The Tech Guy Episode 1851 Transcript

Please be mindful this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.

(00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks all over the country coast to coast on Saturday December 11th, 2021. This is episode 1,851. Enjoy. The Tech Guy podcast is brought to you by userway.org. Userway ensures your website is accessible, ADA compliant, and helps your business avoid accessibility related lawsuits. The perfect way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's not only the right thing to do. It's also the law. Go to userway.org/twit for 30% off Userway's AI powered accessibility solution. And by worldwide technology, a platinum IBM business partner with an innovative culture. Thousands of it, engineers, application developers, unmatched labs and integration centers here, testing and deploying technology at scale WWT helps customers bridge the gap between strategy and execution. To learn more about WWT. Visit wwt.com/twitA And by Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment right now for a limited time, save 60% on your first three months of audible. That's only $5 and 95 cents a month. Give yourself the gift of listening for more. Go to audible.com/techguy or text tech guy do 500, 500.

Leo Laporte (00:01:45):
Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo? Leport here. The tech guy, time to talk computers and the internet and home theater. Yes. This is a show. We talk about digital technology of all kinds. The metaverse the Twitter verse, the Luna verse. My, my partner in crime tech guy two is joining me. Hello? What Mr. Mr. Micah Sergeant. Hey, how are you? Do you have a good week?

Mikah Sargent (00:02:11):
Oh, I had a great week. Leo. Yes, yes, yes you did. How about you? I hear you did I did, you know what I'm doing this crazy thing. I, I would like to know Leo. I have a feeling I, but I'd like to know. Tell what crazy thing is Leo doing?

Leo Laporte (00:02:27):
This is the latest thing. Well, it's and I ex I kind of told you when I got here just a, a minute ago, <laugh> <laugh> that I get a little distracted because I'm solving these crazy computer problems. It's called the the advent of code, you know, an advent count, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:02:44):
Yeah. You get a little chocolates that tastes terrible.

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
Yeah. Every day of the month up leading up to Christmas, they're ostensibly shaped like 25 crappy, crappy, crappy chocolate chocolates. <Laugh> so this is the advent of code, which is computer programming problems. And there's 25 of them. Actually. There's 50 of them cuz there's two a day, but they're related. So like there's one problem. And then you do the first part and then it says, okay, now that you've done that, let's completely throw you a curve ball and do this. And it's really fun. There's the guy who does it. Eric Wastel is obviously a very proficient coder. And I think this year a hundred thousand people are doing it. Wow. All you'd have to be, you'd have to be. I think most of 'em are probably professionals.

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
A few of 'em are hobbyists. Like me. You'd have to be pretty serious about writing programs. Yeah. Cause they're tough problems. They sound very complicated, and get harder every day. Yeah. I've never finished. I've never gotten to the end. In fact, I I'm currently farther than I've ever been. Usually I, I poop out about day five or six. It's like, I don't know. I last year it was some sort of crazy luggage problem. The, so the, the, the <laugh> the story of the oven of code is it's a Christmas story. Always, usually involving Santa and the elves this year <affirmative> unfortunately Santa dropped his keys and he didn't drop 'em in just any place. He dropped them in the ocean and they've fallen deep, like deep, deep, deep within the ocean. Fortunately, the elves have a submarine. I know it's a little far fetched. So they hop in the submarine and then you have to solve various problems to get to them.

Leo Laporte (00:04:20):
I maybe by maybe we're trying to save Christmas every year. It's trying, he's been doing this since 2015. Okay. And every year you're trying to save Christmas by by computer programming. <Laugh> I mean, that's how it works. Yeah. oh, I'm sorry. 180,000 people completed day one. Thank you, Addison. He's doing it. I know in our chat room it tapers off though. Consider playing, you know, a 10th of them will continue all the way through the end, but mostly they're professionals. And then there's two ways to play. There's the way I play, which is in a more leisurely fashion. Ideally, I'd like to finish it every day so I can keep up I'm I'm on day eight and this is what December 11th. So I'm three days behind, but I'm gonna try to catch tonight. The problem is you have to, you can't at my coding speed.

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
You can't have a life because you know, but there are the, so then there are like competitive programmers. Did you know there was a category called competitive programs or like race car drivers.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:13):
Holy moly. So they are all competing against one another?

Leo Laporte (00:05:16):
They're competing against each other for speed. So they, they solve it seconds. Oh. Because, so everybody gets a different problem set, but everybody's answer is known to Eric. So when you get your problem set, the, the problem's the same, but the, the input data is different. Oh, when you get your problem set, you solve it and you submit the answer. And at that point, ding, ding, ding, the timer goes off and that's your time. And then the first person to gets a hundred points, first person to submit the answer, second person, 99, all the way down for the first a hundred people.

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
And then they add up the points as you go. And so the, there are people literally who are solving these problems that take me days in seconds. <Laugh> wow. They're obviously there's a, there's a whole category, as I said of competitive programmers. But this would, I was thinking as I was coming in, you know, obviously that's an elite. Those are the grand masters of computer coding and some very heavy duty people like a legendary coder, perhaps the greatest of all time, at least greatest of our generation Peter Novi, who works at Google. He did 'em last year. I haven't checked to see if he's doing 'em this year. I'm trying not to see any spoilers, you know? Right, right, right, right. I wanna do it all on my own. But Peter does them of course very quickly. And he also more importantly does them very Heley. And so his solutions are always fascinating. Oh. So he'll actually

Mikah Sargent (00:06:41):
Publish his solutions.

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Well, that's the other thing you can do and I'm doing it. You can publish, typically put, put him up on GitHub or somewhere like that, where other people can see him. If you search GitHub for AOC, you'll see a lot of people solving him in a variety of languages. So it's fun. You know, after you've done the problem to look at how other people solved it, it's a great way to learn coding. But this is what made me think. I think this would be a great thing for a school, like a high school. If you had a high school coding class, I'm just saying this right now, to people who are teaching programming and maybe high school or college be appropriate to this would be a fun thing to do with a class. It'd be really fun. Have a little, you can have your own private leader boards. We have our podcast network has our own private leaderboard. Oh yeah. And it's just you. No. Oh, there are people's elses participants. Let me just check our leaderboard and see who's winning. It's not me.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:32):
Oh, the network. I was thinking the company,

Leo Laporte (00:07:34):
The TWI TWI. No, no private leaderboard. I, John Arnold set it up. He, he there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of us. Nice. John and Jay Koski and Mark Harrison and Jillian law are all in there. John is, is winning. He solved all 11 of the puzzles. It looks like he's all 10, I guess, because the puzzle comes out at 9:00 PM tonight, Pacific time, mid Eastern. So day 11 will be tonight.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:02):
Maybe I'll participate next year.

Leo Laporte (00:08:04):
You should, you wanna learn coding, right? Yeah, exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:07):
And you know, it's a little over my head right now, but 

Leo Laporte (00:08:10):
It's not, you don't have to 

Mikah Sargent (00:08:12):
It says you don't need a computer science background. Yeah. It would

Leo Laporte (00:08:14):
Help <laugh> I don't, but you know, I don't have one, but it would help because some of the problems require, well, in the past, some of the problems have well famously last year mm-hmm <affirmative> problem. 13 day 13, lucky you needed to know, and I didn't get there, so I don't have to worry about it, but you needed to know something called the Chinese remainder theorem. Oh, right. Yeah. For, of course everybody knows that. Yeah. The CT, yeah. CRT. That's what they call it. Yeah. So <laugh> a number of people were left behind at that point. But I think if you had a computer science degree, maybe you you'd recognize it and maybe you'd recognize it. Oh, out of sync. You're not on the leaderboard. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put the code in the in the chat room.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:58):
Oh, you have to solve a problem to get on the

Leo Laporte (00:08:59):
No, no. The, the, the code number for it. But anyway in fact, anybody who wants to I'll, I'll put the code number up there. If you wanna do it, is the

Mikah Sargent (00:09:07):
Creator, just the most brilliant scientist computer science. Well, he's

Leo Laporte (00:09:11):
Got a certain skill. Who, who is the Eric was the Wastel and he's a, he's a professional programmer works. I don't know when he does this, does he find he has a day job to do this? He he's a, he's a senior architect at TCG, the number one market play. He is for trading card games. <Laugh> TGG player. That's his job day job.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:40):
So it's pre NFT,

Leo Laporte (00:09:41):
But I have a feeling his employers say, yeah, go ahead, Eric take the second half of the year off <laugh> he writes all of these problems. He, he has to do more. He, he not only has to create the problem. And I think he gets help from, you know, the community. But I think he also has not only has to create it and solve it, but then he has to generate unique problem sets for many, many different cuz you don't want to have everybody have the same answer. So everybody gets a different, otherwise you, I could just say the answer is 15 and everybody would know. Right. That would be no fun. So that's why it'd be fun for a school to do it because every student could have their own. 'em Said in the, in their own answer, you should interview Eric. I would love to interview Eric, cuz he's gotta be crazy just to hear

Mikah Sargent (00:10:23):
The process. How do you gear up for the I'm? Like I wanna know all of that. Even if I never participate, just knowing kind.

Leo Laporte (00:10:28):
He's been on a few podcasts and stuff. So, so scooter X says today is also a big day. It's the financial modeling world cup finals. <Laugh> that's are, are you good at Excel? The spreadsheet, the number one first place Diidd early from New York at early days consulting second place currently a Argo AR Aral from Bengal Bengaluru and from London Andrew Nye. The financial modeling world cup is going on this weekend entirely in Microsoft Excel. Oh, by the way, the prize $10,000 donated by Microsoft 128 people from all over the world. They qualified start qualifi qualifications, November 13th. But today <laugh> is the big finale. So I know everybody's very excited. Each round consists of case studies, a problem between one and five pages long as sounds very much like the advent of code. But the big difference is you have to solve it in Excel. Are you good at spreadsheets?

Mikah Sargent (00:11:38):
I, I get better every day. <Laugh> I don't think I could be this good

Leo Laporte (00:11:42):
Though. You can you can actually watch the finals on YouTube. I might actually watch the FM WC open finals. There's a big spreadsheet open right now. We see the commentators. We see bill gel and my good friend, Mr. Excel is one of the commentators. He he's a brilliant Excel Excel user. It's fascinating tables. It's fascinating. So we're watching Andrew and and Andrew and Tim kind of bash away at this, the world cup ha who knew it's funny. What, how people humans like to compete? Don't they? They do. Yeah. Yeah. And they like to gather around mutual interests. Yeah. It's based on our it's. Cool. And thanks to you too. You can watch this stuff now. You would never see the financial modeling world cup finals on, you know, NBC's exact channel, but you, you, I seen on YouTube, we just finished the world championship of chess.

Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
That's over now, by the way. I won't tell you who won in case you're I know there was a big flub by one of the contestants three flus in, in that really put 'em out of the, yeah. So but that's another example of, you know, watching on TV, we talked about this last week, you know? Yeah. You can, there's a 20, 20 minutes in Opsis on NBC sports, but you can watch the whole game all five to eight hours of it on YouTube. In fact, there's multiple ways to watch it, many different channels with different commentators and it's like, you know, amazing. Yeah. Thank you, YouTube. But that's neither here nor there because we have a show to do I don't no, I got, anyway, I was explaining why I was just a little late getting here. Didn't mean to scare you and professor Laura and you know Kim and everybody. I I'm here now, but my mind is in a submarine <laugh> below the ocean searching. What color is that submarine for? Well, probably yellow Uhhuh searching for Santas keys. Leo LePort the tech guy. We're gonna get back to the Excel spreadsheet solving in a moment. No, we'll answer your calls right after this phone. Angel buzz, buzz. Hello, Kim Schaffer.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:48):
That's all you're gonna get right now is a busy signal. I'm warning you.

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
The lines are jammed. Is it people looking to buy a holiday gift for the geek in their life? No, no, no. That's great. Did I say that every, every year when I do the promos for the the holiday shows, the December shows I say, and I know it's hard to buy a gift for the geek in your life, I'll help you. And no one ever asks cuz you know what? They just wanna spend money on themselves. The geeks, the geeks. Yeah. They are the geeks I see. Right? Yeah. True. Who should I start with? I, yeah.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:19):
And so far, none of these are you spending their money. It's actually just help. So let's go to Epston in Kansas city, Kansas looking for a video editing software. <Laugh> okay. For a short documentary.

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
I can do that too. Doesn't have to be hardware. We can, we can buy software. San Santa's ecumenical. Ecumenical. Yeah. He, she doesn't mind bringing boy. I'm really trying. They don't mind bringing oh good Lord gifts of all kinds. Software and hardware. Thank you, Kim. <Laugh> hello? Hello. Eston Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy along with Mikah Sargent tech guy two. You got, you got the, both of us.

Eston (caller) (00:14:56):
Hi. yeah, I I'm creating a short film document for my history class. How old are you?

Leo Laporte (00:15:02):
How old are you? Eston 15. So this is like eighth grade

Eston (caller) (00:15:09):
Freshman year,

Leo Laporte (00:15:10):
Freshman and high high school. And and are you guys meeting in person or are you still working out of the house?

Eston (caller) (00:15:16):
Oh, we are in person, right.

Leo Laporte (00:15:17):
Oh, isn't that nice. Much better. Isn't it? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yes, it is nice. So you're taking a history class mm-hmm <affirmative> and the assignment or you, this is extra. Is this extra credit?

Eston (caller) (00:15:29):
So this is for program called national history day.

Leo Laporte (00:15:32):
Oh, neat.

Eston (caller) (00:15:33):
I'm not familiar with that. You create different history projects and I'm creating a

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
Documentary. I bet. You know, these days, you know, in my day it would've been a 15 page type hand typed paper or maybe a clay model of Stonehenge, which I did do, but nowadays sure. A video and hd.org. Cool. So what is your video gonna be about?

Eston (caller) (00:15:59):
It's gonna be about the 1973 Oil Crisis.

Leo Laporte (00:16:02):
Oh yes. I remember that long gas lines. Jimmy Carter, the the Arab oil boy. What do, what do they call that when they, they say no more oil for you anyway. <Laugh> okay, cool. And are you on a Mac or a PC?

Eston (caller) (00:16:22):
It is a PC,

Leo Laporte (00:16:23):
Both Macs and PCs these days come with kind of simple video editing software, but you might want something a little bit better. Do, do you need to put it on a DVD at the end or how do you deliver it or not these days you probably upload it, right?

Eston (caller) (00:16:39):
Yeah. I should upload MP4.

Leo Laporte (00:16:41):
Yeah. So have you played with Microsoft's video editor program? It's not very good, but it it's. I have not, at least you have it. It's on windows. So it's called video editor. Boy, there's a name that that's an inspring name isn't it, used to be called movie maker. Now it's video editor, but there are better, absolutely better programs, but I, you know, given you got it and it's free. See if it'll do what you wanna do. Is it just editing stuff? What exactly are you how, how fancy are you getting, do you need to titles and all that?

Eston (caller) (00:17:12):
I would like to do a couple

Leo Laporte (00:17:14):
Titles. Yeah. Transitions. You want dissolves star wipes, things like that. Yeah. All of those are all of the, all of the above. Yeah. So you want, you know, look, you grew up watching very sophisticated, you know, video. And so you wanna do the same thing. Do you watch YouTube channels? I do. What's your favorite YouTube channel?

Eston (caller) (00:17:38):
I like a car YouTube channel called the Stratman. He's a blogger.

Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
And, and is it pretty well edited?

Eston (caller) (00:17:46):
Yeah. Most of the time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
So there that's the that's setting the bar, James, James is a supercar fan and he does some pretty good editing. So you're kind of, you're kind of thinking something along that line, right?

Eston (caller) (00:18:01):
Yeah, it doesn't have to be quite as crazy, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
You know, it's funny cuz my son he's now 27, but when he was your age, he started doing a lot of video editing. Now he's a TikTok superstar. He's got 1.7 million followers. So there is a future in this. I might have mocked it in years gone by, but there is a future in this. So it's a good thing to learn. I think the least expensive, but most powerful choice would be Premier Elements from Adobe. It's on to a hundred bucks. Do you have a budget?

Eston (caller) (00:18:33):
I would like it to be as cheap as possible.

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Cheap as possible. Well look at the video editor in, in windows and then there are open source, free video editors as well. They're harder to use, but they're just as powerful. Hang on. We gotta take a break, but I'll talk about that. When we come back, Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
Shouldn't have asked you so many questions. Oh yeah. It was Nixon in 70. It was 70 Carter was 76. So it was the Nixon, but there was a fuel crisis under Carter as I remember. So yeah. Okay. 73 you had OPEC. Alright. I would say the open source video editor that I actually, the one that I would really look at is DaVinci resolve, which is free. That's true. I forgot about that. Yeah. and that's a professional. Very good. Very powerful. How, how fast is your system?

Eston (caller) (00:19:28):
Not very,

Leo Laporte (00:19:29):
Not very, it might be too high end for you, but that one is free DaVinci resolve. So you can at least try it. You know, there's a paid version of it, but DaVinci resolve free is very good. Right. Let me think on a, a lower end video editing program,

Mikah Sargent (00:19:50):
There are two open source ones. I keep seeing coming up Shot Cut and Open Shot.

Leo Laporte (00:19:54):
Yeah. I haven't used either of those and I have not used either of them. That's not the one I'm thinking of.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:01):
Um I know a lot of good audio editors you can get

Leo Laporte (00:20:05):
For free, but yeah, isn't that funny? Video's a little harder to do. Yeah. Yeah, they do. They do like shot. I see Canon live is the one, but that's Linux only. Unfortunately that's the one I was thinking of, but that's Linux only. So how, tell me about your PC. How old is it?

Eston (caller) (00:20:27):
He is, I think three years old.

Leo Laporte (00:20:29):
Oh, that's not too bad. That's not too bad. There's a lot more stuff for Lennox. I don't see a lot of, let's see here's windows. Okay. V cutter is a very simple, free version that is just, but mostly just for cutting. They won't have a lot of dissolves and wipes and things like that. Can you get, can you get mom and dad to spring for I mean, this is for a national competition. Get them to spring for something a little better. Just tell 'em look. Leo's son got now is making a living as doing videos. So I wanna do that. Do you think it's something you might wanna do as you get older?

Eston (caller) (00:21:17):
I'm actually looking to become a mechanical engineer.

Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
Even better, even better. So you like the tech? Well look at, okay, so the free, free have already got it. Video editor on windows 10 for about 80 or 90 bucks, you can get premier elements. If, if you can get somebody to spring for it or maybe Mo some lawns or I guess today's be shoveling some snow. Yeah. Especially in KC. K. Yeah. is it snowing yet?

Eston (caller) (00:21:50):
It has not yet. Oh, it's getting really windy though.

Leo Laporte (00:21:52):
Yeah. I bet here comes. We're getting big storm tonight. I'm sure it's huge storm tonight. I think I think we should take a look at that. What is it? Shot? Cut shot. Cut Shot Cut. Take a look at shot, right? Is that free? Yep. That's a good deal. Free and open source, shotcut.org. Everybody seems to like that. I've not, you know, I should probably try it and see, oh, it looks pretty good. Yeah. Looks pretty good. Anything that does timeline editing and this is timeline. Editing will be good to learn because that's the standard, you know, that's what eventually you'll use with premier or a final cut or avid. One of the big editors you'll do timeline editing and this looks like a timeline editor. So that's good because then you get to kind of get used to this and these are really skills that, that translate very well. So yeah. Shot Cut. Nice that it's free.

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
I think we're gonna, we're gonna go with that. Hey, have fun. Let me know how you do. Okay. Estin. I will. All right. Best of luck. Take care. Hey Scotty. Welcome home. Hey Leo. Welcome back, Scott. We're gonna do our Scotty thing here. The Scotty thing, the Scotty, I beat me up. Caden live is on windows. Okay, well that would be another good one. I've used Caden live on on Linux and that's a good one. Excuse me. We're watching the Excel F M WC open right now. We can't be doing any of this. Leo Laport, the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
Do we have a winner now in the in the FWC FM WC open the financial modeling world cup. Is there a winner yet? I don't know. I don't know. It's very exciting. I guess there is, but I wanna spoil it for anybody. Who's you know, like videoing it, videotaping it. Hey Scott Wilkinson home theater geek back from Santa Cruz, contributor to techhive.com and our regular AV man from the north pole. <Laugh> he has a little, has a little Santa little Santa vibe going. Did you go to see the 3D display? The new 3D display?

Steve Wilkinson (00:24:11):
I did. Oh man. Really? Oh man. It's it's really good.

Leo Laporte (00:24:17):
Micah. This was Micah's assignment for you is to go. Yes. I've been

Steve Wilkinson (00:24:20):
Waiting to hear about it. Well, it's, it's pretty amazing. I I've, I've got a pretty extensive article on tech hive right at the top of the home page at techhive.com. You'll see my article about.

Leo Laporte (00:24:34):
Tell us what it is.

Steve Wilkinson (00:24:35):
What is it? Okay. So it's a company called light field lab started in 2017 and the technology they've called it solid delight, which is actually a really good name.

Leo Laporte (00:24:48):
It's the old idea though. Going back to star wars, help me OB one Kenobi. You're my only hope of that. A holographic projection. In this case it was R two D two projecting princess Leia. Correct. And you know, we've seen this in sci-fi for years, but

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:05):
It's a of sci-fi absolutely. There's princess Leia. There is the 

Leo Laporte (00:25:13):
Back to the future, Marty MC fly back

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:15):
To future Marty MC fly the

Leo Laporte (00:25:16):
Comes out.

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:17):
Yeah, right, exactly. The, the the ho deck and star Trek. But those things all break the laws of physics in one don't you hate

Leo Laporte (00:25:27):
It when that happens.

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:28):
I hate when that happens.

Leo Laporte (00:25:30):
<Laugh> well, what does that mean? How could they work if they break the laws of

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:33):
Physics? Well, because it's special effects. They can do anything.

Leo Laporte (00:25:37):
Oh, they're faking it. In other words, they're

Steve Wilkinson (00:25:39):
Faking it. Exactly. But this isn't, this is the real deal. So basically what they're due is they're replicating how light works in the real world. So in the real world, you look at an object. You've got light in the real world, from the sun or lamps or whatever source. It hits the object. It reflects off the object, bunch of different directions. The light goes in a bunch of different directions and some of it enters your eye and you see, you see your eye detects these light rays. And it looks three dimensional because you have two eyes. And the point is that the light is coming from particular directions. And if you move around the object, the light is coming from a different direction than it did before.

Leo Laporte (00:26:27):
That's why we can around, you know, stuff and look at it like you're at a museum. You can go see what's behind David. Right? Exactly.

Steve Wilkinson (00:26:35):
Yeah. And also the object that you're looking at occludes or blocks, whatever's behind it.

Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
Object that you're looking. Oh yeah. Yeah. So you can't see the wall behind David

Steve Wilkinson (00:26:46):
Cuz he's in the way, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But then when you move around, David, you suddenly see the part of the wall that you couldn't see before. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (00:26:55):
He's naked. I'm sorry. We'll use something else. You get the, you get the idea. Okay. Yeah.

Steve Wilkinson (00:27:00):
So what light lab is doing with this technology is it's replicating exactly that and what they need to do that is they need <laugh>. They need to scale up the number of quote, unquote, pixels or light Ray by many orders of magnitude over what we do now. So a 4k display, right? Your standard 4k TV has 8 million pixels. Eight K TV has 33 million pixels. Wait

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
A minute. I thought an eight K would have 8 million. Okay. So I, my math is off. No, your math is

Steve Wilkinson (00:27:38):
Off. Okay. Has 33 million pixels.

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
33 million. Okay. Yep.

Steve Wilkinson (00:27:42):
The solid light panel that, that light field lab banks has 10 billion

Leo Laporte (00:27:50):
Pictures. Oh, that's a lot, a lot more than an eight K display a lot more. Are they firing though in different directions or just different? Okay. That's why you, you have to be able to walk around in.

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:02):
Exactly. And that's the, is it a, that's why you need so much? What is it?

Leo Laporte (00:28:06):
What does the display

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:07):
Look like? It's a flat panel. Tiled modular display. Exactly like a micro L E D tiled video

Leo Laporte (00:28:15):
Wall. How big is it?

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:17):
The tile itself is 20 inches on a side, 28 inches diagonal square. So you

Leo Laporte (00:28:23):
Can't walk all away a around it cuz it's a flat pill. No, it's

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:26):
Not a hundred. It's not a hundred percent,

Leo Laporte (00:28:28):
But you can walk back and forth.

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:30):
Well, the current, the current, the demo that I saw had a viewing angle that you could walk around a hundred degrees. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:28:37):
That's quite a bit, that's almost all around. It's pretty good. Really kinda targeting this for a television or

Steve Wilkinson (00:28:43):
Visual display. Yeah. The first applications are going to be in like museums or corporate video walls or dig this virtual production. You've heard this before. Right? Where shows like the Mandalorian have a video wall, an led micro E D video wall behind the actor. So instead of green screen, you got this video wall showing the, you know, the, the scene that the, the actor is playing upon. Well, what if that video wall actually had a 3d scene behind it? It would be, it would look much more realistic.

Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
So I, I guess I understand there are plenty of applications. You'd also have zoom calls when, so forth, but oh yeah. Let's talk about the thing that you looked at how you said it looked pretty good. Is it solid? It looked really it's solid princess Le was kind of like, you know, ghost

Steve Wilkinson (00:29:37):
And you could sort of see through it, right? Yeah. Not this, this is solid. I was looking at this chameleon. It's it's a computer generated chameleon and I was looking at it and there were plants behind it. Completely occluded, completely blocked. And

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
As you moved the background, you had perspective, the background shifted differently than the foreground. So Exactly. You said, right. You said an interesting thing. Computer generated. Can you, can you do this with video or do you have to, you,

Steve Wilkinson (00:30:07):
You can. But it, it requires a volumetric data set. Okay. So it requires lot of points, actual, a lot of points. You could do it if you had a bunch of cameras, for example, around what you were filming.

Leo Laporte (00:30:20):
Okay. Like bullet time with the matrix. Okay,

Steve Wilkinson (00:30:22):
Exactly. You could do it that way, but for now the technology is mostly using volumetric data from things like unity or unreal.

Leo Laporte (00:30:32):
So yeah. Digitally created stuff. So that created stuff. We're not gonna see it on a zoom call because you need a special camera to do it on a zoom call. The reason I mentioned that is cuz Google, supposedly has something similar for video conferencing. This is very different though. It sounds like. Yeah, but it works.

Steve Wilkinson (00:30:51):
It works. It works really well. In fact, they said, go, go, go, try to touch the chameleon. And so I did, and of course my hand passed right through it, dig this, they gave me a magnifying glass and I could look at the chameleon through the magnifying glass. And it worked as if the chameleon were a real thing.

Leo Laporte (00:31:09):
What you mean? It got pixels.

Steve Wilkinson (00:31:11):
It, yes.

Leo Laporte (00:31:11):
Yes. That's weird. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:31:15):
Okay. That kind of breaks my brain a little bit. Yeah. <laugh> heck so is it, is it like projecting the light into empty space? That's that's how this is working

Steve Wilkinson (00:31:25):
Exactly what it's doing. That's exactly what it's

Leo Laporte (00:31:27):
Doing and you can move around and, and, and you're can different bounced off light rays. Correct. As you move around, correct. Just like you would in the real world. The problem of course. And is generating the 8 billion pixels. Yeah. What

Mikah Sargent (00:31:42):
Kind of heater has to be connected to this? A

Steve Wilkinson (00:31:44):
Lot of data they've that's they've got, yeah, they've got basically a, a huge parallel processing system with F PGAs field programmable Gatorades, which are basically programmable processors. And they've got a bunch of them. Yeah. In these tiles, you have to feed it coal

Mikah Sargent (00:32:02):
Every couple.

Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
So, so the get, go is a model done in, you know, unity or unreal engine, energy, unity or something. Yeah. And then they've got this massive computer generating it. I mean right now I mean it works, which is cool. It works, but they're, but we're quite away from content looking like, well, they're, they're saying it's got before we run outta time, two buzz to tomorrow,

Steve Wilkinson (00:32:25):
Tomorrow three o'clock Pacific time. It'll be in the, it'll be in the show notes. Tell us the URL. Facebook.Com/Two

Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Bop, T U B O. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
Our show today, the tech I podcast brought to you by the user way. Folks love user way. They're doing the work of the angels by making websites accessible. 60 million Americans have disabilities chiefly. I think if you're blind and using a screen reader, so many websites are just inaccesible right? The nav menus don't work images or just blanks user way, fixes it for the 60 million Americans with disabilities, all kinds of disabilities with one line of JavaScript. That's an amazing, amazing product. So good that a million websites now use user way, including some of the biggest websites in the world. Walmart uses a Coca-Cola eBay, FedEx, Disney uses user way to make their websites accessible. Now there's a number of reasons why you would want to do this. Of course, it's the right thing to do, right? Plus there's, you know, that's 60 million Americans who will do business with you.

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
If you site were just accessible to them. There's also, I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna pressure you, but it's also a legal requirement. All websites are public entities and the Americans with disability acts, thanks to Bob doll like Bob doll requires that you make 'em accessible. Fortunately, it's really easy with user way and very affordable too. Their enterprise product that's really changed the world for enterprises. Big ones like eBay and Disney is available at a lower cost for small business and medium business. One line of JavaScript, that's it user way can achieve more than atti team of developers makes your website accessible. It's easy to use. It's cost effective. Now, before you do anything, you should probably go to user way.org/twi. They have a little scanning tool there and just see how compliant or not compliant your site is. And then of course, after you do that, you might wanna check out user way.org/twi and use it.

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We got a great deal for you and it works everywhere. My hand coded sites, but it also use works with WordPress and Shopify and Wix and AEM site course SharePoint. It would work with your GoDaddy site. It would work anywhere. You can put that line in Java script in it integrates seamlessly. It fixes those complex weird nav menus, which really honestly is a big problem. Your shopping cart it'll fix that. So it's accessible forms. It generates alt tags for all the images. That's why it needs AI. Cuz it looks at the image. It uses image recognition to say, oh, that's a golden gate bridge. And they'll add that and you can add more if you want. In fact, after you run it, you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed and you can go in there. It gives you an easy way to do that and say that's the golden gate bridge. It's sunset buddy. And, and make it even better. I think user way is brilliant, but don't you don't have to just listen to me, listen to the voice of Siri. She's got a, she's got a message about user way. Hi, I'm Susan Bennett,

Speaker 6 (00:35:33):
The original voice of Siri. You won't hear me say something like this too often. I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're looking for. But every day that's what the internet is like for millions of people with disabilities user way fixes all of that with just one line of code.

Leo Laporte (00:35:52):
It's so easy. Anybody can do it and it's really affordable, but we're gonna make it even more affordable right now. 30% off user ways, AI powered accessibility solution user way. It can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant. That's important. Avoid ADA lawsuits with user way. Everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly and customize it to fit their needs. It's a great way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. And it's also the right thing to do. Go to user way.org/twi user way.org/twi for 30% off user way's AI powered accessibility solution, user way, making the internet accessible for everyone user way.org/twi. We think of so much for supporting the tech guy podcast and you're supporting us when you use that address. So please do user way.org/twi. Now back to the show, love the monkeys, playing this to commemorate the passing of Mike NMO.

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
The great my, my wife said, did they have a TV show? I said, yes, honey. They were the Zas Beatles that the TV network said the Beatles are so big. We've got to have something. That's what they put an ad in variety saying, looking for actors who can play musical instruments. They got Dave, Joe owns Mike NMO, who is Peter torque was the cute one. And I'm trying to remember who the fourth one was. And they had mop tops just like the monkeys. Right? And they played, they actually got the, some of the best songwriters in the world, like Neil diamond and Neil SAK to write songs for him. And they actually made some hits like this, wake up sleepy, Jean that's Davey singing. So Mike Nemo, Mickey that's right. I forgot about Mickey Dolans. So no. Wow. We got all can't believe. I can remember all four names of the moment, all three of the four anyway I wanted to give you the full plug because we got the NA the address wrong.

Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
So tomorrow Scott will get gonna be playing the tuba. He's gonna play some of his own songs. He's gonna play some of his father's songs and he's also gonna play one of his own compositions, which is Santa wants a tuba for Christmas. We've been playing with other tuba players. The, the reason this is important is we're not doing tuba Christmas this year. It's been called off due to COVID. Can't get the venue in all, all that. So this is your chance. If you miss Tuana Christmas carols, this is your chance. Here's the Facebook address? It's facebook.com/two B live T U B O P live. And it's actually a podcast called conical supremacy. Obviously that's a tuba joke, I guess <laugh> if you go there on the right, you'll see a link to the YouTube that you can go to the YouTube channel and watch tomorrow at 3:00 PM, Pacifics 6:00 PM Eastern time, get some holiday music and watch.

Leo Laporte (00:38:57):
And frankly, if, if Santa were gonna play any instrument, it would be a tuba. And if you, and, and if you look at, if you look at Scott Wilkinson, it's kind, kind of looks like Santa. So you'll get to imagine what it would be. If Santa's playing the tuba, facebook.com/tuba, Tubo P live tub up T U B O P live. And so thank you, Scott, for I'm sorry. We didn't get the plugin in time and we kind of, I kind of messed it up, but there you go. TIS the season tuba jolly <laugh> on with the show. Diana I'm sorry. Deanna is on the line from El Dorado Hills. This is California. Hello, Deanna.

Deanna (caller) (00:39:38):
Hey Leo, how are you?

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
I am well, how are you?

Deanna (caller) (00:39:43):
Well, I'm doing pretty good. Cuz I got through to talk to you. I'm a long time listener, never called before contact at the end of my rope with Dell corporation.

Leo Laporte (00:39:54):
Oh the Dell corporation day. What are they doing to you?

Deanna (caller) (00:39:59):
Well, I'll try and make a long story short exactly. A year ago I purchased an X PS desktop computer since then I've had nothing but problems with it. I paid for premium support, which allegedly was premium support.

Leo Laporte (00:40:18):
Dell has, you know, so there's, there's there's levels of premium support. The more you there's premium support plus <laugh> there's there's premium support gold. So yeah. What depends on what you paid for the best support is is that they, after they do the remote diagnosis, come to you and fix it, have they done that? Well, that's

Deanna (caller) (00:40:42):
What it says. That's what it says I have and they have not done that.

Leo Laporte (00:40:46):
Okay. So I guess you're stuck in that, in that weasel word, remote diagnosis. So

Deanna (caller) (00:40:55):
They've done five, which they've done five.

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
So what is your computer doing

Deanna (caller) (00:41:01):
Well? And I'm not really asking you to troubleshoot it. No, it's kinda done with how the heck can I get to somebody who's gonna resolve this problem? Cause conveniently the, the warranty expired yesterday. Oh my

Leo Laporte (00:41:15):
Goodness. But they've been working on it before. Were the warranty expired, right? Yes. Okay. So you should be covered, you know, so what I would do and this is a good little tip right? To the boss, Michael Dell, his name's in the company name, he's the CEO. And when you write to him almost all executives, Dell certainly will have a office of the executive where they respond to these kinds of messages. Tell him you to, you talked about it on national radio with Leo LePort and Leo said, well, I'm sure Dell wants to make you whole I'm sure Dell wants to make you whole, I think actually Dell's a, a decent company. I, I do recommend Dell's we buy Dell's at work for our office. Every computer company is gonna have a lemon from time to time, but the real test of a good company is how they support you. If you get one and it doesn't sound like they've done a good job and you paid a lot for that premium support plus I did. Yeah,

Deanna (caller) (00:42:19):
I did. And, and let me just tell you, I mean, this isn't my first rodeo with Dell. I mean, I've, I've been a Dell customer since 2008 and I have never had a problem.

Leo Laporte (00:42:32):
Yeah. So make sure tell him that too. When you email him, it's Michael, by the way, at dell.com,

Deanna (caller) (00:42:40):
<Laugh> really awesome.

Leo Laporte (00:42:43):
It's easy to remember. At least it used to be,

Deanna (caller) (00:42:46):
I even went on their Twitter account and I was, that's a

Leo Laporte (00:42:49):
Good way to do it too. TWI tweet tweet at Dell and Dell support. That's a very good way to do

Deanna (caller) (00:42:55):
It though, is they, they shoved me off into private messaging is what they did.

Leo Laporte (00:42:59):
Yeah. They don't want it in public. So you keep, keep it in public because that's when they're gonna Twitter. It turns out as a, and it's kind of funny because not, you know, Twitter has a big name, but not that many people really pay attention to Twitter, but boy companies hate it if you expose them in public on Twitter. So that's a very good way to get to a company. But I would emailMichael@dell.com tell 'em this. I love Dell. I've owned Dell computers for years, but this one has really been a problem. And frankly, after weeks of trying, your support has not fixed it. I bought premium support. Plus I expect onsite service, but they refuse to fix it onsite because they keep doing this. He'll fix it. He'll fix it. Okay. Because this is, you know, that in other words, this is escalating and, and why escalate, you know, to your super, when you call this support, give me your supervisor when you can go right to the top, just go to the top. Well, and that,

Deanna (caller) (00:43:57):
That's what I was looking for. It's just like how in the world, because I could never get a quote supervisor and yeah, I there's just no way around, but I love this. I appreciate this because this is I'm gonna do that because I, I filled out all the or surveys. I'm gonna go back. I hate Twitter personally. I reactivated my Twitter account just to, to call 'em out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:44:24):
So, so do the, do this do a, the first sentence should be a very quick summary, cuz he's not gonna he's he's not gonna read the whole thing, but then document it in the rest of the letter, all, all the stuff you've been through, just so they have it a record. And if you've got a, a case number and all that, make sure that's in there too, what's gonna happen is Michael's not gonna look at it, but his office of the executive will look at it. Yeah. Well, but you're, you're, you know, this, they do most companies, I I'm presuming Dell's one of them pay attention to this stuff. So Michael's gonna his office, the executive's going to get it and they're gonna, they're gonna escalate it for you cause, and just make sure you mention, you know and Leo's waiting to hear what happens and that way there's a little bit more public pressure that it's a shame.

Leo Laporte (00:45:09):
You have to do this. But it sounds like, you know, you do so I'm sorry. And you're right, Dell, you know, you've had good experiences with Delta now. Really the there's no computer company in the world that doesn't make a lemon every once in a while this or any company that's happens. What we really measure these companies by is how they stand behind the lemons, how they've, how they, they protect the customers. And if a company does that, then it's a good company, you know? So Dell makes good computers, but they need to stand behind the ones that aren't perfect.

Deanna (caller) (00:45:44):
Absolutely. And I mean, literally I was looking up the California Lemon Law.

Leo Laporte (00:45:50):
Yeah. There is a lemon law for are computers actually. There's but it's not, it's not as good as the Carle law. The other thing to do after the show goes on, is done. We're gonna put a podcast of it, send them the, the recording of this conversation, cuz Dean, and then I want you to call me back and tell me how it went. Okay. Thank good luck, Deanna. I hope this works Leo Laporte The Tech Guy. And now we give you Santa who wants a tuba for Christmas <laugh> tuba. So is this in lieu of tuba, Christmas kind of it

Steve Wilkinson (00:46:30):
Kind of, yeah, the problem is be because I'm not doing the normal tuba Christmas. I can't call it tuba Christmas officially.

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
Oh, someone. Oh yeah. Cuz there's a national tuba Christmas

Steve Wilkinson (00:46:44):
National organization. Yes. The national exist. And there are a number of tuba Christmases that are happening around the country, all outdoors. Yeah. And I, I, I almost had a venue at USC. I almost had an outdoor venue at USC and then they, they pulled the plug and they said we're not gonna do any programming during finals week. Oh. Which is when I had, when I could do it. So I can't do a real tuba Christmas. So we're calling this one Christmas tubas. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:47:13):
Close enough. You know, do you have control of tuba Christmas, la.com? I do. You could have that redirect to the video. Well

Steve Wilkinson (00:47:22):
AC actually my friend Mike Klein, Mike Mann in the chat room just did he just redirected 20, 21 dot tuba, Christmas

Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
La.Com. Oh good. So I'll give that out. Give that one out. It is tomorrow though, right? Correct. Well, the good news is I have a show tomorrow before three, so I'll plug it again before, if you could. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what's nice about these is you don't have to be in the LA area to attend. Correct. So I kinda like these remote ones.

Steve Wilkinson (00:47:52):
I, I agree with you on that. I, I sent out a big blast over the last few days to, you know, basically my, my PR list and you know, all my friends around the country, around the world. Good. you know, to tune in cuz otherwise I'm only sending a blast to, to be in LA. Yeah. Yeah. So I hope you can tune in. Now you might have something to do with three o'clock off. I have a

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
Thing called TWI. It's just a little show

Mikah Sargent (00:48:17):
I'm going to be tuning in. I've got the reminder set up. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:48:19):
Looking for Mike's day off so he

Steve Wilkinson (00:48:21):
Can do it. I appreciate that. No, please do fun. It's gonna be a lot of fun. We're gonna be out on on one of the player driveway. 

Leo Laporte (00:48:32):
You're gonna, so I was gonna ask how you solve the latency issue. You are gonna be together. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. We're gonna be physically together that yeah. So that's a perfect way to do it. Yeah. Mm-hmm <affirmative>

Steve Wilkinson (00:48:43):
And so yeah, 20, 21 dot tuba, Christmas la.com. We'll also redirect, but Micah, thank you. You so much for making a Bitly.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:53):
Yeah. Bitly slash Toop

Steve Wilkinson (00:48:55):
Live. Yep. That'll be fine too, too. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:58):
So there are lots of ways to get there many

Steve Wilkinson (00:49:00):
Ways. I love it. I love it. Many ways to get there. And I hope those of you who are watching and listening in on the stream will, will tune in yes. Mike B tuba christmas.com/select lo select location will tell you where there is an actual tuba Christmas they're do. They did it in Boston outdoors over the Thanksgiving weekend. Geez. They're doing it in New York. They always do it outdoors in New York at the Rockefeller center. There have been a few in Southern California, smaller ones. I just, I didn't wanna do it indoors and I couldn't get an outdoor venue. So yes might be that's correct. Tuba christmas.com lets you see where tuba Christmases are being held or around the country and around the world. Really? yeah. Ha <laugh> hamster M MH Kazu Christmas still hasn't taken off nor has trumpet Christmas. I saw a, a video once of, of somebody trying to do a trumpet Christmas and it really didn't work.

Steve Wilkinson (00:50:11):
Yes, Dr. Mom, grandma spraying. COVID Omicron out of the bells of tubas, the venue that we had required that all the tubas have cloth coverings over their bells and believe it or not, those are now made that are supposedly acoustically transparent. But I didn't wanna require everybody to buy one flugelhorn Christmas Allen Gabriel actually I have in the past had flugelhorns at tuba Christmas because they are after all soprano tubas they're Chronicle, if you'll recall the name of the podcast we, we will be on tomorrow is conical supremacy. And that is what Chuck Manchi plays arch Chandra. That's exactly right. It's basically a trumpet, a conical trumpet sized instrument. But I counted as a soprano tuba. So I've had it loquacious with the cover muffle the sound of the tuba potentially. Yes. you know, there are cloths like speaker grill cloth, for example, that does not muffle.

Steve Wilkinson (00:51:23):
So if you made a, a cloth cover over for a tuba bell or an brass bell out of speaker fabric, speaker grill fabric it shouldn't be a problem at all. And there are companies that sell musical instrument, accessories and sheet music and stuff like that, that, that sell that kind of thing. And, and they sell these, these cloth covers that don't fle the sound, but Hey Mike, Heis give a conical for Hanukah. <Laugh> exactly right. Jay French horns do not count. They are conical. You're exactly right about that. But they are in a different family of instruments. Now we do allow Vagner tubas in tuba Christmas, and those are more or less in the closer to the French horn family than the tuba family. But since they have tuba in their name, we make an exception in their case.

Steve Wilkinson (00:52:26):
So bell barrier, yes. Scooter. Let me take a look@thatbellbarrier.com. That's probably exactly what it is. Yep. That's exactly what it is. You put that on your horn and it does definitely reduce the amount of particulate emanations, Dr. Mom, grandma SUSE phone. Absolutely. We love SAF phones at tuba Christmas. We usually line 'em up in the back and in fact, SUSE phones very often have cloth covers over their horns over their bells. They have for years with the school logo or things like that. So, so that's a very common got brass. Indeed. <laugh> so so yeah, again, I hope I hope you all tune in tomorrow. It'll be loads of let's see, where am, where am I? Zoom wise. I got a minute in 30 seconds. So if anybody has any other questions, I'm happy to address them.

Leo Laporte (00:53:40):
So gone yacht. Oh, sorry. What so gone.

Steve Wilkinson (00:53:45):
What is so KA?

Leo Laporte (00:53:46):
They are Hanukah donuts. Jelly donuts. They're so good. Of course. Oh man.

Steve Wilkinson (00:53:53):
So good. In fact, Dr. Mom, grandma asked me earlier, if, if I could play tuba after eating some of those, no, the answer is you cannot well, you can, but you should

Leo Laporte (00:54:04):
Because you get little SOCAN crumbs in your bell.

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:07):
Exactly. And sugar, which is a bad sugar,

Leo Laporte (00:54:09):
Sugar in bell. Yeah. Sugar in the Bell's not good.

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:13):
Bad. Very bad.

Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
I love SoCon. I love Lakas too.

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:18):
Oh, I do too. We had LACAs when I was up in Santa Cruz. Oh, for last night of Hanukah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
Delicious. Is that why you went up for, for Hanukah?

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:28):
No, I went up for a Memorial. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:54:29):
That's right. All right. That's

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:31):
Right. Most friend of mine who died the Memorial. You said Sheva phenomenal.

Leo Laporte (00:54:34):
What's that? Did you sit Sheva? No, nobody does that. No, we played sack butts,

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:38):
Sack butts, even better. He played sack butts. He was an early music guy. He taught me most of what I know about early music. Oh wow. Oh, got to play some sack butt.

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
I love early music. I, when I want to hear, you know, just great music. I listen to those medieval sack butts. All right. I gotta run. Thank you, Scott.

Steve Wilkinson (00:54:56):
<Laugh> thanks. See you next week.

Leo Laporte (00:55:04):
Hey. Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo port here. I should get a tuba. <Laugh> the tech guy, time to talk, talking to Scott Wilkinson he's gets, he's getting me all excited about tuba. We're talking tech here at eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number. We mentioned that tuba Christmas, which has been an LA event every Christmas for many years. They used to hold it down at the, at the cemetery in the freedom hall down there at forest lawn. But I guess because of COVID they can't do it this year, so Scott is doing something else. And so first thing I guess I should mention is for there are, and I wanna make this clear cuz I, I hope I didn't miss tuba. Christmas is still are going on in many other areas of the country. I guess it's a national thing.

Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
So if you go to tuba, Christmas dot, I think.com you could find a tuba. Yeah. You could find a tuba Christmas near you. If that should be your desire <laugh> and you could search for different locations and so forth. So I don't wanna give the impression that there is no tuba Christmas. It's just tuba Christmas LA, but what we have done, and this is nice is we've redirected. Thank you, Mike Mann, 2021, tuba Christmas la.com to the proper YouTube page. Does it go to the YouTube page? It does to the YouTube page and you'll see on there John Norco and he's playing the various tuba themes and stuff. And that's where the live event, the a conical supremacy event will be. So and I guess Scott was saying, they're gonna all it's tomorrow 3:00 PM, Pacific 6:00 PM. Eastern. They're all gonna be playing in one of the players driveways cause they, they wanna do it outside. So again, 2020 one.to book Christmas la.com and I'll put a link in the show. And if you are somewhere else, I mean, the nice thing is you can watch that anywhere in the world cuz it's streaming. But if there are live concerts, apparently in some areas of the country, you can go to tuba christmas.com. So yes, Virginia, as Dr. Mom says yes, Virginia. There is a tuba Christmas. There will be Christmas this year. Stanley on the line. Hello Stanley from Northwest Ohio. How are you?

Stanley (caller) (00:57:27):
Hello, Leo Laporte I'm doing great. And you

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
I'm great. Say hello to Mikah Sargent. Hello, the tech guy Jr. We're here to help.

Stanley (caller) (00:57:36):
Hello Mikah. And again, Leo, I'm gonna be switching phone companies, cell phone companies after the first of the year. But my one question is you see all these ads from the lesser known companies that say we use the same towers and all of that, my primary concern is clarity and volume of the phone calls. Is there truly no

Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
Difference? There's no difference in that regard. So what those little companies are. So there's the big companies in the world T-Mobile Verizon at and T us cellular. They run their own towers. They have their own infrastructure. They're their standalone companies. But as you mentioned, then there are a lot of other little ones like mint mobile they're called M V N OS mobile virtual network operators. Some of them are owned by the company. Verizon owns visible for instance cricket, which is another one. I think, I can't remember who cricket is owned, but I think at and T, so there are a number of them that are actually owned by the companies, but then there are a lot of others that basically buy the inter I guess the best way to think of it is they buy the, the mobile service at wholesale.

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
So they get a little bit of a break and then they sell it to you. And generally it's gonna be less expensive than getting it from the big boys. So there must be something you're giving up, right? This is most the only thing you're giving up. I'll give you an example, mint, mobile, and T-Mobile cause I use both. So T-Mobile, if you're getting it from T-Mobile, as you travel internationally, you get internet data globally. You get a, a price for calls and you get priority on the cell towers with mint, mobile, the international stuff doesn't happen. That's a deal that T-Mobile has with other companies and mint mobile doesn't get access to that. And, and I don't ever find this happening, but in theory, if there are a lot of T-Mobile customers using a tower, you might be de prioritized, your data might be slower. I think in every respect, the calls are the same. They certainly will be the same volume.

Stanley (caller) (00:59:48):
Okay. That makes sense. Any thoughts on spectrums venture into the

Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
Cell phone tower? Well, now this is interesting because Xfinity started this, but the cable companies are starting to get into it, right? So I'm not as familiar with Spectrum's offering as I am with Xfinity, but I'll talk about Xfinity. Xfinity is an mvn O for Verizon. So when you're on pure cellular, you're on Verizon, but I, and I suspect Spectrum's doing something similar. What, what Xfinity realizes, but wait, <laugh>, we have a lot of customers who have cable modems. Of course, when you're at home on almost all services, you're using your wifi, not the cell tower, but what if, you know, we modified the cable modems we give to our customers so that they would be available to cellular customers as they wanted around town. And so that's in fact what they do. It doesn't work very well in my opinion, but as you wander around a town and you're using Spectrum's phone service, sometimes you'll be on other people's wifi.

Leo Laporte (01:00:55):
And then sometimes you'll be on the, the actual cell service. And because in an area where spectrum is the, the incumbent cable company, they have lots of base stations. You might actually be on wifi most of the time. Wow. I never knew that. Yeah. So I, I that's how Xfinity does it. And I'm guessing that spectrum is doing the same thing. That's why a cable company would want to get in the phone business. They're realizing, well, wait a minute, in a way we are a wire company because we've got all this wifi all over town. Right, right. Yeah. So I'll have to look up, I'll have to learn more about spectrum. We're not in a spectrum area, we're in a Comcast area. So I'm pretty familiar with how Xfinity works. Okay. Yeah, but you're a, obviously a charter spectrum person. So now that's another question.

Leo Laporte (01:01:44):
What happens if you are a spectrum user and you go somewhere where Comcast is the incumbent, then you just use the mobile service, you know, you'll be using the same. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it'll be the same. I'm not sure who they use as as their bar, you know, who they rent this mobile system from, but okay. Yeah. They're mvn O let me just see. Yeah. Let me just see who they're in. Mvn oh, four, if somebody says, yeah, I don't, I don't see charter follow Comcast lead. Yeah. I, you know, I think if you do it, you're doing it to save money, perhaps. I don't think it's, and I'd love to hear from people who have cable companies providing their cell service, whether it's Xfinity or a spectrum, how do you like it? How do you like it? I, I could see it's a benefit for those companies.

Leo Laporte (01:02:35):
Not sure it's a great idea for the customer, you know, so I'd be curious how you like it now, on the other hand, I love the MV and OS I use mint mobile. They're great. Ting is another one. Visible is actually owned by Verizon. So a cricket is owned by at and T. So sometimes you're really just getting, you're just getting a, a deal. And you, the, the, the reason the companies do this is there's different different models. And they're trying different stuff visible for instance, is aimed at a younger audience that doesn't use phone calls as much, but they use data a lot. So it's very data focused. It's, it's more expensive for the phone calls, less expensive for the data which flips the normal, you know, cell phone thing on its head. It's kind of an interesting idea. All right. Enough of that, eighty eight, eighty eight S phone number, Leo and Micah taking your calls.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:35):
So good.

Leo Laporte (01:03:40):
Yeah. I don't know anybody yet who has T-Mobile internet it's, but even if they said the answer would vary, T-Mobile now has this home internet, depending on how close you are to the tower, how many people are using the tower. So it's gonna really vary quite a bit from person to person. They do have a free, I would, I would try it. The theory is good. And if you don't have less expensive high speed internet from your phone or cable company this is a great alternative. If you're near a T-Mobile tower Verizon's now doing this as well. The home internet using their towers, which I think is a good idea. Kind of as always with this stuff, though, you gotta read the fine print and no know all the details. Do they slow you down after 20 gigabytes or things like that? We routinely at home use more than a terabyte a month. Yeah, same. And you know, Comcast was gonna ding me when we go over you know, a terabyte several times, I got the, you know, oh, you went over a terabyte, we're gonna charge you. So I finally, they do have unlimited service, but it costs a lot more. So finally you said, oh, screw it. I'm just gonna, that's what, I, I don't wanna worry about it. You have it too. I, I,

Mikah Sargent (01:04:51):
And you have to, they don't even make it very clear. You have to call and do the right things, say the right things to get that unlimited option, say magic words, Uhhuh. And then there, I mean, which you would think they would just let you because paying them more, but yeah, you have to, they're like, oh no, you probably don't

Leo Laporte (01:05:05):
Need that. No one, no, no one knows

Mikah Sargent (01:05:07):
Over. I'm like, yeah, I've paid you overages three months in a row.

Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
This, so they give you like three months warning mm-hmm <affirmative> and then yeah, I end up they specifically say they have no throttling, no data caps, no taxes or fees, no price increase 50 bucks. That's pretty good. So really again, it's gonna depend on how close you are to the tower and how busy a tower it is. If you're in a rural area and there's a tower, a hundred feet away, it'd probably be great. Cuz remember the issue on this is that each tower is connected to the internet through a back haul. And the whatever bandwidth that tower gets is shared by everybody using the tower. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, if you're the only person on it, it's all yours. But if there's a hundred people on it, you may not have it's you know, the same for a lot of, I mean, it's basically the same for cable. But my experience is that they, this may have changed. You know, they may not put a huge amount of bandwidth in each tower cause it's expensive, right? A hundred megabits. That's pretty good. Typical between 30 and 115. But see how it says many customers, <laugh> many customers, but not all speeds can vary. Yep, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
Tech I podcast brought to you this week by worldwide technology, a platinum IBM business partner, WWT is the company you wanna work with. If you you're a business and you use technology, they call it enterprise technology, right? They are at the forefront of innovation and enterprise technology, working with companies all over the world, transforming their business. And the reason WWT is such a great partner. Well, there are many, one is they understand business. So they're, they're not gonna give you technology for technology's sake. They work with you to make sure, first of all, learn your strategy to make sure that any technology you employ supports that that's so important. The other thing, one of the many other things, but the another big one that comes to mind that makes WWT unique is their advanced technology center. I've talked about it before. This is a research and testing lab that brings together half a billion dollars worth of equipment from all the big OEMs.

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
It's just amazing. This is what WW T's engine is. They started this years ago. I think a decade ago with one building, a couple of racks. Now it's many racks spread over. I think four buildings. We went and visited last year. I was blown away. It's beautiful, perfectly done. And I talked to some of the engineers in there. They love it. I said, you got the greatest job in the world. Don't you? He said, yeah, we get to, you use all the latest stuff. That's where their engineers spin up. Proofs of concept, learn about technology, do pilot programs for their customers, that kind of thing. But here's the thing that's amazing at WWT. They also let you have access to the labs. The ATC, the advanced technology center offers hundreds of on demand and scheduleable labs for you. Things like, well, their labs proofs of concept like the IBM storage POC, the newest advances in multi-cloud architecture and security, networking, primary and secondary storage, data analytics, AI DevOps, AI process too.

Leo Laporte (01:08:15):
And you get to use this too, as a member of the ATC platform, which is free with the ATC. You can test out products and solutions before you go to market. There's more than just the labs there. There's technical articles, there's expert insights, there's demonstration videos and white papers. All the tools you'll need to stay up to date with the latest technology and, and they virtualized it. So you, if you're on the platform, you can access these resources anywhere. Anytime I love this. And while you're visiting the ATC platform, you should also check out WWTs events and communities these days they're virtual as well. So you can, you can find out more about technology trends here, the latest research and insights, their experts, and, you know, have a laugh too, cuz they bring in some great talented entertainers for this stuff as well. It's just, you know, the community ATC is second Deni is fabulous.

Leo Laporte (01:09:06):
Whatever your business need WWT can deliver scalable, tried and tested tailored solutions, right? For you. WWT is famous for bringing strategy and execution together to make the new world happen, to learn more about WWT, the ATC to gain access to all these free resources I just described. It's very easy. You just go to wwt.com/twi, create an account on the ATC platform and have@itwwt.com slash we thank WWT for supporting the tech I podcast. Thank you for using that address so that they know you saw it here. And now back to the show, I like it where I figured professor Laura would find unusual holiday music to play. And she did. She also warned me ahead of time. She said, don't worry. This is the clean version. <Laugh> oh, okay. Thank you. Am I liable or are you liable? I think you're liable. Laura. Both of us.

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
I could it's my show. I guess I, you know, the FCC would come to my door. I'm the only one that's who's this Micah guy. Can we Sue him to oh no. 80. Oh, you know the penalties for fleeting expletives on the radio. Quite I'm very careful. Be very careful. Very careful. I should have probably told you that before we started working together, 88, 88 ask Leo, Mike is a longtime podcast colleague and there's no FCC doesn't regulate podcasts. You can say whatever you want for as many, as many podcasts do. No, I don't think they ever will. It tease, but it's very different in broadcast. You know? I have to be very careful. Just remember that's a microphone. You don't know if it's on or off. Just pretend it's always on. Look, I was in theater for so many years that every microphone is a micro that's it's live.

Leo Laporte (01:10:50):
You go backstage and go, boy, audience is terrible. And that would go right through the crowd. They wouldn't be our lead using the restroom with the microphone. Don't wear the microphone to the bathroom. Yeah, it was bad. Oh, I have done that. But only as a joke. Oh, at yeah, we were doing an event at CES, which is coming up couple of weeks, the big. So the show formally named as the consumer electronic show. And we were doing a broadcast there and I want, I, I thought I'm gonna leave it on <laugh>. I mean, I didn't do anything. I just went in there and talked to it was funny. Yeah. Trust me. I believe you. You had to be there John on the line from <laugh> geography joke, John on the line from Concord, North Carolina. Hello John. Hello, Leo

Lex (caller) (01:11:34):
And Mikah. How are you? We're great.

Leo Laporte (01:11:36):
How are you?

Lex (caller) (01:11:38):
Oh, welcome to the crew. Mikah. Thank you so much. You know what you're getting into <laugh> oh yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:43):
I worked with this guy for a little while.

Leo Laporte (01:11:45):
Think, I think you kind of might. Yeah.

Lex (caller) (01:11:47):
Yeah. I got two questions. One from my grandkids and one from me. Which one would you like

Leo Laporte (01:11:53):
Start with? Whichever one matters to you the most, which I'm guessing is your grandkids, but I grandkids. And

Lex (caller) (01:11:58):
It it's a simple question. You know that lady on the iPhone, when you ask her to send a message used to do the whoosh after you, my grandkids missed that. She, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:12:12):
They don't, it doesn't make the send. No. well I don't know if it has to do with the lady or not. There's a couple of things going on. First of all, the lady in your phone has, has gotten dumber. In fact, Apple's getting a lot of heat for this. We've had several calls from blind users and others. It used to be, you could tell her to read messages, send messages and all sorts of stuff and she's to is stopped. So that's one issue, but you can also, there's also a setting. The whoosh is actually in the sound settings. It's the, it's the sent mail setting. So if you go into your settings and then go to sounds and haptics, you can have a variety of sent mail. Let's see if I can, I can make mine. Well, that's a bell. I want the swoosh. It's called swoosh. There it is. I love that. Okay. That's my favorite sound. It's very satisfying. Love it.

Lex (caller) (01:13:05):
They don't think the message has been sent until they hear that sound. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:13:08):
Yeah. In fact, it's funny that you should say that cuz I feel the same way they actually updated it. So this is the old swoosh they call it swish. Can you hear that? Yeah. And then now these days it's this, it is different. It goes a little longer, a little farther. The male's going a little farther. So that's in your settings and if it's disabled, but you can have a do other sounds too. Don't tell the grand, how old are the grandkids? Three and four. Oh Don tell 'em how to get to this. Cuz they will mess with you. In fact, when we first got phones that allowed you to set ring tones and, and sounds like this, I would sit and I would drive my wife crazy. I'd go. Hmm. Do I want to use Aurora? Maybe I want to use that. What should I? And it would drive her crazy by the way. I've sure just driven the audience crazy. Cause they all think they got text messages. So that was me not you anyway.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:01):
And also a simple thing just to check is that that mute switch on the side of the phone is not turned on if the mute switch is on. Yeah, that one. Okay, good. Just wanted to check cuz I always have mine turned off. And yes, the lady on the phone will be quieter if you do have it

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
Turned off. Well, and one other thing that I never knew, it used to drive me crazy. If you invoke the lady on the phone by calling her out by name, Hey, you know who she'll talk to you out loud, but you know that on an I phone, you can press the screen on, off button and hold it to talk to her. And at that point she won't talk out loud back to you. She assumes, oh you must be in a meeting or backstage with a microphone. <Laugh> and, and you don't and you don't want me to say anything. So I'm just gonna put it up on the screen for the longest time that puzzled me. And now I understand. Yeah. It's because you're pressing and holding <affirmative> instead of

Lex (caller) (01:14:52):
I know they love it. It's big time when I call out that's so cute.

Leo Laporte (01:14:55):
Two or three year olds. That's so cute. <Laugh> do they think it's actually a person?

Lex (caller) (01:15:00):
I don't know. But they, they, they love the lady. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:04):
<Laugh> yeah. Used to be Susan Bennett. I don't know who her voice is now, but yeah. So what's grandpa's question.

Lex (caller) (01:15:10):
Grandpa's questions a little bit more calm. I got a 2019 MacBook pro fourth Thunderbolt ports. I have a O WC Thunderbolt, DAS direct attached storage. Love those. And I'm not getting the speeds that I want. I'm getting, and I'm using the black magic disc speed tester through the Thunderbolt and a raid five configuration, 40 terabyte server grandpa. The big,

Leo Laporte (01:15:32):
Yeah, listen.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:33):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:15:34):
Wasn't a grandpa over here, grandpa. I

Lex (caller) (01:15:37):
Need some personal video editing, so I need,

Leo Laporte (01:15:38):
Oh yeah, you want, so this is part of the, I think this is part of the whole conundrum of what does that type C port do? It can do USB two. It could do USB three. It could do speed. 3.1. It could do Thunderbolt two. It could Dobo three. Each of them is a different speed. There's even now Thunderbolt four. So what year is your laptop

Lex (caller) (01:16:00):
Getting here? 19 20 19

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
Crew. And then when you bought that thing from the otherworld computing, was it a Thunderbolt three device because yes, it was

Lex (caller) (01:16:12):
For sure. IBO three. Yeah. Cause that's it had thunderbolts in the title that had two Thunderbolt ports. Here's

Leo Laporte (01:16:18):
Interesting. Well, Thunderbolt by itself doesn't mean Thunderbolt three. So check and make sure is

Lex (caller) (01:16:25):
A Thunderbolt four, but

Leo Laporte (01:16:26):
That was work Thunderbolt two. So, so that, so there is an issue and I've been bit by that. <Affirmative> and you'll notice this because Thunderbolt three devices and op are much more expensive. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> so cables too. So yeah. What cables, what brand of cable are you using? That might be the other issue. Yeah.

Lex (caller) (01:16:47):
I do cable jive. Okay. Those

Leo Laporte (01:16:49):
Are good. Okay.

Lex (caller) (01:16:50):
So here's what I'm getting on my right speed to the da. I'm getting 70 megs and I'm getting a read speed of 570

Leo Laporte (01:16:57):
Megs.

Lex (caller) (01:16:58):
Yeah. 70 megs. It's ridiculous. That's terrible. However, a Daisy chain SSD drive a GForce SSD drive Daisy chain through the dag has right speeds of 400 and re there you go. 500.

Leo Laporte (01:17:11):
Well, here's the deal. In fact, I should have just let you finish your question cuz you solved all that. Yes. That's thunder bolt three. It's that spinning drive? You've got, can't do anything faster. I think it's a rage. You said?

Lex (caller) (01:17:27):
Yeah, I got it. Raise five and three.

Leo Laporte (01:17:29):
And it's a they're spinning discs. Yes. Yes. And is it a Thunderbolt device? Yes. You sure? Yes. Cause that's really pig slow.

Lex (caller) (01:17:39):
It's pathetic. Yeah. Cause it's my USB three drives connected. You know, they get like, you know, one 50 S one 60 S yeah. Those

Leo Laporte (01:17:46):
Spinning. So you, you, you know, this is the difference between SSD spinning drives. And frankly it's, it's a waste of money to buy a Thunderbolt three interface to a slow drive, cuz it's never gonna be any faster than the drive is. I think obviously it's that raid array who makes that it's other world computing. Yeah. And it's their direct access, huh? Yeah, that should be okay. It's a thunder bowl. Three da. It should be faster. Did you put your own discs in it or use the ones that came with

Lex (caller) (01:18:18):
It? I used the ones that came with it.

Leo Laporte (01:18:22):
Yeah. There's something wrong too. So, and they're but they are spitting discs. Yeah. Faster discs. Make a difference for sure. That's all I could think of. It's it's just the limit of that. Drive Leo LePort and Mike Sergeant, the tech guys. So let me think here. Did you get, which one is it? The thunder thunder bay or yeah, thunder bay. I love those. They're so cute. They look just like a Mac pro <laugh>. Huh.

Lex (caller) (01:18:53):
So that's yeah. And they got, they got the, the, you know, they put Shiba drives in it, which I hadn't had any experience with. I know they're not the reds or, you know, in the sea gates, but they seem to be working for now, but it's just getting slower and slower over time and I don't even have it halfway full.

Leo Laporte (01:19:09):
Yeah. And I, I mean, you can replace them with S SDS it'll fit in there. In fact it uses N VMEs as well. If you've got the latest one I have to think it's the drives. That's it's unfortunate. Cuz when it's in raid, you can't really test individual drives, but, but you might be that you have one drive that's messed up and that's bringing the whole Raider Ray down. So a good idea. You probably should own these anyway is to get one of these USB drive interface devices that let you take a drive and hook it up individually to your computer. In other words, take the drive out and test it. Okay. Cause I'm gonna guess at one of these drives there's no, this is by the way, one of the things that Drobo does in their software is they'll tell you the health of each individual drive in the raid. You don't have anything like that for the thunder bay.

Lex (caller) (01:20:09):
They do have a, a program that runs, I didn't pay for the, the latest upgraded program, but

Leo Laporte (01:20:17):
Well, that's, you know, that's one possibility because there's how many drives is it? Four? Yeah. So if one of the drives is bad the whole thing had slowed down cuz it's probably using all four drives for every right. So you, if you could test the drives individually and find the bad drive, I bet you that's the simple fix. And then you just replace that

Lex (caller) (01:20:43):
Now would I be able to mix drives? Can I get an SS D for one port and still use the spinning drive? And as time

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
Goes on, which thunder bay do you have? Do you have the flex?

Lex (caller) (01:20:55):
No thunder bay.

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
That's why they call it the flex because you can mix and match on the flex. Oh, okay. So can't the older one. I don't think you can. Okay. So yeah, they made a new one. Of course this is what never O WCS. Great. But this is what they do. Yeah. And for a little more money, you can have a mix of heterogeneous drives in there. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that's not typical on raid and raid. Usually you want all the drives to match. Golly. Yeah, I think, I think that's probably the, the, certainly the enclosures capable of full speed everything's capable is full speed. We check the, you know, check the cable, check the enclosure, check the computer. It's gotta be a bad drive.

Lex (caller) (01:21:35):
Okay. Well thank

Leo Laporte (01:21:36):
You very much. Hey, nice to talk to you.

Lex (caller) (01:21:38):
Great. Personally, the grandkids are gonna be thrilled with the answer.

Leo Laporte (01:21:40):
Oh grandpa. You're great. You what, what kind of video editing you do?

Lex (caller) (01:21:45):
Professional. Corporate.

Leo Laporte (01:21:46):
Nice. That's great. And do it. You use final cut or premiere Adobe.

Lex (caller) (01:21:53):
Yeah. Yeah. After 30 years in television news, I got smart and went to corporate.

Leo Laporte (01:21:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Good for you. Oh yeah. That's great. So my son studied CU Boulder studied this and he was always mad at the guy cuz he came from TV news. He said, no, I don't wanna do AB cutting. I wanna do something. So now he's doing really fancy editing on premier for his TikTok and his YouTubes and stuff. And he's doing quite well. So it's fun. It's a really it's a good thing to know. It's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Lex (caller) (01:22:20):
Very much. So. Very

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
Much so. Pleasure meeting you, John.

Lex (caller) (01:22:22):
Thank you so much. Lu Mike. Great. Have a great day. Take care.

Leo Laporte (01:22:26):
Hello Mr. Johnny jet. Hello. I on to the other one, John to the other. And how are you today? Better. Thank you. You feel did you, you had that cold. Well, you know what I told you, like in October I got a virus which was not COVID but it messed up my lungs. Yeah. And we went up to the mountains this week on a road trip. Oh I spent night. I couldn't breathe. Oh wow. Geez. So you're still met. You think there's something I think you have long haul. COVID that's what one of my friends thinks, but some I got tested. I was negative. No, no, no. Yeah. Well test yourself again. Get a PCR. No you can't. No that wouldn't do it. You need to get now you need to get the antibody antibody test. Yeah. Oh, who cares? Just you know, every year, this time my lungs get bad cuz it's so dry. Here we go. He's been everywhere, man. He's our traveling guru. The guy who helps you travel better with tech, Johnny jet from Johnny jet.com world famous traveler, actually it's been a little, you kind of had a cut back on all the appearances and the events and stuff since COVID right, Johnny. I mean,

Johnny Jet (01:23:39):
Oh, I mean my schedule in March, 2020 just fell off a cliff. I mean every pop, like speaking gig ever had or travel, it was just wiped. I got crushed, but fortunately it's been coming back since maybe June or may last year. And you know, everyone's worried about AMN but it seems like it's not slowing down the passenger numbers yesterday. TSA checkpoint over 2 million and you know, the holiday crush is coming up probably next week. People will really start traveling. So those numbers are gonna go and the all time high again was 2.8 million going through us checkpoints. Wow. Which was a Sunday after Thanksgiving, traditionally

Leo Laporte (01:24:17):
The worst day of the year for travel. And it was again this year. Yeah. It's back to normal. Well I think

Johnny Jet (01:24:22):
Not quite 85%, I think 85.

Leo Laporte (01:24:24):
I think people have just said, you know, enough, <laugh> I'm gonna take the chance. I'm VA I one, you know, I would hope most of 'em are vaccinated. So they go, eh, how risky is it? My friend was asking me, you know, well now that we're vaccinated and boosted in many cases, is it worth just, you know, living, he went to Vegas when of his wife. Yeah. Yeah. To see to see they saw Brooks and Dunn. They saw Carrie Underwood. They had a great time and didn't get sick. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:24:58):
One of my good friends has long haul. COVID has all kinds of problem had COVID twice. And he, he asked his doctor, he sent me his email that he sent to his doctor asking if he should go to a family matter back east and he's out here and the doctor said, listen, you need to live your life. And just, oh, you know, wear a mask, an N 95 mask. We gotta still do those

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
Distance. Wash your hands, wear a mask face shield. Interesting. And stay out of poorly ventilated spaces. That's the real risk, right. For, yeah. Okay. But we can, and by the way, plane is not a poorly ventilated space. In fact, it's one of the safest places you can be. I just saw some stats. Very few people have caught COVID on a plane.

Johnny Jet (01:25:38):
Very, I mean, think about people are traveling every single day around and these flight attendants and, and pilots. Yeah. You know, they're not, they're not getting it in huge numbers. Like everyone was afraid. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:47):
I they're are they coming back?

Johnny Jet (01:25:50):
They are. But you know, they're definitely coming back. It's a little bit slower, but

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
They're gonna, they're coming and hotel bookings and stuff like that. People are they're traveling again.

Johnny Jet (01:26:01):
They are hotel, actually hotel rates are

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
Up. So

Johnny Jet (01:26:04):
I noticed, I think 25% are up. I guess that's the summer airfares are down 3%. Yeah. so yeah, they're back. So anyway, I have a couple tips this week. Give week

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
Give us some travel tips. Yes, sir. My

Johnny Jet (01:26:17):
Notes just went blank for some reason, but I sent out a travel tip this morning. If you get my newsletter, hopefully you do. The tip was, if you have any vouchers or credits that airlines gave you because your travel plans were canceled because of COVID go right now and check the expiration date. Chances are, it's gonna expire at the end of this month. Oh no. So don't lose that money because a lot of airlines will not alert you. One of my readers sent me an email that Alaska airlines actually alerted her that they were expiring. And they said, listen, this is what you can do for Alaska. You can book now for a flight 11 months from now. So you don't have to travel before the end of the year, but you just need to book it. But every airline is different. So what you need to do is find out when the expiration date is, and then call at airline and find out the rules because they're different.

Johnny Jet (01:27:06):
I have tickets that I booked for my family and I to go to Toronto right before the pandemic. And we had to cancel, I called up American to use 'em for June. And they said, sorry, you have to use 'em by March. You have to fly by March. Not just book 'em oh, that's terrible. And I was like, that's ridiculous. My kids. Don't what the, I gonna put my kids on a plane to Toronto right now. So anyway, what if that happens to you? You can call up and ask for an extension, which I have. I just sent them an email. I have not heard back from American, but you can usually get them to do it. And if they don't, there's one way you can really play some hardball, which is doesn't always work. But if there's a big store and brewing, you can book a ticket for that area. And chances are that flight will get canceled. And if they cancel it, you can get your money back in full. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:27:53):
Wow. That's a tricky little that is really end around. Only do that. If it's it's gonna expire in days and you got no other choice and by the way, there's a good time of year to do that. There are lots of storms, tornadoes. We're gonna have a atmospheric river dump, a two inches of rain on us tomorrow. So this is a good time to do that.

Johnny Jet (01:28:12):
Definitely. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
You didn't hear me say it or Johnny jet. You just thought that on your own. No, that's right. You thought that up on your own <laugh>

Johnny Jet (01:28:20):
Airlines hate when I say this stuff. Oh man. You know, also the hidden city ticketing they hate. Oh, don't when I talk about that, it stay

Leo Laporte (01:28:27):
In any city. A <laugh> that's yeah. Yeah. They don't like it, but you're no, but listen,

Johnny Jet (01:28:33):
The thing is I'm on the side of consumers, I'm always fight for the consumers because I'm so sick and tired of these airlines.

Leo Laporte (01:28:39):
This is, this is the motto of the show. Use technology to your benefit. These companies are using technology to benefit. They, they computerized prices. Everybody on the plane paid a different price for the ticket. They're using it to their benefit. Okay. And you find a loophole, Hey, use it to your benefit. Exactly.

Johnny Jet (01:28:58):
And actually, so actually let's talk about hidden city ticketing because of I'm sure you're gonna, it's

Leo Laporte (01:29:04):
Risky. Cuz if they catch you doing it, you can, you can, they can punish you.

Johnny Jet (01:29:07):
They can, they can take away your miles. It's not against the rules. I mean, sorry. It's against the rules. Not against the law. Okay. So a hidden city ticket is let's say I wanna fly between LA and Charlotte. And there's only one nonstop. It's an American and they're gonna charge you fly $560. But if I book a one way ticket between, and the key is a one way ticket. If I go LA to let's say LaGuardia via Charlotte, a ticket could be $120. So what you do is you don't check a bag and you get off the plane in Charlotte. And the

Leo Laporte (01:29:35):
Reason you wanna do one way is cuz they will cancel your return leg. If you do a round trip. Exactly. Because they'll say, well, I don't know what happened to him, but he fell off the face of the earth. We're not gonna, we're gonna cancel his return. And

Johnny Jet (01:29:45):
If you do it often, they will, they will take away your miles. They could, I've heard stories where they'll even meet you at the gate and walk you to the next gate or they'll, you know, try and charge you the full price. But they're, they're only doing it for people who do it a lot. Yeah. And just don't put your freaking flyer number in as well. Yeah. So that's but that's, and again, you didn't hear that from me or Leo, but

Leo Laporte (01:30:08):
No, no. And I've never done it. I'll be honest. I know about it. You've told me about it a long time ago. I think I've known about it for a long time and I just never have done it cuz I'm a rule follower. I'm the kind of person I'd feel squirrely the whole time doing that. Like I, the plane now and they keep track. When you, if, if the second leg goes, the Charlotte to New York, LaGuardia goes and you're not on it. How do they know you're not on it? Well,

Johnny Jet (01:30:32):
They, they do a, they do a check and then they'll pay you in the airport. So, you know, if I ever have done it and that I would not admit to it, but you know, I would go and tell the gate agents say, listen, I'm not gonna make this don't page

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Me. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:30:46):
I go to the bathroom. I'm not feeling great or whatever, whatever the reason was. And actually I've not felt great on flights. I was supposed to fly LA to Miami, to Puerto Rico in the one way flight business class from LA to Miami was $1,500. One way business class from LA Miami, Puerto Rico was 300. So I went to Miami and I actually was not feeling well. And I got off the plane and I told the gate agent and said, listen, I'm not going. So don't pay. There's no problem. Yeah. But I save

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):
$1,200. Yeah. And at that point they think you gotta, boy, you've really, the lie has expanded. However, this is the problem, Johnny, once you start lying, you never stop. Do you, you gotta have another lie. After of that line. I can have

Johnny Jet (01:31:24):
To say for the line, listen, I'm, I'm known for not lying. I do

Leo Laporte (01:31:27):
Not lie. <Laugh> to a fault, to a certain extent. The hidden city ticket is a bit of a

Johnny Jet (01:31:34):
Lie. Listen, there there's a website called skip lag.com. Yeah. United and orbit sued them because this is what they specialize in. They show you which ones are the hidden cities and they lost skip lag one. So it's it's well, it's not against the law. It's not against the law. It's it's just against the rules. Exactly. That's what I'm telling you. You beat them at their own game. It's kind

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
Of the, it's the motto of the show now it's not against the law. It's just against the rules. Yeah. okay. Okay. Johnny jet.com. This is the kind of valuable stuff you'll find there. Johnny jet.com/newsletter. If you wanna subscribe to his newsletters to some great ones, they're all free. Johnny jet.com/podcast for his podcast. Of course, he's got a YouTube channel and Instagram channel and a Twitter channel all at Johnny jet. Are you going anywhere this week?

Johnny Jet (01:32:22):
I'm not sure. Actually. There's a chance.

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
He's amazing. Well, safe travels if you are. Thank you Johnny. Thank you, Leo. Leport the tech guy. It's not against the law. Just against the rules. Love that. Oh like you Leah. I, my new motto. I'm a real, I can't do it cause

Mikah Sargent (01:32:41):
I know it's not worth. I feel it in here

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
To feel bad. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:32:44):
I just feel bad. I don't, I don't get what you feel bad

Mikah Sargent (01:32:46):
About. I know you about it. You shouldn't feel bad. I even feel bad if like a, a restaurant or a a, I don't know, like going and getting a cup of coffee and then they're like, Hey, we have extra lemon loaf. Would you like have two? And oh, I would

Leo Laporte (01:33:01):
Take the lemonade. You

Mikah Sargent (01:33:02):
Kidding? Don't do that. Add sugar anyway. But still my point is like, I can't get over any kind of squirrels or any kind. So like

Leo Laporte (01:33:11):
What you call that SRR if it's the middle of the night. It's four way stop. And there's no cars anywhere around. Would you just roll through? Oh heavens no, no,

Johnny Jet (01:33:18):
No, no. Heck no. Never. That's

Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
Ridiculous either with Johnny. Okay. No, definitely. I know people definitely. I won't

Mikah Sargent (01:33:24):
Say who, maybe if it's in your wheelhouse, like your whole thing is flight. So you feel more comfortable doing well. Not saying that you've ever done the, the hidden ticket, hidden city ticketing, but in a world where you did, maybe it's because it's your wheelhouse that you, do you feel more comfortable doing that? I'm trying to think of what sort of is in my wheelhouse that I could do that I feel is quote, unquote, squirrely that but I,

Leo Laporte (01:33:49):
When you, I got it when you're doing a coloring book and sometimes you just want to go out, you know, maybe not use the same color or go outside the lines. You, you will do that. And you don't feel bad about that.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:00):
About go outside the lines. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:34:02):
No, that's, I'm just saying, I knew I found it when you're making a crochet pattern and it says, you gotta use blue here and you use blue green. Does that make you feel bad? <Laugh> this

Mikah Sargent (01:34:12):
Is not the same thing at all.

Johnny Jet (01:34:14):
If the airlines offering that deal and you find it, you should be able to take advantage of it. Doesn't it shouldn't matter. You're

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
Not offering a deal. Yeah. That's they

Johnny Jet (01:34:22):
Are, they are, I'm booking a ticket between LA and LaGuardia. It just stops in Charlotte. But I found the fair. It wasn't like it's true. A fair, not

Leo Laporte (01:34:30):
Fair should have been more cost them anything, except maybe it shouldn't cost them more a paging at the gate agent, but you can forced all that. I mean, didn't cost

Mikah Sargent (01:34:39):
Them anything. I'm thinking about the humans involved that agent that now I've taken up, feel bad about them. Are

Johnny Jet (01:34:44):
You kidding me? Thinking about the people you're helping, you know, how many, you know, how many people are standing by, especially airport workers or airplane workers that are like my God. That's why you tell someone didn't

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
Show up. They didn't show up. Take the agent. No

Johnny Jet (01:34:56):
20 minutes before the flight, they're doing a check. And then if people don't show up, they cancel

Leo Laporte (01:34:59):
Their ticket. Can you say, add, stand? You know what? I've always wanted to visit Charlotte. I'm just gonna get off here. You can have my seat. Bye. Maybe

Johnny Jet (01:35:08):
That's what it is. It's the

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Idea of going, oh, I'm not feeling well. I don't wanna do that. I'm not feeling well. But if I said, you know, I've always wanted to see Charlotte. That's a little white lie.

Johnny Jet (01:35:16):
Gate agents don't care. They don't care. They just want, they wanna make sure that the plane just

Leo Laporte (01:35:20):
Let have time. So just say, dude, I'm using I'm using the magic of open city ticket and I'm open job, baby. I'm getting off. You can have my seat. You know what I bet they'd appreciate if you said that. Definitely. You know? And they go, oh, she shame on you. You're breaking the rules, but no, you're not breaking the

Johnny Jet (01:35:40):
Rules. And you'll hear applause from the crowd next door. I mean, all the people hanging around the gate, somebody got his seat. Cause there's so many

Leo Laporte (01:35:46):
Standbys, some poor captain. Who's got to get to Charlotte so he can pilot the next flight. He can't get on. Cuz the plane's full. You've just gave him a ride. <Laugh>

Johnny Jet (01:35:58):
I can't excuse me. I can't wait to see all the emails I get.

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
I hope your lungs feel better. I'm sorry about your lungs. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:36:04):
Did you ever once, once I came down to the mountain, no, but once I came down to the mountains, it was fine. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:09):
You need the oxygen. I don't like altitudes actually.

Johnny Jet (01:36:12):
I never really did. Yeah. But, and speaking of altitudes, are you gonna be around for holiday schedule? Oh, are you working Christmas

Leo Laporte (01:36:20):
New year's so that's a good question. What am I doing Laura? Do you know? Yeah. You're not doing Christmas day and new year's day, but the, I guess I wouldn't be working Christmas day or new year's day. So you're doing Christmas

Johnny Jet (01:36:33):
Eve. So you're doing Christmas Eve and new year's Eve

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
I'm well Eve is Friday, so I'm not doing those. So do do I do a boxing day and new year's.

Johnny Jet (01:36:41):
Okay, so I'm done. I'm done. You're

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
Done next week. No, you do next week. Yeah, the next, but you don't have to next time be January, January 8th. All right. Wow. Good question. See you next audible, audible Mike and I are audible. So I'm watching the wheel of time TV show and I'm thinking, you know, this isn't as good as the audio books, 14 or 15 volumes of this saga and I'm listening on audible and I'm loving it. You're in this world and it's better than a TV show cuz you're hearing it, but you're imagining it. And it's incredible. And rich, I just love of audio books from audible. In fact, I started with audible 21 years ago with a famous saga, the Aubrey match in saga. I think they're, there were 13 or 14 of those they're seafaring during the Napoleonic wars. It's about a British Naval captain and his best friend and the Naval doctor and the adventures.

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
Oh wow. It's so good. And, and the reader on this is incredible and I listened to all of them and it saved me cuz I was commuting at the time to San Francisco for tech TV and it saved my life cuz otherwise I don't know, road rage. Would've taken me <laugh> so I've been an audible member forever and ever, and ever, and incredible, incredible just life saving. So it's easy for me to tell you dear listener that you need audible. This holiday season is a great time for family to get together exchange, thoughtful gifts with the people you care about. Maybe though, maybe though a gift for yourself, the gift of an audible membership for you now is the best time to do it because this is amazing. They've got a special offer, 60% off for your first three months. And of course, you know, gonna, you're gonna go crazy and you'll be there like I am for 20 years, cuz it's just amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
It's not just audio books, tons of binge-worthy podcasts. Now exclusive originals that only audible has all available to download. You can stream 'em from the website, listen on your, I use the audible app on all my phones. And then as an audible member, you get to choose a title a month, like the latest, best seller, the hottest new release or the wheel of time series. I think it's a good one, yours to keep forever. I'm you know, I think I I've, I own on audible eight of the audio books. So every month I get another one. Nice. It's staying ahead of me though. Cause they're they're long. The best part you also get. And if you ever run out at the end of the month, don't worry you at the full audible streaming library, they call it the plus catalog, which has lots of audio books, podcasts, original content from celebrity creators, best selling authors, leading experts.

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
They have the words plus music thing. They have the great courses. There's so much stuff on audible and with the audible plus catalog, they, if it's in the catalog stream, all you want as much as you want. So you'll never run out of wonderful audio content to use your audible membership. You start by getting the audible app. It's free. You can install it on all smartphones and tablets, no matter where you're going or what you're doing this holiday season. And you know, maybe as grandpa is going on and on about Christmas night, 1824, you could put the air puns in and be listening to something a little more interesting. You'll always have just the right thing to listen to. Perfect for commuting at the gym long road trips or just cozying up by the fire. Are you listening to anything new since we talked last?

Mikah Sargent (01:40:11):
Oh yeah. I there's a, the schooled in magic series. It's a little bit of a, of a guilty pleasure. It's a little bit Y but it's, it's a fun series cuz there's sometimes

Leo Laporte (01:40:22):
These young adult stories are great

Mikah Sargent (01:40:24):
AB absolutely. And they it's, it's a rich you, you know, world building, it's

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
A magic school. They're

Mikah Sargent (01:40:30):
All in school. Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, she comes from a different world and comes to this world and has to learn about magic. And I love whenever they build that up and

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
System, I just love audible. Save 60% on your first three months of audible, 5 95 a month. Give yourself the gift of listening. Go to audible.com/tech guy. Please do that by the way. So that they give us credit audible, cuz we wanna keep these guys as a sponsor forever, cuz I know I've been a member forever. Audible.Com/Tech guy or text tech guide to 500, 500. That's easy. Then you get the link on your phone. It's easy to install a U D I B L E audible.com/tech guy, text tech guy, T E H G I to 505. Thank you audible. They've been with us. I've been with them since 2000. And I hope we're together for another lifetime. Exactly. audible.com/tech guy. Now back to the tech guy show. This is very eighties. Isn't it? Leo. Leport the tech guy. I feel like Molly ring wall is gonna come running in the door any moment it now and say it's my birthday party. I have a rich fantasy life. Eighty eight, eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number? Arizona Lou. Our favorite comedian is on the line. Hello Arizona. Lou.

Lou (caller) (01:41:46):
Hey, I wanna give you a warning. You and Ray, because people are breaking both a law and the rule rules when the, you know, Ray last weekend said that he got a notice from his bank that his password had been compromised

Leo Laporte (01:42:02):
Or somewhere. Yeah. And I said, Ray, did you reuse that password? He said, yes I did. I said, well, Ray, you need to stop doing that. I remember that. So was that a law? We broke, what law did we break?

Lou (caller) (01:42:14):
Both you and Ray overlooked. The fact that that very well could not have been a message from his bank. Oh yeah. But a criminal that made it look like his

Leo Laporte (01:42:26):
Bank. I did me, you know what Arizona, Lou, you are right on. And I think I mentioned that to him to, and, and then call the bank and make sure it's the real, you know, deal. Not some you're exactly right. It could have been a Phish scam cuz that's what they looked

Lou (caller) (01:42:42):
Like. Go to your bank site, go to your bank site by hand, not click on that email. Do not call a phone number in it because the criminal will send you to a bank site. That looks exactly right. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:42:53):
Like you exactly right. You write at Arizona loop and, and, and what you do. You don't call that number on there. Either you go out, you get your white pages and you go through there and you turn the PA until you get to the bank and you see that phone number right there. That's the number you call, not the number on the email. You call the one in the, in the phone book.

Lou (caller) (01:43:14):
And then I do have a question. Oh, okay,

Leo Laporte (01:43:15):
Go ahead. No, that's a, you know, it's an excellent point. I think I brought that up, but if I didn't shame on me,

Lou (caller) (01:43:21):
I, I listened to it again and I, I didn't hear it. Oh, shame on me. Make sure that the listeners, well, I would just so the listeners know I'm changing my my web host from go daddy to host Gator. Okay. Because host Gator offers free SSL.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
Nice GoDaddy charges you for SSL.

Lou (caller) (01:43:45):
They're not yet, but to get it, they would charge me. And I don't. That's terrible.

Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
No, no SSL should come with every website

Lou (caller) (01:43:52):
Automatically. My stuff goes to charity so well, and

Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
They don't, by the way, GoDaddy, nobody pays for those certificates. They use, I'm sure they use the free certificate engine. Let's encrypt cost them nothing. But it's an, but this is what I don't like about goads. Just another way to make a little more money

Lou (caller) (01:44:11):
Off of you. Well, I've been a happy GoDaddy customer until the SSL thing came along. Yeah, but there's a twist. There's a twist. Yes. I my website with GoDaddy is Arizona. Lou kite, border.com and Arizona. Lou.Com.

Leo Laporte (01:44:30):
Redirects.

Lou (caller) (01:44:31):
Redirects. Yep. Yep. Well, with, with host Gator, I it's going to be Arizona, lou.com and Arizona. Lou kiteboard direct com will redirect to it.

Leo Laporte (01:44:43):
Here's a chance for you to fix all of this or unless you want both sites. Do you want both sites to be they're all the same site. You want both URLs to work?

Lou (caller) (01:44:54):
Yeah, at least for a while. Yeah, but my question is what about SEO? Because if you search

Leo Laporte (01:44:59):
For no, it won't affect that

Lou (caller) (01:45:01):
Favorite old man. I'll be number one. I just don't. You're you

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
Wait a minute. You're America's number one. Favorite old man,

Lou (caller) (01:45:09):
If you Google America's favorite old man, I'll be number one. Hey, I can't help it.

Leo Laporte (01:45:16):
I'm coming Arizona. Lou comedy. It's number one. That's impressive. That's impressive. You own that man. And you didn't even pay for it. You just, by virtue being Lou how old do you have to be by the way to be America's favorite old man. I mean, when, when will I be eligible is what I'm asking.

Lou (caller) (01:45:39):
Well, I don't know. You got a ways to go because I just had a birthday about a week or two ago. And now

Leo Laporte (01:45:45):
I'm 80 happy birthday. That's a big eight. Oh yeah. Congratulations. My birthday's November 29th. When's yours. Lou

Lou (caller) (01:45:56):
28Th. Oh, you're right before me. Just the day before you. Yeah. How about that? So 30, about 36 shows

Leo Laporte (01:46:04):
It won't affect SEO at all because you're gonna be doing the same thing you did before. Right? So the way search engine optimization is not by IP address. Yes. Your IP address will change. Oh good. But it goes by the actual words. America's favorite old man and Arizona, lou.com and Arizona, Lou kiteboard.com. And those are not gonna change you to say

Lou (caller) (01:46:30):
That stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
<Laugh> this is how you get to be America's favorite an old man, by the way, <laugh> you call the radio. So yeah. That's that? So the way search engines work is they don't pay attention to the IP address. I mean, they do, but not in this case. And that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so your IP address is gonna change cuz the host will have a different set of IP addresses. That's the underlying phone number for your site. But the, but the name in the phone book is the same and that's really all that matters.

Lou (caller) (01:46:58):
Yeah. Okay. So the redirect won't change anything. All right.

Leo Laporte (01:47:02):
So when did you become America's favorite old man? Did you start like Arizona's favorite old man and then work your way up?

Lou (caller) (01:47:10):
No, no actually I, if you say Arizona's favorite old man, I'll be number one too. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:47:15):
I'm sure you would. I mean,

Lou (caller) (01:47:16):
I started a few months after I started my website and started comedy. I decided that you know, I knew lots of people and I know a little bit learned from the you about search engine optimization. I don't pay anybody, anything. I just keep my website up to date. Don't use keywords.

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
And do you, and do you tell people when you do your shows, don't forget to search for America's favorite old man, that kind of thing?

Lou (caller) (01:47:48):
No, but I have it on I posters and things like that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
So that's yeah. So that eventually cuz the way the search engines work is they look at what people click after they search for America's favorite old man. Yeah. And if they're clicking Arizona, Lou kite border.com. Well, they go, that must be America's favorite old man.

Lou (caller) (01:48:08):
Well, this makes me feel famous. You're

Leo Laporte (01:48:11):
To me you are you're the world's famous Arizona. Lou.

Lou (caller) (01:48:16):
Yeah. You were on last time I was on Mikah, but I didn't say hi to you. So hi Mikah.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:20):
Well, it's good to talk to you Arizona Lou.

Leo Laporte (01:48:22):
He's he's America's favorite young man. <Laugh> I'm working on it. I'm working on it. That's a great title to have. Isn't it? Speaking of great titles, Leo is on the line from orange county, California. Hello, Leo.

Leo (caller) (01:48:36):
Hello. Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay. about a year ago you recommended wise outdoor cameras. Yes, I, I got 'em. I was happy with them, but one can camera is a little further away and 90% of the time it wouldn't record any yeah, it's a

Leo Laporte (01:48:57):
Wifi problem. And then it'll record locally, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just that it won't get back to your base station so you need, yeah. There's a couple things you can do. How far away is it? Well I

Leo (caller) (01:49:06):
Got it. I got it solved. Oh, good. All right.

Leo Laporte (01:49:09):
I love this kind of call. That's great. Well, thanks for calling I'm

Leo (caller) (01:49:12):
I'm I called I called their support and I was really unhappy with them because they always told me go to the community. Well, I don't wanna go to the community. I wanted to know if they had how much

Leo Laporte (01:49:25):
Did wait a minute though? How much did you pay for that camera? Leah,

Leo (caller) (01:49:28):
I bought three of them with the, the bay station. I think it was 150 all together. Yeah, but the price is fantastic. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
That's one of the things you give up with low price is support's not gonna be quite as good.

Leo (caller) (01:49:40):
Yeah. But but you know, all I wanted was a an extender or an amplifier. What did

Leo Laporte (01:49:46):
They suggest? What did they tell you?

Leo (caller) (01:49:47):
They, they never gave me an answer. Yeah. So what I, what I

Leo Laporte (01:49:51):
Did, because that's not in their product line. Right. That's something that's fixing your internet, not their issue. Yeah. Right.

Leo (caller) (01:49:58):
Well, I, I fixed it. I got two things and now I'm, I'm getting 99% of, of the recordings. Very

Leo Laporte (01:50:05):
Good. What'd you

Leo (caller) (01:50:06):
Do myself, a, a reflector. And I put it behind the bay station pointing in the direction of the camera. Clever. And then I, the reflector is cheap, you know, piece of cardboard and and tissue and tinfoil. Yeah. Tinfoil. Yeah. And then I also made, had to make sure that the elevator is not on our floor. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:50:30):
The elevator's blocking it. That's why, yeah.

Leo (caller) (01:50:33):
That, that screen, you know, that it's a big

Leo Laporte (01:50:36):
Screen. <Laugh> oh my gosh. Hey, I gotta run, but I'm glad. I'm glad you fixed it. Still recommend wise. I think they do a good job. Yes. Delete this old file. December 11th, my birthday, my sister's birthday. I gotta call her after the show. Ooh, but first I've gotta solve day eight. Part two. <Laugh> it's funny. Cuz day eight part one was like, like you should see the instructions. It's crazy. I'll go there. I don't know if you can. I, oh, that's true. Unless I joined the, you know what? They did it this year they're unlocking 'em for everybody. Even if you haven't solved it, but this is the day eight instructions. I'll just show you real quick. Cause barely it's the safety of the barely reach the safety, the cave. When the wheel smashes into the gave mouth collapse, the, in it sensors indicate another exit to this cave at a much greater depth.

Leo Laporte (01:51:31):
You have no choice, but to press on you notice the four digit seven segment displays in your submarines are malfunctioning. They must have been damaging the escape. You'll be in a lot of trouble without them. You better figure out what's wrong. Then the explain how seven segment segment displays work. Oh, like a clock like it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 segments. But unfortunately the wires connecting each segment have somehow been scrambled. And not only that, there are 200 displays and each one is wired differently. So elves those El elves. Well it's I think when they ran into the clip or whatever, they, the whale hit 'em they? Anyway. So the problem is the signals control. The segments have been mixed up on each display. Each one, uniquely mixed up by the way, submarine, still trying to display numbers by producing output on signal wires, a through G. But those wires are connected to segments randomly where the wires segment connections are mixed up separately for each of the 204 segment displays.

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
So what you have to do first is easy. As it turns out, all you have to do is some basic string. Look how long this goes. But then at the bottom, it's really very simple because the digits 1 47 and eight each use unique number of segments, you should be able to tell which combinations corresponded those. If you see two signals, well, that's obviously a one cuz it it's the only number with two segments. So anyway, so it's a very easy, it's like three, it's a one liner as it turns out. But then once you do that, then it gets hard <laugh> so I was thinking, oh, this is easy. Then I went to part two. I knew cuz part one was like, oh, that's what you said. Okay. Well, and part of the challenge of this is can you read a so it's fun because one of the things programmers have to do is read specs, right?

Leo Laporte (01:53:23):
So part of this is can you read a spec and turn that into a program, right? And you read all the spec and it turns out it's only really a couple of lines that matter for the first part. Oh, the second half is short, but a killer through a little deduction, you should now be able to determine the remaining digits. So they're gonna know what all 200 of those displays say, oh, add them up. And they give 'em the final number. So you've actually gotta do some code breaking now. Oh boy, that'll be fun. So that's what I'm gonna do this afternoon.

Leo Laporte (01:53:59):
It's actually there's this is why I, I need the remarkable, because I'm sure there's a simple logic. There's four digits that you can guess just because like a one is the only number from zero to nine that only has one segment lit. So anytime you see just one segment lit, you know? Oh, that that gotta be a one and there's four numbers like that. So it should be able to get the other six. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here, The Tech Guy. Tech Guy Two is also here like a Sergeant. You're lucky today you get double tech guys, double the tech double. The tech guys. All you gotta do is call 88 88, ask Leo 88, 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. And you can also visit our chat room where the team tech guy, hundreds of other tech guys and gals lurk, irc.Twit.tv. There's also a website tech guy labs.com that has all the show notes there links and so forth from the shows plus audio and video from the show after the fact. So remember that too. Techguylabs.com and that's free. There's no, no charge to use it. 88 88. Ask Leo next call. My good friend from Monte Negro. Vdak is on the line. Hi Vdak. Hi

Vidak (caller) (01:55:22):
Leo. And hi

Leo Laporte (01:55:23):
Micah. Hello? Did you, when you were out here, VAK visitor, our studio some years ago, I don't know if you were even working for us yet. Did you meet Micah?

Vidak (caller) (01:55:31):
No, I don't think we did. Yeah. I know him from the appearances

Leo Laporte (01:55:34):
In the shows. Oh well he's world famous host of iOS today and Tech News Weekly. So of course, you know him and Micah even did a podcast about an American comedy show called the office. That's true called somehow I manage somehow he managed to get off of that before the end of the run. But anyway, <laugh> what, what can I do for you, Mr. Vidak?

Vidak (caller) (01:55:57):
Well, I have a tech problem, which I, for some reason cannot solve and that doesn't happen all too often. I'm not trying to be cocky. I I'm just, no,

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
I know you're you're, you're a tech guy in your own, right? Monte Nero's tech guy will call you

Vidak (caller) (01:56:14):
<Laugh> apparently, but this tech guy is not happy cuz I can't figure out what's going on. It doesn't make any sense. Listen to the is every time I save a new contact in my iPhone, which is a iPhone it's old it's I think it's on iPhone eight. Yeah. It saves it normally as it always does, but the contact does not appear in my content like contact list afterwards. Here's the fun part. It doesn't show up in my iCloud contact, but I use a app called Viber, which is the same thing as

Leo Laporte (01:56:54):
Whatsapp. I know Viber. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vidak (caller) (01:56:57):
The contacts show up in there and Viber is supposed to sync your contact with, from your phone. So they find

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
Viber you, so you enter it into the iPhone. Viber, picks it up, syncs it, but nobody else does. And then weirdly it gets deleted from your iPhone's contacts as well. Yeah. But all the contacts are still in Viber.

Vidak (caller) (01:57:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Here also second when which is what's baffling me when the person called like an old call, a cellular call, the name that I saved for that contact member shows up. No

Leo Laporte (01:57:34):
<Laugh> does. And you're talking about a call that comes to the telephone. Not through Viber. Yeah.

Vidak (caller) (01:57:39):
Yeah. Just a regular cellular call to your

Leo Laporte (01:57:45):
That is kind of a mystery. So there is a general problem with syncing anyway. And my initial thought was, oh yeah, he's syncing his iPhone contact list with something that's messed up. That is just deleting it instead of syncing it. You know, if you sync it with Google contexts, for instance, it should say, oh this a new contact. I don't know it. Let me add it to my list, but it is completely possible for synchronization programs to get screwed up and say, no, no, I'm the boss of this list. It's not in my list. So I'm going to delete it. It's syncing deletions. And of course you want it to do that. If you deleted it, for instance, from your iPhone list, you would want it to deleted elsewhere. Right? You wouldn't want it to stick around. Exactly. So it really comes down to who's the boss of this list. What's the official list and you want it to be as it should be your iPhone contacts, but somebody else has other ideas. So first thing to look at is all the things you're syncing to. Is it just Viber?

Vidak (caller) (01:58:49):
I mean, I also have WhatsApp,

Leo Laporte (01:58:51):
But is it syncing to WhatsApp as well?

Vidak (caller) (01:58:55):
Actually I haven't checked. I like bar over

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
Yet. Yeah. And then well WhatsApp doesn't yeah. I mean it will go through your contact. We'll add 'em but I don't think we'll automatically add 'em unless that person is also on WhatsApp. So I don't think WhatsApp's the problem. And when you go to iCloud, when you log into the web, do you see the contact there or they're not there either? No, they're not there. They're not there either. It is a little weird that the phone sees it. So

Vidak (caller) (01:59:20):
It's some do show up, excuse me. Some do show up, but it's very rare old it's with old contact. I'm completely fine. It's just a new one. Yeah. In

Mikah Sargent (01:59:30):
The contacts app there's a button in the top left called groups. Have you tapped on that before to see what you have selected in groups? Because what happens is on the iPhone, there are multiple accounts you can set up iCloud. I've got one for TWiT. I've got one for a Gmail account that I have, and you're able to disable in the contacts at viewing some of those addresses. So I am wondering if perhaps you've got something deselected there that's keeping you from being able to see all of your contacts.

Vidak (caller) (02:00:02):
If I go into groups what's selected is all iCloud mm-hmm <affirmative> and all Yahoo. Okay. Why all Yahoo

Mikah Sargent (02:00:15):
<Laugh> the other place that you can go is

Leo Laporte (02:00:17):
Yahoo makes that just for you to be nice.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:20):
Yeah. The settings app, I'm sure you've tapped on contacts before, but what you, what I'd like to know is what you have said is your default account because that's this was actually an issue that I had in the past where I was creating new contacts and they weren't showing up in my different iOS devices. And that was because I was, my default account was not set to iCloud instead it was set to my Gmail. So it wasn't syncing across my different devices. So the settings app, you choose contact. You make sure that default account is set to iCloud. And then from there you will definitely have that syncing, taking place across the devices. The part that's still a little confusing is about Viber seeming grab some of these. But I do, I'd like to know that first, if you've got default accounts that correctly.

Leo Laporte (02:01:08):
Yeah, the probably what I would do is turn off all synchronization at first and then slowly work your way back. Sometimes the best fix for this is to delete the contact. You know, you need, I've done that one. Canonical mm-hmm <affirmative>. This is the geek key term for official contact list. So turn everything else off, delete all contacts from everything else, clean up your contact list somewhere probably on the iPhone or on iCloud. Save it back it up, save it somewhere where it can't be touched because this could happen again. You want to have a canonical list. That's kind of backed up and then turn synchronization on one by one. And in theory, Viber, and whoever else will look at this and go, oh, this is a new list. You're the boss. And keep because you wanna be the boss. You don't want deletions coming from other site others site. This is kind of the general advice I give people with synchronization issues. It's re finite is really hard. As you can imagine to synchronize things because who, who wins that, that, that contact doesn't exist on this list is that cuz it was deleted. Should I delete it everywhere? Or, or is it new? And I should add it everywhere. And you know, some program is making the wrong decision. It's deciding to delete it instead of synchronize it.

Vidak (caller) (02:02:30):
Okay. I will. I guess I'll try that then. Just yeah. Everything

Leo Laporte (02:02:34):
From scratch. The one thing you said that doesn't match this theory is why the name are showing up when somebody calls mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's not in your that's what I don't understand. Yeah. I don't understand it either. If it's not in your iPhone contacts, it should never show up because it doesn't know. But maybe Micah has something with his group's thing. Maybe it's a hidden group or it's there's somewhere on the phone. The phone does know that when Leo, when you see Leo's number, put Leo's name on there, even if I'm not in your contact list, now it may be that it's getting that information from the carrier or some other place. It might just be plain old caller ID. So maybe that's a meaningless, what was that default

Mikah Sargent (02:03:13):
Account set to in contact settings?

Vidak (caller) (02:03:17):
Icloud. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:19):
That's what you want. Yeah. So it, should

Leo Laporte (02:03:20):
You want iCloud to be the boss perplexing, delete it everywhere. You know that you've got so do you have somewhere that you have all the contacts? Probably not at this point? No, not at, not even. Fiber's what I'm worried about. Not even fiber. Yes. Fiber. Yes. Okay, good. So if fiber will let you export that contact list, that becomes your official list, cuz everything's there now. Now what you wanna do is delete it everywhere. Import it into iCloud, making iCloud the official list. Then one by one, turning on the syncs and they should all say, oh, iClouds the boss. I have nothing. So it must all be new. Copy it all. And then when hopes it would all fix it.

Vidak (caller) (02:04:01):
Do you, you know, if VIBER will actually let

Leo Laporte (02:04:04):
I don't, I don't off the top of my head. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:04:05):
Yeah. On the PC, the PC version does, but mobile Wises

Leo Laporte (02:04:10):
Doesn't look like. Yeah. So just do it on the PC and Matt, by the way, re con five in our chatroom has done some research and says, and this is interesting. If you don't have the name in your contact list, it will look in your

Mikah Sargent (02:04:24):
So we can scan some other places, but it typically will show a maybe in front of it. It does maybe colon. And then it says the name. So if you're not seeing maybe colon in that name, if you're just seeing the name, it's gotta be pulling from somewhere. There are some integrations between messaging and phone apps that apple provides. And so it could be that because it's in VIBER it's pulling from that because

Leo Laporte (02:04:46):
I think, yeah, maybe he just sees it and says, oh yeah, I know this. Yeah. In fact, I would make sense that the phone app is going, somebody must know who this is. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> let me find it. It's gotta be somebody. And then vibe. Do you know who and fiber goes? Yes, I know. Of course. I know. I why wouldn't I know I'm vibe. I know everything. <Laugh> how are, how are things in Monte Negro? Do you get cold winters there and you're on the Gian?

Vidak (caller) (02:05:09):
Well, yeah, it gets cold. Pretty 

Leo Laporte (02:05:12):
Such a beautiful, beautiful country.

Vidak (caller) (02:05:15):
I mean it's raining cats do. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
But no snow.

Vidak (caller) (02:05:20):
No, not, no

Leo Laporte (02:05:20):
We're too, too far. South. Yeah. Yeah. South. Yeah. Beautiful at GNC. You ever been to Monte Negro. Micah. I've never been outta the country. I know what. Okay. We're gonna send you outta the country. I guess I'm going to Monte Nero. You're going to Monte soon. Thank you. Vidak have a great day. I still have my Monte Negro cap. I'll give you that. You can wear that in your app cap. Perfect. Leo Laport, the tech guy more calls coming up. The GWIS too. Zaba Zubi that was a weird one with Vidak. I don't know. I don't get that one every once in a while. We'll get these puzzlers, but you know, sinking is always a sinking can

Mikah Sargent (02:06:14):
Be constant issue. And you know, I had a, I, I talked about it before I had an I F T T T thing set up that I didn't remember that had

Leo Laporte (02:06:20):
Yeah. Set you forget, you know, he could have done that easily, right? Yeah. Maybe set up some other thing and he forgot about it. That's very common. I was going, where

Mikah Sargent (02:06:28):
Are all these photos disappearing to? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:30):
Yeah. Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy. Mikah Sargent tech guy too. Answering your, your calls at 88 88. Ask Leo. Dan is on the line from Vancouver, Canada. Hello, Dan.

Dan (caller) (02:06:44):
Well, hello there. And I'm for now. I'm gonna say Mikah is Sergeant and Lieutenant Leo. I think that <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:06:50):
He's ranked Sergeant Mikah, and Lieutenant Leo. I like it. I like it.

Mikah Sargent (02:06:53):
I can dig it.

Dan (caller) (02:06:54):
I can forgive the spelling.

Leo Laporte (02:06:55):
Welcome to the squad room. <Laugh> yeah.

Dan (caller) (02:06:57):
Right, exactly. Yeah. Watch it guys watch earlier in the show. I meant to tell you this. This is the funniest thing you were talking about. Swear words on the radio. I don't worry. Not going careful.

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
<Laugh> I know professor, Laura's got a hand hovering over that big red button.

Dan (caller) (02:07:12):
Not anywhere near. I had a teacher who used to be a broadcaster and every time in class he'd wanna swear. He'd say Farnsworth yes. Which is a pioneer in television bracket. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:23):
Filo T Farnsworth. He invented the TV said yes. You of

Dan (caller) (02:07:26):
All, of course you would

Leo Laporte (02:07:27):
Know. I would know Filo T Farnsworth it. I

Dan (caller) (02:07:29):
Don't have to pull up Wikipedia for you. My

Leo Laporte (02:07:31):
Favorite is the good place cuz they have, they can't swear on that TV show. Cause they're in heaven or something like it. That's right. And so they always, they try to swear <laugh> and it's so can come out. I know. I wanna teach myself all those words so I can I can use, but shut the front door

Dan (caller) (02:07:49):
Reply for me. For me, it's always off Farnsworth

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
Is good. Great.

Dan (caller) (02:07:53):
Maybe a chance. I'll get this.

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
I like it. <Laugh> what can I, by the way you must have been a broadcaster yourself. Dan, you sound like no, no,

Dan (caller) (02:08:02):
I just, I just, no, I listen to you all day. You see, this is what I do. I just have you on. And it fixes all my Aw

Leo Laporte (02:08:10):
Aw.

Dan (caller) (02:08:10):
I just use Leo as my voice coach.

Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
Aw, you sound great. You'd be great on the year. Wouldn't they? I agree.

Dan (caller) (02:08:17):
Small confession. My question is about podcast, but it's not for me. I've got I'm too afraid. You put a microphone in front of me. I'll probably faint. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:08:24):
I don't think so. Dan. You're great. You can, you enunciate your, your mote. You you've got a great, you totally do this for the call. You can put one word after the other. <Laugh> that's you're good

Dan (caller) (02:08:36):
In the right order, too concept.

Leo Laporte (02:08:38):
Even, even in order <laugh> except for that Sergeant Mikah Sargent thing. But other than that, okay. <Laugh> yeah.

Dan (caller) (02:08:44):
Well what can you do? Hey, it's Canadian. Listen it, I apologize. I'm sorry, but we still love you. Sorry. That's a throw back to one of your other,

Leo Laporte (02:08:51):
Oh yeah. Canadians. We love you hysterical. You know, if step on their feet, they say so sorry.

Dan (caller) (02:08:58):
I really do that. I really

Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
Do. <Laugh>. That's why I love Canada. And I love Vancouver, beautiful area

Dan (caller) (02:09:04):
Back from, from Asia and nobody stepped on my feet. The minute I got into to Canada, somebody stepped on my foot and I thought, well, that's one of the odds of that. I'm sorry. I said, sorry, sorry. Sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
We're gonna be in Vancouver on the TWiT cruise in July.

Dan (caller) (02:09:17):
Oh, you know, I'm gonna wave at you. I'm gonna wave and go. Hello?

Leo Laporte (02:09:21):
Hello. Actually, maybe we're no, you know what? It's gonna be Victoria. We're gonna be sailing by Vancouver. We will in BC. We'll be be INBC

Dan (caller) (02:09:27):
Very easy. I'll take the ferry over and I'll wave. Nice. You see a big fat guy wearing a green shirt. It's like, hi it.

Leo Laporte (02:09:34):
It's Dan. How's it going? Dan, did you, you so a question and I interrupted you. I'm sorry, what?

Dan (caller) (02:09:39):
That's okay.

Leo Laporte (02:09:40):
No that's you wanna do a podcast,

Dan (caller) (02:09:43):
But I, well, I don't wanna do a podcast. A friend. Definitely not. I will faint in front of a microphone friend. I wants to do a podcast and I am a geek. I love your twi.tv network. I listen to your show. So of course I recommended like $20,000 of gear cuz I'm

Leo Laporte (02:09:55):
I'm gonna save you some money. I'll tell you what I, yeah, I hope my son's not listening. I'll tell you what I got my son, cuz he wants to do a podcast too. And I, and, and I take it. This is audio only. Yes.

Dan (caller) (02:10:07):
Audio only, but you know what? Everything is now audio on video. So I, I of course suggested at switchers and yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:13):
And please don't don't don't don't do that. Don't do that. Especially on initial investment, you know? Yeah. <laugh> well also it's not just the money. I mean it adds a huge amount of complexity. We do it. But I don't recommend it. So there's a company called zoom, not the not the video company, but zoom corp.com. They make microphones podcast stuff. They just announced, this is my son's Christmas present a really cool sh don't tell him you're not a really cool recorder slash mixer. So this is the issue with podcasting. You know, the computer, your laptop is, is, is really a great start for any podcast, but you can only get one microphone into it. So now I need a mixer to have multiple microphones and it just, it's easier if, and zoom makes little handy recorders, they make the gr really great recorders, but they now make something called the pod track. Oh, pod track with a K at the end, they make a four track recorder, which means four microphones for 219 bucks. And if he's gonna have many more people, I mean, most people four is enough for a podcast. Right.

Dan (caller) (02:11:25):
I, I think so. And, and those inputs, it could be anything, I suppose it could be like one of the inputs from a computer or

Leo Laporte (02:11:31):
Well, that's an interesting question. I, I haven't tried that, but yes, I'm, I'm gonna guess that it's my, it has Mike input, so you can use standard microphones on it, but I think it, well,

Dan (caller) (02:11:42):
You've already saved me 19,000. I know. I bet I did. I think

Leo Laporte (02:11:45):
We're on the right track. I bet I did. Yeah, I I'm gonna guess it also has an audio input cuz that really you'd want that for sound effects and music and all that. The recorder is built in. It records on SD cards. It, it has a he phone. It has a couple of headphone jacks. Yeah, you can get audio into it. It has in fact it doesn't use standard. Xlrs like microphone. Oh it does. It has. Oh wow. It's it's got both. It's got a mixer. It's everything you need for 200 bucks. I think this is brilliant. Zoom corp.com the podcast for Leo Laport, the TEI. So this for a voice podcaster, even if you're gonna play some music I think this would be a really good solution. Anyway. It's what I got Henry.

Dan (caller) (02:12:31):
That is very, very good. You've you? I'm all kidding. Assigned. You really saved me up by the

Leo Laporte (02:12:35):
Way. <Laugh> well, you want something simple, you know, first of all, how many people, you know, say I'm gonna do a podcast and two weeks later go what podcast?

Dan (caller) (02:12:43):
Yeah, but Leo was an excuse for me to spend someone else's <laugh> I love those. They didn't have though. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte (02:12:49):
I learned my lesson cause my daughter was gonna do this. So I got, I went out and got her fancy mixer and you know, my phones and all this stuff and it was too complicated for her. And she are you looking

Dan (caller) (02:12:59):
To adopt by <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (02:13:01):
What did I do with all that? Actually I think I gave it back to John, John. I think we have it right. Is part of our massive gear collection <laugh> but it's just too complicated. The zoom is so much simpler. You got four knobs, the volume on, in a little meters on for the volume. And then it's got four knobs for the headphones jacks. It's it's really just like a little thing that does a four person podcast in this very compact form. No, I think

Dan (caller) (02:13:29):
That makes a lot of sense. You don't want, I guess I didn't wanna overwhelm her either at first, get

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
Her all. Well, that's what I did to my daughter. I mean, it just killed her cuz she's oh, so God, again, you need an I this thing you, you mixed with an iPad and the whole thing was just crazy. Oh no, you'll need microphones. You'll need microphones, but you don't need, you can use any kind of microphone. I would get the inexpensive. Sure. SM 50 eights because they have a good sound. They're pretty, you know, unbreakable. And you'll need a cable and you might need a mic stand for each microphone. That kind of thing. But if you look at zoom Corp, they'll show you all the stuff. They even sell the microphones. But I,

Dan (caller) (02:14:05):
I, once she becomes big and famous, I'll be sure that that's nice. The credits where

Leo Laporte (02:14:09):
It's do, what does she wanna do? What kind of podcast? Well,

Dan (caller) (02:14:12):
I'm not exactly sure. She's kept at mum and quiet in silent. I said, well, that's the, that's

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
Actually smart

Dan (caller) (02:14:17):
Later.

Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
You're gonna have to yell off later. She could tell the world. Yeah, exactly.

Dan (caller) (02:14:21):
That makes sense. Yeah. Well Leo is always, you've saved 19,895. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:14:27):
You need an eight, 10 minute. You need four HD cameras. You need lights. You need yeah. I mean you lighting involved. Leo lighting. Don't do lighting. Yeah, just too on. I told Henry wants to do video too. Everybody wants to do video. I said, don't do video, please.

Dan (caller) (02:14:41):
Just do well, it's been blocked and you've gotta do me a favor. You've gotta take my URL, my IP address. I mean, you've gotta block your TWI do TV. So can't keep looking at your equipment. Let's going. Yeah, I need that's great.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:53):
Oh no. Yeah. Watching MacBreak Weekly and spending

Leo Laporte (02:14:55):
All that money. I, I feel very lucky. We've got so much good stuff and I you've

Dan (caller) (02:15:02):
Got good toys, but you put them to good use, which is much better than just sitting in a garage somewhere 20 years from now. So you're absolutely right.

Leo Laporte (02:15:07):
I agree. Hey, pleasure to talk to you. Nice to meet you, Dan.

Dan (caller) (02:15:10):
Thank you so much, Leo. I'll wave at you, have a great cruise.

Dan (caller) (02:15:13):
Thank you. See you later, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:16):
Bye. Bye.

Leo Laporte (02:15:18):
Kind of sweet guy. Yeah. bottom of the hour coming up. Let me look at this. Revelator Revelator digital. Oh, it's all software. Well, that's the other thing. In fact, I should to mention this anchor.fm really is all you on your phone is all you really need to do a podcast. You'd still need a way to if mix microphones. But if it's just one person, man, anchor is makes it so easy to do a podcast. I wish we'd TWI would be a different thing cuz I wouldn't have had to do built it all from the ground. Build all the yeah, exactly. Build it all from the ground up. Have you seen her Christmas special? No,

Mikah Sargent (02:16:03):
Because I don't want to watch her. I want to say very far from early

Leo Laporte (02:16:07):
<Laugh> terrible. Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leah with apologies to all the Carrie fans. Indeed. I do

Mikah Sargent (02:16:15):
Apologize

Leo Laporte (02:16:16):
To you all including my wife, Lisa loves Mariah. But you like queen B. Yes

Mikah Sargent (02:16:23):
There. I, you know, I'm not gonna talk on the radio about the things there. There

Leo Laporte (02:16:27):
Are reasons that you don't like Mariah they're they're complex and have to do with identity. And so I'm not gonna get into that on the podcast. Wow. I think we've tapped into a rich vein indeed of Freudian psychology, but we won't go down that road. Let's go to Lex in Richmond, Virginia. Next. Hi Lex.

Lex (caller) (02:16:45):
Hi Leo. Thank you for having me on, Hey, my question is ultimately gonna be about phone security, but finally, a joke I've wanted to tell you for years is in context and I know it's a family joke. Can I do it? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:16:57):
What do you mean fam? You mean? Is it not a family con joke?

Lex (caller) (02:17:01):
No, it's a family joke. Good. Then

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
Go right then go right ahead. I don't want any adult jokes, but if it's kids safe, go right ahead.

Lex (caller) (02:17:09):
What kind of pants do security experts wear?

Leo Laporte (02:17:12):
<Laugh> what kind of pants do security experts wear? I don't know what kind.

Lex (caller) (02:17:19):
Security breaches

Leo Laporte (02:17:21):
Security breaches. Ah, that's what we call a dad. Joke. Lexi. Yeah, it's good. I like it. A dad joke is not one. You laugh at it's one. You go. Oh exactly. Like I get it. Ah <laugh> no thanks dad. No, I love it. That's good. You've made that up yourself. I think

Lex (caller) (02:17:42):
I I'm afraid. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:17:44):
What can I do for you? Lang

Lex (caller) (02:17:47):
Leo. I may have re reviewed a certain on a website. The Zeer P 10. It's an unknown name. There's 12 count. 'em 12 reviews at Amazon, but I own one now and it's heavy duty. It's submersible, not bad specs, but unknown company. So unknown.

Leo Laporte (02:18:05):
It's actually not an unknown company. It's from cha me, which is okay. I think I believe the second or third largest phone company in the world.

Lex (caller) (02:18:17):
Well, I'm, I'm embarrassed now.

Leo Laporte (02:18:19):
Well, no, you wouldn't know because they rarely it's a Chinese company. They rarely cell phones in the us. Although I've had a number of Shami phones that I love that I think are fantastic. Maybe it isn't SHA I might be mistaken on this. You know, it's gonna be some Chinese company that makes it, let's put it that way. Yeah. Now I'm now I'm I think I'm gonna retract what I said cause I, maybe it's not Shami. It might be Zeer, which is definitely not who makes it 108 megapixel rugged smartphone drop proof from 1.8 meters, which is taller than Micah IP 68 and 69 K plus mill spec eight, 10 G. All that means is Dustin waterproof, super steady video. That, that, that could mean just, you know, as long as you hold your hand steady our night vision. So what do you think you like? It

Lex (caller) (02:19:15):
It's, it's been fun and you know, sometimes I just get bored with what I've got. So I

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
Like, yeah. And it was inexpensive, right? It's like three 50 bucks.

Lex (caller) (02:19:25):
Yeah. and you know, mine came because I reviewed it. But what I'm thinking is they're promising a, a mid-December update. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:19:36):
Cuz it's Android 11 right now. That is the security question you're gonna ask. Huh? so Android phones worse than there's two kinds of updates Android for I've mentioned this before, there's the, you know, annual Android update from 10 to 11, from 11 to 12, that's usually feature updates. It's kinda like Microsoft releasing, you know, when midyear windows 10 update, but then there's the monthly Android security updates. And those are the ones you care about. You know, who cares if I get the feature of Android, 12 material you or whatever, I wanna make sure my phone is secure. Do you, are you getting security updates? Here's the, here's how you check you go into the settings of the phone. You look under the phone usually it says system or something like that. There'll be an update section and you can see what the latest update is on my pixel phone. What, what, what, when is the latest security update?

Lex (caller) (02:20:31):
It's September and they're promising a December update.

Leo Laporte (02:20:34):
September's not bad. Motorolas

Lex (caller) (02:20:36):
I've had Motorolas that update twice a year. And I'm just wondering.

Leo Laporte (02:20:40):
Yeah. That's why September ain't bad. <Laugh> you want, I mean, a pixel from Google will update monthly. That's right. And that's why, and that's when Google puts out the updates to Android and then it's it's a matter of the manufacturer and the carrier to get it to you. And, but it's expensive for the carriers and it's expensive for the manufacturer. So I'm looking at my pixel and it's latest update as November. It's got the November fit update. Although any minute now we'll get the December update. So September isn't bad, a couple days ago, did they promise a monthly update or have they made any claims?

Lex (caller) (02:21:19):
No word there. They say they're working, they're testing a December update. Perfect. But with, beyond that, we don't know,

Leo Laporte (02:21:24):
They support Google pay, which means they're, you know, they're fully to the Google security ecosystem and I'm gonna bet you anything. If you're gonna support Google pay, Google has requirements about how often you need to update it. So I'm gonna say you're probably all right. I always recommend for people who use Android phones that you check with the manufac factor and see what kind of commitment they have to updates. Cause it's really important. You know, some will say we're gonna give you monthly updates for four years, three years, two years, some no updates at all, the cheaper Android phones. Sometimes you get nothing and, and the Zeer P 10. I don't, I don't know may or may not be one that gets regular updates. I gotta figure out who Zeer is. How many months

Lex (caller) (02:22:15):
Would you count off? How many months would you count off without a update that,

Leo Laporte (02:22:20):
That I, you know, ideally you'd get every month, right? But, but that's not practical many phone manufacturers. It's six months as you said. So I think if you, if your update September's great relatively, if you didn't have anything like from July or later, I would be a little nervous. Six months would be the absolute minimum. The problem is whenever these updates come out, it's an announcement to the hacker come, there's a problem. We're gonna fix it. And that means hacker community says, oh good, cuz most people are not gonna do it. So let's hack those people.

Lex (caller) (02:22:57):
Yeah. Well, thanks for your input. I'll pull up my security breaches and keep an eye on

Leo Laporte (02:23:03):
It. <Laugh> secret. So did you like it over?

Lex (caller) (02:23:06):
I did. I think the weakest two points are very minor. One is that the size of it are slick is grease Telon and the screen is right up flush with the built-in heavy duty case. Right. So if it goes screen down, it's gonna crack,

Leo Laporte (02:23:20):
But that's, I mean, tell me a phone that won't right. Unless you have a cover over the screen. Yeah, I can't I'm I'm looking at, I don't see who makes this, it must be a company named Zeer <laugh> yeah. I'm sorry. I thought it was Chami but that's cuz I was seeing a review on a, on a Shami site, but it's not, it's not actually Shami. Oh yeah. And it's using a slower process or the media tech, which is, you know, okay. It's not gonna be the fastest, but for the price, you don't expect a snap drag in 8 55, you know, you're gonna get something a little less. So that's interesting. You know what? My daughter breaks her phone pretty much like clockwork every third month. So this may be her next phone. Is it, does it seem pretty rugged? It does. Except for that display down problem,

Lex (caller) (02:24:07):
I may get some EG grips or something for the sides and not, not fear dropping it. Yeah. But supposedly it'll stand to drop anyway. Nice. All right. You need as fast as my pixel three a

Leo Laporte (02:24:20):
Yeah. I mean the, the pixels from Google are the kind of gold standard for an Android phone. Yeah. it's it's it's it's not as fast as your three a or it is.

Lex (caller) (02:24:32):
It feels

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
The same. The same. That's pretty good. Nice. That's about what you expect on it. So yeah. Couple of year old phone that's about what you expect. It's got a big battery battery life. Pretty good.

Lex (caller) (02:24:43):
It's a battery with a phone built in <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:24:46):
Yeah. 6,000 million. It should get very good battery life. It does that. The only thing I'm not crazy about it says it has its own Zeer UI on top of Android. That would be a show stopper for me. I don't know what, I don't know who Zeer is and why they have the, their own user interface. But that's why I like Motorola. Why I like pixel they don't mess with Android.

Lex (caller) (02:25:09):
You know, it's pretty clean Android experience. Is it okay? They have some, they have some apps for use outdoors. They've got a a barometer and a level and

Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
AOB. That's fun stuff. You'd use every phone should have a plum plum. I agree. Sure. Yeah. Hey L a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for calling the GIW coming up next. Zeer that's my little brother's name is Ezekiel. Oh, Ziel. Zeer it's gotta be a Chinese company. I saw Netherlands. Oh, that's the closest thing I was seen. Well, you know what? Netherlands might make sense. Zeer would be a, a Dutch word, Zika visit Z Zika store. Zika dare to explore from Zika store. I bet the camera's not great. Even, you know, whenever I see 108 million, I know I'm like, what are you compensating? They also have a Zeer watch for 50 bucks. Maybe it's another wise style deal, you know, sort of, yeah. I shouldn't. I should never it's more expensive. It's got a support. Endoscope night, vision IP 60, huh? Ideal Christmas present for your family. Well, certainly for anybody who drops funds a lot. And who needs a plum? Bob? Yeah, the plum Bob vote. Hello? Dickie. D Leo. How you doing pal? Marvelous. Marvelous, marvelous dog marvels. Marvelous.

Leo Laporte (02:26:45):
Who the hell makes this thing? <Laugh> where are you? Zika? Is it Zika? I just want to know more. Have you ever heard of the zer phone? I think Mytel. Next thing. Yeah. <Laugh> hi, zika.com. It says Zika is a global about, let's read about, about you about Zika. Tell me more where your sneakers, when you use your Zika, it's fueled by geek DNA, Zika philosophy is there to explore. Yeah. Doesn't say where they are there to explore. And it has people doing exploring things. <Laugh> connect visits on Twitter. Let's see what language, just tweet at them. Where are you from? Where are you? Where are you from?

Leo Laporte (02:27:37):
Zika. Where? You know, I might get this for my daughter Zika. Huh? Well, they got a little plug. Mm it's funny how 108 megapixels sounds better than 12 megapixels, but it's almost, always not. It's a lot, lot of data. That's not been properly handled mega pixels. Yeah. So have Zika arch wouldn't Zika phone. The Dutch would make sense with a name like Zika with a name, like name like Zika. It has to be good. Yeah. I saw the alley express listing. That's why I thought it was cha me. I do not know. Yeah. Zika would make sense of his touch. How does this happen? You get a phone, but nobody knows where they came from. Yeah, he's a mystery. A little fearful. I see a review on taker radar. Did

Mikah Sargent (02:28:39):
You see the, the one of those reviews had a link to target?

Leo Laporte (02:28:43):
Yeah. Is this selling target? It's a brand new thing that I'm not, you know, I've wonder if Jason Howard knows Perth and boy Zeer a tech company developed outdoor smart devices. Oh yeah. They started with outdoor smart devices. I are no longer available zer engineers available globally. October 10th, come to Europe. The following months Zeer is a global technology brand providing rugged smartphones and smart hardware with a remarkable experience for outdoor enthusiastic. It's fueled geek DNA. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (02:29:25):
Where do you get the DNA? Let's

Leo Laporte (02:29:28):
We get from geeks.

Mikah Sargent (02:29:30):
I need two gallons of a geek from my phone. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:29:37):
Well, I'm seeing their press release, but it, it comes outta PR news. What? Iron? Perth Amboy. So I don't know where Zeer is based. That makes me a little nervous. Who's gonna support the Zeer get up and boogie. Oh, everybody ladies and gentlemen. I've got the boogie fever and the boogie fever is in me because it's time for the GWiz. That's right. Hello. Dickie. D

Mikah Sargent (02:30:10):
Le how you doing P and what are you throwing on the floor? Hear it. It's through peace on

Leo Laporte (02:30:15):
The floor. It just knocked peace on earth under the floor. And so that's that on that? I don't think that's an Oman. I hope it's not an Oman. It's

Mikah Sargent (02:30:22):
No it's on earth now. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:30:25):
Dick is as you probably could tell mad magazine's mad writer. He's also a gizmo wizard from GI whiz.biz. Hello? Dickie D

Mikah Sargent (02:30:36):
Little Powell, everything good there.

Leo Laporte (02:30:39):
How, how, how happy? Happy holidays. I know it. I knew it was something happy holidays.

Mikah Sargent (02:30:48):
Yeah. Well the same to you. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (02:30:50):
The same to you. There's some reason why I point Setas everywhere and I must be that 

Mikah Sargent (02:30:55):
It, I think it is that. And you've

Leo Laporte (02:30:57):
Got your light up Christmas tree there behind you. I,

Mikah Sargent (02:31:00):
I have my laser Christmas tree, my fiber optic tree.

Leo Laporte (02:31:05):
Wow. It's very festive in Disneyland. Very festive. Now Dick joins us every week with a gadget or a gizmo of some former fashion. What do you got

Mikah Sargent (02:31:15):
If, if fit right into what you're talking about, I have two easy ways to help you decorate for Christmas. Easy and expensive one

Leo Laporte (02:31:24):
Them is called. I have one. It's called Burke.

Mikah Sargent (02:31:28):
Oh, <laugh> On Tuesday. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:31):
That's the easiest on Tuesday. I realized it's December and I yelled Burke, get the Christmas decorations. And within about five minutes he was a little grumpy. He threw decorations all over the set and it looks great.

Mikah Sargent (02:31:46):
Oh no, it does. Maybe

Leo Laporte (02:31:47):
Next year we'll get one of these naive brick wall clips.

Mikah Sargent (02:31:51):
Well, yes, it's called, well, this is for the outside of the building. Okay. Yes. It, it it's brick clips. And basically you put the little claw part at top of the brick and then you hit the bottom of this in, and then it sticks. And now you have two hooks to hang lights or wreaths or anything from, and it can hold up to 25 pounds. So they're really an easy way to decorate the outside of a building.

Leo Laporte (02:32:21):
I, the halls with a brick clips. <Laugh> LA LA.

Mikah Sargent (02:32:27):
I found that when a building like mine is 130 years old. Yeah. The bricks don't have that nice shop and no,

Leo Laporte (02:32:35):
In fact, I'd be careful hitting them with a hammer if I were you. Well, not only

Mikah Sargent (02:32:39):
That, I, I, I was worried that I had to break one of them out of the wall so I could do that little demo. But fortunately, the, the building is still standing. You found

Leo Laporte (02:32:47):
A street brick, other

Mikah Sargent (02:32:48):
Thing. Yes. A street brick. Exactly, exactly. The other thing called stocking holders. And again, neither one of these need screw nails or glue stocking holders. Just slide on onto the mantle. Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (02:33:02):
Clever.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:03):
And then from it, you can hang a stocking. I'm not sure about where can I get

Leo Laporte (02:33:08):
A mantle? That's what I need. <Laugh> oh, oh, you could also put it on your ear.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:12):
That's nice. Well, yeah. Yes, you can. While, while you're carrying it around, it's a place to store until you get to where you want. There

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
Also, by the way, I can't, I'm looking at the video you posted at GIW is yeah. Is this your house with this big mantle piece and fireplace that's

Mikah Sargent (02:33:29):
That that's Dennis' house, but

Leo Laporte (02:33:32):
Doesn't he live in the same building as you? Yes. Yes. He, how come he rates?

Mikah Sargent (02:33:37):
I'll tell you how come he rates is the tenant who lived there before him <affirmative> was there for like 50 years. And they, it was the only apartment in the building that had never been renovated. Ah, and when he moved in, I said to Dennis, Dennis, get 200 bucks and go up and talked to the guys who were renovating the apartment. And just say, I wanna Pret tip you because there are certain things I want a Pret fire place to. Yes, yes, yes. The fire place to stay the way it is. And those shutters that fold in back of the window.

Leo Laporte (02:34:16):
Don't yeah. The old stuff. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:18):
Yes, exactly. And they said listen, that's, that's fine with

Leo Laporte (02:34:21):
Us. He has cardboard floors. But other than that, it's great.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:25):
Exa well it's okay because I live below him. So all the drippings, my client and, and I don't complain because I'm married to the guy.

Leo Laporte (02:34:35):
So, well, the that's what happens when you get married, you share drippings. So I know that sounds like something terrible. So so two things, one that you hammer into your bricks here in California. There's not a lot of bricks, but some oh, bricks not included, I guess you'd have to have bricks.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:52):
No, those

Mikah Sargent (02:34:53):
Mantle clips though, are actually quite nice. And you have those because I've got, yeah, I've got a fireplace. Nice mantle. Nice. and so not having to put holes in the, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:35:00):
You don't wanna put holes in yeah. You just slide it on. And if the mantle is a different thickness, they said it's, there's like two inches of adjustable just by bending it because

Leo Laporte (02:35:09):
A little metal thing. Are you going? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:35:11):
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it come in silver and in gold, I don't think it's real gold and real silver. Probably not. They're just fought for 1290 nines, but they're very convenient. Like the name

Mikah Sargent (02:35:22):
Is, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:35:23):
You do have, as you often do, do you have a link to Amazon on your page so that we can easily

Mikah Sargent (02:35:28):
I certainly do acquire

Leo Laporte (02:35:30):
These. I certainly just in time for decorating for the holidays. Yeah, exactly. Right. GI the website, by the way, these can't be the C names. That's

Mikah Sargent (02:35:39):
What I said. It's so funny. Jen UBE and

Mikah Sargent (02:35:41):
A no, I know. Well, you know, Chad's take on that is, is these Amazon companies smash their head into a keyboard? <Laugh> that's my name Judah. That's my, there it is. There it is. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:35:54):
I wanna, it's the sound that an old car makes

Mikah Sargent (02:35:57):
There. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:59):
Cuz a I E V E brick wall clips and J a N E U B E Christmas stocking holders, neither of which are Jane

Mikah Sargent (02:36:09):
UBA do not roll off your

Leo Laporte (02:36:10):
Tongue. They do not roll off the tongue, but, and let's hope these brick wall clips don't roll off your brick wall or stocking holders, roll off your man. You can find these plus everything ever mentioned on this show and on all the other shows he appears on, including ABC's world news. Now at his website, GI wiz.biz, G I Z w I Z dot B I Z. There's also while you're there, click on the link that says, what the heck is it? It's a chance to play the, what the heck is it contest a close up picture of a gizmo or a gadget? This is, can you guess what that is? Micah? Don't say it that loud. I won't say it out loud, but, but you kind of know what that is. This is the easiest one. Evert

Mikah Sargent (02:36:56):
Enough to even know that. Okay. It is. Yeah, it is

Leo Laporte (02:36:58):
Even the Youngs know this one, but you will be playing for this and thank you. Mike and I both got our Mads. Yes. Thank you. Oh, great. Autographed. You're welcome by Dick. You'll be playing for the February 20, 22 mad magazine. What me? Vengeance. It's all. I guess, Batman stuff. It's all Batman stuff. Nice. That looks really fun. And Dick broke the parody for the animated Batman called batsman the anemic series. <Laugh> as opposed to Batman, the animated series. Ah, I get it. Okay, good. Oh, Batman, my Batman, I guess a per already of Walt Whitman. I don't know. Yes. wow. This is great. So I love I'm a big fan of mad magazine, by the way, if you're at website, GIZ wisdom up is he has a few copies left of his memoir. Good days in mad, which is a must read for anybody.

Leo Laporte (02:37:50):
Who's a fan of mad magazine other memorabilia match game memorabilia. It's a great I for, for the holidays, a great place to shop for the thank you. The kind of the humor nerd in your life. <Laugh> and of his podcast. Let's not forget gwiz.tv. He does that with Chad Johnson. Well, Dick I'll be here next week. You'll be here next week. Yes. Yes. And we're off for two weeks. Yeah, because the, the following Saturday is I hear something called Christmas day. And then the following day after the following week after that is I think something called new year's day. So we've lucked out this year. Wow. Wow. Yeah. there's still some debate professor. Laura has not explained to me if I'm working the day after Christmas or the, or the day after new year's we haven't figured that out, but you, that won't affect you.

Leo Laporte (02:38:38):
So no, thank you. Dickie D we'll we'll talk next week. Okay, buddy. All right. I'll be here. Thank you. Thank you, professor Laura musical director. Thank you to Kim. Shaer our phone angel. Thank you so much. Micah, Sergeant tech, guy two. We're gonna wrap this up for the week, but we'll be back next time. I hope you will too. Thanks. Mostly to all the people who listen to this show, Mike and I would just be sitting here chatting without it. Wouldn't be as much fun. It's true. Yep. Have a great geek week. Bye bye. Well, that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. TWI T w I T it stands for this way in tech and you'll find it@twit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all@twi.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.