Ask the Tech Guys Episode 1974 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):
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo LePort coming up, I'm gonna show you what some are considering the greatest video game of all time. And it just came out on Friday.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:10):
And I'm Micah Sergeant and we are gonna talk about a big problem. It's lithium ion batteries on airplanes.

Leo Laporte (00:00:17):
And then Sam Abul Sam at our car guy tells us why cars are better than ever, except for this one car from Vietnam, which you really don't want to buy. It's all coming up. Next un ask the tech guys podcasts you love

Mikah Sargent (00:00:31):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:33):
This is is Tweet.

(00:00:37):
This is Ask the Tech guys with Micah, Sergeant and Leo Laport. Episode 1974, recorded Sunday, May 14th, 2023 Mother's Day. I'm a gnu. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Thanks Canary. Detect attackers on your network while avoiding irritating false alarms. Get the alerts that matter for 10% off and a 60 day money back guarantee. Go to canary.tools/twit and the code twit in the how did you hear about a box? And Byta security professionals often undergo the manual task of collecting evidence. With Rada, companies can complete audits, monitor controls, and expand security assurance efforts to scale. Say goodbye to manual evidence collection. Hello to automation. All done, ATDA speed. Visit rada.com/twit to get a demo and 10% off implementation. And buy well us as an ad supportive network. We're always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our audience. With our tailored host Red Ads, you'll get an authentic and proper introduction to your brand with every ad read, visit, trip.tv/advertise and launch your campaign today. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you Today it's time for guys again. Back to the plural. Thank you for coming home. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:01):
<Laugh>, happy to be home.

Leo Laporte (00:02:03):
I we missed you last week. Did

Mikah Sargent (00:02:04):
You? How, how was that?

Leo Laporte (00:02:06):
You know, it was harder than I thought. Cause I thought, oh, this is good. This'll be easy. This is like what you doing in the old radio show. It's not, it's hard. So thank you. Stay here. Don't go on anymore vacation. I'm buckled in now. I am wearing my somebody e emailed me said Whatever happened to those shoes you used to wear on the screensavers the flame shoes? Those are So I'm wearing the, aren't they nice? The flame shoes and of course funny socks as you are wearing. Are

Mikah Sargent (00:02:28):
Those custom made, those flame shoes?

Leo Laporte (00:02:30):
No, I got 'em down here. There's a local it's still here. Store. I got 'em. So this week was the 25th anniversary of Tech TV's launch in May, 1998. And I got these then, so these 25 years ago. Wow. They're, they're kind of still kicking stock Martins. And that store is still there. It's called Stink

Mikah Sargent (00:02:54):
<Laugh>. How's it spelled? You wouldn't stink like it sounds Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:57):
With a name like Stink? No, S T I N Q U

Mikah Sargent (00:03:00):
E. Who You never know.

Leo Laporte (00:03:01):
No, it's yes. Just like it sounds you wouldn't think of that name. That would be still in business 25 years later, but No, it is

Mikah Sargent (00:03:07):
Is it a shoe store specifically?

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
No, it's all kinds of hip, hip gear for youngins.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:11):
Oh, hip gear for cool cats. I

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
Was a little younger 25 years ago. Still not a youngin. I was older than you. 25 years <laugh>. So anyway, yeah, I thought I'd bring these, break these out. And then I have another pair that's black and white that I, that are my wedding shoes. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:03:23):
Nice.

Leo Laporte (00:03:24):
Anyway. Hello everybody. Welcome to Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leon LePort.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:28):
And I'm Micah Sergeant

Leo Laporte (00:03:29):
And we are gonna answer your questions. Still don't have a phone number. I'm sorry. So that's probably by next week. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:03:35):
It's in testing now. We're working on it. It's exciting. We've got a number on the

Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
Way. So for the time being call.twi.tv, that's a, well, if you do that on your phone, on your browser, or you do it on your computer, on your browser, it will launch Zoom if you have it. If not, you can do it in the browser and it'll make a call to us and we will put you in our Zoom room and we'll pick you up. Raise your hand if you have a question. We look for people's hands raised call TWI tv and we do have some emails from Ask our website, our our email address, which is atg, or ask the tech guys twit tv. Either one will work before you get to your sermonette. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Just wanna say Twitter has a new C e o Linda Yak. Aino. you think I'm, you think I'm joking?

Mikah Sargent (00:04:20):
No, I don't. I I,

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
Elon has nominated and says he owns it. I guess it's all takes.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:25):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:04:25):
All he to do. He says has nominated a f the former head of advertising at N B NBC Universal. Linda Yak Carino. She quit on Friday like that. And she'll be starting Elon says in the next six weeks, she put together all of the different companies. You know, n b NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, has been accreting, all these TV companies. She took all the sales divisions of Bravo, peacock usa, sci-Fi, n b, NBC Universal, put 'em all, smushed them all into a giant ball and, and made a lot of money for B NBCUniversal Comcast. So I think Elon's hoping he'll she'll do the same for Twitter. Sh goodness knows they need to. And Elon says, I'll still run the technical side of it and I'll, and all the dad jokes will still be on me. Oh, I'll, I'll continue.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:15):
<Laugh>. I'm glad he can continue his dad jokes.

Leo Laporte (00:05:17):
Now you saw something which I saw as well, that kind of shocked me.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:22):
Yeah, it, it, I was surprised that about once a once a week in the United States, there is a lithium ion incident on an airplane, a battery fire of some sort that takes place with lithium batteries. There are a few sort of harrowing tales in this piece from CBS News where there, there are people who were talking about how I was just sitting on the plane and suddenly there was smoke in the plane. Yeah. And I thought, it's scary. Surely no one's smoking on this plane. Yeah, no. It ended up being a lithium ion battery.

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
FAA says the number of ithe m ion incidents has risen 42% in the last five years 15 years. And, and I think that because we're all carrying laptops and stuff, they did change the rules mm-hmm. <Affirmative> probably since the last time you were on an airplane, <laugh>, since you don't fly very often. Yeah. And now you definitely

Mikah Sargent (00:06:12):
Since

Leo Laporte (00:06:13):
Then. Yeah. that you can't put these in your luggage and check it. You have to bring it on the plane. Yeah. And that's so that if something goes wrong, they can do something about it. The problem with these fires is they're self-contained. They create their own oxygen. Yep. So you can't just smother 'em.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:29):
No, it's, it, that's the, the biggest problem I think that we're, we're seeing and it ends up being because, okay, so the way that this works, the way that every airline is supposed to do this is as you are going to get on the plane, you are meant to tell them, I have no, this, this kind of issue. I have some sort of lithium ion battery. You have to tell them. Yes. Because because

Leo Laporte (00:06:51):
Everybody has one. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:53):
And, and the it's because the pilot is supposed to be told about it so that they're just aware of this. Right. Well, the c b s news did a little investigation. They looked at all of the data and about 64% of the time, the pilot was not aware of the fact that people had lithium ion

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
No one's ever asked you batteries. But I have to tell you, because everybody has a smartphone. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:13):
We,

Leo Laporte (00:07:14):
We all have. It would just be everybody saying, I got one. Yeah, I

Mikah Sargent (00:07:16):
Got one, I got one, I got

Leo Laporte (00:07:17):
One. Something. The pilot can safely assume every single person on the plane has a lithium eye on battery.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:22):
But you know, where they're seeing most of the issue where

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
Not in the phones. Vaping, vapes, vaping, vapes.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:28):
And this is what's interesting to me because when I, I'm reading through this and the first thing I'm thinking is, are these those $4? That's ridiculous devices that buy u b chargers that you're buying at at a gas station on the way to the airport where, what is causing this issue? Because I've never, other than the one smartphone, the Samsung phone that of course had this issue that you didn't have to be on an airplane for it to happen. There's not been this sort of ongoing story about all of these smartphones suddenly bursting into flames. And so if that hasn't been the case, where is this coming from? There are so many different battery chargers that people can buy that cost very little money that aren't made up to the, the specs that they should be. And I wonder if that's where we're seeing most of this problem.

Leo Laporte (00:08:14):
No, we, I mean, the thing is, we are c besides that we're carrying phones, we're carrying laptops. We're carrying tablets. I carry cameras, so I have my camera batteries. I mean, I carry probably half dozen lithium ion batteries on. But well-made ones don't, don't usually burst.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:29):
Doesn't, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

Leo Laporte (00:08:30):
Although y you know, nowadays they say if you drop your phone or your AirPod, you know, my earbuds have everything. I have my earbuds. How does lithium Yeah. If you drop one of those into the seat, do not move the seat to try to find it. Cuz you could crush it and cause a fire. Oh, they say get the flight attendant come to come on over. Anyway, one a week. I, when I first saw this, I thought, oh, this is your typical mainstream media scare story. Like how often? But one a week is a lot.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:55):
That is a lot. And they did this be, that's one of the good things I guess about the airline system is that there is so much data that is recorded. So they were able to independently go and verify this through the faa. And this, this, it's called a, a runaway thermal event. And this happens in lithium ion batteries where once one thing goes wrong, the heat builds so quickly and every single sort of system within the battery makes it even hotter and hotter and hotter until you get that that issue where the fire catches. And as we've, we've talked about, it's supplying its own oxygen. So, you know, of course individuals don't have much that they can, they can do in terms of, you know, we're not all carrying sand traps with us whenever we're going places like this is a bag. But yes, there actually is training that a lot of these airlines are doing specifically for this to make sure that the, the device gets smothered. And when they've done this research, because CBS b s News also spoke to a university that's doing research specifically about lithium ion batteries in devices. They had several instances of the lithium ion device being underneath the water and still able to catch fire. That's right. Because

Leo Laporte (00:10:09):
It's producing its own oxygen. Yep. I learned something. The Department of Transportation dot <laugh> has a department called the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration. Okay. Yeah. And <laugh>, P H M S A this is where the data comes from, from March, 2018 through March, 2023. So five years there were 5,319 incidents on airplanes. That includes cargo planes and 700 of them occurred on passenger planes. That's one every two and a half days. So I don't know what they're, I don't know what the upshot of this is. If you can leave it behind you Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:45):
Especially if

Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
It's a cheap vape pen.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:47):
Yes. That I, I would, I would be mortified if that ended up causing an issue. Yeah. For everybody on the plane, I remember I was going on a plane and at the time that luggage had just started coming out where it had a built-in battery pack and the airline was saying, if you have luggage that has a battery pack, you need to remove it from the luggage. Even though that luggage was going on the plane with me, they didn't want it in the overhead bin. And I got up there. So how

Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
Are you supposed to take

Mikah Sargent (00:11:14):
It? So they

Leo Laporte (00:11:16):
So hold it out in front of you the whole

Mikah Sargent (00:11:17):
Time? No, they had a little key, they had a bag you could use that would let you unscrew it and then you could take the, but I didn't know that they were gonna do that. And I didn't have the key with me. I literally had to break my luggage. It was the only way they let me get on the plane because I had the luggage that had the battery pack installed. I had to take it out of the luggage and keep it in my bag beneath my chair. So I ended up having to break my luggage in order to get on the plane. Holy cow.

Leo Laporte (00:11:40):
Yeah. It

Mikah Sargent (00:11:41):
Was not fun.

Leo Laporte (00:11:42):
Yeah. Wow. Anyway, I guess this, that's the story.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:46):
Yeah. There's not much to it

Leo Laporte (00:11:47):
Other than say about it. It just confirms why Mike, I did not go home for Mother's Day. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:51):
<Laugh>. This is why I don't

Caller Micah (00:11:52):
Fly <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:54):
But yeah, just something to be aware of. You were, you know, all of a sudden you notice whenever you get a package that has a battery in it, it's got a, that sticker, a big sticker on it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> says, this may not be flown, it has to be ground transport and stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I guess we're just becoming aware of these. And of course when those hoverboards were big, oh my goodness, there were a number of hoverboard fires because they had to

Caller Micah (00:12:13):
Have so many batteries. One right after the other too. So

Leo Laporte (00:12:16):
I have giant lithium ion batteries in my garage. We got Micah, the plane guy from Maine on the line. He's a, he's an aviation expert. Yeah. Hi hi Micah, the other Micah. It's good to talk to you. He does the the the airline pi, the airline pilot guy podcast. Is that it Micah?

Caller Micah (00:12:35):
No, I'm good friends with the airline pilot guy, but we do the Airplane Geeks podcast. The airplane geeks. That's the one that I'm part of. So were you

Leo Laporte (00:12:40):
Aware of this whole issue?

Caller Micah (00:12:43):
Very aware of it. And what's going on? Micah, what you said is not exactly correct. Okay. They definitely ask you if you, your checked bags have a lithium ion battery in Yes. As you're not allowed to check them, but they don't ask people going on a plane. Now I have for example, a T-Mobile came out with the uncarrier carry on and it has a charge, a lithium ion battery built into it to charge your phone. And it's a great piece of luggage, I've gotta say. But you can, because you're carrying that on, that's fine. You can bring that with you and it's not a problem. But if I were to check that, I would absolutely have to remove that lithium ion battery because on the planes, most aircraft, most airlines, in fact, I think all of them are supposed to have battery bags.

Leo Laporte (00:13:33):
Ah.

Caller Micah (00:13:34):
So if there's a fire, they take the whole device, they put it in the bag, they zip it up, and they fill it with a water bottle. And that will ke they won't put it out, but it'll keep it under control so that it's not going to cause any more difficulty. But they are, like you said Leo, they definitely tell you that if your phone falls into your seat, don't lower the seat. Don't raise the seat, call somebody and have somebody else fetch it out. Because as you know, if you bend a phone, if you bend those devices, the battery cracks, you're in trouble. If you're, they're the

Leo Laporte (00:14:04):
Worst thing arrive away do is puncture a lithium ion battery. Cause then you're gonna have heat and flame. And often heat and flame, especially an enclosed area, causes explosion. And that's not good. Plus there's a ton of toxic crap inside those batteries. <Laugh>, you don't want to be breathing. Well, I'm, I'm glad you were there to help. Is that why you called in? Just to give us an update on that?

Caller Micah (00:14:25):
That's exactly why I called. Thank you. I was listening and I appreciate and I heard it. And you know, you, you, you don't have Johnny on every week to be able to help you with these things. And he, you know, he has kids. He doesn't have time to listen. So I figured I'd call in and see if I could help. Mic.

Leo Laporte (00:14:39):
Tell me about your hat. What's that hat?

Caller Micah (00:14:41):
Oh, it's the G four 50 hat. It's a Challenger G 4 50, 1 of the most marvelous private aircraft around. And if you're going to charter an aircraft, certainly get one of those. But is it expect to pay, you know, $20,000 an hour?

Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
<Laugh>? It's a private jet.

Caller Micah (00:14:56):
Yes it is.

Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
Okay. I know a G corporate six jet, cuz there was a song. But this is like the a more recent right? Wasn't that a song? Yeah, that was like a G six. This is a later Gulf Stream, I take

Caller Micah (00:15:06):
It. Right? Absolutely. And you probably remember the L Jet, which Oh yeah. That was invented by Mr. Leer. The same man that brought us the eight track tape.

Leo Laporte (00:15:13):
Yeah. What really? I did not know that.

Caller Micah (00:15:15):
Oh, yes. Mr. Leer invented the eight track tape and then went on and created the Learjet

Mikah Sargent (00:15:20):
Lear first name. Eight track. Eight track. Leer

Leo Laporte (00:15:23):
<Laugh>, I think it was his middle name. Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent (00:15:26):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:15:26):
Okay. Yeah. Joey eight track Leer, they called it eight track leader. Hey, thank you Micah. Thanks so much. The bag is a, is a great bit of additional information. So they are supposed to have something just in case. So if you do see smoke coming outta the overhead or out of your pocket, call the flight attendant and say, Hey, get that bag cuz I, this is bad.

Caller Micah (00:15:46):
That's what those call buttons are for? Yes. They're four emergencies. They're not to be pressed to say, I want another ginger ale.

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
Oh, that's good to know. Emergencies. Okay, good. Yeah. I I never press it.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:56):
Wait, that button is not supposed to just be used to. I I've seen people just

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
Waitress a waitress.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:02):
It's an emergency button. It's for

Leo Laporte (00:16:03):
Emergencies.

Caller Micah (00:16:04):
That's really what it's there for. And, and they have bags put big enough to put, you know, your whole laptop in there. Oh, that, that's good. That's, that's how they do it. So I

Leo Laporte (00:16:11):
That's okay. You're reassured

Mikah Sargent (00:16:13):
Us. Yeah. That makes us feel better.

Leo Laporte (00:16:14):
Yeah. I don't have to worry about the pipeline. Next. Where

Mikah Sargent (00:16:16):
Was that in the piece? CBS News?

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
Yes, cbs. Thank you Micah. Thank

Mikah Sargent (00:16:19):
You.

Caller Micah (00:16:20):
Have a great show. You

Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
Too. Oh well. Have a great day. You have a great show.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:23):
Yeah. When you have your next show, have

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
A great show. Yeah. The excellent show if you're in

Mikah Sargent (00:16:26):
There. Airplane geeks podcast

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
Airplanes. I always get the name wrong for some reason, for some reason. Yes. I neander Bear and I, IRC says, and I have this too, we have the away luggage that has a, I have an away as

Mikah Sargent (00:16:39):
Well. That's what mine was wasn't away. Yeah. Yeah. And they made me take the battery thing out.

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
Yeah, yeah. It has a removable battery, the idea. And then you could check it if you remove the battery Yeah. Or use it as a carry-on. Exactly. It's designed to be

Mikah Sargent (00:16:51):
A carry and, and Yes. They a away literally sends you this little thing you could put on your key chain and it's got a screwdriver on one end and it's all TSA approved so you can easily undo it. I didn't know that I was gonna have the takeout the battery though, so I didn't bring that little key chain device. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
That's why I ended up having a break. Said he also got yelled at because he didn't remove the battery from the piece of luggage. He try to get on with it. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:13):
When one is being told no, it often feels like one is being yelled at.

Leo Laporte (00:17:16):
Yes. No, no. <Laugh>. N O call twi tv. Sam AAM is coming up in just a little bit, but let's take some more calls. Eric is on the line. I like calls. I like calls. I wanna get more on. Hello Eric. Where are you calling from today? I like calls. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:17:36):
Okay. A little bit of it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:38):
I thought. I never thought I'd have to say this. Turn your radio down. <Laugh>. There he is. <Laugh>. Hey Eric, where are you calling from?

Caller Micah (00:17:46):
I'm from

Leo Laporte (00:17:46):
Wisconsin. Nice. Welcome. You. What can we do for you? Thank you.

Caller Eric (00:17:51):
Question. I don't a question but inquiry. Yeah. so you've got cellular antennas, radios in your watches, phones, tablets,

Leo Laporte (00:18:02):
Everywhere.

Caller Eric (00:18:02):
Yeah. I don't, they have, I know there's ad additions, but why don't they have the Zoom laptops?

Leo Laporte (00:18:10):
They, you know, it's funny they used to do that more commonly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we've had this conversation on Windows Weekly with Paul Throt. The early surfaces, for instance did have cellular radios in there. You can still, when you buy an iPad, you have a choice. $129 more put a cellular radio in there. But for some reason, I think, my guess is the, and you still by the way, can find an occasional laptop with a cellular built-in. My guess though is that it, it, most people have a smartphone that they can hotspot. So the sales for the cellular enabled laptops went down because people said, well, I don't need to do that. I just turn on my hotspot when I am gonna use it and use it on my phone. And and

Mikah Sargent (00:18:51):
It adds a considerable expense. So having to pay for the laptop with that extra thing in it, whenever there's a way to do it without having to pay that extra. I think that's why, another reason why people have not, you have

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
To put another radio, another card. It's a, you know, and so on an iPad it's 129 bucks. I think it's even more on laptops or a few hundred bucks. And most people just say for the amount I'm gonna use it. You still can, you can still go out and find in fact, I think Microsoft just released I seem to remember a surface that has cellular, maybe the surface go that has cellular built in, but it is less common. Yeah. That's why I think in the answer to your question. Yeah. Do you, would you use it if you had such a thing?

Caller Eric (00:19:31):
I would, yeah. I don't hotspot because it's an additional fee for my service. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:19:36):
Yeah.

Caller Eric (00:19:37):
Well that's why I've got unlimited. Unlimited. But

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
You have to pay an extra 10 bucks. It's still

Caller Eric (00:19:41):
Limited. Yeah. Yeah. Or 30. It'll be another 30. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:19:45):
The other thing is, in my opinion, hotspotting is not as fast as a built-in cellular modem would be. So I do, when I you know, I always take my, I always buy it in the iPad and I take my iPad. And then I know Lenovo, it's often a b a build to order option on the Lenovo laptops. Those are kind of business focused laptops. And you can add acellular modem there. I, I don't know exactly what the cost is. Hey, it's good to talk to you. Thanks for calling Eric.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:12):
Yeah, great question. Thanks you.

Caller Eric (00:20:13):
Thanks

Leo Laporte (00:20:13):
Michael. I'm glad you asked actually. Oh, yeah. More, more people. Sh you can ask. Queries are okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> doesn't have to be a question. Can be a <laugh> can be

Mikah Sargent (00:20:23):
A query a thought experiment. Right. A thought

Leo Laporte (00:20:24):
Experiment. <Laugh>. I gotta take Bruce cuz I just love the mustache.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:28):
Oh my goodness. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:20:29):
Isn't that amazing?

Mikah Sargent (00:20:30):
Magnificent.

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
I just have to put him on the air. Bruce

Mikah Sargent (00:20:32):
The magnificent. Bruce

Leo Laporte (00:20:33):
The magnificent. Where are you calling from? Unmute your microphone and turn on your camera unless you don't want us to see your, your beautiful. Okay, now we can hear you. Hi Bruce.

Caller Bruce (00:20:50):
Hi, I'm from Las Vegas, Nevada. Look at this where dreams killed.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:55):
Oh, <laugh>. Where dreams might be killed, but glorious mustaches are not. They, they thrive.

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
Do you live in in town or do you live in Henderson or on the outskirts?

Caller Bruce (00:21:06):
No, I'm on the East side. Nice far. East side up Boulder Highway.

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
Lisa and I kind of thought for a long time of retiring there mm-hmm. <Affirmative> because it's always, there's some, always a party to do. Right. There's always something to do. Yeah. I remember. And if

Caller Bruce (00:21:19):
Go ahead her and better with the F1 and cuon and Super Bowl coming it's gonna be an amazing town for the next year.

Leo Laporte (00:21:30):
Yeah, absolutely. Not only that, I saw that the Oakland a's our own Oakland a's baseball team is is negotiating to tear down the Tropicana and build another baseball baseball stadium there. So you've got the Raiders. Yeah. And you're gonna have the ass you have, we're going, Lisa and I are coming out in November for the F1 race. We're very excited about that.

Caller Bruce (00:21:51):
Is it is Now we got our Golden Knights that are going golden. The Yeah. The night.

Leo Laporte (00:21:56):
Yeah. What can we, what can we do for you, Bruce?

Caller Bruce (00:21:59):
Okay. I have a MacBook Pro 2013 that Apple has in their great wisdom told me you can't get any more updates for it, <laugh>. So my question is, I wanna either turn it into a Windows machine or into a Lennox machine, and if I turn it into Lennox, what is the best distro for a MacBook hardware?

Mikah Sargent (00:22:29):
I definitely think don't go Windows. I don't

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
Think you can

Mikah Sargent (00:22:32):
Go. I don't can. Right? Yeah. So definitely wanna go Lennox. But as far as taking now whatever you say, going from a Mac to, to Linux, do you mean in terms of the, the one that feels the most familiar to you?

Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
Or you have to wipe the drive? Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:46):
And I'm just curious if he wants one that works well on, on the Mac or if you're just wanting one that will feel more familiar coming from makos.

Caller Bruce (00:22:57):
I want something that just road that will handle the Mac hardware, the, the easiest

Leo Laporte (00:23:04):
Before before we try that, there is a way to get an up update. So you wanna put a, and I'm, I don't blame you, you want to put a more recent version of Mac os in your system so it's secure and so forth. And I don't blame you at all for that. But Apple says, oh, that 2013, we don't support that. Nevertheless, lots of people do it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and, and, and honestly there the hardware's good enough to do it. So there is a there's a I don't know, a hack I guess is what you would call of kind of a hacks. Do you remember what the name of his

Mikah Sargent (00:23:36):
Of Workaround? I wish <laugh>. Okay. I thought you had it. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:23:42):
I can't remember.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:44):
Let's see if that

Leo Laporte (00:23:45):
Open Core Legacy Patcher. Thank you. Thank you. The open core legacy. Now you know why, neither my nor I can remember that every time

Mikah Sargent (00:23:54):
<Laugh> such a long name. If you

Leo Laporte (00:23:55):
Google open Core Legacy Patcher, it works. The, there are some downsides to it. Any update Apple pushes out can is potentially gonna remove it. So you have to be careful about updates. But if you go to the forums where they talk about the open court legacy Patcher you'll see them warning, okay, don't do this one. Or here's how you do it. Or how's, but lots of people mm-hmm. <Affirmative> are running the latest version. What is the latest version? I can

Mikah Sargent (00:24:20):
Never remember. Macwas Ventura.

Leo Laporte (00:24:22):
Ventura, yeah. Are running Ventura on 2013 max. Fine. Just fine. Right. So it Apple's concern I under, you know, you you might say, well, they just want you to buy a new Mac. I think their, their concern is it won't run as well as

Mikah Sargent (00:24:38):
Well as they want it to. Yeah. And then there would be complaints about that. But you

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
Can't. Now, when it comes to Linux, which is not a bad idea, it is a little tricky getting Linux to run on a Mac. And here's why most PCs are using standard hardware. So the drivers exist, the Linux drivers exist. The people who write, you know, Linux is all done by enthusiasts for the most part. So enthusiasts have a Lenovo or Adele or an hp. So they have hardware support for everything in those computers because Apple's stuff is completely proprietary. They use some stock parts, but a lot of 'em, they don't. Most Mac most Linuxes don't run perfectly on a Mac. There's only one designed for the M one, for instance. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you're using a modern, you're not obviously, but you're using an Intel Mac. So it's a little easier. But there's only one, there's a Sahi Lennox, it's the only Lennox that will run on the, on the Apple silicon.

(00:25:29):
And it doesn't run that well for a Mac. I think the ones that look the most mish elementary os is a good one. Budgie is a good one. But what you probably want to do, what I would recommend is type is Googling your particular Mac model down to the, you know, the, the model number, the M 9 1 34 and, and Lennox and Linux and see there'll be pages where that's a, where people have put up a blog post and have said, so I have this Mac and it was, it took me this and I did this and I had to do that and I had to get this driver. Cuz there will be some tweaking you'll have to do to any generic Linux version to get it to work. Then your track pad, the camera, all of those things, those proprietary things that Apple uses. So you know, elementary os I don't even know if it's, I think they went out of business

Mikah Sargent (00:26:22):
And while you're, you're looking through that, it's my, I just had that realization. You do have an Intel Mac, which means bootcamp would allow you to install Windows if you wanted to. A again, I don't think that either Leo or myself recommend that you install Windows, but because you've got that older Mac, it does have the ability to use bootcamp to install Windows on it as Oh, that's a

Leo Laporte (00:26:46):
Good point. Oh, I didn't even You're right. You could bootcamp it. What was I thinking? So you could,

Caller Bruce (00:26:50):
Yeah. Cause I have, I have a old Windows seven installed. So I have a I'm sorry, activation number.

Leo Laporte (00:26:59):
Yeah, yeah. There. Well, absolutely. And if you have seven, you can go to 10 for free. So Yeah. Okay. So you could do that. This is elementary os it's still around elementary.io. You could see it looks a lot like a Mac, they have a dock and all of that, but it's not gonna be exactly the same. If you're more comfortable with Windows, maybe that's the way to go. And Yeah, the reason Bootcamp works is cuz Apple provides the drivers for their proprietary hardware.

Caller Bruce (00:27:28):
Well that's why that was one of my thoughts. I don't wanna go to Windows, but if it's the easier way to be able to use my perfectly good laptop, right. So there's, and that's the only reason why I hate Apple is because I'm on fixed income. I can't afford to go spend Sure. Right. A a thousand $1,100 to buy a MacBook Air. I need to be able to use the equipment I have.

Leo Laporte (00:27:56):
It's not just Apple. I mean, everybody does this. You know, Microsoft says we won't install

Mikah Sargent (00:28:01):
Windows 11, windows

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
11 on an older machine, even though it could even Google Chromebooks. You know, after, after a certain number of years they say, well, we're not gonna optune, it's just update. This is just the way of the world. I'm sad to say, I mean, I understand hate's a strong word. Dislike <laugh> resent, peeved, all of them would be appropriate. Yeah. So there's three choices. You've got the Core, core boot which will let you install Ventura might be worth a try anyway. You've always, I why, why I forgot about boot camp because one of the reasons cuz Bootcamp's Gone, Apple's no longer supporting so bootcamp and then you, you know, there are, there are a number of Linux operating systems that would work just fine. It's gonna be up to you in your preference and how much fussing and fighting you want to do with it. Bootcamp would be the easiest. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:28:47):
I was gonna say, if you're wanting to do the least amount of fussing in fatten, that's gonna be bootcamp. Yeah. Yeah. And then probably Linux and then open Core legacy Patcher. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:59):
Yeah. I appreciate

Caller Bruce (00:29:01):
You. Oh, one more thing. Yeah. I, I, I wanna ask. Sure Bruce. You think with all the ransomware that we've had in the last few years that we're getting more and more up to demon from <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:29:17):
Daniel Suarez is Damon <laugh>?

Caller Bruce (00:29:19):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
Yeah. Sort of.

Caller Bruce (00:29:21):
Do you think that we're getting closer to that than, than we'd like to <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (00:29:26):
Yeah. You know, Daniel, who's a great friend, and I love Daniel, is he writes the most dangerous kind of science fiction, which is near future sci-fi. Cuz you know, you could, if you write something that's a thousand years in the future, you can't be proven wrong. But he's writing 20, 30 years and so far he's been pretty right on <laugh>. So I think he's very good at predicting the future. I think we are getting close to that. Here's the good news about ransomware. They're no longer targeting you and me. You might get hit in the Splashback, but really they're going after companies where there's some deep pockets and they can make more money. So as individuals, I don't think we have to worry about ransomware so much. Yeah. but, but boy, if, if, I mean, I worry about it all the time. I ask our it guy, are we safe? Are we safe, Russell are we safe? Because you know, people try to hack us all the time and get a lot of spearfishing attacks and it's just a matter of one employee once saying, oh yeah, sure, I'll install that. Leo must want me to do that. And and we're in trouble. Leo doesn't want you to do that. Leo doesn't want you to do that <laugh>. No, do not do

Caller Bruce (00:30:27):
It. Well the one, the one that scares me the most is when he wrote a book called Change Agent.

Leo Laporte (00:30:33):
Yes, that's right. And Kill Decision too. Right. Which is about smart drones. He is really on the cusp of what's going on. I don't

Caller Bruce (00:30:42):
Want, I don't want somebody changing my dna, so I look like somebody that's been a crook all their lives. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
No, no, you got that. You got a great mustache. I love that. Don't they Couldn't nail that. Don't change a thing. Hey Bruce, thank you for calling. I'll see you in November. We'll be out there.

Caller Bruce (00:31:00):
I will look forward to seeing you when you're out here. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
I know. As, as a, as a resident, you're gonna be cursing this <laugh>, this racetrack. Oh, these people all over. You're destroying downtown. That

Caller Bruce (00:31:09):
One's gonna be bad, but the worst one is gonna be Super Bowl.

Leo Laporte (00:31:12):
Oh man. It's gonna be

Caller Bruce (00:31:14):
Crazy. I don't think I wanna be in town. I think I'm gonna take a week off somewhere and Yeah, leave town for that one.

Leo Laporte (00:31:21):
Lisa and I went to the Super Bowl in New Orleans some years ago when the 49ers were there and it was so much fun. But yeah, I mean, new Orleans is used to this cuz they got Marty gra, you know, all that. But yeah, we're thinking of coming to the Super Bowl. She, she's funny. She says I'll only go if our team doesn't go. Cuz she doesn't want to go and watch them lose again. Oh, that would be hard. She only wants them watch somebody else lose <laugh>. <Laugh>.

Caller Bruce (00:31:44):
I just don't want the Raiders coming here winning the super or going to the Super Bowl because then we lose all the tax.

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
Oh, interesting. They

Caller Bruce (00:31:52):
Have a, they have a thing thing in their contract with the city. If if the Raiders make it to the Super Bowl this year, they don't have to pay the holy Entertainment

Leo Laporte (00:32:03):
Tax. Holy cow. Boy, I tell you, these stadiums, they make real sweetheart deals, don't they? And it comes outta your pocket and mine in the long run,

Caller Bruce (00:32:12):
Hey, $750,000. And now Oakland wants another 500 million from us to help build their stadium. It's

Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
Probably good for the economy, I guess, but that's a half a billion dollars. A lot of money. Yep. Bruce, take care. Have a great week. Thanks guys. Thank you. Happy Mother's Day. I don't know why I said that. He doesn't look like a mother. You know what, I dunno. Everybody could have that. Everybody should have a Happy Mother's Day. <Laugh> Sam Bull Salmon coming up in just 15 minutes. Let's prepare for Sam by me doing a little commercial. What do you say? Sounds good. And then we will come back with more of your calls. Again, call TWIT TV on the Zoom. I love all the calls again. I know some great calls today. It's great. Thank you everybody. We appreciate it. I was getting a little nervous. That's why we wanted to put in the phone number that people couldn't figure out how to use the, the Zoom.

(00:33:00):
It's a little, it's a little Trixie. I know. And coming up it's the hottest game of the year. In fact, some say the gr best video game of all time. It came out on Friday. Are you a Zelda fan? No. Are you a Mario fan? You're not that gamer. Yeah. so Zelda and Mario are the two Nintendo characters that have pretty much owned gaming. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the New Zelda came out on Friday. And we're gonna get a little demo. Tears of the Kingdom. Te thank you for remembering that. T O T K is all I can remember. John Ashley has been playing all weekend. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have I would not. I if I, yeah. Yes, yes he has. If I had to be here, I would still be playing <laugh>. If he, if he weren't here working, he would see he be playing.

(00:33:49):
He be playing right now. So we're gonna let him play it. We're gonna get a little demo of what Summer's saying. Summer calling, calling the best video game of all time. That's coming up a li little later on. I like to keep up on what the kids are. Yeah. What they plan, what the kids are doing. These What's You plan our show today brought to you by Thinks Canary. We were talking about ransomware. You know what the biggest threat to companies is? You know, you put up these defenses, you put up these walls, but how do you know if they've rep they've penetrated your defenses and they're inside the network? Because once they're inside the network, that's when they, they start preparing their ransomware attack. You know, the days where they would just launch it and, you know, say, give us money are gone.

(00:34:31):
What happens now? Bad guys get in, they browse around, they look at all the places you back up cause they want to get your backups. And then they do something even worse. They exfiltrate all your private information, customer information, things like that because after they fire off the ransomware bomb, then they can blackmail you and say, oh, and by the way, it's gonna cost you a little extra. Or we're releasing all this information to the public. The reputational damage to your company, the cost to your company of these kinds of tax is unbelievable. But there is a way to detect intruders in your network the instant they arrive. It's something we have on our network and I really love, it's called the Thinkt Canary. You maybe, if you've heard the term honeypots, this is what it is. It's an easy, simple to configure honeypot that runs on your network.

(00:35:20):
It's a honey pot because it attracts hackers. If somebody's in your network, they're browsing around, they'll see the canary, they'll see it on your, your active directory, or they'll, or they'll see a server or they'll see files around. The beauty of this is you just connect it. It's a little box looks about the size of an external hard drive. You just connect it to your network and forget about it. It's easy to configure. It can look like anything. A Linux server, a Windows server. You can light up all the, all the services or you know, like a Christmas tree or you could just have a few select services. Mine looks like a nas, a Sonology nas. It was very easy to set up. And the thing is, they do such a good job. It really is indistinguishable from the real thing. It has the same Mac address, you know, legit Mac address.

(00:36:03):
It has the legit login, but, and it, so the bad guys go, oh, they don't think it's vulnerable. They think, oh, this is valuable. And they, and the minute they attack it, boom, you're notified. You can also create what they call canary tokens with your canaries. These are little files. They can be PDF stocks, spreadsheets, whatever you want that are spread on your network. Same thing. Somebody tries to open it, you're notified. And that is huge. Canary uses deceptively uncomplicated, high quality markers of trouble on your network. You choose a profile for your device. You could tweak the services it runs. You can have Iiss running open s ssh. You can actually have a file share with actual files on the file. Shary Canary tokens. Then you register your Canary with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. You get notifications any way you want.

(00:36:51):
Email, text, you can get syslog. There's an api. It supports web hooks all sorts of ways. The point is, you won't hear anything unless something bad has happened. Once an attacker gets into your network, or maybe it could be you know, the evil made attack. It could be an an employee who's snooping around. They'll make themselves known by accessing the canary or the canary tokens and you'll immediately be notified. If you wanna see how people love Canary, go to canary.tools/love people on all seven continents. Love their things. Canaries, deploy your birds. Then just forget about 'em. They stay quiet until you need 'em. One alert and you know, there's somebody, there's somebody in the room visit canary.tools/twit. Most, you know, a big bank might have hundreds of them. The Vegas, you know, services for the backend the Vegas casinos, they might have hundreds of them spread out all over a small business.

(00:37:47):
I got cars might have typically say let's five. That would cost about 7,500 bucks a year. You'd get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. I'll send you a new one right away. And if you use the code twit in the, how did, how'd you hear About Us Box, you'll get 10% off the price for Life. Plus we get credit, which I, I like things canary. It adds incomparable value. But here's the good news. They've got a 60 day, two month money back guarantee for a full refund if you're unhappy in any way. Although I have to point out I love this, that in all the years they've been advertising on our shows, not one person has ever asked for their money back. Cuz these things are great. We're really happy to have 'em on our network. You should too. Visit canary.tools/twi, enter the code. W i t and the how did you hear about his box for 10% Off for life. Thanks, Canary. Canary Do Tools slash twit love these guys. Harun is a teamer. Just excellent. I think we have time for another call before say that both Samage. Let's do another call. Let me push the button. Guy is next. Hey guy. Hey Guy <laugh>. He's waving at us. Guy, come on in and join us in the magic zoom room.

(00:39:05):
Did I push the button? Maybe. Let's do it again. Guy. Send a breakout room. There we go. There it is. Go. Okay. Hi guy.

Caller Guy (00:39:15):
Hi guys.

Leo Laporte (00:39:16):
<Laugh>. Hi. What going

Caller Guy (00:39:18):
On? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Why is that Tron?

Caller Guy (00:39:21):
You one, one of my favorite moves of all time. You know, I love it. I'm waiting for Tron three to come up and all the news. It comes around Tron, you know, I'm ready to hear from it.

Leo Laporte (00:39:31):
What's up, what's up in your world, guy?

Caller Guy (00:39:34):
Hey guys I I I wanna continue this Linux train, you know ok Hoo

Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
<Laugh>.

Caller Guy (00:39:40):
Yeah, that's right. You know, I get, I I get to handle a lot of old computers and stuff like that. And the more older computers and the more you guys talk about old computers and how you can put a Linux on it I'm kind of interested in kind of you know, putting more value towards their computers towards letting them understand an older operating system and stuff. So my question is, is that I I, I installed Linux Mint on a old Mac Mini Okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know, everything looks good. It, it, it's kind of a familiar interface with you know you know, the the start menu look or something like that. But my, my question is, is that when I install a program that is outside, like the store or something like that, does it require additional things to install it out of protection? Because the reason why I asked that is, is I wanted to install my preferred V P N and everything, and it says it requires additional components to install.

Leo Laporte (00:40:56):
Ah,

Caller Guy (00:40:56):
Okay. You repositories or something like that. Yeah. So that's my question.

Leo Laporte (00:41:00):
So do you wanna take this or shall I, I think you should take it, Mr. Lennox <laugh>. I love talking about Lennox. So Linux is an open source operating system. You know, you've got Mac Os, you've got Windows. You probably have heard of Unix, which was the original kind of operating system out of Bell Labs. Unix is essentially the backend for Mac os. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And in 1992, a finished graduate student named Linus Alz, who decided he was gonna write his own operating system. And he based it on a, a teaching operating system called Minx. His name was Linus, so he called it Linux Lin's Minx. But his goal was, and they, and they've always called it this, they aimed to be Posics compliant. Posics. P O S I X is a standard that is essentially Unix. If you're POSICS compliant, you are considered a Unix like operating system.

(00:41:57):
And Unix people can understand how it works and, and know what the commands are and kind of know how it works under the hood and all of that stuff. Linus never tried it as to create a Unix, but but he was aiming towards posics compliance. Now, over the years, Lin's timing was great because the internet was just emerging, right? So, over the years, many, many people have worked on Linnux Linux as a kernel and have added on top of IT programs. In fact a big contributor to all of this is the Free software foundation, Richard Staal's group. In fact, his, he created something called gnu, gnu, not Linux, G N u, gnu, not Unix by mean G N U. In, in his goal was to recreate all the well-known Linux programs or Unix confuse Linux and Unix don't, two different things. He wanted to recreate all the Unix programs to make them available, open source and freely to anybody who wanted them.

(00:42:54):
Well, that timing was perfect cuz Linus has created his kernel of operating system. The internet has appeared. So he is got contributors all over the world helping him. And then all of a sudden the Free South Fair Foundation is releasing standard Unix utilities that work with Linux. So when we talk about Linux, we're really talking about a Linux kernel with free software utilities on top of it. And like any operating system, you can install more and more and more. So you talked about your repositories every Linux, oh, I should mention what a distro is. So once, once we, once we got the Linux kernel, the stuff we put on top of it, the installers, the programs and so forth, those are called distributions. And anybody can make a distribution. There's a great site, distro watch.com, that lists all the distributions and their popularity. You mentioned Mint.

(00:43:46):
That's currently the number three version of Linux after MX Linux and Endeavor os MX Linux is used in, in containers. That's why it's so popular. It's probably not something any end user would install. Then there's Manjaro, fedora, pop Os, Ubuntu, Debian Light, Opena, Garuda. That's just the top 10. There's a lot of different kinds. There's hundreds of distributions. So you choose a distribution. Mint's very popular. It's based on a buntu, very, very popular. You choose a distribution, it's gonna be, it's gonna have its own kind of installer. It's gonna have its own group of programs and you install it. But now, in order to add features, you will use the repositories and every single distribution has its own repositories. These are servers spread all over the world. There's usually hundreds of them where you can get additional programs for free in most cases.

(00:44:45):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to install on top of it. It's kind of the idea, like the Windows store or the Macintosh App store. But there's many of them and there's many more programs and they're all open source. And the quality will vary quite a bit. When you say I wanna do a vpn, it may well be that in, in addition to that one VPN N program, and this is kind of the way Unix works. A number of other programs have to be installed with it. Generally when you're using Mint, you're using ABT as the installer. You're gonna go to ABT or APT Get, and you're going to say, I wanna install A V P N and the package manager, that's what APT is, should then say, oh, well I'm gonna also have to install these 14 other programs and it'll do it for you. And then you'll have a full version. That's what's going on. You'll even see this going by on the screen as it downloads each and installs each. It's, it's really common. It's rare that you would install anything on a Linux distribution and not have to install some extra stuff in the background. Eventually, I guess you'd install everything you ever needed to install and it would just go, okay, now this'll work. But usually you have to install a bunch of other stuff.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:53):
So does this involve kind of getting out of the mindset as you do on a Windows machine or a Mac going to a website, clicking, download, double clicking and installing? You're

Leo Laporte (00:46:01):
Done. Because on Mac and Windows, typically they'll include all this stuff in this blob that you download. So really the, what's different with Linux is you're seeing all the stuff happen. It's still happening on Mac and Windows. You just don't see it happen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So which, which now installing a VPN is kind of complicated. It is not like just going out and getting our sponsor express VPN n and installing it. You're gonna install are you doing wire guard? Do you, do you, which, which V p N are you installing? I use Nord. Nord. Okay. So Nord is a commercial program. I'm, it, it's, so it's saying you need some additional stuff. That is correct. Yeah. there are, people have been trying to solve this in the, in the Linux world with various packages like snaps that make it easier to install.

(00:46:51):
That might be the solution on Mint is to, instead of installing from scratch, there's different ways of installing software. In Linux, you can actually download the source code and build it. That takes the longest amount of time. Or you can download blobs and install them one by one and have a full set. Or you can use these packages like snaps. There's several of these. Snaps is probably the I think it's the one that is preferred on Mint. So you might look and see if there's a Nord p n Snap that will behave much more like a Windows or Mac program where it will just have in a package all the stuff you need. And then you shouldn't have to do anything. It should just work out of the box.

Caller Guy (00:47:30):
So none of this is done through a term, the terminal program or anything where

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
You Well, it can be or you can use the you know, the store they call often call it a store. It's really just a gooey on top of the package manager app. So yeah, you can do it in the command line or you can do it in the in the, in the, in the, I can't remember what Mint calls it, but the store.

Caller Guy (00:47:52):
So what, what what one do you use? I think you said you've used Pop before.

Leo Laporte (00:47:58):
So there's really kind of two. There's more than two, but there's two main branches in the Linux world. There are rolling distributions, which is much more like you're used to with Mac and Windows, where every program gets updated whenever there's an update and there's stable distributions where they try to make it as stable as possible and only update if it's absolutely necessary for security. And some people first stable and some people for rolling the Stable Options mince one of the stable options, it's based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debbie and Debian is the kind of the root stable operating system in the Rolling World. Arch is kind of the stable the rolling version. And then people build on top of Arch. So I use Manjaro Pop Os is Debian <laugh> plus ATU Plus from System 76 Pop Os. So they've taken, and this is what it happens in the open source world, nobody owns it.

(00:48:55):
So they've taken Debian, which is the largest community driven version of Linux. It's got very, very common probably the most used version because of all these derivatives. And then Ubuntu was a company called Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, who made a lot of money in the.com era, decided, you know, I should, I should have a Linux that we really make easy to use. So he created Ubuntu, put a lot of money into it. They do sales services, they sell additional stuff to kind of pay him back. But that's on top of Debbie. And, and then Pop os another company that makes Lennox Hardware system 76 took Ubuntu <laugh> and, and made Pop os. Pop Os is great because it's all the edges have been sanded down. It's very easy to use. It's a great beginner distro. And because it's a stable distro for the most part it's, it, it doesn't break.

(00:49:44):
The problem with rolling distributions BEC is at any given time, you can break them with an un untoward update. There's it's starting to blur a little bit. There are rolling distributions and stable distributions. Fedora has both, for instance I think Susa has both now. They're starting to, they're starting to give people more choices. Yes, there's even rolling distributions in the, in the ATU world, but most of the time I think for beginners, Debbie and Abuntu, pop os Mint, which is also based on a buntu, are very good choices. They're not gonna, they're, they're more stable. They're not gonna break, especially if you use the lts version of them. The long term stable version of that. I like to use a rolling distribution. In fact, if you really want to become a Lennox guru and you've got a machine, you don't mind messing up, messing, you know, not a, not a machine you're using in production, but one you don't mind messing with.

(00:50:36):
Arch is the way to start. That's like putting in Deb in on there. When you start with Arch, you build it yourself from scratch. The Arch Wiki is the most, is the single best, most useful informa information database for Linux users, no matter what version you're winning using. But the arch Wiki you can use to walk through the beginnings of, from the very, from the kernel on up, building your own, essentially your own distro. And by doing that, you'll really understand how it all works. I think everybody who's really wants to be serious about Linux and understand Lennox should at some point build an ar, build an arch system from scratch. Inevitably there'll be problems. It won't work, you know, it's like building your own computer. But once you're done, you really will understand the what's going on with Lennox. And then all your questions will be will be kind of answered. You'll have add the experience. I think for you, for Nord, you should look at if there's a Snap for Nord. And if there is, that would probably be the easiest way.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:33):
I also found a support document that walks you through installing specifically on Mint. So we'll include, oh, there you go into that. No show notes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:39):
That's, this is what's great about Lennox is, is there's no, generally there's no company behind it. And so enthusiasts and users support each other. And so there's things like the Arch Wiki where people just, you know, contribute what they know. And it's a really great system, actually. I

Mikah Sargent (00:51:56):
Like that community aspect of it,

Leo Laporte (00:51:57):
For sure. I really like it. You're, you

Caller Guy (00:51:59):
Know, my, my whole idea, well my whole idea behind doing this is, is that, you know, with all this whole computers and everything, instead of just trashing it Yes. You know, kind of given the opportunity to you know, put a clean, a clean operating system and allow people to you know, that are not so green as far as computers to have a computer where that they can use it in production. But if it goes down and everything, you know, something that we can reinstall and you know start fresh. Yeah. And just using, using the hardware as much as we can before we have to consider it really toast.

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
This is really great now, but you're gonna give this to people, strangers, or, you know, seniors or whoever, or schools or teachers?

Caller Guy (00:52:41):
Well, it, it, it it'll be in a school situation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:45):
So, and you're gonna be responsible for main maintaining it, or you're gonna give it to them and say, good luck, have fun.

Caller Guy (00:52:51):
Well, <laugh>, so

Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
Pop, I would say Pop OS is a very good choice for that. It's very stable. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:52:58):
What I like. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:52:59):
It's very stable. And it's easy to use. It's using the Gnome desktop. We won't even get into desktop environments, but that's what makes it look like whatever it looks like. And there's a lot of different ones. Nome is really straightforward and most people make the transition from Windows or Mac to Nome with you. You've been using it.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:19):
That's the one I use pretty easy. Cause it's, yeah, it's easy. Yeah. I understand it. And if I need to, there's

Leo Laporte (00:53:24):
So much out there that I can read to figure out whatever I'm having trouble with. Yeah. So I like Popo. I think Pops is a very nice way to start. Makes it very easy. It's it's very similar to Mint. I, I think that the team behind it is a little more sophisticated. Okay. Alright. Thank you guys. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks for the question. It's great to talk to you. Love the question. All right. Bye-Bye. Now it's time. Let's talk cars. Sam, AB Sam is here. Hello, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:52):
Hello gentlemen. How are you? This week

Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
Sam is a principal researcher for Guide House Insights. No. Is that right? Yeah. Did I say that right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:00):
Principal Analyst. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
Principal Analyst. He also hosts the Fabulous We Bearings podcast, and we wanna make an announcement. We are gonna do a Will Bearings takeover of oh's. Right, right. When is

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:12):
That? June 11th.

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
June 11th.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:13):
June 11th.

Leo Laporte (00:54:13):
Yeah. So Robbie and Nicole and Sam will all be on Twit. And let's hope there's some car news that week. <Laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:21):
I'm sure we can come up with something.

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
When's the Detroit Auto Show? Isn't that the big

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:25):
That's, that's not till September. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:54:27):
Right. I'm sorry.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:27):
And, and, well, to be honest, auto shows aren't really where the big automotive news comes from anymore. Oh. all right. It it's kind, it's kind of like, you know, back in the day when Apple stopped going to Macworld Yeah. And start doing their own events, automakers are doing the same thing now because it, it's enormously expensive to put on a display and a press conference at an auto show. And again, just like with Apple, you know, it also ties them down to specific dates. Yes. you know, now most automakers are doing their own standalone events. A lot of times they come kind of lined up, you know, a week, two, three weeks before or just after an auto show anyway. But you know, this way they don't have to fight with 20 other automakers for a 15 minute slice of the news cycle during the course of an auto show press day. They, they get the whole day all to themselves.

Leo Laporte (00:55:22):
So Sam joins us every month now, and I'm, we're thrilled about that. To give us the latest automotive news. What's going on in your world, Sam

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:32):
<Laugh>? Just checking over Billy Glanced over at the chat and twisted Mr. Mentioned Alpha Romeo stopped going to auto shows because the cars kept breaking down on the way <laugh>, I think. I think on the way. I think that's a little harsh, harsh man. Yeah. Alphas are not that unreliable. <Laugh> I know people who own Alphas. I love driving Alpha Romeos. They, they're lovely vehicles.

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
Italian cars in general have Italian and British cars in general have that reputation, but I don't, I

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:59):
Think it's, they, they have that reputation. But for the most part, you know, with modern vehicles, that reputation for unreliability you know, is, it's one of those things of the past that, you know, most modern vehicles are very reliable. It's pretty

Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
Amazing, isn't it? Yeah. We kind of take it for granted. But you know, 20 years ago, cars break all the time and you'd have problems. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the electrical would catch on fire. There are all sorts of problems. And and why, why do you think that is? Is it, I feel like the, the Japanese manufacturers came in and they showed people what a quality vehicle, reliable vehicle could be, and American automakers and automakers around the world said, yikes, you know, they're gonna eat our lunch. We better, we better follow their standards and practices. And they've kind of adopted those. Is is that, that's just my sense as a, as a late person. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:52):
So, so kind of what happened is, you know, after World War ii the Japanese automakers, particularly Toyota, adopted some ideas from an American named Jay Edwards Deming about quality and, and quality processes. And, you know, adapted that into the Toyota production system. They

Leo Laporte (00:57:11):
Call it quality circles, right. And things

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:13):
Like, like that. That's, that's part of it. Yeah. Yeah. And so what they do now, you know, and there's a, there's a whole bunch of components to this. You know, there's there's the the CanBan boards, you know, where they, they put ideas up on there and, and they track what's changing. They have kaizen cords, I think. I think that's what it is. On the assembly lines, you know, so Toyota started this where any worker on the assembly line could pull the cord and stop the assembly line at any time if they detected a quality issue. You know, if they saw something that was problematic. And, you know, then everybody would dive into it, figure out if what the problem was, fix it, and then the line would start again. And, you know, they also did things like, just in time manufacturing.

(00:57:59):
It used to be that car factories would have, you know, weeks worth of inventory of parts to build cars, and, you know, so they would have huge amounts of a factory. It's just dedicated to all those parts inventory. But the problem is, if a supplier was, had, you know, had a quality issue somewhere along the line, now you suddenly had weeks worth of bad parts in your factory. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so they went to just in time manufacturing. So ev instead of, you know, parts being made, you know, weeks in advance of when they got installed on a vehicle, it's often hours, or at most days in advance of when it goes into a vehicle. And so that cut down on costs for the inventory of parts. But also when a quality problem was detected, you could stop the line. You wouldn't have this huge nu inventory of parts that needed to be reworked or scrapped.

(00:58:53):
And you could find the problem, fix it, and then get things going again. And that has since been adopted by almost the entire industry. In fact, many industries, not just the auto industry. This whole approach to, to production now, over the last two, three years we've kind of seen the limitations of that, you know, with things like the chip shortage and, and shortages of many other components. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because, you know, along with that, what happened at the same time over the last few decades is we had this consolidation in a lot of industries of fewer and fewer companies making more and more stuff in fewer and fewer locations. And now it became ver this whole system became very brittle and subject to disruptions. So that if you if something went wrong somewhere, whether it was a quality problem or, you know, natural disasters, earthquakes, fires, floods, all of a sudden everybody got got hurt.

(00:59:51):
So now everybody's trying to rebalance and trying to find the right balance again of, you know, between just in time being able to address quality problems quickly. But back to the beginning of this, you know, that is a big part of why modern vehicles tend to be so much more reliable because you get fewer quality issues getting through. And then, you know, if and when they do get through to customers then you in most cases, you know, manufacturers, you know, get onto fixing them. They, they do recalls. We do mu many more recalls than we used to to fix problems. So while recalls are annoying to customers, it's better to you know, do that recall and get something fixed, especially if it's a safety related issue, and get that done before it leads to unexpected breakdowns later on.

Leo Laporte (01:00:50):
And I think the, the other thing that's gonna happen is as we move to EVs, they're even more reliable. You know, internal combustion engines are amazing. Does in general, amazing engineering feats. They're incredibly complex. But an electric engine is very simple.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:05):
Yeah. I mean, the, the, the fact that a typical indu internal combustion engine works at all, <laugh>, it's amazing. As efficient as it, it's, yeah. It is a real feat of engineering. No kidding. Yeah. You've got thousands of parts in an engine and, you know, they're all running and, you know, and moving at very, you know, parts moving at very high speeds inside the engine, pistons moving up and down high crank crank sha spinning at six, seven, 8,000 rpm yet at hundreds of degrees. And, and the, you know, the progress that's been made on efficiency, on emissions with these engines is remarkable. But the next big step is electrification. And electric motors are much more much simpler than internal combustion engines. There, you know, we often hear, you know, there's one moving part, which is, it's only sort of true, you know, an electric motor is generally a stater, which is stationary and a rotor which spins inside of the stater.

(01:02:04):
But of course, each of those components are actually made up of hundreds of components, cuz the stator and the rotor are made up of a stack of laminate plates metal plates and magnets. And you assemble all that together. And the, this, the rotor is assembled from hundreds of parts into one component called a rotor. You know, kind of like a battery, you know, a battery, you know, has one part number, but it can have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of parts inside that battery for all the cells, depending on the type of cells you use. So it's, it's not quite that simple. But the, the real issue with electric vehicles and even gas vehicles for the next decade or so where we're actually probably gonna have more problems is software. Yeah. which

Leo Laporte (01:02:52):
We know how reliable computers are <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:55):
Yeah. That's why we have the show.

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
Exactly. Yeah. We wouldn't have a show. They weren't, if they weren't as expected. You know, the big story in my world this week is the announcement that many car manufacturers are dropping the AM radios out of cars. Ford announced that they're gonna stop putting 'em in all first in the Mustang and then in all vehicles. And then other auto manufacturers follow along. The Washington Post had a story, and it was kind of brought a tear to my eye. The end of a love affair AM radio is being removed from many cars. Ford, bmw, Volkswagen, Tesla, my Mustang Maee doesn't have an AM radio. And it you know, originally I guess it was cuz they said, well, electric cars aren't gonna you know, they interfere with the AM radio. But I think, I think honestly, most manufacturers are saving money. They're taking the radio out and they're saying, you can listen on your phone. You know, you can listen to whatever you want on your phone. There was this, this, it's a good

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:57):
Thing you're not on AM radio

Leo Laporte (01:03:59):
Anymore. I know this, this <laugh>, I believe brought a tear to mind, turned that right. Because this this article, the post a great article and it, it, it highlighted a small am am Station, Bryant and College Station Texas. And and, and the DJ who'd been there 25 years and all that stuff. And so much of AM radio listening is in car. Yeah. Where else? Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:22):
Traffic reports and Yeah. And other things. Although, you know, now, you know, with your phones and with, with connected navigation systems and vehicles, you know, we're getting more, even more realtime traffic reports, you know, instead of waiting every half hour. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:39):
It's in my ways traffic

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:40):
Report on the radio

Leo Laporte (01:04:40):
Or my Google Maps. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:41):
Yeah. It's, you're getting realtime updates in the map telling you, oh, there's a, there's a backup here. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:04:47):
I'm gonna, same with weather, same

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:49):
Suggest a different route. Yeah. Yeah. So there, I mean, there's, there's upsides and downsides. You know, the, the, the, the downside to that, of course, is that we don't actually have connectivity everywhere in, in most urban areas. Urban, suburban areas, most populated areas. Yeah. That's the connectivity is generally not a problem. But when you get out into rural areas, when you're out in the middle part of the country, or even, you know, in, in other area, you know, just down the road from you guys, you know, if you had towards the coast and Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
Easy Italian, easy to get out of it. We were just, yeah. We, Micah and I just took a road trip on was it Friday? Yeah, Friday I <laugh>. And, and both of our phones, all it said was sos Yeah. <Laugh> it, it was like, oh, I guess yeah, if

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:34):
It's not the Marshall for some oysters, yes. There's no, there's no cell phone signal there. And then

Leo Laporte (01:05:38):
You can't, like, your maps stop working, everything stops working. And, and of course am radio stations are saying, look, we have a huge role to play in emergencies. This is how people get hurricane information or earthquake information. So I'm not sure this is a, a good thing. Are, are car makers doing well?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:55):
It's maybe premature. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:56):
Are they getting a little backlash from, from, for all this?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:01):
They're getting some you know, I mean, as there's always backlash. Anytime you, you change anything, yeah. You know, somebody, somebody's gonna complain about it. I'm sure they're certainly getting some backlash, but my guess is that it's probably not enough to offset, you know, the advantages, you know, simplifying certain things. You know, there, there are challenges with doing AM radio in terms of you know, some of the shielding you have to do against electromagnetic interference and that sort of thing. And it, it is tougher to do in an ev you know, you've got those, those big electric motors that are throwing off all kinds of E M I. Oh, yeah. And so that's, that, that is a, a problem. So my guess is we will not see AM radio coming back to vehicles unless regulators mandate it. Right. Which is, you know, is probably unlikely that, you know, that they will get their act together to actually do that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:53):
They're trying, they're actually the am am stations are lobbying the Department of Transportation to kind of make some sort of requirement. We'll see. We'll see what happens in that. Anything else before we let you go in in, what are you driving this week?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:07):
Well, this week I have a 2023 Ford Bronco Heritage Edition. Ooh, fun. Yeah. So it's you know, it's got the big 35 inch tires on there. You know, it's, it's, it's a real off-road or, you know but, but it has a manual transmission, believe it or not. Wow. yeah, four cylinder turbocharged engine, a manual transmission. Wow. It's, it's kind of fun to drive offroad. But I, I wanna touch on something else. You know, going back to the software issue in cars you know, this past week, you know, we've had a couple of announcements from automakers about software problems. On Thursday Polestar, when they released Polestar is an offshoot of Volvo that does higher performance EVs. And they're they were supposed to launch a new vehicle late this summer called the Polestar three is a, a crossover electric crossover.

(01:08:02):
And it's sharing a platform with the new Volvo, EX 90, which is Volvo's new electric three row suv. It's a replacement for the XC 90. And Volvo is doing the, the platform for both of those vehicles, including all the software. And they're having some issues, some delays with the software development. And so they have had to push back the production launch of those vehicles by about six months. Hmm. because of that. And then earlier in the week Volkswagen a couple, several years ago, Volkswagen reorganized their engineering teams and they took all of the software engineers from across all the brands and all the different groups within Volkswagen and put them into a new business unit called Carry a which was gonna be responsible for all of Volkswagen software. Well, that's not working out so well, uhoh.

(01:08:57):
They've had a lot of issues, a lot of delays with their software. And last summer or last fall Herbert De, who was the CEO of Volkswagen Group, he lost his job because of the problems at CAR ad. And now this earlier this week, the C e O, the C T O and the cfo, F O of CAR AD were all fired. And re and they're being replaced car ad's version 2.0 of their CAR OS platform for future VW group vehicles, including Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, and a bunch of other brands was supposed to launch in 2025. It's now being pushed back to about 20, 27, 28 timeframe. So software is really hard, especially if you're trying to do it in a way that is actually safe. Because the thing you gotta remember, unlike our phones, you know, if the phone's on our, if the software on our phones breaks or crashes, you know, your, so your phone resets, you know, it's more of an annoyance than anything else.

(01:10:02):
People don't usually die. If the software in your car crashes that can be really, really bad. And as, as an example this past week VIN fst, a new automaker out of Vietnam launching their first vehicle it's an ev here in the US they had a, a media drive program, which Nicole went on. And <laugh>, we I just, just before we came on the air, I published this week's wheel bearings and she shared her thoughts on the VIN Fast v F eight. And I'll just say there's a, a story on Jalopnik where they they have some excerpts from a variety of all the reviews that came out the other day about the VIN Fast VF eight. The headline is Predicts agree, the VIN Fast, VF eight is very, very bad.

(01:10:55):
<Laugh>, and that's all cuz of software. Well, a lot of it is software, but there's also a lot of hardware issues. Oh, let's not buy that car. They're not selling in the us are they? Yeah. Yeah. They've already started doing deliveries in California. Okay. you know, to, and circling back to what we started with about know cars, modern cars getting better. Yeah. you know, the, the final paragraph of the, the Gelo story, the real commonality between all of these accounts is that overnight, the VF eight has obliterated the notion that there are no terrible cars for sale anymore. <Laugh>. Oh my goodness. Frankly, it's hard to remember the last time a car released to overwhelming disdain a car that every critic agreed. Simply wasn't ready. And wow. A lot of it is software but there's also a lot of hardware issues with it too. So, yikes. You know, for, for all the progress we've made, every time, every once in a while, something bad still manages to slip through.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
Wow. On that note, <laugh>, wow. Yeah. If, if you wanna screw things up, it takes a computer to really screw 'em up. Good. I think

Sam Abuelsamid (01:11:59):
Absolutely. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:12:00):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Mr. Sam. Yeah. Someone

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:02):
With the wrench can only go so far. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:12:05):
Catch that all on wheel bearings wheel bearings.media, or wherever you get your podcast is a great show. And the entire meet wheel bearings crew, I can't wait. We will be joining us. I love Robbie. I love you. And I am met Nicole. So I'm looking forward to that June 11th for this week in Tech, our round table show. And of course Sam is best known as the Intrepid researcher and and, and writer at guide House Insights where he writes his notes for all investors. And you should listen to him. Thank you, Sam. Thank you

Mikah Sargent (01:12:38):
So much.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:39):
Thank you guys. Always a pleasure. Talk to

Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
You guys soon. All right. See you soon. All right. Nice to see Sam. I like talking about cars.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:44):
Yeah. And I honestly did not know about the change in the way that cars were sort of done, including, I didn't know that's where CanBan boards came from. Yeah, yeah. And then the pull, that was all very fascinating

Leo Laporte (01:12:57):
To me. It was a huge thing in, I'm thinking, I wanna say the seventies or the eighties. There were many, many books written about the Japanese process and how we should be adopting it in the United States and stuff. And then I guess it did work cuz cars are more reliable until the computers got involved. <Laugh>, and then it was straight downhill. We've got some great calls ready to go. We've got some emails too, the email address, ATG twit.tv if you wanna call in a phone number. We're, I don't wanna promise, we're hoping next week, but meanwhile you can use our Zoom number. That's call TWIT tv. We'll get to the calls. I see Jeff and Phil waiting in the wings.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:36):
And we've also got a video question.

Leo Laporte (01:13:39):
Excuse me. We do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Oh, I'm excited. Well, we'll get to that too. And then we're gonna demo, excuse me, I have got a little frog in my throat. We're gonna demo the best game of all time. What is that fair? John Ashley, the best, eh, tell you, it's the highest ranking game that has ever been reviewed in the open gaming reviews. It's, it's pretty impressive. We will get to that in just a second. But first a word from our sponsor, dta, if your organization is finding it difficult to collect manual evidence and achieve continuous compliance as you grow and scale, you need to know about stratta, a leader in cloud compliance software according to G2 Drta streamlines your SOC two, your ISO 2,701, your P C I D S S, gdpr, hipaa, and other compliance frameworks. And it does it by providing 24 hour continuous automated control monitoring.

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DRA maps appropriate controls to risks simplifying risk management, automating the process. Andrada Trust Center provides real-time transparency into security and compliance, which improves sales, security reviews and better relationships with customers and partners. So bottom line, say goodbye to manual evidence collection. Say hello to automated compliance. Visit dta.com/twit DTA D R A T a.com/twit DTA bringing automation to compliance. Atta speed draha.com/twit. Thank you Drta for supporting Ask the Tech guys. Phil is on the line. Let me press the magic twang and <laugh> swanger him into the twang. Phil, welcome. Join us in the Star Gate. I'll ask the tech guys.

Caller Phil (01:17:40):
Hello. Hey, Phil and Phil. I have to say it's good because I've been waiting decades literally to talk to you here on the threecom net cam network. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
My god. You know, so Mr. Sergeant has no idea what you're talking about. No. So I'll explain please. For those of us who don't know, it was actually a big deal for me. May 11th, just a couple of days ago and, and get ready for this, Phil was the 25th anniversary of the launch of Tech TV

Caller Phil (01:18:09):
And time sh and stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:18:10):
25 a quarter of a century, Phil. And one of the things we wanted to do when we started Tech TV is do this, take calls. But remember this is 25 years ago, nobody, there was no zoom, no zoom. Nobody had a way of doing this. So we actually made a deal with a company called Threecom. They made these little ball net cams and we sent out thousands, maybe tens of thousands to people. Wow. They called it the Threecom net cam network. They wanted to call it the webcam network. And I said, you can't, guys, you can't call it a web cam. It's not a web, it's not on the web, it's not on the world, it's in, it's on the internet. So we called it a net cam network and Phil, so you must have watched back in the days and you knew about that, right?

Caller Phil (01:18:57):
We behold, aren't they <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:18:59):
It was so crappy. <Laugh>, I can say this now, you know, you get one frame a second <laugh> and the sound, there was no, I mean, the audio was terrible, so we made people be on the phone. So you, if you look at those old videos and there's still some on YouTube, you see they're holding a phone <laugh> and talking to us on the phone and we've got their picture slowly <laugh>, we've come a long way. I mean, this, this works so much better. Now we got frame rate that's at least 12 frames per second. <Laugh>, what can we do for you, Phil?

Caller Phil (01:19:26):
Well I have an iPad related question. I had just recently retired a iPad air two Uhhuh <affirmative>. I got it about 20 15, 20 16. I used it as long as I could. And apps finally started, so stopped working on them. So a very wonderful friend of mine bought a new iPad, air five for me. And I'm having a few problems with vision these days. So I went in to adjust the accessibility settings to try to make the text and things bigger. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And from what I can find, it seems as though the text will adjust larger end menus and things like that. But on my home screen, where the icons are and where the texts are for those app icons, they're small and I cannot adjust them any bigger. Do you know of a way to do that?

Mikah Sargent (01:20:24):
Yes. so there is a special setting and this is unfortunately they have these options stored in different locations. But I do see, I wish I had an iPad in front of me. If you go into the settings app on the iPad, there is underneath general you'll see control center display brightness, and you'll see home screen. And if you go into that home screen setting, I believe that is where the toggle is, that lets you change the size of the home screen. So by default it will, you kinda have an option. You can either have it larger or you can have it smaller. And that's cuz they wanted to give people the ability to kind of treat it as a bit of a, a personal computer. But the larger option will give you those icons a lot bigger. And I actually have a recommendation for you that on top of using that you might consider using the sort of built-in utility called magnifier mm-hmm.

(01:21:19):
<Affirmative>. And what's great about Magnifier is that you can trigger it at any time that you want to use it. And so what, what it lets you do is kind of make different parts of the screen bigger as you need to. And I guess it's called Zoom on, I, I forget that's makos, where they, they call it magnifier. But when you turn it on and this is an accessibility setting. So you go to settings, you go to accessibility and you tap on Zoom, you can turn it on, and then you trigger it by double tapping three fingers onto the screen. And when you do that, then it brings up this little rectangle that is sort of zoomed in even more than the basic text is. You can move it to where you want it on screen, see what you're looking at, and then do, do tap it again and it'll go away and Okay. Yes. So someone has helpfully put into the discord thank you to whomever you are screenshot. And so

Leo Laporte (01:22:14):
It's at the top level and it's under home screen.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:17):
Home screen and multi and multitasking. Yes. Yeah. And so that will let you see a larger version. It's the actually the first option that says use large app icons. So very clearly there, use large app icons

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Is what you have to say. It's, there is a limit to how much bigger you can make it. Yes. And, you know it's unfortunate cuz that's Apple and that's, you know you know, they don't wanna make it ugly

Mikah Sargent (01:22:44):
<Laugh>. Right. And that's where Zoom can be helpful to you to take it in even like a mega step further. And as I mentioned, what's great about it is you just double tap again with your three fingers and it goes away. So it's not as if it's annoyingly taking up room on your screen at all times. You can use it temporarily to see what you're looking at, get what you need, make it go away. And

Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
As you, as as your eyesight deteriorates, you may eventually want to broadcast it up on a screen. You easily do that. Yeah. Put it on a big screen and then get close to the screen. Things like that. You're gonna have to use tricks like that to, to make it more usable. I know that makes it less portable. It just depends on how bad your eyesight gets.

Caller Phil (01:23:20):
I will try the the Zoom option. I know I did try the used large app icon send. Okay. And there didn't seem to be that much difference between with that off on

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Apple doesn't wanna make it esthetic, but <laugh> it's very useful if you can't see it. So there's only so much you can do, I guess. And also turn the zoom all the way up. I always do that on my phone.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:46):
Yeah, it's a and it's a really handy feature. I'm also going to reach out to my pal and person who's regulated on the show, Matthew Castelli. He has a great shortcut ah, to where all you have to do is tap on that shortcut and it turns on all of these features. He calls it Biggify, if I remember correctly. <Laugh>. Good man. And so you can tap it, you can biggify everything and then whenever you're done, you can tap it again. And it enables a lot of these accessibility features, but also some of the other features. So let me get that into the show notes as well, so you can use that kind of secondarily if you want to.

Caller Phil (01:24:18):
Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you,

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
Phil. Absolutely. It's great. Where you, I didn't ask where you were calling from.

Caller Phil (01:24:24):
Kettering Ohio.

Leo Laporte (01:24:25):
Kettering Ohio.

Caller Phil (01:24:26):
Thank you. Yeah, it's a suburb of Dayton.

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
Nice to hear from you.

Caller Phil (01:24:31):
Oh, thank you. I'm glad I got to talk to you. Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:24:33):
On the, on the Z D T V three com net CAM network.

Caller Phil (01:24:39):
<Laugh>. There you go.

Leo Laporte (01:24:40):
I'll have to find some, some video of that. We had a, that was a very funky setup. <Laugh>, we've come a long way, I have to say. Well, it makes sense. That was 25 years ago. Wow. Thanks Phil.

Caller Phil (01:24:52):
Thank you. Have a great day to

Leo Laporte (01:24:53):
Talk to you. You too. Jeff's on the line from Oakland, California also been hanging on forever and ever. Welcome Jeff. It's great to have you on. Ask the tech guys call TWIT TV and then we'll get to our video question as well. I love it when people send us videos. Atg@Twit.Tv. Got it. Hello Jeff. Welcome. Hey

Caller Jeff (01:25:14):
There, Leo. Glad to talk to you again. Great

Leo Laporte (01:25:17):
To have you.

Caller Jeff (01:25:18):
It's been a long time, but you know, I live in Oakland and I've, I never ventured to come up to Petaluma.

Leo Laporte (01:25:26):
Yeah, it's too late now. We've, after Covid, we closed the missed studio.

Caller Jeff (01:25:30):
I missed. Yeah, I've been

Leo Laporte (01:25:32):
Okay. Don't tell anybody. But if you let me know ahead of time and I don't just kind of sneak you in, you know, don't tell, don't tell anybody just between us. I, I sneak in <laugh>. Yeah. Because, well, we don't, you know, the reason is we don't have a security guard anymore and so, and we don't have to be manning the front desk anymore. So it really has to be kind of prearranged and, you know, we

Mikah Sargent (01:25:51):
Have a security guard. It's just a canine security guard.

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
Yeah. And she's this big, so <laugh>.

Caller Jeff (01:25:55):
Yeah, I see. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:25:57):
<Laugh>. She's not gonna protect much. What can we do for you today? Oh,

Caller Jeff (01:26:02):
So yeah. Okay. I have this annoying problem and that is my text messages. Don't tell alarm on me in particular. My wife don't, and actually sometimes they do, but my wife does it and she, you know, when she sends me five texts a row the same thing. She gets a little upset.

Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
What happens? It doesn't, it doesn't notify you.

Caller Jeff (01:26:30):
It doesn't, doesn't go ding.

Leo Laporte (01:26:32):
Doesn't have a ding. I it doesn't ding.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:36):
Yeah. What kind of device are you using?

Caller Jeff (01:26:38):
This is, oh, I'm sorry. Phone. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
And they iPhone. So they aren't coming in you. If you open up the messages app, you'll see them. Oh, they come in. It's just not notifying. They just, but it is sometimes.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:49):
You said it's sometimes though.

Leo Laporte (01:26:51):
I hate that. Well,

Caller Jeff (01:26:52):
Some some text, yeah. Some texts do. I'm not sure why, but I really wanna, I don't really care about the other ones. I just want to make sure my wife, yeah. Ding.

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
Fair enough. Honey, you didn't ding. It's not my fault you didn't ding.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:09):
So it's that intermittent thing that you're talking about. That makes me wonder because what I was going to suggest is taking a look in your contacts app and seeing if you've set up a custom ringtone or text tone for the person. Because that can make a difference.

Leo Laporte (01:27:26):
In fact, that might be a good idea to do that. To

Mikah Sargent (01:27:28):
Do. Yes. So if you're, if you're wanting to do that, you launch the contacts app, you choose edit on the contact, you scroll down and there's an option for ringtone and text tone. By default it's set to, can you guess default, but if you tap on that, you can set up a custom default. And I should also mention that iOS recently added a feature called emergency bypass. And with emergency bypass toggled on, here's what it says. This feature allows sounds and vibrations from this person, even when the ring switch is set to silent or when a focus mode is on. Oh, I like

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
That.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:02):
So you could push it through and say, I don't care what's going on.

Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
I want to hear,

Mikah Sargent (01:28:06):
I want to hear this every single time. Yeah. I also like to set up a custom vibration for people who are very close to me so that I can go, oh, I know that's a message coming in from this person. And all of that is available via the contact, the

Leo Laporte (01:28:20):
Contact app. Okay. So Yeah. Yeah. Cause so there's a couple of, the problem is there's several ways to mute those dings. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> multiple ways. There's the silencer switch, which by the way, I'm glad Apple still puts, no other phone company does that anymore. And that's sad, but it's really nice to have a physical switcher. You just switch that silent you can, I think you certainly can do it with, with phone calls, but putting it face down will mute phone calls. I suspect it might mute, mute dings as well. So don't put your phone face down. And then there's these focus Oh no,

Caller Jeff (01:28:47):
I keep,

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Yeah. Then there's these focus modes, which are really nutty. I'm, you know, I have mixed feelings about this. It used to be there was a just a do not a do not disturb. Turn it on or off. Now you got all these focus modes and all these settings. If you're willing to put the time into it, it's great. It's like when I get in the car and drive, there's a driving focus mode. So it changes how my phone behaves in the car. Same thing at home. I have my work focus mode on right now. Cause I don't want it to make any noise while I'm on the air. It does that for my calendar. So there's, if you're willing to put some time in it too, it's very valuable. But it's, but if you don't want to, and most people don't. It's ex, it's extremely confusing and a lot of the features are hidden away and so forth. My wife, every time she says, I just, I just want do not disturb on my watch. And when she puts it, she says, well, you want it for an hour, you want it for two hours. <Laugh>, you want it until you leave. You want it to, it. It's so complicated. So there are a lot of places you can look. I love this idea and I didn't even know this existed. Go into context and say, this person must always ding.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:53):
Yeah. That's, this is relatively new, this emergency bypass feature. Yeah. So I would try that for your wife and then that way you can definitely go, look, I did all of the things I was supposed to do. It's not my fault. <Laugh>.

Caller Jeff (01:30:05):
Right, right. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:30:06):
That's a good feature. I'm gonna turn that on. Lisa got you too. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Tell her Happy Mother's Day. Okay. You doing anything?

Caller Jeff (01:30:13):
Okay, I will. Hey, I have one other question.

Leo Laporte (01:30:16):
Yes.

Caller Jeff (01:30:17):
Her, her, her MacBook, M 1, 20 20. It thing about in 21 is the screen doesn't show up. It, when you open it, you can see the Apple logo when you start at the computer, but then it disappears and blank all the rest of the time. That's

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Interesting. And

Caller Jeff (01:30:45):
I took it, I took it to the Apple store. Yeah. I took it to the Apple store yesterday. Yeah. And they looked at it and they said they want $400. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
Hmm. They want that just to look at it and Yeah.

Caller Jeff (01:30:57):
No, no, no. They already looked at it and decided $400 Oh. To

Mikah Sargent (01:31:00):
Fix. Did they say what they were wanting to repair

Caller Jeff (01:31:03):
<Laugh>? No. No, I haven't, I didn't call 'em back and ask one.

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
I'd really like to know what's wrong.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:09):
Yeah. That's honestly, I would con I would suggest maybe calling them and saying, oh, you know, I'm thinking about doing this. What is it that you're gonna be repairing? And then you call us back and then we might be able to help you with whatever it is that's wrong

Leo Laporte (01:31:21):
With it. The, the un well

Caller Jeff (01:31:22):
Is if you open the screws at the bottom of one of those things is there like a,

Mikah Sargent (01:31:30):
Oh, is there a little, is there sticker inside? It's gonna break and then you can't get it?

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
No,

Caller Jeff (01:31:35):
No, no, no. There's a, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:31:36):
There's a cable. Every, every, every laptop has a ribbon cable that goes from the, the guts of it where the, you know, CPU is into the screen. That's the connection. The fact that you see the Apple logo though. Yeah. The tells me the screen is not dead.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:53):
I I really would like to

Leo Laporte (01:31:54):
It sounds like a software thing. It does. Okay.

(01:31:56):
It really does. The fir does the light. The, he's asking the light comes on. John, we don't have lights anymore. Apple. Oh, he's talking about the Apple logo on the screen. Yeah. Right. You're talking about the screen Apple logo, right? Yeah. On the M one screen, there's no lights on when you start up, there's Apple and it says way. So that tells me the screen's working. Yeah. Then disappear. Honestly, the Apple store should have done this. I would do this. Reinstall the operating system. Yeah. Yeah. That's an easy quick way to make sure that you don't have some weird setting going on. Actually, before you even do that, and this is, everybody who has a Mac should do this. When I first set up a Mac, I always create a unused administrator account. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I call it ghost in the machine, but you call it whatever you want.

(01:32:40):
But that account I never touch. And the, it's useful for diagnostics cuz if a machine's misbehaving, I want to know, is this local just to this profile, this user, or is this to the whole system? Yeah. And so what you could do is create a new account. It's better to do it when you first set it up. Do it now. If you don't have it, create a new account. Log into it and see if you could see the screen. Now it might be hard to do you have to attach an external monitor? Well just can you ex by the way? Yes. That's question. Can you attach a external monitor? Yes. And it works. Can you see the screen? Yes. Yeah. So it sounds like a hardware issue more than this. Oh. So it does work from the outside. It's weird that you see the apple, but that may be coming through in some different way.

(01:33:21):
You know, that might be the bio kind of screen or something like that. You know, I'd still, here's my problem with the Apple store. Ask them. But my problem with the Apple store, this is all modern computer techs nowadays. They swap parts. That's all they do. They don't fix anything. They just, you know, they, and Right. 400 bucks is not enough for a new logic board unless you have AppleCare. Do you have AppleCare? No, no. Not enough. So that's, so a new logic board would be more, well be probably over a thousand. So it's not the motherboard. Maybe it is just that cable. That seems like a lot, but they have to open it up and put a new one in. Yeah. if it's just that cable thing is you can't do that yourself. Probably ask 'em what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

(01:33:59):
Yeah. Find out. Okay. Have a wonderful day. Enjoy your weekend. Thanks for the question. It's a beautiful weather here in the bay area this week. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. Great to talk to you. You too. Bye. is it time I want, I think I want to get John a put John Ashley, our producer to work. All right. What do you think? Moving to more work? Yeah. He's laughing. He's laughing. So right now on Friday a new, a new video game came out and you probably, it'd be hard, you'd be hard pressed not to be hearing about this right now. It is, it is a sequel to one of the most popular franchises on the Nintendo Switch on Nintendo in general. Zelda came out, I, on the, I think it was a super n e s first. It's been around for decades. Tears of the Kingdom is a sequel to the last Zelda for the Nintendo Switch. Breath of the Wild. It is the highest rated game of all time on open critic. It's gaining rave reviews everywhere as one of the best video games of all time. And I thought, since I know you're hearing about it, even if you're not a gamer Yeah. Or you don't have a switch or you don't know about Zelda. I think this is culturally important.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:19):
I agree. Right. Let's talk about it. It's

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
Not as important. You wanna know about it as the Eurovision Song Contest <laugh>, but it's, it's up there. So I'm gonna walk over cuz one of our, one of our team members is a Zelda freak. And he is already, he's been playing it nonstop for two solid days. Let's go talk to John Ashley. I'm gonna take a walk. So you've been playing Zelda for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Zelda is now, tell correct me if I'm wrong, she's a princess. Yes. the, the, the story has changed a little bit since the beginning. In the old, in the first one, I think she was kidnapped and you had to rescue her. But now it's like she rules a, a land called high rule. And high rule has had some troubles. Oh. Lately

Mikah Sargent (01:36:05):
Just, just, just a little

Leo Laporte (01:36:06):
Bit left lately. Yeah. The mo most recently in Breath of the Wild calamity Gannon. Yep. Came along and destroyed the whole place. Knocked everything over. Yeah. And her hero link mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, who is the hero of the game had a magic sword. Just, you know, the whole thing he got, they got, they killed, almost killed him. They had to put him in a, I'm interpreting here a coma.

Mikah Sargent (01:36:32):
I mean, pretty good

Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
Interpretation for, for a hundred years. Yeah. He's sleeping. Yeah. Just getting better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we pick up the game in the, in the new one. Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah. So

Mikah Sargent (01:36:44):
This is after, this is the sequel to Breath of the Light. And

Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
It's a hundred years later.

Mikah Sargent (01:36:47):
No, no, no. It's, it's sometime after the breath of the Wild. So, okay. Yeah. So that's what pretty much happened. The first game. The second game Zelda and Link are investigating some things underneath the castle. Underneath the castle. They came across a secret. A figure that there's some things Zelda disappeared and Link got

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Zelda keeps disappearing, by the way. Yeah. I just have to point this out. <Laugh>. She is a very unreliable

Mikah Sargent (01:37:12):
Person. I wouldn't say unreliable, it's just unfortunate things have been happening to her. But

Leo Laporte (01:37:16):
Link is a constant,

Mikah Sargent (01:37:17):
Right? Yeah. I was about Europe. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:37:19):
So let's put the game up cuz I, I want people to see it. One of the things that's unique about well hold

Mikah Sargent (01:37:25):
On, hold on. Before I have to do this. So we need to get to a place,

Leo Laporte (01:37:30):
Right? Whoa, whoa. Hold on. You're way ahead of me.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:33):
Yes. Just a little bit. You're way ahead of me. I've been playing since that game came out Friday. But we need to get to a certain place first.

Leo Laporte (01:37:39):
So the thing that's Oh, you play, and I'll talk a little bit about this. The thing that, whoa, watch this. This is so cool. He's got a little glider.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:46):
Oh, I did the wrong thing.

Leo Laporte (01:37:47):
Oh. Oh, don't

Mikah Sargent (01:37:49):
I need to get falling?

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
Oh my God. Like a flying. So one of the things you're seeing by the way, is this is an open, what they call an open. Yes. And this was the big tra thing that happened with Breath of the Wild. Suddenly you had a massive universe that you could wander around and play in. And there were many puzzles, many interactions, many characters. There's this little glider that got him down safely.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:11):
And what's big about this is, this is where you can do anything. You can start anywhere you want. There's no linear structure to the game. There is

Leo Laporte (01:38:19):
An end of the game. There

Mikah Sargent (01:38:20):
Is an end of the game. Yeah. Like for example, ow for example. Oh, come on.

Leo Laporte (01:38:24):
Oh no.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:25):
Is it procedurally generated or is

Leo Laporte (01:38:27):
It It's like a minute mo

Mikah Sargent (01:38:28):
The same

Leo Laporte (01:38:29):
Map. Rusty, broad swords badly damaged. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:31):
It's the one thing with this game is

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
How much combat is There's a lot. Is there a lot? There's

Mikah Sargent (01:38:34):
A lot of combat. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
But, but you also can cook. Yes. You can build. In fact, cooking's really important because that's how you get your health.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:41):
Yeah. For example, I have some foods here that gives me like, you've been doing

Leo Laporte (01:38:44):
A lot of cooking.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:45):
Yeah. Well you spent the weekend cooking a little dubious, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
What was the dubious food? I don't, I

Mikah Sargent (01:38:52):
No, no. I mean it's, pick the latest blow out for a reason.

Leo Laporte (01:38:55):
We should point out this is available on the Nintendo Switch. What's interesting about this, the switch is just six years old. This is my switch. Don't judge me. These are the I like

Mikah Sargent (01:39:05):
That one though. This is,

Leo Laporte (01:39:05):
This is the

Mikah Sargent (01:39:06):
That's a good one though. This is the

Leo Laporte (01:39:08):
Animal game Animal, yeah. Animal crossing.

Mikah Sargent (01:39:10):
That's a, I like that one

Leo Laporte (01:39:11):
Though. And I got the animal crossing versions. Well you had

Mikah Sargent (01:39:13):
To cuz that was the only version available at the time. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:39:16):
This has been out for about six years. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, Nintendo says sales are dropping and it seems likely this will be replaced in the next year or so. Some people are saying this might be the last great game on the Nintendo Switch. What's cool about it? And you've probably seen the steam deck and Asus as a competitor. It's portable. Yeah. You can carry it around. What we've done though is you can also dock it. We've docked yours mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in the HTM I station and you've taken the controllers off. They slide right off of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you're now playing it with a regular controller as if it's like a consult game.

Mikah Sargent (01:39:50):
Yeah. So the one, the big thing with this one is you can kind of build things like in Minecraft. So what I'm trying to do right now is, this is very rudimentary and I haven't got two of our bar in this yet. Oops.

Leo Laporte (01:40:03):
I've seen people build ladders to climb up the sides of rocks.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:07):
I gotta do one thing real quick.

Leo Laporte (01:40:09):
Are you gonna build a shelter

Mikah Sargent (01:40:10):
Here? No. What I have to do first is actually

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
Wait, what are all these, are these weapons?

Mikah Sargent (01:40:15):
Yeah. I have to unequipped things or else I'm gonna get struck by lightning.

Leo Laporte (01:40:19):
Oh. So if you carry around a metal sword. Lightning.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:21):
Yeah. Anything metallic. I can get struck by lightning and die. And we don't want that.

Leo Laporte (01:40:26):
What happens when you die in this

Mikah Sargent (01:40:27):
You die and then you go back to the last say point you had. Okay. So it's not,

Leo Laporte (01:40:32):
It's not the end of the world. This is, is this a I would say this is appropriate for kids, not six year old, but maybe 10 And us.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:38):
Yeah. Anyone that pretty much probably is Minecraft could probably, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:41):
It's not, it's not a super violent game. It's Nintendo. I

Mikah Sargent (01:40:44):
Mean, it could be violent, not like blood or anything like that, but you know. So I'm trying to Are you gonna build a wagon? I'm gonna try

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Your, your car. Oh, who's that?

Mikah Sargent (01:40:55):
They have to hide and I just hit them by accident. Now you're in my way.

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
Get outta the way. Come on. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Yikes. He says you're putting a wheel on me, man.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:03):
He's in the way. I can't help it.

Leo Laporte (01:41:05):
<Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:41:06):
Again. This is,

Leo Laporte (01:41:07):
I haven't, so what's cool is this really is completely open world. There are puzzles to solve. There are enemies to defeat, there are levels. You have bosses. Yep. ultimately you're gonna want to defeat Ganon again, I guess. Yeah. So

Mikah Sargent (01:41:20):
What's great about this is comparing the first game. There are those who speed run this game and able to defeat the main, the final boss within half an hour. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:41:29):
That's no fun cuz you're missing all the cool stuff like building a vehicle. You're building a car.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:35):
I'm not quite there yet. I need something to actually propel it. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
So this does remind me of Minecraft. You have?

Mikah Sargent (01:41:41):
Yeah. No, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:41:42):
You have red stonelike things. Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:45):
Wow. Now the only problem is I Oh, two kick job.

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Is it attached?

Mikah Sargent (01:41:50):
No, I'm not attaching it to the wheel. Burke. Thank you

Leo Laporte (01:41:52):
There. Oh, it's a giant fan.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:54):
Yeah. No. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
It's a, you've made a fan boat.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:58):
There

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
We go. Look at that.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:00):
That's the problem. I can't, I don't know how to steer it. Haven't figured that out yet.

Leo Laporte (01:42:03):
<Laugh>, we haven't learned the steering wheel. Action yet.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:08):
Oh. Could you blow wind into it?

Leo Laporte (01:42:10):
What are you doing with your Oh, you turn

Mikah Sargent (01:42:12):
It on. If it works. It's not working.

Leo Laporte (01:42:14):
<Laugh>, it's not going anywhere.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:15):
No. I think I need to make it a little bit bigger. But

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
You need a bigger fan. But that was a good example of this stuff. And now it's raining, and so there's lightning. Yeah. So that's why you were worried about that. Yeah. I don't want that. Do you end up building a house in shelter or Mostly it's just wandering around and you're

Mikah Sargent (01:42:30):
Just wandering around. You're finding random not random, but like, things are keep popping up. Like there's this thing here. I don't know. What's that? I don't know. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
Gonna, this happens a lot in this game where there's a thing. No, I, you don't know what to do with it. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:41):
Yeah. Pretty much. You

Leo Laporte (01:42:43):
Looks like it was a balloon. You popped it. That's your energy level. Oh, you're so tired. Yeah. Very tired. You're running along. But

Mikah Sargent (01:42:49):
There are, yeah, like I said, there are a lot of things you can do. I'm gonna actually show a better example of some of the things you can do.

Leo Laporte (01:42:54):
You see what a big world, how it, it's not infinite, right?

Mikah Sargent (01:42:57):
No, it's not infinite. I mean, it, it is a open world game. There is a limit to like what you can explore, set by the game. Right. But I'm gonna see, I'm gonna go somewhere. This,

Leo Laporte (01:43:07):
What's interesting about this is it's kind of a kid game, but it's not. No. And a lot of adults play it, but I think it's appropriate for young, young,

Mikah Sargent (01:43:15):
I'm 33 and I'm playing this

Leo Laporte (01:43:16):
Game. Yeah. You, you've been playing it since 1996. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:43:19):
That's my first one. Yeah. 96.

Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
You were, how old were

Mikah Sargent (01:43:22):
You? I was seven <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:43:28):
And was, but the graphics had come along. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:43:30):
Miles.

Leo Laporte (01:43:31):
Yeah. This is 10 80 p graphics.

Mikah Sargent (01:43:33):
Yeah. This is 10 80 p right now, I think. I don't know what the O LD version, but Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:43:37):
Yeah. There is a newer version of this switch, which has an ole screen. It's quite beautiful.

Mikah Sargent (01:43:41):
Yeah. I'm actually gonna go in here, kind of show an example of some of the things you can do. Hopefully, I don't know which one this is, but one of the things with this game, the quest you're on. No. So one of the things with this game is there are these called shrines you can visit. Yeah. And there are different things you could do that has like a puzzle element to it. So essentially you could visit these different shrines to solve a puzzle that has like a theme to it. And for example, right here, I don't know, eight from a buck. So

Leo Laporte (01:44:04):
No, I'm figuring you don't wanna walk into that laser. Oh, all right.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:08):
We're just jumping. And Yeah. These shrines have like, different elements.

Leo Laporte (01:44:12):
There's a lot of puzzles. Some things you have to actually solve with logic, sometimes with the, in this case, dexterity. And I guess there's a little logic to that step.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:24):
Yeah. And there's little sliders. There're kind of new things you can do. For example I can ascend to this whole platform here.

Leo Laporte (01:44:31):
Oh, nice. Right through the bottom. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:34):
And then, oh oh. Yeah. See that happens.

Leo Laporte (01:44:38):
What's fun about these games is the exploration. There's a lot of it. Yeah. It's kind endless. Yeah. You could speed run it. It wouldn't be hard. In fact, if you look online, there's already guides that give you every step of the way what you need to do. But this is really more about exploring and having fun. It's not super violent. There are enemies. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I think it's really the kind of, there's something about these games that are really attractive, cuz

Mikah Sargent (01:45:04):
Oh, no.

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
Oh. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:45:05):
So I need, yeah. This is like a puzzle. You have to kind of do things kind of quickly.

Leo Laporte (01:45:12):
Can you go up through the bottom

Mikah Sargent (01:45:13):
Of that? That's what I'm doing. You

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
Can look at that

Mikah Sargent (01:45:15):
Pop

Leo Laporte (01:45:16):
Out. That's a good tool. Did you find that line on? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:18):
When you, when you get to that, when you get to that point, Leo, you'll, you'll have access one day. Leo. Someday

Leo Laporte (01:45:23):
I, when I grow up. Yeah. I will have access to the go through the bottom of a

Mikah Sargent (01:45:28):
Three. Now I've already done this one, so nothing cool happens, but I just leave.

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
Yeah. Hey, cool. John Ashley is the guy who produces this show. So this is the first time we put him on camera.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:36):
Well, on camera. But you hear me every now and then you hear him.

Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
Yeah. But it's really nice to see you. I didn't realize you were so tall. Next time I want an Apple box. Okay. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:45):
Might Good. We

Leo Laporte (01:45:45):
Have one. We have one. No, I'm kidding. It's really great. Thank you. Yeah. We I thought it'd be kind of fun to see what every, what all the noise is about. And it's a, it's a great game if you have a switch. Probably everybody who has a switch had Zelda. I mean, I know one breath of the wild came out. It was the first game I got. Yep. And I got a switch

Mikah Sargent (01:46:03):
That was the same year.

Leo Laporte (01:46:04):
Yep. And I think everybody's gonna want the new Zelda came out on Friday. Woo. Already, according to open critic, the best video game of all time. And by the way, it ain't about the great graphics. It's, it's about play. It's about the gameplay.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:19):
It's all about the experience. And I think just most people think this gonna be a good experience. The one main thing with this game, which I totally understand, is your weapons here, they have a durability to So you can use Yeah, they wear out. They wear out. Yeah. And for some people that can, you know, be a, a turnoff for the game because, you know, people like having a certain place out that they want to

Leo Laporte (01:46:38):
Sit there. Can you repair them?

Mikah Sargent (01:46:39):
You can. I I believe in this version you can repair them. You can add things to it. So for example, in some

Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
Games, you know, you as things wear out, you can bring 'em back to the forge and you know, you can fix

Mikah Sargent (01:46:50):
'Em. I'm, I'm, I haven't got that point yet. I'm sure there's a way I get You can't. But like in the previous version once it get, once a weapon is broken, it's broken.

Leo Laporte (01:46:59):
You can't

Mikah Sargent (01:47:00):
Snow fun. No. But

Leo Laporte (01:47:01):
You kinda get attached to the pink xx or the Yeah. Or the sturdy thick stick. Well,

Mikah Sargent (01:47:07):
What's kind

Leo Laporte (01:47:08):
Lots of 30 sturdy, thick sticks around though. Yes. Never have to worry about those. No. And they're actually pretty good.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:14):
Yeah. I can show an example. For example, what's great about this, what are

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
These porcupines

Mikah Sargent (01:47:18):
Don't touch 'em. No, I don't wanna touch 'em. <Laugh>. But what's great about this is you can actually attach things to weapons. Now, for example, I have a, a sore that has a rock build

Leo Laporte (01:47:25):
Things. Yeah. You can. Are there are, is there in-game merch that you can buy

Mikah Sargent (01:47:32):
In-Game merch? Probably from you're talking about within the game or, well, see,

Leo Laporte (01:47:35):
One of the things I don't like about these games is loot the loot box. Mechanics. Yeah. Yeah. Of some games. No, there's, they don't do this. And I like that about Nintendo. They don't, they don't trying to grab your money.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:45):
No. I mean, there are is downloadable content. Right. They've been dabbling that more recently, which is fine. And

Leo Laporte (01:47:50):
This is not an inexpensive game. This is a $70 game, I think. Well, this is

Mikah Sargent (01:47:54):
The first Nintendo game where it is a $70 game. Cause they actually just priced it up for this game. This is the first time they're doing this. Right. You usually be 59 point 99. Otherwise

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
Yeah, they've gone up 10 bucks on, on the

Mikah Sargent (01:48:05):
Games. Yeah. I mean, we're gonna see that with PlayStation games and Xbox Games.

Leo Laporte (01:48:07):
But you could have thousands of hours of game plans. Yeah, this

Mikah Sargent (01:48:11):
Is, or you could be like some people and beat the game within nine minutes

Leo Laporte (01:48:13):
Trying to beat it and then go back and see what you

Mikah Sargent (01:48:14):
Missed. I mean, I only think I ever beat this game in

Leo Laporte (01:48:16):
John Ashley. Go back to work. Stop playing games.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:19):
<Laugh>. No. By Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
What are you gonna do with your life? You're gonna grow up and be a game player.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:24):
<Laugh>. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you,

Leo Laporte (01:48:26):
<Laugh>. We'll let him go back to his game. <Laugh>. Does that look like fun? Would you play

Mikah Sargent (01:48:33):
That? I would play that. Now that I know that it's open world and you can make things. Those are the kinds of games I like. Me too. The crafting, me building, making. I think

Leo Laporte (01:48:42):
More and more games have exploration. A building mechanic in them, even Fortnite which is basically about shooting things. There's a lot of building going on. I think Minecraft maybe kind of established that. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:52):
They, they realized that there was something to

Leo Laporte (01:48:55):
That. Zelda. Tears of the Kingdom, the highest rated game of all time. An open critic. It's only been out for three days. Two days, really. And whoops. Let's agree to the cookies and meta critic's highest rated game of 2023. It, and I think it deserves it. It's, there's a lot of nostalgia for the character. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's part of it as well. But I think it deserves it. Let's do that video. Well, let me see. What time is it? I, you know what? Let me do one more ad. Sounds good. And then we'll do our video call. The ad is for us. This is, I call this our begging ad <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:49:32):
Here. I'll get the almonds plate

Leo Laporte (01:49:33):
<Laugh>. But actually it is really more of a pride ed for me. You've seen it. It's written on our wall in if you ever visit the studio and we sneak you in, you'll see it. Our, our mission statement, twit is dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. That's you. By offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. That's really what we're all about. That's the news shows, the help shows the how-to shows, the review shows. All of the shows we do are really aimed to build a community of tech enthusiasts and give them that information they need. Now, that's a good thing for you as an advertiser, if that's an audience you're trying to reach. I would like to invite you, my personal invitation to come to us and help us build a marketing plan to introduce your good or service to our highly qualified audience.

(01:50:28):
Now, we understand our audience better than anybody. And, and one of the things we do is we make the introduction. We don't pitch 'em. We don't, we don't trick them. When we do our ads, we talk about features and benefits. And I or our hosts, like Micah and aunt and Jason, introduce you to our audience with ads. We think really work. In fact, we have a lot of evidence. They work better than any other kind of advertising you can buy. Twit, we have host Red. They call 'em Host Red Ads. We are the tech experts. We're trusted and people know that we have a lot of integrity. We don't do ads for anything we don't believe in, we don't care about. According to Nielsen, 56% of podcast listeners pay more attention when a host does the ad. They trust us. They, they trust what we're telling them.

(01:51:17):
Right? we pride ourselves in delivering information that's relevant to our audience. 72% of our listeners have a job function directly related to technology. 87% are making it and Tech decisions, 87%. And, and, and their top earners, 66% of our audience earns over a hundred thousand dollars a year. 23% twice that. So that is together. That's 89% of our audience, over a hundred k a year. It's a highly qualified audience, but it's also an intelligent audience. And they listen to what we say and they analyze it, and they think about it. And they can be a great customer for your business. We also pride ourselves, you know, over time Lisa has built a team to take care of you as an advertiser. We really pride ourselves in what we do. We've got a continuity department second to none. Viva and Sebastian and Debbie, we've got a great sales team with Max and Ryan and Lisa.

(01:52:18):
And, and when you come to us direct, we give you benefits. Nobody else offers a full service continuity team, which will do your copywriting. They'll help you with graphics, onscreen graphics and things like that. We put our ads in. They're embedded. They're not in, they're not inserted after the fact. They're part of the show. And we make a unique ad every single time. Just like this. This is a different ad. Every single time we we over, we guarantee over delivery on impressions. You'll always get at least the impressions you're buying. Onboarding services and detailed reporting come to you free of charge. If you're a direct client, courtesy commercials are available. We make, you know, like this commercial, we can chop it up. You can put it on your socials, you can put it on your landing pages. Other free gifts like mentions in our newsletter sent out to thousands of listeners.

(01:53:12):
We've got recession bonuses, social media promotion, value ads. We like to put you on other shows too, to introduce you to a broader audience that no cost to you. It really works. You heard, just heard me do an ad for the Canary thinks Canary's founder Haroon Mir said unsolicited, by the way, thank you Haroon for this quote. We expected Twit to work well for us because we were longtime listeners who over the years bought many of the products and services we learned about on various shows, and we were not disappointed. The combination of the very personal ad reads, the careful selection of products that Twit believes in, gives the ads an authentic, trusted voice that works really well for products like ours. Thank you Haroon. He said 10 outta 10 we'll use Again. Maroon's been a gr. We've had thanks. Done for a long, long time.

(01:53:59):
They've been a great sponsor. And you know, that's one thing you'll see is a lot of the sponsors, you'll see again and again, Audible's been a sponsor for more than a decade. Why? Cuz it works. Cuz it really works. Our listeners are highly intelligent, heavily engaged, tech savvy. So if you're ready to elevate your brand, I want to invite you to visit twit.tv/advertise and launch your campaign today. It's a really I think a great opportunity to break out of the norm, grow your brand. Let us do an authentic, genuine introduction of your product or service to our highly qualified audience, twit.tv/advertise. Okay, I'm gonna put away the begging bowl. We, I, we, we, I like to do this cause I, I think I'm really proud of what we've done here and the team Lisa's built and our, and our hosts and everybody. And I, I, I I I I really want people to take advantage of that. So please. Okay. let us do the video. Did we get John Ashley away from Zelda?

Mikah Sargent (01:55:00):
I think so. I don't hear any more chimes of Rupe going into bags. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:55:06):
Let's do the video question. We got.

Caller Jon (01:55:09):
Hi Leo and Micah, I'm hoping you can help. I am looking to reduce the rate of my cell phone plan. I have had at and t for 20 years not paying a horrible amount, 60 bucks or so a month, including tax. I use about three gig of data a month. Cause I'm mainly on wifi. Keep looking at the MVNOs specific with Mint Mobile. And for some reason I'm always a little leery about going to the M V O route. Is it something I should be okay with? Also, I'm an iPhone user. Is there anything I need to watch out for features I may or may not get on the M V N O that I would get on somebody

Leo Laporte (01:55:42):
Like at and t? Great question. Did he say what his name was? John. John. John. And did he say where he was emailing from? All right, thank you John. We gotta say MIT Mobile's a sponsor. Yes. you're paying four times what you would pay at Mint Mobile for the same service. But there are caveats with MVNOs Mobile virtual network operators. These are people who buy, see, really, there are only a few nationwide cellular networks. There's T-Mobile slash Sprint, there's at and t, there's Verizon, there's US Cellular there might be one or two others, but they're only a, a handful of them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you're gonna be a Mint, you go to somebody, in this case T-Mobile and say, I wanna buy connectivity wholesale and sell it to customers retail. Now, it's interesting because you pay four times more to T-Mobile for the same service.

(01:56:38):
So there are a couple of things that they do with the MVNOs. One of the reasons that T-Mobile does is by the way, they, they, they're not trying to buy men. I, I think they, yeah, I don't think it's gone through yet, but they're trying to buy men. They've made an offer and accepted. But I think it has to, there's regulatory stuff. It's kind of like when you go to an outlet and you buy a fashion brand. The fashion brands don't wanna sell at a discount in their store because it dep they considered her, it dep it depreciates their value. Right? So Ralph Lauren either opens an outlet store or goes to some unknown brand and says, can you unload these? We've got extra shirts. That way it doesn't hurt their brand, it doesn't lower the value of their brand. It's kind of like that for an M V N O, these networks are huge and they have a lot of extra capacity.

(01:57:32):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they don't want to increase, they don't want increase the number of their customers, but they wanna sell off their excess capacity. So they do to an mvno it means you get a great deal just as you would if you went to an outlet store, you get a much better deal. In this case, you'd be paying one quarter of what you pay for exactly the same service except, and these are the contractual exceptions. And M vn O makes, when it goes to a cellular carrier, the cellular carrier says, okay, but if a, if a network node gets congested, a cell site gets congested, our customers are gonna get priority over your customers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I've never experienced this in all the years I've used Mint and other MVNOs, but in theory, if you were on a congested cell site, you might get slower bandwidth.

(01:58:19):
I I've never experienced a, a call being hung up or anything like that. I think in theory that could happen. T-Mobile will say, all right, mint. But if, if it's congested, you know, T-mobile customers get priority. So that's one thing. Again, I think it's a theoretical problem that doesn't really happen. The other problem for men is if you travel internationally, T-Mobile has a great kind of international presence. You don't pay extra for this. You're able to make calls. You're able to get data to a certain point internationally without additional cost. You don't get that with Mint. So if you're in a, if you like to travel mint's not a good choice. I can't, I think it's probably us, Canada, you should check maybe Mexico two. But you wouldn't want to go to Europe with Min, cuz you'd have to make some other arrangement. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, as far as I know, those are the only two negatives. That's not bad.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:10):
Yeah. I I will say not with Mint specifically, but I remember my grandmother using a different mvno. She

Leo Laporte (01:59:16):
Probably used the one that you StraightTalk, the one that you get at Walmart. Something

Mikah Sargent (01:59:20):
Like that. Yeah. Yeah. And the customer service center was different from the one that it actually ran on. And the customer service was subpar in comparison. So you, you want to sort of look at reviews of their customer service as

Leo Laporte (01:59:32):
Well. Mince is excellent, I have to say. Yeah. StraightTalk, which is widely sold in Walmart. And they will, by the way, they do deals with all three car major carriers. You can get Verizon, you can get T-Mobile, you can get at and t. But I ha I, I'm not sure about the Exactly. The customer service.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:49):
Yeah. It was sketchy for her.

Leo Laporte (01:59:51):
<Laugh>, was that me? That probably was me. I'm gonna mute whatever that was. So that's something to pay attention to, I think. I mean, I've used Mint for four years now without any problem. So I think that's fine. I I don't, I think you'd be happy with it as long as you understand those, those limitations. Right. that was a, that was a great question. That's a question, John.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:12):
I'm, I'm sure a lot of people wonder, well, should I switch to one of those

Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
Other options? And this is by the way, example of, you know, we sell ads for Mint, but doesn't mean, I'm not gonna be completely honest at all times about any, all of our advertisers. No, that's, that's that's part of the deal. Right. And that's what they, they want

Mikah Sargent (02:00:28):
One other thing too. A lot of them, including Mint, have offers for you to try out their service. So give it a try. Yeah. And see what you think about it. Yeah. Even before you make the switch.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
Yeah. There are a lot of them. Wikipedia. Thank you. Matthew in our chat room has given me a list of on Wikipedia, United States, MVNOs. And there are quite a few of them are public. Wireless is another one. There's some I've never heard of. Armed Forces Wireless cyst Wireless. So you could see a list here and you'll see if you go to this Wikipedia page, this is very useful. Thank you. The various issues, you know, what their caps are, things like that. International service, things like that. So that's, this is a very helpful way to choose the Vienna. You want, you got some email.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:17):
Email questions.

Leo Laporte (02:01:18):
Do some email.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:19):
Let's see about an email question. Alright. All right. Here's another fun one. This one comes from Lucas. Lucas writes I've been trying to run Linux on my HP 14 inch pavilion, specifically Manja. And I've been having problems <laugh> with frames dropping. Say that again. Is, isn't it gnome? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:38):
No, I just like how you say

Mikah Sargent (02:01:39):
It. Okay. I It's not, we don't just say Manja Manja. It's just Manjaro.

Leo Laporte (02:01:43):
Yeah. There are, there. Manjaro lets you use different desktop. We were talking about those desktop environments and No, I'm gonna, I, you know, it's spelled G N O m E. It's from the GNU people. Uhhuh, G N U. I've been saying gnome. I've heard people say, what do you say chatroom? No. Or G, aunt. What do you say? No, nom. Aunt says nom. Nom. What do you say Nom like Alaska? No. Okay. We're gonna say nom.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:08):
I like Gnm. It's

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
Funny. I like gnom too. That sounds, it's fun. I've always said gno. I like how

Mikah Sargent (02:02:12):
It feels too

Leo Laporte (02:02:13):
Omeo.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:13):
Anyway, there's,

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
It depends on you, Cano. And they, it's Cano, it's Cano, <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:18):
They've been having trouble with frames dropping on streamed videos like YouTube tried looking for answers online, couldn't figure it out, blah, blah, blah. Would love to make the switch to Linux full-time. But that's an issue that's holding them back. Is there an easy way to make video frames not drop? And how can a Linux gnu like them figure it out. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:02:37):
I'm a gnu.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:38):
So, yeah. Lucas is having frame dropping issues. Is that going to be a driver issue with their

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
Screen? Well, so one of the things, some, some distributions, some Linnux people are purists mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And they say, thou shalt not use any proprietary drivers. Everything must be open sourced. Richard Stallman of the new foundation would say, or the new foundation would say that everything must be open source. And some distributions are very finicky about that. Manjaro is an example of a distribution that gives you a choice. So when you first install it, you can install it with or without proprietary drivers. If you have an Nvidia video card, for instance, you want the proprietary drivers because the open source drivers are for Nvidia. Mm. But the, but the Nvidia drivers are very good. So you want the proprietary drivers. Pop os also gives you that option. Some, some Linux distributions are not so adamant about, it has to be open and free. So look at non-free or proprietary drivers.

(02:03:43):
I su if you make sure you have the right driver for your video card, of course it could be a bandwidth issue. But if it's only happening on Linux on the same box and you have Windows on the same box and it's not happening it could also be a bad network driver. And again, this is a really good example. There are intel wifi carts, for instance, that don't have open drivers. You have to use a proprietary driver. So it's probably a driver either for your network card, your wifi, or your video. And almost always you can fix that by just some searching around. This is where the community is really a very big help. Yes. Frankly, I would go to, there is a Manjaro forum on Reddit Reddit slash r slash manjaro. I would go there and, and be as clear and precise as you can in your description of your problem. You put up a video if you've got one, and I bet you'll find an answer very, very quickly.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:40):
Beautiful. I love this. Next question from Robbie. Robbie says, I have two kids, 10 and eight, and I'm looking for options to get them into programming. I've heard lots of benefits as well as I think it could get them an early start into a promising career path, but I don't know what language to have them learn. Are there any good books you recommend? I know they may be out of date. I've had them play with Scratch and they like it pretty well. Good. Didn't know if this is a good starting place. Yes, they're kids. So anything with sounds and bright pictures and making it like a game is best. They have a PC and we have a Chromebook and an iPad. So lots of different options, I would say with that iPad. Definitely. give them the opportunity to try. And now I'm forgetting the name of it. <Laugh>, the

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
Swift Playgrounds.

Mikah Sargent (02:05:24):
Swift Playgrounds.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
Thank you. Are really amazing. Well, in theory, you could design a program that you could actually put in the app store on Swift Playgrounds. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I think that's a good start. It's kind of like Scratch. Scratch is an excellent start. There's also something called Alice from Carnegie Mellon University. These are kind of graphical user interface programming tools. And the theory being, especially your younger child, they're probably, if it's too much text, too much typing, it's gonna be out of reach. But if it's just drag and drop and they can learn a lot of fundamental programming concepts, control structures, branching, things like that that will then transfer to a later text-based programming language. So, Alice Scratch, which is a, actually Scratch is a kind of small talk. It's actually pretty impressive. And swift Playgrounds are very good starts.

(02:06:18):
There's a wonderful book that I've recommended in the past called If Your Kids Are Playing Minecraft. This is a great book. It's called Learn to Program with Minecraft. It's from No Starch Press. I interviewed Craig when the book came out. It's a little old now, unfortunately. I wish he would update it. But it comes with a disk or downloadable software that will work with a raspberry pie to set up windows, Minecraft, and a special driver that lets you program it with Python. And then you fall along in the book. And of course it's Pi, it's Minecraft. So people, people love. I've

Mikah Sargent (02:06:54):
Used this book. Have you? Yeah. Because I thought it was such a fun way to get home. It's so cool.

Leo Laporte (02:06:58):
Yeah. So one of the first things you do is you build a bridge made outta dynamite. Yeah. And then you set it up <laugh>. It's really fun. You can actually write programs that would build a whole city. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, you, and, and what you're learning there is, oh, with programming, you break it down into small task. You build a house, you write the program, build a house, and then you repeat it 20 times. Okay, now I'm gonna build a taller house. And so forth and so on. So I really like this. It is a little old. It's probably Python two would be my guess, which is added. But Craig did a wonderful job and there are other things out there like this. Oh no, it says uses Python three. So that's good news. At least it's the up-to-date. It's up-to-date Python which is a good one. So I really like this, but I think your kids are in the right, you know, it just, swift Playgrounds is so much fun.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:48):
Yeah. And it, it's, it, it's got the visual little creatures and they walk around. You can make them dance. I mean, there's a lot that's built into it. That, and, and it's, it's a game that continues to build on itself. So they are purpose built to be these lessons. And as you learn, you kind of continue on with this character. So you feel like you're getting these achievements along the way.

Leo Laporte (02:08:07):
Let me give you the pitch for why it is a good thing for your kids to learn programming. And obviously that could be your retirement plan. If they become, you know, bill Gates, you're golden. But there's another reason. It's the same reason, you know, I remembered, you probably remember this when you were in high school. Do I have to learn algebra? When am I gonna ever

Mikah Sargent (02:08:28):
<Laugh> Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:28):
Use algebra.

Mikah Sargent (02:08:30):
Yeah. For me it was trigonometry. I'm like, yeah, why do I use

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
This? Why would I ever need to use this? Why would I, maybe I'm not gonna be a coder. Why would I? And this is the reason you learn math. And the, I think the reason to learn coding, it teaches you how to think. And that's a skill. You learn Latin, right? Yes. I learned Latin. Yes. People say, why would I ever learn language? Nobody speaks mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Because it's a foundation for all future language learning. Right?

Mikah Sargent (02:08:54):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:08:54):
And it's the same thing with math and coding. It teaches you how to take a problem, break it down, solve it in chunks, you know, really approach it. And I think it's a really valuable tool. Now, they may love coding, and if that's the case, it's the best, most fun game ever is writing your own software. There is a curriculum based on the language that one of the languages I really like called Racket for high schools. Let me see if I can find this. I interviewed the creator of this. He's at Brown University. And it's for high schools to, in a way add to the math program with a high school w with some coding involved. And they're so committed to this. They have free cla you know, classes for teachers. They have you know, congress, you know, kind of a congress every year that everybody gets together. It's incredible. And I just can't remember the name of it. Let me see if I can find it. Well, I'll have to, I'll have to do some searching. I, it, it was back in the day I did a triangulation with the creator of this. But I'm a big fan. This is for older kids. This would be later. I think if you got 'em started with these basics,

Mikah Sargent (02:10:16):
That's what get them started

Leo Laporte (02:10:17):
Once they get to a high school. If they're not learning on their own, you know, maybe this would be the I

Mikah Sargent (02:10:23):
Mean, it's the same way that teaching kids languages is so much easier than teaching those of us whose neuron, what is it? Neurotic pathways or more cement. Yeah. In place. So yeah. That's why

Leo Laporte (02:10:35):
You do it when you're a kid, cuz you have a plastic brain. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:10:39):
It's a compliment. I swear.

Leo Laporte (02:10:41):
<Laugh> oh gosh. I'm mad at myself cuz I, you know, I've quoted this many, many times and I just can't remember off the top of my head. Oh, well, it'll come to me and I'll put it in the show notes. I'll get John Ashley to put it in the show notes. But it's it, if you're a teacher, if you're, especially if you're a math teacher, this is a great way to introduce some programming into the math curriculum in high school. That really does it, it you're learning a very powerful language, very powerful tool. And it's really excellent. You got one more?

Mikah Sargent (02:11:09):
Yeah, actually, and I think this is a great question that I think will won't take us too long to answer. It says, and we don't have a name here, but it says continue to love the, oh wait, here we go. I have a Mac Mini M one it boots very fast to the login screen. Then I must sit there and wait for the computer to accept my keyboard entries. Why? Why Boot Fast just to make you wait

Leo Laporte (02:11:31):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:33):
And now I've got ant throwing up his hands in the air, which tells me that he feels the same way.

Leo Laporte (02:11:37):
T's been, t's been. How's that, how's that Mac move been going for you? I still like it. You like it right there Still bugs

Mikah Sargent (02:11:44):
Me. So I just wanna put in

Leo Laporte (02:11:45):
My password.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:46):
Yeah, almost certainly. And I, I, we'll see, I'll see the response from Ant here. It is because you're using a Bluetooth keyboard as opposed to a USB keyboard. And the problem is that the Bluetooth radio takes a moment to get going and it doesn't happen for some reason until after you get to that login screen. So I've had this happen before, and what's annoying about it is that sometimes it feels intermittent. Sometimes it seems like it connects quickly. I can log in, it's going. And I think it's all about battery preservation and depending on what cycle the keyboard is, whether it's awake and communicating with the computer and if the computer is, you know, has the radio connection back to it. And so if you really wanna be able to type something in as quickly as you possibly can, you have a Mac Mini, that means that Mac Mini is not going anywhere.

(02:12:41):
It's, it's a, it's a stationary device. So having a keyboard that's at all times plugged in is not really an issue. It's of course, different story with a laptop that's moving around with you. Of course the keyboard's already built in. That's why you don't experience it if you're using something like a laptop because the keyboard that's built into the, the laptop is not connected via Bluetooth. So you've got that direct connection. So I suggest it shouldn't have to be this way. A hundred percent agree, but plugging in that keyboard and just having that always plugged in will give you that ability to log in. For me, I'm just aware of the fact that it does this, that the Bluetooth takes a minute to connect. So I just wait for it. Basically I'll just hit that space bar a few times. <Laugh>, I'll wait a second.

(02:13:22):
Hit space bar. Hit the space bar, then I see that connection take place. I can type in my password and log in. It's annoying. I wish that the Bluetooth fired up faster. But I think it's also, I I if you looked at it in, in comparison to how some other machines will boot up, they're getting to that screen as quick as they can when if they would just let it take a little bit longer to boot and then fire up that Bluetooth radio sooner, you probably wouldn't even notice. But because it gets to that screen so fast and you're going, well, let me get to the next stage, then that's why that happens. And then this second question, and Leo, I, you've talked before about drive formats and that's why I think this is great for you to answer. The person says, I want to clone two max. Can I use the same external hard drive? Should I use an s s D to do it? And then what drive format do you recommend? And then the last question is, how do I turn determine the size of the drive needed? We'll get to that in a moment, but I want to clone to Max, I'm assuming this means that I want, they want to take everything off of two max and put them onto an external drive.

Leo Laporte (02:14:32):
There's, there's two programs. One's called Carbon Copy Cloner. A lot of people love this, but I've used for years Super duper okay, from shirt pocket software. Both of them essentially work the same way. You can get an external drive, it has to be the same size as the, well actually it doesn't, it has to be the same size as the amount of data on the internal drive. You want to back up, yeah. Bigger, we just get the same size, right? Or bigger. And then you run SuperDuper internally and it will make a bootable sector by sector copy of that internal drive on an external drive, which you can then, if you wish, store save as a backup, move to another computer. You can even use it to boot your computer. Now it's a little tricky in the more recent versions of Mac Os because they've got a whole weird process that they've done where they've part created a boot partition and a data partition. And the boot partition has to be blessed by Apple and so forth. But I think that Carbon Copy Cloer and SuperDuper have both

Mikah Sargent (02:15:35):
Figured

Leo Laporte (02:15:36):
It out, solved this. So either one would be great. They, they are the equivalent of ghosting. Norton Ghost is the, you know, program we used for years on Windows for the Macintosh. I mean, you can use, there are imaging programs that will image Macintosh, but, but Super Duper and Carbon Copy Clooney run under Mac os they know about Mac os. They're smart about it. They know about this blessing problem. So those are the two I would recommend, you don't have to worry about file format, it's just gonna make it exactly the same. Eventually everybody uses a Mac will be using the new Mac Apple file format, A P F S. And so you'll probably be using a P F

Mikah Sargent (02:16:13):
S. Yep. And as far as determining the size of the drive you need, just click on that Apple logo and the top left corner. Choose about this Mac and then choose more info. And then you can see the storage, the space that you need. But you can kind of just base it on however whatever the size is of your hard drive in total, because then you at least know that you'll have enough space. So if you've got one terabyte hard drive, even if you're not taking up all of that space, you might as well get a one terabyte external hard drive to move that too. And if you're trying to clone multiple MA does that, I don't know if Carbon Copy Cloer or SuperDuper, and you might would let me say plug it in one hard drive. I plug it into the MacBook Air, I make that copy onto that hard, that external S s D, and then I go and plug it into my Mac pro or whatever and also make a cologne. Can I have them both on that same external hard drive? Super

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
Duper wants to erase the drive, but I think there's a way to make an ISO style image. Got it. On that drive, I know there is a carbon copy cloer. Maybe this is the one to use as carbon copy clone to, by the way, download them from the creator, not from I notice Super duper is all over places like soft tonic. Don't get them from third party download sites. Get them from <laugh>, get them from the manufacturer. In the case of carbon copy Cloner, it's bomb bitch B O m B I C h.com. This has been around four. And I think they now have solved this issue of, of the A P F S file systems. Yeah. And

Mikah Sargent (02:17:50):
The weed, it's a little finicky, but if you read through everything all the popups that come up, then it, you'll see what you're supposed to do.

Leo Laporte (02:17:57):
I'm, I'm having trouble finding SuperDuper. I wonder if there's, I saw,

Mikah Sargent (02:18:02):
Saw Reccon in the chat said that he had to make the switch over to C C C to carbon copy Cloer.

Leo Laporte (02:18:08):
Oh, shirt pocket. His shirt pocket outta business is shirt-pocket.com. No, they still make SuperDuper SuperDuper 3.75 includes support for Ventura. That's what you want. It was, it got, it's got a little complicated in both cases. They're free versions and paid versions. Highly recommend them. I think we've done everything we needed

Mikah Sargent (02:18:31):
To do. I think we have

Leo Laporte (02:18:32):
Everything that was on our agenda,

Mikah Sargent (02:18:33):
Played the games. Yeah, we've answered the questions. We've taken the calls. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:18:38):
So I think it's time to say goodbye to all our family. We're so glad that you joined us this week. If you have a question or if we didn't get to you, email us. Atg twit.tv. We love it. If you send video mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or audio, you can record audio. Just do it on your phone. Do say your name and the city you're calling from, your first name and city, because we'd like to know. I don't know why I just, I have a little map's put in it. It's just the,

Mikah Sargent (02:19:03):
You should see it. It's huge. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:05):
But I, I'd just like to know again, that email address, ATG twit tv the Zoom is gonna continue next week. Call do twi.tv. We may also have a phone number. Yes, we will eventually. And I should explain that the phone number will be available all week for voicemail. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's gonna be another way that you can leave an audio message for us, which I'm excited about. We also wanna make it easy. We realize a lot of the people who used to listen to the radio show are kind of baffled by this called Twitter on tv, <laugh>. So a phone number is the easiest thing to do. So we're gonna have that. We're working on it. It's been a follow

Mikah Sargent (02:19:39):
Us on social media. We might have an

Leo Laporte (02:19:41):
Update for you. We'll, we'll promote it as soon as that number is available. If you wanna watch us live, we do do the show on the Air Live as we used to do the radio show at live. Do twit tv. There's audio and video. It's every Sunday. We start around 1111 Pacific <laugh>. Let's just say 11 o'clock. We're usually here by 11 and it takes us a little while to get going. 11:00 AM Pacific, that's 2:00 PM Eastern. That's 1800 utc. We stream until about one 30 Pacific time, four 30 Eastern time. And we love getting calls in that live timeframe. If you're watching Live chat with us, live at IRC dot TWI tv. And don't forget, club twit members get extra special access in our club Twit Discord. They can watch live they can talk to us live. And we are even, we haven't set this up yet, but I would like to also add the ability for them to ask us questions directly during the live show.

(02:20:33):
The, the Club Twit really helps us keep this show on the air and all the shows you do, including Micah's, hands on Mac, hands on windows with Paul Throt. We just ant just did a great ask me anything with my friend Alex Wilhelm. We do lots of special events. Our community manager, aunt Pruitt's done a great job there. And that $7 a month helps us keep our shows on the air and develop new ones. We just launched this week in space out of the club. Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson is Back thanks to club members. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get special shows we don't put out in public. You get access to the Discord. I think that's a great deal. It's seven bucks a month if you wanna join. We've got individual memberships, family memberships, and corporate memberships, all at twit tv slash club twit after the fact.

(02:21:16):
Even if you're not a Club TWI member, you can download free versions of the shows ad supported at our website. Twit Do TV slash atg. Yes. Tech guy labs.com still works. Or, and when you're there, by the way, at the website, you can subscribe. There's a link to all the different big name podcast applications, but also you can search for it in any podcast application. Look for ask the tech guys. That way you'll get the current show, not the tech guys show, because that's not getting updated. Actually it's the same feed. I think it's same feed. Same feed. So actually you could look for the tech guy as well and subscribe. And that way you'll get it automatically. One air for it's done. You like dope shoes? You like the shoes? Yeah. These are the old screensavers shoes. I thought I'd wear them to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Screensavers and All for help. Thank you Micah. Sergeant, thank you. Love doing this show with you. I missed you last week.

Mikah Sargent (02:22:09):
I'm happy to be back.

Leo Laporte (02:22:10):
But I want you to go home, <laugh>, and I want you to bring all your batteries with you. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:22:14):
<Laugh>. Just as an experiment. Let's just to see that's why I'm going home. Truly, as I can attest, the Lithium ion <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:22:21):
We thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time and ask the tech guys