Ask the Tech Guys Episode 2004 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys Coming up. Scott Wilkinson will tell us how the Christmas Tuba Festival went and talk a little bit about streaming channels and how to get them.

0:00:12 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Micah Sargent, and I give you the answer for what you do when one of your family members wants to leave the iCloud family sharing nest.

0:00:19 - Leo Laporte
And then Samuble Zammett, our car guy, answers the question why can't I just change the battery on my electric vehicle? It's all coming up next on Ask the Tech Guys.

0:00:32 - Sam Abuelsamid
Podcasts you love.

0:00:33 - Caller 1
From people you trust.

0:00:36 - Leo Laporte
This is Tweet. This is Ask the Tech Guys with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2004,. Recorded Sunday, december 10, 2023. Stringy floppy Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Discourse, the online home for your community.

Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Visit Discourseorg slash Tweet to get one month free on all self-serve plans. And by our friends at ITProTV, now called ACI Learning. Keep your IT team skills up to date with the speed of technology. Visit goacilarningcom slash Tweet, but, listeners, you'll get up to 65% off an ITPro Enterprise solution plan Depends on the size of your team, so complete the form and find out how much you can save at goacilarningcom slash Tweet. And by Cash Fly, delivering rich media content up to 159% faster than other major CDNs. Join Cash Fly, the world's fastest CDN. Your website visitors will love Cash Fly's lag-free video loading, hyper-fast downloads and friction-free transaction processing. Learn how to get your first month free at cashflycom slash Tweet. Hey, hey, hey, happy holidays. It's time for Ask the Tech guys. Welcome back. I'm Morticia, thank you. Hello, leo La Porte. Thank you, it's good to be back. You did three shows without me. I did. I apologize. First of all, my bad. I hate it when people say my bad. That's a way of not really taking responsibility.

0:02:26 - Mikah Sargent
Oh my, bad, my bad. I don't think it's something you apologize for, though I apologize, but thank you.

0:02:32 - Leo Laporte
Time to be. And did you have fun without me? I had fun Without the old guy. We had fun, ok, good. Yeah, for the most part I had fun too Good. I got my brain rewired, so we'll see if it works had a wonderful, wonderful time. And because it is Hanukkah it is the second day of Hanukkah I am wearing my Clippy, very cute Windows ugly Hanukkah sweater.

0:02:58 - Mikah Sargent
From this was the one from last year's Microsoft. Yeah.

0:03:02 - Leo Laporte
This year, apparently, was not ugly, and so no, forget about it, forget about it. You have one as well, which is weird, but I think it's wise that we don't wear it at the same time, because we ain't the double mint twins, kids, Double your flake. So this week boy.

There was so much excitement going on Wednesday or Tuesday, rather on Mac Break Weekly, because the company Beeper that has made in the past a compatible iMessages tool for Android users but its tool wasn't great because they had to run a Mac many in their operations center and you had to give them your Apple login and they were logged into it on this Mac in their computer room and it felt wrong.

0:03:49 - Mikah Sargent
The security implications were not great.

0:03:50 - Leo Laporte
It felt wrong, so they found. So it turns out there was this, apparently a 16 year old high school kid who wrote a Python who somehow reversed engineers Apple's authentication server and wrote a Python script, which he posted on GitHub, that let you log in as if you were an iPhone, even though you're not. You're on an Android device. Beeper immediately released it as Beeper Mini and offered a seven day free trial of Beeper Mini, which I installed right here, and before the seven day trial ran out, apple cut it off yesterday. Yeah, didn't take long.

0:04:27 - Mikah Sargent
I was surprised at how quickly it got cut off and that Apple was able to differentiate, because that was one of the early things, right, that they claimed that you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. So you interviewed Medjikowski on your show on Teed Tech News Weekly yeah.

0:04:41 - Leo Laporte
What did he say? He's the guy who founded Beeper, who came by the way, has good credentials. He started Pebble yeah.

0:04:49 - Mikah Sargent
So he knows what he's doing and an investor, so he was, even at that point, still feeling very positive about the whole thing. Yeah, on Thursday. So on Thursday he explained that they had actually worked over the summer with this 16 year old developer and had been working on Beeper Mini for some time to actually get it out, because, basically, I asked about the differentiation between what that script was doing and what Beeper was adding to the plate, and they had their own background network that was helping with the push notification side of things, and they felt very positive about it. The party line, so to speak, seemed to be hey look, this is something that makes it better for everybody, for both Apple users and for Android users. This is something that is obviously something the company would want, because they care about privacy, and I really tried to get into the weeds in talking about what could possibly happen. Were they prepared for Apple to shut this down? And Mijakovsky did not want to answer that question.

0:05:50 - Leo Laporte
They implied that Apple couldn't shut it down because if they did, it would break their own authentication for their users. I was skeptical. On Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly we talked about it. I said there's three things, three issues for Apple. Can they technically do it without damaging their existing users? Should they do it? And well, enough people use Beeper Mini that Apple even cares. And if they do it, are they willing to take some heat for being monopolistic? Because, in effect, this is saying no, we're keeping now. I also suspected that Apple would play the security card and which is reasonable.

0:06:25 - Caller 2
Exactly what they did.

0:06:26 - Leo Laporte
Which is to say, if we're gonna let just any old people log into authentication servers. That's insecure. Here's Apple's statement. I'll read this in a suitably Apple-y voice At Apple, we build our products and services with industry leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.

Okay, so they played the card. That's playing it hard. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials. They were not fake. They were my real Apple credentials In order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques pose significant risks to user security and privacy You're a mean one, mr Cork including the potential for metadata exposure oh, bum, bum, bum, bum and enabling unwanted messages, spam and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

So apparently, apple did have a way of turning it off, which doesn't surprise me. Come on right. Of course they did, and they played the security card which they're hoping with the EU, which, by the way, the EU and the Digital Markets Act is going back and forth on whether to force Apple to be interoperable, whether to force Apple to allow Android devices to log into Apple's messages. The EU, by the way, it looks like, are gonna say no, you don't have to Apple, because this happened this week, by the way, they said Apple is not prominent enough in business Apple Messages are not prominent in business to have to make that threshold of I can't remember what it was 50 million users to make it be a requirement that they be interoperable. So they were gonna let Apple off the hook, which Apple probably went whoo, whoo, whoo. So, no surprise, they've disconnected it. Now I have sent you. I sent you a couple of messages.

0:08:17 - Mikah Sargent
And they did go through. At the time I thought that this would take longer. I knew that eventually it would get down. I thought it would take longer. I was surprised. I'll be honest, I thought I was surprised at how quickly it happened. But I have to say there is one part that I agree with Apple on, in the aspect of thinking about how easy it would be to suddenly use iMessage to sign up a bunch of accounts and spam people over iMessage. That is annoying, and I am able to at this moment separate out those messages and at least kind of relegate them to a spam folder. But if they are blue bubbles, does that change? So I'm glad that that's not the case.

0:08:55 - Leo Laporte
I just don't know. Anyway, I said this last message, which you have yet to receive. If you're reading this, beeper is working again. Yeah, did not get that and notice it says failed to look up on server. Look up request is, I think, denied is what it says. It get cut off, so it's, and it hasn't succeeded in going again. So I don't. And they and Midget Cops. He says we're working as hard as we can to get it back. They're not gonna ever get it back. What could they do.

This was just a big ad, if you ask me. They knew this wouldn't last. This was a big ad for Beepercom, so you'll use their service, which I do not recommend because you're putting your credentials on their server and I don't trust them. Eric, you're a nice guy, but no one should trust a third party with their Apple credentials period. Now I use a tool and I would recommend this. It's only good if you have a Mac. You can leave on all the time, but it's open source. It's free. There's no subscription. By the way, I think the $2 a month subscription is what Apple really is.

0:09:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that which is, I think, fair. You can't use their technology and make money off of it and use a 16 year old's idea and like that yeah, we'll give you $2 for this idea.

0:10:08 - Leo Laporte
So Air Message, which you can look up, it's free, it's open source. You run it on a Mac. I'm running it on my Mac Studio, which is always on any way at home. It becomes a server and now I can do it on Android, I can do it on Windows. In fact, I sent you a message from a Windows machine.

0:10:23 - Mikah Sargent
That's right, yeah, using.

0:10:24 - Leo Laporte
Air Message. Using Air Message. It's a regular bubble. What is it blue? It's a blue bubble. It's a blue yeah.

0:10:29 - Mikah Sargent
It essentially is using the automation controls on your Mac.

0:10:35 - Leo Laporte
Basically, the Mac Studio is what's sending it? Yeah, because it has access to messages legitimately Yep and Apple. This has been around for at least a year and Apple's never said word one about it.

0:10:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I mean. In that case it's quite literally just you using your own system to do it, so it's secure in the same ways it would be.

0:10:52 - Leo Laporte
You know, if you're not using it, you're not letting anybody else have your credentials. I think it's a good solution. The drawback is you have to have a Mac that you're willing to leave on all the time. Yeah, and there's one other advantage Beeper. As we started using some drawbacks to Beeper, you couldn't, for instance, make it your primary Android messaging app. Oh, so that means it's just like Telegram or WhatsApp, it's just another messaging app. That's not a huge improvement. Air Message you can use as your primary messaging app. It could be your default messaging app, which means you don't. You know now is how you message people, and it'll use SMS with the Android and it'll use. It's really a great system. It'll use messages with iPhone people, so anyway, wha, wha, that goes, beeper Mini.

Wha, wha. No, I can't no surprise. The only thing I thought Apple might slow down is because it is kind of admission that, yeah, we want a monopolistic control of the but it is their product, right, right At the end of the day.

0:11:57 - Mikah Sargent
their product, their servers, it all is that's. The other thing is I learned through this that Apple uses its Apple push notification service. Apns is the means of sending iMessages to. It's all baked into one thing, so those push notifications is push notifications that you get on your phone for other things are also for the iMessage service, and so, in that way, suddenly having a bunch of other accounts that aren't from devices that you purchased from the company and subscriptions that you're making through the company, all using APNS that's another aspect of it, and then the other company's making money off of something that Apple is then losing money on, it was never gonna fly.

0:12:42 - Leo Laporte
Apple is gonna do RCS. I believe them when they say they're gonna do that. That's the rich communication service that Google has been promoting. It's not a Google tool. They did buy the company. That kind of provides a back end for it, but phone companies can have their own RCS server. So it's an open standard and once Apple supports that, you won't be able to be a blue bubble unless you have an iPhone. You'll still be a green bubble, but it'll have secure messaging with many of the features of Apple's messages with Android folks and it'll interoperate with Google's own messages or Samsung's messages. So I think that that's really a good solution. Everybody should be satisfied with All right. Oh, here's an interesting one. You know cameo, I do.

0:13:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I've actually purchased one in the past. Yeah, I have too.

0:13:29 - Leo Laporte
Your favorite person from the office, the woman who set her hair on fire. What's her name? Meredith.

0:13:35 - Mikah Sargent
But I can't think of her name. She's on there.

0:13:41 - Leo Laporte
So is.

0:13:42 - Mikah Sargent
Frodo, elijah Wood. I'm sure that's a very expensive one.

0:13:46 - Leo Laporte
So are other people like Hank from Breaking Bad, the DEA guy Turns out Russian propaganda operation. A troll factory used cameo to get those celebrities and others oh dear To record a cameo that implied that Zelinsky, the president Zelinsky of Ukraine, had a drug problem in his rehab. They didn't say it outright, but they said the sentence is that the bad guys needed to edit together To put it together.

0:14:20 - Mikah Sargent
Okay.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
So one of the videos, a crudely edited message by Elijah Wood Frodo to someone named Vladimir, references drugs and alcohol, saying I just want to make sure that you're getting help. Oh no, you know, of course Elijah Wood thought it was like legit and you know he also got whatever $180. So Mike Tyson did it, steve Norris is Hank from Breaking Bad, john C McGinley of Scrubs and Kate Flannery.

Kate Flannery that's right Of the office. Priscilla Presley did one. A representative for Priscilla Presley said her video had been submitted through cameo but it was not intended to be addressed to Zelinsky or have anything at all to do with the Russia-Ukraine war. Oh yes, we realized that? Of course not, so I just thought that was a kind of funny little hack.

0:15:10 - Mikah Sargent
It makes you wonder you know how these stars are going to look at future cameos.

0:15:16 - Leo Laporte
So I was thinking of doing cameo, but then I realized how humiliating it would be when nobody would.

0:15:21 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, if you didn't get one, oh great.

0:15:23 - Leo Laporte
Who's this guy? What? Oh lovely, so I'm not going to do that.

0:15:28 - Mikah Sargent
Man. But now I'm thinking about the potential for what essentially would be sort of you would, depending on your name and what you put in, you may not get the cameo that you wanted and it just so happens that you have a name that they're all being afraid of at that moment. Does that make sense? Like I worry about the discrimination that could be involved with that going forward because the star would go.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
It's risky, right? Oh, I bet. Another message for this person, now that we know that this is going to happen that's risky. Oh. And finally, I don't know, did you see Google's incredible Gemini video? Good story, wow, I mean. Can you imagine? Let me play a little bit of it, because it's so impressive. It makes you think. I don't common color for ducks, however there are some breeds of blue ducks.

0:16:13 - Scott Wilkinson
The voices is the AI. These are typically not as common as other duck breeds.

0:16:16 - Leo Laporte
And so a guy's drawing and interacting with it. Here he's doing the cup game, the cup to the left, and it, of course, correctly identifies. So it's now it's going to play a game. I know what you're doing. You're playing rock paper scissors. Okay, except what do you see? As impressive as this was and by the way, we watched it this week in Google, it's here Probably gasping yeah. It's here, agi's here, it's over. The goodbye humans. Yeah, maybe not so fast. Google admits yeah, well, that was just, it was imaginary.

0:16:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they completely made it up so the rock paper scissors is an example.

0:16:55 - Leo Laporte
So they said Because if you just do this to an AI, it doesn't know you're playing a game. It's a peace sign, right? It doesn't know.

0:17:05 - Mikah Sargent
Depends on how you hold it.

0:17:07 - Leo Laporte
So they actually in the prompt. First of all, all of this was done in a text prompt.

0:17:10 - Mikah Sargent
It was done in a text prompt.

0:17:11 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't done by speech. It wasn't done by speech With still frames, it was done by pictures and they said it's a game and they had to give it a couple of pictures before it went. Oh, you're playing rock paper scissors. This is essentially fake.

0:17:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

0:17:27 - Leo Laporte
It's wrong. It could sort of do it in if you gave it more prompts and more information and took your time and gave it stills. All it said in the YouTube video is this has been edited to compensate for latency, but Google admitted.

0:17:44 - Mikah Sargent
Which is the frustrating thing about that is the damage is already done. You during the present, which I understand is the point, but I don't like that a large company like this did that, that after the fact, after the eyes were on the show, and then may not hear that it was all faked. That's when they admit that it was not what it looked like and the voice was reading a script, mm-hmm.

0:18:11 - Leo Laporte
When I asked about the video by Bloomberg opinion at Google spokesperson at least they admitted it right Said yeah, we lied. No, they said using the image. The video is made using still image frames from the footage and prompting via text. It's just not, anyway, not cool. No, I don't think it's cool at all. Hey, my bad. No, the other is, you know, it didn't want to scare you. So Google here's the problem.

Google got completely scooped by open AI and an effect Microsoft and freaked out. And they have been rushing ever since with Bard, and now Gemini is supposedly a new model that goes into Google's Bard, and they're desperate to show you that. Oh no, we got this and everybody is. By the way, so is Yanlac Kun at Facebook, so is the, so are the guys at Apple. Everybody said oh no, oh, oh yeah, because it's true that everything open AI does is kind of open knowledge. There've been papers. They're just using technology. Everybody knows papers written so forth. They just have been working on it longer than anybody, and these other guys kind of, oh, leisurely, we're working along. That's just really annoying and I have to say shame on you. Do you still do this?

0:19:28 - Caller 3
Yeah, shame, shame on.

0:19:29 - Leo Laporte
What does that mean? I'm rubbing my index finger across my other index finger. We'll have to someone will tell us.

0:19:36 - Mikah Sargent
Where did that come from? What am I scraping off?

0:19:38 - Leo Laporte
I feel like you know it's probably a medieval anti-hex witch, hex kind of a. Anyway, I'm sorry, I did that. If it scared you Forget it.

0:19:47 - Mikah Sargent
I know what you're doing. You're saying shame on me, shame on me. That was Google, bard.

0:19:53 - Leo Laporte
Was it? Yeah, if you do this to Google Bard, see what it says. I know what you're doing. Yeah, I'm sorry my bad. All right, let's. What should we do? John Ashley boy producer. What?

0:20:04 - Caller 4
should we do? Maybe we should take a quick break first.

0:20:07 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we've decided we're gonna, because he. How old are you, John?

0:20:10 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know who's producer boy.

0:20:12 - Leo Laporte
How old You're in your.

0:20:13 - Mikah Sargent
You're in your 30s right. I am a number.

0:20:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he's at his 30s, I'm gonna guess, but he looks very young and boyish and cute. I'm saying this out of love, ja, and I just also think it's pretty funny because you're like, you know, you're like the boy wonder Robin.

0:20:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, robin, that's my Superman. All right, Did you just say to your Superman? Yeah, I was about to say, now you're trolling. No, let's take a quick break while you all write emails to Leo about the history of superheroes.

0:20:46 - Leo Laporte
Our show today, oh you know. So I took a week off and I let the discourse our community run without my help. Paul Holder, who's a great guy, has been helping out. He's monitoring, but I'm so impressed how well Twitter community survived my absence. I went back in. There was great conversations going on.

Community is what we do. That's what podcasting's all about. It may be important to your business too. You should take a look at the software we use and highly recommend for your community. It's called Discourse. Ask the Tech Guys. It's brought to you by discourse D-I-S-C-O-U-R-S-E. It's the online home for community.

John O'Bacon told me about it. I did a triangulation with him years ago. He said you don't have a discourse. I said no, should I? He said, oh, yeah, he was absolutely right.

For over a decade, discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities. Discourse it's open source that was important to me Trusted by more than get this 20,000 online communities, including some of the largest companies in the world, because it's robust, it's secure, it's reliable and it really works. It's more than just a forum. Yes, you get the power of discussion, but you also have real-time chat. They now have AI built in which is great for summarizing things like that. Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations, to collaborate with your community anytime, anywhere. It's a real boon to us. If you, as a business or an individual or a family or a charity or a club, are ready to create a community, we're gonna get you one month free on all self-serve plans when you go to discourseorg slash Twitter. It's great. The basic plan is for a private, invite-only community. Great for a club, an organization, a family or just people who wanna kind of talk together. Right? A standard plan is available if you want unlimited members and a public presence. There's also a business plan, which is great for active customer support communities. Lot of companies use discourse. Now that I kind of know what to look for when I see a discourse site, I'm blown away by how many companies use discourse for their customer support. One of the biggest advantages to creating your own community with discourse is, of course, you own your own data. You always will have access to all your conversation history. Discourse will never sell your data to advertisers. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make discourse the online home for your community. Visit discourseorg slash Twitter to get one month free on all self-serve plans. That's discourseorg slash Twitter.

Our phone number I forgot to mention, that's right, shame on my dad, shame on you, yeah, shame on me is 888-724-2884. That is the number. See, I remembered that after a whole month away. I remember that you can also calltwittv. If you do that, that's gonna be a Zoom call. We like to see your shining face Do that on your phone. And we do get a lot of emails. In fact, I have an email from my son, which one ATG at twittv. You said you actually knew the answer, so you better.

0:24:01 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that's what I thought you were talking about.

0:24:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll answer that we have a little family crisis that you're gonna help out with, okay, michael, my stepson, lisa's son. He's just turned 21. And he wants to take control of his phone. He wants to take it back, so we'll talk about that in just a bit. So what should we do? John Ashley, who should we start with? You get to pick.

0:24:28 - Scott Wilkinson
Me pick. Oh sorry, he's not ready. I was ready.

0:24:34 - Caller 3
I thought, you were a pickup, I'm gonna pick us Douglas, because his hands up.

0:24:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, how about that?

0:24:39 - Mikah Sargent
It's been three weeks since you've been on the show. It's been three weeks since I've done this show. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do do do, do, do, do, do, do.

0:24:47 - Leo Laporte
Do you don't remember lyrics either, do you? No, don't remember lyrics. One cotton pick and bid Douglas has his kitty cat. I don't. Maybe he doesn't still have his kitty cat. Yeah, she ran away. Oh yeah, of course, that's the way it is with cats. As soon as the camera's on, it's like oh no, no, sorry, not today, not today.

0:25:04 - Caller 2
That was our newest kitten, loki oh Loki.

0:25:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, are all your cats named after Marvel comic universe characters?

0:25:12 - Caller 2
or North Stadies. No, we have. We have Starbucks, oh, from Battlestar Galactica yeah, Chewie Chewie from Star Wars.

0:25:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and Linux I don't know where that comes from. I love it. The nerdy cat names those are very good.

0:25:31 - Caller 2
She was a black and white tuxedo stray that we caught, and as soon as I saw her, I mean her Linux, both our cats are tuxed, it's got a little flame on her forehead. Mike has seen her on the on one of the days. Hey, what's today? Nice?

0:25:49 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, that's right yeah.

0:25:51 - Caller 2
Pet tax. That's right, he was the one who would sit up for the treats.

0:25:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, okay, that's wonderful.

0:25:58 - Leo Laporte
Well as we know, linux performs beautifully. So, what can we do for you, Douglas?

0:26:04 - Caller 2
Somebody wanted to know what the definition of an open source cat is. I said she'll eat anything. I love it. She's 10 now and she's gone from being a frail little two pound kitten that we found to being a fat princess.

0:26:19 - Leo Laporte
So now she's desktop Linux.

0:26:21 - Caller 2
Yeah, as I said, she's a princess, not a queen, because she and you spoiled her. Yeah, I've spoiled her, my son said, because she queens have jobs.

0:26:32 - Mikah Sargent
So oh, I see, yeah, but the princess just hangs out.

0:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Dogs have masters, cats have servants.

0:26:42 - Caller 2
Cats have staff Staff. So I actually had two questions, one of which I'm pretty sure you're not going to be able to answer. But I'm trying to log into a Gmail account, an old Gmail account, as a matter of fact, it's so old that I bought the name on. I bought the invite on eBay. Oh, I remember that those days.

0:27:01 - Leo Laporte
yeah, how much did you pay? I just had a curiosity. You remember I think $5.

0:27:06 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, okay.

0:27:08 - Caller 2
So I'm trying to log in. I got the password right, but then it comes to a sign where it says we're going to text you a code. Right, and it's got the right number, but I never get the code.

0:27:19 - Mikah Sargent
So it has that you recognize the number that it says it's going to send it to.

0:27:23 - Caller 2
Yeah, the last two digits are right, oh okay, there are other recovery processes, yeah. I've tried that. It doesn't really matter. It's nothing I really ever use, yeah, but I understand.

0:27:33 - Leo Laporte
So very important when you have a Gmail account or any Google account, that you give it the recovery, a number of recovery methods. Usually an email it's not that Gmail address is good and also a phone number and of course, I hear this a lot which at least you still have the phone number A lot of people. Well, that was 10 years ago. I don't still have that phone number.

0:27:54 - Mikah Sargent
I would. There are a couple of things that I would do. First, I would check to see if you have whatever your carrier is. Go to your carrier's website and see if you've got some sort of spam blocking or other sorts of protection. Sometimes those can be enabled automatically as well.

Every once in a while, what happens is a service will be reported as spam and then it's not, and then the company ends up blocking it. Highly unlikely, because this is Google, but just in case. Also, depending on what device you're using, make sure that you're not using some sort of SMS filtering system. And you know an app that you set up. Okay, yeah, if you've got RoboKiller or Haya or any of those, those will sometimes block those numbers by accident. And then the other thing I'm curious about is depending on whether this was a business account or a personal account, and whether or not you've done anything on the account in the last two years. Yeah, I have. You have or have not, have not. Okay, so on Friday, as actually two weeks ago now, two Fridays ago Google started removing accounts that had not been used in two years. Oh, do you think that that's what happened?

That's why that's one of the reasons why I was talking about it, yeah, and two Fridays ago. What's interesting, though, is that you are getting pushed forward in the process, so I don't think that the account is gone, given that it's getting you to that point, but it would just say who are you?

0:29:27 - Sam Abuelsamid
You know, this is an login.

0:29:28 - Mikah Sargent
The thing is that Google said that they are not allowing those you know emails to be used at all anymore once they're shut down, which is fair, because you don't want somebody to take them over.

So in that way would it necessarily say oh, this isn't an account that you can't register. Okay, those are a bunch of different things that you can try, with the last one just being an awareness that maybe the account has been deleted and it hasn't, you know, sort of gone all the way through the process Like it's in process of being removed.

0:29:59 - Caller 2
And I have something to show you. Okey-dokey. Two weeks or a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Vintage Computer Festival flea market.

0:30:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look at all those Commodores. Holy cow, did you buy one?

0:30:17 - Caller 2
No, no, no, no, no Good. There was a lot of stuff for sale, though, because, like there was a bunch of Apple IIs, even an Atari 400.

0:30:25 - Leo Laporte
Probably from a school. Oh, I would have bought the 400. That was my first computer. Wow, look at that.

0:30:31 - Caller 2
That runs on AA batteries, I think.

0:30:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that is the Model 100. That is very famous. Yeah, I love that. I had a Model 100. Those are great computers. That's the Radio Shack Model 100.

0:30:43 - Caller 2
Used by sportswriters all over America during it was the first kind of portable, and this was their table of people selling all sorts of computer cards. Oh, where is this. I want to go. This was in.

0:30:55 - Leo Laporte
New Jersey. Wow, this looks like the MIT flea market. This looks spectacular. Yes, the vintage.

0:31:00 - Caller 2
They hold this twice a year. This was the Vintage Computer Federation that would be worth flying out to go to. It's basically like a whole parking lot was full of stuff. Holy cow what is that thing? It's a 3-com, audrey.

0:31:14 - Leo Laporte
That was the kitchen computer.

0:31:16 - Caller 2
Yeah.

0:31:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:31:18 - Mikah Sargent
It looks like it belongs in an emergency room.

0:31:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was designed. It was a silly idea that never flew, but that's frankly. These are classics. What is that?

0:31:28 - Caller 2
Oh, that's something. This is an Atari portfolio.

0:31:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I remember that yeah.

0:31:35 - Caller 2
It's actually a 386 computer, right, I looked it up when I got home.

0:31:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the portfolio, wow, that's kind of amazing.

0:31:44 - Caller 2
Some books like 6502, Professional Development System, Controlling Things, Timex and Claire.

0:31:50 - Leo Laporte
You know somebody's clear. It's either a widow clearing out her basement or somebody who really has saved all these years. I mean that Atari 400 is 30, almost it's more than 40 years old. Yeah, so somebody's had it all that time and finally got rid of it. I might fly out to New Jersey for the when's the next one? I want to see that.

0:32:12 - Caller 2
I don't know. You have to check their website, VCF.

0:32:15 - Caller 3
That is so cool.

0:32:20 - Caller 2
They're having a weekend thing in April, I think, where they have people come in and present and they demo all their stuff. Wow, they have all these different computers. That is so neat. I have to tell a story. I was at a local big garage sale huge garage sale for charity, and sitting in a box in the electronic section, still in its foam, still all wrapped in plastic, was a Coleco computer.

0:32:50 - Leo Laporte
The Coleco used something they called. It was a cassette tape. They called it a stringy floppy.

0:32:57 - Caller 2
This wasn't the Coleco game, this was the Coleco computer, coleco Adam.

0:33:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the Adam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that did not sell well at all.

0:33:05 - Caller 2
It was all still in the original boxes with the plastic and everything, and I walked by it thinking what am I going to do with that? The guy behind me grabbed it. He wound up paying $15 for it Wow.

0:33:15 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's the problem.

0:33:16 - Caller 2
I thought there were $300.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. I guess if you were you know eBay adept, you could buy all this stuff and sell it to hardcore fans.

0:33:26 - Caller 2
The following year I was smart enough. There was a box that had a flight yoke and pedals in it.

0:33:32 - Caller 3
Oh now that item.

0:33:34 - Caller 2
I grabbed them and I paid $10 for them. I brought them home and I looked them up to get the drivers for them and found out they were worth almost $400.

0:33:41 - Leo Laporte
Wow yeah, they're not. Probably not USB. They might be like PS2 or serial.

0:33:45 - Caller 2
No, they are.

0:33:46 - Leo Laporte
USB. They were oh well, that's really. Yeah, you got a good deal, yeah, wow.

0:33:52 - Caller 2
So the other thing I was going to share with you was I heard you talking on this week in Google about you're talking about Starlink and you were talking about the fact that you pay $60 for fiber internet. Well, it's $15 everywhere, leo. Huh, it's not the same everywhere. No, I know how much do you pay. My internet service provider was charging me for a 300 meg connection $235, which is three times the national average.

0:34:24 - Leo Laporte
That's outrageous. Who's the provider? Is it cable vision Optimum online?

0:34:27 - Caller 2
Optimum. So I called them up and complained and they immediately lowered it to $90.

0:34:33 - Leo Laporte
You were paying the historic rate for suckers. I hate that.

0:34:38 - Caller 2
Well, I've also told them there's another internet company that's been building out. That's the key. That's the key. Competition is the key. Yeah, they're waiting for to get permission from Verizon to use the polls. Yeah, and I suspect they said Verizon has been dragging their feet. Of course they have. They charge $110 a month for one gig internet. We've talked a lot we're getting ready to go up. What's that?

0:35:04 - Leo Laporte
We've talked with our friend from SonicNet. He has a license plate that says Linux. You two should get together. But Dane, what's this, jasper? Dane, jasper has told us that's the biggest problem is getting access to the polls, because the telcos, you're the natural competition. So he actually, in our town, has been laying fiber underground. They dug to you, john, they dug a trench when we got fiber at the old place. They dug a trench because they can't get on the polls.

0:35:34 - Caller 2
Yeah, they've been doing that here. They have a ditch which um that's exactly, but the thing is that um, verizon doesn't really offer internet in our town. They thought they've rising has been rolling out. Someday, they know they are they offered DSL. That's it, yeah, got it.

0:35:49 - Leo Laporte
That's why that's their thinking we don't want any competition, just in case. Yeah, plus, you might have to. You might, we might not be able to charge as much for our crappy DSL If you could get $60 fiber.

0:36:00 - Caller 2
So I don't know if you.

0:36:01 - Mikah Sargent
I want you on my poll yeah.

0:36:03 - Caller 2
But they said Verizon has said that they're not going to roll out Fios anymore in New Jersey because New Jersey has refused to pass laws against community Internet. Yeah so, but that's. I had to call. Just tell people. If you're not happy with your rate, call up. I didn't even have to threaten to leave and they lowered my rate. Always do that. I've already told this this other company, planet Networks, that I will have beer and cookies for the guys that come to do my installation, you bet, and they can put a sign on my lawn anytime they please.

0:36:39 - Leo Laporte
Douglas, I appreciate it. I agree with you.

0:36:41 - Caller 2
This is a huge problem in this country Cookies when they come here and cookies for me.

0:36:46 - Leo Laporte
The breakfast of champions, the. I lost your audio, oh sorry. Well, thank you.

0:36:53 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much, douglas Bye.

0:36:56 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what happened. This is a huge problem and I the FCC has to do something about this and they have. You know, there's a national broadband plan. They've been moving along. They really need. The problem is with the lack of competition. These monopolies like Verizon, like Comcast, will continue to overcharge us for Internet, and especially because they're losing the TV business, because people are no longer watching their cable, they're streaming. They need to make up the revenue by increasing the cost of your Internet. That's not OK, and so we got to fight that.

Sonic, if you can get it is incredible Sonicnet, and they are. You know, I've talked to Jane. He says we can make money at $60 for gigabit. That's gigabit down, not gigabit up. It's not symmetric, but I can't remember what it is up. What do you get up, john? It is symmetric. You get symmetric for 60. Wow, so John, who lives in Petaloma, gets 60 up and gig up and down for 60 bucks. He says we can make money at that. That is a viable price if enough people in a neighborhood that we trench out to subscribe. So get your neighbors together. Sonic is in mostly in California, but I are the West Coast, but I think your town probably has somebody like that, like planet, that's kind of thinking about this. If you can get enough people to sign up, it shouldn't cost much. It's not an expensive proposition. The infrastructure is so. That's why they have to get enough subscribers coming in month after month to pay back the cost of doing that.

Coming up in a little bit, scott Wilkinson, our home theater geek we're going to have a visit from Sam Abul-Samad. He's our car guy. I should address something before we go to Scott. I just I know some of you have read our blog post on the Twitter site and this is if you're not sitting down, please sit down. I don't want to shock anybody.

We've been telling you for some time that finances are tough. This is true across the podcast industry. Spotify has had its third layoff this year. 1500 more Spotify people are gone. Most of their podcast effort is gone. They've closed down many podcasts. Gimlet, the Gimlet network, is gone. Wnyc has pulled back from podcasts.

A lot of the companies that really thought podcasting was the future of audio entertainment have had to contract, as have we, and a lot of it is because there's so many podcasts that listenership is down. We've diluted the audience. That's fine, that's, that's great. But the other side of it is that advertisers no longer are willing to spend money if they can't track you, and the nature of podcasting is that we can't really tell anything about you. That's why we do our yearly survey Spotify.

If the reason Joe Rogan gets so much money is because he's exclusive on Spotify, which means you can only listen to him on Spotify, and of course that means with the app, and the app tracks you. The app knows everything that you know. That's always been that way. They have your credit card number if you're a customer, and they they know you. And so advertisers, they want to know who who's listening, how many listens. When do they stop? When did they begin? They want all that information, information we cannot provide and won't provide. But Spotify can give you, google can give you. A lot of companies are willing to spy on you and advertisers, rightly or wrongly, say you know, why are we spending money? Twits expensive. Why are we spending money on Twitter, where we don't get that information? And we can go to Spotify and get that information or go to Google and get that information, or Facebook and get that. So it's been really, really hard this year to sell advertising. We've lowered our prices, we've changed how we do the ads. You know we've kind of bowed to pressure from ad agencies, but it's still not enough.

Lisa and I sat down last week and we looked at our projections for 2024 and we were $1.1 million in the hole. Now that's a problem because we don't have investors, we don't have a big bank account, we don't have any way to make up $1.1 million. So, with great sadness, I don't like to do it. We're going to be canceling shows and we had to lay off three of our most beloved staff members and even then, by the way, that doesn't get to the $1.1 million. So I'm going to tell you the second half of that. So, but we have to do it. We couldn't make them work for free as much as I'd like to. You want to get paid, right, right, yeah, me too. Yeah, I don't give it. You know what? Can I tell you something? Lisa and I did not get paid many months this year. This is a business owner. That's normal, you know, because that means we broke even. But we can't lose money.

So I'm sad to say if you haven't heard this and I apologize if it's a bit of a shock we've had to lay off Jason Howell, love Jason so much. He's been with us for 13 years so it broke my heart. It was very hard. We had to lay off Ant Pruitt. Love Ant. Five years broke my heart. And somebody you may not know you might have heard his name Victor Bogdnot. One of our great editors, been with us for a decade. So we had to lay those three off. We took care of the three of them. We took care of them. I promise you we did the best we could. All three were very gracious. They understood that we had no choice.

Jason's already kind of you know he's going to go over to the Android faithful podcast that his fellow all about Android hosts went to, ron Richards and when to Dow went to he's going to do some other stuff. He's I think we're going to hear a lot from Jason. His Patreon is up and running and all of that. Uh, ant, same thing antpruittcom. If you go there, he's got his prints. He's got lots of plans for the future. Same with Victor. These guys, uh, I hope we'll see it as an opportunity. You know, if you get laid off it's.

It's hard, especially this time of year. Um, it happens this time of year often because that's the end of the fiscal year and that's when we finally know. You know, there's no hope. Uh, the last straw was unable, we were unable to sell the yearly naming rights. We sold ACI learning this year and, uh, losing that meant, uh, we, really we're going to be in a deep hole. So, uh, that helps a little bit.

We have some show cancellations, which we'll announce next week, uh, but really, uh, we need to double the size of the club to continue and, uh, I want to keep doing what we're doing. I love you Micah. We're going to keep Micah, of course, and we're going to keep this show as best we can. This show was on the chopping block, I hate to say it. Uh, I, I made a strong case for Lisa. I stamped my feet and cried and uh, uh, we're going to keep doing it, but it's going to take you to make up the difference. So, if you're not yet a member of club, please, I know not everybody can afford it. That's fine.

We will continue to offer ad supported versions of all of our shows as much as long as we can. Uh, but we are going to have to move some shows into the club. Um, the club seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of the shows, gets you, uh, additional shows we don't put out in public. It also gets you access to the club twit discord. All of this stuff is, I think, a great benefit, but really the main reason to do it is cause you want to hear us continue with our shows and, uh, you know twit and security now and Mac break weekly this week in Google tech news weekly. Ask the tech guys Um, and I can't go through all of them, but we want to keep doing these. We think they're important. If you agree, go to, please go to twittv slash club twit. I'm not, I'm not a beggar. I don't want to beg. If you can't, no problem. Right now it's, it's just a little bit more than 1% of our audience. If we got to 5% of our audience, that would solve our financial problem.

0:44:36 - Mikah Sargent
Tell others about it too, right.

0:44:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, buy it for Christmas gifts. Yeah, get it for somebody else. I know everybody's getting, you know, paper cut to death with subscriptions. But, and and if, if you can't do it and don't want to do it, that's fine. I understand, um, and but there is a consequence in which we which would be very sad if we had to stop doing the shows so we want and we want to keep doing it. So, thank you, sorry to do that, downer, uh and and, by the way, I've been in touch with all three of our wonderful employees and I. There's a blog post in which I talk about their accomplishments and um, and I hope they are going to do great, and all three have invites to come back anytime. They can use their office if they need to, you know, a printer or Xerox machine or whatever but I can't ask them to work for free. I really can't, and I don't think they want to. So that's the story. So, thank you, uh. Club twit members. Uh and yes, thank you, jason and Victor. Uh and uh. You know I gave it such a big hug. It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. It really does Um, all right, on that bright note, should I uh, should I welcome in.

Uh, our, our wonderful Scott Wilkinson. Yeah, all right, scott Wilkinson is here. He is our home theater geek. He also hosts another great club exclusive the home theater geeks podcast. You know, when we were fat and happy, we did a lot of shows. One of them was home theater geeks. We had to cancel it, uh, but because of the club, we were able to bring it back and, frankly, I'd like to do more of that, but it's going to it's up, it's really up to club members. Uh, scott, are you there? I'm here. Ho ho, ho. How did two Christmas go.

0:46:19 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh, two, christmas went great. We had a hundred tubas. We had 800 people in the audience. Oh, that's great.

0:46:25 - Leo Laporte
What a great showing. Oh, I'm so happy. Yeah, it really was. I was a little worried that without the radio show to promote it we might not get the word out in the Southland. But that sounds good. You got, you got a good show.

0:46:36 - Scott Wilkinson
We did, we did. I mean, I do a lot of PR, oh, I know.

0:46:40 - Mikah Sargent
I said, that's awesome.

0:46:42 - Scott Wilkinson
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, it was really great. We had the group of 12 professionals who, do you know, very sophisticated, really nice, interesting arrangements, um, and the big group, of course, played. My wife was the song leader. Everybody in the audience sings along with the main Christmas carols. Oh, so it was a family affair for sure. Yay, scotty.

0:47:05 - Leo Laporte
That's awesome. So tell me, dear, what's up in the worlds of AV and high five, Do they still? Nobody still calls it high five, do they?

0:47:16 - Scott Wilkinson
No, nobody still calls it high five.

0:47:18 - Leo Laporte
No, that dates you if you say hey, how's your high five? Yeah, right.

0:47:25 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, I actually, um, I got a question from some friends of mine here in town, in the lovely town of Santa Cruz, uh who? Who came to me and said you know what? We're paying $190 a month for our cable AT&T Uverse. Is there anything lower cost that I can do? Well, yes, there is. And Leo, as you know, I think you're a YouTube TV subscriber. I am, I love YouTube TV.

0:47:56 - Leo Laporte
That. I even want the NFL Sunday ticket package that is an extra. Yeah, it's not like we're paying $190 a month for our box, but yeah because of it, it's less now, because the season's almost over, but because, because, Michael likes to watch the Packers he's a Packers fan and that was the only way we could, out of market, see every Packers game. But it's great too, cause Lisa's an NFL fan, so she likes to be able to pick which game she's going to watch.

So if you're an NFL fan and you know that's probably worth the money Plus, I have to say yeah, and you know they have other other things you can buy, so you know that's the kind of thing you can get on the on YouTube TV is quite good. Yeah, same thing with Amazon on Thursday night football. These streamers are doing higher quality than your broadcasters were.

0:48:40 - Scott Wilkinson
Often, that's true.

0:48:42 - Leo Laporte
Yes, um, especially cable, I mean over the air if you, if you can get the game over the air which it had HD versions of the game over the air.

0:48:52 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean, while these, these streamers will do you uh, uh HD. In fact, youtube is one of the only ones that does some four K content content. If you spend some extra money and I don't recall whether the NFL package gives you any 4K I seem to recall it does, am I right?

0:49:09 - Leo Laporte
Uh, yeah, so it's an additional, I think $20 a month. $20 a month so that's YouTube TV. So, and I subscribed when the Olympics were on two years ago the Winter Olympics because I want to see it in 4K. There's most program. There's very little 4K programming, right, so it's probably not worth the money I spent. There's occasionally the Amazon Prime is is recorded in 1080p 60, which is pretty darn good, pretty darn good, and if you can get that stream that's.

That actually looks noticeably better than the 720p you might be getting from other streamers like ESPN, right, Exactly. And, and I guess I don't know if the broad, I guess you can't get it on broadcast alone, right, cause it's it's Amazon Prime. Well, right, yeah, that's exactly right. So it looks good, and occasionally it seems like the playoff, the baseball playoffs were I don't know if they were 4K, they might have been. I think some of them were 4K, they looked really good. It's noticeable on a 4K, oh, let TV. It's noticeable, exactly.

0:50:16 - Scott Wilkinson
That's? That's the point. I'm sure that's true. In addition to the to to the 4K content for $20 a month extra, though, you also get unlimited simultaneous streams. With the regular package, which is $73 a month less than half of what my friends are paying for for their AT&T U-verse you get three simultaneous streams, so you know, somebody in one room can be watching something, somebody in the other room can be watching something else up to three. You spend that extra $20 a month. You get unlimited, and you can get offline DVR downloads.

Youtube TV, of course, like many of these, offer a cloud based DVR, so if you're watching live TV, you can record. If you can't see it when it's on, you can record it and watch it later, and with YouTube TV, with this extra $20 a month, you can download it into a local device and play it. You know, when you're on a plane or something like that. Oh, I didn't realize that you can do that. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice, it's very nice. Yeah, I'm liking the YouTube TV package, live TV, and we're talking live TV. All these services also offer lots of video on demand, obviously.

0:51:30 - Leo Laporte
I should mention that our our Discord out of sync says YouTube TV lower the price of 4K to $10 a month. Oh, very good, and I think that was right, because 20 is really too much.

0:51:41 - Scott Wilkinson
That's a little.

0:51:42 - Leo Laporte
I think 10, maybe people might consider it. If you have a 4K TV, the problem is the lack of 4K content.

0:51:47 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah Well, that's true, that's true. The other one that I was particularly happy with was Hulu Plus live TV.

0:51:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's you know. I would love you to do some research on which has the best streaming quality. I've heard I think I read it on Reddit that Hulu Plus did that it was the best quality.

0:52:04 - Scott Wilkinson
You know that's a great idea. I will do that, I will. You know, I mean it's going to be subjective. I mean I I suppose I could do some measuring. But really, more to the point is taking a look at it and saying, oh yeah, that that does look, does Sling still?

0:52:17 - Leo Laporte
do? I think Sling still do his live streams right?

0:52:20 - Scott Wilkinson
They do, yes, they do, so you got.

0:52:22 - Leo Laporte
YouTube, you've got Sling, you've got Hulu, right, You've got.

0:52:25 - Scott Wilkinson
Direct TV Stream.

0:52:26 - Leo Laporte
Direct TV Okay.

0:52:28 - Scott Wilkinson
Which is they have four packages and they're pretty expensive. The highest, highest package with 150 live channels is 165 bucks a month. Is that over the internet or is that from the satellite? No, no, it's all streaming over the internet.

0:52:43 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you have Lottie. Nine in our IRC says he believes Direct TV has the best stream quality. So that's worth. It's worth looking at these.

0:52:51 - Scott Wilkinson
It is worth looking at. Yeah, I agree, sling, as they have for a long time, have two packages called blue and orange, and they're all. Both of those are, let's see, I think 40 bucks a month for either one or 55 bucks a month for both, and you get some live channels not nearly as many as Hulu or or YouTube or Direct TV, and it doesn't say anything about local channels. Here's another thing to consider is does your streaming service provide you with your local area channels? So if you like to watch the local news which I do you know Central Coast, california local news you want to make sure that this, the service that you select, provides it.

0:53:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm nothing without KSBW. I mean I've got to get my channel 44 on.

0:53:46 - Scott Wilkinson
That's right.

0:53:47 - Leo Laporte
That's right. It's not just local news. There is other stuff that your locals carry, including network programming that you may not be able to see otherwise, correct? So I think that's now. Youtube TV has locals in almost all markets. I think they do, correct.

0:54:02 - Scott Wilkinson
And Hulu does as well. Yeah, and I believe Direct TV does as well, but Sling does not. I mean, at least I didn't see anything about it on their website.

0:54:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in fact you've seen the ads for Hulu, hulu plus live TV. They really understand that people want those locals. That's a big big deal.

0:54:21 - Scott Wilkinson
Right, that's exactly right. Another thing to consider is not is that all of these services, each one of them, doesn't carry certain channels, and so what I recommended to my friend was that she lists all the channels that they like to watch and then go to each website and see which are the channels that they don't carry. For example, hulu does not carry AMC or BBC America. I like watching BBC America.

0:54:52 - Leo Laporte
It's so hard because and we're just talking about getting subscription paper cut to death- yes, yes, there is that, it seems like there's so many streaming channels and you have to pay for each one, although they are kind of shrinking. Now. Right Max has absorbed discovery. Disney just bought Hulu outright. So there's Disney and Hulu are going to merge. It's interesting, I guess they're. We're getting you know what's happening. We disaggregated and now we're re-aggregating every time.

0:55:23 - Scott Wilkinson
Re-aggregating yes, exactly.

0:55:26 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, it's very hard to watch TV these days if you're, if you don't know where something is, you have to search for it. I know.

0:55:33 - Scott Wilkinson
I know I've often, I've often dreamed of some service, some app or something that that would you type in what you want to watch and it'll tell you everywhere it's available.

0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
It's still the case that if you can get an antenna and get live locals, that that's the best quality, best way, and it's free, and it's free. I want you to get the equipment to do it, right, right.

0:55:56 - Scott Wilkinson
Right, right, exactly Right. There are even some antenna over the air DVRs you can buy. Oh yeah, like.

0:56:05 - Leo Laporte
Channel Master or Silicon Dust HD Home Run. Yeah, there's definitely ways to to get all of the conveniences. Channels is an app that Jason Snell was recommending on MacBreak Weekly this week. He uses it in conjunction with a device to get either locals or cable and it basically becomes a DVR that you can then stream everywhere, not only throughout the house, but even for yourself as you're traveling. Oh, wow, so it's cloud DVR, Kind of sort of getchannelscom. It's local software that you run. It's not cloud, it's local software that you run on your own machine. But then then you have basically your own personal cloud.

0:56:47 - Caller 2
Oh, okay, channel looks pretty cool.

0:56:49 - Leo Laporte
A number of people use it. It's like Plex a little bit, so a lot of people, a lot of people and Jason loves this and you can use your existing provider. So if you have YouTube TV, for instance, you can then connect it to this software on one of your machines and then have Wow.

0:57:05 - Scott Wilkinson
What's it called?

0:57:05 - Leo Laporte
again Channels at getchannelscom. Okay, all right.

0:57:10 - Scott Wilkinson
I had not heard of that before. Work to the HD Home.

0:57:12 - Leo Laporte
Run as well. Wow, so that's a that's a good solution, cool, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're, we're in this. It's always a problem and you've seen this so many times. In technology and the internet, there's an interregnum between the old way that we are all used to and the new way, and they're in that period. There's always disruption and craziness and it's inconvenient and weird and it changes by the minute, and we're in that period right now. Right, we are, we are.

0:57:41 - Scott Wilkinson
And on these, on these streaming packages, uh, streaming channels, you know channels come and go depending on contracts and so on, you know so that it's in flux. You don't know for sure that you're always going to get this channel Some. It may disappear.

0:57:56 - Leo Laporte
Right.

0:57:57 - Scott Wilkinson
And that's frustrating.

0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
So when it comes to broadcast, uh, I've recommended in the past a site called TV Fool, tvfoolcom which will tell you whether you can get your locals and what kind of antenna you would need, what the signal strength is and so forth oh very useful I've used antenna webs.

And antenna webs are great one as well. Yep TV Fool. It really is just just to show you the coverage maps, which is which is very useful. And then, apparently, there's a YouTuber, uh, antenna man quippy, who's telling us in our discord. Antenna man on YouTube, who will help you with the best outdoor antenna recommendations. Everybody's gotta be, it's gotta be, on YouTube these days. Yeah, right, right For the youths. They don't, they don't, they don't do this. The youths, the youths, the youths want to uh want the uh YouTube.

That's for sure. That's for sure. Scott Wilkinson, how do you? You have a website. Is there something I can plug?

0:58:58 - Scott Wilkinson
How very nice of you. I appreciate it. Actually I I don't have my own website. I should have. You're so old fashioned.

0:59:05 - Leo Laporte
I know, oh well, we know you're going to be here and that's the main thing.

0:59:08 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, I'm going to be here Exactly. Yeah, I'm also on AVS forum. Avs forum yeah, I do my monthly uh home theater of the month on on AVS forum and those are always really fun. I love that.

0:59:20 - Leo Laporte
That's a great feature. Well, we'll talk about your home theater of the month next month. How about that? There you go. How about that?

0:59:26 - Scott Wilkinson
That sounds great.

0:59:27 - Leo Laporte
And of course, club members know that you can catch home theater geeks inside club.

0:59:33 - Scott Wilkinson
I'm going to be on the YouTube Twitch. Thank you, scott Wilkinson, my pleasure. Have a good day. Happy holidays to everybody.

0:59:39 - Leo Laporte
Happy holiday. I guess we won't see it till after the holidays. We won't Merry Christmas. Santa. I know you're going to be busy. I'm going to be busy in the next couple of weeks, so we won't bother, santa that's right, okay, he's got a job to do.

Take care, scott. Bye-bye, he's got a little work ahead of him. All right, we're going to continue on with the calls in just a moment, but, uh, before we do, I do. We love our sponsors and I do want to thank ACI learning. Oh, all year long has been a studio sponsor for us at twit. We love you guys and you know we've known them forever because you may remember it pro TV.

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1:03:24 - Mikah Sargent
We really appreciate it All, right Shall we do the email.

1:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Should I? Oh the email? Yeah, I don't know if I have it right. No, I have it. Okay, this email comes from somebody important.

1:03:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, so here's the question my son is on our family Apple account for apps etc. And he wants to pay for his future purchases. Leo tried to set up his credit card in our family account and it's not working, meaning Michael cannot see it as an option for payment. Therefore, how do we keep Michael on our family account while allowing him to make his own Apple purchases using his own credit card? This is a really good question and it what's a wild coincidence is, quite literally, I had just been asked by a family member this same question earlier in the day.

1:04:10 - Leo Laporte
Lisa said because I tried and I tried and it was great out. So on his phone I couldn't add his credit card and I said you can't do it. Lisa said well, I'm going to ask Micah. I said Micah won't know. You can't do it you know, I do know.

1:04:25 - Mikah Sargent
So here's the thing, though it's not a solution that everyone's going to love, because Apple okay, I feel that Apple, with the family sharing stuff, should take things just a little bit further and make them a little bit more adjustable, but they don't. So here's what happens. I have this pulled up on AirPlay one whenever you can show so on your iPhone. You, I assume Leo, are the family, I'm the administrator, yeah, so I'm going to. Let me follow along with you. Yeah, so you would tap on family. Okay, so we went into the settings app, we tapped on family.

1:05:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm looking at my family. There's Michael. Yeah, he's an adult, he's an adult.

1:05:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, down at the bottom, yeah, family checklist. Below that you'll see purchase sharing. Now here's what it is. In order for an individual to be able to make their own purchases, purchase sharing has to be turned off for the whole family. I have to stop it for everybody. You have to stop it for everybody. Then, immediately, michael will see in his own settings the ability to add his phone.

1:05:32 - Leo Laporte
The funny thing is and you can look at this, I'm not. There's nothing secret in here. The funny thing is Michael's not sharing. I'm not sharing with Michael. In fact, the only person I'm sharing with is my wife, lisa. What do you mean when you say sharing? Well, it says sharing their purchase.

1:05:45 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, they're not sharing with me it means that they have no purchases, but I am sharing with them, well, the son of a gun.

1:05:51 - Leo Laporte
If he's not sharing with me, I'm turning off purchase sharing Well do I have to leave it off?

1:05:55 - Mikah Sargent
Up to this point, though, he's not made any purchases, right, so it's all been in my account. It's all been yours, so that's why there aren't any purchases in here, so I'm going to stop it. You would stop it, so can I turn it on again after he adds his credit card? That is something that we did not test.

1:06:08 - Leo Laporte
That's actually a good question. Well, I'm going to do it anyway. So here's the button.

1:06:11 - Mikah Sargent
What I know for sure is that turning it off makes it so that, yes, he can add his own card. Now what I'm not sure of is, if you turn it back on, if his card will stay. All I know is that once it's off, then everybody can make their own purchases. Who are members of the family?

1:06:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to get why Apple does this, they figure, since you're all on this, once you're on, when a family members are all on the same credit card sharing purchase is no big deal.

1:06:38 - Mikah Sargent
And I think that what this does is it discourages friends from getting together as much you know what I mean. Like if you have a group of friends who you want to do it with, but when it's family, then it's like, oh yeah, we'll do this. We'll turn on purchase sharing. It's great so.

1:06:50 - Leo Laporte
I've turned off purchase sharing and now, when I go to it, it says well, here's you know, sharing payment methods. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:06:58 - Mikah Sargent
Importantly, everybody should know all of your subscriptions that are family sharing subscriptions, those still sync. Oh, they do. Yeah, all of the movies that you've purchased.

1:07:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, thank God.

1:07:08 - Mikah Sargent
Those kinds of things are still sinkable. It's just the purchases specifically that you make in the app store, so location stuff still happens.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Stuff for the future.

1:07:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so all of the rest of that and like if you have a Because?

1:07:21 - Caller 3
I'm already paid for it Exactly.

1:07:22 - Mikah Sargent
That is. That's still going to happen. It's just the purchase sharing going forward. Those purchases that they buy on their own will be theirs and not yours, and vice versa. So I have purchase sharing turned off because I my family that I've set up is just a couple of family members of my partner and everybody wants to make their own purchases anyway. But I have all of the rest of the features turned on. But yes, if a family has purchase sharing turned on, then that is the only way to make purchases, except if you wanted to use and this is the potential other way of doing it in the app store is the account balance, your Apple ID account balance and so you could add money to that and then use that as a means of making purchases. But it's an extra step that's not really necessary for someone like Michael, who has a card that he would like to use on his own.

1:08:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he has a job, he's gainfully employed and he's 21. So I don't want to pay for his redfish, bluefish, bluefish anymore. Yeah.

1:08:24 - Mikah Sargent
And so now all Michael needs to do is and I won't go into this because then it'll show a bunch of stuff, but you can show my settings page here you would just tap on Michael, would tap on his name at the top and once he taps, there's a place to add a credit card and then he can add it under purchases.

1:08:38 - Leo Laporte
And that was what was weird, because we went there and it had my credit card and then it said add a credit card. There was a button for it. I kept tapping it. Nothing happened. It wouldn't work, it's disabled. But they don't say why or what's going on.

That is frustrating and so it's a little confusing. Boy, you are a champion. I just texted Michael and, by the way, I have to say I just texted Michael and it's good I did, because when I opened my text messages I got a very important message that said my US Postal Service Package is a rise at the warehouse and can't be delivered due to incomplete address information. So it sent me a link to confirm my address. And you know it's interesting, the post office would be using the account J888Romero at Outlookcom.

1:09:23 - Scott Wilkinson
That seems like an odd address for the.

1:09:26 - Leo Laporte
Postal.

1:09:26 - Mikah Sargent
Service to be using A Postal Service worker, maybe yes, it says please reply.

1:09:29 - Leo Laporte
Why then exit the test message and open it again to activate the link? Oh my, oh see, they're going to send me a different link.

1:09:36 - Mikah Sargent
And yes, and this is what this is how they skirt around Apple's built-in protections for. Because Apple has a thing that can, if you have it set up. The one is it's like a scanning type thing and it can find those bad messages.

1:09:51 - Leo Laporte
If I click this link now, it'll know it's a bad site. Oh, but and you know, I know, it's not the Postal Service, besides the fact that it's from J888Romero at Outlookcom, the USPS team wishes you a wonderful day. See, I don't. I don't think that's true. No, I love my. You know, we love our mail carrier. She's great. Love her a lot. I'm just being silly.

1:10:15 - Mikah Sargent
And by the way, just so everybody knows how that plays out, what's what's wild is they almost can get you because if you go to it they will tell you oh, it's just $2.99 to deliver the package. Basically, they say they just want to cost more than it should need to be and you go oh, $2.99. That's not bad, but you've just typed in your credit card information into the website to pay the $2.99. Now they have your information and they can use that.

1:10:40 - Leo Laporte
So I'll show you what I'm going to do to respond to this. There's a delete, right, I'm going to delete it, but then I'm not only going to delete it, but I'm going to delete it and report junk. There you go, because that'll take care of that. It's gone and presumably Apple will then block J8T8, romero or whatever, yes, and sending any more messages.

1:11:01 - Mikah Sargent
If you have a third party service that is using the SMS reporting functionality in your settings, it will also report it to that. Oh, they does, oh, that's nice.

1:11:11 - Leo Laporte
So the only reason I brought that up a besides the fact that I just received it is I know many of you, especially in the holiday seasons, are getting these and you're smart because you watch this show. So we know you're smart, but your family members aren't. And they may not, and they may go. Oh, wait a minute. I can see my mom falling for that in a heartbeat, right, especially the elderly family members. So really help them out and let them know. Don't be doing that. Don't be clicking links and text messages.

1:11:41 - Mikah Sargent
Period Amen, yeah, unless they're from me, no.

1:11:46 - Leo Laporte
Unless they're from Leo8atoutlookcom. Now, we did an ad, we did a warning. I think we should take a call.

1:11:58 - Mikah Sargent
There's a couple of people who actually called in over the phone that we like phone calls 888-724-2884. And I think there's a someone from Bakersfield.

1:12:06 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's go to Bakersfield, ladies and gentlemen, and say hello to our caller, who may or may not be from Bakersfield Because, as you know, caller ID is very odd. But I pushed the button I sent to the breakout room. Do they have to press star, star, six, six to unmute and then say hello, hello.

1:12:29 - Mikah Sargent
Hello. Sometimes they've put down their phone, so we'll give them a moment. Wander it off.

1:12:35 - Leo Laporte
Star six. So I don't know if you noticed, but I am now using I'm no longer using the Lenovo Windows computer as my. Oh, there we are, Hi, what's your first name? Am I on the line? Hello, You're on the line. What's your first name? Can you hear me? Yeah, I'm sorry Turn off the stream because that'll confuse you.

1:13:02 - Caller 3
It's like they used to say on the radio.

1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
Turn down your radio. We don't have to do that anymore, thank goodness.

1:13:11 - Caller 1
You're on my return, right? Okay, yeah, can you hear me now? We hear you, greg.

1:13:18 - Leo Laporte
What's your first name and where are you calling from?

1:13:21 - Caller 1
Oh yeah, I'm calling from Brazil. My first name is Ayrton A-I-R-T-O-N.

1:13:27 - Leo Laporte
Like the great, Ayrton Senna, the great Brazilian Formula One driver. Yes, hi, ayrton.

1:13:36 - Caller 1
Yeah, well, it's actually after my father, but everyone just says the name. Well, I had noticed that I wasn't. Actually, I was expecting to be picked Right First. First off, you have your M3, right, I'm going to the States and because you know, in Brazil it's Apple is. We've got Apple stores here, but they're ridiculously expensive. You can buy a car, oh wow.

1:14:14 - Leo Laporte
Lord kidding Wow Although.

1:14:17 - Caller 3
Apple is.

1:14:18 - Leo Laporte
Apple is opening Brazilian manufacturing for the iPhone. For that reason, because the tariffs are so high in Brazil. They want and recently the A-O-T-O-N is already here.

1:14:28 - Caller 1
Yeah, a-o-t-o-n is already here. I'm not sure if they are producing for Apple as of now, but that's the plan, even though the taxation I don't think the government will actually make it easier for them to do that. They really want it to be.

1:14:45 - Leo Laporte
Brazilian companies. Yeah, I understand, yeah.

1:14:49 - Caller 1
Yeah, everyone, everyone kind of forgets about us. It's like I've got I'm calling from a Google Pixel. Google is not in here. I had to get my Google Pixel from somewhere else and so it's not. Even though it's a 5G, I don't get 5G. It's just annoying, I'm so sorry.

1:15:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm so sorry, but where in Brazil do you live in? Do you live in? Do you live in Sao Paulo?

1:15:16 - Caller 1
Sao Paulo, yeah, nice.

1:15:17 - Leo Laporte
Sao.

1:15:17 - Caller 1
Paulo is correct. Yeah, beautiful.

1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Well, what else can we? You wanted to ask about the M3, which I have sitting right in front of me. I was just about to talk about it.

1:15:26 - Caller 1
Yeah, exactly, I know it is. You might be a question that you have received before, but I've heard very good things about the MacBook Air M2 and now there's the MacBook Pro M3. I'm a MacBook Pro guy. I have the 2011 one, I have the 2018, which is I couldn't modify in any way because everything is soldered. It's the same thing on this one, 2011. Oh, yeah, I know that, but at least the offer, because I got that one from friend and they had it on a deal that I could only get it with eight gig of memory. So I mean, it's not the end of the world.

1:16:20 - Leo Laporte
You know, I think you can get away with eight gig. I bought this with 64 gig. I spent a ridiculous. I could have bought a house for this. I spent a ridiculous amount of money on it.

So I got the Max and I got, you know, the M3 Max, and I got 64 gigs, which is crazy. One thing I do notice, though no matter how much RAM you have in a MacBook, it uses it all. It's smart, the memory management is actually quite good, and so people I've seen people say I don't know, I bought 16 gigs and it's all used.

1:16:52 - Mikah Sargent
We had a car last week. Who was asking about that? So you've talked about it.

1:16:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what you want. You don't want to have it just sitting there unused. You bought it, use it. But even with eight it can operate pretty well. I upgraded this because I was thinking I'll be doing some machine learning stuff on that which uses the high end machine language processor on here. So I really and that means also a lot of storage, a lot of RAM. So I really wanted to kind of max it out, if you will, and I spent a ridiculous, I spent my inheritance on this, yeah. But I have to say, if you like the air, if you like the air, I honestly, for most people, m2 is perfectly fine. I agree it will be so much faster than your Intel. Get it with 16, if you can get your friends to get that one.

1:17:46 - Mikah Sargent
But I think the air for 99% of the people who are not crazy like Leo is great, yeah, 100%, and especially if you can splurge on the internal storage for it, you'd be better off frankly.

1:18:00 - Caller 1
Yeah, I'll definitely get one terabyte.

1:18:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get a terabyte. You'd be better off buying an M2 with more RAM than an M3 with less RAM. The speed increase on the M3 is very specific to certain kinds of tasks. It's not going to be noticeable in most of what you do. What do you do with your Mac?

1:18:24 - Caller 1
Well, I just left a company I was working for. I was working for an app, a French app, and I will be joining my dad's company in the marketing department. So I don't think I know I need a Mac because I'm in marketing. So it's just that I don't suppose I'm going to be meeting a lot of horsepower. Get an air.

1:18:57 - Leo Laporte
The M2 air has an immense amount of horsepower.

1:19:01 - Caller 1
What about which? The ports? The?

1:19:05 - Leo Laporte
number of. So here's what I use. So I do have to say right now, because I'm using the Pro, I've got an HDMI port so we're plugged into that. I've got the card reader which I, as a photographer, I use, but this is what I was using on the air when I had the air in here and notice this is kind of intriguing it has two Type-C connectors. So it plugs right into the two Type-C connectors of your air there's side by side. And look what it adds. I'll put it, hold it upright. It adds a display port, an HDMI port, another display port, another HDMI, so you can have multiple monitors. Ethernet.

1:19:44 - Caller 1
I'll check it out.

1:19:46 - Leo Laporte
So all and this is nice because it's a dock, so it's got this little rubber thing, so you put it on this, you plug it in and you're docked to it. This is from a company called Hyperdrive. This is the Hyperdrive 4K multi-display docking station. But there are many companies that make these other. World computing has some very good ones. We use the Cal.

1:20:09 - Caller 1
Digit as well.

1:20:15 - Leo Laporte
I think this is because it's 4K display so it must be using the Thunderbolt, but you know.

1:20:22 - Caller 1
but if it depends on what you want to do.

1:20:24 - Leo Laporte
If you want to if you want to do a displays then, you might want the Thunderbolt because that will let you do more displays.

But if you're just doing USB ports, hdmi maybe not HDMI ethernet and the card readers and stuff, you could get a less expensive one. Thunderbolt really adds to the cost because of the licensing fees and additional circuitry. So you could use whatever is appropriate to your use case. But there are plenty of these docks and this one's a nice one. This is I'll have to look up the price but it's from Hyperdrive. I was very happy with this and it does let you drive multiple monitors off of MacBook Air, which is kind of, but it's not like you're on the laptop.

1:21:10 - Mikah Sargent
I know, I agree, it's a dongle If you need more ports, then yeah, you're going to have to go outside of the air to get those ports. I find that I don't need those ports. I mean Apple's wireless technologies. Air dropping from this thing is very easy. That's a good point. I'm moving between an iPhone and this. All that stuff is syncing anyway in the background, so if it's photos they're syncing between them. I rarely plug this thing in. I think the one time that I regularly plug it in is when I need to. When I say plug it, I mean plug something into. It is when I need to sign into something that requires my UB key and I just happen to have a USB-A UB key for two-factor authentication. So I have to plug in a little dongle that gives me USB-A out and then I plug that. But outside of that, the only thing that's ever plugged into it is this USB-C charging cable that I have when I'm here at the studio, because otherwise it's got MagSafe on it to charge it. I don't really.

1:22:07 - Caller 1
I'm just using it as it is. The MacBook Air has dedicated MagSafe.

1:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so don't worry that your charger is not using a port.

1:22:19 - Mikah Sargent
You still have two Thunderbolt ports yeah, you'll get two ports, plus the headphone jack and the charging.

1:22:25 - Leo Laporte
Actually, I love it because you can charge. I'm charging right now on a Type-C charger. Yeah, you can choose either one, but it's nice to have the MagSafe. I keep the MagSafe at home and that's really easy. Hey, errin, I'm so glad you called. I really appreciate it.

1:22:39 - Caller 1
Thank you very much for the help. Good luck with the new job. One last little yeah, well, that will depend on my parents, but not only on that, on my performance of course, just one little thing that I'm really sure you don't want to hear. I'm listening to it since 2005, when I was living in London and I got to know about podcasts because of my iPod and I was like, well, what's?

the next new thing about podcasts Is it for the iPod. And then I just found out about tweets and I've been listening since. But I want to join the club and I know right now it's a matter of surviving and I will do it no matter what. Thank you, but I'm pretty sure that Brazil has 230 million people and it's two thirds the size of the US. A lot of people listen to your shows, but the companies they adapt the prices here, like Netflix is much cheaper, amazon Prime is much cheaper. Oh, that's good. It's just that, with the, with a dollars, which I will be paying the one who up, I can, I can kind of for, or Netflix and HBO, for example, together. Yeah, so so we're. What you're saying is we're more expensive in Brazil than a lot of the other streamers.

1:24:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's seven. It's seven dollars.

1:24:37 - Caller 1
Yeah, because of the current, yeah, the currency exchange and and because, like Brazil is a very specific, we're not Latin America. I mean, well, we are like in Latin America, but we're not. We're kind of limited. Here's the deal.

1:24:54 - Leo Laporte
Here's how. Here's why it is the way it is. We use a service from patreon called memberful, and Memberful does all of the back-end hard work. We don't have the team to do that. They're the ones that hook up the discourse, they're the ones that provide the feeds for ad-free and all of that. So we're kind of at the mercy of memberful. They use stripe, that's their payment system, which can use PayPal, but they are not. It is not smart enough to do Appropriate prices in various countries and things like that. They just don't have that facility.

If you can't afford it and and this goes for everybody everywhere in the world that's fine. I understand, I really appreciate your support. You don't, you don't have to subscribe, and if it costs more than HBO and and Netflix put together, I wouldn't. I Wouldn't because I don't think, you know, we give you that much value. As good as we are, we try, but we're not. We're not doing Succession here, we're not doing Game of Thrones here. So I understand, maybe we are limited by what we can do. We don't. You know, you can always send us a check, I guess, but you won't get membership features. It's just the way it works because we use a service and that's how the service works.

1:26:10 - Mikah Sargent
We can put in a request. I'll put in a request to memberful to talk about localized currency. I'll be great.

1:26:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that'd be great, and if they can, they will, but it's not our choice.

If we're up to me, erton, I would just say give me a buck and we're good. Hey, erton, it's really nice to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Obrigado and adios, and I you know, by the way, I should say one of the things we're very interested in and, thanks to AI, increasingly is possible is I Would love to do a Portuguese version of our shows, a Spanish version, and AI is getting so good that they even make the mouth move.

Right, it doesn't look dubbed, it's in our voices, it's in your language. Spotify offers that as a service to some limited people. As soon as we can do that, I would love to do localized versions in Portuguese, and I think Spanish Would be our very first. Portuguese would be our second, maybe Chinese and Japanese, because I really think this, the content, should be available to anybody in every language. Great to talk to you, erton. Thank you, anthony Nielsen, our AI experts is yeah, that works for some shows, but you try it with twig. Hey, these AIs are smart, anthony, they're smart. Yeah, I apologize for the limitations in the club. We picked memberful. Lisa did a lot of due diligence when she started this two years ago. We picked memberful because it gave us the best combination of features for you and ease of use for us, and we're very happy with it.

But there are limits to what it can do, so I was gonna. I started saying, before Erton called, that I am and he is not from Bakersfield, by the way, I don't know if you figured that out. He was using, probably, google voice and it showed up as Bakersfield right. I have switched from the Lenovo to the Macbook Pro and and for a couple of reasons. One, the main reason is I can use both, so I'm using the using is a Mac right now Running Firefox on a Mac, but I can do. I show my screen with this, the swap of the fingers Go over to Windows and it's a Windows machine. It's Windows, it's Mac. It's Windows, it's Mac. So this gives me the ability to answer questions in both A current, both dialogues both, and that's why you need 64 gigs of that's exactly why I got.

Yeah, yeah, windows needs a lot, of, a lot of memory, so thank you. It's so nice to talk to Brazil. That's wonderful. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, there's a. Okay. So one US dollar is right now is $4.93 in Brazil. I think they've had some inflation as our, so, yeah, that means it would be what $40 or something to subscribe to. She's the way I can. I know you don't, please don't. Of course I know he wants to get in the discord. He wants to be getting the house, he wants to hang who else? How about a guy? That's a? Rotator cuff a little bit.

Oh, I need the exercise. It's okay, I've been rowing Just so I can, just so I have the muscle power to reach back. Here is another email from some lucky listener at G at Twitter TV Bitwarden USB fingerprint reader for Windows 11. Hi to the tech guys. My Windows 11 PC, says John in Norfolk, uk, doesn't come with a fingerprint reader. I'm looking for a USB fingerprint reader, not only to log into Windows 11, but unlock things like a bit warden his password manager. Will a third-party USB fingerprint reader do this, or will it only log into Windows 11, and which one should I go for? So the one thing I would say is Windows uses an authentication system called Windows Hello, yep, and if you get a Windows hello compatible fingerprint reader, you will be able to, if it's my understanding, not only unlock Windows 11, but anything else like bitworn that's properly configured to take advantage of Windows Hello authentication. So as far as I know, that will work. Now, as for which company, I don't, synaptics probably makes one, I don't know which one's the best.

1:30:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was trying to see if Microsoft had a page that Recommends them.

1:30:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm not seeing it will say whatever one you're buying, if it's Windows Hello compatible, it needs to be Windows Hello compatible. That's the that's the main take away on that and I don't have any experience with third parties. You know what I can do, john, is ask Paul Therat and Richard Campbell if they have a recommendation on Windows weekly. We do a great Windows show every Wednesday and I will. I will save this and I will ask Paul and Richard which one they recommend. But I can't tell you if it supports Windows hello, it should support bitwarden, no problem. What else?

1:31:18 - Mikah Sargent
another one let's do another.

1:31:20 - Leo Laporte
Sam and Bull Sam at our car guy coming up in the in just a little bit. Oh Got collars. Oh, you know you want there's hands up. I see I'm gonna do James and then I'll do another email. How about that? James is on the line sending James to the breakout room, james.

1:31:44 - Mikah Sargent
You're the next caller on ask the tech guys, you must watch the prices read deed yes, a lot. Do you know when I was well, when I was sick from school? Oh yeah, I'm from school.

1:31:55 - Leo Laporte
So when I watch, my mom would make me tomato soup with a crate, with a grilled cheese sandwich. Oh, and I think what would I watch? I think I would watch, like the Andy Griffith shot and petticoat juncture, old-time TV Sitcoms. I think would be what's on around around noon. Nice, here's from our discord. While we're getting our call, there is Vera mark desktop fingerprint key. He recommends Fido, utf certified. Good fight. Oh to web, often Windows hello certified. There you go. So that's from Kensington, kensington comm. Thank you, scooter X. Oh yeah, kensington's a great. The Vera mark, well, hello there my friend.

1:32:42 - Caller 4
Hey guys, thanks for taking my call. Where are you calling? From calling him?

1:32:45 - Leo Laporte
from Philadelphia Beauty Philly. Hey, I'm sorry about the Eagles. Last week we just we lost our heads and that was tough to watch.

1:32:52 - Caller 4
Beat the crap out of you. Yeah, I know we had a comment, I guess.

1:32:59 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure it was really tough to watch for a Philly's yeah, oh, doctor, is a big fly Eagles fly guy and I know, yeah, it was hurt and it was painful. What can we do for you?

1:33:08 - Caller 4
I have two questions, two things I want to talk about. First off, happy holidays and in that vein, I'd like to get one last-minute gift recommendation from each of you guys.

1:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Okay, good Wait, I got to talk about some of the gadgets. I know, look at you? First of all, are you a podcaster?

1:33:23 - Caller 4
Or a no streamer stream a little bit. I spent a lot of time on discord. I definitely get the streaming vibe.

1:33:28 - Leo Laporte
I love your EFF t-shirt that is. Love that light up, mike man. I might recommend that that's cool. Oh my god, it mutes. It mutes so when it's on, you're on the air. But I got to ask you. There is a river of light coming from the back of your head.

1:33:46 - Mikah Sargent
What the hell is that Tell which way do I go?

1:33:49 - Caller 4
Oh my god, it's like one of those globes that you touch and it follows your finger.

1:33:54 - Caller 3
I'll get a plasmid like a twirly thing, oh wow.

1:33:58 - Leo Laporte
It's like a Jacob's ladder or something. Plasma is his plasma.

1:34:02 - Caller 4
Yeah, yeah, I've had that forever. I can't believe I haven't broken it, to be honest.

1:34:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that is well what's great is coming out of your head. So it looks like yeah, yeah, what game did you play when you were streaming?

1:34:17 - Caller 4
Oh, I play anything my friends are playing. We played a lot of warzone call duty. That was kind of our big, just easy to get into and it was free. That's the thing. If you can find a free game that everyone will play and everybody plays. Yeah, everyone plays. Otherwise they have to, you have to pay for, even if it's kind of a crappy game. Yeah.

1:34:35 - Mikah Sargent
Gift ideas. This is this is a great question.

1:34:39 - Leo Laporte
I have to be honest. Every year on the radio show for 20 years, they would say okay, leo, I need your colony gift guide. And I would say I hate. After doing that for 20 years, I hate doing holiday gift guides. Well, you're doing it again Because you know you have to do it. The 20 hour in the $50 in the price is no object. You have to do this whole thing.

Oh, yeah, and then you go on the morning shows. Oh, we got from a KFI Los Angeles. We got the tech guy on what's your holiday gift idea. Well, I just used to hate doing that.

1:35:14 - Mikah Sargent
See what. What Leo's doing now it's very common in radio is while he thinks about what he's going to oh you caught me riffs for a while. All right, I'm gonna tell you what I was riffing.

1:35:23 - Leo Laporte
I was also thinking, I'm gonna tell you what I recommend a lovely package of salt from my son, salt Hank, and the salt lovers club everybody loves salt, and this is Hank is not paying me for this. Do run, though, because there's almost there's only three left. They've sold out of almost everything, including oh f. That's pretty good, which was we were gonna. I really wanted to give the works to our staff, but also sold out, so salt tank, but I did bite and I shouldn't say it. Never mind, I won't say what I bought too late, too late.

He also has hysterical apparel Like this one which says I f'ing love salami, and then salt lovers. On it he says Obama says this is my go-to casual shirt for social events. I don't know if that's true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not. He also has and I bought this the, the, the very beautiful any does, good quality material, the. The caption on it says does your dad know you put his cast iron in the dishwasher? And I think that comes from life. I think it comes from from, maybe, perhaps an incident involving my cast iron and his filthy little hands Also does. Does your mom know you don't baste your steaks is another, is another good one. That's funny so, and they're very nicely made, they're very good. And then there's, of course, the ever popular flaky salt Tea. John legend says I have this recurring dream where my fingers turn into peanuts. I don't know what to do, what it means, but it's starting to kind of mess with my head by this shirt. So I don't, you know, I don't know where he's getting his quotes from.

So you gave me a chance to plug my, my dear son's salt business. He's a he's an internet chef. You know he's a tic-tac chef and he's got a good fan club buying these, apparently because he's almost sold out. That's only been a week, he's since he opened it.

1:37:27 - Mikah Sargent
What do you recommend? Yes, I've got two things on my end. It doesn't seem very glamorous, but every time I've given this, the person on the other end is so Excited, so happy about it. Specifically, I've gotten them from nomad, which is a former sponsor on the network. But nomad makes these really long usb-c Cables, charging cables that have Kevlar around the outside. Oh, so people with kids I what I did was I bought one and then I installed a little label on it that had the kids name on it, and so it was his cable and he loved that thing.

It charged his iPad and whatever else he had. So a really nice, really strong Cable that will charge the different electronic devices is great, and even more so if you can also get an adapter to go with it, because a lot of people they've got one and then they share it among the different family members. They're not like us who are just flush with these things. That can be really life-changing. And then the other thing is it's you have to find the right person for this. But I was definitely the right person for this, which is why I bought it for myself. I got like a high-powered duster. That's for tech and I use that thing for so much. That's actually a very useful tool.

It's plug-in, it's not, you know, the rechar, it's not the shake the can and spray it. Yeah, you gotta be careful with those anyway, exactly the one that I purchased unfortunately is not available anymore so I can't read the really long silly name that it has. But if you look up a computer duster and look for one that has multiple options for speed, multiple speed options Someone who enjoys cleaning out their tech or whatever it happens to be, will have so much fun with that. It makes me think of that, I don't know, like a song, almost like Flight of the Bumblebees, comes on as I'm just running around these just spraying everything. It's so much fun. So, yeah, I think these they're. They kind of catch you off guard, but then they start using it, whatever it happens to be. I think those are really fun gifts.

1:39:29 - Caller 4
So so is that electrically powered? It's not the old full of whatever is in there.

1:39:33 - Mikah Sargent
No, no, no, yeah, it's electric.

Definitely get an electric one, not the the frozen stuff because I use the frozen stuff and I'm always worried that can's gonna explode yeah it ends up running out too, too quick and, yeah, those should be relegated to the thing that they're very good at, which is cake decorating. That is where you need that kind of stuff, because you okay, yeah, a little tip there, you turn it upside down and you spray it, and it helps to freeze things in place. So people who sculpt with chocolate or with different things, they'll use that to freeze the I don't use the ones with bitter end.

But yeah, one that plugs in. I wouldn't even get a rechargeable one because that won't give you the power you need. I love the one that I have where it plugs directly into the wall. I've got the one switch where it'll blow you, blow you back and then the second switch which will blow you back and the person behind you Wow and it's there's static electricity issue with these because sometimes there is with like dust busters and there can be. I have not run into that issue, but I also.

1:40:34 - Caller 3
I'm very Anything with it electrostatic discharge here.

1:40:38 - Caller 1
If you need to, you can get the little ESD cuff and do all that kind of stuff, yeah, yeah you may remember.

1:40:44 - Leo Laporte
Thanks guys, I get. I'll give you one more, but it's every thing. I should tell everybody to get the Cheeto duster, don't.

Don't get the G it didn't look like it actually chopped up this was something that the salt Hank was selling on his Amazon Stream earlier this week and I did buy one, so I will have it to demonstrate. The idea is you put Cheetos Inside it and you it's basically a magic bullet and you press the button, they go and it chops the Cheetos up into Cheeto dust. I'm not gonna recommend that. I don't know about that. Wait, I'll get mine and I can give you a review. Yeah, I will do it.

You know what I will do it, you know what I should do it so funny. Cheetos duster review. It'll be excused to have a bunch of Cheetos. Do you remember when you first came here for Christmas? I gave you, yeah, a hobo Nietzsche a hobo Nietzsche.

1:41:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, do you like your hobo Nietzsche? I love the hobo Nietzsche.

1:41:34 - Leo Laporte
So I bought another one this year. I bought these every year. Now this is not a tech guy recommendation, because it's completely analog, but there's something about writing in a notebook with your, with your pen, and I have a nice pen that I bought for this. This is a Japanese company that makes a Techo. A Techo is a day planner and they make they're made of beautiful paper. Don't get the Japanese edition. I did by accident but they haven't. Unless you read Japanese, I wouldn't.

They use Tomo River paper, which is so nice. It's very thin and light, so you get a fairly small planner, but it but it's, it's. You can use a fountain pen with it. It's very good paper and they release this every year with new covers and bindings. The English language version is available at arts dash, science comm there and I, you know, I would have brought mine with me. I carried around with me, but of course it doesn't start till January 1st, so I don't have it with me today, but I will show you next week. These are beautiful and, yeah, I know it's not, it's not. You know, I do keep my you know calendar and everything on my iPhone and I have, you know, a Daily technology based journal that I type with. There's something about writing.

1:42:50 - Mikah Sargent
It's different.

1:42:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's yeah, and they they have some nice little back-end features like this, an interview with myself that you fill in my top 100 and then they don't say what so you can decide. But it's really a beautiful day. Top 100 cheetos flavor cheetos flavors, it could be and they have Japanese culture pages and stuff. I just think it's a really elegant, nice feeling thing to have a physical day planner. So they're not hugely expensive, they're under $100 With a cover. They have a variety of different color covers effect. The covers tend to sell out Because they have all sorts of styles the Japanese, I think Japanese girls especially. They seem to be a lot of kind of.

1:43:37 - Mikah Sargent
Japanese girls. You got me a cute one with with bears on it.

1:43:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I get you the bear one, yeah, and now you could put it every year. You should get you a new filler, because you can take that.

1:43:46 - Mikah Sargent
Go inside. Yeah, keep the bear case.

1:43:49 - Caller 4
My brother would love something like that. Yeah, some people still.

1:43:52 - Leo Laporte
I'll end up with that and I'm getting back into physically writing stuff. I just like that. It's not as easy to search right, you could lose it. There's a lot of disadvantage compared to digital.

1:44:02 - Mikah Sargent
But there's something, but there's an aesthetic of writing.

1:44:04 - Leo Laporte
You know it works with your mind and you know Neil Stevenson, the great sci-fi writer, hand writes in fountain pen all of his books, and they're long, long books. That's that's interesting. And he says he has to because he can't typing. It doesn't, it doesn't come out right, doesn't come out of his head, right. Anyway, it's a pleasure to talk to you and your beautiful setup. I think you must go back to streaming, because you have it all made there. It's really gorgeous.

1:44:32 - Caller 4
I appreciate you saying so one other thing I wanted to ask how was Vegas? How was the f1 rate? I'm a big f1 fan. I got right, oh my goodness, uh, I showed.

1:44:40 - Leo Laporte
I could show it again. I showed you what it looks like when you go to an f1 race. It's perhaps not as um.

1:44:48 - Mikah Sargent
Could you even see the?

1:44:49 - Leo Laporte
cars you don't see as much as you do if you watch it on tv, but on the other hand, when you're there you really get a sense of how fast and powerful these cars are and how brave they are. Here they come, oh my, that's all you see and that's all you get to see. That's it. They go by really quick and those were very expensive tickets, but I would know I probably will never do it again, but having done it once now I have a great Appreciate. That's why what's going on? These guys are crazy. Yeah, oh yeah. They're different breed. That was on the strip, our seats were on the strip and they were going over 200 miles an hour and passing each other and I mean, and then there's a big turn. You know like a mile away, but they're gonna get there in three seconds and it's crazy, it's crazy sounds like you had a good time, even though you don't get to see a whole I Loved it.

It was an amazing thing to do. It's crazy expensive, especially in Vegas, you know. If you're, if you really want to go, I would say I could have. For the same amount I spent going to Vegas, I could have flown to belgium and watching this spa francours race for a lot less money. Oh wow, better track and a better track.

Yeah, so yeah but it was fun to watch. It was crazy. We were right. I don't know if you remember, but in the practice One of the drivers, carlos Sainz, hit a. There was a little drain cover that came up and he hit it and it it caused a million dollars damage on his car. It could have killed him. I mean, it's a terrible thing. He came up and we were right there and you saw him. I knew something was wrong because he went down and he was sparking it was like the fourth of july as he went by, um, they shut the whole race down that day. They said, oh, no, more practice and they cemented all of the drain pipes. But that's the problem with the street track. There's things on the street. Uh, it was pretty, it was pretty fun.

I am, I am still, I remain a fan and uh, but I will not be going back for uh for next year. But james, who lives in vegas, he says I've already put in for my passes. It would you know if you're in the area, it's something to see. Yeah, wow, hey, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for calling the call. Thanks, guys, take care, take care.

1:47:13 - Mikah Sargent
I think we need to take a break because we have uh, our next oh, sam apple, samod, holy cow.

1:47:19 - Leo Laporte
Well, get ready, because the car guy speaking of speaking of f1 Is coming up in just a second, right after this word from the people who bring you this show Cash fly. You've heard me say it a million times bandwidth for us, the tech guys, is provided by cash fly at cacag flycom. But what is cash fly? They are our content delivery network, a cdn. For 20 years, cash fly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. They serve over 5 000 companies. They're in over 80 countries. Organizations like twit choose cash fly for scalability, reliability and unrivaled performance. Now, for years, we've been using something now that they offer everybody called the storage optimization system, and it ensures that your holiday season remains jolly because with the sos, you get private partitions dedicated to your use on their servers, providing 100 band width to ensure your content remains king.

Eliminate cash misses because your content's on cash fly. Keep your data and content primed, keep it closer to customers, maintain optimal speeds and ensure quicker content delivery, no matter where your customers are the thing I love about cash fly. You don't know. We use cash fly because it works, it's, it's flawless, it's fast. You probably don't even notice that you get your podcasts faster, but you do, and we love that and we have never. We've been with them for more than 10 years. Let cash fly. We've never had a problem. Supercharge your images, get a website, watch your web content sort of new heights of efficiency and performance. With their smart image optimization service, which automatically resizes all your images to fit any size screen, and your, your viewers, your users, get the seamless, lag free experience they deserve. So putting your content out on the edge, close to your users, means that delivery speed is virtually instantaneous. Cashly's video on demand cash layer if you add that to your mix, you're going to witness a transformative reduction in loading times. You'll say goodbye to the buffering blues and I love it because you'll immediately and permanently drive your cash hit ratio to 100% using cashly's vod cash. It is the way to go with, and what's great is it's primo primo experience for a fraction of the price.

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We've been using cash fly for more than a decade and I would not have it any other way. People come to us all the time and say, hey, hey, what about us? What about us? And I always tell them never, ever am I changing. Jump start your journey with cash, like get a complimentary first month or give it a whirl with a free five terabyte account when you go to cashlightcom slash twitter. Cash fly dot com slash Twitter. We thank cash like so much for supporting. Ask the tech guys. Look at james's badges, james, so you went this year. Look at that. He's got the special special event staff stuff. So that's it. That's the way to go. Be on the staff. There you go. They have. They had a better view than I did.

1:51:51 - Mikah Sargent
The ushers they were maybe more dangerous view. It's not dangerous. I mean, if that cap had flown into the audience that he hits, oh yeah, and then and another driver.

1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
The wheels fell off. See, that's some final destination some bumps and the wheel goes flying and I always think, like what happened if that went into the Grandstands? That would be anyway, didn't?

1:52:14 - Mikah Sargent
so Sam Abul-Samid, can you tell us what happens if the wheels fly off in your electric vehicle?

1:52:21 - Sam Abuelsamid
Toyota, that bad things, toyota knows, toyota knows all about that. They had a problem with the, the bz4x, when they launched it last year, with wheels falling off.

1:52:31 - Leo Laporte
But now you're really falling off. You're in front of an accurate race card today. What is that?

1:52:35 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, so well, I just put this up while you were talking about the f1 race. Okay, is that? Yeah, um, when, especially when you're going to a street court street race, um, you know, if you're if you're an oval race like the indy 500, something like that, you can see the whole track. Yeah, but if you're at a street race, the only way to really get a good view of everything that's going on is to if you can get media credentials and get a photo pass and get access to all these little Places where I'd love to have been in the paddock. Regular fan, yeah, as I'm going in the paddock?

You're not. You're not going to see any of the race, right? But if you've got media credentials, like I, happen to have a few occasions like this was the 2018 Detroit Grand Prix.

1:53:16 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's your photo.

1:53:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, so that's my, that's one of my photos From the race. You know they have. If you, if you look, you'll see. If you're watching especially street races or any even Road course races, you'll see that at various places along the the chain link fence There'll be little holes in there and there's photographers sticking their big lenses there getting these kinds of shots. Wow, yeah, but but most people don't don't ever get that opportunity, unfortunately. Yeah. They want you know I get to wander around, all around the track, different corners and fun. That's awesome.

1:53:54 - Leo Laporte
They did have the a formula one. They had fences that went up and then had Fencing that kind of angled in over.

1:54:00 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, that's, that's to catch the you know tires parts, loose tires.

Oh no thanks, um, I can't remember if it was this year, I think it was this year. Actually, at the end of 500, uh, there was a crash and a tire came loose and flew off into the, the infield of the indianapolis motor speedway and Crashing into a car that was parked there. Um, basically crunched the Collapsed the roof of the car. It's human and uh it it happened to be a chevrolet cruise, and chevrolet is one of the two engine suppliers for indycar. And so they, they found out who it was. Uh, fortunately, no one was. No one was. Well, and here's the good news they don't.

1:54:43 - Leo Laporte
they don't need those cruises anymore. So, uh, no big deal, no loss.

1:54:47 - Sam Abuelsamid
I mean, this was a fan's car, oh, so Chevrolet actually gave them a new car. Oh wow, that's awesome, that's a good gift, but but nor normally. That's. That's actually pretty rare for that to happen, yeah.

1:54:58 - Mikah Sargent
Particularly getting a new car from a company or well, both, both, actually.

1:55:03 - Sam Abuelsamid
but no, the tires flying loose because they actually have a tether system on the wheels. Now, they've had that for I don't know, last 15 years or so. Um, they have a tether system that's designed to prevent, you know. So the wheels will come loose. You'll see the cars if they crash, you know the wheels will be flopping around, but they usually stay attached to the chassis. That's interesting, yeah, because that that is something that has happened in the past, where a tire will fly off into the, into the grandstands, and people will get injured and, in some cases, have been killed. Oof, uh.

1:55:36 - Leo Laporte
so yeah, no, no tires came with flying off and rolling down the, uh, the, yeah, it was a pretty nasty. You could see it right here.

1:55:45 - Mikah Sargent
Who's?

1:55:45 - Sam Abuelsamid
gone off the road in the background there, Landon Norris I think it's the McLaren and Landon Norris goes off the road.

1:55:51 - Leo Laporte
It was a that was a nasty crash. They sent him to the hospital.

1:55:53 - Scott Wilkinson
He was fine, thank goodness.

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
You know we were talking about air and Senna earlier with our uh calling from Brazil. He was the last person to die in an F1 crash.

1:56:03 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, I was. I was watching that race live when it happened. That was devastating, devastating, but as a result, uh a lot of safety um yeah, there's been amazing um developments over the last 40 years, uh in in race car safety Um so no one has died in a Formula one accident since 1994.

1:56:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

1:56:25 - Sam Abuelsamid
One of the one of the complaints a lot of people have about modern F1 cars is that they're so big, and if you actually stand next to one, you realize, you know, these things are five meters long. Um, and part of the reason why they are so long and so large is because of the safety regulations that they have now. So, you know, one of the most obvious things, of course, is the Halo you know you'll see on most modern race cars, which is designed to prevent, uh, you know, if a tire or some some other piece of debris comes off, it's designed to deflect it away from the driver's head. Oh, the.

1:56:59 - Leo Laporte
Halo would have saved Senna's life actually.

1:57:02 - Sam Abuelsamid
Uh, yeah, oh, there's a bunch of things that would probably would have saved his life. Uh, but also um in F1 and in most other top class racing um. Before, uh, before a car is allowed to compete, they actually have to crash test it. Oh really, I know that.

1:57:17 - Caller 3
It has to meet certain requirements. Yeah, oh, wow.

1:57:19 - Sam Abuelsamid
So when F1 teams design a new car, and same for prototypes when they design a new car, um, it has to go to an FIA facility to be crash tested, just like, or they're allowed to run it just like our street vehicles.

1:57:33 - Leo Laporte
Yep, they crash test every car that you could buy, uh, to drive around, right?

1:57:39 - Sam Abuelsamid
Or no, they're supposed to be crash tested. Um, the in at least in North in the US, the government does not actually crash test all the cars. Um, they have a. We have a process, unfortunately called self certification, where the government publishes the rules and the procedures, the manufacturers go out and test them and then um, submit those results to the government and they'll the government will crash test about 10% of new cars. Um, you know, to essentially to audit to try to keep everybody honest, but sometimes things slip through the cracks and and the same is true for emissions and fuel economy tests they don't. The government does not do all of that testing. The manufacturers do it themselves, submit the data and then, uh, it gets signed off. Do European countries do that or does no? In Europe they have a type of approval process, um, where there's independent third parties that are appointed by uh regulators that have to do that. Do the testing under?

writer's lab or somebody like that, yeah, yeah, and so they. There's a uh, you know there's an organization called Toove in Germany that does a lot of this, and so they'll. The manufacturers will send vehicles to them to do all of the regulatory compliance testing before the cars allowed to go on sale. Um, but that's not the case here in the U? S, so things do occasionally, uh, slip through the cracks.

1:59:10 - Leo Laporte
Uh, is it? It's probably a good idea, though, to look at the crash. Oh, absolutely, and and one of you know there.

1:59:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
There's also an organization here called the IHS, the insurance institute for highway safety. That is a nonprofit that is funded by the insurance industry and they do a lot of testing. Um, you know they have, they have their. Uh. If you've ever seen the top safety pick, uh ads for her for new cars and manufacturers will advertise their top safety picks Right, those top safety picks are handed out by IHS and they crash test dozens of vehicles every year. Uh, and you can go to the IHS uh dot org I think it is website and check out you can see the, the vid. They post the videos of all the crash tests they do. So they do and they do crash tests that go above and beyond what the regulations call for. So one of the and and you know over time, sometimes those, what they do, gets incorporated into the regulations.

So one of the, the current tests that they started doing, probably about 10 years ago, is uh referred to a SOARB, the small offset rigid barrier tests. So you know the original crash test. You crashed the car straight on into a concrete barrier at like 40 miles an hour. Does the small offset rigid barrier tests? They, um, they crash it into uh into a barrier, into a rigid barrier, but with only a 25% overlap, so one quarter of the car is overlapping the barrier. So that simulates what would happen, uh, in the kind of situation where you know if you're driving down the road and a car drifted over the center line and you had, so not a direct head on collision, but you know the corners colliding and that's actually one of the the toughest tests that they've ever devised, because it's, first of all, it's a very realistic test, but it's also really hard to design a structure to withstand that, because what often happens in that kind of a crash and if you look at some of the older SOARB tests, you'll see that the like the whole front wheel and front suspension uh will collapse into the passenger compartment, excuse me, cause some very serious injuries for drivers and or passengers. So if it happens on the other side, uh, very serious leg injuries. And now you know, because of IHS doing this testing uh independently, all the manufacturers um have redesigned the structures of of modern vehicles to withstand the small offset rigid barrier test.

And a few years back in 2019, I visited Honda's R and D facility in Ohio and we got to witness a crash test there and they did a SOARB test and you used, and it used, like I said, and it used to be that when they did this test, they did this test. The whole the door and most of the front structure would be destroyed and it'd be very hard to get occupants out of the vehicle. People were very often very seriously injured or killed. Um, and now we saw I saw them do a SOARB test with a Honda Civic coupe. Uh, and afterwards we walked up and the door, the driver's side door, could open up. Even though the whole front corner, right front or left front corner of the car was completely destroyed, the door still opened and and the you know, the structure around the door was intact. That's important, yeah.

And so it would have been very minimal injuries, if if any at all, to the, the occupant of the vehicle in that case. Wow. So so those sorts of those sorts of tests are really important, and so, even though the government doesn't necessarily do all of the testing themselves, they do some but they don't do all of it. So there are other organizations that are trying to keep the industry honest about this stuff.

2:03:10 - Leo Laporte
Is that what you called in to talk about, Sam? Or no, it wasn't actually what would you like, what's on your mind, Sam so?

2:03:20 - Sam Abuelsamid
uh, you know, over the years, you know, we've often talked about, um, you know, uh, the loss of removable batteries, swappable batteries in our laptops and our phones and everything. Of course, cars, electric vehicles, are one of the places where we don't generally get to swap out batteries. Um, you know, it's not generally not that practical, but there have been attempts at doing battery swapping over the years as an alternative to, particularly as an alternative to fast charging, because fast charging is expensive, the equipment is extremely expensive, it's hard on the battery when you're fast charging, uh, and, yeah, it's. It's challenging, you know, to be able to install fast charging stations because you need to have very high power levels at the locations where you're putting these chargers, and so, um, there's been various attempts at doing battery swapping. There was a company that launched in 2007 called Better Place and Israeli startup that built a small network of swap stations in Israel and they were supposed to do it in the Netherlands and a couple of places here in the U S. Um, and they had Renault design a version of one of their cars with a swap, one of their EVs with a swappable battery. They ultimately went bankrupt in 2013 and shut down.

Tesla demonstrated swappable batteries on the Model S and the Model X and they built one uh swap station uh somewhere out in the central valley of California uh, where there were not very many people actually driving by. They may or may not have actually done a few swaps on using that station. Uh, they mostly just collected a lot of extra Zev credits from the state of California that they could then turn around and sell for millions of dollars Typical, typical Um. But there's a company that's been around for a couple of years now called Ample, that's taking a different approach. One of the problems with swappable batteries and there's a problem with phones and with laptops is that everybody's got different battery form factors, and the same is true for EVs. You know, every vehicle's got its own battery pack form factors. There's no standard battery pack and no standard battery chemistry. So what Ample? And so to do swap stations becomes very hard economically because you've got to stock all these different kinds of batteries and everything Um.

So, uh, ample came up with a concept where, instead of swapping the entire battery, they swap uh just the battery modules. So they came up with a standardized module. So this is basically. You know, if you look at an EV battery, it's it's most of them are made up of. They're mostly modular, so they typically have, you know, anywhere from eight to 10, 12, in some cases, 24 modules, that each one of those is essentially a battery unto itself, and uh, ample developed a standardized battery module and then the idea is you can create a pack enclosure that fits each individual vehicle and holds these modules in there, and so the modules, because they're much smaller and lighter, the mechanism to swap them in and out is a lot easier. And, um, they've been piloting this Uh, they've got a pilot in San Francisco with a fleet of Nissan Leafs.

They're used in a ride-hailing service. They're doing it with a couple of other companies and this week they announced a deal with Stellantis uh, the parent company of Chrysler and Jeep and Fiat and a bunch of other brands, and they're, um, they're going to start uh working on uh integrating the Ample system into some Stellantis EVs. Uh, their first pilot uh in 2024 is going to be with a fleet of Fiat 500Es that are part of the Free to Move ride uh car sharing service in Madrid, spain, and the Ample system. They also have their. Their swap stations are very easy to deploy Uh.

They basically it's kind of like an IKEA for a swap station. The whole thing is essentially in flat pack rates and they can come in and set up one of these swap stations in a in a matter of a few days, as opposed to doing a DC fast charging station that can take months, uh or in some cases years. If you need a substation upgrade to get a DC, dc fast charging station, they can get an Ample swap station set up in a few days. Car comes in, stops, gets lifted up, the mechanism comes in, uh from underneath um drops the the mat modules out of the battery pack in the car, takes them, puts them in a rack where they get charged and puts freshly charged modules back in the car. You can be in and out in about five minutes.

2:07:51 - Leo Laporte
I mean, this is obviously a great idea but your car has to have these packs right. Yes, has to be designed this way. Uh, so the industry has to buy into it. Um, do you think that's likely?

2:08:07 - Sam Abuelsamid
Um, on a broad scale, probably not anytime soon.

2:08:11 - Leo Laporte
It was a sell of EVs? Because there's. No, you don't have to wait half an hour to charge your car.

2:08:17 - Sam Abuelsamid
Right. So where, um, where this actually makes a lot of sense is for fleets, Right? Um, like ride hailing, car sharing fleets, delivery fleets, where they they, they need to minimize the down time for the cars so they can come in swap out modules in a few minutes, Because one, one potential downside of this is because the modules are a standard size, Um, it's possible that you know, uh, depending on the vehicle, you know, uh, depending on the vehicle, you might not be able to get the same battery capacity as you would if you had a uh, uh, an optimized battery pack specifically for that vehicle.

2:08:51 - Leo Laporte
That's why we went away from swappable batteries and phones and laptops.

2:08:56 - Sam Abuelsamid
Right. So think about it. You know, if you had a box and you had some, some wooden blocks, um, if you want to fill that box with wooden blocks, you know the the box, the dimensions of the box, have to be some multiple of whatever the width of those the blocks are. So if you, you know, if the blocks are one inch square and you have a three and a half inch box, you're going to have three inches plus a half inch left over, um, uh, and so you may have some empty space. So it's not necessarily going to be as optimized packaging. But for things like these fleets that are not necessarily being driven you know cross country road trips um, it makes perfect sense. You don't necessarily need 300 miles of range If you have a hundred hundred and 50 miles of range, and then they can come in and swap modules in five minutes and be back on the road. That's fine, it's at, it's more than adequate.

2:09:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's cross your fingers. Remember, elon showed this, uh, with Teslas.

2:09:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier. Yeah, they built one swap station.

Yeah, they made the cars, so that the batteries were swappable, but they never actually really implemented it, you know, except you know because the California rule said you know, if you build a battery electric vehicle you get a certain amount, a certain number of credits, zav credits, and if it has swappable batteries you get X plus. I think it was like four credits for each EV and then seven if it's a swappable batteries. So they got extra credits that they got one station, one station, and it was only open for less than a year, yeah, and then they shut it down and never, never discussed swappable batteries again.

2:10:34 - Leo Laporte
Sam and bull Sam at his principal researcher at guide house insights. He also does a great podcast called wheel bearings at wheel bearingsmedia joins us every month to talk about cars. What are you driving this week, Sam?

2:10:49 - Sam Abuelsamid
This week I have the new uh Chevy, uh, colorado trail boss, uh, mid-sized pickup. But, uh, this past week, uh, I was in California for a couple of days. I was driving the Kia EV9, uh, electric SUV, a three row SUV, and also the new Chevy Blazer EV, which can't talk about my drive impressions of that yet until Wednesday. So, uh, check out wheel bearings next week, uh, and also on Forbes on Wednesday for my impressions of the Chevy Blazer EV. Lovely.

2:11:21 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sam, thank you very much. Have a wonderful month, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you guys as well.

2:11:29 - Sam Abuelsamid
Happy holidays and uh and uh best to all your families and uh, sorry to hear about uh the the challenges you guys are having at Twit.

2:11:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, we knew, you know, we kind of it's not a surprise, but it kind of a, you know, slow burn, but still it hurts, it really does hurt.

2:11:46 - Sam Abuelsamid
And I uh, especially when you've got to let people like Victor and Jason oh, we love you, know all three of them.

2:11:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we love.

2:11:50 - Sam Abuelsamid
Victor.

2:11:51 - Leo Laporte
Jason, and I mean three of my favorite people, yeah, Thank you so much, Sam.

2:11:57 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you for your time.

2:11:59 - Leo Laporte
And now, on that note, I think we can uh wrap things up for the fabulous we do have one more break.

2:12:06 - Mikah Sargent
we need to do, we do.

2:12:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we do, four, we do, but this one has no content.

2:12:12 - Mikah Sargent
Correct Unless it's just going to happen, just like this. It has.

2:12:14 - Caller 1
It has that was a bad snap, but you get the idea on that.

2:12:19 - Leo Laporte
Whoa, we're back, but that does mean that we have to continue on, for a few more minutes.

So let's let's do uh, cause we don't want to put the ad at the very end, right, we want to give you some juice, a dessert. This is our dessert call. What is the dessert today? Is it Adler Should I go to? I'm going to go to Adler cause he's been his hand's been like for hours, idling Adler, idling Adler. Oh, he's in pain. Adler, welcome to ask the tech guys. Where are you calling from my friend Binghamton, binghamton, new York. Yep. Home of the beautiful Sunni Bingham, dinghamton.

2:12:57 - Caller 3
Yeah, Bingham's diversity is doing well and um, uh yeah, it's right down the road for me. Let me get more in frame here. Other way, other way, there you go.

2:13:09 - Leo Laporte
What is that? Is that CDs, dvds, behind you?

2:13:13 - Caller 3
Yeah, dvds for the most part.

2:13:15 - Mikah Sargent
Funko Pop. I'm Funko Pop.

2:13:17 - Leo Laporte
That is a lot of movies. What, uh? How big is your DVD collection?

2:13:22 - Caller 3
Just 350, 400 ish. I think Wow, Do you?

2:13:26 - Leo Laporte
put them on a Plex server.

2:13:27 - Caller 3
Are you actually?

2:13:28 - Leo Laporte
physically go to the wall and pull a DVD.

2:13:32 - Caller 3
I physically pull it. Um, nice, and you know to go on what uh Douglas was talking about earlier in regard to that festival, you know it's like I got so much of the former tech. Oh yeah, my Commodore big 20. Look at that, wow, the uh inbox phone mate answering machine.

2:13:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, one of the very first Nice See there was a oh.

2:13:58 - Caller 3
Now I can't find the other history. Oh man, this.

2:14:06 - Mikah Sargent
I just imagined it, right out of frame. It's.

2:14:08 - Leo Laporte
Fibber McGee's closet. I tell you, now there's a Netflix red envelope.

2:14:17 - Caller 3
Are you going to keep?

2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
that You're going to keep that one.

2:14:19 - Mikah Sargent
That's good, I'll only charge you $700.

2:14:24 - Caller 3
And of course, for the gift guide. You know you can always get someone a Funko Popa that's of their own.

2:14:30 - Mikah Sargent
I just saw that this morning. That's the Adler Funko Pop. I went to DesignMind and I thought I don't have enough unique things about me. Mine just looks like any other brown person.

2:14:41 - Caller 3
So what you do, you put out like so I have headphones in there because and they don't have a DDJ, so unfortunately, like my IDJ, and then there's also a camera in here. That's cool, of course. Photographer.

2:14:53 - Mikah Sargent
If I had a Chihuahua then they'd know it was me. Yeah, well, they might have Chihuahuas. I think they do. They do have dogs. Oh well, maybe I'll have to go look again because, yeah, this morning I got sad. It's designing, of course.

2:15:04 - Caller 3
For Scott's question, or Scott said it would be great if there was a website where people could locate or, you know, some type of search service for where to watch things online. Yes, and there's actually two. One is called Real Good R E E L Good Ha, and the other is Just Watch.

2:15:26 - Caller 1
I like Just.

2:15:26 - Caller 3
Watch better. You know I saw I put in Blossom, you know the 1990 show and that came up with a lot of things for different things called Blossom and then something called Blaze, so must have a subtitle of something called Blossom. So for Blossom, the TV show it shows, you can stream on Hulu or buy on Apple TV, amazon or Google Play. There's a the thing called Blaze has for streaming Prime Video, hoopla, voodoo 2B, plex and Zoom, oh Rents on Microsoft, redbox, amazon, voodoo, apple TV, google Play.

2:16:06 - Mikah Sargent
And what's? What else is great about Just Watch is if you you can install it on your Apple TV and if you do a search, it has links directly to that. Would be good Apple TV, that's a selling.

2:16:16 - Leo Laporte
That's what I like about, just because the search on Apple TV doesn't cover Netflix.

2:16:20 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't. Yeah, exactly, there are some things that won't cover.

2:16:23 - Leo Laporte
And then I for a long time used to, can I stream it, but they, they, finally, I don't know what happened. They kind of they're defunct, they're rebuilding it, so I don't know what's going on. So it sounds like Just Watch is the is the premier one. Here's real good.

2:16:38 - Caller 3
Yeah, and it shows all the prices for the different providers.

2:16:41 - Leo Laporte
I like this, so they have an app that that makes all the difference to the world.

2:16:46 - Mikah Sargent
I like that. It has an app. I think Rosemary was the one who put me in the Just Watch.

2:16:51 - Caller 3
Yeah, but yeah, so that's what I you know based on what was on the show, but I did have a question. So about a few months ago I called in in regard to my email, where my Time Warner Roadrunner email was crashing every time, just for the one account, and you suggested Thunderbird and that works well. So for that one account I use Thunderbird. Everything else I still use Apple Mail. But my issue now and I don't know if it was from a power outage or something, but and I'm trying to figure out if it's a RAM issue or a software issue or whatever If I let my computer sit for a while and I come back, firefox doesn't work Much.

You know. Facebook or Instagram or other things might not work. Youtube It'll just not load anything. And the Microsoft updater for the office applications says not, it can't connect, there's an issue, please click somewhere. So I have to restart the computer and everything works fine. Sometimes, if it's, if it's not been too long and it's just Firefox not doing well, even though Chrome and Safari work fine, I just have to close it out and restart it and then it works OK, but not always there's you know. So a lot of times I'll have to restart the computer. So I was trying to figure out if it could be a RAM issue, if there's an easier way than Memtest 86 to test the RAM.

2:18:22 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, this is interesting. So your computer goes to sleep when you leave it.

2:18:28 - Caller 3
Yeah, or even if I'm just using it for a while. And it's like it's more of a time period thing than even if you're still using it and it goes to sleep while you're like, I was actually on a zoom yesterday and when I would go back to doing the stuff in Firefox, it was not connecting. So alert from Microsoft.

2:18:51 - Leo Laporte
Office came up. Ok, that's your network card. So here's the deal. Do you? Are you ethernet or Wi-Fi? Both? Well, I've got both. Ok, yeah, it's a Mac 2013. Oh, never mind If it's a Windows machine. It's not unusual, for in the device manager you could see power settings for devices and some devices and that this is very typical of network cards will go to sleep, and a network card could, in fact, go to sleep in the middle of you know a conversation, in which case you'd get exactly that symptom. But it's on a Mac.

2:19:24 - Mikah Sargent
That sounds like a DNS problem, maybe so you you're on the zoom call and then you end the zoom call and you go back to, so the zoom call is still going on in the background. You try to use Firefox and you can't connect to the internet, but zoom is still connected.

2:19:40 - Caller 3
Yeah, and the Apple Safari would work, chrome would work. That's been crashing two times. Just crash like not able to start.

2:19:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they don't, they won't work. That's not merely not merely can't get to the site, but they, they actually won't start.

2:19:57 - Caller 3
Yeah, and Firefox will operate, but it won't go anywhere. That's a memory issue.

2:20:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, that's a memory issue.

2:20:04 - Leo Laporte
So activity monitor is your friend on this one. That's a program you have on all Macs. You run that you can look at memory usage. But what I would look at and I actually found this on this computer, brand new Macbook Pro I noticed it wasn't getting great battery life. But, worse, I noticed it was still hot after it had been shut down and was getting powered or not powered. It was warm, which means something's running in the background.

So I, if you go to activity monitor, you can see what's going on, you can see what's using RAM, you can see what's running in the background and in my case it was a file manager, this part of the system but was using 100 percent CPU almost all the time. Oh dear, and it was because of the drop cloud. It was because I had the cloud desktop, so I clouded, turned on, so I turned off having my documents and desktop folder in iCloud and I stopped that process and I haven't had the problem since Now. Maybe it was because it was a new computer and it was trying to upload all the documents, folders, large, and so it was in the background constantly uploading. But I think that you have, because you're in a zoom cause eating all your memory.

Chrome and Firefox notorious memory hogs. It sounds like zoom is not releasing the memory. Firefox can't get sufficient memory to launch it's it's. You can run this activity monitor in the background and keep an eye on RAM. You see it has different tabs, including a memory tab. You can see what's using memory.

2:21:41 - Caller 3
But it just doesn't work though, in regard to normally when it's just sitting overnight and I come into the office in the morning and it sounds to me like a process is running as a memory leak or something like that.

2:21:53 - Leo Laporte
So how old is the MacBook? You said 2013. Yeah, I mean, I think you probably have a lot of cruft still running. I would look at processes that are running in the background, closed stuff you don't need. This has happened to me before on Intel Max, where there are processes that take up a ridiculous amount of you know. It's a finder process or something like that. I think that that's what I'm seeing here.

2:22:27 - Caller 3
And we're getting new RAM from OWC no it's not a.

2:22:31 - Leo Laporte
It's not that the RAM is faulty. In my opinion, I mean, getting some more RAM might help but really you want to track down this process If it's a memory leak, for instance. So let's say you've got a driver that's running in the background and it has what we call a memory leak, which is that it allocates memory and forgets to release it, and over time it continues to allocate memory and never releases it and eventually, if it's running long enough, it fills up your memory. Yes, there's no memory left, and having more memory will solve that, just like adding a fourth lane to the super high will solve that, until until the process fills that up, yep, and then you're going to have the same problem. So I would very much, I would look at activity monitor and really try to understand what's running in the background, what's using processing power.

Macs are good, but there's, but there's it's. You know, like any computer, you can have stuff and this goes, by the way you know, with on a Windows machine as well. The monitors, the resource monitors, are very useful. They're third party ones, but I think the one that comes on the Mac is just fine, and I think it's going to be very helpful to see what. Firefox uses a lot of RAM at Chrome uses even more so those. It sounds to me that's what's happening is something's eating up your RAM. That was no work, so.

2:23:50 - Caller 3
I appreciate that.

2:23:51 - Leo Laporte
Zoom runs in the background, by the way, and you could turn off that little zoom stub that's always running. That might be the culprit, who knows?

2:24:00 - Caller 3
Yeah, I can do that. And speaking of I forgot I wanted to also mention, you know, watkins Glen is up the road and I really hope F1, some of your returns there, since they left in 1980 or the last race there was there. So I'm glad you enjoyed it and they get so much fun.

2:24:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, thanks to that Netflix show drive to survive, suddenly there is a massive American audience. You know, f1 is owned by Liberty Media, an American cable company. So I think you're going to see more American races. But I have to say the Europeans are not happy about that.

I was on a cruise with the Stig Perry McCarthy, who was a former F1 driver. He was the black suited driver on what was it called Top speed or top gear. Yeah, top gear. And so he's a, you know, and he gave lectures and there are people going, those Americans. There's another race in America, you know, and they don't want, you know, spa and Monza and Silverstone, all the classic races to be superseded by American racetracks. And yet, you know, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. There's a lot of money to be made in the U S 350,000 people for the Las Vegas race, I think it was even more in Miami. So you know, it's it's money and, and they're adding races, they actually have a longer season than ever these days. So, yeah, I think Watkins Len is a classic racetrack.

2:25:30 - Caller 3
It'd be really interesting to be up there yeah.

2:25:33 - Leo Laporte
And, of course, happy Hanukkah. I hope you have a wonderful Hanukkah. Get lots of guilt. Yes, yes, you know, here, the Shabbat here, shabbat here has a guilt drop. They get a helicopter. Really, they get a helicopter over the fairgrounds and they drop chocolate Guilt out. That's awesome Helicopter for the whole kids. It's really cute.

2:25:57 - Mikah Sargent
Have a wonderful holiday season. Yes, indeed, thank you so much.

2:26:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh my yeah, the stick was great. I really enjoyed Perry. He was. It was so much fun to spend time with him and talk to him about all of this. It was. It was great. I think we can now and must now, because we've got twit in like five minutes Wrap this puppy up. Wrap it up. It's my fault because I forgot that we have had one more break. I am Leo Laporte. You might have heard of me. He'll be back in just a minute for Twitter, and then, of course, on Tuesday and Wednesday for Windows Weekly. This week in Google back break, weekly security. Now that there is Micah Sargent. He'll be back on Thursdays for tech news. Weekly Tuesdays for iOS. Today and, of course, every Sunday. We get together and he dresses nicely and I dress like this, but we always have nice socks. Somebody wrote me an email. He said I listen to your shows for information to learn about things and all I'm getting is talk about socks. So that's it. Bye, bye, bye.

2:27:02 - Mikah Sargent
It was nice, nice having you around.

2:27:05 - Leo Laporte
We'll try not talk too much about socks. I don't think we ever talked too much about socks. As the tech guys is every Sunday, you can never talk too much about socks. We do it live 11am to about 1 30pm Pacific time. That's around what is it? 2pm Eastern 1900 UTC. You can watch live. We thought we were going to take away the live streaming. We figured out we could stream for free on YouTube, but we were going to do it just during the show. So we start the stream right when the show begins and we cut the stream off when the show ends.

So go to youtubecom, slash, twit our YouTube channel and subscribe, smash the bell or whatever the kids do, and that way you'll get a notification when we go live or just you know when we. You know the show is going to be on on a Sunday morning or afternoon, just go over and you can watch it there. Of course, after the fact there's it is a podcast. You can subscribe. The tech guy labs page still works. It takes us, takes you to the twittv Ask the tech guys page. You can subscribe there for you know on your favorite podcast. You can download shows there. The show notes are there. All that good stuff Thanks to our boy. Our boy, producer John Ashley does such a great job putting this show together. We need to talk about that title. He's going to beat me up after the show If I beat you up then I'm not getting paid.

Yeah, you probably shouldn't be my advice.

2:28:27 - Mikah Sargent
Anything you want to say. Micah, yeah, join club twit. Twittv, slash club twit. Send us your emails. $7.134 a year. Yeah, also, you can. I guess you did a little bit of a club twit. Also, you can send us your emails.

2:28:38 - Leo Laporte
No, you can talk about club twit ATG. I want you to talk about club twit I. Just you know I'm I'm squirrely, aren't I A little bit?

2:28:44 - Mikah Sargent
I don't want to beg Well, and also we you know how much time. So ATG at twittv is how you can send in your emails, and in text. That way it'll end up in the mailbox. You can send us video or audio there. Also, you can call us during the week at 888-724-2884. If you call during the week, you can leave a voicemail that we will play back and be able to answer live on the show. The URL that you can go to on your browser on your phone or on your computer is call dot twittv to join us and hopefully get to ask your question live on air.

2:29:15 - Leo Laporte
Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next time on Ask the Tech Guys. Bye-bye, bye-bye.