her. We bow to her genetics, which are obviously better than your in mine. But anyway, woman eyeballs is not a good thing. You don't want that. I don't. No. And you know what's weird is, so this this intercranial pressure thing theory was around for a long time, and this is still in consideration, but for somebody like Scott Kelly who came back, I don't know what, two years, years ago, was a long time ago.
(01:32:13):
Yeah. Yeah. His eyes haven't returned to normal. Oh, oh wow. Since he's back on the ground. Yikes. Now, you know, I wear glasses. I think you wear glasses. So it's like, so what? You know, you wear glasses, it's worth it for that kind of adventure. But yeah, so, so the additional time can have some complications and who knows what's going on on the ground for those guys, you know, hopefully none of them have spouses having children or anything. But, you know, I just hope picture car to take your chances, bring extra socks, you might be there, little extra socks a little bit longer. There's no laundry. Is there laundry up there? They pack the dirty stuff. So, so they've got enough changes as I understand it that they don't have Yeah, but you can't pack for it's hard to six months and then spend a year and not well, but there's deliveries of stuff constantly.
(01:33:00):
Oh, oh yeah. Do they have wear sock delivery? That would be pretty cool. You bet. Fresh laundry. That's that, that Russian progress I told you that went up, which is the other version of the sos is just a freighter. So it delivers stuff. Oh. We have a couple of different, you know, the regular old dragons deliver stuff with their UNC crewed flights and there's, there's other spacecraft that do that. But I have another story. I got a bunch of stories. How much time are we gonna spend? Take all the time you want tell us this. There's no radio company saying, yay. Wait a minute. We gotta get our 19 minutes of ads in. Oh my God. I did coast to coast last week and I think out of the hour we might have done 33 minutes of editorial. That's about right. Because it's not just 19 minutes of ads.
(01:33:41):
There's local news at the top and the bottom of the hour. Yeah. Yeah. I think I don't remember, but I think it was about 32 or 33 minutes of content. An hour. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fun. It's just, you know. Yeah. A lot of, lot of ads explodes are fun. So asteroid Rgo, which you'll remember from Dan Suarez's book, which was very well documented there. He, we were talking about that earlier. I called it Ragner Rock. It's Rigo <laugh> Rego. Okay. I kinda like you really called it Rag Rock. Yeah, I kinda like rag rock too. <Laugh>. we just got an article written up by the Japanese. So they sent their probe hausa there a few years back and it grabbed a very small sample and returned it to Earth. So they've been looking at it ever since. And they have found not entirely surprisingly prebiotic organic molecules.
(01:34:26):
And what does that mean? Well, if you remember Star Trek two, you remember their discussion of prebiotics, which is, you know, it's the building blocks of life, but it's not quite there yet. But it doesn't include amino acids and some others that only form the presence of water. So is this a big deal? Well, kind of because, you know, we're still curious about where life came from on earth. And increasingly as we look at asteroids and meteors and even comets, we're finding these organic compounds and on moons of other planets by the way. And maybe even out as far as Pluto, although they haven't confirmed that yet. There's organic compounds out there that probably made their way to earth in the early days and may have been what got us started. So we know you and I may be the Seeds of Life are on moderate sized asteroid Yugo survivors.
(01:35:13):
Yeah. That's really cool. Cool. Does it change the cuz of course in Daniel's book which by the way, great book Critical Mass, it was a, a successor to Delta V. They go to Ugu to harvest it and there's a lot of valuable resources there. I is that turning out to be true based on the spectroscopy from body to body is different. But yeah. You know, there's, there's an asteroid that's expected to be very, very high in platinum content. There's a number of them actually. Is rego all that? I don't, it's just easy recall. Easy to ridge. Yeah. It's just easy to, you know, I think it's more of a, of a carbonation chondrite type, which means it's this kind of carbon e pre-organic goo. People call me that a lot <laugh>, but <laugh>. But it's exciting to find that what's missing on Riu that they found in some other asteroids are or meteorites are sugars and components of RNA and dna n a that have been found in carbonation con rights, which are the most common kind of meteorite.
(01:36:16):
And of course those meteorites came from bigger asteroids that got broken up. It looks more like the kind of stuff left over in my grill after a heavy smoke <laugh>. Did you see, can you show, do you have my screen? I know we're having trouble with the TriCaster. Wait a minute. You got a picture of your grill? <Laugh>? No. <Laugh>. Yes. Right there. Sort of. This is from, that's the sample. That's the sample I brought back from our good friend Tark Malik. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the takeaway f fr from this for me is the stuff of life is everywhere. And so I think, you know, what I find encouraging about this is it feels like it's just a matter of time before we find it somewhere else, whether it's the surface of Mars. Wow. Curd or fossilized. Our friend Pascal, who's been on the podcast a couple of times says he expects it to be found in a cave or a lava pit somewhere where it's sheltered from radiation and and so forth.
(01:37:09):
Maybe got some warmth that there's still seismic activity there and who knows? We'll see. But you know, the, the, the hot candidate at this point are the, the moons out by Jupiter and Saturn and Cellist and Europa. And I'm just finishing my annual jpl l you know, 30 greatest hits of technology book. And there's some incredible stuff in there about, you know, these, the instruments on a chip, you know, it used to be something the size of a golf cart that you'd send out to, to do spectroscopy and mass oscopy and so forth. Now they're putting this stuff on chips and they'll be able to land on these moons, scrape up a little bit of ice near those vents where stuff keeps spewing out. So you're getting a sample from the under ice ocean being delivered by nature up to the top. You scrape up that ice, look at it like, oh look, there's a critter.
(01:37:56):
And there we go. We find life somewhere else, which would be very cool. This is the same technology Apple wants to use in the watch to Yep. To detect your blood sugar. Blood glucose. Yep. So yeah, I, so the thesis then is that the earth in its primordial state was a stew of organic chemicals, but that something land, you know, a asteroid hit or something and and injected something closer to some sort of protolife formm. Is that the idea? That that's one theory. Yeah. Wow. It came from outer space. Wow. Very interesting. Or conversely, it could be that what was in Thater space came from us. Yes. Well, and I love talking about panspermia. Don't get the wrong idea. <Laugh>. I love talking about this notion again with a crico life. I swear to God, may <laugh> life may have started on Mars earlier because it, it settled down and was apparently tempered earlier than Earth, at least in some theory sets.
(01:38:57):
And that something hitched a right on a meteorite came to earth and seeded here at the right time. Wow. And just exploded into this incredible diversity of life we have here. In which case we would find cool fossils once we get up to Mars. Or it could have gone the other way. It could have formed on li on Earth first got knocked off by some kind of impact. It has to be a pretty good sized impact to hit escape velocity on Earth. Mars is a little easier cause it's smaller and has a lighter gravitational field, but you knock something off, one planet travels the other. And you know, this is a really instinct theory. No proof one way or the other though. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. So we got how many SpaceX launches in the next couple of days? Oh God.
(01:39:37):
I, I don't even track anymore. But what did they hit last year? I think they hit 62. It's amazing. I think there's two three in the next couple of days and there's three in the next, there's an article coming out in the next ad, Astrid a couple of weeks, has a guy wrote an op-ed about regulation. He's saying, you know, SpaceX has flown 200 times without a meaningful accident or incident. You know, these things are credibly reliable. They're flying themselves back. And yet we still have these rules of, of when you can fly and how you can fly and how you have to blow up the rocket if it does something naughty that were written in the sixties. And he's calling for the Air Force Space Force to take another look at these things and lighten up a bit. Because as you know, if you're waiting for a launch and some pleasure boat drifts into the corner of the prescribed box out next to Kenny Space Center, Vandenberg, they have to put everything on hold and it's millions of dollars because some dummy was paddling his kayak out there.
(01:40:32):
So they're trying to, he, he's asking for a, a, a look at that stuff again to try and just smooth the roads so that they can launch more often, more effectively and for less money. Cuz the, the name of the game is how cheap can you get stuff up there. And when you get costs of launch down, then everything happens. Then you get people to the moon, then you start building that moon base. Then we have an angry stare down with the Chinese on lure South Pole over the water resources down there and split it up and off we go. We're building rocket fuel and going everywhere. Well, we live in interesting times, I must say <laugh>. We certainly do. Yeah. And it's good. I mean, I, I think this is really good. I think we we're fortunate to be at the beginning of a new space age. Rod pile is our chronicler of the new space age. And I know I can't play Elton John for you, but I think I can play. It belongs to us all because it belongs to us all. I salute you. Now, this isn't the official one. Oh, this is not Stop it. Go away. I want the official one. No, but this is better. One
Mikah Sargent (01:41:43):
Better is great.
Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
Yeah. The official one's wimpy. No, this is the Darth Vader version. So some dumb group of kids. Dumb. The university wrote and performed that. And it's brilliant and it's like space force is coming for you. Right. And not in a good way. The real one sounds like something Suza would've done if he was on drugs. <Laugh>. And it's pretty
Mikah Sargent (01:42:04):
Lame on shrooms that you scrape out of the,
Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
And it has lyrics, which I really quite enjoy. I think that's part of the, I do like
Mikah Sargent (01:42:11):
The lyrics. That is
Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
Fun. We go above, we go beyond. We're gonna kick your No, that, that's the other one again. That's the good one. <Laugh>. That's the good one. All right. Nevermind. I probably can't play that one. That's the irony of it. I can play well. Can you hum? Rocket man. I'll take that. I don't think, I don't know. Can I, oh, I have a question. I don't think they're gonna put us down for that. What, what's your question? I almost forgot. Your fireplace back there. It's, I wanna put, I wanna put one on my boat. Which one is that? You put this in a boat. It's legal. Which one is it? I don't know which one it is. Oh.
Mikah Sargent (01:42:45):
Oh, it's the Calistoga 35 90. No, it's
Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Not. It's not. Let me look behind here. <Laugh>. Sorry, I didn't mean to, to upset the broadcast, but I'm just curious. It's the
(01:42:56):
it's the F F1 eight V6 six L <laugh> electric fireplace.
(01:43:04):
It was worth it. Just for that view of you. Leo <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:43:08):
Oh, it looks like it needs a firmware update. Actually we should get on that.
Leo Laporte (01:43:14):
No, I think he needs a footwear update. <Laugh>, what's wrong with the footwear? Nothing wrong with your footwear. Yours d I
Mikah Sargent (01:43:22):
Just had to make the joke though. So
Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
<Laugh>. Yeah, I just had to take the shot just for that. Now I'm playing this <laugh>. Wait a minute. This is not any either. I think this when there's all these fake Space Force themes on you. Well, because people had better ideas than the guy who did it. <Laugh>. It's that one again. I just <laugh>. I love that. Stop it. Stop it. I want, but you know, you could really picture like, you know, viper fighters, laser beams firing up that one Right. Seber with the lyric supra. Which means what? Always on top <laugh>. That seems like a <laugh>. That seems like a wishful thinking. I'm just saying. Oh, there's another Crisco joke. Oh. All right. We are gonna get rid of you now. Thank you. Rod, what if either of you are down in Southern California next weekend? Yes. By any chance? Yes. Alien Con. Is it the Pasadena Convention Center Con And I'll be there. Alien Con performing NASAs. I kid you not. That sounds like fun. Is it talking a and e television puts it on. It's everything. And it's like, I don't know, 8,000 people or something. It's one of the biggest things of its kind. So that's interesting. Editor-In-Chief at Astro Magazine. Here it is. This is the right one. Dot org. He is the mighty watchful eye. A guardian beyond the blue
Mikah Sargent (01:44:43):
Surprise. Higher. Always higher.
Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
Always on top. I like that. Oh God. Thank you Rod. Thank you Rod. Thank you. Rod. Piling. Good to see you, gentlemen. Did you get the number? Do you want that number again? <Laugh>? I'll hit replay. All right. That was fun talking to Rod. Yeah. Playing that crappy music. I think there's a new thing that we're gonna have to do every episode, which is check in with our trucker <laugh> because he's driving Eric is how do I, can I, can I bring up his video without making him talk to us? Or do I have to bring him in?
Mikah Sargent (01:45:27):
Don't bring him in. Oh, yeah. Can we just full screen his video? Just,
Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
I think this should be a regular feature on the show. Where's Eric driving? Where's Eric driving now? And he's got a new backdrop in his in his big rig, which I like. Maybe
Mikah Sargent (01:45:42):
If you Leo, pin him temporarily.
Leo Laporte (01:45:45):
Should I pin him? Then
Mikah Sargent (01:45:45):
They can shoot to the video of the think pad, and then we'll be able to see full
Leo Laporte (01:45:51):
Screen. That's one way to do it. Here you go. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you <laugh> <laugh>. Eric is driving. Hi Eric.
Mikah Sargent (01:45:59):
That's Eric behind him as
Leo Laporte (01:46:00):
Well. And Eric's is that Eric behind him too? Nice. That's me and Eric in the pre prebi. Eric, pre Beard. Yeah. <laugh>. I love it. All right. This is gonna be a regular feature. Eric, you now have to call every show <laugh> and we have to see where Eric is. That is awesome. Let's let's go to another oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's, he was showing the outside. Show that again, Eric. Nope, that's me. <Laugh>. That's Eric. That's all right. Yeah, it's, that's right. I don't want you to have an accident. He's driving a big rig. That scares me. It really scares me. Hey, I'm gonna let Chris from Miami back in. What do you think? It's been a long time. Been a long time. Been a long time. Lonely. Lonely, lonely. How many cups of coffee has Chris from Miami had today? Oh, do you think? 10. 10. Eight. Eight Aunt says four cups in, I'm gonna say six cups. I don't know how many he drinks each time. How many?
Caller 5 (01:47:05):
I can't
Leo Laporte (01:47:06):
Put your shirt on, dude. This is not,
Caller 5 (01:47:08):
My shirt is on. Are
Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
You, are you trying to get us pulled from Google <laugh>?
Caller 5 (01:47:12):
Oh my God. Hang
Leo Laporte (01:47:14):
On. <Laugh>. How many cups in? How many cups in?
Caller 5 (01:47:19):
No. No. Can you hear? Can you hear me okay?
Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
Yeah. Yeah. You're great. I can tell by the motion of your hand at least.
Caller 5 (01:47:23):
Gimme one. Gimme one. No, I'm wearing a tank top because it's like 95 degrees down here today. But gimme, gimme one second and I'll go get a regular shirt. No,
Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
No, I'm teasing you. You're fine. We're just tank top is fine. Stay here. Don't go away. Stay here. I I'm
Caller 5 (01:47:35):
Not one of those pe You know what? I get really crazy because I remember during Covid where people were basically doing a lot of weird things with Zoom, and I'm like, not one of those people. No. You know, and so if I'm wearing a tank top and I'm not wearing a regular shirt, I feel a little uncomfortable. Yeah. Because it's a, it's a, I like to go pro on about 95% about everything.
Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
Look south, look fine. You don't look it. No one needs to wear a neck tie. Right. To be un asthe tech guys. Amen.
Caller 5 (01:47:59):
Well, I actually, ive got way too many ties from the days of working in men's re men's clothing, so I'm gonna start getting rid of them.
Leo Laporte (01:48:05):
So I'm gonna call you from now on. Not coffee Chris, but Haberdasher. Chris <laugh>.
Caller 5 (01:48:09):
Hey,
Leo Laporte (01:48:10):
Hey. How many cups in? So I, how many cup in I want? We've got bets going.
Caller 5 (01:48:16):
We got, oh, well, okay. Okay, so I mean about Four Cups Easy. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
Four cups easy. Aunt wins. Aunt wins directly.
Caller 5 (01:48:24):
An an an a rock star. I mean, literally, this guy's like a party animal. And I actually have to respect that. Ooh, look real quick. Of course. Mikah, Sargent,
Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
Here's the road. We have to show the road real quick. We're going down the freeway. Hey, here it is. Look at that. Yeah, look at that. Wow. Riding that big icy snow. Is that snow? Wow.
Caller 5 (01:48:42):
Not in Miami. It's not probably in, oh, you know, Los Angeles down there around Campy AM six 40 ship? Yeah. Yeah. They had snow. We had
Leo Laporte (01:48:50):
Snow on the hills up behind us. It was wild. It looked like we were in the Sierra. What can we do for
Caller 5 (01:48:55):
You, Chris? Unbelievable. I'm not gonna keep it long today, because I wanna get down, see if I can get down to the southeast food, wine festival thing, whatever it is. If I time today, look for
Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
Salt Hank, he's there.
Caller 5 (01:49:06):
Well, he makes some of those chicken sandwiches. And I gotta tell you, he
Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
Bloody Mary's yesterday and he did a Cubana sandwich with Guy Fieri yesterday.
Caller 5 (01:49:17):
Oh my God. You're making me hungry. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:49:19):
Same. Yeah,
Caller 5 (01:49:20):
Right, right. Yeah, same thing, Mike. You get Yeah, I know.
Leo Laporte (01:49:23):
We're talking about my son, who is
Caller 5 (01:49:24):
A
Leo Laporte (01:49:25):
Celebrity chef. I think I could say that now. Celebrity Chef <laugh>. He is jazz
Caller 5 (01:49:30):
Hands and he's got the best dad in the world. I'll tell you that. He said that. He
Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
Said, said, I told my manager I owe it all to my dad. And I said, Henry, you don't have to take, give me any credit anymore, because you really did it. You really did it. And I've, he's, what's cool is he's surpassed everything I've done. You know, he's got 2 million followers on TikTok, 1 million followers on Instagram. He's way beyond anything I ever achieved. And I, I thought of, you know, I mean, maybe I'd be jealous or something, but No, I'm thrilled. That's good. It's really awesome. Yeah. It means I can, you know, hang up my hat and <laugh> say Thank you, everybody have a great time.
Caller 5 (01:50:06):
Well, you know, you're nothing to be shy at either. I mean, you know, when you think about it I mean, we're talking 19 years. I know. I don't know what happened there with the screen. I don't know what happened with the screen. All of we're of a sudden, I
Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
Can't, we're seeing you. We're seeing you full screen.
Caller 5 (01:50:18):
We're seeing me, but I can't see anybody now. Kind
Leo Laporte (01:50:21):
Put us back
Caller 5 (01:50:21):
In the screen there. We, he
Leo Laporte (01:50:23):
Like to be in the he likes to be in the bull
Caller 5 (01:50:24):
Zone. I like to be in the gateway from Star Gates, like go see the Egyptians in another, in another Galaxy. Absolutely.
Leo Laporte (01:50:29):
Yeah. <Laugh>, you know, you're on the RV 66 L 3 94. Yeah, that's
Caller 5 (01:50:34):
Right. I am. There's a little bit of a drag there, but it's probably this, this iPad Pro Apple product service. Chris, ask
Leo Laporte (01:50:40):
Us a question. I think Chris is just that you move quicker than other people because of Chris is caffeine is on a different time
Caller 5 (01:50:45):
Zone. It's possible.
Leo Laporte (01:50:46):
Timescale.
Caller 5 (01:50:47):
I'm on, I'm in Miami. Miami. Miami, okay. So I well, okay, let me just say this real quick. That you know, salt Hank is amazing and I still want to get one of his chicken sandwiches, but you're, you're nothing to really snap a whip that either, because you know what, you are 19 years in the tech industry. And, and I think it's funny because I do listen to Rich, but he said that he's replacing you on Saturday and there's like a whole group of us that are like, okay, so you took over the Saturday slot indirectly, you're not working for Twit and you can't replace Leo Laporte. So for the rest of us out here in the real world, and you stop saying that you replace Leo Laporte.
Leo Laporte (01:51:25):
Well, he's saying it so that people don't say, well, what happened? I mean, you know, I
Caller 5 (01:51:29):
Get that part. He's
Leo Laporte (01:51:30):
Gotta say, he won't say it much longer, I promise you. But he's gotta say it for a little while. And the good news is he didn't do Sunday. I was pleased so that we could do Sunday. So really,
Caller 5 (01:51:39):
You know. Yeah, I was, I was, yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
We're tag team in the weekends, so I think that's good.
Caller 5 (01:51:43):
No, and that, and that's and that's fine. But you know, it's funny because Kim came by and every, you know. Yeah. Did you
Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
See Laura last
Caller 5 (01:51:49):
Week with Laura? I know. I was just, I Well that was three cups easy right there, seeing Kim and Aw, we're all coming back. You know what it is cuz we know that, you know, no matter who's out there replacing whatever, we're all here for you boss. And you're just spectacularly you and Mikah sergeant. And of course I'm not, you know, Rosemary Orchard, I'm not gonna leave her out of the party. Mikah. I'm just saying. Cause you
Leo Laporte (01:52:11):
Won't ever see now on, you have to call her Rosemary Orchard. Orchard. Yeah, you're right. You gotta go that orchard,
Caller 5 (01:52:15):
Rosemary, or, ok. Lemme get to my question real quick. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:52:18):
Yeah, Richard. Okay. Thank you very much.
Caller 5 (01:52:19):
Okay. I wanted, okay, first of all, I apologize for last week for being in there too much. I couldn't No, no, no.
Leo Laporte (01:52:26):
Going. You underst understand. We only wanted, we only wanna probably pick up once a month on you cuz you're a strong, I want some new people. You're one strong cup of coffee. And we want other people too, which is nice, you know. But I love,
Caller 5 (01:52:37):
I like the bombas sauce.
Leo Laporte (01:52:38):
I also love the regulars. We've got regulars. Woohoo. Yeah. This is my mom mate. These, these are not Bombas. These are, yeah. He's got the Bombas. I
Caller 5 (01:52:46):
Got, we still haven't seen mom anywhere.
Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
Mamba, Mamba. I told mom, I told mom, mom, I said, Chris in Miami wants you on the show. And she said, they don't want me. I'm an old lady. I said, that's exactly why they want you.
Caller 5 (01:53:00):
They want you, we
Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
Want to see you. So I'll, I'll, I'm working on her. I'll get her. I'll wear
Caller 5 (01:53:04):
It. Okay. Okay. So front door, I live in a condo and I got the basic you know doorknob and, and lock system. But I want to get something that I can put a camera in there like right there. But
Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
I also want last week, cuz you have, what do you have?
Caller 5 (01:53:20):
What do I use?
Mikah Sargent (01:53:21):
Oh, the, the, the doorbell cam. But I thought you were wanting a full security system. Isn't that what you were saying in the chat? Well,
Caller 5 (01:53:26):
You know, a full security system. I mean, with cameras in my house, I wanna take the first step first because I've been traveling a little bit more and I wanna see who's coming and not approaching my door. I
Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
Love seeing the door. We had cameras everywhere and I ended up not putting them back. We got the house painted, so I had to take 'em all down. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, I didn't end up putting 'em back cuz I don't like being paranoid. Yeah. And nothing happened. And I felt like I'm always looking to see and the front door is, you know, that's, I wanna, I wanna see that that's been useful, but I don't really, you know, for packages and stuff I guess if you lived in an area, a high crime area, it would be nice to look down the side where the garbage cans are. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, be able to see what's going on around your house. But I found it made me more paranoid and I noticed my brother-in-law <laugh>, who put up cameras too, he'll come over and visit. He's staring
Mikah Sargent (01:54:13):
At the cameras still looking. Yep. The whole time. I see that happen a lot. Yep. And it's
Leo Laporte (01:54:16):
Like that just make, it's making you paranoid. It's, in some ways I feel the same way about sleep tracking. Like you do too much sleep tracking. Pretty soon it impedes your sleep. Mm-Hmm.
Mikah Sargent (01:54:25):
<Affirmative>. I mean, that's actually,
Leo Laporte (01:54:26):
I'm so worried about the metrics.
Mikah Sargent (01:54:28):
Yes. That's a, that's
Caller 5 (01:54:29):
A, yeah, I don't do sleep tracking. I just, I fall face first. That's it. I'm out to <laugh>. Nice. Have a coffee in the morning. Well, that's it. So when
Leo Laporte (01:54:35):
Does the coffee
Caller 5 (01:54:35):
Don't wear off night?
Leo Laporte (01:54:38):
What time is does it wear off?
Caller 5 (01:54:40):
It It does, it depends upon, well, you know what it is. I've been doing more ice, you know, col Brew coffee. Like when I went to Disney in November of last, he went to GRE's Coffee. I gotta tell you, I love my sizzle Cafe coffee. It really is the world's best coffee. It's never dress with him because never. But the thi I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna stand, but I gotta tell you,
Leo Laporte (01:54:57):
Somewhere down, somewhere the road. Yes.
Caller 5 (01:54:59):
Geoffrey's Coffee, I went in, there was nobody in there. And I went in and I said, I desperately need a cold brew coffee. And I tell you it was a large, like 5 95, you couldn't go wrong. And it had hints of vanilla with a nice citrus finish. Oh, I loved it. That was really, really nice to walk around Disney Springs and keep eating all those gummies and stuff. Next time I go, I don't go to Starbucks.
Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
You're eating gummies and drinking coffee. Oh, the gummies? No, like coffee,
Caller 5 (01:55:26):
No gum, no gummies. So I got my co brew coffee from Geoffrey's Coffee. And then I met gummies, Disney Springs, yummies going around gummies. Okay. Yummies not gummies. Yeah. That, that's extra sugar. And well, we can't be doing that, that extra. So by
Leo Laporte (01:55:38):
The way, Anne has, I hope you see this in the Discord post a picture of you when the coffee wears out late at night, boom. Just like that. Boom. It's over. It's done. That's it. You're right there. That is
Caller 5 (01:55:51):
Priceless. An that's why you're a rockstar buddy. <Laugh>, look at that.
Leo Laporte (01:55:55):
He's good. He's, he's got some strength with the two. To
Mikah Sargent (01:55:57):
Go back to your question or
Caller 5 (01:55:58):
When I had too much
Mikah Sargent (01:55:59):
Twist, I think that I fall face first a peephole cam, which is what I have. That's
Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
My friend. That's what I was asking about. Yeah. Oh,
Caller 5 (01:56:06):
Is it, is it called Peephole
Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
Camera? It goes in the hole where you look out it, see who at the house. That's a nice place to put
Mikah Sargent (01:56:12):
It. Yeah. Cuz it also, it has a pass through so you can easily peephole through it. You still do. It's fine. Yeah. So the peepholes still there. Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
Is it super wide angle
Mikah Sargent (01:56:19):
Though? It is. Yeah. the one thing I don't like about the people cam that a lot of these more modern cameras do have is they go, oh, we don't want to 16 by nine or four three the video. We actually want it to be flipped on its Ted so that you can see down further because that's where you put your packages. So Sure. With this, you actually, yeah. You have to buy a special attachment that puts a mirror into it, that kind of clips onto the front and then it will look down. But then you also don't get to see out because of that. So I would recommend any modern doorbell camera over people camera because Modern Doorbell cameras are gonna have the view out. And then some like ufi and I believe I know UFI for sure, but there's another one that does it. They've got two cameras, one that is for looking out and then one that is specifically made to see down in front of you so that it can see that the package is there. I have had two things happen at my place, and this isn't a high crime area normally, but somebody for some reason, and I was like, you know what, that's fine, you take it. They I had like a water subscription. They took a whole five gallon jug of water off of my porch and walked off with it.
Leo Laporte (01:57:33):
They stole your
Mikah Sargent (01:57:33):
Water. They stole a water. And I thought, you know what, you probably really needed that. Yeah. They
Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
Were thirsty.
Mikah Sargent (01:57:37):
But then I actually did have recently midday the, the, the I. Wow. I'm just shocked at someone being this brave package theft. And I never would've expected it happening midday. Wow. did
Leo Laporte (01:57:52):
You ca But was the problem is you see it after the fact.
Mikah Sargent (01:57:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so this,
Leo Laporte (01:57:56):
Oh look. Poor Chris. I think he Oh, oh.
Mikah Sargent (01:57:59):
So
Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
Sneaking. He lost Chris. He fell asleep. So face down. Did we actually this Chris the coffee? No, I hung up. Oh, the coffee. Oh, the coffee wore off.
Mikah Sargent (01:58:09):
Well, there's your answer though, Chris.
Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
Yeah, no, I think that's a good answer. And is yours from
Mikah Sargent (01:58:13):
Ring? The one that I have is from Ring. Yes. Ring. But see, ring doesn't make a peephole camera anymore. Oh, they, they discontinue their pee. Oh. So I believe UFI makes people cameras still. But doorbell cameras, you can get them from anywhere. But I really recommend Google's
Leo Laporte (01:58:29):
Easier to install though, than a doorbell camera, which you have to replace the doorbell and all that stuff. Just the people there I think is a great idea. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it's clear enough that you, you obviously you could see what was going on Yep. And all that. Hey, this just in, by the way, from the Verge, thank you to the chat room. Oh yes. We mentioned that 50 people were laid off yesterday at Twitter. It looks like almost the entire Twitter blue team was laid off, including Esther Crawford who ran Twitter Blue. So I don't know what's going on at Twitter. <Laugh> this comes from the platformer where they've done some really good coverage. Zoe Schiffer Alex Heath of the Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off. There is speculation that Elon's about to install a new regime at the company. Like he wants all Elon's people in there. In a recent interview he said, I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it's in a financially healthy place. That, in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out before the end of the year would be a good time to find a replacement for himself. So maybe put in a new regime. Hmm. she was the one, you may remember Esther Crawford who tweeted a picture of herself after Elon took over sleeping on the floor. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:59:44):
And also ha very much encouraging other teams to do much of the same saying, you know, be here as long as you can. I'm encouraging my team to do that and so
Leo Laporte (01:59:57):
Hashtag sleep where you work. But the good news is she can now sleep at home. This is true because she doesn't work there anymore. That was dedication though.
Mikah Sargent (02:00:07):
And an update by the way. Thank you. Scooter X in the chat ring has begun once again selling the people camera. So I must have been popular enough that they thought let's definitely bring that
Leo Laporte (02:00:17):
Up. I think that's a good product to be honest, especially for renters. Good way to go. Yeah. How do I unpin Eric? Because
Mikah Sargent (02:00:23):
Three
Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
Dots. Oh, there it is. The remove pin. Okay. <laugh>, because all I see is Eric Drive and drive and drive and hey everybody, Leo Laport here. I'm the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit because I think it's unique and I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do. Here at twit, we've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Well already you should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world.
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Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with Twit. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this. We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ad saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>.
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That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always overdeliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. Gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working. You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really wanna see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too.
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I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertisattwit.tv, breakout of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red ads on twit.tv. Visit twit tv slash advertise for more details or you can email us, advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring, Richard. He's got his hand up. He is calling us from. Well, let's find out, shall we? Let's bring Richard into the Star gate, the Stargate <laugh>. Hello Richard. The star <laugh> still muted. Richard's still muted. Muted. No video. Nothing. I got nothing from Richard. There's a
Caller 6 (02:05:59):
Richard's Leo. Sorry
Leo Laporte (02:06:00):
About that. No, it's okay. Where are you calling from, Richard?
Caller 6 (02:06:03):
I'm from a small town in Tennessee called Huntingdon.
Leo Laporte (02:06:06):
Nice. Is it beautiful there right now?
Caller 6 (02:06:10):
Eh, overcast about about 55 degrees. Can't really complain. Our
Leo Laporte (02:06:15):
Caller for Winnipeg would take that for sure. <Laugh>, what can we do? What can we do for you Richard? Absolutely <laugh>.
Caller 6 (02:06:22):
Okay. I'm volunteering at a local public school to help out their IT department and I'm new to the industry myself. Good for
Leo Laporte (02:06:29):
You. That's great. That's
Caller 6 (02:06:30):
Awesome. And we have a mix of about 60 Windows, windows PCs and it's a one-to-one Chromebook environment for the students.
Leo Laporte (02:06:38):
Cool.
Caller 6 (02:06:39):
And I'm wanting to know, is there a way probably through either Azure or one of Microsoft's or Microsoft 365 to run a company-wide defender scan? Ah, that I could schedule to happen every day at like 2:00 AM when nobody's there and just get the report, get all the machines reported back to myself and my
Leo Laporte (02:07:13):
I'm gonna guess you don't have an enterprise. They don't have an enterprise license. They probably bought those machines. Onesie two
Caller 6 (02:07:19):
Z. No, that's it. And ed education licenses.
Leo Laporte (02:07:25):
Oh, okay. Okay. So you know, I wish Russell were here cuz Russell is our ITT guy. He's really the expert in how to do this. My guess is you wanna look at something called Windows intune which is alright, an enterprise system that lets you control what apps are installed. I bet you there is an education Intune or something like it. If you've got the education license, that's, that's the thing to do to look at is what what does the education license give you? And I wonder if it gives you a copy of if it lets you do in-tune some bill in Michigan says Microsoft licensing should be an accredited course. <Laugh>. Yeah. They have in-tune for education. So that's what I'm All right,
Caller 6 (02:08:16):
I'll look into
Leo Laporte (02:08:16):
That. That's what I would look at. So this is really designed to not just do the scanning, but really do the whole setup and management, right. So that you can, for instance, deploy stuff. Now the students have Chromebooks, not Windows stuff, right?
Caller 6 (02:08:33):
For the most part, our high schoolers do use Windows PCs. Okay. That's for like one or two, two courses. That's but other than that's, it's mainly Chromebook. That's
Leo Laporte (02:08:40):
Okay. You know, my guess is the Chromebooks probably don't need scanning. They're kind of by their no nature secure. You might do a power wash every semester, but other than that, you know, you probably don't have to do anything. Right. So this is just for the Windows machines you have, right? Since you have if they have a Windows for Education license, I think they probably already have in tune. But you should look into that. That's, I think that's the tool I would say you would want. For this particular application, I am not an expert. However, in Windows it <laugh>. Does anybody in the ch if anybody in the discord of the chat room wants to chime in, I would welcome that. And I, I know Mikah, you're kind of a, you're kind of a, a new Windows user. Yeah. Which is good. I mean, there
Mikah Sargent (02:09:28):
Are some, some links that we're getting, but one of them talked about Microsoft Defender for business, not for education. So that one is probably not going to be
Leo Laporte (02:09:39):
Usable. Taylor is in our discord Taylor, we have our, our caller is is using, he has 80 Windows machines in an education environment. They have Windows for education license and wants to do a daily virus scan using defenders. Something like that. But I think you want more than just virus scanning. I think you want really management. And I was recommending internal, correct. Yeah. As, as that. But we'll, we'll keep an eye peeled. I'm no expert in this. If Russell were here, he would know all about it. What's the other, you kind of, you've done a lot of Windows support. What's the other, there's another Windows thing that we use that gives us, I think it's for enterprise more than education, but gives us full control over what apps are installed and, and does all the security and stuff for us, it's, remember the name of that? I can, I always forget it. We use it here, but this is not, we have an enterprise, not a, not a education essence. No. Yawning. Eric, you gotta keep your eye on the road. I saw that. Yawn, <laugh>. I think Intune is is gonna be the one I'd look at. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:10:49):
That's what it's from everything I'm reading. Yeah. in tune is where you're gonna wanna look.
Leo Laporte (02:10:53):
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I think it's great that you're doing this. It sounds like this is new to you, which is great. It's a, what a way to learn and support your local education and your local community. I think that's fantastic. I did that myself for a while for our high school. Nice. And yeah. I, we, fortunately we had an IT guy. I could just be advisory on that one. <Laugh>, but we were one-to-one and it was one-to-one Mac at the time. They had to change it to Windows. When Max got so expensive it was kind of too bad. Hey, I, I appreciate the call, Richard. I hope that helps keep listening. If somebody comes up with something better we will, we will say it on the air. I think you said we had more than one video. Do we have another video we could throw in here? Let's try it out. See what we got.
Caller 7 (02:11:41):
Hi, Leo and Mikah. This is Dan. My son is going to be traveling to Taiwan soon for a few months to study the Chinese language. Ooh. He has been getting conflicting information about how to deal with his mobile phone and get it to work properly there. I have an advance set up, a international plan with Verizon, but we're not sure if that will work. People at the school also suggest getting a SIM card as soon as you arrive in the airport from Taiwan or perhaps even purchasing a flip phone or a local cell phone. Do you have any suggestions on how we could resolve all these conflicting ideas so that he can get to work as soon as he arrives at his destination? Thank you.
Mikah Sargent (02:12:34):
Wow. Thank you for taking the time to make. What
Leo Laporte (02:12:36):
Are the production values? We don't usually get that kinda production values. There used to be a great wiki, I'm looking to see if it's still around, called prepaid with data. That was a really useful site for people who were traveling because it would have in it, it would have every country. And then because it was a wiki,
Mikah Sargent (02:12:59):
Everybody could contribute and say, I've
Leo Laporte (02:13:01):
Actually been here and this is, I dunno if this is it. Let me just go prepaid with data.com. I think that was it. Prepaid with data.com. Might it be.org. You know, this is the problem. Some of these sites, they come and they go boy, it looks <laugh>. This is a little, wants me to add something to Firefox to do this. I don't think that's, it's not right. So somebody has already kind of taken over. It looks like prepaid with data. The there, we talked about this with our caller from last week who was coming to America. It's the same issue. If you take your phone and your Verizon plan, it's gonna be expensive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, Verizon does it day by day and he's gonna be there for two months. You said That's a lot of money. And the advantage of that is you, it it'll just work.
(02:13:54):
Your phone will work. You'll ha you'll have the same phone number, but it's gonna be expensive. If you buy in-country a phone or a sim and put that in your phone, now you're gonna have a Taiwanese phone number. It'll be cheaper. It'll a lot cheaper. In fact, a lot of times, if for years that's what we recommended people do is pick up a sim. When you get at the airport, there's little kiosks. Pick up a sim put it in your phone, but you lose your local phone number. You now have to tell everybody, here's the phone number. I'm here one, you know, plus 32 with 4 7 9 4 4 4 1. And that's problematic. So I think though this has gotten really much easier. Now thanks to Eims. And that was our answer for mark. Absolutely because he had a phone. The sport of eims and modern iPhones do many Android phones do.
(02:14:39):
These are electronic sims. The iPhone, for instance, allows you to have eight different <laugh>, eight different carriers. And so you keep your Verizon, you even can keep your Verizon phone number. BG Oz said, and I think this probably is true, if you turn on wifi calling that Verizon number will work at the hotel anywhere he has wifi, which nowadays, especially in Taiwan, is everywhere. But then he also gets for data, for mobile data. Cuz that's what's expensive on Verizon. For mob, for local calls and mobile data, he can get a Taiwanese sim, activate it locally and have both. In fact, even in the iPhone settings or Android phone, if you use that settings, it'll say which one do you wanna use for calls? Which ones do you want to use for data? Our recommendation is use wifi calling with Verizon only. It's the most expensive plan.
(02:15:26):
And if your wifi, I think it should be free. Telstra and the Australia was free. I imagine Verizon will be the same. Yeah. And then get a Taiwanese Sim eim and use that for data and local calls. I think that's gonna be the best way to do this prepaid. It is at Fandom. Okay. That was the right site. So thank you to our irc, who's very good out of sync. Found it prepaid. I don't know if this is the same site, but this is Taiwan, the prepaid with the data sim card Wiki. I think this is, this is the same site. Maybe they moved somewhere. But this talks about all the different plans, what he'll be faced, who the five 4G providers are. Cheung, wa, Taiwan, far East, tone, T Star, and gt there is an M V O in the country.
(02:16:15):
This is where you're gonna get information for people who are either living there or who are visiting there. And that's gonna be useful. It says SIM cards are easily available, but you have to have proper identification to save time and hassle. Purchase your prepaid sim prior to leaving the airport can be recommended many wifi options, which is great. Here's where to purchase them at the airports where to purchase them in the city. It's one of the few countries in the world that offers unlimited real unlimited internet, which is not surprising. Taiwan is very sophisticated technologically. So this is prepaid data sim card.fandom.com. But if you, if you look for prepaid data sim card Wiki you should be able to find that. I think that's the sim that's still the best advice. Yep. I don't think there's a better way. I, I used to carry around a puck that gave us international data.
(02:17:14):
It was a big mistake. I I bought a variety of different ways to do this. Your phone is your lifeline. Keep it working. Keep the Verizon account if you can get the international plan when you get there. Or as redacted said, just download the whole internet <laugh> and you'll always have it <laugh>. It'll always be there. Yeah. It'll always help with you. I want to thank, I did thank our Club TWIT members, but let me give a little pitch. If you're not yet a Club Twit member, a lot of the answers we get come from the Club TWIT Discord, but that's just one of many benefits. The big benefit is Aunt Pruitt, our community manager, he helps put together a great program of events in the Discord for us. You get ad-free versions of all of our shows. You also get access to stuff we don't put out in public.
(02:17:58):
Mikah does hands-on Macintosh for the club. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We also have a Hands-on Windows show from Paul Throt. We launched this week in space in the club. And then as it grew an audience size, we were able to put it out in the public. And as it continues to grow, we're able to bootstrap it up. And this is because we are not financed by some big corporation somewhere. We don't have giant venture capital fund investments. It all comes outta my pocket <laugh>. And I can't afford to pay for a show that doesn't make money. As we've seen ad revenues dwindle and they are dramatically dwindling we have had to turn to you the audience and ask for your help. Seven bucks a month is all it costs. Go to Club Twit or actually twit.tv/club. Twits probably the best way to do it. Twit.Tv/Club twit sign up seven bucks a month, you can pay for a whole year at once, 84 bucks.
(02:18:53):
There's corporate memberships as well. You'll have a good feeling. You're s you're, you're, you're saving the network. You're keeping it on the air, keeping all these lovely people employed. And you're getting I think, some real value for Dollar. The, the Club is so much fun. I love the Discord. I love what we do in there. And it keeps this showing a lot of others on the air. I hate to beg, I'm not good at it, <laugh>. I'm really not. And I don't, you know, I don't want to become like public broadcasting, whereas a pledge break every, every week. But we really, these days we really need it. And it makes a big difference. So if you listen to the shows and, and honestly, if you can't afford it, we'll always offer all the free content we do. And the chat room is free. And the, and the forms are free and the masses on free. But if you can seven bucks a month, it really makes a big difference. Thank you in advance. Twit.Tv/Club Twitch. Yeah, we, I guess somebody said, couldn't you make it non-profit and, and, and get grants? Well, we're certainly non-profit. <Laugh> <laugh>, we got half, we're halfway there. I don't, you know, and then I have to hire a grant writer. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:20:00):
That's also so scary.
Leo Laporte (02:20:02):
Yeah, there's, I mean, it's, people are great. We get lots of ideas. We love your suggestions. Our audience is wonderful. We get lots of ideas for how to, somebody said you should be on Sirius XM and stuff. But honestly, the the best thing for us, I think for going forward is being an ad supported network. We love that. I think it makes it possible for everybody to watch for free everywhere in the world. That's great. We don't have 19 minutes of ads an hour like the radio show had to. So we really like that. But for some reason, and it's not just us, NPR just, yeah. Laid off 10% of its staff. They've lost $300 million, mostly from ad revenue, declining ad revenue in podcasting. There's something going on. I don't know what it is. If people have decided podcasts aren't any good or they've moved on to YouTube influencers. But if you like what we do, and I really think what we do is great. Of course I'm biased, but if you like what you do, we do. And you wanted to keep it going. It's not free for us. We and, and up to now ads have really helped us do this, all this all this time. But I, I see a day, frankly, when we can't because ad support is just dwindling. Twitter tv slash club twit. There we, that was pretty good begging.
Mikah Sargent (02:21:15):
I was. I'm impressed. I felt it. Yeah, right here. It's Stir it.
Leo Laporte (02:21:18):
Yeah. <laugh>. Hey, this is a fun show. And I thank you Mikah, Sargent for taking time outta your weekend. To do Ask the tech guys. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (02:21:27):
Well thank you for taking time outta your
Leo Laporte (02:21:28):
Weekends. We love our callers. We love hearing from you. You can email us, ask the tech guys@twit.tv. We are here every Sunday. We do it live. So if you want to call in live, you can. We'd love two to 5:00 PM Eastern. That's 11 to one. Actually, we really start at 1111.
Mikah Sargent (02:21:45):
11, 11.
Leo Laporte (02:21:45):
Yeah. And we end at one 30. Yep. Because we have to vinos gotta have lunch. But if it weren't for that <laugh> <laugh>, so it's really, I should say it's 1111 to one 30 every Sunday. Uhhuh <affirmative>. That would be Now, now here's now Hold on
Mikah Sargent (02:22:01):
Though.
Leo Laporte (02:22:02):
Hold on. That's two 11 to to four 30 every Sunday Eastern time. That is 1911. U T C <laugh> pretty good.
Mikah Sargent (02:22:16):
Yes. But you and I have to keep telling ourselves that it starts at 11. So that way we do get here in time to start at at 1111. That's
Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
Right. We'd like to start at 11. The plan someday. We will. There's a lot. You
Mikah Sargent (02:22:27):
Know what, there's a lot that happens. This
Leo Laporte (02:22:28):
Is complicated. More complicated than any other show we do, I think at this point thank you so much for being here. I don't know what we're gonna do next week. I think I have ordered the new, the new podcast, Mike of Choice.
Mikah Sargent (02:22:43):
Oh, that's right. I'm excited for this.
Leo Laporte (02:22:44):
I didn't know this, but Road, which is well known as making podcast mics and so forth. Their first mic was called the Rodent <laugh>, and that's why they call themselves Road. Wow. But they still make the nt The NT one is now in, I think it's fifth or sixth generation, and they've done something really interesting. It's a large coil dynamic mic. And now they've added 32 bit, which means you cannot overdrive it. You could physically overdrive the capsule, but you can't over put too much sound into it. The conversion, the A to D conversion can handle 32 bit. That's really interesting. So I ordered one. I, it says it's coming out February 27th, so I should have it for next week's show. What I'll do is I'll bring in a bunch of podcast mics mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and we can do a little taste test.
Mikah Sargent (02:23:29):
I'm looking forward to that. And I'm looking forward to having that conversation about what 32 bit means in terms of Yes. Going up and down.
Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Yes. I will also bring in my 32 bit recorder from a Zoom. They make it a, a new little portable recorder. That's really cool. Awesome. so, so if you're interested in audio and podcasting, we've got that. I will also have an I I'm getting ready. We're taking a little vacation end of next month. Now somebody's saying, I can tell, I see it in your head. Hey, he's going on vacation. We're giving him seven bucks a month. I paid for this <laugh> literally three years ago. This was a, a trip we had planned in 2020 that was canceled twice. And this is the third time we're trying this,
Mikah Sargent (02:24:14):
Trying to make it happen.
Leo Laporte (02:24:15):
So this was paid for long ago. I have actually canceled all our expensive future trips cuz I, I want to tighten my belt as well. So believe me, we're not spending your money on cruises, <laugh>. But I am planning for this trip. And so, and you'll be interested in, in this ant d i which makes the a portable gimbal for cameras. Their new one just came out. The the, is it the Om Osmo Mobile six, I believe. And I've ordered that as well. So we'll do a little, this'll be a good little portable thing doing it. And then what else? Mac os.
Mikah Sargent (02:24:54):
Oh, ants joining. Makos
Leo Laporte (02:24:57):
Aunt is gonna do a special, oh, this is gonna be painful. Anne has moved from Windows to Mac Os you talked a little about it. This a little bit on Wednesday. On this week weekend. Google. So you're gonna do a little piece for us in your life. No,
Mikah Sargent (02:25:09):
I,
Ant Pruitt (02:25:10):
I want to sit in the chair next to both of y'all and
Leo Laporte (02:25:12):
Just, and just ask us a bunch of questions. I, a bit of therapy. Yeah. We'll do some ant therapy next week. Yeah. <laugh>, you're gonna have to sit on the fire. Not
Mikah Sargent (02:25:20):
Necessarily here the We'll figure it
Leo Laporte (02:25:22):
Out. Sorry. No. We'll, you know what? We'll get him a little pillow. He can sit on the floor. Yeah. A beanbag. He'll still be taller than both of us. No beanbag chair. We'll bag camera. No, that'll be fun. So people moving from Windows to Mac. I love that. Has questions. Yeah, we got the Mac guy right here. We got lots of answers and
Mikah Sargent (02:25:38):
It's, it's super common. I hear that a lot. Hey, I've moved from Windows to Mac. Tell me everything I need to know. So it'll be good to hear which specific pain points you've had.
Leo Laporte (02:25:46):
Yes, it's gonna be fun. And of course we'll answer as many questions as we can. And, and we'll see how Eric is doing Driving down the road. <Laugh> pull. Eric, Eric, all right. You did it. You did it for, Hey, thanks everybody for joining us and Asthe Tech guys, I'm Leo Laport. And
Mikah Sargent (02:26:03):
I'm Mikah Sargent.
Leo Laporte (02:26:04):
We hope you have a wonderful week and you'll come back here next Sunday. Bye-Bye. Bye.
Jonathan Bennett (02:26:09):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but to game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. You already knew all that. What you may not know is that Quit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning ciit man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club twit Exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet? We'll go to twit.tv/clubtwit and sign up. Hope to see you there.
