Ask The Tech Guys Episode 1966 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 (00:00:00):
It's time for Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte. Coming up, Chris Marquardt. He's gonna review your crazy photos. And

Mikah Sargent (00:00:07):
I'm Mikah Sargent and I am looking forward to showing off two awesome tech

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Bags. Plus I've got the new Apple Home pods. We'll compare them to the old one. See what you think is the best ask the tech guys is next.

... (00:00:21):
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This, is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:30):
This is Ask The Tech Guys with Mikah, Sargent and Leon LePort. Episode 1966, reported Sunday, March 19th, 2023. Keep away from the hacking. This episode of As The Tech Guys is brought to you by ACI Learning Tech is one industry where opportunities outpace growth, especially in cybersecurity. One third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity certification To maintain your competitive edge across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness visit go.acilearning.com/twit. 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 at twit tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you Today? It's time for Ask Tehe Tech guys. I'm Leo Laport.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:30):
And I'm Mikah Sargent. Place a little stuffed up. Oh, yes. Oh, your nose is a little red. Did. Oh, yours is too. Mikah, did you get the proper Kleenexes

Leo Laporte (00:01:37):
<Laugh>? It was Red Nose Day comic Relief to raise money for a variety of charities on Friday in, eh, and so every, it's pretty much in the uk. Everybody does it and some people do it in the US but Johnny, ive designed these red noses and several people I have had received now three shipments. Oh, wow. Several people. The fans from the uk Thank you, all of you sent us Red Noses. And the good news is that it benefits comic relief Red Nose Day. But we're not gonna wear them all day because we said cut

Mikah Sargent (00:02:15):
Of funny. No, it's hard to hear what we're saying, but well designed. I will say they collapsing on themselves. You can carry 'em around with you. It's, this

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
Is a really good Johnny Ive example. It's, I mean, that's beautiful, right? Yeah. It's what we call form over function, though, <laugh>, because it hurts like hell when you're wearing it. <Laugh>. And those those foam rubber noses, the traditional ones, you just have a little slit in the ball of foam rubber. They're comfortable. They'll make you talk like that. This is like a designer's idea of a really cool nose.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:43):
Well, Peyton is

Leo Laporte (00:02:43):
Beauty that no one wants to put on. Right? Very typical, isn't it? <Laugh> coming up, Sam will, Sam, at about half an hour, he is gonna talk about cars. He just drove a new, I think it was a Kia new ev. He's gonna give us a, a review. He was supposed to be here yesterday or last week, and he he missed the, he didn't miss his plane. The plane had a broken light on the exit row, and so they delayed his flight till they could fix the exit row light. Okay. As a result, he missed the show and an entire cascade from there. So for one of a light

Mikah Sargent (00:03:15):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
Sam

Mikah Sargent (00:03:17):
Was, it's wild what that can do.

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
Lost. so he's coming up also Coming up. Chris, mark, his photo assignment day. Yes. A third Sunday of every month. We do his photo assignments. Next week Dick de Bartolo will be joining us. He's now a fourth Sunday. And good news, there's one person left from the old radio show that we haven't had on yet.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:35):
Maybe if I make some rumbling sounds in the background.

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
I dunno. Johnny Jet will be here next Sunday. Yeah, but you know who won't be here next Sunday.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:48):
Wait, is that you? Wait a minute. No, that's not till next. I'll

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
Be here next Sunday. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:52):
<Laugh>, it's not you. I'll

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
Be leaving though the Sunday after. And you've got some great guest hosts coming on.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:57):
Yes. first we've had 'em on the show before. Over there in Radio Corner. Aunt Pruitt will be here as my guest host, but I also am excited to say is, are we revealing this Scott Wilkinson of Home Theater Geeks will be joining us as Will Rosemary Orchard of iOS today.

Leo Laporte (00:04:13):
And, and Rosemary's not joining us from Ingle land. Mm-Hmm. She's gonna be sitting in this seat right here. Actually, you have to decide. Do you take the, the pilot seat and have them be the co-pilot? No. John says no. John says

Mikah Sargent (00:04:24):
No, because the, the cameras colors are dialed in for me is

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):
Rosemary. I don't even know. We've never met. She's beige.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:30):
Have you met?

Leo Laporte (00:04:32):
I mean, person,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:32):
Rosemary? Yeah. Yeah, I have. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Is she tall or

Mikah Sargent (00:04:34):
Short? Oh I maybe you two are the same height.

Leo Laporte (00:04:38):
Okay. So she should sit in the

Mikah Sargent (00:04:39):
Seat. Yeah. And she's beige like you. So, because

Leo Laporte (00:04:40):
This this seat is somehow I'm managing to be your height in this seat,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:44):
<Laugh>. I'm,

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
I don't know how that's happening at all. Don't sit up. Whatever you do. <Laugh>. So that's gonna be fun. We have a number of video calls. Thank you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the way you call in call dot twi tv. Do it on your phone. That way the camera and the microphone will work. It'll launch a Zoom meeting and you'll be joining into our Zoom meeting, and you'll be in the, what they call the lobby. And so you'll be able to see everybody else in the lobby, and you can raise your hand if you have a question, we can pick you up and put you in the No John shaking head. They see program. They see program. You'll see the show. Got it. Which is even cooler. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> what else? Call Twitter TV emails to ask the tech guys@twit.tv. We I Russell came to me and said, do you wanna renew the certificate for Tech Eye labs.com? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>? And I said, absolutely. So you can go to tech Eye labs.com and get to our show notes on our website, which it's actually part of the TWIT podcast network site. So you'll, but you'll be going there. But we're gonna keep Tech guy labs.com afloat.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:44):
Indeed.

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
Dro has taken over the Saturday show. He's doing a great job. They finally got him a mic flag <laugh>, I saw, and a, and a backdrop and all that. So he's like, he's looking like it's, it's like he's settled in, which is great. But we took Sunday. He took Saturday, we divided like Spain and Portugal dividing the world. We took Sunday, he took Saturday. And one of the main reasons we wanted Sunday is so that I can do my sermon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> my Sunday sermon. Hey, man. Yeah. Actually coming up in a little bit. Alex Wilhelm Will he was on Tech News Weekly with you guys on Thursday. He's gonna explain what happens next after the SVB Bank collapse. It was interesting. It was like a little, you know how when you play Jenga and you take out that little SVB wooden thing, and then everything kind of Ooh. And we weren't sure, was it all gonna collapse? It's teetering, but it seems to be we've survived

Mikah Sargent (00:06:40):
Studying out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:06:41):
Yeah. But Alex will have something to say about that in just a little bit. Meanwhile, let's check in on what's going on in the world around us. The Olympics have announced eSports.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:53):
What eSports are coming to the Olympics?

Leo Laporte (00:06:56):
Yeah, I guess, I mean, sort of like a de you know, a demonstration.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:01):
Okay. So it's saying it's not no one will be getting gold medals. I,

Leo Laporte (00:07:04):
Well, I, it's not clear. Okay. On March 1st, the International Olympic Committee announced the first details of the Olympic eSports series 2023. It's their according to Polygon, the next step in the venerable sporting buddies tentative move into the E. So it sounds like,

Mikah Sargent (00:07:20):
Okay. So it's one step along

Leo Laporte (00:07:22):
The way. Step. Yeah. It's a, they're shuffling along <laugh> Bonino is not happy with the sports they chose. <Laugh> Bonino is a gamer. And the games, the choice of games to put to say it in the words of Polygon is odd. No League of Legends, no t no. Typical eSports, no. Dota two,

Mikah Sargent (00:07:44):
No

Leo Laporte (00:07:44):
Fortnite. Not even any Fortnite. The only branded games that you'll recognize are Grand Tomo. That's a racing game. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and just dance.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:53):
Okay. Okay. I could see some Olympic level just dancing. That could be really entertaining. They're just B B B B BA hitting all those spots. That's, I mean, that's an exercise right there.

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
Yeah. it is. That one's sporty. Yeah. Chess, that's sporty chess.com will do this. Chess,

Mikah Sargent (00:08:12):
Brain sports

Leo Laporte (00:08:14):
The indoor cycling trainer is whiff, which I've never heard of. Have you heard of

Mikah Sargent (00:08:17):
That? No, but I could see that again.

Leo Laporte (00:08:20):
Virtual regatta for sailing.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:22):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:08:23):
Because they want, so they said, we wanna make it like real world games. We don't want to have League of Legends for two reasons. One, it's not real world. That may come as a shock to some League of Legends players. Two, it's violent. We don't want violence. Oh, we just want sport.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:35):
What about plane

Leo Laporte (00:08:36):
Landing? No. Virtual TaeKwonDo, <laugh> Tennis Clash, which weirdly is a mobile game. Oh, that's the other thing. They said. It was important that it not be, you need not have to top of the line PC to play it. That it, that it, that was accessible to everybody.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:51):
Hang on. Because I have to have a top of the body if I want to go to the Olympics. That's a good point. Be doing shot put or something like

Leo Laporte (00:08:59):
That. It's expensive to train for all of that. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:01):
So this is, this is an everybody. Is that the idea? Anyone can make it to anyone.

Leo Laporte (00:09:05):
Could anyone, if you could play tennis Clash Komi, W B S C E, baseball Power Pros. What a

Mikah Sargent (00:09:12):
Mouthful.

Leo Laporte (00:09:13):
And are you ready for archery? Yeah, there's archery. It's a game called, and I, I just, in my imagination, this sounds really terrible. Tick Tac Bow.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:21):
Oh, funny. I

Leo Laporte (00:09:24):
Guess that's also a mobile game, huh? Anyway get ready. <Laugh>. Who's in charge of this? Sharp. The I o c char sharpen up your tic tac bow skills. You too can go to the Olympics.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:38):
I'm sorry, I just gotta say something real quick.

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Bonito. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:41):
Why do they, why do they have chess.com but not actual chess in the Olympics? That is an interesting,

Leo Laporte (00:09:46):
They should have chess in the Olympics. They should have Jenga in the Olympics.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:49):
<Laugh>, I, that

Leo Laporte (00:09:50):
Would, would be Olympic Jenga.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:51):
I would watch the heck out of that.

Leo Laporte (00:09:53):
Honestly. They should make Olympics the more like approachable stuff that you and I can do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> not running a mile in four minutes. That's nuts. You know, that's, I mean,

Mikah Sargent (00:10:02):
Maybe instead of winter, Olympic Olympics and summer are Olympics. They have the sort of professional Olympics, and then the, everybody Olympics.

Leo Laporte (00:10:10):
Everybody Olympics.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:11):
And anyone can make it there.

Leo Laporte (00:10:12):
Speaking of Fortnite, federal Trade Commission has finalized its fine. Fortnite was using dark patterns,

Mikah Sargent (00:10:21):
Not

Leo Laporte (00:10:21):
Those, to get people in the, in the design of the menu system, in the interfaces to get people to make unintended purchases. Now remember, Fortnite is free, but you can buy weapons, you can buy outfits, you know, you can buy dance moves. Literally. Do you wanna see my Fortnite dance move? No. I better <laugh>. I didn't have to buy it.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:40):
I was gonna say, how much was it? I think 50. They have dollars for this dance

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
Move. What they got, remember they got sued by the guy who did the dance in Fresh Prince?

Mikah Sargent (00:10:48):
Oh, the Carlton. The

Leo Laporte (00:10:49):
Carlton Carlton Su him son. You can't put that in Fortnite. That's mine. Judge said, no, <laugh>, this is not patentable. You can't patent this. So anyway, you can buy those things, but, but the FTC has ruled that the, they're kind of enticing players, probably especially younger players, to buy things that they can't afford. Ready for the fine. 245 million. Oh, that's some real money. I

Mikah Sargent (00:11:17):
Was gonna say, I thought you were gonna say $245,000 then he said million at the end million. And I thought, oh, that's actually a real fine.

Leo Laporte (00:11:22):
<Laugh>. Yeah. The, the, the full settlement was more than half a billion. But I should point out that Fortnite is insanely profitable. Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games when Fortnite first came out, made 7 billion in the first year. The owner,

Mikah Sargent (00:11:35):
The just the owner.

Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
7 billion. So, you know, a half billion fine. Woo. While a lot of money for you and me, maybe not so much for that. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:11:43):
Tim's fine. Sweeney's

Leo Laporte (00:11:44):
Fine. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC thank goodness our federal government is working hard, oh boy. To protect us. They're moving ahead according to TikTok, with a plan to force TikTok either to be sold to a US company or shut down entirely. This is, this is what President Trump suggested some years ago and then lost interest. The Biden Camp says, no, we're, we're actually, it's TikTok says the Biden Camp has told them. So they're doing everything they can. Weirdly enough, the sale of TikTok, this might confirm the government's suspicions has to be approved by the Chinese government, who will obviously say Uhuh. Right. So, I feel bad, you know, my, I, I have a little bit of a

Mikah Sargent (00:12:31):
Dog in the

Leo Laporte (00:12:32):
Hunt. That's the word. Because my son is a TikTok guy, got made his, has really made his career first through TikTok too. More than 2 million followers as a TikTok chef. He's moved on. Cuz I asked him, I said, what are you gonna do? He said, well, I'm not so worried, cuz I've got Instagram, I've got YouTube shorts, I've got other things, you know, I've got the salt business. I've got the cookbook. He's really, you know, but that's all thanks to TikTok. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he came to me, we had lunch maybe not even much more than a year ago, and said, dad, I got about 30,000 followers of my sandwich cooking channel on TikTok. You think I should pursue this or get a real job? And I said, pursue it. You know, when I started doing what I was doing, you know, nobody ever heard of podcasting. Right. Pursue it. And I'm glad I said that. <Laugh> once, once dad got off a good one. So, but now you know, there are a lot of people like him who will not have an opportunity if TikTok shuts down. I guess Instagram reels. I mean, everybody in their brothers trying to copy TikTok. That's Facebook, Instagram YouTube. Every Twitter now wants to do that too. So

Mikah Sargent (00:13:38):
There was one, one leader, one government leader. I, I can't remember which one that's said that TikTok was quote, uniquely replaceable. And I don't think I agree

Leo Laporte (00:13:48):
With that. Yeah, that's bs. That's bs. Anyway, there you go. You can get a blue check now on Insta or on Facebook? That's my, for $12 a month. And you can't be an individual. You have to be a company or a business. Oh, okay. And I'm thinking of doing it because somebody's impersonating me on Insta.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:05):
Oh, well then, yeah, that's a good, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, and what's worse, they're sending out invitations. And some people I know have already started following them. Ah. And so if you get a DM from Twilio one, or just anybody, cuz I am not active on Insta. If anybody pretends to be me on Insta, just ignore that. That ain't, that ain't me. Babe. <laugh>. All right. We have at photo in the in the room today, Mike McDonald's taking pictures. Are you still at photo? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you still on the Twitter still? What's left of it? What's left of it? He says <laugh>. So MI Michael's great. We're gonna get to Sam in just a minute. He's, he's, he's in the building. Yes. That's the good news. The virtual building. They fixed the light on the

Mikah Sargent (00:14:51):
On the fix the light on the plane. So he's here, he finally touched down. Yeah, he's here. But let's do one call. All right. Should we do a video? Let's do a video of video. We got so many videos and we'll get to your calls on the zoom too. Again, you can send in videos, ask the tech guys@twit.tv. Yes. Who do we have?

Caller 1 (00:15:09):
Hey, Leo and Mikah. This is Tom from Las Vegas. I'm a longtime listener, first time caller, and I'm calling about my power beats trying to get the darn things to pair up with. My iPhone Pro 13 and my Mac Mini gets very frustrating sometimes, rebooting this, that, and the other thing, trying to get sound into my ears. And I was wondering if you might have some advice on how to do that, either an app or a workflow. Thanks in advance. And keep up the good work fellows. Boy,

Mikah Sargent (00:15:40):
The Power bees should work great, by the way. Nice to see you, Tom. Tom is, I think Tom LV in our chat room in our Discord. We see 'em a lot. First time caller though, which is nice, but I think Power Beats is owned by Apple. Yes. Yes. It's a Beats by drag which is owned by Apple. And so it should be, you shouldn't be having these issues, you know, just the other day I got a family support request and they were having trouble pairing one of their devices. And I, they were ready to throw the thing away, et cetera, et cetera. I walked them through the process to parrot, and it worked just fine. One thing I recommend is every once in a while, it doesn't hurt to do kind of a refresh of these devices. And so what you do is on your iPhone, you go into your Bluetooth settings, you tap the little I next to the device, and then you choose, forget this device.

(00:16:34):
Oh, start over. Yes. And the reason why I say this is because Apple is doing something that they consider clever with these devices so that they can connect across multiple platforms. So you mentioned, you know, pairing them with your macros device. Essentially what happens is when you pair these power beats with one device, apple then sort of lets the other devices that are logged into your iCloud account know that that exists. So then when that Bluetooth sort of signal comes up, then it's very easy for you to pair with a Mac. But on occasion, that can get a little messed up in the cloud. And so by forgetting on one device, you end up forgetting on all of the devices, and you can kind of reset and start the pairing process anew. This is great after a firmware update, especially where sometimes that can mess things up.

(00:17:21):
So yes, I just recommend choosing to forget the device. And then if that's still not working for you, you can then go in and reboot the, the, the beats themselves. And we'll include a link in the show notes too. You can actually reset the headphones. Yes, exactly. They, they, they have a little case like the, I like the yeah. Airpods. Yeah. A little charging case. So, and there's usually a button on that charging case, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's another thing to try normally with AirPods, and I think it's true now of Beats, when you open the case, they'll actually show up on your iPhone.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? You see they're supposed to Yeah. <Laugh>. Yeah. They're supposed to. You'll see it pops up. And if that doesn't, then I, I, I always push, you know, it's so Bluetooth is so annoying. I almost always have to go on the internet and find out how do you pair this device? Usually it's pressing and holding a button of some, but which button you know of some sort. Right? So on, on the AirPods and I bitch, it's true on the beats too. There's a button on the case that is not obvious. And pushing it will force them into pairing mode. Yep. Keep the pods in the case. Press that button, make sure everything's charged. Yeah. And then see if it pairs. Bluetooth is a nightmare. There was some good news in the Bluetooth world this week though. Qualcomm, so for a long time there has been a Bluetooth codec that's very high quality called Aptex.

(00:18:31):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But Apple never included it. And I wondered why. Now I know why it's encumbered. Patent encumbered, cuz Qualcomm owns it and forces you to buy a license. They just announced this week, no more licenses for Aptex. So I would love to see Aptex implemented. It's not, there are other, now newer Bluetooth codex are supposedly even better. But Apex was much better than the longtime Bluetooth stereo code deck. And I'm hoping better and better. Remember, Bluetooth was originally designed for earpieces, right? Yep. for your phone. And the, the Bluetooth headset they call 'em profile. The is very low quality professional. It's for hard so far compressed. So so's terrible. So eventually they realize, oh, people are gonna use this for other stuff, including headphones. So they added some higher quality audio. Codex Apex is one of the best.

(00:19:22):
A DS 80, what is it? A DS P was the first stereo one. And then there's some newer ones now. In fact, maybe a good subject down the road to talk about Bluetooth codex. Speaking of pairing, we're gonna, I brought in the new home pods, Chris from Miami, demanded <laugh> demanded that we take a look at the new Apple Home pods, the re-released version of the, so I have the old one and the new one. We're gonna play 'em both. You can see if you like them, I'll show you how they pair. Cuz it does kind of the same thing as these beats. Yeah. So I'll show you how you pair it with a phone to get first of all to get it on your network. And then second if you want, if you've got two of 'em, make a stereo pair. I bought them 600 bucks for the pair, $300 each for the bedroom. So we would have, we could listen to books and music at night. In there. Lisa has one on her side. I have one on mine. Nice. Yeah, it kind of sounds good. So I'll just show you that. And we'll, and I have the old one too, so we can show you what they, how they compare a little bit. But meanwhile I think Sam Abul Salmon is on the line. Check my computer though. I think I have, I I might have the wrong video for Sam Abuelsamid. Is that him

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:27):
<Laugh>? No, that's definitely not me.

Leo Laporte (00:20:29):
<Laugh>, that's Carlton.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:31):
I, I do not dance.

Leo Laporte (00:20:33):
Oh yeah. Hello Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:35):
Hello. Leo And hello Mikah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:38):
I'm so sorry we missed you last week. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:40):
Well, I mean, I saw you briefly. I popped by the studio on my way. Thank you. Further north. Thank you. Just, just say hello, but yeah, sadly my flight out of Detroit to San Francisco was delayed. And so I didn't make it to the studio in time for the show.

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
Well, it was nice to see you. I'm sorry I couldn't spend any time with you. You know, we were setting up for twit. We're just about to start. But you, were you driving this new vehicle?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:06):
I was heading up to Healdsburg to drive this vehicle on Monday. Oh, okay. Cause I wanted to see this the vehicle. Yeah, the vehicle that I was driving. I actually well the vehicle I was driving on Sunday when I stopped by was the new Kia Niro ev Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
One I wanted to see too. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:22):
Yeah. And then on Monday we were driving this, the the Nissan Aria. And I, part of our drive route actually did run past run basically right past the studio. Funny running up the 1 0 1. And I sent a, a text to to John Ashley to see if, if you were in the office. I wasn't, I didn't realize that Monday, on Monday was one of your, one of your dark

Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
We're dark on all day.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:47):
Yeah, yeah. Otherwise I would've stopped by and let you take a look at

Leo Laporte (00:21:50):
This. Ah, well, I'm, you know, as you know, I am driving in a love right now. My Mustang Machi, I love EVs. We have them in the house. Lisa has drives that mini Cooper ev which is great. Michael, our, our 20 year old drives a Chevy Bolt, which is great. Those are both, both fairly inexpensive, which is nice. I drive the Mustang Maee, but my Maee lease runs out in February. So it's time for me to start shopping around. Cuz as you know, sometimes you have to order six months in advance for these things to get 'em. So Yeah, absolutely. I am shopping actively right now. So tell me, tell me.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:24):
So, so I think, you know, this is definitely one of the cars that should be on your list. This is the, the Nissan Aria. It actually went on sale in December of 2022. So a few months ago in front wheel drive form single motor front wheel drive form. The one that I was driving while I was out there last week was the dual motor all-wheel drive version, which has about 385 horsepower. Ooh. and so I think it's a little more than, than what you've got in your mock e but not, not by much. And it'll, it'll zero to 60 in just a shade under five seconds, which is more than adequate for, you know, pretty much everybody, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:23:08):
Yeah. There was

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:08):
A race course, you're taking it to a track. In

Leo Laporte (00:23:09):
The early days, Tesla

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:11):
Was still, oh, there still is,

Leo Laporte (00:23:12):
Was spouting, you know, zero to 60 and three seconds and stuff, which by the way is not fun. Your head is no <laugh>, your head is pinned against the back.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:20):
Well, it's, it's also unsafe, you know, I mean, real world conditions. Yeah. And, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
You don't need it to merge on the freeway kids, maybe if you're drag racing at on your spare time, but

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:30):
Yeah. Yeah. it's

Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
More bragging rights than anything else. Five seconds is

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:33):
Plenty, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, it'll, it'll get up to speed and merge with highway traffic. No problem at all. You, you will not have an issue. I mean, just look at it from this perspective. 20 years, 30 years ago Ferrari's were doing zero to 60 in about six seconds. Wow. So, you know, this is going faster than those were, you know, 30 years ago.

Leo Laporte (00:23:58):
And this is, electric vehicles are really, and electric are great for this because they have a hundred percent torque from the get-go, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with a gas vehicle, you put your foot on the pedal, there's a little bit of a lag and it gets faster. Electric vehicle, <laugh>, <laugh>, it's instant on. And absolutely. Actually most vehicles now, I think EVs manage that somehow because they don't, it is a little disconcerting. The, it's the golf cart effect. We've all done that in the golf cart. Right. You, you touch the pedal and you lurch forward. They, they somehow moderate that, I think.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:28):
Yeah. I mean all, all of these electric vehicles are all drive by wire systems. You know, it's not like, you know, when we had internal combustion engine, in fact, even all internal combustion vehicles now are drive by wire at least for the, the acceleration. You know, it used to be in the old days, there was an actual physical cable between the pedal that you pressed down on and the throttle plate on the engine. And, you know, so however much you pressed on the pedal, that's how much the throttle plate opened. And then at some point after that, you got some acceleration. Now it's all electronic. You know, you're, when you press that pedal, all it is is a a potentiometer mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that's measuring how far you're press not only how far you're pressing it, but how fast you're pressing it. And then it goes through an algorithm and says, okay, give me this much torque from the motors.

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
Yeah. The computer's doing it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:21):
Yeah. The computer's doing it all. So it's easy to modify all of that and give you, you know, give it better behavior. One of the interesting details on this car, I mean, there's actually a lot of interesting details on this car, but one in particular that I was really looking forward to, to trying out was Nissan's Profilet Assist 2.0. It's, this is the, the Aria is the first vehicle in North America to get this. So this is the latest version of Nissan's Prolo, which actually launched in Japan on the Nissan skyline a couple of years ago. Version two for the, for the Aria now allows you to go hands free. So they've had version one pro pilot, which is a hands-on adaptive cruise control and lane centering system. This is more like the blue cruise system that Ford has and GM super cruises where you can actually go hands free for highway driving. And it, it works really well because it, it

Leo Laporte (00:26:22):
Has, I know in my Mustang, I have a camera mm-hmm. <Affirmative> watching me. And if I look away for very long, it yells at me and says, pay attention. And I know the Cadillac is the same thing. And so this does this, but this is the third of these.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:38):
Yeah. Well, there's actually a couple of others. BMW's got the the new seven series now has this capability. Mercedes-Benz has got it. And there, and there's others coming to market. So as with the, the the other hands-free systems there's and if you're watching the video stream, you can see over over my left shoulder, I guess, I guess it's my right shoulder. On the left side of the screen, <laugh>, you can see the infrared camera that looks at the driver to monitor where the driver's looking and make sure that you are still watching the road. Cuz it's, this is not this is not a self-driving system. Yeah. This is a, an assistive driving system. Yeah. Which means that you can go hands up, but you have to keep your eyes on the road and be ready to take over control. I

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Do, by the way, I have blue crews on my mm-hmm. <Affirmative> on my Mustang. And and I definitely have my hands hovering somewhere near the wheel <laugh> because well, my experience has been that sometimes things happen on the road that the, the computer isn't capable of. Oh, ab

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:38):
Absolutely. And this, this is why these are still supervised systems, you know, where the human driver has to be supervising. Yeah. and one of the things that I really like about this sys the, the Nissan system versus the Ford implementation is the what we call the hmi, the human machine interface. So one of my, one of my biggest complaints about blue crews is Ford kind of cheaped out or, or went, went the wrong direction with the H HMI design. So if you remember on the gm on the Cadillac with Super Crews, there was a light bar across the top of the steering wheel. Right. And, you know, when it was in ready mode, when Super Cruise was ready, but not currently active, it would be blue right when it was active, and you could take your hands off the wheel, the light bar would turn green, right.

(00:28:27):
And when it wanted you to put your hands back on the wheel, it turned red. Right. And it was always visible in your line of sight when you're watching the road. And it, it was it, it really eliminates mode confusion which is really important with a system where you have to supervise it. You don't want mode confusion. And my complaint with blue crews, not so much on the mock e or at least to a lesser extent on the Mae, but especially on the other Ford vehicles, the F one 50 s and the Lincolns that have it is they have a predominantly blue color scheme for the instrument cluster. They don't have a light bar. And then the icon for the steering wheel that shows you hands off versus hands on for the steering wheel is also in a different shade of blue <laugh> on there. And it, it's not particularly visible. That's not good. And you have to look, you now know what

Leo Laporte (00:29:16):
Cluster See Yeah. You need to know, am I driving or not? On the Mustang, it's in the instrument cluster, it's blue and blue cruises on everything looks very different. When it's off, it changes to a completely different look. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:28):
It changes to white. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
And it, and it has you know, a, a, a thing saying keep your hands on the wheel. So it's much easier. I have, I've had no trouble. I agree. It would be nice to have a physical affordance, like on the steering wheel. It does that, but I, I have had no trouble in distinguishing between the three different modes Right. On the, on the Mustang, but maybe on the lightning and other

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:48):
Ones. Yeah. So, so what Nissan has done is on vehicles that have blue crews they actually have heads up display as standard equipment on all the vehicles, or not Blue crews Prolo 2.0. Yes. Let's

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
Get your names right. Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:02):
<Laugh>. So they have a, a standard heads up display. So you have the digital instrument cluster that you can see through the steering wheel, and then the heads up display that's in front of you all the time. And they, they change

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
The entire on the, on the, on the windshield.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:18):
Yeah. If you, if you ever driven a vehicle with a hud Yeah. It, it actually looks like it's projecting on the windshield. Yeah. But it actually appears to be floating out just past the edge of the hood in

Leo Laporte (00:30:27):
The car. That's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:28):
Me. Lisa's

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Car, car has a, about

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:29):
Six or seven feet in front of you. Yeah. Yeah. And so what they do is they, they completely change the color scheme based on the mode. So when you activate ProPILOT, it's got three different modes. There's the base mode, which is just adaptive cruise control. So when it doesn't, when it hasn't detected lane markings or or, or that you are on a highway, you you get the, the base setup of adaptive cruise control. Then the second level is like prot version one where it's a hands-on lane centering system and adaptive cruise control. And when it in that base level, it's the, both the instrument cluster and the the HUD have a white color scheme. When it goes to prot version one capability, the hands-on capability, it goes to green for both the cluster and the hud. And then when it says, okay, you can take your hands off the wheel now it all changes to blue. So it's very clear when when when what mode you're in all the time. It's clearly visible without having to look down at the cluster. And you know, it, it, there's, there's no mode confusion at all, which I think was a really, well, it's a really well-designed HMI that they've done for this system.

Leo Laporte (00:31:48):
So this is the aria, the Nissan Aria available next year or is available?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:55):
Available now. Okay. the front wheel drive one is available Now, the all-wheel drive that I drove last week will be in dealerships in the next two to three weeks.

Leo Laporte (00:32:03):
Nice. And 300, three miles, they're claiming range. Is that about what you saw?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:10):
Yeah, so that's the 300 a little over 300 miles is for the front wheel drive version with the extended range battery. So they've got two battery sizes, just as they do for a lot of vehicles, including the machi. The, the extended range front wheel drive is about a little over 300 miles. The extended range, all-wheel drive, which is what we were driving cuz it's a little bit heavier. You got a little more drag. It's about 270 miles. And given, you know, the fact the driving we were doing you know, it was raining quite a bit that, that always adds a little more drag that's gonna reduce your, your range or your efficiency if you're driving a gas vehicle. And you know, we had the, you know, a little bit of heat on, you know, I always get the window de fives.

Leo Laporte (00:32:54):
I always look for the all-wheel drive. Maybe I'm Yeah. Nuts. I don't know. I just like it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:58):
No, I mean that's,

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
And that's not like the traction's better.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:01):
Yeah. Depending on where you're driving. That's not necessarily a, a, a bad thing. There's noth nothing wrong with that. It's two

Leo Laporte (00:33:06):
Motors. Yeah. Usually get more horsepower.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:09):
So with and on the, you know, on the drive route we were doing which went from Healdsburg down to Sonoma Raceway and then out to Bodega Bay and then back again. Yeah. It was, it, it worked out. I think we drove about 145 miles. I, I worked it out. It would've worked out to just shy of about 250 miles of range on, you know, on that particular drive.

Leo Laporte (00:33:33):
Yeah. That's pretty good. So I'd take it. Yeah. It has one thing that I thought I'd see more of. But we haven't yet. But our niece, our Chevy Bolt has it, it has a rear view mirror with a, that's a camera, not a mirror.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:47):
That's becoming more and more common. It takes a

Leo Laporte (00:33:50):
Little getting used to, but it's actually what you want cuz there's no obstructions. You have a great view. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:56):
Yeah. Especially, you know, on a lot of modern vehicles, you have often have a very narrow you know, the windshield or the rear window is often slandered and sloped quite forward. You end up having a very narrow field of view through the windshield. If you're driving an S U v, a lot of times you've got rear headrest that are blocking the view. So what this does is it gives you a camera that's mounted on the back of the car and it projects onto the mirror.

Leo Laporte (00:34:21):
It's a little queasy making it first. I don't know what if there's lag

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:24):
Or something? The newer Yeah, the, some of the early ones the frame rate was a little slow. Also a little bit of latency.

Leo Laporte (00:34:31):
It's an a wider angle than you're, than you're getting with the mirror. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:35):
You can usually change that. They usually give you an option to change, because

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):
That's a little weird too. You go from this normal angle, suddenly you're, you have supervision <laugh>. Yeah. You have wide angle. But once you get used to it, it's great. Now I'm wondering how long before we can, before Nitsa or whoever is in charge, let's us do that with the side mirrors

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:54):
They're working on that. It takes nitsa a while to change the regulations. There, there is a move to allow those, they have just recently, like, just like a year ago, changed the regulations for headlights to allow the sort of projector beam headlights, I dunno if you remember Yeah. When we visited Audi, those Saudis, the CS in 2020, you know, that can do different patterns with the headlights. Those are now legal. Those just became legal in the past year. Yeah. they're

Leo Laporte (00:35:21):
Expensive. I was looking at the Audi cuz I wanted them.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:24):
Yeah, you don't wanna break one of those, one

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
Of the trons, but then it says, you know, you have to pay thousands extras for that feature and Yeah. How much to replace.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:32):
Well, right. Yeah. I mean those, those are gonna become standard in the coming years. Of course. That's great. The

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
Process coming down, it leads you when you turn, it's leading you where you want to go. And I think it's much safer. 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:43):
Well, and and one of the great things is you know, when you're driving down a dark road you know, you got high beams on when it detects it, there's another car coming towards you. It there uses a camera and uses sensors to figure out where the, where that camera is. And it will, because it's basically projecting it, it's kind of like a project, you know, a a TV projector. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's use, it uses a D L P technology. Oh, that's wild. For that. And so what it will actually do is it will actually dip the pixels that surround the oncoming vehicle so that you don't blind, you

Leo Laporte (00:36:21):
Still have high beams

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:22):
Starting everything from high beams to low beams. Yeah. It only puts, essentially puts low beams only on the oncoming vehicle. So the other driver is get blown. Yeah. Everything else is still illuminated. Our

Leo Laporte (00:36:31):
Cars getting, getting brighter. I'm, I've blinded more, maybe it's cause of my age, but I'm noticing at Eli noticed it too that we're seeing a lot of cars. We think they're high beams are, are you see it too? Yes. Yeah. I think their high beams must be on, but I think they're just brighter now than

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:45):
They used to. They, they are much brighter. Yeah. most modern vehicles are moving to l e d headlamps, which are substantially brighter. And and part of it, you know, one, once we get more of these adaptive headlights where, you know, it knows what it's what's in front of it. Yeah. And it can adjust pixel by pixel. That will, that will be a lot better. That's

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
So neat. Well, this next car I think is gonna be the last car I ever buy. So I want to make sure it's a, it's one that it will take me into the future at least a couple of years. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:16):
There, I mean, there's a bunch more, there's a bunch more new EVs coming out this year. The New York Auto Show is coming up in just what about two and a half weeks time, I think. Oh, perfect. I got some time. And, and that one, well, one of the vehicles that's gonna be shown off there is the new Kia EV nine. Now

Leo Laporte (00:37:35):
That's too big for me. That thing is like a suburban, right? It's giant. No,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:38):
It's not that big. It's, it's smaller than a suburban. It's, it

Leo Laporte (00:37:41):
Looks huge and it's got it's swiveling mid, it's three rows. Yeah. And the mid row swivels around so you could play back, you know, gin rummy while you're <laugh> driving down the road. It's a little weird. It is

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:52):
Very futuristic. It's about, it's about the same size as a Ford Explorer. Oh, okay. Okay. So more of an a midsize, hard

Leo Laporte (00:37:59):
To tell pictures. It looks pretty darn big. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:02):
Yeah. The, the proportions make it look bigger than it is,

Leo Laporte (00:38:04):
And it seems to have the thing that I don't want to participate in, which is a very high hood, higher than a child. And I really get nervous about cars that you, you just can't see a kid in front of you, you know? Yeah. That seems to me a bad idea.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:19):
It, it absolutely is. And you know, this is one of the reasons why we're seeing vehicles being equipped with more and more sensors mm-hmm. To detect what's around you. Yeah. To help detect what's around you and, and give you more more aware, more situational awareness. So, you know, we're seeing more and more cars that are gonna be equipped with lidar in the next year or two. And also for example, the the Jeep grand Cherokee and some, I think some other Jeep models now have an option for and infrared sensor. So don't worry kids, it's mattered in the grill.

Leo Laporte (00:38:56):
The kids, the car, see kids, the car sees the kids kids <laugh> just relax. I don't know if I, what

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:01):
If there's a no and then you don't wanna rely on that, but, but if it can inform you that there's, that there's someone there change

Leo Laporte (00:39:07):
The brakes on.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:07):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of, one of the cool technologies we're, we're starting to see is adapt augmented reality heads up displays. So the, the HUD on the aria is, you know, basically all the information is in a, looks like it's in a single plane. But what we're starting to see is these augmented reality HUDs where the information can be displayed at different distances in front of you. So, for example, one of the things that can do is use the cameras that are on there. When it detects a pedestrian, it can actually highlight that pedestrian. So it can draw a box around Yeah. The pedestrian and say, Hey, look, there's a PE pedestrian over here Yeah. In your perimeter.

Leo Laporte (00:39:45):
And it, you know, you be aware of that. Are these being reliable in your experience?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:49):
They're just coming to market now. So like this year. So we don't, we don't know yet how reliable they'll be. You know, it's, it's never gonna be, it's not gonna be a hundred percent, but it'll be probably better. It's better than having more information. Having yeah. Having more information for the driver is better than less.

Leo Laporte (00:40:08):
Sam Abul, Sam, principal, researcher, guide, house Insights, and host of the Fabulous Wheel Bearings podcasts@wheelbearings.media with our good friends, Robbie Baldwin, lover Roberto and Nicole, you've got a great team there. And I'm you thrilled that we can get you on and we'll, I'm sorry it wasn't in Studio, but next time

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:29):
And we'll, we'll, we'll be recording the next episode of Wheel Bearings in about two hours time. Ah. so, you know, if anybody's got any questions that you wanna throw away you can just drop those in the in the Discord we have a wheel bearings discord, but yay. You can also drop 'em in the, in the twit Discord in the Autos channel. And we will try to answer those. And if you download the show, you can, you'll see the answers to those questions. That's an here, the answers to those questions. And I'm

Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
Sure you'll be talking about the Aria in more detail

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:56):
Scenario. Actually, all three of us drove it this week. Robbie and I were on the same wave on Monday. Oh, nice. And Nicole came in a couple of days later for a later wave during, later in the week

Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
Sometime. Let's do a twit with the three of you. It'd be kind of fun.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:09):
It'd be happy

Leo Laporte (00:41:10):
To We did that with Rocket and it was great. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe just have you know, kind of a wheel bearings takeover on this, on this show. We can do that. All right. Maybe after New York's auto show, we could do that. Yeah. Or next. Sounds good. Does Detroit still do the big one?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:24):
Yeah. The Detroit show is moved to September now. Okay. people were complaining about having to come to Detroit in January. I don't know what the problem

Leo Laporte (00:41:32):
Is. What's wrong with you?

Mikah Sargent (00:41:33):
Where, where would you prefer to be in, you know, the second week of January

Leo Laporte (00:41:36):
Isn't, he is not a good judge of this <laugh>. I hope it's not too cold out there for you. Spring is coming. The

Mikah Sargent (00:41:44):
Crues are perfect. Yeah. It's, it's in the low thirties right now. It's about 21 earlier this morning. God,

Leo Laporte (00:41:50):
We think it's cold when it's 50 degrees here. <Laugh> Sam, a pleasure. Thank you for

Mikah Sargent (00:41:54):
Us. It was a pleasure to be with you guys. We'll see you soon. Have a great day.

Leo Laporte (00:41:57):
Take care. Sam Bull Salmon Guide, house Insights and wheelings.media. Sock time sock.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:04):
Oh yes.

Leo Laporte (00:42:05):
I'm wearing tiger Stripes. You're wearing Leo Stripes.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:08):
I am wearing Leo Stripes. Yes. Thank you to our third biggest fan for these Leo themed socks. So what is

Leo Laporte (00:42:15):
Disconcerting for me to look over Yeah. And see me on your ankle?

Mikah Sargent (00:42:18):
I'm sure it is, and it does make me wonder why for you they chose Steve Martin instead of me, but then I thought maybe they felt uncomfortable about <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:42:26):
It may also be you're

Mikah Sargent (00:42:28):
More public, I guess. I don't

Leo Laporte (00:42:28):
Know. There aren't as many pictures of you lying

Mikah Sargent (00:42:30):
Around. Yeah, that's probably

Leo Laporte (00:42:31):
What it is. You know, 20 years from now, you can have, I'll have my own

Mikah Sargent (00:42:34):
Custom Socks. Socks

Leo Laporte (00:42:36):
<Laugh>. I'll wear Mikah socks in in the, the year. What is that? 2043. Oh, don't, apple has a new TV show called Extrapolations. I saw that. 

Mikah Sargent (00:42:47):
We were just watching

Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
The trailer last night. The next one is 2037, so I'm doing the math. Okay. I'll be 75 and I'm doing the math. And then this 2049, I think it goes like through the end of the century. I'm going, okay. I'll be 90 <laugh>, but I plan to be here. Dagnabbit, dagnabbit, let's say hey to Paige, who's had her hand up for some time. Let me push the proper buttons here and bring Paige into our magic Stargate. Woo.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:16):
Welcome.

Leo Laporte (00:43:16):
Paige. Hello,

Mikah Sargent (00:43:18):
Paige.

Caller 2 (00:43:19):
Hi.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:20):
Yay. Hey, there we go.

Caller 2 (00:43:22):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:43:23):
<Laugh>, welcome to the Stargate. Ooh, she did. That was cool. You flipped your phone. Now you're wide. Yeah. <laugh>. Where where are you calling from? Paige?

Caller 2 (00:43:33):
Los Angeles. All right.

Leo Laporte (00:43:35):
Did you listen to the old radio show back in the day?

Caller 2 (00:43:39):
I did. Faithfully.

Leo Laporte (00:43:40):
Well, I'm glad you found us. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:42):
Glad you're

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
Here on the internet.

Caller 2 (00:43:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's great. I I miss both days of the weekend, but I understand you need a break, so it's okay, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:43:53):
I, you know, I miss it a little too. It was really fun. But it's a lot of work. And just between you and me, I don't know how radio's going these days. They stopped paying me you know last year the my income got cut in a half. And then in 2022 it was basically I think I owe them money. <Laugh>. Seriously, I get my gosh statements and it would be in parenthesis, you know, you owe us $25,000, so they have not come after me for it, so I'm wanna just like sh

Mikah Sargent (00:44:23):
Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:44:23):
But I noticed that the new Mustangs, I should have asked Sam about this. The new gas mustangs no longer have am radios in them. And I think this is a trend. And that's gonna be, that's gonna be the death now because that's how most people listen to am radios in their cars, in the car. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you found us here. The internet's probably gonna be around for a while.

Caller 2 (00:44:45):
Yeah, probably <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):
In fact, that's what, that's why they didn't put an AM radio in and they said, well, you got the internet. What do you want? What can we do for you, Paige?

Caller 2 (00:44:54):
Well, I'm not super tech savvy, but somewhat. Okay. And I have a Adele PC desktop and I only got 16 gigs of RAM in it, and I'm feeling that. So I wanna add Ram.

Leo Laporte (00:45:15):
Are you, are you sure you're feeling that 16? Because that's a lot of Ram. Yeah. Nor normally I would say. You're fine. You're using Windows 11?

Caller 2 (00:45:23):
Yes. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:45:24):
Well, and what tells you, what tells you that you need more memory?

Caller 2 (00:45:30):
I tend to have a lot of tabs

Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
Open. Oh yes. <Laugh>.

Caller 2 (00:45:35):
And I see the little, the little like working light. The computer is working. Yeah. Blinks a lot. Yeah. And I, I go into task manager and see what's running. And even when I have my browser say, say if I've just restarted and the browser isn't on anymore,

Leo Laporte (00:46:00):
Then it seems fine.

Caller 2 (00:46:01):
No, then it still seems high.

Leo Laporte (00:46:03):
Yeah. Really. But it's not slowing down. It's just, it's just working.

Caller 2 (00:46:09):
Well, once in a while it does slow down. Like right now, I don't know what this means. I've got 4,400 megabytes going because of my Firefox.

Leo Laporte (00:46:20):
Yeah. Nev. Okay. So first rule, <laugh> of memory. First rule. First rule. My doctor, my doctor told me this. I said, I'm gonna get the full body MRI said, don't. He said, you don't need to know. You don't want to know, and it's just gonna scare you. And okay. And it's the same thing I, I think with PCs that if you start looking at this activity monitor Yep. And you start seeing, oh my God, it's using all the memory. Oh, it's now, it's paging. Oh, the CPU is a hundred percent. It freaks people out. But the PCs are designed to use every resource possible. So it always will. So you could add, if you put in 32 gigs of ram, we're gonna help you put RAM in. By the way, I'm not trying to talk you out of it, but, okay. <Laugh> if you put in 32 gigs of ram, just be prepared.

(00:47:02):
You may see the exact same thing. Browsers are notorious Ram Hogs because they, they, each tab of a browser is like another program running, right. So if you have a hundred tabs, you've got a hundred programs running I would say close the tabs browsers, by the way, are doing something smart. Both Firefox and Chrome have started putting these tabs to sleep mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so that they don't do this. Right. They're both very aware of the hyper aware of this effect. And they know it's disconcerting to people. So they're starting to, you know, try to take a take. See, I'm not a, I'm not a tab guy. I close tabs when I'm not using it, but I do, you know, so here's my browser. It's open right now. I've got two tabs open, but I do pin tabs and I guess that counts too. So I have, these are things that are always running in my browser, these pinned, this is Firefox pinned windows. So I, cuz I go to them all the time. So Yeah. You know, maybe I am a tab guy. You are a bit of a tab <laugh>. Maybe I am a tab guy, so maybe I should pay attention to this. We normally think 16 gigs is enough for either Windows or PCs. If you want to put more in, is it a, it's a desktop, right?

Caller 2 (00:48:07):
It's a Dell desktop.

Leo Laporte (00:48:09):
Yeah. So there've looked at, put RAM in. That's not a hard thing to do.

Caller 2 (00:48:15):
One of my questions is the Dell 16 gig is $300 and then there's

Leo Laporte (00:48:25):
A brand Dell. Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:48:26):
Okay. There's a brand called Crucial.

Leo Laporte (00:48:28):
I was just gonna send you the crucial site. Isn't that hysterical? That's the old micron. They're very good. They make RAM and they have a picker, which is nice. So if you go to crucial.com, this is the same thing with other Ram MA manufacturers. They'll have a picker. So you can just literally enter in and I think it sounds like you've already done this page. Enter in which, which computer you have and it'll tell you what you need. Now the one thing to be aware of with any computer is you have to have a slot for that ram. So sometimes when you buy a PC and you buy it with 16 gigs, they will, they'll put four, four gigs dims in the, in the thing and take up all four slots. So make sure, oh boy. Yeah, you can't be sure. It depends on how you bought it.

(00:49:13):
 In fact, sometimes you'll pay more. So they'll even say in the, in the picker. Yeah. 16 gigs, one dim, that means you get some extra slots. So make sure you have a Ram slot in there. That's something crucial. Can't tell you. You can open up the case. It's very easy. And you'll see where the RAM goes. It's, it's they're, I think they're still on so dims for this kind of computer. So they're little daughter, small daughter boards, and they have a little slot. You'll see at least one, you might see two. If they put two eights in. If they put four fours in, then you might wanna, and Dell and, and Crucial will tell you this. You might wanna order, you know, two sixteens and take the old ones out and put in the two sixteens. You usually do wanna have it balanced, by the way. So I don't, it used to be a big deal with interleaving of ram. I don't know if it still is, but it usually, you don't want an odd number of Ram dims in there. Okay. So Crucial will help you do this. Walk through it. And how much cheaper was the crucial

Caller 2 (00:50:08):
<Laugh>? $42 versus

Leo Laporte (00:50:11):
300. Yeah. Don't buy it from Dell. Now you could look at the specs and it may be, I, I don't think it is, it may be that the Dell Ram is what we call ecc error corrected ram. That would be more expensive if it's a server. Sometimes they put those in. I've seen lately a lot of experts say, you know what, we should all be using ECC because RAM errors are one. It is, it is E C C. Well that's expensive. Yeah. And it may be in fact that the crucial is not E C C that would explain the difference.

Caller 2 (00:50:39):
Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:50:40):
Okay. So look, if you can get E C C for $42, do you want e ccc? It's funny cuz for years I said, oh, that's for servers. You don't need ecc. But, but a number of people, I think including Linus Tour Vault's creative of Linux have been saying, yeah, you know what, we're seeing a lot more crashes than we think we should be. And we think that that's because of bits being accidentally shifted in ram. And whether it's from cosmic rays, el stray electricity or just errors and programs. And the ECC will fix those and make your system more reliable. So it is more expensive. Error correcting RAM is much more expensive. So I would say okay. Trying to make, you know, when you're looking at the pricing, do apples to apples. Crucial. Yeah. Crucial. is cheaper. Dell's the brand and it's gonna charge you more. But there may be, when you said that 200 bucks, I thought that must be that's fancy. Might be higher speed or ecc. That's probably why 300. 300. Wow. That's a lot more. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:41):
That seems roughly pricey. I think there's still a markup for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:51:45):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Joe and our Discord is telling, is reminding me that there's a program still out. Boy, this is, this brings me, this is like the year 20 2007 or something. There's a program called a Bel Ark advisor. It's free to download B E L A R C. You can download it. We'll tell you how many slots you have. So you don't Oh, okay. You don't even have to open it up. Bell Ark. So it's proprietary ram I don't know, check and see. I don't know. Try to make apples to apples for your price comparison. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you have ecc, well you may not want to spend. And that was for 16 gigs. Additional to double it. Yeah. Wow. Yep. That's 300 bucks a lot. I would, I would say you, it's fine. Crucial is fine. I get my ramp from crucial. It's fine.

Caller 2 (00:52:36):
Okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:37):
Good. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. good. You're so, you're, you're technical enough. You're gonna open that up if you open your case before.

Caller 2 (00:52:45):
No, I need to find a place that's clean enough without cat hair all over

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:51):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:52:52):
Cat hair's already in there, my friend. 

Mikah Sargent (00:52:54):
There's nothing. Once you open it up, you go. Nothing

Leo Laporte (00:52:55):
You can do about that. Not even this

Mikah Sargent (00:52:57):
Place is clean from cat

Leo Laporte (00:52:58):
Hair. <Laugh> fans are sucking that in <laugh>. That's actually a good opportunity to clean that out. Be careful. Static electricity's not your friend. So you know, people yell at me cuz I never use a grounding strap. When you get the ram from crucial, it'll probably come with a little bracelet you put on and you put on the case or you put on something that's grounded. That's to keep the static from zapping. Anything. Same thing when you vacuum it out, you may be tempted to vacuum it out. Sometimes vacuums can add a lot of static knock stuff loose, so Oh yeah. Yeah. Better to use a little compressed air when you order the ram. Order some compressed air. Okay. And just pump it. Don't spray long sprays cuz it gets cold and condenses. So you just go

Caller 2 (00:53:36):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
And just blow that there, there will definitely be dust and stuff in there. Blow that out. Clean off the fans. And and yeah. And if you can ground yourself, I guess I should say that I never do, and just, it's easy to push it in. It's gonna take more force than you think. Mm-Hmm.

Caller 2 (00:53:51):
<Affirmative>, ah

Leo Laporte (00:53:53):
That's the, that's I think the number one thing. People go, Ooh, gee, do I wanna push it that hard? You kinda have to give it a little force in another chunk. Okay. It's keyed so it can only go in one way.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:04):
Yeah. It wouldn't hurt to go to both i fixit.com and also to YouTube and just type, type in the name of your Dell. Yeah. Watch people do it and just watch some people do

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
It. Yeah. Yeah. That's always fun.

Caller 2 (00:54:14):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
I think this is a great project. Call us back after you've done it. Yeah. Let us know how it goes. 

Caller 2 (00:54:20):
I

Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
Will. And I'll tell you, there's no downside of 42 bucks. There's no downside to adding another 16 gigs. You may see some performance improvements. The biggest reason you need a lot of ram is if you were doing things that had big data files like Photoshop editing with big photos, or if you're using a virtual machine, you know, I, on my my Mac running windows on my Mac, that windows takes up a big chunk of Ram. So I want to have more ram on the max or I to run Macon windows. But most of the time, most people browsers are actually the biggest challenge. And you probably are right. But it, why not? Let's do it. It'll be a fun project and it'll give that machine a little extra life. The other thing you might do is that machine have a solid state. Hard drives We're spinning hard

Caller 2 (00:55:02):
Drive. Yes, I did. Shut

Leo Laporte (00:55:03):
That. Oh good. All right. Nice. So that's a another wonderful upgrade. I recommend anytime you got the machine open, replace spinning drives with solid state drives, that makes a

Mikah Sargent (00:55:13):
Probably single biggest difference. Whoa. I didn't know it could be like this.

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
Yeah. <laugh>. It boots up faster. It runs faster. It's great. You were smart. You did it right. Well, it's nice to talk to you. Well, I

Caller 2 (00:55:21):
Listened to you <laugh>. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
You. I really appreciate it. I'm glad you followed us. I know it's kind of a pain in the butt, but I appreciate you doing it. Thank you.

Caller 2 (00:55:30):
Alright, thank you boys.

Leo Laporte (00:55:31):
Great to talk to you. Take care.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:34):
Best luck. There

Leo Laporte (00:55:34):
Goes page from Los Angeles. Gonna do her hard drive or a RAM upgrade.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:39):
That's exciting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
We've got lots more to come, including a visit from Chris Marwat, our photo guy. I'm gonna take a walk over to the other side, walk on the wild side, and show you those new Apple Home pods. And you can be the judge of whether it's worth the upgrade. But first I want to tell you about our sponsors. As you probably know, when you watch the shows you see it all over it. We are in the ACI Learning Studios, ACI learning coup last year, paired with our longtime friends at IT Pro to make a very exciting partnership that is gonna give you everything you need to get into it to get more skills in it, to get a better job. And because ACI Learning brings audit skills along with Audit Pro and they also have learning hubs where you can actually go in person, it's such a great partnership.

(00:56:35):
Our, our friends at IT Pro have been bringing you engaging in entertaining IT training for the last decade. We've been advertising and talking about them. Now that it pros part of ACI learning, it's expanding its reach and production capabilities, offering you the content and the style of learning you need at any stage in your development. Whether you're at the beginning of your career trying to get that first IT job or looking to move up in your sector. ACI Learning is here to support your growth, not only in it, but in cybersecurity and audit readiness. And wait a minute, on the screen right now, Don Paset, they do that. Great Tech NATO podcast just did their 300th episode. So congratulations to IT. Pro and Tech, nato actually with ACI Learning, there's a new podcast. These, I love this. There's Skeptical Auditor podcast because they have audit as well.

(00:57:25):
 Audit It Pro, audit Pro, which includes enterprise solutions, webinars, the skeptical auditor podcasts, and then two podcasts. Those are free by the way. You can listen to, they've got the practice labs, which is a great way to learn the skills even if you don't have that hardware at hand. The learning hubs. So you can go in and in person, you can mix and match too. You don't do little in person, little remote. It's just a great way to learn Tech. And tech is a great area. It is a great area right now. It is the one industry, I think in, in 2023, where opportunities outpace growth. So many people are learning these skills, but not enough to fill all the open jobs, especially in cybersecurity. There're more than a million open unfilled cybersecurity positions in the US right now. And these jobs pay well about a third of it.

(00:58:17):
Information security jobs require a cybersecurity cert. 23% of all jobs require certs. This is how they know that not only do you have the skills, but you have the determination of the gumption, the, the persistence and the, and the follow through. Cuz you gotta, you know, study and take an exam and all that stuff. It shows you can do it. You know, you got it. You got what they need. Organizations are hungry for cybersecurity talent. Average salary for a cybersecurity professional, 116,000 a year. That's great. And the great way to start ACI learnings, information security analyst and cybersecurity specialist programs. Two programs that can help you get certified. The workforce gap now. So, so in 2022 it was up 26.2% higher. The 2021. We obviously don't have those numbers yet for 2023, but I think it's gonna be even more. That's the gap between people who have the skills and the number of jobs available.

(00:59:14):
It's, I mean, I can't give you a guarantee, but go take the test. Go learn the skills. Cuz I think you got a good shot at a very, very, very good job. And if you're watching our shows, you're already, we know you already like this stuff. You're interested. Right? The most popular cybersecurity certs they've got at ACI Learning. C I S S P, EC Councils Certified Ethical Hacker. That's the one I always wanted. Certified Network Defender. Cybersecurity Audit School. That's a big and growing area, by the way. The audit area and cybersecurity frameworks. You can, you can go in the classroom, you can do it online, you can do it remote, whatever you prefer. This is a, this is, this is a, an area where the, the number of jobs vastly outpaces the number of people trying to get those jobs, especially in cybersecurity.

(01:00:05):
Get the certs. A third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity cert to maintain your competitive edge across Audit IT and cybersecurity readiness. Go to ACI learning and learn more. Go.Acilearning.Com/Twit . That's the address. Go dot ACI learning.com/twi. Our special code TWIT three zero, we'll get you 30% off. TWIT 30 that's on a standard or premium individual IT pro membership. Go.Acilearning.Com/Twitt. We love ACI learning. We love it pro. We're so thrilled that they sponsored the studio this year. Thank you guys, and do keep doing that. Great job you're doing because what a great time to be in this business. Go.Acilearning.Com/Twitt and you help us by the way, when you use that address. That way they know you saw it here. Go.Acilearning.Com/Twitt. 30% off. What are we doing?

Mikah Sargent (01:00:58):
We're gonna take a video call. Video

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):
Question.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:02):
So yes. A video question.

Caller 3 (01:01:03):
Oh, Leo and Mikah, this is Martin Hansen from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My question is, I would like to extract all the images in my iPhone messages to my Windows computer. Currently I have my iPhone set to back up to iCloud. I have my messages set to sync to iCloud, and as you can see, I have 32.6 gigabytes of messages syncing to iCloud. I'd like to get those image files out of that sync file, but I can't find a way to do that. Tried a couple third party programs, but nothing was successful. Would be even better if those could be downloaded with all their picture data attributes and dates. Hope you can help. Have a great day.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:53):
I love this question because it's so easy to answer. Good. Every time I say go to i amazing.com and check out I amazing. I always hear back that worked. Yeah. I think it's been like four or five, six times now. So amazing is this application that basically takes your backups and it knows how Apple does backups with iPhone. And so what it does is it gets into the backup and it understands how Apple stores things, what files and what folders are named, how they're stored within this sort of overall backup. And then lets you break it down, break it down now into all of its component parts. So if you're wanting your messages with the images, then you can get those very easily. If you want your photos from the photo library that are stored locally on your device, you can get those very easily. And yes, you can get it on Mac or on windows. So head to amazing.com. They're not a sponsor, they just are a great application. It's not free of us. Yes, it is not free. We

Leo Laporte (01:02:53):
Should mention that.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:53):
You can, you can try it out for free and it does have many features available for free. In fact, the last time that I talked about I amazing on the show, the person was able to use it as part of the trial, the free version Okay. And get what they needed. So,

Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
Okay. Certainly try it for free. And what it's like 30 bucks,

Mikah Sargent (01:03:07):
40 bucks, I think. 30 bucks. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:09):
I ended up buying it even though I feel like everything I wanted to do with I amazing. I could probably do in a variety of other ways. So, you know, so is the problem. It's on his phone mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:23):
<Affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:03:24):
And he can't sync it to

Mikah Sargent (01:03:25):
Icloud you, so you, no. So the problem from what I'm understanding is we've got someone who likes to be in control and

Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
So he doesn't want to use

Mikah Sargent (01:03:33):
Icloud. He wants to use Yeah. He wants to be able to go. I plug it into my, my Windows machine and then it just backs up my messages I see. And my photos. Yeah. Amazing. With that tie on. I mean, maybe a lawyer.

Leo Laporte (01:03:44):
Well, that's how I wanted to say. You don't have to dress up to call the show. Yeah. <laugh>. Okay. You can be in your gym Jams. We don't mind. It's all right. It was, he was very nicely dressed. Yeah. the other, yeah, if you're a lawyer, maybe you don't want you know,

Mikah Sargent (01:03:55):
Or you need to have local copies for it. Yeah. Because yeah, it's not the same. When I, when I back up to iCloud, I can't just go to a website. I can't go to icloud.com/messages and try to find all of the photos so I can see someone who wants to be able to kind of have a database and they can go here, all the photos. Here's the

Leo Laporte (01:04:12):
Message. Does Apple not automatically copy all images from messages into your photos library?

Mikah Sargent (01:04:17):
No. No, it doesn't. So yeah, they're stored as part of the messages. And unless you choose to have it brought over, and especially for folks who don't know it, again, we'll go on an iPhone. We'll launch settings, we'll scroll down to messages and you will see a section that talks about message history and whether you keep messages forever or you erase them after a year, or you erase them after 30 days. For folks who have those turned on because they're trying to save storage space locally, or maybe even save save storage space in their online backup, that feature is helpful. But at the same time, if you wanna make sure that those messages are always available, suddenly you've got a problem. So yes, this is where I amazing can come in handy. And you can also, if you know what you're doing, you can just plug in your iPhone. You can launch the Finder, you can do an encrypted local backup. And then you yourself, if, again, if you know how to get into those files and what you're looking for, you can, they're there. You can find it. Yes. They're there. Image. That's what amazing is using, right? Is that encrypted? It

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
Backup. It has to be encrypted, not,

Mikah Sargent (01:05:22):
Yes. And the reason why is because when you encrypt it, that's when Apple will pull everything off the phone. Ah, every other kind of backup is just piecemeal. But because it's encrypted, then they feel comfortable just hoovering everything off the phone, plopping it down on your machine where you have it.

Leo Laporte (01:05:36):
What's file format? Is it a single blob?

Mikah Sargent (01:05:39):
It's, I believe it's like a package file. And so you write

Leo Laporte (01:05:42):
Clicks. So you clicked on it in open contents. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it probably is a folder in there that says photos,

Mikah Sargent (01:05:46):
Several folders. And yes. So you, but that's the thing is that they're all numbered according to kind of when you're doing the encryption. So it's like 0 5 6 7 3 dash, it's all very confusing to do it yourself. So that is why something like amazing can come in handy. And by the way shout out now Hands on Mac. Check it out because I just did an episode. Oh. On managing your iPhone with Finder, so you can Oh, that's good. Learn about at least how to do that encrypted backup.

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
Amazing. For three devices. The nice thing is it's not a subscription 60 bucks. Or unlimited 65 bucks. Oh, it is a subscription. A year.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:20):
Yeah. Per year. Oh. but it's kind of pricing for one device, for one device, it's $40 for the entire year. Okay. I think, again, again,

Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
You don't have over and over again

Mikah Sargent (01:06:30):
Use the trial. Yeah. And I think, you know, yeah. If you're, if in this case for the, the person with the tie <laugh> you are probably wanting to keep using it. So you would maybe pay that $40 a year for the one device. Right. but for folks who are just kind of trying to get into a backup and find some photos or something, they can even go with just the trial. So yeah, use the trial, see if this is what you're wanting and then you've got it, you're ready to go. But at any time, if you wanted to and do it for free, just keep doing those encrypted local backups, you know, they're there. And then in the event that you actually do want to access it, use a tool like I amazing to browse into that database and get it with that free trial. Is there ways

Leo Laporte (01:07:12):
If, if you were in our Zoom, we, I think we rebooted it or something and call back. We're re resetting the Zoom. I see, I see. Most of the people have rejoined, so I guess that worked fine. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:24):
Looks like it.

Leo Laporte (01:07:25):
I little personal question. I hope you don't mind. Do I smell good? You? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:29):
<Laugh>. Sure. I can't smell you from here. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:07:31):
So I'm reading, I'm reading prince Harry's book Spare. Okay. And he talks about his father now King Charles, I third mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and his cologne. And he says, my only memory of my father, really, cuz he wasn't very physical, was was him calling me Precious boy and how he smelled, which was his cologne, which was Otis Savage by Christian Dior. Okay. So I ordered some, I just wondering, you know, if I smell, if I smell royal to

Mikah Sargent (01:07:57):
You, I maybe you do. I I use Victor and Rolf's Spice Bomb. And I have for like,

Leo Laporte (01:08:04):
Is it B O M B or b a l

Mikah Sargent (01:08:06):
S? Spice Bomb. Yeah. B O M B. Oh. do you throw it in the

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
Tub?

Mikah Sargent (01:08:10):
<Laugh>? No, it's not, it's not a bathtub bomb. Oh. It's actually, it looks like a little, this is probably the most rugged thing about me. It looks like a grenade and you pull the pin to spray it. Oh, that's hysterical. But it's, it's these very spicy black pepper and stuff like that. But anyway, I've worn that for like, since college. So yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
I never worn 11 one before, but I just thought, yeah, maybe I could smell like a king for, for a while. Nice. Just to see what it's like. Nobody's treating me differently. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:38):
It's weird. No one's treating

Leo Laporte (01:08:39):
You. Nobody's called me Your Majesty or anything like that.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:42):
<Laugh>, are you gonna start calling people Precious boy around here. And then that'll work.

Leo Laporte (01:08:45):
I am gonna call you Precious boy, <laugh> Chris Chris Marquardt is on the line. Our photographic guru, chris marwar.com, host of the Tips from the Top Floor podcast for many years. I think probably the longest running photographic podcast. He also does a future photography podcast, has written many great books including a Wide angle photography book and a film photography book, both of which got me into extreme. A Financial Straits <laugh>. Thank you Chris. And we are ready, I think, to do our photo review. Chris, welcome.

Caller 4 (01:09:21):
Hey, how's it going?

Leo Laporte (01:09:23):
Mor Moin as they say.

Caller 4 (01:09:24):
Mor Moin. Yes. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:09:26):
<Laugh>. I was funny because our son Michael's studying German. He's 20 and he has a German tutors and a native speaker. And as I'm leaving for work this morning, I hear German coming out of his bedrooms. Oh wow. It's great. I just

Mikah Sargent (01:09:39):
Love it. That is cool.

Leo Laporte (01:09:40):
Chris, if you don't know, is from Germany, he joins us from, is it Hanover?

Caller 4 (01:09:46):
It is right outside the gates of Hanover, the view finder villa,

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
The viewfinder villa. He's planning soon in his Tesla to go on a photo expedition through Eastern Europe. Is that you're filling that up? Discover the top floor.com if people wanna know more about that.

Caller 4 (01:10:04):
It's two, it's two 10 day tours. The second one is already full. The first one has two spots left. Nice. So yeah, that's our discover the top floor.com. That's where now we'll

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
Find that. I forgot what was our assignment this month?

Caller 4 (01:10:17):
The assignment was crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:10:20):
Ooh.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:21):
Crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:10:22):
Crazy.

Caller 4 (01:10:23):
Oh, it's too bright. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:10:24):
Crazy for being great. Great. I bet we've got some crazy photos. I'm looking forward

Mikah Sargent (01:10:29):
To that. Yeah.

Caller 4 (01:10:31):
Yes, we do. We had crazy photos. Let me put those on the screen for you. So I've picked three as usual, and those three are, well, the first one, red Umbrella by Demi Lente. What's

Leo Laporte (01:10:46):
Going on there? It's floating through the air.

Caller 4 (01:10:50):
That was my first question because I saw this, the, the thumbnail tickled me and I looked at it and it's like someone is hovering or what, what is going on? So turns out it says you're in the description. First try at a layered float, two images stool erased, and some contrast work. Nothing else. So this is one of the tricks you can do if you have something like Photoshop or, or affinity photo. You can have multiple laser you took, you take the one picture without the stool, and then the other picture with the stool and the person, and then you can pretty much fill in that that part of the picture where the stool was with what was behind it. So I

Leo Laporte (01:11:29):
Love, I it's a very interesting Yep. Crazy. It's

Caller 4 (01:11:33):
Trick. Pretty much.

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's great. 

Caller 4 (01:11:37):
So second one? Yes. Yeah. Really nice job. Ententes. Second one is by David Ingram. Says, best friend passenger from Austin, Texas. What

Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
Is

Caller 4 (01:11:47):
That? Is that a dog? Well, I think it's a dog in the backpack on the, on the motorbike. And it looks like the dog even, can we zoom in here? Let me see. Yeah, I think the dog is even wearing a helmet. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
Oh, that's, that's great. That's hysterical.

Caller 4 (01:12:04):
Oh, isn't that amazing?

Leo Laporte (01:12:06):
Yeah. Always put your doggy in a helmet if he's gonna ride on the bike. Absolutely. That is a

Caller 4 (01:12:11):
Great shot. Absolutely makes perfect sense. And, and a really nice looking bike as well. I, that looks like one of these, it's probably electric or something. You

Leo Laporte (01:12:19):
Think it's maybe a, not a motorcycle, but an electric

Caller 4 (01:12:21):
Bicycle. It's not a motor. You

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Know what he did? That's really cool. Oh yeah, I see. It has derailers in the back. He did what I've done with my mo bicycle pictures. He panned the camera. So I was gonna say that motion. Yeah, you got motion, which is really nice.

Caller 4 (01:12:33):
Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a panning shot where you, where you take a bit of a logger exposure. By the way, a good, a good rule of thumb for getting these panning shots where you move the camera with something that's moving is set the shutter speed to one divided by the speed of that object. Ah. So if he's going 15 miles an hour, try a 15th of a second. If a car is going 30 miles an hour, try a 30th of a second. And this way you will get a, a nice pleasing looking blur in the background. What

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
I, A tip, I didn't even know that. And one of my favorite shots, it's a fairly recent shot of mine is of a a father. And it's similar actually, a father and son whizzing by on their motorcycle. And yep. And there you go. It did the same thing. You pan it. I didn't know I about the shutter speed thing, but that's a fun shot. I love, I love his shot. That's very, that's great.

Caller 4 (01:13:30):
So, and, and if you try panning shots, then take a lot of them, keep, keep the camera on burst, and then just go click, click, click, click,

Leo Laporte (01:13:37):
Click. Yeah, I think I did that. But I mean, you only get one shot cuz the guy's going by <laugh> pretty quickly. It's one of those things where you feel good when you get it because you have to, you see him coming and you go, I think I might be able to do this. And you race cuz this isn't a stage and you're, and you're trying to get that panic. Michael. Oh, at photo is in the studio, Michael McDonald. And, and he's smiling. You ever do those kinds? Yeah. He's, he knows about that. He knows all of that. Of course. <Laugh>. Very nice. What else?

Caller 4 (01:14:04):
Last but not least, the third one that we are going to look at is by Byron Amin. Byron Amin. So, so what's crazy

Leo Laporte (01:14:13):
About this that's not crazy.

Caller 4 (01:14:16):
Well, well, Byron did wrote this was taken with a Nikon D seven 50 no filters fixed 50 millimeter F 10 meant to show crazy from a perspective of anyone looking up and seeing this image after a storm with the sunset. And I'm, I'm, I concur. I concur. Yeah. I like the So what we're, what we're seeing is the sun shining through the clouds. It's a sunset. It's nice and warm. Very contrasty. And you see this volumetric light. We've, we've talked about this so many times in the past. Volumetric light. Light that has volume because there's, there's mist in the air, humidity in the air, and it, and, and the way it it shines up means that the sun is really low. Yeah. Almost behind the horizon. So you get the, you get those rays coming from below, which is very unusual to see. So yeah, crazy, crazy. Good

Leo Laporte (01:15:09):
Looking. And it's, it's bifurcated. So he calls it the devil's eyes cuz it's, it's kind of like the sun is splitting too. Yes. I like that. Yeah. Fun. Very fun.

Caller 4 (01:15:20):
Amazing photos.

Leo Laporte (01:15:21):
And thanks to everybody who's submitted. I'm seeing a ton of great shots. You can go to flicker, by the way, and see all of the submissions. Yes. In fact, you can even submit some of your own. They're all in the tech guy group. So flickers a free site for photo sharing flicker.com. Once you're there, join the tech guy group. Chris, we are 33 members away from 14,000. Wow.

Caller 4 (01:15:44):
Isn't that

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
Wild? Everybody go join and put us over 14,000. There are 7,600 photos. 315 discussions is a great place to go to post pictures, get comments from nice, you know, comments helping you get better photography. And sometimes they're just, ah, great shot, which is always a nice comment to get, but <laugh>. But the real reason you want to join this group is so you can participate because it's time to go to the fish bowl. 

Caller 4 (01:16:15):
Five seconds. Five seconds. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:16:17):
He forgot his fishbowl. He didn't bring it with him. Where he's going to get the fish bowl. There he is. <Laugh>.

Caller 4 (01:16:23):
The fishbowl was not where it's supposed to be. Here we go. It's here.

Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
Move the fishbowl. All right. The fish bowls full of sips of paper with adjectives written on them. For our next photo assignment,

Caller 4 (01:16:36):
I've drawn one anti tears. Oh, perfect. Perfect, perfect. There we

Leo Laporte (01:16:48):
Go. So what does this mean? Now you gotta go out and take a picture that doesn't have to be perfect. Picture has to illustrate in your mind, in your mind's eye the concept. Perfect. Whatever that means to you. It could be perfect. Oh, could be perfect. Right? We don't have any ization on there, right? So there you go. Yeah. So it could be perfect and but, but whatever it is, once you get an image you like, you can submit up to once, one a week. So it's gonna be four weeks. So up to four images, pick that image, upload it to flicker, tag it TG for tech guys, perfect. Tg. Perfect. And then submit it to the tech guy group. Our wonderful moderator, Renee Silverman, who is a brilliant photographer in her own right, will acknowledge your submission. She'll put it in the pool and in about four weeks, Chris, exactly.

(01:17:39):
Four weeks, Chris will be back. I'll have just gotten back from my vacation and we'll talk about, maybe I could take some perfect shots on my vacation. There you go. Sounds perfect. Yeah. <laugh>. Chris, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Discover the top floor. Always fun to be here. Two slots left for the Eastern European expedition. Only two. Make sure you listen to his podcast tips from the top top floor, which is tf ttf dot hiccup. <Laugh>, did you know there's no dot hiccup domain? There should be. Nope. Tf ttf, right. Take two. Tf ttf.com. Thank. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. I cracked myself. Thank you. Bye-Bye. <laugh>. Take care. Shu. It's perfect. It's perfect. Perfect. Or perfect. Interesting. Interesting. You could submit a mix as a picture of Bo Derek, Mick, you're showing your age on that one. I think <laugh>. All right. Let us go back to, let's do another video call. I, I, we have, we have such a backlog. Yeah. People have been so great. Let's get another, and then we'll go back to the zoom video call please.

Caller 5 (01:18:51):
Hi, Leo and Mikah. My name's Andrew. I'm from the uk. I love the work that you guys do on Ask the Tech guys. It's amazing. And I have a question for you regarding email and web hosting. I think I'm currently being taken for a Ride <laugh> and by my current web Anima hosting company. And was wondering if you could talk about some of the companies that you've used that you would recommend. It's just simple web hosting. Nothing complicated, just a bit of PHP and some files. And my email is nothing too complicated, but I would like the power to just be able to manage aliases and incoming email with various rules. I've heard you talk about Fast Mail and wondered whether you had any concerns about it being an Australian company. And as we know, the Australian government has got some interesting views towards privacy of its, its online services. Look forward to hearing your recommendations. Thanks. Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:19:49):
Great questions. And I will start. It's Red, red Nose Day. Yeah, from the uk. UK I will start with the last, which is Fast Mail. You know, Australia is one of the five eyes countries, including the uk, Australia, the United States. I can't remember where the others are, but these are the countries that people don't trust because their governments are aggressively searching through things. There, there was the Echelon program, the joint program of the UK and the US to look at all internet traffic search for keywords. Australia itself has had some kind of lately anti encryption legislation that we're concerned about. UK is also looking at such a thing. America would love to do that. The good news is, while it's an Australian company, all your data, if you're in the US, is stored on US servers for Fast Mail.

(01:20:41):
Fast Mail is a sponsor. I'm not sure what the UK situation would be. You might inquire. It may be, and I, I wouldn't be surprised, thanks to GDPR that they just store it in whatever your nation is. They have storage there. Does that mean that Australian authorities couldn't come for you? Probably not, but let me tell you this about email. It's not private <laugh>, right? In any respect. It's not private. In fact, that was the problem with the nsa, the whistleblower Edward Snowden pointed out is they do what's called upstream collection. They don't need to get your email from your email provider. They just watch as it transits across the internet. So if you want private email, you've gotta encrypt it on your side and then that, that's a burden because your recipient also has to decrypt it, cetera, et cetera. Frankly, I wouldn't use email for anything you want to keep private.

(01:21:30):
I would use Signal, which is a messaging system. There are other encrypted messaging systems signals the one I recommend. But a true end-to-end encrypted messaging system is gonna be far superior. For instance, perfect Forward secrecy is an issue with all, with PGP and all email encryption technologies because they don't rotate the keys. So if somebody got your key 20 years from now, they'd be able to read that old email with Signal. That's not the case. They have perfect forward secrecy. There's a lot of other reasons why you'd prefer to use Signal. So if you really need to be private, don't use email. Email is like a postcard. It's gonna be forever. It's not designed to be secure. Having said that fast Mail is a great place to have your email. You can have any email provider. So, so I'm assuming because you tied the two questions together, you want to have a website let's see my domain.com, but you also want to receive email at that website.

(01:22:28):
So the way DNS works that they actually make that distinction, there are different kinds of records for website hosting for, and then for email hosting. So when you buy an email domain, you manage the dns. The MX record, which is your mail record, will then go to Fast Mail or Gmail or Outlook or whoever you want to use as your email provider. So mail to me@mydomain.com will go to that mail provider and web visits, http and HTTPS visits will go somewhere else. That's a, that's a different record. That's the AA name or AAA name record. So that's all set up in, in DNS because most people don't run the same server for both a website and email. So you can have two different servers, distinct servers for your domain name. As for where you should host my domain.com, I'm not sure I have a strong recommendation on that. Generally what we say for ease of use is that you should probably go to one of the big providers like wordpress.com. Google has blog spot blogger.com, squarespace.com. The disadvantage of those is you're, these, you're gonna pay for them as with Word Spa words, WordPress or Squarespace, or you're gonna have ads in them as with Block Spot and WordPress. So that's probably for a lot of people, not palatable. What was the site that you recommended? Yeah, he said it's a simple site. Like it's a one page

Mikah Sargent (01:23:52):
Site, right? Yeah. If it's a simple site I've had good luck myself. And then also in recommending it to other people have heard back from them, positive it's a site called card.co. It's c a r r d.co. For one you will pay for it, but it's really reasonably priced. I think it's like $16 a year which is kind of wild, especially when you look at the other sites and how much those can cost. The sites look great. You can get a free version that does have, you know, build up to three sites per account for free which will have ads, but it's not very expensive to buy a yearly subscription. And you get multiple sites that you can set up using that. And then of course, there's always GitHub's own, what is it? Github pages,

Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
Right? Yeah. Those are free. In fact, CloudFlare also offers free pages. The trick is can I make it be my own domain name, right? So many cases it's my domain.cloudflare.com or my domain di and GitHub. It's like my, my website is leo laport.github.io. And so that's, you know, so you have to figure out, I don't know if Card, I Imagine Card Card does

Mikah Sargent (01:25:00):
Let you do custom, custom domain domains not for free. So that again, yeah, if you want to do that, you pay for

Leo Laporte (01:25:04):
It. So you can have my domain.com. You can also use Let's Encrypt to Encrypt It, which is nice. That's free SSL certificates. So yeah, if you did that, for instance, you go to card.co, you'd sign up, you'd set up your site, you attach it to my domain.com, and then you actually first you'd register my domain.com. You could go to our sponsor Hover. Google Domains is very good. That's probably the least expensive. We don't like GoDaddy. But you could go there. You go to a domain registrar, you're gonna sign up for let's say Jiggly Pants. Let's call it jiggly pants. Jiggly pants.com. So you've signed up for Jiggly Pants. Now the registrar has a way to modify your S record. So all the registrar is doing is taking your money and sending that information to the big DNS servers in the, in the sky.

(01:25:55):
 But you can modify that record to say website star dot what did I say? Jiggly pants.com comments? Yep. Goes to card.co. And card.co will have a way of setting that up so that that'll do that automatically. And the MX record at jiggly pants.com goes to wherever you want it to go. Fast mail or whatever, what you want it to go. The way I do it with Fast Mail, because Fast Mail also does DNS, is I have Fast Mail host my DNS servers that gives me all of the fast mail email capabilities automatically. And then I can just say to Fast Mail, oh, and if it's a website, they actually do one page website. So I guess you could do that as well. But it's probably not the best thing for, they're not designed about website hosting. They do it.

(01:26:40):
 I have a one page site there just like a calling card site. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But if you say they use fast mail, and then you could say, and when somebody comes in with a browser, go to card.co and that would handle it as well. So it's a kind of tripartite solution. You've gotta have a domain registrar with that domain name that domain registrar. You will put in DNS settings that will say, when somebody sends me email, I want it to go to this site. When somebody want comes in with a browser, I want it to go to that site. So you have three things. You've got web hosting, email hosting, and a DNS provider, which is usually a registrar. Okay. And I think that that's actually a, maybe it's a little complicated, but once you set it up, it runs forever. Exactly. I think that's actually the best way to do it. That's pretty much how I do everything. So I have a website, leo.fm, I'm hosting myself. That's another thing you could do is host it yourself. I'm hosting myself here on a server, but Leo, do FM mail goes to fast mail and f and while I register it@hover.com, I actually have Fast mail, do the dns, all that dns, same stuff like that. Yeah, you

Mikah Sargent (01:27:41):
Do that. Yeah. For fast mails. No kidding. Yeah. I just like it that it takes care of it all on its own. I don't have to worry

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
About it. Great minds, I tell ya. Isn't that amazing? Hey everybody. Leo LaPorte 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. Wait, 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.

(01:28:40):
And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red Ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the Twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding.

(01:29:37):
Advertisers like it Pro tv, an 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>.

(01:30:30):
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.

(01:31:22):
So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience, visit twit.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary is the c e o of authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I am very proud of what we do because it's honest, it's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted.

(01:32:21):
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@advertiseattwi.tv. Break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red ads on twi.tv. Visit twi.tv/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. We have you had on Thursday, see did I mention Mikah as a great show with Jason Howell called Tech News Weekly every Thursday, 11:00 AM Pacific. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, 2:00 PM Eastern 1800 U t c you this week. Of course, the big topic Silicon Valley Bank, it's collapsed, it's failure. And what's next? You had one of my favorite people on, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:33:09):
Jason Howell. Spoke to Alex Wilhelm of TechCrunch about what is going to happen next now that this whole s v B thing has taken place. So listen in

Alex Wilhelm (01:33:20):
Because deposit insurance seems to be effectively unlimited. I think that this means that mid-size and smaller banks will retain a customer base, cuz otherwise people were just gonna leave and go bank at, you know, chase or Goldman or whatever. Some bank, some bank that's just too big to fail, you know? Mm-Hmm. Hmm. <Affirmative>. the question that I have is what happens to the world of FinTech? Now, FinTech startups raised roughly one in every $5 over the last couple years. They're one of the biggest venture capital bets ever. And, you know, things like Chime and stripe and other kind of relatively big names in the tech and finance world are now in this FinTech bucket. And if the consumer and business worlds get more conservative, do FinTech startups just slowly decline and fail? I'm very curious about the, the, the next steps for a big chunk of the kind of tech startup world. I, I don't think we know how they're going to do yet, because they're not publics. They don't have to tell us mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But I'm concerned about how attractive they'll be as places to put and move money in this now seemingly riskier world to we live in

Leo Laporte (01:34:18):
Riskier or riskier less <laugh>. Because now there's also the thought, well if the F D I C's gonna ba back all deposits for svb, I bet you it would, you know, I wouldn't have to worry however much I've got deposited at any bank.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:32):
I hear that song, TA boom da. Why do you hear that? Because it's like, just, they're spending the money, they're throwing it here. They're getting more risky and they're just like, happy

Leo Laporte (01:34:42):
The printing press as they can print as much as they want. But I think of course, the money for that comes from banks. But that's another question that's raised. Alex, by the way is a financial reporter, has been for a long time. He's right now a tech cruncher general reporter, but he's not a finance podcast for them for a long time. So he was really up on this stuff. He raised an interesting question. Sites like Robinhood, where people are, that's a FinTech site where they're depositing money, they're buying stocks. What's that gonna look like? There's also the question of crypto. Bitcoin, Ethereum, these these cryptocurrencies some people saw as a haven during all this. Well, I don't have to worry. I got my money in Bitcoin. And, and certainly there are a lot of Bitcoin proponents who thought this bank failure was a real opportunity to get people on the Bitcoin bandwagon.

(01:35:32):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's a kind of crazy guy. Can I say that in my opinion? Nutty guy on Twitter, I think his name is Balaji, who has now said, if I I think Cryp, I think Bitcoin's going to a million dollars a coin. And he's making bets. He's saying, let's put I, you put, I'll put a million dollars in escrow. You put a Bitcoin in escrow and in a year either I'll get your coin or you'll get my million depending on who wins the be. Oh boy. Okay, fine. Anyway, <laugh> doesn't it, it all just feel like it feels a little frothy. Yeah. Yeah. Ta rah rah Boom di <laugh>, how you would know a World War I era song. You were the strangest young man I've ever met. I don't make sense to myself. <Laugh>. All right. Ron is now in these star gates joining us thanks to the miracle of Zu. Hello Ron. Thank you for being very patient and welcome to Ask the Tech guys. Have I done everything I needed to do, have, have, have, I can't see what's going on in the world? Hold on a second, Ron. We're trying to, there we go. Ron moved. At least

Caller 6 (01:36:48):
You got me there. You

Leo Laporte (01:36:49):
Hey. Hello, Ron.

Caller 6 (01:36:51):
Hello. Hello. So I'll start over again, I guess.

Leo Laporte (01:36:53):
Yeah, we're first tell us where you're calling from.

Caller 6 (01:36:56):
I'm sorry, I'm in Baltimore.

Leo Laporte (01:36:58):
Don't apologize. Baltimore's a wonderful city, <laugh>, you have nothing? Sure I saw the wire. Sure, I understand. But it's a wonderful city. In fact, the har the inner Harbor is so I love it down there. So what's up?

Caller 6 (01:37:11):
I have been using Steve Gibson's three routers set up. Oh wow.

Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
The inner

Caller 6 (01:37:16):
House. I wanna update that. The routers are a little bit old, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanna use, be able to use WPA three and I p V six and so on and so forth. What I thought would be nice, rather than have three routers is see if now there's one router that has multiple segments in the single router, ideally as a physical segment, not as a logical segment. And I can't find anything.

Leo Laporte (01:37:41):
I'll tell you what Steve would tell you. There are many routers that will do this. I have an Obi ubiquity system that I use. Vlans, you're absolutely right. That is a better way to do it than the three router system. In fact, when Steve recommended the three router system, I wasn't appalled, but I was like, okay, if you really think that's a good way to go, it's amazing you did it though and you've been happy, right?

Caller 6 (01:38:05):
Yeah, no, it works fine. It's just a, a lot,

Leo Laporte (01:38:08):
It's a little, it's a, yeah, it's a little it is a little weird. Anyway he doesn't use it. <Laugh>. the theory is we should explain. You have IOT devices that are made by noname Chinese companies which have nominal security, maybe no security at all. Some of them have hardwired logins that are accessible over the internet. You know, they're, they're essentially a security nightmare and even good stuff from companies like Wise turns out, maybe there's some problems there as well. So it makes sense. You don't want your IOT device to become a gateway into your network. Cuz once a bad guy gets into your network and sees your machines, you know, there's all sorts of things they can do. You'd ideally like to have your I OT stuff isolated. You still needs to be online and still needs to be on the network, but isolated from your computers and your phones and all the things that have all your precious data on them.

(01:39:04):
So that somebody who has managed to find an exploit for your hue light bulb that gets into your network can't then get into your computer. There's a boundary there. Now, one way to do that is have three routers, one router on the internet, one router for iot and one router for your computers. But really that's just a kind of a poor man's way of doing exactly what you wanna do, which is segmenting, creating virtual networks so that you have a virtual network for iot, ot, and a virtual network for your computing. Now there is an issue because one of the reasons you have IOT devices is so that you can with your phone or your computer control them. And in some cases, not all, some cases the control goes out to the internet and back down into the IOT device. And so those will continue to work.

(01:39:51):
But in some cases Sonos is one, it expects you to be able to control the iot devices over the land. So you need to then create firewall rules that say, okay, this kind of traffic can go back and forth between my IOT devices, but only this kind of traffic. The other kind of traffic is blocked between IOT and my computing systems. So you obviously understand all that because you've set up this three router system. There are better ways and a VLAN is the better way. What Steve uses is a software called PF Sense, which is very nice, very sophisticated router software that's security focused. And he actually runs it on an inexpensive device from Net Gate, the in net gate 1100. So this is a router they call it security gateway. You see, it's kind of a limited router. It only has a couple of ethernet ports on it, but in a way that's all you all you need cuz you're gonna then put it on a wifi. It's not wifi. So you're then gonna put it on a, a wifi radio, separate standalone wifi radio. But then you have pf sense running on your router and pf sense gives you absolute control. This is what Steve does he does not do the three router solution. So you'll be able to set up VLANs, you'll be able to have firewall rules between those vs.

Caller 6 (01:41:05):
I'm not sure what you mean by why I actually looked at, at the net gate, I have their, the net gate brochure, and I'm not quite sure what you mean by wifi radio in addition to the

Leo Laporte (01:41:15):
PF sensor. Well, I may be wrong, but I don't think these net gates have wifi. Do they? I think they're just ethernet only. So if they have wifi, then you know, you don't have to worry about it. But if they don't have wifi, then you would, and they, they, they make 'em. Or you could just buy a regular wifi router and turn off the

Caller 6 (01:41:36):
So essentially you, you have two routers instead of one router.

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
No, you only want one router ever. But

Caller 6 (01:41:42):
Do you have a, you have the, the,

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
But you don't have radios, right? <Laugh>. So you need, and there are companies that sell just wifi without routing, or you could turn off the routing, you know, buy an ASUS or whatever and turn off the wifi. I mean, turn off the routing. But you do, yeah, if you want wifi, you need, you need to add wifi. TP link makes inexpensive wifi only devices, for instance. So that's, yeah, you need a radio, right? There's no radio in this.

Caller 6 (01:42:07):
That was actually, I guess

Leo Laporte (01:42:09):
You could continue.

(01:42:11):
So there's some with radios, <laugh>, I guess. I mean, the ubiquity solution I have has a standalone router. That's the thing that connects the internet and then it connects to switches and then the switches, power ubiquity wifi devices. So in effect, it does still have standalone separate wifi devices. But that would allow also, you know, I have, you can have multiple networks in there just as you can with a PF sense. It's just, they're separate things. So there's a router, that's one thing. And there's a wifi radio center, receive radio. That's another thing in many devices, consumer devices, they're bundled together, but you can unbundle them. And in fact you would have to if you want to use the net game. So yeah, that's what Steve uses. But there are, in fact, I think asus probably, and a bunch of other co companies now sell, in fact, I know they do.

(01:43:04):
 VLAN capable consumer grade routers. Just don't know. You'd have to look on the specs. I don't know what, I don't have one to recommend off the top of my head. Andrew does your net gate 5,100 have wifi? Because if there's a net gate with wifi, that would obviously be the best way to go. I don't, I'm not seeing any as I'm looking at the tech specs. Yeah. Yeah. These are you know, these are hardware routers. It's kind of like he u Steve used to recommend the ubiquity edge router X, which is the same, it's kind of the same as this net gate. It's a little hardware device that's a router, router's, not complicated router could be just this little hardware device with a couple, with an with a WAN in that's connecting to your cable modem or your DSL modem or your fiber, and then land out. And that's gonna go to your network. It could just be a switch. If everything's hardwired, it could just go out to a switch and everything's attached to that. And you set up the VLAN using that and it does it automatically. It's a firewall capability, basically. Yeah. Apparently they don't have any which is weird. They don't have any. He uses let's see. Yeah, he says he would recommend unify, which is what I use, which is the ubiquity solution. Yeah. It's expensive. And

Mikah Sargent (01:44:25):
I think by this, when you're doing this, you are more likely to, you buy these little wifi access points as a separate thing as opposed to getting them all together. Yeah. So if you're going as far as using pf sense pf sense device, then you know, the system of basically getting wireless access points that you want to install in different locations as opposed to these all-in one devices that those of us who don't have this more advanced technology use.

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Yeah. This is pretty, you're getting fancy, but it's simpler than a three, three routers right away. You probably, I would assume, assume in these three routers, one of 'em has wifi, right? At least one.

Caller 6 (01:45:04):
Well, there's an edge router X as a matter of

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
Fact. Oh, you are using Edge router part

Caller 6 (01:45:08):
Of it and then two TP link.

Leo Laporte (01:45:10):
Yeah. So you say they're old, but if, if maybe they're not, I mean, you know, if you were going to, if I were gonna do this now, I'd probably get wifi six E wifi seven is already on the horizon. <Laugh> I would get, and somebody's selling a wifi seven router. I wouldn't get that yet. They're no devices that support it. But wi I would get a wifi six or wifi six E TP link is fine. They, I'm, I'm almost certain they sell wifi only devices that don't do routing. Cuz you don't need the routing. That's what the, that's what the net cable will do. So yeah, you've done a lot of research on this. I think everything I'm saying makes sense to you, right, Paul? Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:45:45):
Except that why can't they put it all in one machine? <Laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:45:48):
Yeah, well they can actually, they can. I know and I'll do some research. We're doing, so you're doing Steve Lev Gibson level <laugh> stuff. There are absolutely consumer grade routers that will do VLANs euro won't ubiquity might. I think what you really want to look at is one of the, you know, the ASUS is with 18 in antennas look like spiders. And just look for one that supports VLANs. That's all you really need. Steve has talked, you know, it's funny. Steve's gone back and forth on whether you could use a guest land, almost all wifi routes now support guests. And he's gone back and forth on whether you could use a guest land for your I O T devices. Initially he said you could not that there was not enough isolation between the guest network and the main network. But lately he's been saying it's okay.

(01:46:44):
I'll have to get some clarification from him. It may be that modern routers with modern guest networks do in fact isolate the guest network from the main network. But that's still a problem if you don't have a firewall that allows it to be somewhat porous. Cuz you do need, you know, it depends what your IOT devices are. But there are IOT devices. I use Sonos as an example, that require that you be on the same land as the Sonos device. In order for that to work, you'd have to have complex firewall rules. I gave up, I just put the Sonos on the <laugh>. You're like, okay, I have a secure land and IOT land and there are just some devices, printers too that I just have to have on the secure land. Yeah. And that's a security flaw because if any of those are hackable, they're sitting on my main network.

(01:47:29):
And that's what you've been trying to avoid reasonably. Trying to avoid all this time. I honestly think it would be best to eliminate IOT devices that you aren't comfortable with. You know, Steve went out and bought a cheap Chinese on off switch. It's like I wouldn't put that on my network at all. Ever go with well-known names that offer over the air firmware upgrades, automatic and that have a commitment to keeping them secure. For instance, if you only got home kit stuff, Apple's making very sure those companies are gonna stay secure. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so probably that's the right answer, which is, you know, I trust the Sonos stuff. I can put that on my secure land cuz I know Sonos is updating it, keeps it up to date and they're not. And if, and they're big enough brand that if there were a security flaw as there was with Wise, that everybody there alarms would go off.

(01:48:27):
So I would know about it. Right. I don't, there's not a good answer to this. There really isn't. You gotta live on the edge, but I under, I, I honor your desire for security. Paul <laugh>. I I think you got the right, you got the right idea. You're already looking at the net gate, which is what what Steve recommends Andrew is saying he has a TP link AP only wifi six. The wifi does not have to do the w the the v landing. The router does the V landing. The wifi is just a radio, just transmitter. I do have though, I actually did this with the ubiquity, which is nice. The I Iott network is only 2.4 gigahertz. Nice. And the, the secure land is both two, four, and five. That's smart. So that whenever an Iott device is being put online, it use, we have two different access point names.

(01:49:27):
So the Iott land is named Godzilla and the Secure Land is named Mothra <laugh>. And Godzilla is only 2.4 gigahertz. So when I have an IOT device, I say join Godzilla. I know it's gonna work, it's gonna be 2.4. I don't have to worry about it accidentally joining a five gigahertz network I can't use. And then I let the phones and the laptops and the everything. By the way, most of my stuff is wired now. Cause that's the other thing you do when you're gonna do this is run ethernet everywhere. So all my TVs the main, the computer workstation areas cuz cuz this was back in the COVID when Michael was zooming to class, right? Yes. Lisa was zooming into work. I was zooming into podcasts. We potentially had three zooms going at the same time. I wanted to make sure everybody was hardwired. And that's worked fine. That's worked very well on a gigabit Comcast gigabit system. Andrew says, I don't have any IOT things to worry about except for printers. <Laugh> 10 them. He says the AP needs to tag it. Yeah, the AP has to be. That's an interesting point. The wifi access point. Well, what you would do is you'd have two different ones. You'd have one for the iott and one for the that's gonna be complicated.

Caller 6 (01:50:40):
And that takes you back to two machines. Yeah. What what you really wanted is a router.

Leo Laporte (01:50:44):
It'll do vlan

Caller 6 (01:50:46):
Wifi router, so to speak.

Leo Laporte (01:50:47):
Yeah. I'm pretty sure wifi ASUS has them. I like Asus cuz they they have open firmware. Let me just see Asus wifi vlan. I'm gonna do a Google's, or actually in my case a Neva search. Yeah. So it looks like the B R T A C 8 28 among others, we will set up v a networks. So that's the so that's, that's, that's probably the way to go. In fact, this is, this is ASO's F faq, how to configure vlan ID tagging for internet connection on B R T A C 8 28. That's, see those spider <laugh>? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> turn that upside down. And you wouldn't want to meet that in dark alley. So this is, this is what's

Caller 6 (01:51:29):
The total number again?

Leo Laporte (01:51:30):
This is just one. I suspect they have many, but this is the 8 28. But I, I suspect if Aus is putting this into their firmware on one, they're gonna put it into their firmware on all of their higher ends. This'll be more expensive. They'll be $400 routers at least. But see how they have the, the VLAN choices? Yeah. This looks like it'll do, it'll do exactly what you want. You wanna make sure you can have a, a firewall routing between them so that you can control the devices. Do you have any Sonos stuff? No. No. Printers are one of the, or another one? 

Caller 6 (01:52:11):
No, the printers are hardwired. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:52:13):
Cue lights. Cue lights goes out to a server and back so it doesn't act traversal. So it doesn't need a firewall rule. A lot of iot stuff. Now I always bet thermostats, store bells, all of that would go out to the public net and come back down. So you don't have to worry about putting a holes in your wall. I hope that helps.

Caller 6 (01:52:33):
It's a start. It's a

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
Start. It's more information than you wanted. <Laugh>.

Caller 6 (01:52:37):
<Laugh>. Well, more than I started with an hour ago.

Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
So it's a really, you know, it's actually, I'm glad to talk about it because I think this, most people, almost everybody is just gonna put it all on one network. Yep. And then, and for that reason, that's why I really push getting it from a reliable person. A company that will do firmware upgrades, that will pay attention to it, that won't abandon it. Because

Mikah Sargent (01:52:59):
That has a security team, <laugh>. Yeah. They pay people too. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:02):
And that usually means not a known no name device. Yeah. The ubiquity dream machine is what I have at home and it does a wonderful job. All right. That's actually, you couldn't get that just by itself. The dream machine, the udm. And I think that's a great choice. Ubiquity is kind of a prosumer, not quite professional. Yeah. We use Ruckuses here. But we have, you know, a real IT department. One guy, but it's a department. <Laugh>. It's a big department. Thank you Paul. Paul. I'm the

Mikah Sargent (01:53:28):
IT department at our place.

Leo Laporte (01:53:30):
<Laugh>. Yeah, of course you are. You know, I did all this because I got tired of honey. The internet's down again. Or it's not working or it can't get online. So

Mikah Sargent (01:53:39):
Why is it not moving fast enough? You, you

Leo Laporte (01:53:41):
Really, you know it's hard being the IT guy in a house, cuz I don't like sleeping on the couch.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:48):
Yeah, thank you. And they may come to you for the problems and then when you they're not solved, then it's your fault. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:53:53):
You Paul. <Laugh>, take care. I <laugh>, I told Lisa, I said have fine, have Russell to it. <Laugh>. alright. What, what direction here? We have half an hour left. Should we just go through a bunch of calls? Let's, let's go to the calls. Yeah. Why? Wait a minute. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, oh yes. Oh, we

Mikah Sargent (01:54:15):
Can't go to the calls. Yes. Let

Leo Laporte (01:54:17):
Me get my

Mikah Sargent (01:54:17):
Phone going

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
Because I'm gonna take a walk. Take a walk. It is time to show off the new home pods. Wait a minute. Somebody, somebody left his underwear. Here is this, oh, is this, is this yours?

Mikah Sargent (01:54:29):
That's so that is when Burke made that fake HomePod. Oh, that's a HomePod cozy that you put over a HomePod. <Laugh> that the company that made those scent me and it's got misk, one of my dogs on

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
It. That's your dog? I thought so. Yeah. Okay, so it's actually HomePod underwear.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:46):
It's Home pod. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
This is a fake home part that, that Burke did make for us. Anyway, I'm just gonna leave it like that. That no sound comes in. No

Mikah Sargent (01:54:54):
Sadly

Leo Laporte (01:54:54):
Here are three home pods. One of them is not like the other.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:58):
I was gonna say, are you gonna put a ball under one and we'll just spin 'em around and see where the ball ends up? Oh

Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
Yeah, yeah. <Laugh> one of these is the original home pod. They're all plugged in now. And, or are they? Yes, they're okay. And one of 'em not. What I thought it'd be kind of fun to do is compare the sound. They apple did they lower the price? This is, these new ones are 299 bucks. They

Mikah Sargent (01:55:19):
Lowered the price and they lowered the number of tweeters. Tweeters inside tweeters. So it's and microphones hardware is not Yes, exactly. It's not as robust and hardware there, there aren't as many hardware devices inside. But what about the sound? They may

Leo Laporte (01:55:34):
Still sound. Well, let's, lemme tap this and see if it makes any sound. This, by the way, cats love to do this.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:40):
<Laugh>. I could

Leo Laporte (01:55:40):
Just see. And our cats are constantly, this is the original. I'm gonna turn it up a little bit.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:46):
Oh, hello. Gwen Stefani.

Leo Laporte (01:55:48):
You could tell what Lisa likes <laugh>. It's from her office. I think it sounds pretty good. What Apple has done with these, remember when they first came out with the home pods, they they built I think nine anaco chambers in their, in the Apple facility. And they brought in acoustic geniuses and they did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they built something they said that is small but mighty. That this, because there's with sound quality physics is part of it. The size of the speaker determines how low it can go, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, a little tiny speaker, can't move slowly enough to generate, you know, 30 hertz waves, those very deep rumbly bases. So typically you need a big speaker for good base. Now these have multiple tweeters in here. I'm not taking this apart cuz Lisa wouldn't like that. But there are multiple tweeters in here that can specialize the sound, aim it. Right. And they have a subsystem that they claim does a pretty good job. And actually, as you heard, it does sound pretty good. You know, it, it's not a bad sounding system. They also put, woo, I you can feel that face. I can feel it

Mikah Sargent (01:57:00):
Over here a little

Leo Laporte (01:57:00):
Bit. Yeah, I can feel it. So that's pretty amazing given the size of this speaker that they were able to get good sound. This will never sound as good as real speakers. Okay. Big speakers, good tweeters. Good subwoofers. They're always gonna be better. They're gonna be open more, they're gonna sound and they're gonna cost more in general. Although this is still a pricey device. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, especially if you want stereo. Cuz this doesn't do stereo. It's one. These are the new Apple Home pods. I don't know if they're gonna make it. I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Yeah. See it doesn't it doesn't, it's in a noose environment. Lisa's has been connected to this Shh, <laugh> internet. The cats do that in the middle of the freaking night. I think they climb up on top of it and then all of a sudden Gwen Stefani in the middle of the night. <Laugh>, you don't like it. So I'm gonna show you the whole process here. So we've got, we bought two cuz I wanted a stereo pair. Yeah. They it allows you to stereo pair. Yeah, I'm gonna separate them because the first thing you do is you take your iPhone and you get it close to the home pod. Maybe I have to unplug it and plug it in again to get it into pairing

(01:58:08):
Mode. Let's try it. Hi. Down here to see

(01:58:14):
If the home pod works. Oh, there, it's all right. Eventually it's gonna pop up. We'll see. Do

Mikah Sargent (01:58:19):
We have room to airplay Leo's iPhone to see what the process looks like

Leo Laporte (01:58:23):
On the screen? Yeah, I can do that. Actually. I wonder if that'll complicate the whole thing. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:58:30):
<Laugh>. Actually, I've done some, I've done a lot while still airplay a

Leo Laporte (01:58:32):
Screen. Okay. I'll share it. I'll share it out. Airplay one, airplane one. All right. You're gonna have to gimme the magic number. Wait, no, it says I'm mirroring. Okay. Yeah. Mirroring to the Apple tv. But it's not, it's not

Mikah Sargent (01:58:45):
If you tap and hold on the top of that for this station,

Leo Laporte (01:58:48):
Just for you. Oh, now it's playing music.

Mikah Sargent (01:58:52):
That is wild. How did it sit playing music when it isn't connected to the

Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
Wifi <laugh>? It must have yeah, it thinks it's, it's connected. I see it. Oh wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:00):
Well, there you go.

Leo Laporte (01:59:05):
Huh? It's normally what will happen is you get the, the devices in the house. You'll you'll put your phone near it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and it'll say, oh, I see a HomePod. Cuz they do some, I think it's Subsonic, right? It's not Bluetooth. There's a Subsonic signal.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:18):
Well, it depends on the device. The HomePod Mini has ultra wide band. And so if you've got an iPhone with ultra wide band, it uses that. If you've got a phone that's older that doesn't use that, it actually does use Bluetooth. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:59:28):
Okay. Bluetooth le maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't need to, you don't need to turn it on the searching and all that stuff. Well, I, you know what, it's, let's see if, oh, they're, I think they're paired even. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah. So here we go. I guess we're gonna play something and it's, yeah. So it, they were paired as a stereo pair at home. I guess all they really needed was the internet.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:54):
Yes. And because it's connected to your Apple id, it can access this as the

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
Iphone. Oh, I see where we are. Should I play that same Gwen Stefani song? Yes. That would be the right thing to

Mikah Sargent (02:00:04):
Do. It's called Sweet Escape.

Leo Laporte (02:00:05):
Sweet Escape. Okay. 

Mikah Sargent (02:00:10):
And I just was checking the new home pods. Homepod second generation also has ultra wide band, so, okay. Yeah, I can do that.

Leo Laporte (02:00:17):
So kind of knows where you're, the other thing it does is a little disconcerting. If you're listening to music on your phone and you come next to this, it goes, who? You, your phone vibrates and the thing says, well, you can send it over to the home pods. Which I guess some people like, do you like this? I hate it. I hate it.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:31):
I hate it. Because what ends up happening for me is I've got one on my office desk and I will prop up my iPhone so I can see my iPhone screen while I'm doing a show. But it happens to be close enough to the HomePod Mini. So then it starts going thinking that I wanna change some. No, no, no. I don't like it. But yeah, some people, the the whole idea was too, you could be on the phone and then you could come home and you could just tap your phone on the top of the HomePod and pass the call over to the HomePod and have that conversation. I got people around me. I don't want everybody here in my phone calls. I, I'm more private than that,

Leo Laporte (02:01:03):
By the way. I could not do this while I was airplane

Mikah Sargent (02:01:07):
<Laugh>. Oh, well there you go. Because

Leo Laporte (02:01:09):
It started playing

Mikah Sargent (02:01:10):
Music into

Leo Laporte (02:01:11):
The Apple tv.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:12):
That makes sense.

Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
So let's let's go back. Now I'm, now we've listened to the whole, the whole process took so long. We're listening to now some other song. Yeah. So let me go back to Apple Music. And

Mikah Sargent (02:01:24):
I mostly wanted to display the pairing process over airplay. But since it It's very cool. Already paired, we're good

Leo Laporte (02:01:30):
To go. Well, and that was interesting. Says it, it saw the phone and said, well, I know what the wifi is are available to your phone. And it just picked it up. I didn't have to do anything. Yeah, that's nice. Apple has basically attempted to do that in every respect. Right. It's always gonna try to make things easy. Now I'm playing this on the phone. Let's switch it over. It's very confused. No, play it on the it's very unhappy. Come on.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:08):
There we go.

Leo Laporte (02:02:10):
I'll turn it up. So one thing you get

Mikah Sargent (02:02:15):
Is you now get

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
Stereo separation. You also get spacial. And I have to say, doesn't, the base is not as deep

Mikah Sargent (02:02:23):
And I'm, I also don't think that the clarity is as good as the HomePod first Jen. The, her voice doesn't sound as crisp as I was hearing with. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
Well, you'd expect that they took some tweeters

Mikah Sargent (02:02:35):
Out. Some tweeters out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:36):
I don't think the base is as deep.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:39):
And hon I will say I was talking to Leo about this off the air, I don't mind losing a bit of base because I do live in a town home. And so that base rattling people next to me is kind of like, ugh. And the, the HomePod first gen that I have, I have to use, there's a feature in the home app that lets you reduce the base because the base is so good in that first gen home pot. Yeah. And it just rattles so hard. So I end up turning it down anyway, so I don't mind that it loses a bit of base, but in terms of comparison between the two, yeah, it's not the same. It's not the

Leo Laporte (02:03:11):
Same. Do you think it sounds good?

Mikah Sargent (02:03:13):
I think it sounds good. But I honestly, when I think about the HomePod minis that I have,

Leo Laporte (02:03:21):
It's not that much better.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:22):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
I gave him my my minis.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:27):
Yeah. I I have one and you gave me two others and now I've

Leo Laporte (02:03:31):
Got a stereo HomePod. Yeah. I do like stereo pairing. I mean, I think it makes a difference to have stereo. The reason I'm having Mikah Judge the Santa is cuz you can't at home because you're hearing is as we compress it and stream and stuff, we've set up a very fancy crisscross PR 40

Mikah Sargent (02:03:47):
Microphone. Oh, I just noticed that, that is very clever.

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
This John is an audio file. What do you think, John? I'll play, I'll, I'll go back to the original home pod. Two questions on paper. Okay. I'll get to those. But let's play the original home pod again. Let's do an ab There's more of a lot more bass. You know how I know I can feel it.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:13):
You can feel it. <Laugh>. You might check if a reduced bass is turned on on those second

Leo Laporte (02:04:22):
Gen, or, or more likely Lisa's turned the base way up on this

Mikah Sargent (02:04:28):
Eqd

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
It. I don't e I don't eq the the new ones or I haven't I don't know what song hat was. See it

Mikah Sargent (02:04:40):
Doesn't sound as clear.

Leo Laporte (02:04:42):
John is more of an audio file, but we're both old. You have young ears. Okay. What Bonino is young as well. What do you think, Bonita?

Mikah Sargent (02:04:53):
Yeah, this single one sounds way better.

Leo Laporte (02:04:55):
Sounds way better.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:56):
Yeah. I mean, in person it sounds, I can feel the bass on that one.

Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
Maybe it's turned way up. I don't know. I don't know. I can't control this. Interesting, interesting. So price is still, if you could, you can't get to the old one.

Mikah Sargent (02:05:13):
No. Yeah, I

Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
Guess the, this is only gonna help somebody who's saying, well, I have the old one. Should I replace it? No.

Mikah Sargent (02:05:19):
Yeah, I understand. I, I agree. So there are multiple things to consider here. A question that I got a lot after the second Gen HomePod came out was, if I have a single HomePod first generation, and now I want to do a stereo pair, can I buy a HomePod second generation, the new one and make a stereo pair between those two? You cannot. You have to have either two home pod first gens or two HomePod Second gens. Yeah. Yeah. So I <laugh> had to reach into the,

Leo Laporte (02:05:46):
The

Mikah Sargent (02:05:46):
Archives of the internet and find someone who had a first gen HomePod they were willing to get rid of. So I could do that stereo pair eventually. But yeah, the second gen, as we mentioned, they were hoping to, for the, the sake of bringing down the cost a little bit take out some of what at the time I think people called an over-engineered smart home speaker. Maybe not <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:08):
Yeah. Siri might be a little better on the new ones.

Mikah Sargent (02:06:11):
That is true because it has a better chip in it. So the processing is better. And that means a lot more processing is happening locally on the device. So with that, you are going to get a quicker response. And then also because of the the, the Bluetooth is, is 5.0 the wifi I believe is, is better as well. And it also has thread built in. So if you do have smart home stuff, then this is an additional device that can help with that. But having a lot more happen locally. And then you pair that too with what is Better Sound processing than the first gen home pod could provide. So the first generation home pod, when you first got it, you set it up, you move it, it's got an accelerometer in it. When you move it to a different location it sends out or it uses whatever you're playing. Basically when that Gwen Stefani song first started playing it sent out and listened back for how that song was coming back, and then it uses that information to adjust how it is playing. And the second gen home pods can do that, but they can do it better because of the newer chips.

Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Now I have all three of them playing somehow I don't know how. Oh wow. And now we're really getting some bass <laugh>. John wanted to know if you could play something besides Apple Music. You can, anything that supports airplay. These are airplay two speakers. Airplay two by the way, is better than Bluetooth. It's pretty much full quality. So because it's using wifi, so it's got enough bandwidth to send pretty much a full quality signal over to the devices. So yes, it does support Airplay. Now he also has a network connected library an iTunes library on an IP address on the network. I bet you I could cuz I, if I

Mikah Sargent (02:07:57):
Could if you can play it from your phone Yeah. Then yeah, you would then airplay

Leo Laporte (02:07:59):
It. And can you play it from your phone? Cuz you play it from the Sonos John. Yeah. From my phone. But you play it from your phone. So Yeah. If you could see it on the phone, because these support airplay,

Mikah Sargent (02:08:07):
As long as you're on the same network as whatever those home pods

Leo Laporte (02:08:10):
Are on. Right. It has to be on the same network. That's right. So Chris in Miami wanted to know he was thinking about getting these, I guess the next question is, should you get the a hundred dollars HomePod mini or the $300? Homepod full size. I love the sound on the full size mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And there is definitely a difference. Oh, absolutely. So we replace the minis in our bedroom, the ones you have now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, don't worry, I I cleaned them off. <Laugh> the ones you have now. With these, and for, we do two things in the bedroom. We do more than two things, but we do two things with these. And one is we listen to audiobooks and even audio books sound better. And audiobooks are not notoriously high fidelity, but the voices sounds clearer. We can listen to it. And, and it's, you know, it just sounds fuller and music sounds a lot better. And there's this additional feature with spatial mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that I really like. I can you know, I can move around in the bedroom and it adjusts somehow. I don't know how it's knowing where I am, but it sounds

Mikah Sargent (02:09:10):
Yes, great. The, the 360 audio. And also it's worth noting that HomePod Mini, even when you stereo pair them, they cannot do the Dolby Atmos spatial audio for when you're watching a show. Whereas if you've got these two HomePod second generations or two HomePod first generations, they can do that spatial audio. So if you have gotten into the habit of watching shows and listening with that spatial audio where it bounces audio off of the ceiling in the interest of sort of making you feel more of a surround sound experience, HomePod Minis won't do that. And yeah, overall these are more powerful devices, so they are going to sound better. But when we're comparing it between the first and second generation, it's

Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
Interesting. The first generation sounds so much better. Yeah, yeah. By the way, these will also work with an Apple tv. So if you have an Apple tv, you can use them as your home theater speakers and you'll also get that spatial

Mikah Sargent (02:09:58):
Yes. And I have to give a shout out. I will say that when apple first released a feature it's, it's an E Arc feature, so that's enhanced audio return channel. Essentially what Apple said was you can use your home pods as the kind of soundbar, so to speak, for your television. And what would happen is you would have the Apple TV connected into that arc port on your television. And then when you were watching or play, let's say, playing a game on a PlayStation, then it would output the audio to the home pods. I was so skeptical of this and so ready to be disappointed it was going to lag that for a, I don't know, the first year that this was announced, I refused to use it cuz I'm like, I'm just gonna be disappointed it's not going to work. I finally gave it a shot and I kid you not, it works and it works very well. So I now, or not, not at this current point, but when before I got the projection television that I have now the television I was using before, I was using the Home pods with that er functionality and it worked great. And again, I was shocked at how well it worked.

Leo Laporte (02:11:02):
So That's good to know actually, cuz you don't have a htm I port obviously

Mikah Sargent (02:11:06):
In the home pods. Yeah. It's basically sending it to the Apple TV and the Apple TV is then sending it to those home pods. Right. But they can all communicate together to properly delay essentially the video so that it matches the audio and then it all plays as it needs to. I was impressed.

Leo Laporte (02:11:21):
Let's briefly check in on Carmen San Diego, a k a our driver <laugh> Eric, who is in the gates, I believe the gates of Newum manure right now delivering his very important cargo, which is probably something related to Dragon's Gold <laugh>. Do you have, do you have, do you have that on the I don't have Zoom running on here. I want to get, I can, I can launch it if you Oh

Mikah Sargent (02:11:48):
Yeah. Cuz that'd be hard to show

Leo Laporte (02:11:49):
That one. Let me show it then I will. I I can do it. Oh. I have to go. What happens after the show is over is John Ashley comes in with his sharp razor blade <laugh> and cuts out all of these. There we go. Click on him. Yeah. If we click on him, can't you just pull him up all by himself?

Mikah Sargent (02:12:09):
Pin or something like that? Click

Leo Laporte (02:12:10):
His, click his thing. It'll just go big. Go bigger. There we go. There we go. He's driving, driving, driving. Where do we do where? We don't know where he is, but we know he is driving safely because that's who Eric San Diego is all about

Mikah Sargent (02:12:24):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
Every week. He's somewhere else

Mikah Sargent (02:12:27):
And looks

Leo Laporte (02:12:28):
Like he's, it's a long ship. But, but I, but doesn't that look like a Lord

Mikah Sargent (02:12:32):
Of the Rings? It does, it's definitely,

Leo Laporte (02:12:34):
It's the gates, what do they call it? The

Mikah Sargent (02:12:35):
Gates. The Giving Lord of the Rings for sure.

Leo Laporte (02:12:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Let's, we got one video call and we can wrap the thing up, I think with with that one. Right? Is that what you wanna do, John Ashley? We do

Mikah Sargent (02:12:46):
Either. Let's do it. We have, we have another

Leo Laporte (02:12:49):
Callers though. I know. But let's do that video call cuz I, I gotta get ahead. We'll babe, if we have time, we'll do another caller.

Caller 7 (02:12:56):
Hey, Leo and Mikah, I've got a question for you. I've always wanted to call into the old radio show to ask this, but honestly it's not a question worth radio. I know you guys both carry around man purses or Mercy <laugh> and I've been looking for the best one for myself. I've tried backpacks, I've tried eBags, I've tried Messenger bags. I wanna see what you guys carry. Do you mind showing us?

Leo Laporte (02:13:18):
Oh, I don't have mine with me. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (02:13:19):
I can't wait. I gotta tell you. So the one that I carry with me most places, I found this bag on Amazon. Okay. ages ago. And, we'll, I'll send John Ashley the link to it. It's just this little bag that has lots of zippers, which I like. Inside. There's a mesh zipper that has a lot of my tech in it. And then this, this part on the front folds up and inside I've got a place to store pens and other things. I've got my, oh goodness, what is it? The, the key in there. And then also my partner got me for Christmas, this tool that's like a multitool so I can unscrew things and, you know, little bolts and whatnot and an Apple Air tag in it as well. What's funny is I am not a huge fan of the Walking Dead, but again, my partner is.

(02:14:06):
And we were watching an episode and the one of the main characters, Carol, I noticed that she was carrying this very bag in the show. And then shortly after that, a friend of mine started carrying this bag and I it was in a different color. And then shortly after that my partner's grandma started carrying this bag, <laugh>. Wow. And so this is become a very popular bag. I think it's because it's perfectly sized and has so many different pouches and pockets in it that makes it quite nice. And then when it comes to work, this isn't so much immers as it is like a tote bag. But this is from, I believe it's from b N case from Bekin. Yeah. and this has, what I like about it is that it is sort of a long tote that you can I, I put my, my laptop in here and it has plenty of space in the middle, but just this sort of tote shape that makes it very easy to carry on my arm.

(02:15:06):
And then two sides for putting a water bottle in whatever else I need in. So yeah, this is in cases bag and oh, my favorite part is iPhone can slide right into this very nice and soft pocket. And this tran this, this can transform from what it is now, which is a tote that I can carry on my shoulder to a backpack. So it's got these clips here that clip on the bottom, and then these sort of d rings that clip into the sides of the strap. And I can wear it as a backpack. And I took this to the Apple event that I was invited to and it was handy to keep everything that I needed inside of. So between those two bags, I've got everything that I need. And again I'll make sure John Ashley gets the links to these two. But yeah, one is kind of a not name brand bag. And it's quickly become a very popular bag that I see so many people carry. And then the other is this Incase bag that's a sort of tote slash backpack. But Leo, I know you like leather.

Leo Laporte (02:16:09):
I like leather. The bag I carry actually most of the time it's just a saddle bag. And then I got it in San Diego at Coronado Leather. And I don't think they sell it online. They may not even make it anymore, but Andy and ACO has for years recommended a manufacturer and I'm, I'm desperately trying to find the name. It's, there it is Pilsen, f i l s o n. Now he likes this Pilsen rugged Twill field bag. I'm gonna go right to Pilsen's website because they specialize in kind of expedition bags, American heritage, outer wear and stuff. They do a lot of waxed stuff. I have a Pilsen bag that I just looking at our, our collar. Yes. He looked like a rugged man's man. Can I say a rugged guy? So, Patrick Norton, who I used to work with also big strong guy, used to carry like a 50 pound pack.

(02:17:11):
He'd have everything in it. And so I, my little slim saddlebag is not for that kind of person. What I would recommend is a Pilsen duffle pack. I have one of these. In fact, this is what I'm gonna take on my trip. This can be jammed in to the overhead. It's big enough. Duffles are, are great because they're big enough to store a week's worth of clothing in. And I think this is the one that converts into either a messenger style or a backpack or just a regular duffle that you carry. Does not wield. That's for sissies. It has, you have to carry this sucker. I think this is the one. I'll bring it in next week. But it has a back, it has a laptop area. So you have a padded area to put your, I think this is the one, I may be wrong.

(02:18:01):
Yeah. See it backpack or duffle or sling it like a messenger pack. You see there's the sling. The thing is, we will never die. So you better like it. Because this is so tough that pon stuff is so tough, it'll never die. I like the flexibility of it because it's a duffel bag, but it can, and I'm trying to remember which one I got. This was much more expensive. One. The tin cloth. It might be, I got this one, but certainly look at pilsen's. Everybody has a different kind of need for, for a bag. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> what you want to carry, how heavy you want it to be, the style of carrying it, whether it's by hand or or slinged, like a messenger pack or as a backpack. I love it. The one I got, and I'm pretty sure it's the duffel pack, can go all three.

(02:18:51):
So you really can decide. And it's big enough to hold plenty of stuff. But it also has padding for a laptop. It has little, I always look for little pouches so I can get extra Yeah. Little inside. Yeah. Wires and stuff in there. Andy recommended. I I really like it. I'll bring it in next week and I'll show you a a grid thing with rubber straps that you can put cocoon. Yeah, yeah. The cocoon. And that you could put little wires in. You slide that in, you slide your laptop in. You got everything you need. Pilsen makes amazing stuff. Lisa bought me a beautiful Pilsen leather bag that is kind of too fancy, frankly for me to carry around all the time. But I'll bring that in as well. So I would, I would take a look at at these pons and then just decide, for instance, for some people who just want a side kind of messenger bag style, this rugged twill field bag is great.

(02:19:44):
I, this is the one that Andy carries and loves and they have 'em in a variety of shapes and form factors. The hardware is excellent. That's one of the things I look for in a bag. Hardware and especially zippers that are not gonna fall apart and break. Cuz that's the worst thing yet. A beautiful bag. And then the zipper breaks. That's no good. Pilsen is making stuff for sportsmen for people who are out in the wild. They make really nice stuff. So this is if you, if you want something and he looked like a man's man. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I'm just gonna say he had racks of stuff behind him and he looked like a guy who would carry a 30, 40, 50 pound pack with no problem at all. Then you don't want the There he is. Look at that guy. That's a guy who has a big backpack.

(02:20:27):
He probably wears a util hilt <laugh>. So for, for you I would definitely look at Phils. I will bring in, I I wish I'd known we were gonna have this question cuz I I have a variety. A lot. Yeah, you've got lots of bag. Oh, doc sent me the cutest little bag. I thought that was funny cuz it's just this little thing he sent me his That's a perfect European carry. All. All right, let's do one more call. I really want to. So who should I do next? Who's been on the line the longest? John, Ashley, Richard or Marcel? Marcel. Marcel. All right Marc. I am going to bring Marcel on the air here. I think that button is not working. You might have to do that. And we will talk to Marcel. That's a great question though. Just get me started in the bags. Yeah. for some reason I have a fetish. Hi. Hey, how you doing Marcel? You see me?

Caller 8 (02:21:16):
I can you see me?

Leo Laporte (02:21:18):
Nice. See you. You're in our

Caller 8 (02:21:20):
To see you guys. Happy afternoon. Happy

Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
Afternoon. Do you celebrate St. Patrick's Day on Friday?

Caller 8 (02:21:27):
Well I was to celebrate the lucky to be Irish as some very good news. You know, <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (02:21:33):
Are you Irish?

Caller 8 (02:21:35):
No, I'm an Fen African American.

Leo Laporte (02:21:38):
I thought you might be, I could see the picture, but you know, they have some people called black Irish. I don't think they're actually that black. But anyways,

Caller 8 (02:21:45):
I like that Leo

Leo Laporte (02:21:46):
Black. You could be that black Irish. Anybody can celebrate St. Patty's Day. That's

Caller 8 (02:21:51):
Some very good news. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:21:53):
What can we do for you, Marcel?

Caller 8 (02:21:55):
Alright, that's a very good news. But some bad news. Uhoh in past 24 or 48 hours, my Twitter has been definitely

Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
Hacked. Oh, sorry, sorry.

Caller 8 (02:22:07):
Hacked. H A C K

Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
E. What's your Twitter? Marcel? What's your Twitter?

Caller 8 (02:22:14):
I will try. What what is

Leo Laporte (02:22:16):
It? Go ahead, Leo. What's your handle?

Caller 8 (02:22:17):
My Twitter, my Twitter account is at M me 29. I will try to get the verification going on, but not gonna be there. But no one has Twitter blue for the subscribers, but for my hacking because of that direct messages, links, all that genres, what can I do to protect my safety and keep it away from hacking? For sure.

Leo Laporte (02:22:43):
Yeah. My you know Lisa's Instagram has been hacked. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I have got my Instagram impersonated. They're out there. They're bad people. Marcel, you know about, you know about two factor, right?

Caller 8 (02:22:57):
Yeah. I have two factor.

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
And you still got hacked.

Caller 8 (02:23:02):
No, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Oh yeah, yeah. No, no, no. So that's the thing. Two factor is going one step beyond a password. The three factors of I, the whole issue is how do I prove I'm me? How do I prove that I am Marcel to the outside world? How will help,

Caller 8 (02:23:19):
How will, how will provide me as always to change my password and exactly. Everything correctly.

Leo Laporte (02:23:25):
Exactly. So that's the real trick. How it's all about what we call authentication. And there are three ways to authenticate yourself. Something you know that you've memorized. That's a password, right? Something. Yes. You have, in my case I have my Yuba key, which is a physical key. But it could also be your phone. Your phone is actually something wonderful. Or tablet. Or tablet. Any device. Especially if the device has biometrics. That's something you have. Only you have it. And the biometrics add that third factor. Biometrics is something you are your fingerprint, your face id, your iris id. If you combine, if you just have one factor, a bad guy could guess a password could cut off your thumb and and use your fingerprint, right? Maybe could steal your authenticator. This is very common with sms.

Caller 8 (02:24:12):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:24:13):
Yeah, yeah. Don't use sms. But if you have two of them, something you know, and something you have, you're much more than twice as safe. In fact, I would say if you're using two-factor, you're never going to get hacked because it's so much work. Unless Marcel, you are a famous, famous person and you're the target of an attack. Nobody's gonna take the time to, to steal your phone number and blah blah blah blah. So yes,

Caller 8 (02:24:38):
Yes, yes. This is,

Leo Laporte (02:24:39):
This is, that's true. This is a newest UBI key technology. True. This is kind of an interesting thing cuz it's both something I have and something I am This is a fingerprint reader. Yes. On the Yuki. I got that one. So I have the physical Yuki. Oh

Caller 8 (02:24:50):
Yeah. That will help.

Leo Laporte (02:24:51):
Wouldn't that help? Wouldn't that be great? So you put so yes, yes, yes. So what I do is, and and well this is 95 bucks. It's a little expensive. You can get the inexpensive blue Yuki for $25. Even that is so much more secure. It's probably all you need. Now it's interesting cuz Twitter did a funny thing. They said you can't use phone authentication if you don't pay for a check mark. Well who wants to use phone authentication? That's the worst kind of two factor. It's better than No factor. Better than one factor. But still it's funny that they want you to pay them. So you can use crappy two-factor. You can still use YubiKey or, and I really love this one. This is the one I recommend. It's an open source authenticator. You know, they always say Google Authenticator and you can use that. But this is one called two.

Caller 8 (02:25:39):
Yeah, yeah. I have Google Auth authenticate.

Leo Laporte (02:25:42):
Well then keep using that one. Keep using that one. That's what's Duo

Caller 8 (02:25:45):
Mobile

Leo Laporte (02:25:46):
Or Duo. I'm using something called two f a s. You know why I like it? Cuz I'm an old guy and look how big those letters are and I can sort it alphabetically, which makes it a lot easier for me. You can find it to find what I want. Two fas, it's free, it's open source. Oh

Caller 8 (02:26:03):
Yeah. That will help.

Leo Laporte (02:26:04):
And it syncs. So I'm using this on my iPhone. It syncs to iCloud with a password. You want to encrypt the syncing, right? And so whenever I log in with any other Apple device and install two fas, it goes, oh yeah, I know all your secrets. And it also, if you're using Android, will sync to Google Drive, do the same thing and you can make a backup. Yes. So I, so this way when you get a, a new device, it's very easy to transfer over your two-factor authentication. It's my new favorite. I used to recommend Othe but this is the one I use now. It's free. A yes. Authy is very good as well. So there's a couple of choices for you. Oy is another authenticator. So there's Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, you mentioned Duo Last Pass as an authenticator bit warden, our sponsor as an authenticator.

(02:26:52):
There're lots of these, they all do the same thing. What they do is they give you a secret. It's kinda like a password. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they give you a secret, they give it to you once, usually in a QR code. And then you add it to your authenticator. Your authenticator takes that secret number. It's a long, long number. That's Mushes. It together's right with the time of day. And because the site you're on has the time of day and your secret. And if that six digit mush matches, then they know. Oh. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that person knows the secret. If you keep that secret an authenticator, it now becomes something you have, it is kind of like a password, but it's something you have. Where

Caller 8 (02:27:25):
Do people get the Authy website or even 

Leo Laporte (02:27:28):
Authy on, on your iPhone, on your Android phone? Just go to the store, the Google Play store.

Caller 8 (02:27:34):
Even Amazon.

Leo Laporte (02:27:36):
If you have Amazon, I don't know which ones are on the Amazon store, but I bet you Authy and I bet you two F a Sr. Certainly check. And if not, Google Authenticator is fine. Make connection. Yeah. Google Authenticator is fine.

Caller 8 (02:27:47):
It's, it's always making connection to keep away from hacking. Even destroying my old account. Just like Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, if I can, if everyone could follow me at my 29, that will be 994 followers.

Leo Laporte (02:28:03):
Almost

Caller 8 (02:28:03):
Getting into 1000. But no one has been trying to keep it away from hacking and threat messages linking from my Instagram. It's, oh, no, no, that's no good.

Leo Laporte (02:28:12):
That's where does that, where does that handle come from? You're, you're, you're Mr 29. Is that your handle?

Caller 8 (02:28:18):
No, no, no, no. M Myrick 29. Let me spell that

Leo Laporte (02:28:22):
For you. Spell it out so we know. Yeah, it's not adult or anything. Right.

Caller 8 (02:28:25):
M y r i c k 20 nine's.

Leo Laporte (02:28:28):
M y m R

Caller 8 (02:28:29):
29.

Leo Laporte (02:28:30):
And is 29 your age or

Caller 8 (02:28:33):
<Laugh>? My 29 is the age.

Leo Laporte (02:28:35):
Oh, what year you were born? <Laugh> 19. This doesn't look like you, I'm confused. <Laugh>.

Caller 8 (02:28:42):
No, no, no. It's October the 18th, 1993.

Leo Laporte (02:28:45):
Am I on the wrong? My birthday. Spell it again one more time.

Caller 8 (02:28:49):
O c t o o c t o b e R. No,

Mikah Sargent (02:28:54):
No, no. Not

Leo Laporte (02:28:55):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:55):
Thank you for spelling the month. <Laugh> spell out your Twitter username for us again.

Caller 8 (02:29:00):
Oh yes, yes, yes. I'm sorry. M m y r i c k 29.

Leo Laporte (02:29:07):
Well, somebody must have, heck cuz there's some white guy on it. Yep. So

Caller 8 (02:29:11):
Hey, hey. Show two

Leo Laporte (02:29:14):
Smm. Yes. Two sms. Oh, I was just doing one M You Okay. Two Msms. Y R I C k. Oh, there's Marcel, the one word that matters most. R e s p e c t tell you what it means to me. Marcel, pleasure meeting you. Everybody follow? Yes. Yes. I will follow you. You're in New Jersey. I didn't ask you Where are you, where are you calling from?

Caller 8 (02:29:36):
No, no. I'm, I'm from Brooklyn. My what kind of thought my family moves to Jersey from Get Away From Us. They marry

Leo Laporte (02:29:44):
<Laugh>. Hey, I Marcel, you're a great way to end the show. Thank you so much. Yes, yes. I hope no one hacks your account. I'm keep away from hacking. Turn on two factor. You don't need to have a blue check to turn on. Two factor.

Caller 8 (02:29:56):
That's right. I have two factor to keep away from hacking. You got over the place. You've

Leo Laporte (02:30:01):
Got it. And I noticed you want, I noticed you have a little black, you have a little blackbird next to it. Does that mean you're on black Twitter? Is that what that means?

Caller 8 (02:30:10):
Yes. What is black Twitter?

Leo Laporte (02:30:12):
<Laugh>? Oh, that's another que question for another day. There is a very active community of black people, African-Americans on Twitter. And it's widely considered to be one of the best places to go to find out what's going on in the black community. And certainly it's a, it's a culturally fascinating, you know, Jeff Jarvis, who's about the whitest guy I ever met <laugh> did a, did a symposium on black Twitter with many of the people on black Twitter at his, at his university. And we're trying to figure out if we

Caller 8 (02:30:43):
That that will help.

Leo Laporte (02:30:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I figure trying to figure out if we could somehow recreate that on, on the show. Cause it was just fascinating. That is Marcel a pleasure. Thank you, Marcel, you joining us. Take care.

Caller 8 (02:30:54):
Respect the hacking. Keep away.

Leo Laporte (02:30:56):
Respect from Keep away. R E S P E ct. Let

Caller 8 (02:30:58):
Together to say this.

Leo Laporte (02:30:59):
Sock it to me. Let's all

Caller 8 (02:31:01):
Stay together. Okay. We will not be hacking all, all the us Let us not keep away from hack. Let us all come away. No

Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
More hacking. No more hacking. No more hacking. No thank you. Marcel <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:31:22):
R e s P E C t. Find out what it means to me.

Leo Laporte (02:31:25):
What a character <laugh>. That is a great way to end this Sunday edition of Ask the Tech Guys next week. Johnny Jet makes his triumphant return. Can't wait to see Johnny. Also. Dick d Bartolo will be with us. We will be doing more video calls if you send 'em to ask the tech guys at twit do tv and of course we'll be taking those unpredictable Zoom calls. <Laugh> <laugh> call the TWIT tv. You got anything planned for next week or is it

Mikah Sargent (02:31:57):
Yes, I actually do. So an embargo lifts on Tuesday and I will be showing off some fun things next

Leo Laporte (02:32:04):
Sunday. Oh, but you can't tell us.

Mikah Sargent (02:32:06):
I can't say yet cuz Embargo has not lifted yet. Currently

Leo Laporte (02:32:09):
Enjoined, I will bring in my Filson bag and a couple of oth, actually two Filson bags, a few other bags next week. Sweet. We'll do a little bag demo. I like your bag though. That's nice. Yeah, we both, we both carry man bags. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's so handy. Yeah. European Carry Alls right. There you go.

Mikah Sargent (02:32:24):
Whatever you want to call 'em. I don't care. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:32:26):
Thank you for joining us. Oh, we do the show every Sunday first thing in the morning for us. 11:00 AM <laugh>. 11:00 AM Pacific. That's 2:00 PM Eastern Time. That's 1800 U T C. You can watch it live at live. Do twi do TV if you're watching live. The IRC is open to all@irctwi.tv. Of course, we like it if if you join Club Twit, that way you can join us in the club. Twit Discord Club Twit is one of the ways that we're, you know, kind of making ends meet in a very difficult time for podcasting. It's just seven bucks a month and we think we give you a pretty good benefit for that. You get ad-free versions of all the shows, no ads at all, plus shows we don't put out in public. The, the club pays for like Mikah's hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows of Paul Throt, the Untitled Lenox, Joe Stacey's book club, the giz Fizz

Mikah Sargent (02:33:15):
Home Theater Geeks.

Leo Laporte (02:33:16):
Home Theater geeks, brand new in there. And often those shows will move into the public eye. At least that's the plan. That's what happened to this week in space. But your donation of Seven Bucks helps us make that possible $84 a year. There's also corporate memberships. We, and oh, I didn't mention you also get to chat in the craziest place of all the Club Twit Discord. It's not just chat about the shows though. It's chat about all kinds of stuff. In fact, you heard there's an autos area. That's where Samal Salmon hangs out. There's, you can talk about alcohol and travel and games and all sorts of stuff. We even have a Mid journey channel for people wanna play with artificial art generation. I've been playing with Mid Journey. It's been having a lot of fun. Did you see some of the some of the creations?

Mikah Sargent (02:34:02):
Yeah, the, I mean, wild

Leo Laporte (02:34:04):
<Laugh> mid, we, we didn't talk about this, but this, one of the things that happened this week is Mid Journey released version five. And it is photorealistic, virtually indistinguishable now from you know, a real photo. And that's gonna be very, it's gonna be very, very interesting when we get to that. We have a a public mid journey, but we also have our own private mid journey for staff. And I ended up paying the, whatever it was, a hundred bucks a year for access to the, the latest version, I have to say. Oh, nice. I'm looking to see if I can find some of my unusual art. Some of it's kind of weird. Here we go. Staff Mid journey. Can I click that? I've made it really big <laugh> and I can't <laugh>. I can't, everything's so giant. There we go. I can't click anything.

(02:34:57):
Here we go. Let's see what we've got going. That's so it didn't know what Lisa looks like. Oh, but look how photorealistic that is. Oh wow. I just imagined someone named, just imagined somebody with red lips. I said Steve Martin with the Globe, with the world on his shoulders. It doesn't really know. It doesn't, you know, if you don't provide it with pictures, it's not great. We wanna do some kitty cats. Lisa wanted to do some kitty cats. So there is, this is generated artificial intelligence generated kitty cat in the woods. It's kind of amazing what you can do with this. So we've been having a lot of fun. This is a cat I, this the prompt was photorealistic photo portrait of a black and white cat on a San Francisco fire engine. And then I have a bunch of extra little things that are supposedly gonna make it look better.

(02:35:42):
That's pretty good. That's very good. What Mid Journey can do now. We are, and same thing with chat g, PT four. We are an interesting time. So we'll talk a little bit about that more next week. Thank you for joining us. Join the Club Club. I didn't tell you where. Twit TV slash Club Easy. Yes. Or Club Twi. Do tv. It all works. And we'd love to see you in Club Twit. You can play with Mid Journey in there too. Thank you Mikah. Sargent. Thank you Leo. Of course. Have a wonderful week. We'll see Mikah on on Tuesday with Rosemary Orchard, with ha iPads or iOS today. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Tech News Weekly on Thursday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> back here on Sunday. You'll see me just spread all around, just around around the us Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Unask, the tech guys? Pardon?

Rod Pyle (02:36:26):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in Chief of Ad Astra magazine.. And each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists. And sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space. Books and tv. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventure or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this weekend space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.