The Tech Guy Episode 1856 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
.. (00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:10):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. We're back live, baby! The show originally aired on the premier networks, Sunday, January 2nd, 2022. The show the new year episode, 1,856. Enjoy.
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Leo Laporte (00:00:59):
Well Happy New Year! Hey. Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, The Tech Guy. The first show of 2022 is on the air. This is the show we talk about computers and the internet and home theater. Did I say the internet? <Laugh> I might have, I get a, a lazy tongue the internet and all that jazz, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo's the phone number. If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion you'd like to talk high tech. I'd like to talk high tech with you. 88 88, ask Leo. All right, that's the phone number and that works everywhere in the world, except you can't use a telephone outside the us and Canada. You have to use Skype out or something like that. 88 88 ask Leah website is the same address. But it's changed. It's changed its look and feel as it were last year, we said goodbye to our trustees, scribe James DVO, and we said hello to our brand new scribe, the computer automated AI James, your job was taken by a robot.
Leo Laporte (00:02:14):
It's gonna happen to us all in the end. Techguylabs.com will take you to the mothership of the podcast network, twit.tv. And you'll see the show. This is episode 1,856 for a brand new year. And we're gonna, we're gonna put the links in and things that I mentioned, stuff like that, but at the bottom of all that listing, you'll see transcript, and this is gonna be it's it's computer generated, but it's a full transcript of the show, including time codes, which are a little rough, if you depends on how you're consuming it, but it'll give you the, the rough idea. And if you wanted to watch that portion, we'll put the audio and video up too. So you could jump to that portion of the show and listen or watch, but that's after, after the show's on the air, obviously, but the idea is, well, the transcripts are there.
Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
You can read the question, read the answer. If you wanna listen and watch, you can do that. And then the links are all kind of right in the front center. So look, we're gonna see how that works out, but just F Y I, I, if you're one of those people who after the fact wants, oh, I need to you know, <laugh> what did, what did he just say? It'll all be there. Tech guide labs.com. Of course that's free. There's no charge whatsoever. Let's see. Did anything happen while I was gone? <Laugh> not too much, not too much. There was a guy whose iPhone replaced a woman's head with a leaf. You see, <laugh> we talk a lot about computational photography on this show. You know, the idea that nowadays, especially with the smartphone, a lot, the work is done, not by the lenses and by the sensor, but by the computer at the other end, which takes the kind of admittedly inadequate image and buffs it up a little bit, actually all cameras nowadays do that.
Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
They have bare bare filters and things in, in the, even the fancy digital cameras that do some, some processing, frankly, your eyes do process it, right? The image that's coming into your eyes is upside down. Did you know that? Yes it is. But your brain, the, the, the equivalent of the processor in your phone, your brain goes, wait a, hold on there, flips it around. And you're good. So you, everything you're seeing is upside down. You didn't know that that could be disheartening to know that, but then your brain says, oh, I know it's upside down, so I'm gonna fix it. So that's kind of what happens with the, with the camera phone, the, the, the computer in the phone, which is very, very powerful, kind of remarkably powerful. I just read an article in the I E spectrum that said, it's a quadrillion mainframes.
Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
<Laugh> in your lap. I'll talk, I'll hold, put a pin in that one. We'll get back to that. But you've got this amazingly powerful phone in your pocket. And frankly, the phone because of the size can't really have great lenses or anything. They prove these a lot, but you know, they're still pretty weird. So it's doing a lot of computation back to the guy who took a picture. His name is Mark Cohen. He tweeted it. He said I snapped a photo of a group of people outside today. My iPhone replaced one woman's head with a leaf. The rest of the photo is fine. No weirds settings. I've never seen this before. Some people hypothesized that maybe the leaf had just fallen in front of the camera, but no, you could see the outline of where her head would be <laugh> and blurred and replaced by stuff, including one big leaf, not, not what you were looking for.
Leo Laporte (00:06:04):
Probably it's one of those things where you take a billion photos and every once in a while, the computer's gonna screw up. And it did. It's just a, it's a good thing to know though that this is gonna happen. Just F FYI FYI. Yeah, camera's doing a lot of weird stuff. And actually the the thread on Twitter is, is good. We'll put a link in the show notes to that because this th the thread has a lot of conjecture and investigation, but bottom line you can't nowadays, I think this is true. You can't trust anything you see on TV or hear on the radio or anything like that. So your computer in your, in your phone laptop is so much more powerful there. So this article in the I E E spectrum he compares it to a giant mainframe from the early 1960s, the IBM 7 0 9, oh the 70 90, the first line of transistorized computers didn't use vacuum tubes. It was big, filled up a room. A lot of that was tapes. That's where it would store stuff. And I know some of our audience actually has worked on these 70 nineties. <Laugh> cost 20 million in today's money, about 6,000 times as much as a really good laptop today. Six I'm sorry, did I say six 60? Try 60, no. Six. Let's see. Good laptop. You know, that's about right, good laptop. Be around 2000, $3,000 somewhere in there. 3,500.
Leo Laporte (00:07:53):
Of course, one of the problems in the old days with these mainframes is you couldn't sit down in front of it and use it a hundred percent. You had to times share it with other people. You know, you were lucky according to this article, by Rodney Brooks in the I E E spectrum, you were lucky if you could get an hour of computer time a week, the 70 90 had a clock cycle of 2.18 microseconds translate that into the modern, you know, we talk about mega Hertz and gigahertz. It was 500 kilohertz, but even that overestimates its performance because of the way instructions worked, there was no pipelining in those days. So it's estimated it could do about a hundred thousand instructions a second. That sounds like a, a lot. In fact, in 19, 19 63, that was you're going, wow, that thing's fast, a hundred thousand instructions, a second are modern computers, 3 billion instructions per second, 3 billion.
Leo Laporte (00:08:54):
And of course that's per core. And you have, you know, in your iPhone, I think you have eight cores, six, six, or eight, something like that. And your laptop, you have, you know, four or more. My my iMac has 10 cores. So we're talking when you add up the cores and everything, a hundred thousand times faster than that mainframe a hundred, it's kinda hard. So <laugh>, it's kinda hard to put this all in perspective, but because you don't have to, you know, wait and share your computer with anybody, you can you can rack up not 1900 years of 70 90 computer time every week, almost 2000 years of computer time on the mainframe every week on your laptop. And we're doing stuff though, to you to use it that you maybe you've heard of the AI model G P T three.
Leo Laporte (00:09:54):
This is a new artificial intelligences, writing articles, blog posts plays to, to make the model, just the model to train that language. Would've taken 36 million years on the mainframe. So that's why, you know, we didn't have artificial intelligence back in those days. People gave up on artificial intelligences. You can't can't do it. Well. It helps. If you have, you know, 36 million years to, to work on it, it makes it easier. Makes it easier. I can go on and on about memory and storage and cetera. But the difference essentially in 60 years of computing uhis remarkable. Just you have a, you have the equivalent of thousands, maybe millions, maybe quadrillions of those 70 nineties on your laptop. Wow. Let's see that actually, you know, I come to think of it. A lot of things happened while I was gone, while we were gone, while we were enjoying the holiday, I'll be enjoy.
Leo Laporte (00:11:00):
I'll be at a good holiday. I do. I hope you had a nice holiday. Let's see what else at T Verizon have thumbed their nose at the federal aviation administration, the January 5th. What is that Wednesday? They're going to turn on 5g wireless. And the, the FAA says this could be a problem for planes, especially for navigation equipment, like altimeters, the phone companies said, Hey, you can't hold this spectrum. We spent billions of dollars on it. You can't hold it. How hostage until people upgrade those obsolete altimeters. Yeah. But if you're flying a plane with that imeter and the not good.
Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
So that happens Wednesday, Tuesday. It's the end of the line for an old friend, Blackberry as of January 4th, if you are running if you have an old phone or maybe a tablet, like the playbook running Blackberry's own software, it will no longer reliably function. That's the, a quote from the company. I don't know what that means. It will no longer reliably function. Okay. So I don't know if you're still using that Blackberry. Maybe it's time to get a, a, a newer phone. Speaking of no longer reliably function. There was a why a 22 bug <laugh> January 1st, yesterday, Microsoft exchange, which is a mail server, widely used by big companies broke. They didn't at midnight, January 1st, 20, 22. They, they it's so it's, it's a long, sad computer science story, but but they broke. And the the FIPs Fs engine is blocking email delivery with on-premises server, starting at midnight. That's why you haven't had an email and you know what? Not so bad, honestly, not so bad. Eighty eight, eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number. I want to take a little break, get ready, Sam will. Sam is here. Our car guy will talk to him in a bit, but we're gonna get to your phone calls. Let's have, who's gonna be the first call at 2022. We'll find out right after this.
Leo Laporte (00:13:33):
Yeah. Microsoft used signed 32-bit ints. Oh, uhoh uhoh I gotta take it. Did you take it back, John or something? Now it's working. Okay. Oh, okay. Hey Sam.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:58):
Hey Leo. How are you?
Leo Laporte (00:13:58):
I am, well, how are you?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:02):
I'm doing all right.
Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
Good. What's up? How, how was your Christmas in new year?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:09):
It was fine. Good. We had new flooring installed in our kitchen and dining room and laundry room.
Leo Laporte (00:14:14):
I saw it. Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. We're really enjoying it. Like those hardwood floors. There's that's nice.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:21):
Yeah. Had some nasty old laminate in the dining room before and some rapidly deteriorating vinyl in the kitchen and the laundry room. And so it just replaced it all with these Hickory planks,
Leo Laporte (00:14:36):
Hickory planks. That's nice. Yeah. You could smoke your food with them. <Laugh>
Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:44):
I smoked a Turkey yesterday. Ooh. My wife picked one up at Costco a couple days after Christmas on sale and I smoked it yesterday.
Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
We, what did we do for food? Oh, I made the best spoked prime rib for Christmas day. Ooh, that sounds good. Amazing. In fact I have some prime rib hash waiting for me when I get home. Oh, oh, yum. Yum. Yum. That would be awesome. And then we had crab on Christmas Eve because this is the crab season in Northern California. The Duncan Dungeons crab come in and they're really good. So that's a new year's tradition in Northern California. And then what do we have for new year's Eve? Oh, I, I pulled the, the spouse <laugh> it was a quick bowl, only one vote. And she wanted steak and cream, spinach and mushrooms and onions. So we had a steakhouse dinner on new year's Eve and then watched Anderson Cooper get gig giddy drunk. <Laugh> went to bed at nine. It's. Great. Perfect. Did you stay up to midnight last day? New year's Eve? No. No, I haven't done that in years. Yeah. Years. It's not worth it. What are you gonna do? Are you glad?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:03):
You know, it's
Leo Laporte (00:16:03):
Just another day. Just another day you bang. It doesn't matter anymore. You bangs some pots. It doesn't matter anymore. They're all blurring together.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:10):
I'm I'm just glad that nobody set off a, any fireworks around here. Cause
Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
We, we have a lot of those. Oh, we have all those that
Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:15):
All always gets Daisy all very agitated
Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Set. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad for the dogs. So I couldn't tell Mike B it seemed like Anderson was getting kind of girly giggly, but maybe, maybe he that's just how he is. And he, it wasn't that he was he wast, he was drunk. He was just, just letting go. Couldn't stop laughing. Andy was definitely drunk towards the end. He's starting to yell goodbye. Mayor de Blasio. Don't did I hate you? <Laugh> it was terrible. It was really bad. It, but I think that's why, you know, I don't know why CNN does it because it takes all their serious anchors and makes 'em look like morons, but I guess they do it once a year just to kinda, you know, reassure you that they're human, but boy, boy, <laugh> boy. Okay. we'll talk to you in about in all right. Sounds good. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in 2022 Kim Shaffer our telephone operator, the unbreakable phone angel. Hello, Kim. Back in her little brick cell <laugh> happy new year. Do you have a good new year's Eve?
Kim Shaffer (00:17:32):
On the couch with three cats on top of me and and a glass of bubbly. <Laugh> that's all you
Leo Laporte (00:17:38):
Need. Yeah. Lisa broke out the bubbly, but we did it at 9:00 PM, California time. I, I, I
Kim Shaffer (00:17:44):
Stuck through and, and I did you stay up? I made it till about one in the morning and the night. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
My gosh. Then I turned in serious. Yeah. See the nice thing about being in California is we could celebrate new year's Eve with New York, which I did.
Kim Shaffer (00:17:55):
I celebrate the, watch the ball drop first and then we're in bed by nine 30. It's great. Yeah, it's great. It was, yeah. I mean, I, I hope for something a little more exciting next year.
Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
Yeah. We might actually be able to go out.
Kim Shaffer (00:18:07):
Yeah. You know, make like, even been just a house party with friends, but
Leo Laporte (00:18:10):
Yeah, we didn't, we didn't wanna do that either these days. It's a little scary. So we just stayed home and made the best of it. Who should I who should I start this show talking to first call first call the two. Let's go
Kim Shaffer (00:18:24):
To I'm looking at the name on the caller ID and not the name that they gave me. John John in Naples,
Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
Florida. No, don't reveal. John's real name
Kim Shaffer (00:18:35):
Or whoever is paying the cell phone bill. I don't know.
Leo Laporte (00:18:37):
<Laugh> thank you, Kim. Happy new year too. Happy new year. Hi John from Naples Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy.
Caller #1 (00:18:44):
Hi, Leo. Welcome. thank you. My brother is getting married on Saturday. Congratulations down here in <inaudible> down here in Florida. And he, we, we have a kind of a setup where a guy is gonna give us a lot of raw footage from both the ceremony and the reception. And I was wondering what kind of video editing software you would recommend for kind of a novice to kind of put that together?
Leo Laporte (00:19:05):
Yeah, it's gonna be a challenge because people are gonna shoot it in all different ways. People on an iPhone, it'll be in a high efficiency video, Ko deck people on pixel phones, it'll be in a, probably an MP4, not MP five and it'll be a variety, but so the first cha challenge is gonna be, get all that video on your hard drive, convert it. So it's all the same thing. You know, if you had a good editor, maybe you wouldn't have to do that. So are you on windows? Windows? Okay. Microsoft does ship a video editor with windows. I don't recommend it's pretty primitive. It's, it's, it's BA the basics, you know? Are you willing to spend about 90 bucks? Yeah, sure. I think it's worth getting something called Adobe premier elements. You can get it online and you know, it's always a hundred under a hundred bucks, you know, can vary as little as $72.
Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
I've seen it for, but it's around 90 bucks list price. And what's nice about it is the professional video programming. In fact, we use premier lot of business. Lot of, lot of video companies use premier, the big boy premier for video editing, we do at our pot podcast network. We do a lot of video editing and elements is is essentially all of the capability of premier underneath a simplified user interface designed for, you know, people like you, who aren't video editors, but just have some video you want to do and you can do all sorts of things with it. You can chop it up, you can, you know, match it to the music. People like to do that right. Where the beats of the music match the cuts of the video. I think it's a fun, it'll be a fun project for you and I oh, good. I think, I think I'm gonna give you a little sidebar footnote on this. I think premier elements will import all the, all the videos you're gonna get. Is it people with iPhones and is it camera phones mostly?
Caller #1 (00:20:54):
Yeah, so we have a couple people with iPhones and I think one guy has an Android phone, but we try to replace him with maybe somebody with an iPhone.
Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
Great project. Really I'll tell you, you know, I'll tell you how old I am. When, when we, when we got married, we handed out Instamatic cameras, put 'em on every table and, and asked people to, to drop the cameras in a bin as they left so we can get 'em developed. That's how long ago that was. So I think what you've got there is pretty good. You could set up a Google photos account where people could share the video to actually that might be a good idea, cuz then it would convert the photos. But if you, if you have trouble reading any of the videos, there's a free program. I think premier I'll do fine, but there's a free program called hand break. H a N D B R a K E like a hand break on a car from break.fr that will convert it all into a format that premier likes. If it can't read it, but you should be able to read everything. I don't think it'll be too much trouble. Yeah. And then you can burn it to a DVD if you really want to go old school or you can post what I would do create a Google photos, shared library for the wedding. People could put stills in videos up there and then you could put the final video up there and everybody can get to see it and then you don't have to distribute. It
Caller #1 (00:22:12):
Sounds good. So one more question. So if we have a dance floor in the reception hall and I was wondering if I can kind of notch the camera up on some kind of, or an iPhone up on some kind of pedestals to where it stays still. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:22:24):
That's a great idea. Hang on. I'll tell you how to do that. Okay. We gotta take a little break, Sam. I salmon coming up to talk cars right after this.
Leo Laporte (00:22:41):
So yeah, that's easy to do. There are a lot of mounts for phones either that are, I wouldn't worry about one. That's exactly the right size there. Mounts for phones that are like, kind of on Springs so that you can hold it. I would look at a company called Jo B J O B Y. Okay. They make a product called gorilla pod. That's I think fantastic. It's a tripod. They make one that's designed to hold the phone sideways. And then it's got little Bendi legs, which it's so it's not a standard trip by it's got Bendi legs. So you could find something like, you know, a pipe or whatever, bend the legs around it and hold it on real tight. So these are great. The job J O B y.com. You okay? Yeah. And get a gorilla pod you know, and you could see which one is is right for you, but I love these guys cuz you they'll they're flexible. They'll go on anything.
Caller #1 (00:23:36):
Sounds good. I really appreciate it. Leah. Hey, have a great wedding. Thank you so much. Sounds like fun.
Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
Yep. Take
Caller #1 (00:23:42):
Care, John have thank you. Bye bye.
Leo Laporte (00:23:45):
Leo Laport, the tech guy it's time for another unscripted presentation. <Laugh> from Sam apple, Sam principal researcher at guide house insights and podcaster wheel bearings on media. All of our presentations are unscripted
Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:00):
Flying without a safety net. Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
Performed in front of a live audience in Stu city, California. <Laugh> <laugh> happy new year.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:09):
Happy new year's Leo.
Leo Laporte (00:24:10):
How are you? I am, I am great. I saw Tesla released numbers for their fourth quarter. Almost a million vehicles sold. Wow, wow. Yep. How many of them were recalled still crashing
Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:25):
Of fire trucks?
Leo Laporte (00:24:26):
<Laugh> no, that's not be mean to pour old Elon, the richest man in the world, the richest poor little rich boy. He can afford it. Yeah, he can afford it. So what do you wanna talk about today, Sam?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:39):
Well actually I made that joke for a reason because that's the topic of the day. What is it? Which is an emergency vehicle alert system. So this is some news that just came out of Stant the other day, Stant for those who aren't, who don't keep close track of the, the auto industry is the company that was formed outta the merger of Fiat Chrysler automobiles and PSA, the French automaker that owns PIO and CI last year. So this, this includes Jeep and Ram and Chrysler and Dodge and about 10 other brands globally. Anyway the the thing that they announced was this emergency vehicle alert system. They're working with a company called ha was a host alert who has a product or a platform called the safety cloud. And they've had this operational for several years already.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:37):
It's a vehicle to everything communication system or VTA X communication system. And what they do is they this is one of quite a few of these sorts of platforms that we're gonna see coming over the next several years that collects data from connected vehicles. So most of the, almost all the new vehicles being produced today are connected vehicles. They have really cellular modems in there usually four G LTE modems and in the next year or so maybe by the end of this year, we'll start to cars with 5g coming to market in the us. I think the BMW IAX will probably be one of the first with 5g in the us market later this year. But
Leo Laporte (00:26:17):
Do, do you usually have to pay a subscription fee for the 4g? Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:22):
So what they, what they do is they manufacturers typically give you several years of basic services complimentary that they bundle into the price of the car. So you get typically anywhere from three to five years of service and then after that, and then they have some premium services on top of that, right, as well that you can subscribe to.
Leo Laporte (00:26:41):
So on star is true for a couple of years, and then you, then you pay for it?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:44):
Onstar, Ford's Ford pass connect Hyundai's blue link everybody's got these these services, these connected services. And what what hos alert has been doing is they've been working for several years fleets of emergency response vehicles. So fire trucks, ambulances, police, vehicles, that sort of thing to get them connected. So when they're either these, you know, they've got thousands of these out there already on the road when they're either on their way to an emergency or they're stopped you know, at, at a location, I'm sure you everybody's experienced, you know, you're driving down the road, you hear a siren, but you can't tell where it's coming from. It's, it's hard. It's often hard to judge what direct it's coming from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially
Leo Laporte (00:27:35):
If you get your beats headphones on.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:38):
Yeah. Well, even if you don't, you know, it can be difficult to judge the direction. The sound
Leo Laporte (00:27:43):
Is how many times have we done that? You hear siren, you start looking around. Yeah. See where, where is the vehicle coming from?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:48):
Right. So, so what they do, you know, what they have is transponders in these vehicles that when they turn on the sirens or the, the lights, the flashing lights it sends a signal up to the cloud, gives the location of that vehicle. And then from that cloud, they distribute that that data over the network in real time. They've actually had this integrated with ways for some time. Now, I wasn't aware of that. I only just found out about this, that they're actually providing alerts through ways now for about the last year
Leo Laporte (00:28:20):
W A Z E the the mapping app. Yeah. I love the ways if, if I'm driving somewhere, if I were a regular commuter, I'd use it. But you know, I don't commute that often, but if you're really driving somewhere, you want to know, you know, are there hazards on the road, speed traps, all that stuff. Waze is great for that.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:39):
Yeah. And so what ha does is, you know, they provide both stationary, any location, you know, so when you're driving down the road, you know, you've seen the, if you've used ways, you've seen the alerts that pop up, right. You know, from usually people that tap, Hey, there's a, usually that's a PRAP or whatever. Right. But, but they're also getting it directly from the vehicles now. And they're also providing alerts if there's a vehicle coming up behind you, so, you know, knows what direction you're traveling, what road you're on. And if the vehicle, the emergency vehicles on the same road, traveling in the same direction, it'll say, Hey, there's an emergency vehicle approaching from behind and give you the approximate distance. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:29:13):
That's very useful. That's great. And
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:15):
What they're doing now is they're integrating that with Stant vehicles that have either the Uconnect four their older system or their new Uconnect five system. And
Leo Laporte (00:29:24):
Wait a minute, who, who makes Stant vehicles? Who's that?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:27):
Yeah. So Stant, as I said, is the, the company from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA, the French automaker.
Leo Laporte (00:29:34):
So you might have a KU Joe, you might have a Chrysler, Dodge, Ram.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:37):
Yeah. It's, it's in north America first. So it'll be Ram Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep vehicles. Okay. starting this year. And then they're gonna expand it globally to the rest of the Stant.
Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Now, of course the emergency vehicles have to also have a transponder. They have to be broadcasting.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:54):
Right. And that's what, that's what they've been doing. They've been equipping these for several years now, already.
Leo Laporte (00:29:58):
So they're emergency. So they're pretty widespread those trans sponsors. Oh, right. Yep. Why did they do that for traffic lights or well,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:07):
That's one of the, one of the applications, you know, so as approaching a traffic signal, it can be integrated with traffic control, traffic signal control systems to automatically switch the lights. So they don't have to run through red lights. It can, it can proactively switch the, with this, it'll provide an alert directly on the screen in your Stant vehicle. So you don't even have to be using ways it'll pop up. And if you're watching the if you're watching the, the video stream, you can see over my shoulder, there's a picture of a, a, a ramp pickup with the emergency alert signal on the, on the screen green. So that you'll know that there's a vehicle approaching orders, one on the side of the road, you know, quarter mile, half a mile ahead of you. So you can, you know, adjust your speed and, and hopefully, you know, move over, give them some extra room, that sort of thing. This is
Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
Interesting because it's the first step in getting inner car communication. Yep. Anyway, and ultimately that's what you'd like. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:05):
Yeah. And, and long term that's what we will get is we'll get direct vehicle to vehicle communication as well. So that even if you are in an area where you don't have a good cell signal you know, they're gonna start equipping vehicles with cellular VTA X so that the, the vehicles can talk directly to each other without having to go through the carrier network. So there's less latency then. And it also works, you know, if you're approaching a vehicle, that's stopped even, even if it doesn't have a cell connection. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:31:33):
That's, that's an exciting future. How far off is that? Do you think?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:37):
I think we're going to start seeing some vehicles. There's already vehicles on the market in China that are using cellular VTA X. There are, there have been some vehicles previously sold here from Cadillac that had a, a VTA V vehicle to vehicle technology. That was a different technology. It was a wifi based technology. But we're gonna start seeing some here. I think sometime later this year, the first vehicles with cellular VX and then into 23, in 24, we'll, we'll start to see a whole lot more vehicles that have this technology in
Leo Laporte (00:32:07):
There also critical technology eventually in self-driving vehicles. Cuz absolutely having them be able to talk to that oncoming bus would be a good, would be a good thing.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:17):
Yeah. And to, to signal intent to each other and to
Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
Pedestrians come to a four way stop and they say after you Allons and then they say after you Aons and nobody goes, yeah,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:27):
Because we, you know, as human drivers we use non-verbal communications all the time. We
Leo Laporte (00:32:30):
Yeah. You look or you way. Yeah,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:32):
Go ahead. Yeah. And you know, with with, with V2 V communications, you know, the vehicles can do that directly with each other. The other
Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
Reason they call companies like it, a little thing called subscriptions. They love yeah. They're that too. They love that Sam bull, Sam guide house insights. He's a principal researcher there and don't forget his podcast wheel bearings. If you love this kind of stuff. You'll love wheel bearings, Leo port, the tech guy.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:56):
Thanks Leo.
Leo Laporte (00:33:06):
That's cool. I think that's gonna be very cool. I'm glad that there's, you know, you gotta give 'em some incentive, otherwise they'll never do it. So it's
Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:14):
Good that, yeah. And you know, this is one of many kinds of applications that you can use with V DX. You know actually Audi for several years now on, on most Audi vehicles, they've had a VDA X system to indicate traffic signal what what's going on with the traffic signals coming up ahead. So if you're in an area where they've got connected traffic signals, the vehicle are talking to the traffic control system and it will, it can give you a countdown timer when that light is gonna turn green or turn red so that you can adjust. And actually one of the, one of the newer features that they added last last year, I think, or in 2019 on these Audis is a speed. So as you're driving down a road it can communicate and get the signal timing information from the traffic control center. And it will suggest to you, you know, what the optimal speed is so that you will hit green lights all the way through. So you won't be stuck at every red light. So whatever, whatever, based on that signal time, if you drive at this speed, you'll be able to just drive straight through.
Leo Laporte (00:34:23):
I always assume the signals are time to the speed limit. That's not always the case, huh.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:28):
It it's not well, and it depends. I mean, in some, in some locations you also have dynamic signals, ah that are based on traffic flow so that, you know they will adjust the signal timing. So if there know if there's no traffic in one D coming from one direction or the other at an intersection, they will, they can leave it on longer on the green in the opposite direction, if there's more traffic flow. So they and, and they do that using motion sensors and, and other SIG other sensors. So they, they do make a, they, they does change from time to time. In some places they are static, you know, based on the speed limit, but based on whatever whatever's going on in real time. So it's giving you real time information to optimize your driving because, you know, not only is it less aggravating, if you don't have to stop at every red light it's also more fuel efficient, you know, if you can just maintain a constant speed, you know, say 41 miles an hour, or, you know, 30 miles an hour, whatever it might be for that location, if rather than continuously stopping and, and accelerating again, you're gonna use a lot less energy and have a lot less emissions.
Leo Laporte (00:35:36):
Nice. Yeah. Nice. The future is bright,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:42):
Hopefully. Yeah. A lot of people trying to make it brighter. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, there's, there's a lot of interesting technologies out there and, you know, we'll see other applications of, of this type of technology. You know, the, the original approach they used was something called DSRC dedicated short range communications, which was a, a variant of wifi. It was 8 0 2 11 P oh two 11 P. And they have since switched over to using cellular VTA X it's based on LTE. And now, now 5g. So it's, they expanded the the, the LTE and 5g standards to allow for direct peer to peer communications without going through a carrier network. So it can, you can either get, depending on the nature of the information, it can either go through the carrier. If it's not, if it, the real time capability's not needed, or it can go directly from vehicle to vehicle or from vehicle to roadside units or vehicle to pedestrian. So you can build this into smart phones and get indicators of when a pedestrian is about to cross the street. That sort thing, that was a lot of, a lot of cool applications of
Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
This. That would be nice.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:03):
And, and the, the peer to peer stuff, you know, because it doesn't have to go through a carrier network. Also would not necessarily require a subscription,
Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
Eighty eight, eighty eight ask Leo that's my phone number from anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. Skype will do it. 88, 88, ask Leo Marshalls on the line from Vista, California. Hello, Marshall.
Caller #2 (00:37:25):
Hey. Hey. Oh, wow. I didn't think I was gonna make it.
Leo Laporte (00:37:30):
Oh, you made it. Not only did you make it, you made it before the hour is up. You're number two in 2022. Congratulations. Wow. That's
Caller #2 (00:37:38):
Awesome. Thank you very much. Happy new year to you. I love happy new year for a long time, but half the time, I don't understand anything what you guys are talking about, but I try to learn,
Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
Well, I hope I hope it sinks in, you know, I try to
Caller #2 (00:37:53):
Eventually Let's get to the point. So, so I don't get cut. I got, you know, the smart TV stuff, but when I was overseas way back when I picked up a, you know, a St set like most people do is, is a pioneer six 40 you know, very powerful. And then of course the Kenwood seven, seven speakers.
Leo Laporte (00:38:21):
Oh, no, you love your, you love your system. Don't you
Caller #2 (00:38:24):
Real? The real nice. Yeah. AKA. And then of course the record player, Gerard record player all the down. Nice. Anyway, so I was wondering, is, is there a way to connect my smart TV, you know, to go through it, to come out my speakers?
Leo Laporte (00:38:44):
Yeah, absolutely. But you're gonna have to buy a little converter box to do it. You're what I was wondering. Yeah. So you're, you're old Toshiba amp obvious doesn't have digital inputs and that's what your TV's putting out. So you need, it might, you know, I should actually, some older amps had optical inputs. Do you do you have an optical? No, it's all analog. Just red, red, white, red, and white in, in left and right. No, this is way
Caller #2 (00:39:12):
Back. This is way back during the Vietnam era. Oh yeah, yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:39:16):
No optical, no optical back then. So, you know, in order of preference, you know, your TV has a HTMI port called the arc audio return channel. That that is an HTMI cable that would normally go into a digital amp that has HTMI the amp would say, ah, I see video on this, but more importantly, it, from my point of view, I also see audio, I'm gonna separate out the audio. So what you need is something called a digital to analog converter, or D that will take the H D I digital signal from the RRC channel. So if you look on the back of your TV, one of the H D I ports will be laid abled arc that stands for audio return channel. And that's where the TV sends the audio out. You know, normally TV takes the video and the audio in, but because it's internally got its own computer doing streaming video from Netflix, et cetera it has that information inside the TV.
Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
You need to get it out. So the audio return channel is one of several ways. There may be, you should look on the back of the TV, analog out, if that's the case, then that makes it simple. Sometimes a lot of times there is because the TV speakers are probably analog. So there may be a connection that goes into the speakers of the TV that you can take the analog from. It used to be, they very commonly put he phone ports on TVs. They don't seem to do that much anymore. And those are of course analog. So the first thing to do is look and see, you may have, the TV may have a deck built in. It probably does. And if it does look for some way to get the analog audio out, in which case your job is simple, you just have to get connectors that match up.
Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
So, okay, well, yeah, cable that has the right things on both ends on your end, on the Tuhi band RCA, probably RCA plugs because you probably have R yeah, I believe so. Yeah. That would be for some other input, a turntable or whatever, eight tracks, whatever they used in the sixties. I can't remember. And then <laugh>, and then on the other end, whatever that TV output is, whether it's a he phone Jack sometimes you'll see, I've even seen this speaker wire coming outta the back of the TV, and then going back into the speakers in front, on the, on the TV, like there's separates mm-hmm <affirmative> if you see that that'd work, but if you don't, then you're gonna need to get a converter that will take that have HTM I in and analog out. Now, there are plenty of those. It's H DM, I you could search for HTM I D on Amazon.
Caller #2 (00:41:47):
I was gonna ask you if that's Amazon or mono price
Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
Or whatever mono price has, lots of companies have 'em, they're a little expensive, or they can be because there's, it's a, it's a, it's a little computer it's got circuitry, but, you know, you can, you can get 'em for under a hundred bucks, but depends on the quality of the digital to analog converter. Okay. So I'm looking at one and particular brand. Oh, they're all from China. <Laugh>, they're all, they, they all have funny names from China. Yeah, I'm looking at one that's 23 bucks. Yeah.
Caller #2 (00:42:24):
I'm trying to do this myself. Cause all my tech supporters almost left the country for now. <Laugh> I will
Leo Laporte (00:42:32):
Le I will put in the show notes, tech guy labs.com a link to a $23 box. Now I've never tried it, but I, I imagine this is, is gonna work it's it's exactly.
Caller #2 (00:42:44):
I don't mind. I don't mind the price, you know, well,
Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
Start, start with the $23 box what it does, it takes the ARRC channel from the TV. It also spit if which is the optical, your TV may also have that. And on the other end, it has the coax, just like your stereo wants red and white left and right. Yeah. Going out and has headphones as well, going out. And so you, so this box is a $23 box. It's called the a R C audio extractor and that converter. So it does the two things that you need to do, which is take the digital audio out via the audio return channel from the TV, converts it into, into analog bits that your Toshiba can understand. So I'll put, I'll put a link in the show in the show notes, tech guy, labs.com. This is just one device.com tech guy labs.com. But you can also search <crosstalk>. I'll be able
Caller #2 (00:43:37):
To search my way through the
Leo Laporte (00:43:39):
Website. You'll figure it out. Hey, if not just Google search am or not even Google search, go to amazon.com and Amazon search H DM I arc arc audio extractor. Yeah.
Caller #2 (00:43:51):
A arc pretty much is the key word right there. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:43:54):
That's the, in this, in this alphabet soup of all of this. Yeah. That's the one video return. You got it and that great. Yeah. Look for that on your TV before you buy anything though, do look and see if your TV, sometimes TVs have analog out less. You see that less and less. They don't wanna do
Caller #2 (00:44:10):
That. Samsung as a Samsung, it's not too old. So I don't know. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:44:15):
Yeah. And you know, you, you're gonna, basically what you're doing is taking the digital output from the Samsung, turning it into something that the Toshiba something Vietnam era can understand.
Caller #2 (00:44:28):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
Got it. But you know what? That's a great setup. I bet it sounds fantastic.
Caller #2 (00:44:33):
Oh man, I tell you what it can. It it's. It's got, you know, it's like 6, 640 wat per
Leo Laporte (00:44:41):
Or something. I bet you're. I bet you Creed's. Clearwater tapes sound fantastic. Oh
Caller #2 (00:44:46):
Yeah. All of 'em.
Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
Hey, it's a play. You talking to you, Marshall. Yeah. If you have any questions, just call back. Yeah. This is a good time to call because you know, the holidays people are taking a break and well, look, who's on the line here. Dr. Bird is here. Hello, Dr. Bird. Oh, hello. How you doing? My favorite bird photographer.
Caller #3 (00:45:09):
Oh, good. Good. Matter of fact. I've got a student coming up on Tuesday. I gotta teach her how to use her Sony a nine.
Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Oh, I love the a nine. Perfect. For bird photography. Very fast focused.
Caller #3 (00:45:20):
Yeah. Yeah. Matter of fact, I was, I was looking at it. I, I just met her this afternoon and she uses a 200 to 600 and I do a lesson on how to do birds and flight with her she's oh,
Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Birds and flight, but you know what? That's the camera for it? I think that's a, that'll be fun.
Caller #3 (00:45:35):
Oh, absolutely. I believe me, Leo I'm if I had more money, I'd probably do the conversion myself, but I mean, me as a poor bird photographer, I just gotta stay with my one DX, my 72. Oh, those aren't
Leo Laporte (00:45:46):
Two, my 72 prime me a river. <Laugh> you got a pretty nice set of, it sounds like. Well,
Caller #3 (00:45:52):
I didn't like to, but you know, some of this mirror stuff is, is pretty good. I, I actually tried using the, the R five. What I didn't like about it, the exposure changes too much for my sense device.
Leo Laporte (00:46:03):
Well, and it's such a high megapixel camera that it probably IST ideal for birds and flight. But on the other hand, the a nine is designed for sports and action and all that stuff. Oh, I hear the magic sound. Hang on. We'll get to your question. I know you want to talk about Teslas. We'll do that when we come back. How about that? Yeah, I definitely wanna. All right. Thank you, Dr. Bird Leo. Leport the tech now. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo? LePort here. The tech guy. Yes. We're back live for the first show of 2022 coming up in just a little bit. Chris mark wart. We're going to review our photo assignment. Lazy. Sam we just had Sam, Chris. Oh, rod pile spaceman. We got lots to talk about the James web telescope launching on Christmas day. They're working to unfold, the sun shields and oh, this is very exciting. Very exciting space news. So that's still to come. Meanwhile, Dr. Bird been very patient hanging on the line. Thank you, Dr. Bird. All the way through local news and from Laguna Hills, California. Welcome back. Laguna Miguel lag. Laguna Miguel. Sorry. Yes, that's right, Leo.
Caller #3 (00:47:12):
Well, here I'll, I'll get right to the point. I know you're an electric car fan, but I'm at war with the electric car manufacturers.
Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
Uhoh what's the matter.
Caller #3 (00:47:20):
Well, here, I want you to read about yourself cuz you leave up. You live up on the bay area. East bay county sued over wind turbine projects, threats to bats and birds.
Leo Laporte (00:47:31):
They're not good for birds. Are they? Yeah. Oh, and you have to train birds, not to fly into wind turbines.
Caller #3 (00:47:38):
You know what? Leo, if you go to Donald Trump's website and you see a photo of a golden Eagle with a head cut off. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:47:46):
Geez. Oh, that's disgusting.
Caller #3 (00:47:51):
It's yeah, but wait a
Leo Laporte (00:47:51):
Minute. Let, come on. This is a war against renewable energy. That is propaganda entirely because big oil would very much like you to continue to mine, that oil, get it outta the ground. We already got a trillion dollars worth of oil outta the ground. We wanna sell it to you. We need to do renewables. Dr. Bird know that that's better for birds and other living creatures on the planet. There will be no birds. If the planet warms up another two degrees Celsius,
Caller #3 (00:48:19):
Will I? I'm not gonna argue about the environment cuz I'm out in the environment every day. Photographing birds. Yeah, I am. I'm a, I'm a person who, who does things for real. Now one thing about Tesla vehicles and the electric vehicles, I just don't like is the wind farms. It's just the fact of the wind farm. The wind farms are running all the okay. Hybrid vehicles and plug-in vehicles.
Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
No, no we got it. No, no. We gotta stop using fossil fuels period. There's no question about it. Electric vehicles are not perfect. They're far better than fossil fuel vehicles. You'll hear a lot of propaganda and Fu about that. It's just not true. And you know, it's not gonna end climate change. I wish, you know, we could say if everybody drove an electric vehicle, ch climate change would go away, but that isn't the case, but it is in fact the biggest polluter let's use the word pollute pollution. Instead. What about that? How do you feel about that? That's a better word. I wish they hadn't made it climate change cuz everybody's against pollution, right? There's no debate about pollution. If we can get those internal combustion engines out of production and off the road, huge improvement in huge reduction in pollution.
Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
That's simple enough. Right? Everybody can get behind that. We just have a lot more to do. I agree. Just read an article about the use of power in Bitcoin. It's pretty bad. Bitcoin transactions used as much power as the country of, of Argentina last year. <Laugh> on the other hand, on the other hand, a lot of what we do, a lot of human activity also uses a lot of power. We need to solve it all around. During the year 20 21 Bitcoin consumed 134 Terra wat hours related CO2 emissions 64 mega tons enough to negate the entire global net savings from deploying electric vehicles.
Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
So maybe Bitcoin, another thing on the other hand, if you look at the graphs, gold mining and recycling uses more power or almost as much power as Bitcoin mining, our banking system uses 300 9390 Tet hours in 2020. So there's other things <affirmative> using it. But if you look at the use the amount of CO2 pumped into the air by automobiles, by land transport, it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. So we, we gotta stop that number one, by the way. Not sure why building sector, the building sector is number one. I'll tell you what, I'll put this. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but don't fall for the propaganda, the FUD being spread by the oil companies who want us to keep buying oil, even though it's a horrible polluter, we need to find alternatives. And I don't think you can say that that wind I mean it's not the only way of generating renewables, but I don't think you say wind turbines killing up more. Let's say more more birds than kitty cats. How many birds do kitty cats kill? We're gonna, we're gonna ban kitty cats.
Leo Laporte (00:51:46):
Aaron on the line from Carls bay, California. Hello, Aaron Leo. Leport the tech guy.
Caller #1 (00:51:51):
Hey, long time. First time Leo, I have a plugin hybrid question for you. Yes sir. So I'm looking at buying a 20, 22 Jeep grand Cherokee plugin hybrid. They released a Wrangler model with the same engine and setup last year and it actually gets two miles less per gallon than it's V6 counterpart. I'm wondering how that could be
Leo Laporte (00:52:16):
<Laugh> I wish Sam apple, Sam were here. I know I was hoping he was, you know, the part of the problem really is the measurement is kind of funny. And the, sometimes the EPA changes how they do the measurements, which could be one of the reasons why it's changed it. It is, it's kind of a made up measurement. Anyway, they're trying to estimate how much the energy usage would be, but it very much depends on how you use it. So I wouldn't worry too much about that for, I'll give you an example. You know, I drive an all electric vehicle, my Mustang Maki. Yeah. During, in the summer months when I don't have to do as much climate control, I get around mileage for a full charge, about 260 miles for the 88 kilowatt hour battery in there right now a hundred percent charge is about 50 miles less and that's just cuz wow, I have to heat the car.
Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
So you know, and I, I don't even run the heater very high. The nice thing about most modern vehicles is they're constantly measuring your performance and adjusting and giving you the actual mileage. So what the EPA says sure is their estimate based on a certain kind of driving and so forth, but it's your driving that matters is whether you're running the heater or not. Whether you, you know, a lot of electric vehicles these days have seat warmers and and heated steering wheels so that you won't run the heater, which is very, very you know, use a lot of. Okay. Yeah. So I would say, I wouldn't worry about, about it. I wouldn't worry about it. Probably that two miles difference is more EPA change and EPA measurement than anything else. Yeah. I'll let you know in three months, I think you're gonna love it.
Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
<Laugh> for people who are worried about range, who have long commutes plug-in hybrids are a really good choice. You're still a, you know, it's a battery electric vehicle, but it has a small gas engine that can charge the battery. For times when you can't get to a charger, I think it's a very good choice. It's a very difficult calculation to make. And the EPA, you know, they have these M P G measurements that they give you. Then it's a very rough estimate. It's really gonna be, it's not gonna be real until you drive it and it gets to see your driving and what I, one of the first things I did when I, I got the new Mustang, it comes with a, you know, its own estimate about what its mileage is gonna be, what its range is gonna be. I reset that, which means it was way off at first, but as you use it, it's, you know, you're always looking and most, I think most electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids and hybrids will probably tell you what the power usage is per mile.
Leo Laporte (00:54:50):
And that's what you wanna look at. And it's, that's what it's looking at. And that's where it's adjusting the range saying, well, you know, Leo, this Leo guy he's using you know, three kilowats per, per mile. We gotta adjust that over somebody who uses only two kilowats per mile, that kind of thing. Let's take a little break, come back more of your calls. 88 88, ask Leo, we got a full board, but as I finish up with somebody, you can try calling in. Then you should be able to get through 88, 88, ask Leo Leo. Leport the tech guy. It's Chile chilly out here. Leo port, the tech guy, 88, 88, ask Leo our, our photo guy, Chris mark Mart. My personal photo sensei comes up in just a little bit. We're gonna do a photography review, got some good submissions for the lazy assignment. And Chris will take a look at some of those images and go to the fish bowl and draw another word for next. Meanwhile, let's say hello to Chaon on the line from New Mexico. Hello. Chaon
Caller #4 (00:55:55):
Hi, how you doing? I'm
Leo Laporte (00:55:56):
Great. How are you?
Caller #4 (00:55:58):
Good. so I just got a really good internet connection put into my my house.
Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
Isn't that a nice fit.
Caller #4 (00:56:10):
Yeah. It's it's one gigabit. Yeah. Down one gigabit up.
Leo Laporte (00:56:13):
Ooh, symmetric. Ooh.
Caller #4 (00:56:17):
Yeah, it's really cool. And I, I'm fairly technical and I put an Orbi wifi system into it. Yeah. And I have to have a, a signal at a dwelling that's near my house. That's about 300 feet away. Ooh. That's
Leo Laporte (00:56:34):
A long way. Yeah.
Caller #4 (00:56:36):
Yeah. And I put, I put an extender with that, with that Orbi system at three satellite. Yeah. And for some reason it seems to drop it quite a bit. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:56:47):
How, how far is the most is the closest satellite? I mean, it's still gonna be what 300 feet away. Right?
Caller #4 (00:56:57):
How yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
Yeah. That's the problem wifi really is designed to go that far for, for that. You're gonna need that those satellites aren't gonna do it by the way the or system is good and you're probably getting very good throughput, you know, in the house. It's just that distance 300 foot place is a little bit tricky to get to. So what you need to do is you need to get a specialized antenna for long distance. There are antennas that will do this for wifi, but they're not built into the Orbis. What you'll do is you'll you'll maybe you'll put the one of the satellites as close as you can to that distant house. And then the nice thing about the Orbis at least the ones I have they have ethernet ports out, so you can connect then an antenna to it. I'm gonna recommend a site called Radiolab, radiolab.com. They specialize in long distance wifi, and anything past 150 feet really is long distance wifi. So they have special antennas. You'll put one outdoors on house, one outdoors on the house across the way. It'll reach out to it. And you're not gonna get a gigabit, but you'd probably be happy with a hundred megabits. I'm sure. Right.
Caller #4 (00:58:16):
Well, I mean, it, it only needs to be like 50. Yeah. You know?
Leo Laporte (00:58:20):
Yeah. It'll go down a lot, but, but you could get, I think you can get, they, they claim three as fast as 300 megabits with some of their systems over five miles. So you know, <laugh>, that sounds great. That sounds good. Doesn't it? <Laugh> you'll need, you'll need clear line of sight from your house to that, that outhouse. Are there a lot of trees in the way, or do you have a pretty clear line of sight? Oh
Caller #4 (00:58:45):
No. It's, it's out in the desert. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:58:48):
So you shouldn't have any trouble with that, but, but go to radiolab.com and don't just buy the first thing you see, really do some research. They have a lot of information, click the knowledge section and they'll describe what the issues are and and, you know, give you some ideas about what might be the right antenna. And I think if you choose the right external, you know, outdoor antenna from your house and outdoor antenna on the remember, it's gotta be two way you're sending and receiving I think with the right antenna, right? Yeah. This is not a problem, but the Orbis are not designed to go 300 feet. That's a long, long way.
Caller #4 (00:59:24):
Yeah. I have an extender hooked up to it, an outdoor extender and it seems to operate just fine, but like like it disconnects from like two of the main devices. And for some reason it pushes, it pushes the devices around instead of like being connected to the extender when those devices are over there and that other dwelling, it pushes them back to the main router for some reason.
Leo Laporte (00:59:48):
That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it, it doesn't <laugh>, you know, it's not made to work with the Orbi. It doesn't understand it. The Orbis very confused obviously by it. And that's what that's, what's happening with the Orbi base station. It's going well, you know yeah, let me I don't know. You might be able to fix that by, by manually setting a band for the outbuilding and maybe even a channel within that band. The low, remember 2.4 gigahertz is what you want. Five gigahertz really won't go that far. It just it's designed for short range. So you're gonna be on the 2.4 gigahertz band and maybe choose a unique channel for the extenders avoiding that way channel switching. The, the idea of the Orbi in all mesh systems is that they adjust automatically to conditions. Right. Right. That's not what you want here. <Laugh> oh yeah. You don't, you don't want them messing with it. You wanna, you wanna say no, no, no. This is always on channel 11 on 2.4 gigahertz never. And, you know, just keep it there and don't let it mess around with it. That's probably what's happening. It's being too smart.
Caller #4 (01:00:57):
Okay. And I can just adjust that in the web browser of you
Leo Laporte (01:01:00):
Can, you can set. Yeah. Yeah. You can set it. Yeah. but so try that first, I guess, before you go to radio labs, but if you do really need something extreme, they, they sell incredible wireless networking products designed to go miles. Yeah.
Caller #4 (01:01:16):
Okay. All right. Well then I won't think about buying a new system, then I'll just buy something. No, no,
Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
The Orbi are great. The Orbis are great. There's nothing, nothing nothing's designed, you know? No com no consumer products designed to go that kind of distance. That's all. If you could put, if you could put a satellite halfway, you'd be fine. Just build a little house in between. Put the satellite out there. You'd be fine.
Caller #4 (01:01:39):
Right. Right. Or I was thinking about running that ethernet court, but I was like, oh, it might be a little complicated. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:01:45):
If you can, if you can dig it, dig it in a little bit, maybe. Yeah. so ubiquity sells twisted. Mr. Chatroom says ubiquity sells something called the air fiber radios, $120 a pair. And you'd get about 200 megabits. Throughput that's sounds pretty good. But again, I'd go to radio labs and look, and look at them.
Caller #4 (01:02:07):
Right. Awesome. And you're not gonna get are, are you able to get like wifi signals that are more than 500 megabits per second?
Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
Yeah. That's one of the problems with having gigabit <laugh> is yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a new, the FCC just approved six E actually the FCC approved it a while ago. A court, believe it or not. It went to court. They, I think at and T PDO and the court said, no, no, the FCC can go to six E which used a is six gigahertz. And so there are new and there's bean forming. There's new 8 0 2 point 11 specs that might improve that. But I don't inside the house, even with a gigabit I don't even with, and some of it's the machine and the, and the radios and all of that. And the Orbis very good. By the way, the, or probably has the fastest wifi throughput of any mesh system. But yeah, you're never gonna get a gigabit. You should be happy with 500. What are you talking? Five. Hundred's great.
Caller #4 (01:03:09):
Well, I mean, I just, I wanted to hook an as up to it too.
Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
Ah, yeah. That's use ethernet for that. Yeah. That's one, I think I'm trying to remember, but I think that's one of the advantages of the York be satellite systems. They have their own ethernet ports on there, so you could yeah. You, but you're still gonna have, you know, it's not gonna be more than the 500 megabits. That's pretty fast for wifi.
Caller #4 (01:03:31):
Okay. Well, I appreciate it. I just wanna let you know, I'm a club TWI member too. Thank you. Let me for, for over a decade.
Leo Laporte (01:03:38):
Thank you SHA. I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. What's your handle in the discord
Caller #4 (01:03:44):
Way
Leo Laporte (01:03:45):
Of the Lao? Oh, I know you way of the Lao. <Laugh> I got my eyes on you. Hey, it's great to meet you SHA thank you for your support. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. No problem. Anytime have fun. I'm jealous. Sounds like a nice setup. Gig. A bit symmetric. Wow. Leo Laport, the tech guy talking photos right after this. It's a good point. If they can put a under sea cables, he can get a 300 foot cable to his house. Good point. All right, Chris, let me load up these pictures. Oh right. I'm gonna see these pictures here. Are you eating Christmas cookies?
Chris Marquardt (01:04:34):
Nope. Oh, am I making cookies noises? No, it
Leo Laporte (01:04:38):
Sounds like you were eating Christmas cookies. I just thought I just jealous. I was just jealous. We had to, we had to get the Christmas cookies outta the house. They brought 'em to work.
Chris Marquardt (01:04:48):
I've been eating them. I got
Leo Laporte (01:04:49):
Some mints here. Mints are good. Mints are good.
Chris Marquardt (01:04:52):
Not I'm not gonna eat on, on
Leo Laporte (01:04:54):
What are you? What's the tr so what's the traditional I was asking in the discord. What's the traditional new year's Eve feast in Germany.
Chris Marquardt (01:05:05):
It's not as, I don't know. I mean, I'm I'm I don't do traditions. <Laugh> some families will, will do a, a, a goose. Some people will do a carp. A carp. Really? Yeah. Some people will do a Fundo or relet.
Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
Relet is what I wanted. And I was telling Lisa fun. Do, but she's not a fan of Fundo. I thought she was, but she doesn't want to eat all that cheese.
Chris Marquardt (01:05:38):
And we made oyster very local. What oysters do oyster German can
Leo Laporte (01:05:43):
Do that. No, never. Never in Germany. That was John's. Yeah. Tama. <Laugh>. Did you do tamales professor Laura? That's a tradition in new year's. Yeah. Did you do tongue tamales, sour, sour. Bratton.
Chris Marquardt (01:06:05):
Yeah. Some people might even do that one year. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
I was trying to talk Lisa in a fondu, but I would've had to go out and get a fondue set or two it's. One of those things where you buy a fondue set, you make fond. Once you put it in
Chris Marquardt (01:06:19):
The closet said you burn your house down and all
Leo Laporte (01:06:22):
You put it in the closet, you know, six years later, you give it to Goodwill four years after that you go, Hey, we haven't had fun due in a while. Yeah. We gave away the fun due set. Oh, we gotta get another one.
Chris Marquardt (01:06:33):
Yeah. Whenever we do a Fundo, which is baby, once a year, we have to search. Yeah. Where'd it go. Forget
Leo Laporte (01:06:41):
Fun. You don't wanna eat. Fundo a lot, but it's a nice tradition. Well,
Chris Marquardt (01:06:45):
The Swiss, the Swiss eat it like
Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
Once a week, they eat it all the time
Chris Marquardt (01:06:49):
In winter in winter. It's a so bad
Leo Laporte (01:06:52):
For you. It's gotta be for you.
Chris Marquardt (01:06:54):
I don't think so.
Leo Laporte (01:06:57):
Swedish meatballs,
Chris Marquardt (01:06:59):
Smaller portions. Smaller proportions. Of course.
Leo Laporte (01:07:02):
Tama. That's what you had. They saw your
Chris Marquardt (01:07:10):
I'm. I'm looking up. Tamales. What? A Tama. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:07:13):
Tamales is so good. Nice. It's a ma corn. It's like a, pierogi made outta ma Masa, meat, filling, or fillings of various kinds. Masic corn. Then you wrap 'em in Southern Mexico. They're wrapped in banana leaves in Northern Mexico. They're wrapped in corn hust and then they're steamed. They're delicious.
Chris Marquardt (01:07:31):
I'm so glad I had dinner already.
Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
Tomas are great. It's time. That song tells you everything you need to know. It's time for my photos. Sensei, Chris mark@sensei.photo. He helps us get better pictures with our camera phones. Hello, Chris. Markt
Chris Marquardt (01:07:53):
Hello? Happy new year. Happy
Leo Laporte (01:07:55):
New year. Happy new year to you and yours. How do you say happy? You're in German
Chris Marquardt (01:08:02):
Forest noise. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:08:05):
Okay. You said it I'll listen. <Laugh> I won't try it. Anyway. Anyway, it's good to have you glad you made it through the holidays and today we're gonna review the perfect assignment for the holidays. Lazy,
Chris Marquardt (01:08:20):
The lazy assignment. Yes. And again, thank you very much. Everyone who participated it was fun to go through the pictures and to choose three that we have. We're gonna have a little look at, let me bring up the slides here. So the three that I picked out, the first one is by Brett Jones. It's called hammock. And
Leo Laporte (01:08:45):
It's, there's nothing Laier than lying in the hammock. I agree. As long as you keep your balance
Chris Marquardt (01:08:52):
<Laugh> and what I like about this is that it's from the perspective of the person. So it's, it's, it's a, a lot of pictures depicted someone or something else being lazy, but this is Brett taking a picture off his own feet in the hammock, looking out at the beach probably, and being lazy. So this is a very self referential picture. And that's that's I like this. It's a
Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
Perspective. It's the laziest selfie of all. <Laugh> your picture of your feet? <Laugh>
Chris Marquardt (01:09:22):
Pretty much he probably let, let me check the camera or it doesn't say what camera I would expect him to lie there, browsing the interwebs on his smartphone and just turning on the camera, take the picture. He might even even
Leo Laporte (01:09:35):
Been going back to taken it by accident. <Laugh> maybe, maybe, but you know what? I like the ham hammock is transparent. It's not you know, it's not a canvas hammock. It's like a little plastic rowing hammock. So you could see through it, which is kind of, kind of a cool effect. And he's on the beach obviously. So that's even more lazy. I like it.
Chris Marquardt (01:09:54):
And, and at least, at least he's submit it a photo. So it wasn't all that he
Leo Laporte (01:09:58):
Wasn't too lazy. Yeah.
Chris Marquardt (01:10:00):
<Laugh> next up is by Tom lots, lazy, Larry,
Leo Laporte (01:10:05):
More feet, more feet in this one, apparently laziness and feet go together.
Chris Marquardt (01:10:10):
Well that that's, that's a coincidence. <Laugh> so, so we are looking at Larry. Larry sits on a, on a bench of sorts and Larry has a cup of coffee. It's he's he he's slouching. So it leans on his, on his tummy. And the picture is from the perspective of his feet that are up on some little bench. And I like the perspective, cuz it really kind of <laugh> shows it it's another lazy pose, but the feet in the front kind of gives it, gives it a depth, gives it a well it adds to the lazy feeding. Cause someone who has their feet up is certainly not busy doing something. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:10:57):
Cup of coffee too. I like that.
Chris Marquardt (01:11:00):
Yeah. Or cocoa very. And by the way, the comment comment says that the it's used with permission of the subject lazy
Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
Larry, his name is <laugh>. Thank you,
Chris Marquardt (01:11:11):
Larry. And then last but not least the third picture is I, I love this because it's photographically. Very interesting. So we are looking at a dog lying in a bed, crumpled up bed, heats around it. And the light is so amazing. There's some it's there's sunlight coming in through a window, know skimming over the dock. You don't really see a lot of the dock because lots of, lots of it is in the shade, but you see a part of the face and the eye. And that is what you get drawn to. Yeah. Cause eyes are like a magnet for us. So you, you have to look there and the rest that is not visible because in the shade that's, you will you'll fill in the blanks. That's that gives you as the viewer. A lot of, lot of material to work with because it's not, everything is not, everything is spelled out in this picture. So really like
Leo Laporte (01:12:07):
Really good jobs, really like it. That's
Chris Marquardt (01:12:09):
Nice. Steve even took that one and the dog's name is Sully Sully,
Leo Laporte (01:12:13):
The dog taken with permission. Of course he asked Sully ahead of time.
Chris Marquardt (01:12:20):
Probably <laugh> it's okay. If I
Leo Laporte (01:12:21):
Take your permission dog, he is relaxed. That is one relaxed there. They in acting, they often say if you want imagine emotions, think of a dog. If you want, imagine relaxation, think of a cat. But that dog was very
Chris Marquardt (01:12:38):
Relaxed. That dog is very relaxed, very relaxed.
Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Now that was our assignment for for this month. But Chris is always giving us new assignments. Just an really, there's not, it's not a competition. That's the closest thing to a reward. You get, you might get it reviewed on the show, but really it's an excuse to get you out there taking photos. And there is the magic fishbowl that will deliver us. Our next assignment, the fish
Chris Marquardt (01:13:02):
Bowl. <Laugh> how many,
Leo Laporte (01:13:04):
How many slips, how many slips of words are in there?
Chris Marquardt (01:13:09):
God, they last probably for, well,
Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
Another couple of years. Okay. Well, all right.
Chris Marquardt (01:13:14):
Let's see. Let's see how long we do this, but it's fun. So I am wrestling and I'm,
Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
He's put a lot of adjectives ands and
Chris Marquardt (01:13:23):
All adjectives here is the one that I chose. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh. It says bright,
Leo Laporte (01:13:31):
Bright, perfect bright for this time of year. The festival is it's getting
Chris Marquardt (01:13:37):
Brighter every morning. It's a bit, a bit earlier when the sun comes,
Leo Laporte (01:13:40):
You know, that's really kismet because one of the reasons we have these end of the year festivals is cuz it's so dark and we need to have lights. So bright. That could mean a lot of things. I like that bright. So how does this work? Well, you take a picture that in your mind says bright, whatever that means to you. We're not gonna tell you if you find one, you go, I like this. Submit it to our tech guy group on flicker, flicker.com. It's free to join you. The tech guy group also free to join. You'll know you're in the right. I think there are other imitations except no, except no imitation join the actual tech guy group with, I don't know what it's like 13,000 members in there. It's big Renee. Silverman's our moderator. When you join you can submit up to one picture a week for the next four weeks, tag them with TG bright. So we know it's a submission for this assignment, TG for tech eye bright for the assignment, TG bright Renee will thank you for your submission. And and then in about four weeks, Chris will go comb through them. <Laugh> and he will pick one that's particularly P right? Hmm. I like bright, bright could be overexposed, but it could also mean bright sun
Chris Marquardt (01:14:58):
Or again, meanings, meanings. Meanings could mean much in
Leo Laporte (01:15:01):
There. Yeah. Could be a whole lot of things. Yeah. The latest sunrise in the Northern hemisphere is coming up January 6th, according to at con five. So what does that mean? It means you have a dark morning ahead and you could take some bright pictures then <laugh> I
Chris Marquardt (01:15:21):
Dunno. I mean the, the one, the one thing at this time of year is that if there's good weather, it's fairly easy to get up and catch a sunrise cuz you don't have to get up at 3:00 AM. That's right. For me that's that makes it much, much easier.
Leo Laporte (01:15:34):
The contrasts too, for some reason, I don't know if it's the, the cold air or what, but the does, it seems like it's, it's it brighter in the winter. The sun is brighter in the winter. Doesn't it seem that way to you
Chris Marquardt (01:15:49):
It's it might be well, especially if there's snow, then there's more yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:15:53):
Surface. Maybe that's what it is, but we don't get snow here maybe, but we've had these crystal clear days, the last few days and it sun seems so bright maybe because it's not warming you up. <Laugh> you just notice it more,
Chris Marquardt (01:16:05):
Let stuff in the air to filter out the light.
Leo Laporte (01:16:08):
Who knows? I've noticed that too in the Northern, he, as you go farther north where I guess in the Southern atmosphere or farther south, I don't and I don't know what it is, but the light definitely changes, right?
Chris Marquardt (01:16:19):
Yes it does. It does. I'm I'm I'm a total fan of light up north. Yeah, absolutely.
Leo Laporte (01:16:24):
Well, I know you used to do these trips to Valard. We hope Chris will get back on the road for his photo expedition soon, but meanwhile, go to his website and get coaching. You can get inspiration sensei, S E N S ei.photo. And of course he has the longest running photography podcast in the world. Tips from the top floor. That's TF ttf.com. Thank you, Chris.
Chris Marquardt (01:16:48):
Thank
Leo Laporte (01:16:49):
You, Leo. Leport the tech guy more calls right after this. Yeah, we don't. Yeah. Sun's only brighter in the winter when it's clear. It's overcast a lot. I know in the winter. So, but for some reason, I mean
Chris Marquardt (01:17:08):
The, the, the one experience and that was up in in Iceland, in Revi was in fall I was there for a photo workshop. I arrived a day early. I went out in the afternoon, the sun was low in the sky and I was like, you know, you know how you are calibrated to how long it takes
Leo Laporte (01:17:25):
For the sun to, to go down from a certain angle. Yeah. And for me, that, that was like a 20 minute affair. So I was rushing and to get the nice sunlight and two and a half hours later, it was almost in the same spot. It took forever to, it's amazing to
Chris Marquardt (01:17:42):
Go down. It's amazing. It is. Yeah. Brilliant and higher up north when it gets really cold, like it's ARD, you end up with the there's there's so much like small ice crystals and things in the air that gives you this interesting diffused kind of it's it's a, it's wild. It's really wild for photography. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:18:03):
It's fun. That's one of the things that's so great about photography is you observe stuff like that, that you might just not, you obliviously walk around and not notice, but you start to pay
Chris Marquardt (01:18:13):
Attention. You learn to see. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
You learn to see and I think that's great. All right, Mr. Mark art have a wonderful week. We'll be back next Sunday.
Chris Marquardt (01:18:22):
All right. You next Sunday. See you then take care then. Bye. Byebye.
Leo Laporte (01:18:29):
Leo. Leport the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number? Anne's on the line from Fullerton, California. Hi Anne.
Caller #5 (01:18:39):
Hi Leo. Hi. I just have a quick question for you. Yes, settle. A score here. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
Okay. Yes.
Caller #5 (01:18:48):
<Laugh> nothing like that. I am a a former customer of one of your former advertisers, DSL extreme. Yes. And I've been with them like, you know, like 15 years, whatever. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:19:00):
That's about when they advertised with us. Right,
Caller #5 (01:19:03):
Right. Yeah. So, and I've been very happy with them because I'm not a, I'm not a, a you know, an avid, you know, user all the time. But anyway, we got a notice from them a couple months ago that they were going to stop their support and they were going to ship me over to at and T yeah. What they called true stream. Yeah. Okay. So I did that and, and I have the, you know, the high speed wifi now, which I didn't have with, with DSL. Yeah. But anyway so I, I said, well, who is my provider now at? And T is telling me, they're my provider. Yeah. ESL is telling me, no, we are your provider. Which, which is it?
Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
It's a little of both. I'm, I'm not sure the actual answer in this case. But the it's a, it's a kind of complicated hybrid situation. So at, and T owns the copper lines that go into your house. They're the phone company, right. So they own those lines. And the FCC required phone companies. They never required this at cable companies. I'm not sure why, but they required the phone companies to allow other internet service providers to ride on those lines. Right. So that meant DSL extreme had to put a, a big box in the, at T switching center, the central office, serving your home that would, would be connected to the internet and then provide that service over at and T's lines. So it's a little bit of a hybrid situation. And by the way, the phone companies have always hated this because, well, you can imagine it's like, you know, you know, having somebody come into your house and have dinner with you every night you know, and, and somebody, you know, so it's it, they didn't like it.
Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
And so they've always dragged their feet when it comes to service and support and so forth. And it's one of the, frankly, it's one of the reasons DSL extreme struggled, and it's not their fault. It's true of all third party DSL providers that have to ride on the incumbent phone carrier cable, or wiring mm-hmm <affirmative> is, it's a tough, it's a tough situation. It's not a happy marriage. And I think that's one of the reasons you're getting two answers. The internet may still be coming from DSL extreme and that you can actually figure out for yourself with a little bit of active work. You, you wanna look and see who's providing the internet service, the, the, the DNS service and, and so forth.
Caller #5 (01:21:36):
I couldn't do that. Leo. I am. I am not that <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:21:39):
Sophisticated. Yeah. It it's a, it's a little bit of a sophisticated thing. You would do something called a trace route that would watch your traffic go from your computer out to the public world. And you could see whose servers they went through, whether it's at and T servers or DSL extremes Macintosh computers come with trace route programs. It's easy to download trace routes for for windows. So you could see that it's not gonna help you though, because <laugh>, what are you gonna say? Well, wait a minute, the trace route says, UHT does it you know, the nobody's gonna believe that. Who do you send money to, I guess, is the question.
Caller #5 (01:22:18):
I know DSL, they, they, they doubled their rate. It used to be like around $32 a month for their service. And now they bumped it up to $60 a
Leo Laporte (01:22:27):
Month. Yeah. They, they that's because you using that dual line, true stream system.
Caller #5 (01:22:32):
Yeah. But but I, I was just curious, because like I said, I've asked both companies and I even get letter, you know, on notices from at and T say, thank you for being our new customer <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:22:44):
But when you write the check, you write it to DSL extreme. Yeah.
Caller #5 (01:22:49):
It's a know an automatic thing, but, but it just says it from, at T welcome to a new level of in-home wifi. Thank you for being at T customer <laugh>. And then when I call DSL, they say, no, no, no, no. We are your provider. Oh my goodness. Just thought, well, I'll ask Leo and see
Leo Laporte (01:23:06):
What, well, there is a website you can go to the chat room is telling me that might be an easier way to answer this question, but okay. Purely from a technical point of view, there's still the socioeconomic issue that I don't know how you, I don't understand what's going on. They may have a, some sort of joint deal that they're doing, but it's, if you go to the website, what's my DNS server.com. W H a T S no, Poste okay. M Y DNS. And that's the key. Okay. What's my DNS server.com. The DNS server is run by your internet service provider or whoever that is. So when you check the button, it will say, who is running that DNS product and that in most cases, not all, but in most cases will tell you who's your internet service provider. It should say DSL extreme at and T may feel somewhat proprietary since they're the phone company. But you send your checks,
Caller #5 (01:24:09):
Their wire right there.
Leo Laporte (01:24:10):
It's there. It's always gonna be their wire DS, DSL extreme doesn't, doesn't come to your house. They rely on the phone company for that. But if you're sending a check to DSL extreme, I'm gonna have to weigh in, in favor of DSL extreme. Okay.
Caller #5 (01:24:26):
Well, I, I, I try to listen to you every, every weekend. I, I, I pick up like one of your other callers that I don't really understand a lot, but once in a while I pick up a nugget,
Leo Laporte (01:24:36):
It's osmosis, it'll, it'll it'll get in there. I try to speak English, but, you know, I slip in a nerd and and I apologize for that.
Caller #5 (01:24:43):
Well, I just appreciate your show, but thank you, Leo. You, and I will try that
Leo Laporte (01:24:49):
The website. Yeah. Here's another one from the, another chatter who is my isp.org. I like that one who <laugh> that, that might be the definitive answer. Who is my I p.org. Okay. All right. Give that a try, try that one.
Caller #5 (01:25:07):
Yeah. That the same time I'll keep listening to you and maybe bless you. You'll come up with an answer. Thanks Anne. Later on.
Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
But yeah, it's probably a business thing, right? Not a technical thing, technically I'm sure DSL extremes providing the internet, but they may have some sort of business deal with at and T that makes at and T feel proprietary <laugh>
Caller #5 (01:25:26):
But they're thanking me for being a new
Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
That's hysterical. Now, if you call at and T for support, that'll tell you too they'll cuz they don't want to give you support. That's expensive. And I almost guarantee if you call an at and T say, I'm having trouble with my internet, they're gonna say call DSL extreme.
Caller #5 (01:25:43):
Okay. That's that's <laugh> real good point. I think that'd be easy to do <laugh> and if they don't wanna, if that's not our problem, then you know, they're then
Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
You know, okay, you're writing the checks to DSL extreme. I think they're probably the internet service provider and it may have something to do with, and I, I should check maybe that DSL extreme since we've ha you know, the years since they've left the show and we no longer advertise for them. Gosh, that's been a decade. I would imagine they've been sold, bought and sold several times. So maybe at and T owns them now. I don't know. I don't know. <Laugh> so now Steve, in San Diego, in our charm who's who's I, I guess a DSL extreme customer says when he goes to who my ip.org it says at and T <laugh>. So I don't know. I don't know. I, I'm not sure what that website is is doing, who is my isp.org to figure out who your ISP is.
Leo Laporte (01:26:50):
The internet service provider does a number of things, you know, chiefly connecting you to the outside world, to the internet. But they also provide a service called DNS, which is the domain lookup, the phone book. Cuz when you enter in, you know, Google, google.com you, your computer doesn't know what google.com means. It goes out, it asks the ISP. It says, well, what who's google.com. What's their phone number in effect. And the ISP says, oh yeah, yeah, you want to go to 1 72, 3, 4, 9, 1 of those long number things that's in effect the, does the internet address the IP address or the phone number? And that's, that's what the, another service that the ISP usually provides. You know, looking at that, we should tell you who your ISP is. Good. An interesting question. Leo LePort the tech guy. Yeah. They said that one in the chat room too. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:27:52):
<Laugh> your host name should tell you who your ISP is actually see. Sometimes people change DNS. <Laugh> this is actually a great site. It's too bad. It's so profane <laugh> it's hysterical. Who is my ISP is probably the one to use.org by the way. But we will put those links in the show notes, right? Oh, I had so much fun with the advent of code. Speaking of regular expressions. This was a fun one. Let me see if I can download this. I'm really stuck right now on a, I told you John, my tree trees get me every time I'm getting better and better at trees, but this is a graph which is a tree, a cyclic tree. And it really is tricky Because of the parameters for the search, I can, I can, I can pretty much do a depth first, first and a read for search on a B on a tree, on a BST, but on a graph I could do it. But to avoid loops, you say, well, I've already been to this point, so don't include it. But in this case, he wants you to include lowercase points once. And once only it's a little, it's a little tricky, but I'll show you.
Leo Laporte (01:29:48):
So the, the problem said was these unmatched was like this. It was, but a longer. And you had to, first thing you had to do was get all the pair matched pairs out. So This was the Redex I used, which is great, that matched pairs. And then I had one that matched right side of the pair only. So it was a really cool little <affirmative> very quick stripped out the pairs. Anyway, it was kind of fun. It's kind of fun.
Leo Laporte (01:30:37):
I am well, I've always, I love REDX and <laugh> REDX has never been a problem for me that I have Jeffrey Frito's awesome book, by the way, mastering regular expressions, highly recommend that, but it turns out it's interesting because in he likes there's, there's definitely problems in in fact, almost all the problems Red's handy because you can parse the input data in various ways to get it more manageable. So Redex helps there, but I, you know, because he writes them in Pearl, I think he kind of tends towards red X's problems, but it's interesting to see people with other languages, not always using REDX sometimes they'll use parsing in fact often use parsing tools instead, which I have a lot of trouble figuring that out. But anyway, it's a lot of fun. We're having a good time. I got all the way up to and I am stuck on day 12. I'll show you day 12 Of code.com I'm logged in.
Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
So you see I've gotten I've solved all the way up to day 12. There are 25 days, obviously, cuz it's an advent calendar, but day 12, the whole, the whole idea is Santa dropped the keys to the sleigh in the, in the ocean and the elves have to take a submarine to find the keys so that Santa can deliver all the gifts to the good little boys and girls by December 25th. So you're slowly navigating through the ocean with your submarines, subterranean, subsystem, subsisting suboptimally. The only way you're getting out of this cave, this Eric Wastel who writes these does such a good job with the scenarios. It's kinda like word problems in high school. You know, it's like, oh, the only way you're getting out the cave anytime is by finding a path yourself, not just a path, the only way to know if you found the best path is to find all of them.
Leo Laporte (01:32:45):
So you're getting, you know, this is a kind of well known traveling salesman type problem, except he adds this really. So the caves are designated with letters, uppercase or lowercase. The uppercase letter are big caves. Lowercase letters are little caves. You're going from the start to the end. And this is a sh this is a, a, you know, sample data for your tests. This is a, so then this is a list of how all the caves are connected. You start in the cave named, start your destinations, a cave named end entry like B E D means that KB is connected to day at KD.
Leo Laporte (01:33:26):
And this is what it would look like basically. But here's the, here's the, here's the curve ball, cuz I can easily find, start to end. I can even find all the paths from start to end avoiding loops. Cuz it's a graph. You have to be careful cuz you could end up, start to a, to B, to a, to B, to a, to B, to a, to B forever. So you wanna make sure you don't revisit sites, but he wants you to visit these small letter, small caves once. Exactly. So all the paths you find should visit the small caves at most once. Oh, not exactly at most. Once you can visit the big caves, any number of times. So in this case you could just go start a and would be one way to go start B and would be one way to go. But if you wanted to visit, see at most once is interesting. So I, I, now that I reread that maybe the, this is easier than I thought. Cause I thought I had to go exactly. Once I gotta start a C a B oh, you can't do that. Start B oh, that's go. You can't do this one because you can't go to C and then back. So anyway, actually now that I've reread it, it's not as bad as I thought.
Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
Why, Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo LePort here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, ISPs, internet addresses, DSL cable, all of that stuff. Eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo is the phone number (888) 827-5536, toll free anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. You can, you can still call, but you just have use Skype to, to reach me 88, 88, ask Leah. Let's go back to the phones Don on the line from Dana point, California. Hello Don.
Caller #6 (01:35:24):
Hi. I have several questions here regarding phones. I have a note eight, but the, the problem is I cannot hover over text link to check the information beyond.com. Unlike a PC. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
Do you have, have you tried it with a pen?
Caller #6 (01:35:47):
I'm
Leo Laporte (01:35:47):
Sorry. Have you tried it with a pen?
Caller #6 (01:35:51):
Yes, I and I inadvertently made contact with a linker, turned out to be a porn site. Oh, oh great.
Leo Laporte (01:35:58):
<Laugh>
Caller #6 (01:36:00):
Know you receive a link, a text and you haven't, it has a link in it. And of course you can't hover over it. You can't.
Leo Laporte (01:36:07):
Yeah. My first advice, by the way, never click links in text messages, cuz almost always those are malicious
Caller #6 (01:36:16):
Accidentally did that. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
I delete if I don't know who that text message came from, I deleted immediately. I don't, I don't investigate. Even if it says this is your bank and your accounts being drained by foreign nationals, click this link here. That's almost always, in fact it is always a Phish scheme to get you to click that link. Those links are dangerous, whether it takes you to porn cell or takes you to a malicious site or both. Those are dangerous. So, but, but your question is legit. I like your question because it you're right on any, on any email or on any desktop or laptop you hover, you put the, you position the mouse over the link and you'll get more information about the link in the status bar.
Caller #6 (01:36:58):
Okay. Next question. I'm getting something from horizon direct.com and they say we're going to take because of your subscription, which I never signed up for. We're going to take money from you in three or four days. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
That's fishing, that's fishing. They have
Caller #6 (01:37:18):
A, a bad reputation with the BBB. How do I stop them from no sending
Leo Laporte (01:37:25):
Me it's spam. It's fishing. So the first thing that, oh gosh, I want to answer all of the questions. So the it's really an interesting question of what do I do on a smartphone? How do I investigate a link? Some times with the galaxy notes, maybe it's the more recent ones you could hover the pen and it would tell you cuz it, the, the, the newer notes have the sensor that can actually pick up where the pen is. I see, I think that eight probably would do that, but if not, but that's really not to the point because yeah, you accidentally click it that's bad. And the truth is it may be, it's not merely that you need eye bleach now cuz of what you saw, it may be that the simple act of clicking that link installs malware on your system. So agreed. So we don't wanna ever even take a risk of clicking that link. You wanna delete those messages. You can block messages from particular sender, almost all operating systems. If you delete it will then give you a chance to report junk mail and sometimes even block it. The problem is people who send that kind of malicious link, send it from, made up phone numbers. So you could block that number. Doesn't matter. They're gonna be different one every time
Caller #6 (01:38:41):
Agree then they can, they can just send me incorrect numbers. They can spoof it anyway. They can spoof it. Okay. Next question. So the
Leo Laporte (01:38:50):
Mo the payload on that text message is not the phone number, just like the payload and spam email is not the return address, pointless to investigate where it came from. That's not where it really came from. The main point is don't click that
Caller #6 (01:39:03):
Link. Yes, I agree. Completely. Yes. Okay. Next question. How do I block a text? I'm getting something that's spelled MC a underscore underscore F E E. And they want to, I want to block that, but I don't see any way of blocking again, you
Leo Laporte (01:39:23):
Can't because if, even if you blocked the originating number, they just use a different number. So there's
Caller #6 (01:39:30):
No way to do a one size fits all and no, they send me McAfee. No, who's
Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
Your, who's your phone company?
Caller #6 (01:39:38):
Consumers carrier
Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
Cellular. Yeah. You might call consumer cellular and say, look, I wanna block spam texts. And they, you know, they, all the carriers to a greater or lesser degree have the ability to block spam phone calls and spam texts.
Caller #6 (01:39:55):
I'll do that last. Yes. last pass is becoming business oriented, like that's right.
Leo Laporte (01:40:02):
Yep. Just like Carbonite. I
Caller #6 (01:40:04):
Consider switching over to daylight.
Leo Laporte (01:40:07):
There are many other password managers. It's easy to move from last password to another password manager. They have an export command that will get your whole password vault and allow you to import it into the rec the ones I recommend. I you got, you should be careful. I presume choosing a password manager. I would look at the open source bit warden because it's free forever. There's a small dollar a month fee. If you wanna get a kind of a professional version, but it's full featured for that's bit warden.com. Another very popular, probably the most popular password manager, something called one password. What was the one you were thinking of switching to
Caller #6 (01:40:49):
Dash lane? I have two laptops and a phone. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Dash Lane's fine. That one's fine too. All of those are good
Caller #6 (01:40:58):
And all of them are more consumer focused than last pass. So yes. Excellent choice. I don't mind paying money for it because I, I want as I say, I want both laptops and the phone to share the same thing. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
In the case of bit warden, you don't have to pay for that feature because it's an open source project.
Caller #6 (01:41:19):
So, okay. One thing that's important is another way I found out this a hard way, it's a with a last pass it's a really important to have a secondary means of your account. Last pass now has a biometric, which they didn't have before. And I paid the price for that. They do now with a
Leo Laporte (01:41:45):
Always, always, always you want two factor, an essential, I agree. And all of them do it. That's a form of two factor where you have an, you know, the login and the password, but you also have to provide a thumbprint, a face ID, maybe a six digit code. That's two factor, which is absolutely imperative. In fact, with Laspas in particular, Lapa had a was recently attacked by hackers who didn't get through on anybody who had two factor. So two factor and I, and you're right. I love the idea that you can do it with your fingerprint or your face it's so much faster. And all of them was several years
Caller #6 (01:42:25):
Ago, last pass found my passwords in the dark web or something. Yeah. And they automatically closed my account and I get back in again, response
Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
From, oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry. That happened to you, Don. That's awful. That is not the way to respond to that.
Caller #6 (01:42:44):
We didn't have the biometric backup at that time.
Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
Yeah. That must have been a while ago. Yeah. So absolutely. Use two factor on everything, not just your, your password manager, obviously very important, but your bank, everything, if you can, and the best two factor is biometric. I agree. So, yes. Dashlane should do that one password does for sure. Bit warden does for sure.
Caller #6 (01:43:07):
Okay. Do you read a little pamphlet, 2,600?
Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
I do. I know 2,600, well there that that's a hacker group and it's great. Are you, do you read 2,600
Caller #6 (01:43:16):
Don? They have they have numerous ways getting around a second factor. Yes,
Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
Of course. The wor the chief way is SMS text messaging. So don't use two factor over your cell phone, either use an authenticator or biometrics. I use a UBI key, which is a physical hardware key, and I doubt even 2,600 can break through that one. That's a pretty good way to do it. Okay.
Caller #6 (01:43:40):
Mic Microsoft authenticator. And I have a hate relationship <laugh> cause I, I have never, it used to be able to work and now it doesn't so
Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
Use either Google's authenticator or my third party. Favorite is Authy, A U T H Y it's from a company called Twilio. It's free. I think it's very good. But again, yeah, Authy is great much better than Microsoft's. You still need Microsofts for windows and so forth, so you're gonna keep it on there. But for, for those six digit codes, I would use Authy or Google's authenticator. Those are, those are probably better.
Caller #6 (01:44:19):
Okay. I won't take that more of your time. Thank you very much for all of your help.
Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
Great questions. I love hearing somebody who cares about their security, Don. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye take care. And obviously fairly sophisticated because he's paying a and to the, the thing to remember when you read these hacker magazines or the chaos computer club, or you, or you read even online about security flaws is for the most time, most case it's not something that's gonna affect you. For instance, last pass had a problem. It turned out it was a, it was what they call stuffing. The people who were affected by this had used them and never do this, reused their master password for their password vault. In other places, those other places got breached. The password leaked out, and then the bad guys tried that password and a variety of sites including last pass. And it worked the two things to take away from that.
Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
Don't reuse passwords, turn on two factor, cuz either one of them would've thwarted that attack. Don't reuse passwords. I know you. I know that's. I know. How can I remember all these passwords, Leo? I understand get a password vault. We mentioned a few last passes. Good dash is good. One password bit warden. They're a sponsor, but I, I happen to be use them anyway. I think they're very good. Those are excellent products. Don't reuse your password to log into the vault. That's the one, the one and only password you gotta memorize and then turn onto factor everywhere you can. Eighty eight eighty ask Leo that's the phone number back to the phones. Lots of calls. First show of the new year. Are we having fun yet? All right. We'll have more with a tech guy right after this.
Leo Laporte (01:46:16):
Actually they did, in some cases click things. Golia there were a variety of texts from the NSO group, the Pega once, once they get Pegasus on there, it's zero click, but some of the attacks were in fact text messages that you had to click on. You are so good. Professor, Laura musical director, she just picks the best tunes. Doesn't she? Thank you for, and I have, I have to point this out that even though I was not here for the last three episodes, it took Christmas day off. Of course could, could have come in on boxing day, the 26th, but I, I opted out. Didn't want to come in on new year's day. You know, those are holidays, but you know, who gets to work even when I'm not here. Laura. So Laura, thank you. She, she PR she has to come in to present the best of Encore presentations that you heard over the last three episodes. So thank you, Laura, for for working hard. She she works extra hard now, Kim and I, we didn't bother. We just, we stayed in our jammies and stayed home 88, 88. Ask Leo on, we go with the show. Henry's in the line for pres Scott Ali, Arizona. Hello, Henry.
Caller #7 (01:47:32):
Hey, how you doing Leo?
Leo Laporte (01:47:34):
I'm very well. How are you? Happy new year.
Caller #7 (01:47:37):
Well, I wasn't in the obituaries this morning, so I
Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
Guess I'm doing, do you, you know, that's a good idea. You check those every morning just to make sure. Yeah. Yeah, right.
Caller #7 (01:47:45):
Yeah. Makes sense. I'm Henry the space. Happy moon. My mouse. If you remember
Leo Laporte (01:47:50):
Me, I do remember you cuz my son's name is Henry. So as soon as I saw your name, I knew it was you
Caller #7 (01:47:57):
Uhhuh <affirmative> and I'd like to say hello to Rob the air show guy. My good friend. And one of your biggest fans. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Yeah, we yeah. Good friends. Yep. So, so what can I do for you on this new 20, 22?
Caller #7 (01:48:15):
Well, I have a an E 47 50 right now
Leo Laporte (01:48:21):
Eco tank printer from EPON.
Caller #7 (01:48:23):
Yes, sir. And I love it, but it keeps going blank on me because I don't use it enough. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
This, you know, it's funny cuz they used to be a sponsor and I use eco tank printers, but like every ink jet, if you don't print, you know, at least once a week, I don't know what the actual number of pages you need to print every and what the timeframe is. But I, you know, roughly once a week the, of the jets, the, and the jets dries up and clogs and every time I would say that Epson would call me and say, no, ours doesn't. I said, yes, it does. No, we have special coatings. It doesn't. I said, but it does anyway. We never resolved that one.
Caller #7 (01:49:07):
Well it, it does <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:49:08):
Yeah. I'll vouch for that too. So the, the trick is either to print something every week, there is a nozzle cleaning routine and on the eco tanks, it's not the end of the world cause you have so much ink and the Ink's so much less expensive, but you know, it does use a lot of ink. I think it's just a flaw in the, in the technology, these are very, very tiny nozzles on these ink jet printers and ink dries out, no matter what. So if you don't kind of regularly use them, you're gonna, the, the nozzles will get clogged. They can be unclogged in almost all cases. But so that's why I say get a laser printer. <Laugh> well,
Caller #7 (01:49:47):
That's what I call about to see if you had any recommendations for a laser all in one.
Leo Laporte (01:49:52):
Yeah. So the difference of course, between laser and ink jet is when it comes to color. And particularly when it comes to photo printing, nothing is gonna give you as good a result as on photos, as an ink jet. I mean there's some professional eye sublimation printers it'll do too, but but, but for the, you know, reasonable cost in the home, if you're printing and you want good color, your ink, Jet's your best bet. Do you care about color?
Caller #7 (01:50:19):
I would prefer color, but you know, sometimes you gotta give up one thing for the other.
Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
You can get color laser and it's not very expensive. You know, the, the thing that stopped people for a long time was, you know, I, I remember my first laser printer was an apple laser writer was $5,000.
Caller #7 (01:50:36):
Yes, I had one of those too.
Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
Yeah, great. And they were a breakthrough technology, but the good news is you can get good laser printers now for a hundred bucks. And there's a lot of advantages. You know, consumables aren't as expensive cuz you buy toner cartridges, you can buy 5,000 page toner cartridges for about a hundred bucks. Do the math. That's a very low per page cost much lower than ink jet, even the eco tanks. And also I think the print is a little CRISPR with laser jets cuz they're using, it's the same technology you see in photo copiers. They use static on a, on a well you, I don't have to explain the whole thing you get it. It's a, but the color isn't as rich. So you can get in what they call color, laser printers, typically as business color. In other words, you wouldn't want to print a photo, but it's fine if you wanna do color graphs if you like color in your printing, but you Don that vibrant color from an inkjet they're a good color lasers as well.
Leo Laporte (01:51:36):
I use brother, I think brother makes very inexpensive and very good laser printers. I've been very happy with them, not a sponsor Uhhuh <affirmative> HP is of course the king, a laser print, inexpensive laser printers. I'm not as crazy about them. They've had some security flaws lately. So I, you know, I'm gonna say brother out of the top off the top of my head, but I would also recommend a visit to PC magazine. They do a yearly laser printer review that will give you more detail about, you know, the pros and cons each. They have one called the best laser printers for 2021 very timely. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it was updated in November. So it's at least, you know, late 20, 21. They, they, their editors choices included the HPS the brothers and Lexmarks but I'm a fan of the brother. I, I use a brother laser, a printer and I've been very happy with it and it ne and, and the nozzles never clog. It's amazing.
Caller #7 (01:52:36):
I've used some of their products in the past and they're very good. Yeah. They're
Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Good. They're very good. Hey yeah, I'm sorry. EPON but the facts is the facts. What can I say, Leo? Leport the tech guy. I don't mind cuz EPON doesn't advertise anymore. Anyway, I think the, I have an eco tank and I keep using that. We just have to make sure we use it regularly because it is, you know, you're never gonna get around that clogging problem. How often do you print?
Caller #7 (01:53:03):
Very seldom many more, but I do use it for for lay for gosh, all, all the other things that you can get in a printer. Yeah. Like copying and,
Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
And that sort. Yeah. So you can get a multifunction brother has multifunction laser printer that's I think was 250 bucks. I the cartridge, the toner cartridge, it comes with, well, doesn't go very far. They have like a mini cartridge, but so I went out and bought a big cartridge after that ran out and I haven't changed it since it goes thousands of pages. So, you know,
Caller #7 (01:53:39):
I, I spent six months in hospital and oh, I'm sorry. We have facilities in 2021. So my my at 47 50 had a good chance to walk up
Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
On. Yeah. If you don't use it for six months, but you, you, well, you, if you ran the NA nozzle cleaning routine, did it, did it work again?
Caller #7 (01:54:03):
Oh yeah. I have, have had to do that too or three times. Yeah. And I've almost run out of ink because of it, so, oh. I thought it would be easier just to get a, a laser printer and and just go from that angle because I, I, I don't need color anymore so much since I don't
Leo Laporte (01:54:22):
Inkjet the, the down other downside inkjet, it bleeds a little bit, depending on the pin paper you use and, and laser isn't actually ink it's toner mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so it's much CRISPR printing. I think you, you, you, if you had an apple laser writer, you know, how good those looked, you know? Oh,
Caller #7 (01:54:39):
They were wonderful at the time I was self-employed and I had to prepared long reports. Oh yeah. And it was great. Fast,
Leo Laporte (01:54:48):
Quiet love printer. Yeah. Yep. Lasers can be depends on what, you know, usually those are more expensive, but they can be a lot faster than in jet too.
Caller #7 (01:54:59):
Well, I appreciate it, Leo. And I see rod in the background there. He's here
Leo Laporte (01:55:05):
And his spaceship, my hero <laugh>
Caller #7 (01:55:08):
Happy. Moon mouth. So he out a
Leo Laporte (01:55:10):
Little while ago, remember Henry, have a great week. I appreciate your calling. Thank you.
Caller #7 (01:55:18):
Take care and have a good
Leo Laporte (01:55:19):
One. You too. Byebye
Caller #7 (01:55:21):
B. Bye.
Leo Laporte (01:55:24):
Yeah, you know, I, I, I would let episode would say you have to stop saying our printers clog, and I say, but dudes, they do, but we have special coats. They don't clog. We should do a countdown. 10, 9, 8, oh yeah. 7 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 1. Take off. No, no, come back. Rod files here, author of so many great space books like space, 2.0 first man on the moon, inner robots, the whole amazing stories. Blueprint for a battle star editor inchi of the, a Astra magazine. Yeah. This is the rod pile pile, all the books, you know, and especially we keep it right on the right at right at hand. So I can show you on the radio. Anyway, rod, it's great to talk to you. I hope you had a wonder full holiday break. Did thank you in space.
Rod Pyle (01:56:26):
Had a, had an unscheduled visit from a guest. We didn't want called COVID, but other than that,
Leo Laporte (01:56:31):
Oh no. Are you okay? Yeah,
Rod Pyle (01:56:34):
Actually it was like the mildest cold I've ever had. It was almost nothing. Well, God, I am a believer. I know you're a hardcore right-winger but I, in that space,
Leo Laporte (01:56:45):
If you didn't believe in science, I'd have some problems with you rod. And I don't think you'd be talking about space, to be honest with
Rod Pyle (01:56:52):
That booster, man.
Leo Laporte (01:56:54):
Yeah. So you were already boosted and you had a breakthrough, but it didn't, it didn't knock you down. So that's my I'm boosted, but I'm still, I don't want, you know, cuz it's you don't know. Some people they get really sick. I don't know. I know. I don't want
Rod Pyle (01:57:06):
Be that one. Yeah. I, I wouldn't go around licking door knobs, but you know, if it does happen to a
Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
Parents <laugh> that's good to know. I'm glad you're okay. And the, the family all got it too, huh?
Rod Pyle (01:57:15):
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:57:17):
And everybody's fine though. The
Rod Pyle (01:57:18):
Youngster, but yeah. Everybody's okay. Right. Little harder on, on my girlfriend's daughter cuz she hadn't been boosted yet, but, but still nothing severe, you know, but I know it's, it's it's sheer luck. I mean the booster worked, which is great, but it can affect different people differently. So I still wouldn't recommend it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
Yeah. It is. It's we live in amazing times. I mean Lord,
Rod Pyle (01:57:41):
I mean a year they did
Leo Laporte (01:57:42):
It. Yeah. And frankly you know, anybody listens to show is interested in technology. Technology is just applied science. It's just <laugh> you know, and we're and we live and, and it's easy to take it for granted, but we live in amazing. Well, I'll give you an example. Christmas day, they launched a space telescope. Now the Hubble, which had been up there for a decade, right. Longer is getting a little long in the tooth. It's we some amazing science we got out of this. Tell me about the James web telescope. So
Rod Pyle (01:58:21):
This is outrageous ambition. And, and as we've discussed before this star, over 20 years ago, as a conversation about a large space telescope, eh, maybe it'll cost 500 million. That's kind of expensive, but we think we can do it. And you know, a lot of people talk about the budget creep, cuz it got up to 10 billion, a little over 10 billion by the time it launched. But it's also an entirely different instrument than they were talking about. And you're putting this, this basketball court size space telescope inside a rocket with a 15 foot by about 28 foot faring. So everything's gotta fold up. As we know, we've been talking about it, we've been hearing about it. So it's about halfway to its target. Now
Leo Laporte (01:59:03):
It's gonna go to what they call a LaGrange point.
Rod Pyle (01:59:06):
Yeah. LaGrange two sun earth LaGrange two. So it's as of right now, this very moment it's 515,616 miles from earth. Wow. So a little over halfway, about 60% it to its final destination, which is 900, about 900,000 miles. And it's a weird spot in space. There's a number of these LaGrange points. They are gravitational spots where things conspire to let you maintain a very small orbit in this case called a halo orbit, which lets you kind of stay in one place you're orbiting or around a spot and space. But it's almost like you have a little planet there even though there's nothing there. So this is on the far side of the earth from the sun out beyond well beyond Luna, Oregon. So
Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
Gravitational forces of the earth and the sun are balance. So you can kind of just stay there, which is for a telescope ideal
Rod Pyle (01:59:59):
It's ideal. And unfortunately it's too far to do an easy servicing mission, which is why, of course we're so nervous about this deploy.
Leo Laporte (02:00:08):
This thing has to work right the first time.
Rod Pyle (02:00:10):
Right? So we're about a third of the way through the 400 and something different separate activities that have to take place.
Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
All automated, all we're looking now autonomous or are they triggered mean, are we oh, they're triggered. Okay. They're
Rod Pyle (02:00:24):
Triggered. Okay. So this is coming up later. What we saw before, sorry, I wasn't looking at the screen for a second. So they've already lowered. I can go back to the
Leo Laporte (02:00:33):
Beginning. You made a great video, which we'll post on the, on the website. Thank you for giving credit in there. Well,
Rod Pyle (02:00:39):
Thanks NASA. You know, so solar boom went out for first, which is of course necessary for power and
Leo Laporte (02:00:45):
That's out now. Then they
Rod Pyle (02:00:46):
Lowered these two
Leo Laporte (02:00:47):
Sides, which, and this has all worked so far, right? Nope. No it's
Rod Pyle (02:00:50):
All worked so far. And remember that's just five layers of cap foil. So it looks substantial, but it's not. Yeah. It's like a tissue paper kite, if you remember those horrible things. So that's completed then are they worried
Leo Laporte (02:01:01):
About meteors or meteorite or cons
Rod Pyle (02:01:04):
Or they've Gued the thing. Oh, by the way, this is very cool. This is a little in effect almost a little solar sail. It's a panel that allows light pressure from the sun to help keep the thing oriented. So this step, so
Leo Laporte (02:01:18):
That's nice. They don't have to use, they don't have to use rocket fuel. They're just using not as much little sail, little sun sales in effect.
Rod Pyle (02:01:25):
And then this is the tensioning step, which is what's gonna happen tomorrow. And during that, so these are five layers of cap on foil really thin all smooshed together. As they get tensioned these little,
Leo Laporte (02:01:41):
There, it, it, I, so it's like stretching a sheet and these five
Rod Pyle (02:01:45):
Layers layers kind go with with, with a little stretcher to pull the, the layers taught and you know, it's incredible that it, that it has worked on earth in one G of course you can't, you can't simulate it in zero G. So that's the question. Will everything work perfectly, but
Leo Laporte (02:02:08):
They're close if it doesn't, if we are we, is it just over? I mean, it's like, if anything goes wrong, is it just a piece of space junk?
Rod Pyle (02:02:15):
Well, they've got a variety of techniques and they learned a lot from the Lao mission. If you remember Galileo out the Jupiter, that big antenna dish, which is also a deployable be jammed up because it had been stored too long. Cause the, the debacle with the shuttle challenger and so forth. So they learned a lot about how to unstick stuck mechanism. So if something does jam up, they'll do a little bit of flexing and torqueing and stuck sting with the motors to try and get it unstuck. So there there's a lot of things they can do. Where is the cause nobody
Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
Out there, where is the mission being monitors? Is it JPL or where are they?
Rod Pyle (02:02:50):
I think this one's being monitored out of shoot. I mean, part of it's JPL obviously, cuz they do all the tracking and so forth. But I, I don't remember. There's gotta be some people
Leo Laporte (02:02:59):
I know holding their breath, us every moment of this.
Rod Pyle (02:03:02):
Oh, not just some, the whole science and engineering team.
Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
Yeah. Cuz we want now what are we gonna get from this? Why are we spending 10 billion to
Rod Pyle (02:03:10):
Put this out there? Good question. It's it's three times the diameter almost three times the diameter of the Hubble, bigger, a bigger
Leo Laporte (02:03:17):
Mirror gives it much, gather more light, more, more
Rod Pyle (02:03:20):
Information, gathering, a lot more light, which is why it had to be in separate cells. Now let's bear in mind. If we had the Starship flying space as a Starship, you could launch something almost this big in one piece and practically build it out of lead. You know, it wouldn't have to be this light fragile thing, but we're not there yet. We're using smaller rockets. But what this telescope is so special, it is, it can see in the infrared. So Hubble has some infrared capability, but this has extreme infrared capability because it cools way down. The differential is, is close to 600 degrees between the hot side and the cold side of those sun shields. And in the infrared, you can look way further back in time, way further into the universe we're talking and two to 300 million years after the big bang. So when the first, first stars are still forming, when the first galaxies are first forming. So you're really looking at the very beginning of time. Infrared lets you look past all the dust and all the junk that's out there between us and those things. Billions and billions and billions, billions of miles away. So that's, that's the big thing.
Leo Laporte (02:04:23):
We always, we always, when I was a kid thought, if you could just get a good enough telescope and send it far enough away, you could look back on the earth and you could see Jesus being born and you could see <laugh>, you know, but this is in effect kind of what we're doing. We're looking into,
Rod Pyle (02:04:38):
Into we're doing it the other direction.
Leo Laporte (02:04:39):
Yeah. Billions of years in the past. Yeah. The very beginning of the universe. I mean it's only, it's unbelievable. And that's just part of what the James web is gonna
Rod Pyle (02:04:48):
Be. Yeah. It also will actually be able to measure atmospheres of exoplanets. So it's gonna look
Leo Laporte (02:04:53):
For other imaging that's maybe even pictures of aliens, rod
Rod Pyle (02:05:00):
Piles, hopefully
Leo Laporte (02:05:00):
Just like these right space, dots.org. Thank you rod. Thank you. <Laugh> it's like Wayne's world, if you could, if you could put a, a telescope like, but like 500 or a thousand white years out there and you could see, you could look back and you see. Yeah. But this is doing that stream.
Rod Pyle (02:05:27):
It's it's funny, you know, for so many years, if you are in the, in the press, you know, you're watching this thing and it's like, come on, is this ever gonna launch? How much more is it gonna cost it? We kind of got Jay to it. I think some of us anyway, but now that it's up there and you're watching this stuff and of course, as it's flying, I started paying a little more attention to the details of how this deployment worked, cuz I was kind of avoiding it cuz I was so terrified of it, but it really is. It's
Leo Laporte (02:05:53):
It's definitely
Rod Pyle (02:05:54):
A force of technology. It's
Leo Laporte (02:05:56):
Amazing. John showed me a picture 20 years ago, you know, he was, he worked at Cal state. 20 years ago, NASA came to Cal state with a prototype that looks nothing like this <laugh> and they were looking for, you know, kids studying science to come work for NASA. So we could plan this telescope 20 years in the it's amazing.
Rod Pyle (02:06:19):
And John turned him down to work for you.
Leo Laporte (02:06:21):
And John ended up working here. Sorry John <laugh> no, he was an MSI. He was getting his masters in the, in the information systems MIS so yeah, not, not not really. Well maybe I don't know, John, could you have worked for NASA? I bet you could have. I think he could have,
Rod Pyle (02:06:39):
Have a lot of specializations there, but I think he's probably having a lot more fun working for
Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
You. He said he tried to get a job at Caltech and JPL. Yeah. And PR it's a, and PR it's a tough,
Rod Pyle (02:06:52):
You know, everything's tough. I mean podcasting's tough as you know, not
Leo Laporte (02:06:56):
That tough, not that tough
Rod Pyle (02:06:58):
PR at Caltech and J hill is, is quite a job. I mean, you got a lot of marks to hit. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:07:04):
Well you did it right?
Rod Pyle (02:07:06):
I did. And I, I enjoyed most of it. It's just, you know, like any of those jobs, it's a combination of marketing, advertising, facts, spin control, disaster relief, but also
Leo Laporte (02:07:18):
A certain understanding of the, of this science.
Rod Pyle (02:07:20):
Right? Yeah. And, and I did get into a couple of situations. There was one paper at Caltech. I was writing an article on, I think we did 30 drafts because the professor was just very particular. Yeah. About
Leo Laporte (02:07:34):
The specific, no you of things you're not describing
Rod Pyle (02:07:37):
This accurately. Yeah. And God bless him. I mean, he was a brilliant guy. I, I spent a year falling up,
Leo Laporte (02:07:43):
Have seen the net new Netflix movie. Don't look up. Yes.
Rod Pyle (02:07:47):
<Laugh> now isn't this interesting. I mean, they were so carefully, politically neutral in satire except I'm watching. They want people read <laugh> well, but I'm watching people, you know, critics and social commentary read into some saying, this is ultra conservatives and they're saying, no, no screening's liberal climate change. And it's all about climate change. And though it's not it's this is that.
Leo Laporte (02:08:10):
So the best part is early on Leonard de capos S is trying to explain stuff from the science and people are just lazing over. Yes. Yes. And then he learns how to be a science who, and <laugh> that's part of the fun of the movie. Anyway. I gotta run. He's
Rod Pyle (02:08:28):
Learning the room. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:08:29):
Yeah. Okay. Rod, always a pleasure. Thank you. I'm sure we'll want to talk more about the James web because it's really remarkable. Well, and let's hope
Rod Pyle (02:08:38):
We keep talking cause
Leo Laporte (02:08:38):
We will. These guys are amazing. It's amazing. They really are. The, and I know they did everything possible to test this and yes, something could go wrong. But boy, I, if I were betting, man, I would not bet against this working perfectly. I would not one thing for sure.
Rod Pyle (02:08:56):
We know it'll be in focus.
Leo Laporte (02:08:58):
<Laugh> cause he, what they learn from hub. You can't put a lens on you can't say the Nope guy up there to fix, fix. Gotta be right for the first pass. Yeah. All right. Hey, thank you rod. Take care. Take care. Byebye. Thank you for being my musical director, professor Laura. Thank you so much to Kim sheer our phone angel. Thanks to all of you for being here. And I think it's appropriate to play this, of course, because in honor, Betty whiten the, the theme, it was the theme from the golden girls. Was it not? I think it was. Am I wrong, Laura? She doesn't know. She's too young. 88, 88. Asked go. Thank you. Most of all to you for for listening and calling in too. I appreciate it, Jack, on the line from Huntington beach, California. Thank you for being a listener. Hi Jack.
Caller #8 (02:09:52):
Hi. Hi Leo. Thanks for taking my call. Happy new year.
Leo Laporte (02:09:54):
Happy new year. Okay.
Caller #8 (02:09:56):
I got a new iPhone by the way. I just thought I'd tell you I got the Promax.
Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
Did you get the 13? Yes. Good man. So you got the latest greatest.
Caller #8 (02:10:06):
Yeah. And my, my one comment about it is pretty, pretty heavy phone.
Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
Yes, it really is. It's the heaviest they've made, I think because it's got a bigger battery and of course it's a giant screen. Isn't that funny because I honestly for years, and I think this was because of Apple's chief designer, Johnny ive, they were getting thinner and lighter, but there's a SI there's a negative to that, which is battery life was going down, antennas weren't as good. So I don't mind that they're a little heavier. We just have to get used to it. Think of it as a exercise.
Caller #8 (02:10:40):
Yeah. And it's kind of funny, cuz I've talked to you in the past. My kids have better phones than I do <laugh> and
Leo Laporte (02:10:48):
Not anymore.
Caller #8 (02:10:50):
Believe me have at least 11, but, and they're gonna get new ones, but I was wor I was working off of six, you know? <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:10:56):
Good.
Caller #8 (02:10:57):
Good. And what happened was it wouldn't even download like a Starbucks ad or
Leo Laporte (02:11:02):
Something. Oh yeah, no, you gotta keep up with the times unfortunately. And it, it, I, it's kind of an artificial thing because they don't have to make these ads so big and websites, so fat programs, so, so enormously bloated, but because everybody's got so much memory and so much horsepower, they do it's you know, they don't have to optimize. So yes.
Caller #8 (02:11:26):
Now I have two things to talk about and I know that your time is, is running low. So I wanted to tell, I wanted to respond to my previous call. I talked to you about that my C drive was full. And then we talked about moving it to the E drive. Yes. Because the E drive had like a whole bunch of space on it. And anyway, so you talked to me about the move command. I don't think there's a move command anymore. I looked for it like, so I tried to copy some of the pictures. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
Robo robo copy will do it. Yeah.
Caller #8 (02:11:59):
Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, what I ended up doing, which seemed to be a pretty good solution was I did take it over to the local. It was a best buy and they said, why don't you put in a new hard drive? And so they used to Samsung it. There you go.
Leo Laporte (02:12:15):
And they put a solid state drive too. Right? They did.
Caller #8 (02:12:19):
Yeah. They did put
Leo Laporte (02:12:20):
Solid state, huge improvement.
Caller #8 (02:12:22):
And, and I, and then, you know, they, they have this program where they fix all your personal computer. So I took my old, older laptop over there, but they just moved everything. They just cloned it. They said Samsung has a program that they can clone it that's right. And they just hard drive. So it was kind of a good solution to that. Yeah. Painless.
Leo Laporte (02:12:41):
Wanted to talk about that. Yeah. And do you notice your computers a lot faster too? Now? It is.
Caller #8 (02:12:47):
Yeah. It's super fast and great. Although I will tell you that then my video card went out, so I'm looking at a new, oh man.
Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Oh man.
Caller #8 (02:12:57):
Hard. And, and you know, when I've taken it in twice, they say it they said you know, this is an older computer. Well, I'm an older guy, you know? So <laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:13:07):
Who gonna get you on a new computer? You got you, we got you a new phone. Think it's time, you know, in the next few years dad's gonna get a new computer too. Boy, you're gonna, you're gonna love it.
Caller #8 (02:13:16):
Know the, and I'm not trying to save it forever. You know, it's just kinda, I go, well, you know, a, the computer was a couple thousand dollars when I bought it. So
Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
You put, you know, I think the SSD was a significant improvement was we, when we think of the speed of the computer, a lot of times people focus on the speed of the process or the megahertz. And honestly the other stuff's as important, if not more important, how fast and how much Ram you have, how fast your hard drive is, how big it is, all of those make a big difference. So I think you did, you did a in inexpensive upgrade that gave you a lot of bang for your buck.
Caller #8 (02:13:51):
Yeah, it really did. Now. Here's my big question. And it's for my daughter. She's going I, I, I always feel like I'm bragging when I say this, but she's applying to law school right now. Good
Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
For you. That's great. Good for her. That's awesome.
Caller #8 (02:14:05):
Wants to be a patent for me. I think I've told you that before. Oh, nice. Yeah. So so she, I talked to you once before about this too. She got the, the apple computer laptop with the butterfly keyboard that, you know, just went out, right? Yeah. And then they, okay. So we're turning that in. I'm getting her a new computer I'm looking and I tend to over buy, but I don't want to under buy either. So I'm looking at the pros for her. Very nice. And okay, now this is where I'm getting into my question, which is fast. It's just like they have an app option for an apple M1 pro. Yeah. It's a 10 core. It's a 10 core.
Leo Laporte (02:14:46):
All she needs is the M1 pro don't be tempted by the max. My question. Yeah. The difference between the pro and the max on these max is the ax. Max is the graphics card graphics processing. And she's not gonna be doing any of that. If she were a video editor or photographer, maybe, but no, in fact, I ended up because I could get it quickly buying the base model, 14 inch MacBook pro with the M one pro and it's been phenomenal. It performs beautifully. It's all she needs. If she wanted the 16 inch, you know, cuz with law school, she might be looking at longer, you know, bigger documents doing a lot of that. That would be fine, but you don't need the max. The pro is more than sufficient. I bought the base model. I'm very happy.
Caller #8 (02:15:36):
And 16 Gigaba bites around there. 16 is
Leo Laporte (02:15:39):
Plenty for yep, absolutely. You don't need the 32 or 64 hard drive size. That's a little more tricky because you know, I have, I got, as I said, the base model five 12, and it still was too thin thousand dollars, by the way, these are not cheap.
Caller #8 (02:15:55):
Right, right, right. Well was it terabyte plenty?
Leo Laporte (02:15:58):
Oh gosh. Yes.
Caller #8 (02:16:00):
Okay. Absolutely. Right. And then
Leo Laporte (02:16:04):
That's, you're very generous dad.
Caller #8 (02:16:07):
Oh, well thank you. So what about the pre-installed software that you can pay for? And it's less expensive cuz she's a student. Oh, but they have that pro and logic pro what do you, well, I guess they said you can install that later.
Leo Laporte (02:16:22):
You can buy it later. I don't think she'll need that unless she's logic's for music. It's great if you're, you know, a musician or a composer, but unless she's gonna do that, I wouldn't, you know, it comes with garage band, which is pretty much all you need. Okay. Same thing for you. Don't need final cut. Unless you're a professional editor comes with IMO, pretty much all you need comes with a you know, the, the base you know, pages, you know, I, they call it apple works or iWork, but it's really their office, suite pages, numbers keynote. It's got everything she needs. Don't buy additional hardware. I don't even, I wouldn't personally buy additional insurance, you know, the, the apple care because <affirmative>, it's a profit center for them on a laptop. If you think, if she's, does she drop things a lot <laugh>
Caller #8 (02:17:18):
In, I don't know how she got going through a phone in the dishwash dishwash
Leo Laporte (02:17:23):
Okay. Then it might be AppleCare might be worth it. That's a tricky decision. I'm not a, a big fan of and warranties only because it's a big profit center for those companies. I prefer to self-insure but on the other hand, you know, if you drop it, you break it there is a deductible don't forget, but it's maybe it's, it's a little bit of a reassurance and the student's gonna put it through a little bit more hardship than you or I maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But she
Caller #8 (02:17:49):
Likes support. It's easier to
Leo Laporte (02:17:51):
Carry. I love, I bought the base model 14 inch. Literally. I am so happy. I thought, oh, I'm gonna be sad. I didn't get the max blah, blah, blah. Couldn't be happier.
Caller #8 (02:18:01):
Okay. Thanks so much
Leo Laporte (02:18:01):
For helping me. My pleasure, Jack. Congratulations. That's awesome. You got a lawyer in the family. Hey, we're out of time. I can't believe it. Thank you to everybody who joined us a happy new year to you all stay safe, stay healthy. I will be back next week. Answering calls, talking about the latest tech news, helping you buy computers for your family members or, or yourself smartphones and that kind of thing. Talking high tech, talking about the world of high tech. I am Leo. Leport the, okay. Wishing you a very safe geek week byebye. Well, that's it for the tech eye show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. TWI T I T it stands for this week@techandyoufinditattwi.tv, including the podcasts for the show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, phones, apple watches on iOS, today's 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 at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you. Next time.
Speaker 15 (02:19:12):
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