The Tech Guy Episode 1858 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. This show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, January 9th, 2022. This is episode 1,858. Join The Tech Guy podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. You know, several industries are projected to grow this year. If you own a business in one of these growing industries and you need the hire. Well, I can tell you where to go. Zip recruiter, they find qualified candidates for your job. Fast ZipRecruiter for free today at ziprecruiter.com/techguy. Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. Yes, it's Tech Guy, time, time to talk computers in the internet and home theater and digital photography and smart phones, smart watches, augmented reality, all that jazz eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is my phone number. If you wanna talk high tech, I'm here for you, baby.

Leo Laporte (00:01:08):
I'm here to talk high tech, 88, 88, ask Leo toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada, outside that area. Skype, something like that. Anything that can call a phone number via the internet should work just fine and cost you. <Affirmative> nothing website techguylabs.com. Same address new site. It's actually the, the old site, the this week in tech podcast site, we have always had that site for the radio show, but we had to shut down the tech guy labs site for security reasons. No, no, no threat to you whatsoever. It, the software we used was out of date and the cost to update it was prohibitive is, is a good word. <Laugh> breathtaking. <Laugh> awe inspiring, other good words. So rather than spend all that money to get the up to date, we decided, well, we've got another site.

Leo Laporte (00:02:05):
We'll just move it over. There should be I think, pretty close to what you what you're looking for. When you go to techguylabs.com, it takes you to The Tech Guy show page on our podcast site. And you'll see all the recent shows. This is episode 1,858, show notes go up after the show. But what you'll see there is, is kind of a summary of the topics links to all of the places we talk about. And a couple of days later we will we will get transcripts up. That's kind of a new feature we used to have James RVO, our scribe would write it all down. But now we have a machine, a robot transcribing it and they put in the, the, the times and so forth. So you can, and there's video and audio there too.

Leo Laporte (00:02:53):
So you can quickly jump to that part. If you wanna see that question and answer. I think that'll work. We'll see, I think that'll work techguylabs.com and still it's free. And, you know, if it weren't free, maybe I could afford to update it <laugh>, but, but guess it's free. I decided not to spend the breathtaking amount of money, really exciting news. If you're a space fanatic rod PI, our spaceman will join us later. This this, this day, about hour or three of the show to talk about it. But the James Webb telescope has, has successfully unfurled unfolded, fully deployed it now has to fly to the Laro point should be there by the 29th in three weeks. And then a few months of alignment and calibration and the, the new space telescope will be operational. And it looks like they've, you know, they've done the hard stuff, the, the concerning stuff, the little fidly bits of all unfolded properly.

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Wow, nice. So well, I'll ask rod in a couple hours, you know what we're gonna learn from this telescope, but that's a cause for celebration, it's kind of amazing really. I mean, if you think about it, this is, this is a telescope millions of miles away that has to, it's all folded up because you can't really launch the thing and it's and it's fully deployed form it, you know, it, it wouldn't, it's not aerodynamic to say the least plus it's very, very, very fragile and wouldn't do it so well in a launch. So they fold it all up, put it, and then, you know, a capsule and launch it and then the capsule falls off and they slowly unfold it. And that has to all happen. There's no it's too far away for a a rescue mission.

Leo Laporte (00:04:46):
So it's, it's good news as they say the the, the the, the death star has been deployed and is fully op well, not fully operational yet, but soon, soon that's ex I think that's really really exciting news. Let's see, what else is going on in the world around us? CES is over for another year, the consumer formerly consumer electronic show. They don't want to call it that anymore. It's just CES used to stand for consumer electronic show now stands for nothing much smaller crowd attending this year. What were they saying was about 40% of the normal attendance maybe even less than that and 40,000 people instead of 170,000 people. So that's like 25%That's not much still stuff to be seen, including a new TV technology that Scott Wilkins had talked about yesterday on the show.

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
This is a new OLED technology using quantum dots, or QD-OLED, oh boy, QD-OLED announced by Sony. Samsung's making the panel. So I presume they'll at some point, have them as well, no price, no availability information. But people were very impressed who saw it. These, these handful of people actually took their lives into their hands and went to CES who saw it said it's very, very nice should be ed technology. We, you know, we've already talked about how good OLED is really, really amazing, but it's in the past, it's been a little dimmer than LCD TVs will. Now it will not be, this is gonna make them much brighter, much more suitable for all kinds of rooms.

Leo Laporte (00:06:36):
Sales force. You've heard of them. They're widely used by companies who have sales teams big company, big, big company. They are doing something I think really interesting. They're the, they're the world's largest customer relationship management platform. That's what they call it, a CRM and starting at February 1st, if you're a Salesforce customer, you'll have to use to factor authentication. You'll just have to, it's not an option anymore. That's a risky thing to do when you're a commercial business to say, you know what, you guys, we gotta, but it's, but it is the case. It it's it's, it should be mandatory. I think, I don't think they'll lose customers, but they might get some annoyed customers and they'll probably get a lot of customer support calls, but this is the right thing to do. We know now password alone is not enough. And they have, you know, it's they have a lot of data about companies, customers, customers quite reasonably are not happy when that data gets accidentally leak to the public.

Leo Laporte (00:07:40):
So I think it's fair for Salesforce to say, you know, it's your duty to fully secure your customer's data, and we're gonna help you by requiring requiring two factor. Google's started to do that for some accounts as well. You probably, you might even have seen the notice. You need to turn on two factor. Do folks. It's not a, it's not horrible. It's not the end of the world. It isn't even a lot more work. What two factor means is the first time you use a particular computer or browser to access a, let's say a site. It will say, Hey, I wanna make sure this is you. So passwords, not enough. Please tell me the sick digit code on your authenticator app. Once you do that, it remembers, you know, these, even a checkbox that remember me for next time, you won't have to do that again, but it just means that somebody, even if they have your password, can't get to your bank or your, you know, your home shopping or whatever it is you're doing, they can't steal your information.

Leo Laporte (00:08:40):
They can't poses you because it's an additional form of authentication. Something you have it's on your phone. There is a form of two factor security experts. Aren't aren't fond of which is sending you a text message. You've seen this. Certainly a lot of companies still do this because it's easy or relatively easy for bad guys to spoof your phone and get that text message. It's not considered the best way to do it better to have an authenticator app. Google makes one, Microsoft makes one. My favorite is from a company called Twilio. They give it away. It's called Offie. You could do downloaded it for your iPhone, your Android. You can even put it on your computer. A U T H Y. Once it's on there you go to your bank, you say, yes, I wanna set up two factor. They say, okay, here's a QR code.

Leo Laporte (00:09:26):
Take a picture of it with ay Athie will now have that information. And from now on, when you log in, again, only from a new computer or a new browser, or the bank will say, okay, check off the what's that six digit code. You'll say it. And you'll be done. It is a huge step in security. So you've heard me probably talk about it. I think it's really important. Do it. If you can. Toyota does at Facebook, does it most, I think most financial institutions, I'm sure most financial institutions do it, and it's a lot less annoying than that silly robot capture thing. Is that a bridge? I don't know. It's a lot better than that. Don't worry. It's not that eighty eight, eighty eight as Leo is the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Toll free from the US or Canada. Give me a ring. Let's talk high tech your calls coming up next with me Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy. You can get her on the line. Just call 88 88. Ask Leo. You'll get Kim Shaffer, our phone angel for the week. For the week. The year <laugh> forever. I feel like I've been here a little while. I don't wanna scare you forever. Oh, okay. Forever our phone angel. So I want to correct myself. I said the web telescope was millions of miles away. It is merely 688,683 miles away. Yeah.

Kim Shaffer (00:10:46):
Only 400,000 off. Yeah. 300,000.

Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
That's a little bit off. So big deal. Big deal, big deal.

Kim Shaffer (00:10:51):
It's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Leo Laporte (00:10:52):
Yeah. Be almost a million miles away when it gets to its destiny. We'll talk about with rod. He knows the numbers better than I he's the pro he's. Well, he's our space, man. He's

Kim Shaffer (00:11:04):
The space, man. He's our rocket man. Yes

Leo Laporte (00:11:06):
<Laugh>. So who should I start with on this? Fine.

Kim Shaffer (00:11:11):
Karen's had some hacking problems in the past and sounds like they're getting worse.

Leo Laporte (00:11:16):
Oh boy. Oh, <laugh> little boy. Thank you, Kim. Karen

Kim Shaffer (00:11:19):
In sun city, California.

Leo Laporte (00:11:21):
Hi, Karen Leo Laporte. The Tech Guy. I'm sorry to hear about your hacking problems. Oh,

Caller #1 (00:11:26):
It it's really been a nightmare. I spoke with you back in 2013 about it and given me some suggestions, but nothing's panned out and now I've got, 'em taken pictures of what's on top of my dresser.

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
How do you know that?

Caller #1 (00:11:39):
Well, because it comes up on the television screen and it kinda looks like an x-ray. Does that make any sense to anybody? I, I mean, I've never seen anything like it before, but it was,

Leo Laporte (00:11:49):
You know, for, for you to be hacked, especially in, in a way like this, which is really harassment. It is definitely, yeah. You'd need to have an enemy ex ex-boyfriend, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Ex-Husband who hates your guts?

Caller #1 (00:12:05):
Somebody. Yeah, because it's really been a nightmare. Yeah. It

Leo Laporte (00:12:07):
Have to be some and because it's a lot of effort. And so, and it also some technical skill, this person that you think it might be technically skilled.

Caller #1 (00:12:18):
No, they're not, but they know someone who

Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
Is they? Yeah. Okay. So they know somebody who is so,

Caller #1 (00:12:24):
And I think it's more of a game to them now to see how much they can get in

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
Now. Sure. Let's see. Let's see how we can make Karen crazy. Yeah,

Caller #1 (00:12:31):
Definitely.

Leo Laporte (00:12:32):
So yeah. Being hacked for nine years is no fun at all.

Caller #1 (00:12:37):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:12:37):
Really gotten bad. Let's do something about that. Yeah. So what is, what is in your bedroom that could have a picture of your dresser?

Caller #1 (00:12:46):
I've got my my television is in there and my cable box, my internet router.

Leo Laporte (00:12:52):
Does your TV have, have a camera on it?

Caller #1 (00:12:55):
I, I, I don't, well, it, it must have something on it, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:12:59):
That's what first thing we're looking for is where that camera is. It's also possible. In fact, I'm gonna say likely, cuz your router doesn't have a camera, your cable box doesn't have a camera, some TVs, many TVs do have cameras. They say, so you can you know, do Skype calls or zoom calls on your TV, but really it's so they can monitor who's in the room and send that information back to advertisers. They have,

Caller #1 (00:13:22):
But

Leo Laporte (00:13:22):
I, I think it's more likely at this point, the camera is, is a standalone camera hidden in there. Does this person have access to your premises?

Caller #1 (00:13:31):
This person, this person had hooked up a home home program on my iPad so that it can, and it had it set up to monitor when I left the house. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
And I, so if they have, so they, if they have access to your computing devices do, but they don't have access to the premises.

Caller #1 (00:13:49):
No, they do. Apparently. I, I think that's why they put that in there so they know when I'm not there and they're breaking in.

Leo Laporte (00:13:55):
Oh, that's great. Yeah. When they break in, one of the things they might do is, is put up a, a, put a pinpoint a little tiny camera somewhere in there. If they're sending you pictures, you say x-ray, I'm thinking it's probably more like night vision. So it has maybe yeah, it has infrared, which means it can see in the dark that's really disconcert. So there are ways to detect cameras, hidden cameras which essentially mean involves, shining a light into it and it, and it beams and you see the light beaming back as a red dot, but I'm thinking at this point you need somebody, an expert to come in and, and help you with it. Yeah.

Caller #1 (00:14:37):
I can't get ahold of my communities. I don't trust anybody cuz a lot of times I'll open my iPad and a letter that I had written it to Google for help would be on my iPad. You know? So

Leo Laporte (00:14:47):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly I would go through all your devices and wipe 'em start over. I have, I have, and it comes back,

Caller #1 (00:14:57):
It comes right back. It's like, and if I get a new phone, I've spent so much money on phones. It's like, they know I've got my new phone and I get a weird link sent to my phone number. I got a chance to use it. Yeah. It'll and then it goes screw anyway. 

Leo Laporte (00:15:13):
It's just, it's terrible. Oh, I'm so sorry. So that's the first thing yeah. Is to, when you get a new device, change the locks on your door, what you, if they, once they have physical access, it's very hard to secure anything. Even if you, you know, reset all your computers and phone, if they had physical access, they can get and put something back on their physical access is kind of the, the, you know, you can't, can't be beat. So you've gotta get a, keep them out of the, out of the building, change the locks. You could put cameras up for yourself. The problem is if they have access to your systems, they'll be able to see the cameras. I would, I would there's a couple things I do. I would find somebody you're in sun city. Maybe somebody will know it might be in the phone book, but you find somebody who can scan your home for cameras.

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
It's not a hard thing to do, but you gotta have a, you know, a light and you gotta know where to look and so forth. You see this you know, I I've seen TikTok videos about this kind thing. There are ways to do this. You can also of course wipe all your systems. What you wanna do is make sure before you wipe your systems, that they don't have a way to reassess those wipe. 'em All at the same time, make sure they don't have physical access reset even your router by unplugging it and plugging it back in. It's possible to compromise routers routers are not very well maintained by the manufacturers. So there's, there are many, many routers out there. We know with security flaws. If, if, if you know, if this evil fella has access to a, a good ha hacker he could get into your router once gets a new router, get into your network and reinfect all your devices.

Leo Laporte (00:17:01):
So get a new router maybe certainly at the very, at least today, unplug your router, let it sit for a few seconds, plug it in. Everybody should do this because most of the router modification hacking tools are in memory only. They don't last. So if in fact, the FBI put out a warning about this time last year, saying, please everybody reboot your routers. <Laugh> because of this. Yeah. I mean, if somebody's really determined, then that's, that's the key, by the way, they have to really be out to get you, cuz it, it is a lot of work and if he doesn't have the skills, but he's hiring somebody to do that, he's spending a lot of money. Somebody with these kinds of skills is expensive. So this kind of devotion certainly a call to the sun city law enforcement would be also indicated because it's illegal.

Leo Laporte (00:17:58):
Yeah, you know, somebody's saying this is not a bad idea to see if your neighbor will set up a camera across the street, just to see if somebody's entering your home. You really, you gotta keep 'em off the premises. That's job one. Then it's not so hard to get rid of everything else. It's just software, but you gotta change your locks and keep 'em off the premises. It's a scary thing. Isn't it? The problem with technology is, is we don't really understand what's going on. There's so much stuff all around us. We feel like we're being surveilled all the time. Leo Laporte The Tech Guy. Hello Sam.

Caller #2 (00:18:38):
Hello. Leo,

Leo Laporte (00:18:39):
Are you sitting in front of a Chevy Silverado truck?

Caller #2 (00:18:44):
I am the Silverado EV

Leo Laporte (00:18:46):
Yeah. What do you think?

Caller #2 (00:18:50):
It's it's a good looking truck.

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
Um, my friend who, who is a Chevy truck owner, wasn't he didn't like the looks of it. He says what's with the long with the bed is not a real long bed and stuff.

Caller #2 (00:19:04):
Well, it's actually a longer bed than what you get on most true cab pickups. 

Leo Laporte (00:19:10):
You can fold the front yeah.

Caller #2 (00:19:12):
Thing down well with the, the unit body design that they have, like most pickup trucks, you have a separate bed and a cab. And so that front wall of the bed, the gap between the back the cab and the bed and the back wall of the cab takes up space. Right. So, you know, like on the F-150 lightning, which is about the same am sizes, this the bed is only five and a half feet long, right on this one, it's just shy of six feet. So it's, it's like almost six inches longer. It looks like

Leo Laporte (00:19:38):
A shorter bed, but because you can fold that thing down. Yeah.

Caller #2 (00:19:41):
Yeah. And then you've got the mid gate, you can put that down and then you get nine feet and then you put the tailgate down with their multi flex tailgate and the, the stop on the back, you can have up up to almost 11 feet. That's amazing objects in there. So it's, it's actually quite flexible. But you know, there are some challenges with this thing. Like it's gonna be really, really heavy because of the battery. Cause they're launching. Yeah. They're launching only with the 200 kilowat hour version of 400 mile range. Wow. <affirmative> and I that's

Leo Laporte (00:20:13):
A lot of kilowats. Mine is 88 kilowats

Caller #2 (00:20:17):
Yeah, I was, I was at a briefing for this thing just before Christmas and we got to, we were in a studio and got to see it in person. And I asked them how much this thing weighs because they the humer EV which this is based on the same platform as the humer EV weighs 9,000 pounds empty <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:20:36):
Wow.

Caller #2 (00:20:37):
For comparison, the F150 lightning weighs about 6,500 pounds. Wow. And a standard Silverado crew cab weighs about 5,000 pounds. And so I asked how much the, this electric Silverado would weigh. Yeah. They wouldn't say they wouldn't even confirm if it's even gonna be a light duty truck or a medium duty truck. Which is, you know, based on the weight class. And so my guess is it probably weighs somewhere around 8,000 pounds.

Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
Geez. That's like twice what my mock E weighs. Yeah.

Caller #2 (00:21:09):
Wow. Yeah. About that. But you know, it's, it's a, you know, especially the interior is really nice on this thing. On the, especially on the RST, it's all they're launching in spring of next year, they're launching the work truck version. And then in the fall of 2023, they're gonna launch the fur of the consumer trucks, the RST, which is gonna be a hundred, $5,000. And then after that, they'll start rolling out lower term levels.

Leo Laporte (00:21:36):
Why do companies, is trucks very profitable or just a very popular form factor or what?

Caller #2 (00:21:41):
Oh yeah. They're extremely profitable. The, the F Ford F series truck has been the top selling name plate of any kind in the us for like 40 years. Yeah. And do people actually

Leo Laporte (00:21:53):
Know behind these people or they just like to drive one <laugh>

Caller #2 (00:21:58):
Most consumers just like to drive it. Yeah. <Laugh> but commercial customers need 'em I want

Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
A truck. But I don't wanna really drive a truck all. So

Caller #2 (00:22:09):
Mo most people that most consumers that buy trucks would be better off with something like the new Ford Maverick, which is much smaller. Right. It has, has all the utility they, they actually need. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
Right. And then Mar Barra spoke at CES. Right?

Caller #2 (00:22:28):
She did. Well, she spoke virtually at virtually. She was

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
Actually the, yeah, I don't blame her. Did she say anything? Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. We'll find out in moments because okay. Your segment is next here. We all right. Hey, before we go on with the tech, I show brief in her, Ludes tell you about our sponsor, the great folks at zip recruiter. I come from knowledge on this one because when we hire, we use zip recruiter. It is the best way to hire. I am. I am. I know we've been had a tough couple of years, but I'm just bullish. I feel like we're coming back, baby 2022 is, is gonna be the year business in America comes back. In fact, some industries are really projected to grow even more this year than ever before. Sustainability, new eco-friendly services and products are cropping up pet services through the roof. Perhaps you've tried to find a dog Walker, good luck, more training, more walking, more feeding services are needed because of all those pets per people adopted during the quarantine fitness.

Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
Yes. We're going back into the gym health and wellness apps, even nontraditional workout studios Peloton through the roof, kickboxing through the roof, digital events and conferences, of course for planning and hosting online events. They're hiring like crazy home improvement. If you're stuck at home, might as well have a nice one. So people are renovating they're decorating. Look, if you work or own a business that is in one of these growing industries or a range of other industries, you probably need help now. Right? That's really what's going on a shortage. We need, we need workers. Well, there's only one place to go ZipRecruiter for many reasons. First of all, that post you put on ZipRecruiter immediately goes to the widest possible audience, a hundred plus other job boards, social media, Facebook, and Twitter everywhere. So you're much more likely to reach your or candidates, but then there's some secret sauce that ZipRecruiter does.

Leo Laporte (00:24:28):
And I think this is, and I know from experience, this is amazing. They already have millions of resumes. People come to a ZipRecruiter to apply for jobs. What they'll do is they'll look at the qualifications for your job and they'll match you with existing resumes. And then they'll tell you, they'll say invite these people to apply. And here's a, the good secret. When you ask somebody to apply for your job, they are much more likely to apply, follow through no more ghosting. And they're also much more likely to be the right candidate for your job. So ZipRecruiter reaches out to the most people. It actually brings you people. That's why most people use ZipRecruiter will get a qualified candidate within the day. Our experience was within the first couple of hours, really great candidates. They come rolling in. It's just the best, the only place to get higher for your next job, opening zip recruiter and right the way right now, you can try it out for free at ziprecruiter.com/tech guy.

Leo Laporte (00:25:24):
No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rate hiring site in the us. That's thanks to G two ratings. I'll certainly give it a number one rating. We love it. Try it for free ziprecruiter.com/tech guy. If you're in the fortunate position of, of growing in the unfortunate position of needing people, solve that vacancy, fill it up with ziprecruiter.com/tech I Z I P R E C R U I T E R. Ziprecruiter.Com/T E C H G U Y. I think it's the greatest ziprecruiter.com/tech. I thank you, ZipRecruiter for supporting the show and thank you tech guy, listeners for supporting us by using that address. So they know you saw it here. Zipit com. Now back to the show, Sam bull, Sam is a low rider in his old Miata he's he's way down there. Principal researcher at guide house insights. He is the podcaster of wheel bearings at wheelbearings.media, and he joins us every week to talk automotive tech, happy new year, Sam, we miss Jeff

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:29):
Happy new year to you too. Well, actually we

Leo Laporte (00:26:30):
Talked last week. Oh, whenever mind, I didn't miss you at all, then that three seconds. <Laugh> that's right. <Laugh> happy

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:36):
New year. I could talk about, I, I knew I knew about the stuff I'm gonna talk about today, but couldn't talk about it yet. Cause it was still under embargo. Ah,

Leo Laporte (00:26:44):
And what is that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:45):
Pretail so if you're watching the video stream, you can see behind me is the 20, 24 Chevrolet Silverado EV which is GM's new electric full size pickup truck. This is gonna be their competitor to the Ford F-150 lightning. And if the, the SA, if the cyber truck ever comes out it might, you know, might compete with that as, as well as other things. And this is based on the same platform as the GMC Hummer. So it's using GM's new TM battery and, and propulsion system. It's a, it's a, roughly the same length overall as the current Silverado crew crew cab pickup truck. But it's all electric has about a 400 mile range. Wow. Usually

Leo Laporte (00:27:35):
That's a lot. Yeah. Can you do with it, what you could do with F-150, which is power your house

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:42):
You can't power house yet, but they don't have that full house, you know, backup power backup system, like you have on the F-150 but you will be able to charge other EVs with it. Oh, wow. Cause it has, that's nice. It, it has 10 outlets around there with about 10.2 kilowats of power available. Wow. Including a two 40 outlet. So you can plug in your, your two 40 volt charge cable and, and you know, charge up other EVs from it.

Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
Who's the market for this is, is this a, a work truck? I mean, I really got the feeling the F-150 was a work truck that the lightning was. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:17):
Yeah. So, so they're, they're offering both a work truck and consumer versions of it. They're actually launching the work truck first. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it doesn't come out until spring of 2023. So it's gonna be about a year behind the F-150 Ford actually, the day before GM revealed the Silverado Ford officially opened the order books for the F-150 lightning. So they started sending out email invitations to people who had put in their reservations for the F-150 and start converting those into actual orders. Cuz they're getting ready to start production on those full production. The Silverado work truck launches in the spring of next year, about a year behind the F150. And then in the fall of next year, they'll have the first edition RST, which is gonna be their top of the line consume in reversion, which is gonna cost $105,000. Yikes. and they started taking reservations for those right after the, the press conference on Wednesday. You don't have to worry about getting that a hundred, $5,000 truck they're all sold out already. Wow. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
But that's the right price.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:21):
We don't know how many that actually is. Yeah. You know, that might a hundred, that might be 5,000. We don't know the GM won't say. Yeah. But the, that one comes out in the fall of next year and then that'll be followed in the months after that, by other trim levels at more reasonable price points and, and also versions with a smaller battery and less range probably in the 250 mile or so range. So they'll be priced more competitively with the F150 and with current Silverado gas Silverados. But that, you know, I mean this, this truck is important, you know, because a lot of Americans buy trucks, a lot of, you know, commercial customers, fleet customers, you were saying off

Leo Laporte (00:30:05):
The air that the F150 is, is the most successful badge of any car, any vehicle in the us. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:12):
Well the, the Ford F series, the GM full size pickups and the Ram trucks are the three top selling vehicles of any kind in the United States. Wow. And they have been for decades. Interesting. and then, then you get into cars and SUVs and stuff, but it's the pickups that sell a lot. And a lot of those probably overall, probably around half of all full size pickups are sold to commercial and fleet customers. You know, you see them being used by park and, you know, local utilities you know, all kinds of utilities use them, carpenters, you know, tradespeople use them for all kinds of

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
Things. I live in I live in cow country in Northern California and the truck to car ratio is quite high.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:59):
Yeah. I'm definitely is. Yeah. And any, any rural, rural areas, you definitely find a lot of them. Yeah. so tho you know, and they're, they're very profitable for manufacturers, which is why, you know, the, the big the legacy car makers, you, especially the Detroit car makers are really focusing on getting these trucks to market as soon as they can. But you know, I don't think this was actually the most important thing that, that GM showed, you know, from a mainstream standpoint, you GM's certainly gonna sell a lot of these, but I think the, the vehicle that is actually the, the most interesting oops, turn myself off here is the Chevy Equinox, EV which

Leo Laporte (00:31:40):
Was, is this gonna replace the bolts they've had with the bolt? Obviously mm-hmm, <affirmative> 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:45):
I don't know if it's gonna be a direct replacement for the bolt. It's actually, you know, kind of a size class up it's a little bigger than the bolt. Yeah. so this is, this is probably gonna replace the current Equinox,

Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
Despite despite the bad rep the, the bolt's gotten. And of course, Jim is replacing all the batteries and all the bolts mm-hmm, <affirmative> we love our Chevy bolt. It's a living vehicle,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:05):
Most bolt owners do love them. Yeah. and, but the Equinox is you know, this is actually the, this is the vehicle the E after the, after the Silverado, the Equinox is Chevrolet's best selling vehicle. They sell about 300,000 a year of those things. Yeah. And so they're doing an electric one, and this one is gonna be priced starting at $30,000 before tax.

Leo Laporte (00:32:27):
Wow. Okay. That's one of the other reasons we liked the bolt because that's, you know, the bolt was inexpensive after incentives. We got it down to almost 20,000. This is in that same range. That's really good. That's really good.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:39):
No. And, and this is, you know, this is the, the, the compact crossover segment. So vehicles like the Equinox, the Toyota RAV4 Honda, CR-V Nissan rogue. These are the, the top selling non pickup trucks in the us. So there's

Leo Laporte (00:32:53):
A lot of momentum now for these, for the big auto makers to move to electric, they, they all seem to be jumping on this bandwagon. Absolutely. Yeah. Even though America doesn't necessarily seem to be jumping on the bandwagon.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:05):
Well, you know, I think that that is, that is changing you know, in the past year, you know, in 2020 roughly about 1.3, 1.4% of all vehicles sold in the us were battery electric vehicles in 2021. That was

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
2.6%. Oh, it doubled. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:21):
And we only had 20 different EVs available in the us market out of a couple of hundred different vehicles. This year, by the end of this year, we'll have 40, by the end of next year, it'll be closer to about 70 or 80. So there's a lot of new EVs coming to market segments, different market segments, different price points that people actually buy in the us market. And that's gonna make a huge difference. I mean, as an example, Ford has so many reservations for the F-150 that the other thing that they announced this past week was that they were almost doubling their production capacity for it again, when they started construction of the factory, for those things in mid 2020, they were planning on 20,000 a year by the end of 2020, they had doubled that to 40 by last August. It was up to 80. Now it's gonna be 150,000 unit annual run rate by the middle of next year.

Leo Laporte (00:34:11):
Wow. Yeah. So it's, it's interest. I mean, the government is kind of pushing 'em this way. The companies are pushing consumers this way, but consumers seem to be going along for the right. I'm a, by the way, I'm a little biased. I'm a very happy owner of three electric vehicles. You know, we have a Ford Mustang Mae, the bolt, I mentioned and least it just got a, the electric mini Cooper and we, we just love them. Yeah. And gas station in nature, they drive them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're fun to drive. Not perfect for all situations. It's interesting. So, I mean, do you think we won't see gas vehicles at some point in the future

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:53):
At some point. Yeah. But it's gonna be a while, like, you know, you're still gonna be able to gas vehicles until, you know, probably, you know, mid 20, 30, a late 2030s. Yeah. At least. Yeah. You know, GM is targeting going all electric by 2035 or so, but you'll still be able to get gas vehicles for a long

Leo Laporte (00:35:13):
Time to come. They've been very aggressive. Yeah. Sam bull, Sam principle, researcher, GHouse insights, listen to his podcast, wheel bearings. It's a wheel bearings.media. He joins us every week. Thank you, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:23):
Thank you. Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:35:36):
That guy called me last week. What you heard? I think Dr. Bird saying they killed the turbines are killing the birds. <Laugh> don't drive your EVs. And I think the gas vehicles might actually be worse for birds, but that might be wrong. 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:52):
Yeah, that little, little bit. Yeah, actually I, I ended up losing my connection partway through the, the second break there. Yes. I, I was, I was testing, I've been testing a T-Mobile's new home internet service their 5g internet service.

Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
Oh. And guess it didn't test out so good

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:12):
When it, when it works, it works really well. Yeah. but what I've been finding is that at least once a day or so, the connection will just drop out. And it requires me to reset the, the gateway and reset my, my mesh routers. And it's just, it was too much of a hassle, you know, I mean, I was getting, you know, couple hundred megabits per second down and about 15 up, which was, you know, almost what I get from cable from Comcast. But and it's cheaper, but it's just not reliable enough.

Leo Laporte (00:36:41):
Yeah. Yeah. That's too bad. Yeah. Cuz if something just stops working, even if it's a brief stoppage, I guess that's fine. If, if you're not, you know, if you're just getting email but not going be so good for what you do.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:54):
No, definitely not. Yeah. And you know, when you're, when you're watching something on TV, you know, watching something streaming you know, it, it doesn't, it, it fails the spousal acceptance factor. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
Yeah. The, the worst thing in the world is that honey, the Internet's off. Oh, you hate that. Oh, I spent big bucks making sure that would not happen house anymore. All right. Do you wanna stick around for the top and the middle as usual? Sure. All right. Yep. All yours. Yeah. You got two and a half minutes now, but we'll keep you around for the top.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:30):
Okay. So let's go back here through the chat and see what we got see Aaron KOP see some of the Ford dealers are trying to rip off people who reserve the lightning. Yeah. Unfortunately this is not a problem. Unique to Ford dealers or the lightning. You know, this is a reality of the free market system where, you know, you got supply and demand and when there's a lot of demand and limited supply of something, you're gonna have somebody who's gonna take advantage of that to race prices. It is, is just a reality. It sucks. You know, and if my favorite thing,

Leo Laporte (00:38:04):
If you're in the contract and not all dealers are doing, this is you can't resell it for a year.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:10):
<Laugh> well, this is something that actually that Ford's doing, cuz what they're trying to do is discourage scalping. You try to discourage, I understand

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
That, but I, I don't think you can prevent that. I don't think that's well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:18):
No, they actually did with the 4GT two years ago. Yeah. In fact, for, with the GT, it was two years. You had to keep it for two years before you could resell it. Wow. Because the volumes were so limited, it was only doing about 250 a year. Right. and now you know, they had a lot of problems last year with the Bronco people buying and flipping Broncos right away. And I mean every manufacturer had this problem, Mercedes, somebody posted a picture of a window sticked on a Mercedes EQs last week with a $50,000 deal market adjustment factor from the dealer.

Leo Laporte (00:38:55):
It's terrible. That's called a capitalist, as you say.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:56):
And, and what, what, what I tell people is, you know, if, if the dealer tries to mark it up, you know, beyond, you know, anything significant, just walk away. Yeah. You know, there will be more of these built. Right. you know, don't, don't suffer from FAS,

Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
But you know, there are people who will, you know, especially in the Mercedes yeah. The people who just, oh, that's fine. I'll just pay it. I don't care. I want it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:20):
Yeah. But you know, I want it now. I, I, I, I, I don't want to encourage

Leo Laporte (00:39:24):
Anybody to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:24):
That's bad behavior to do this. Yeah. You know, and you know, the dealers are independent, you know businesses, they're not owned by the manufacturers so they can do whatever they want.

Leo Laporte (00:39:33):
Speaking of bad behavior. We'll have to talk about another time, the new Mercedes that you can't open the hood. I love that. <Laugh> oh yeah. Hey, we're talking in a few, right? Leo Laporte The Tech Guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number back to the phones. We go Arizona. Lou on the line, the world's what is it famous?

Caller #3 (00:39:59):
I've got a chip in my rear view mirror. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:40:04):
I don't wanna know about your medical problems, Arizona. Lou. No, no, I know what you're talking about on my Chevy bolt. I don't have, I have a mirror, but I can flip a switch. And now it's a, a screen for the CA the rear camera. I love that.

Caller #3 (00:40:16):
Actually. I don't have a chip in my rear view mirror, but you wanna talk about things with a chip in them. So that's how I got it.

Leo Laporte (00:40:23):
Yeah. You that's how you got in, but there are, believe it or not cars with chips in their rear view mirrors. So, yep.

Caller #3 (00:40:30):
I've got it in mind. Anyway, the question is regarding rear view mirrors from last year's last chill and Sam apple salmon might have something about this. The reason I, as a pilot, we're pretty interested in seeing stuff. Yes. Other airplanes and where the rear view mirror with a regular mirror where you look at the mirror, your eyes are focused on infinity, right? Just like the need to be for looking at the road. Right. If you look at a screen that's, I don't know, 10 inches plus

Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
Your eyes refocused. And I will, you know what? This is absolutely true

Caller #3 (00:41:10):
Again.

Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
Yeah. The road, when I use the camera on the bolt for the rear view mirror, it's a, it's a little disconcerting because it's exactly right. I'm focused at a distance looking at the windshield. And I look up, I have to refocus. It's not a mirror, it's a camera. So I have to refocus on the screen. Sam isn't do you get, you kind of get used to it, I guess?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:35):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have gotten used to it. In fact, I have come to really appreciate the you get a

Leo Laporte (00:41:42):
Better view systems. You don't have the headrests, the, you know, you get a better view and it's a wide angle camera.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:48):
Yeah. Especially on trucks and SUVs. You know, where often times they're very long you have, and, and you're up higher. You have very limited rear visibility through the mirror. You often see very little with the, the, these camera mirror systems, you get an unobstructed view of what's behind you. You can usually switch, you know, between different field of view. So you can get something that's relatively normal, like a one X, or you can switch to a one right. Angle view depending on where you are, you, you do get, it does require slight refocusing. It's not that bad. And, and you, most of the time, you know, you're not looking really long distances behind you anyway, in the mirror. So you're focusing is, you know, kind of right. Almost right. What's right behind you. Yeah. So it's it. You get a custom to it very quickly. It's at first

Leo Laporte (00:42:35):
Disconcerting, maybe even headache, conducing. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:38):
Well, some of the early

Caller #3 (00:42:39):
Why they require rearview mirrors now?

Leo Laporte (00:42:43):
Yeah. So right now you cannot get a side view, camera side view mirrors. You have to have physical, not optic, not mirror in the us, in the us because of net side.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:53):
That's gonna change probably soon. Yeah. it, the, the current federal motor vehicle safety standards require an optical mirror on, on the sides of the vehicle. But they are working to change that they, they, you can already get camera, mirror systems, external camera, mirror systems on vehicles in Europe the Audi, e-tron the first one to offer it in production and a number of others do now.

Leo Laporte (00:43:17):
I understand why manufacturers want it. There's nothing to get clipped by a <laugh> a car coming by more importantly, aerodynamics are better. And I think for EVs, that becomes a big thing. Do consumers though. I mean, at Lou, I think your reaction is not unusual. I know it was my reaction at first took me a while. And our son who's, by the way, the owner of that bolt he's 19 he turns it off. He doesn't like the camera. He wants a rear view mirror. Lou, did you, did you use it long enough to get used to it?

Caller #3 (00:43:48):
No, I, I never used one. My band does not have one. It had optical mirrors. Yeah. But I do have a GPS and so forth. So I know about it does take a little while to adjust to the distance

Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
It does. You get used to it, but do you think there's a hazard Sam, like from the kind of the adjustment that you have to make that, or will people just BEC it'll become a, like everything else in this modern age, we'll just get used to it and it'll work fine. You, you,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:17):
You get used to it. You know, I, I don't, I think the, the biggest hazard you mentioned, you know, maybe a little bit of a headache some of the, the first generation systems had a relatively low frame rate. And that was a problem. But the, the newer ones that they have now have a higher frame rate and it's no longer, really noticeable after all

Leo Laporte (00:44:37):
You are. I agree with Lou that you have to adjust your focal length, but you're doing that anyway, when you look down at the dashboard and you look up to drive and we do that kind of automatically without thinking about it,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:48):
Or when you're looking forward to the mirror and back around you. Yeah. You're, you're constant. You're constantly adjusting. So I, I don't personally find it to be an issue. Some people might, and that's why all of them, you know, still have an optical mirror. You still have that option, just flip it. And you get back to your optical mirror. Right? You don't like it well,

Leo Laporte (00:45:05):
That, but that won't be the case. If they replace side view mirrors.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:08):
Not, not for the side views. No, that'll, that'll a completely digital setup, but the plus side of that is they're always gonna be aimed correctly. They will always be aimed good point where the actual blind spot is, unless a piece of

Leo Laporte (00:45:20):
Mud hits, then you're gonna have to get out and clean your, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:23):
A lot of, a lot of drivers misalign your mirrors. And so you, you seeing too much of your car instead of what's around you. That's true. So I think, I think that it'll be better in that respect.

Caller #3 (00:45:35):
Speaking of hazards, can I ask Sam a question without hijacking your show, Leo?

Leo Laporte (00:45:40):
Hijack away, Arizona Lou. Oh boy. <Laugh>.

Caller #3 (00:45:44):
Can you say a few words about battery safety and collisions? I mean, after the Pintos, they kind of perfected gasoline safe in a collision. How about the batteries?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:57):
Well, I can, I can say this. You know, in 2019 there was about 212,000 vehicle fires with gasoline vehicles in the United States. And with, even with all the brew haha about the bolt battery fires there was a total of eight, which when you do the math works out to about less than one 10th of the frequency of fires and gasoline vehicles. But

Leo Laporte (00:46:20):
Lou does have a point they're harder to put out these lithium ion fires. They are, they are,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:46:24):
Batteries are much harder to extinguish when they do catch fire, but they also have a very robust structure around them to limit any chance of intrusion. So it's very rare to actually have a fire with, with a battery just

Leo Laporte (00:46:39):
As we see with the self-driving vehicles running over people, there's a lot of focus on this new technology and, and the problems that causes. And we kind of in the background forget about the fact that existing technology is even worse. So

Sam Abuelsamid (00:46:54):
Yeah, I mean, you know, what, what you end up, you know, I mean, you, you know, you, you're not gonna, when you get into a crash, you're not likely to have the kind of explosive thing that might occur with gasoline. You know, it's, it tends to be a fire that, you know, will start in one point and propagate outwards. Yeah. So you actually usually end up having more time. Hopefully you can get out of the vehicle unless you're injured or trapped in the vehicle. So, and it's, it's, there's trade offs with everything. There's, you know, pros and cons for everything. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:24):
Lou, you you're in the camp and I kind of understand it very well where all these new fangled inventions cause all sorts of new problems, but we that's only because we don't pay too much attention to the old problems we've gotten used to. We've gotten used to those. Hey, it's always a pleasure. Thank you, Lou. Good questions. You didn't hijack the show. Those are all good questions. Thank you, Sam, for sticking around a little bit. Oh my pleasure. I appreciate it. 88 88. Ask Leo. I got a minute more. Let's see, I'll get one. Maybe one more call in before the end of the hour. Tom and Rancho Palos ver California. Hi Tom.

Caller #4 (00:47:58):
Hi Leo. I enjoy your show very much.

Leo Laporte (00:48:00):
Thanks for istening.

Caller #4 (00:48:01):
Yeah, I've got kind of a strange question about wifi. So I I've done real well with the wifi in our whole home with like a work laptop and a tablet, but my wife has problems with her cell phone. She can't, she can't seem to use it from parts of the house. Yeah. Even. Yeah. And even my cell phone, I sometimes have yeah. Have some problems low connectivity and yeah. And like the ISP is saying it's the mode, which I don't know that just doesn't,

Leo Laporte (00:48:33):
It's not the modem. It's the, it's the wifi router, but it's more importantly, it's the device. So wifi is a complex <laugh> topic. You know, there's a lot of different components. Your speed can vary depending on so many things, including the radio and the antennas in the devices that are getting the wifi. So different laptops, different phones will get different performance. And this has nothing to do with the quality of your wifi. All you can do to fix that is to have a stronger signal. Overall, Leo LePort the tech guy I had to, I had to take a break there. So I didn to fully finish that. But that's one of the reasons you start to see a lot of these people moving a lot of people moving to mesh systems, Tom sure. Just to get a stronger signal in every part of the house. Not because you really need it, but because some of your devices aren't as good at picking up the wifi.

Caller #4 (00:49:29):
Oh, okay. So, so the mesh route it be

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
Worth worth, I think absolutely. I mean the the, the analogy, the folks at plume use and that's one of the early mesh devices, maybe the first is wifi is like a, a table lamp, you know, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you wouldn't try to read a book with a table lamp three rooms away. Sure. You know, so plume and their idea was they put a little plume in every room and then you have now little pools of wifi in every room. I don't know if that's the right solution. That's what Comcast is using. They bought, bought into plume. But heroes I think are very good and, and solve that problem by just putting more little access points around the house. And so if your wife's really going, Sam and I were just talking about this, honey, the internet sound. Yeah, yeah. You really, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
You wanna fix it? I ended up going with ubiquity, which is a prosumer router. You've seen a lot of businesses spending a lot of money, putting ethernet wiring in a lot of rooms and then ubiquity access points. There's five of them in the house you know, just doing, I really kind of beefed it all up considerably and now we don't have any problems at all. As long as the wi as long as the Internet's good. Of course. Still relying on your is P yet another factor. Yeah. But yeah, I don't think the ISP is right when they're saying it's the modem. Got it. Yeah. Cuz you can, you can get it fine on your laptop as you wander around. Exactly. Exactly my thought. Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Hey, it's good to talk to you, Tom. Good question. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye. All right, Sam,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:00):
It's all. I've actually had Google wifi for several years. Yeah. And been, been quite happy with it. I know you were not.

Leo Laporte (00:51:07):
Well, I had the early Google wifi. I think they've probably gotten better, but yeah, anything that puts more access points around is gonna help.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:14):
Yeah. I mean, our house is kind of spread out it's it's a ranch, you know, and so having multiple access points has definitely made a huge difference in performance, but the, to, to Dr. Mom grandma's comment in the chat it was actually the gateway that was dropping the connection upstream of the, of the mesh. So turn the T-Mobile IV six. Wouldn't have, yeah. Wouldn't have made any difference. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And also one other CES related thing. I don't know if you saw Leo, the video that somebody posted on Twitter this week, they went for a ride in the the boring company tunnel. Yeah. With the Teslas underneath the convention center. Yeah. Got stuck in traffic. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:51:53):
Yeah. They have like 90 cars down there.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:56):
<Laugh> yeah, no, nobody could have predicted that, that you'd have a, a bottleneck of cars stuck in a tunnel

Leo Laporte (00:52:01):
Just where you wanna be. Right. Stuck in a tunnel.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:04):
Well, especially a tunnel that is not wide enough to actually open the doors and, you know, get out of the car. That's

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
Kind of terrifying.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:11):
Actually. It hasn't has no has no parallel escape tunnel. Like, you know, everybody else does like a subway

Leo Laporte (00:52:17):
Might. How, how long were they stuck in there?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:20):
Just a minute or so. Oh, that's not too bad, you know, it's, you know, it's the sort, basically, you know, what they, what they should have just done was just put a train in there. You know, I know that's know it's so much more efficient than having individual cars. This

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Is Elon's ego at work again. It's just, I know. It's just 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:39):
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's ridiculous. Yeah. But yeah. You know, fortunately I, I wasn't there to, to try it out, so yeah. Just

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
What you want be stuck in a tunnel with 90 other vehicles, at least they're not burning gas, that's the, that's the only benefit

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:57):
That's true. Yeah. That, that would've been a problem. You can only, you could really only do this with electric vehicles. Yeah. So, yeah. Let's see to some of the questions that were or comments that were in the chat somebody talked about EVs, you know, not really catching on until same price as gas. That's exactly why I was saying that. You know, I think that that Equinox EV is actually a much more important vehicle ultimately than the Silverado. You know, the Silverado replacing gas Silverados with electric ones will actually save a lot of energy because when, you know, when you're the, the, the lower your, your fuel economy is to start with the more, you know, every incremental mile per gallon, you get saves you more in fuel consumption. As you get into to vehicles that, you know, get 35, 40 miles per gallon or more, you know, adding another mile per gallon or two, doesn't actually make that much difference in your overall fuel consumption.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:54):
So electrifying the, the big heavy vehicles will actually make a huge difference in terms of emissions and energy consumption. But in terms of, you know, getting EVs into the mainstream, it's $30,000 vehicles like the Equinox, you know, and this, this is the mainstream. In fact, you know, the the average transaction price on new vehicles in last year in 2021 was almost $42,000. So, you know, a th a vehicle that starts at $30,000 price point that's, you know, that's what a lot of consumers are actually buying and to offer a vehicle like that in a segment that is one of the most popular segments, you know, at that $30,000 price point should should actually be a, a real, you know, a real game changer. I mean, we've got a couple, we've got $30,000 EVs now, like the the Nissan leaf you know, but again, the leaf is a compact hatchback.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:51):
It's a segment that consumers, American consumers are moving away from towards crossovers and, and trucks. So if they can offer, you know, a form factor that consumers actually wanna buy with a decent range for $30,000, that I think is gonna be, have an enormous appeal, that's gonna really start to tip the scales in favor EVs, especially for people that live in, in urban areas you know, where driving a truck is not, not entirely practical that that's, that's the kind of thing that, that makes a big difference. The other thing somebody commented about, and this goes back to what I was just saying about the Teslas and the tunnel is getting people out of vehicles. You know, the, the bigger problem we have is not so much, you know, what types of vehicles people are driving, but then we've got too many people driving vehicles alone.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:42):
Now obviously during the course of the pandemic, you know, that has, in some ways gotten worse because people have been reluctant or reluctant for a long time to get into public transit or be in spaces with other people where they, they might get sick that you know, is hopefully starting to alleviate we'll, we'll see. But, you know, ideally what, what you wanna do is get fewer vehicles on, on the road. That's what a, you know, get people either into shared vehicles or into public transit. That's what actually starts to have an impact on things like congestion and pollution. So, you know, the vehicles you have left, you want them to be electric as much as possible, but then you also want to get more people using shared modes of mobility. Cuz another problem that we have in, in cities is the amount of land mass that is devoted to parking.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:36):
You know, in the United States we have about seven parking spaces for every vehicle we have on the road in a lot of urban centers, as much as 25 to 30% of the land mass is dedicated to parking cars that aren't doing anything. And that's a huge waste. You know, you look at a place like San Francisco and a lot of other cities where you have shortages of affordable housing. If you could convert some of that space, that's dedicated to parking cars that aren't doing anything to build, you know, residential buildings that would make an enormous difference in the quality of life for people making making it more affordable for people to live. And it's also so much easier to get around a city in public transit than trying to drive around, trying to find a place to park see twisted Mr.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:23):
Talks about future cars. We'll only have heads up displays the IPSS going away. I think, you know, we, as as heads up displays get more affordable, we are seeing more and more of them in more mainstream vehicles. And, you know, I think it'll be a while before we eliminate the, the IP entirely. What we're seeing with a lot of newer EVs is minimizing it, getting it, you know, a relatively small, you know, seven to eight inch, you know, basic display like, like what Leo has in his Machi that, you know, shows you your speed and you know, a few other bits of information. And then most of it is in the HUD. And I think that's actually a good idea, especially as we start to see the rollout of augmented reality heads, a up displays there's a couple out there now Mercedes on the new S class has an augmented reality.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:09):
Hu. If you've used a HUD typically you know, all of the information is displayed in a single plane. It looks like it's floating out over the end of your hood. So about, you know, three or four feet away from you. With these augmented reality, hus, they're actually able to display information at different focal lengths. So it appears to be floating at different distances out in front of you. And so, for example, when you're using navigation with this Mercedes system and Cadillacs launching one on the, the lyric this spring as well, it shows you, your navigation prompts out, floating out over the intersection where you're actually supposed to turn. And then as you get cold to it, it grows looks like it's getting closer to you. Ooh. And it's cool. It's much easier to use.

Leo Laporte (00:58:50):
Thank you, sir. All right. Have a wonderful next week. Great to have you. Thanks Sam. All right, bye bye. Why? Hey, Hey. How are you today? Leo LePort here. The tech guy, time to talk, can computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphone smart watches, battery electric vehicles. Whatever's on your mind. If it's got a chip in it as Arizona Lou said, my rear view mirror has a chip in it. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo is the phone number (888) 827-5536 to free from anywhere in the us or Canada. We talk a lot about internet wifi access. As we did with Tom at the end of the hour last hour, that's a, always a popular subject. How come I, why is my internet so awful? And I think it's, you know, people's expectations were that it would continue to be, you know, when you first got wifi, right, it was great.

Leo Laporte (00:59:46):
But you, you have to remember now we have lots more devices on that same wifi signal because all of these little internet of things, devices are on wifi. The cameras, the Amazon echoes the Google things, all the, you know, your to poster oven. So we have a lot more things. There's a lot more congestion. Your neighbors have wifi, everybody's got wifi now. And a lot of these wifi routers have been beefed up to have extra strong signals. There was actually a, a couple of years ago, it was very common to get a wifi that would asked so strongly would just knock your neighbors off. You would have great internet <laugh>, but because it's an unregulated spectrum you know, they were able to make super power <laugh> wifi that would just knock everybody else out. I think those are mostly gone, cuz they're not very neighborly.

Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Good news. The FCC has finally gotten court approval to take over this six gigahertz range. So there'll be a new wifi band coming soon. This is wifi six E and that having more bands helps cuz it helps with congestion. It doesn't help with low quality signals or, and signals. It just helps with congestion because the higher, the frequency, the worse it travels it, the shorter, the distance, and also the easier it is to block it with walls or even leaves of trees and humans, things like that. So six gigahertz wifi is not gonna be as good as five gigahertz wifi, which is definitely not as good as 2.4 gig hearts, wifi it's, you know, I've talked about this before. It's unfortunate. We suddenly all have to be, you know, network experts. <Laugh> this used to be the province of a person who was so skilled.

Leo Laporte (01:01:35):
They probably didn't even work for your company. They came in as a consultant said, well, okay, we're gonna do this, this and this to set up the wifi in the company. <Affirmative> now we have to do that in our house. We're suddenly the network gurus. Anyway, if I can help with that, I will 88, 88 ASCL once again, the website has changed. I apologize if that's disconcerting we've moved it all to the podcast site, twi.tv. So you still go to tech guy labs.com. It's still free, open to all or trying to, you know, give as much value as James did. He did such a good job for us. We're putting the links in, we're putting information, audio and video from the show after the fact and we've added machine generated transcriptions. So you can actually see a transcript of what went on and the only reason we've done that is they've gotten pretty good. They're actually surprisingly good. Now they, you know, they miss a few things. They're not as good as a human, but much better than they used to be. So that'll give you some idea. You can search through the transcript, find the part you want. There's time codes in there. And, and mostly we're, you know, we're trying to give you all the links. So tech guy labs.com just don't be, don't be thrown if it looks a little bit different, everything changes. Doesn't it? Cotton town, Tennessee. Kenny's on the line. Hi Kenny.

Caller #4 (01:02:49):
Hi Leo. It's good to talk

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
To you again. Good to talk to you again. What's up.

Caller #4 (01:02:54):
Well, since you were kind of talking about networks I wanna talk about cell networks, particularly 5g. Now I know in the past you've talked about that there are three levels, especially with 5g, which I currently have a 5g smartphone. Yeah. And my situation is, is that whenever I go out on the road and whatnot, and sometimes my phone will switch from LTE to 5g. Now, would that constitute us more like the lower band or the medium

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Band? It's hard to tell you can, there are ways that you can look at the phone and see which radio is engaged in all of that, but there's no rule of thumb. It's just switching to whatever strongest in general. Almost certainly you're not getting what the, the high frequency millimeter wave. Are you, I, I, do you, are you going into cities? I I'm sure that cotton town does not have millimeter wave 5g, but it's no it's possible. Maybe Nashville does or you know, some big city might, but it would be in a very, the millimeter wave, which is the 5g they always talk about because it's super fast and oh, it's so cool. And blah, blah, blah really only goes a few hundred feet. So it's only really useful in an office that's right next to a 5g millimeter wave tower or that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):
Most LT networks are on the same frequencies as these medium to low range, sub six gigahertz. Just to give you an idea. Millimeter wave is 24 and a quarter gigahertz. So it's really it's microwave. It's really high frequency, which means it doesn't travel very well. We were just talking about that. Most of the 5g ranges are close, are similar to in fact often the same as LTE. So it, it doesn't mean anything if it's switching, it just means you're now on an LTE radio. It's more about the technology. LTE goes from 700 megahertz to 2.7 gigahertz. But it's using a different technology than 5g. And that's really what the difference is. 5G goes from 450 megahertz to six gigahertz that's frequency range one, and then there's this ultra millimeter wave high frequency, 24 and a quarter gigahertz to 52 gigahertz. But that's not, you're not getting that unless you're in a building next door to the 5g millimeter wave tower. So this is part of the problem I have with 5g is these companies really oversold it. 5G is a marketing term. First of wall that's as is LTE. So they don't tell you much about what the technology is. You know, and LTE will exist mostly because phones, not all phones have 5g mm-hmm <affirmative> so you're always gonna have LTE towers. It's just a different techno, it's a different a protocol. If you will then 5g that's, that's the difference? Not so much the frequency or even the power.

Caller #4 (01:06:06):
No, that, that actually kind of makes sense what you just described there, because I know I've seen a lot of commercials about like Verizon, I saw one today for the 5g UW, but unless you live in a city that can support it. Yeah. It, doesn't not just a city

Leo Laporte (01:06:20):
For you to just in the, in a, on a particular intersection. In fact, you know, they, they advertise big time. All the NFL stadiums have 5g. You can't even get 5g in the whole stadium. You have to be in the area where the 5g transmitter is. It's a very short distance, but yeah, it's a very short distance. Furthermore at and T has a patent as an example that can allocate back and forth between LTE and 5g and, and instantly. So you could be sitting not moving and your phone will suddenly say, oh, you're on LTE now. Oh, you're on 5g now. I don't think it's gonna make that much difference. And for most people, the speeds that download speeds of LTE are more than adequate 5g. It, you know, it, it was just a bunch of Hui. If you ask me <laugh>

Caller #4 (01:07:11):
Yeah. You just kind said what I was thinking about that. Another thing I was gonna ask you and this sort of tied in, but I guess it doesn't make sense for me to get one, but I wanna get your opinion on these extenders or signal boosters, like a we boost. Are they worth the money that they're selling for? Are they just

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
Most, well there's all kinds and some of them are pure snake oil. When you get the thing that glues to the back of your phone. No, <laugh>, that's make oil. <Laugh> but there are, I'll give you an example. I have a, a friend who owns a a cell phone shop, moved to a new building, realized that the inside the building, he has no cell signal. That's really bad for a cell phone salesperson. <Laugh> you got no sales, no bars. So he got one of those we extenders, but the way he did it is you put an antenna outside the door of the shop and a wire from the antenna into the shop. And now he's got a cell signal in the shop. So it's in a very particular application. It's it could be useful. Yes. But but in, in general, if you're in an RV, for instance, you're not getting a signal or a truck and you're not getting a signal inside. It's like putting an antenna outside, basically.

Caller #4 (01:08:25):
Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. This is just like putting an outdoor antenna into a television back in the fifties and sixties.

Leo Laporte (01:08:32):
Yes. RF is RF it, you know, we're on different frequencies, but it's the same idea. Yeah, exactly.

Caller #4 (01:08:38):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> all right. Well, I really appreciate, thank you, Kenny, helping me out. Explain on that. Great. You have

Leo Laporte (01:08:44):
Good rest of day. Great. Great to talk to you Rams. Oh no, no, no. Don't say that. Oh, he's a Titans fan. Now I get it. <Laugh> we're talking sport ball eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number coming up at the end of the hour. Chris mark. We, our photo guy with some photo reviews to do lots more of your calls too. Go Niners. All right. I can get that in. Go. <laugh> I, I, Leo Laport, the tech guy, Leo Laport, the guy. This is the song that got George Harrison in so much trouble. He's so fine by the chiffons turns out. He wrote a very similar tune called my sweet Lord du Lang du Lang got sued by the chiffon. And then, oh boy, this was a mess. Their manager inclined bought the rights to he's so fine. Du Lang du Lang <laugh>. So he was on both ends of the lawsuit. <Laugh> it's maybe it's just, maybe it's just my impression, but it seems like when you get big bucks involved in anything, it all goes to heck it just, all, it just all goes downhill. Everybody gets greedy and nobody wins. 88, 88. Ask Leo, let's say hi to my coffee guy, Chris, on the line from Miami. Hi coffee guy.

Caller #5 (01:10:10):
How are you? My friend happy new year, 20, 22.

Leo Laporte (01:10:16):
Chris, do you work the microphone? You know, when you watch some, a great singer like Mariah, Carrie singing, and she's gonna hit those big high notes, she puts the microphone farther away. Sounds like you're, you're actually doing that. When you come on, you're working the microphone.

Caller #5 (01:10:30):
Well, I listen to the expert Leo port, cause there is nobody else not even rush limb Baugh anymore. And I just, I gotta say, I just listened to the best.

Leo Laporte (01:10:41):
I gotta work. The mic gotta when Celine Dion hits those high notes, you know, she, she pushes it way. I, we went to see Alanis Morris said a few months ago and Alanis is another one who really has a, you know, quiet and then very loud, big dynamic range. And she getss six feet away from the microphone when she's about to scream. It's it's interesting to watch that technique anyway. What can I do for you, Chris? What can I do for you? Well

Caller #5 (01:11:10):
Thank you for having me on your show. You know, I like to come in as, as often as I can, but as a fan, I gotta stay away sometimes. Cuz I want everybody else to have their opportunity.

Leo Laporte (01:11:19):
That's nice of you. That's generous. Cause yeah, we don't. I hate it. When you listen to a talk radio show and it's the same four people all the time we like to mix, we gotta give everybody a chance to get in.

Caller #5 (01:11:28):
It's like a good cup of coffee. I gotta be in at least six before I get to the seventh of 'em. But sometimes I can do three and be okay. How many of

Leo Laporte (01:11:33):
You had today?

Caller #5 (01:11:35):
Today? I'm in three easy.

Leo Laporte (01:11:36):
Three's not bad. I'm having my second right now.

Caller #5 (01:11:40):
So it was a half a cup. So we have to fix that. <Laugh> that was an hour ago. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
Well, so did you have a question, Chris?

Caller #5 (01:11:53):
I did have a question. Yes. I could talk to you all day.

Leo Laporte (01:11:55):
I asked, I enjoyed talking to you too. I have a lot of fun with you, so yeah, you can tell,

Caller #5 (01:12:00):
Well, we like to keep it light and fluffy, but we also have to be real. I wanted to just ask you well, real quick, they are coming out with the iMac pro coming this year sometime. And I,

Leo Laporte (01:12:11):
We think, we think we don't know, but we think, yes.

Caller #5 (01:12:14):
Well I like to, I like to be better on the right side of things. Not, we really don't know what they're doing, but I, I bet on, I bet on what you're doing versus what Apple's doing, because at least I know where my money's going. But on the router thing, everybody seems to be talking about these. Now I'm moving away from you verse. And I do have in my building, I have the webcast by Google fiber and they're not, I don't want the nest, but they have the regular one, which is their Google wifi mesh router. Probably not the best in the world, but I need something to get going. I'm going to use that for now. Should I move up to six E I everybody's talking about all,

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
I wouldn't worry about it yet. You don't have any devices yet. That'll use six E and Google's routers. Of course aren't six E yet. I, you know, this is often the case in apartment buildings that an internet service provider will negotiate with the building owners and become the only option. Sounds like you have more than one, which is great. But Google fiber, if you can get it, I mean, they, you know, this is a, these are rare as hens teeth. You were lucky you were in an area that they wired before. They kind of threw in the towel, get webpa, if you can get it. Absolutely I,

Caller #5 (01:13:27):
Yeah, I'm getting it on Monday. Nice. And I get up to one gig on the speed and run on my apple products. Yeah, no,

Leo Laporte (01:13:34):
You're gonna love it. And I, you know, do they offer, do they say, oh, here use our wifi adapter. I mean, is that part of the deal?

Caller #5 (01:13:44):
Well, you can, I don't have any other routers except for my

Leo Laporte (01:13:47):
They'll let you they'll let you use anything. Well,

Caller #5 (01:13:50):
They're gonna give me one that they have, which is not the nest, but the, but the Google router, which

Leo Laporte (01:13:55):
One the Google routers for. Yeah.

Caller #5 (01:13:57):
If I wanted to invest in something that is a little bit more, I have 1500 square feet here. Suggestions real. You're fine.

Leo Laporte (01:14:05):
Top of the, you're fine because it's such if 1500 square feet, one, one base station, unless there's, there may be metal construction in the walls that probably are sure, but, but one base station is probably gonna cover the house. If you find there is a dead spot because it's small enough yeah. You know, 1500 square feet is about what you would get out of a single wi whether it's an era or a Google, a single wifi station. But it, if there is a dead spot, if maybe your bedroom, because it's distant from where the the main connection is, and there's maybe metal in the doors and the walls. So it's blocking the wifi. Then you could get a second one in one of those dead areas. But I don't think you need to. And I think Google wifi is more than adequate. My, my daughter who li also lives in an apartment building has I got her Google wifi? Why? Cause it, it it's about the same size. Maybe a little smaller. Yep. That's plenty. It does a great job. Okay.

Caller #5 (01:14:57):
Well it's $99 for a second one. And I said, well, be, and I don't mind spending the money. Is that rent or

Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
Outright? The money? Is that, is that total flat? Yeah, that's just, that's not bad. Don't get it. You know what? It's nice. It's an option. Don't get it until you see you need it.

Caller #5 (01:15:14):
Oh, it's only $70 a month. No commitment for the service. They're gonna do the router for free and it's $99 if I want another one, but I wanted to ask the expert. I'd

Leo Laporte (01:15:21):
Wait. I'd wait. Okay. Okay. Boy, that is amazing that I am so jealous. You're one of there's. One of you're in one of nine cities that has Google fiber. It's just, they, you know and, and by the way, there's a secondary benefit to everybody in the cities where Google has done this fiber internet, all internet is less expensive because of competition. Competition's a good thing. So I'm not

Caller #5 (01:15:47):
Over here. I mean, at and T is supposed to have their fiber over here. And the problem is, is that I'm not gonna weigh. I don't have time to wait. Don't wait. Be a

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
Hundred years from now. Don't wait. You've got too much coffee in you to wait. Just keep, just go with the I think the webcast is great. I'm jealous. I would get it if I could.

Caller #5 (01:16:02):
Yeah, but your house is wired with ubiquity,

Leo Laporte (01:16:04):
Isn't it? Yeah, but I still have to get my internet from somebody and it's Comcast, which is not my favorite in the world. I am getting, I, I spent a lot of money to get gigabit internet, and it's been fine, but you know I'm not, they're not my favorite internet service partner. They are the biggest in the nation though. So I feel like I'm, I'm in it with you guys. I'm solidarity, man. I'm, I'm suffering with the rest of the country and that's what counts you. On the other hand, my friend, you are living large with Google fiber, Leo Laport, the tech. I have another cup of coffee. We're gonna talk photos next.

... (01:16:39):
Thanks for listening to TWiT. In a crowded field of digital products and services, you can stand out by advertising on the TWiT network. We offer customized host read ads that elevate your services and products to our tech savvy affluent audience. Twit ads are authentic specialized, and all of our shows include video, which means we can show off products, websites, and customize videos. Visit twit.tv/advertise and launch a tailored campaign. That's twit.tv/advertise.

Leo Laporte (01:17:10):
It's time for our photo guy. My personal photo sensei, Chris Marquardt at sensei, S E N S E i.photo. He joins us every week to help us get better pictures. Hello, Chris? Happy new year. Hello,

Chris Marquardt (01:17:24):
Happy new year to you too. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:17:27):
We are, are in the middle of an assignment. You pulled last week, you pulled a slip of paper out of the fish bowl. You still have it in front of you. And the assignment is

Chris Marquardt (01:17:41):
The bright assignment.

Leo Laporte (01:17:43):
Bright. B R I G H T. Right. All right. So, well, I'll talk about how to participate in that in, but you have some photo tips for us in the meanwhile?

Chris Marquardt (01:17:52):
Yes, yes. And at first I titled that things that fly, and then I looked into photos of things that fly and I thought, Hey, let's make this about birds, cuz birds are they're, there's challenges taking pictures of birds.

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
They move fast and they're distant. You can't get up next. So

Chris Marquardt (01:18:11):
I, I looked at airplanes first and airplanes have have a, have an advantage. Airplanes in flight are very predictable. Yes. They rarely goes exact. They're go. They're not scared of you. They, they stay on their trajectory. And and but, but with birds, you, you especially birds in, in motion in flights you have a few challenges. So the easiest way to go with birds is probably set a camera up at home, near a bird feeder and try to get your longest lens, your best Teleo lens and and, and try the stationary <laugh> thing first, because that is way, way easier. You are going to have three major challenges when you want to take pictures of birds in flight, and that is the first motion. Like you have to track them. You have to, to pan the camera to make sure they stay in frame, which especially with a very long lens is not that easy.

Chris Marquardt (01:19:07):
You wanna look at focus because these things change their distance from you. So you have to have a camera that can kind of follow that and, and stay focused. And then the third is light because birds in flight, you shoot against the bright sky often. So they are not well lit. And that might be a challenge. So birds too dark might be a bit of issue you. So let's look at these things in, in kind of in order motion, first of all, look at the shutter speed. If you have a camera that can do your show, by the way, you can shoot birds with smartphones too. If you have a, a modern smartphone with a longer Teleo lens built in, or maybe even an additional lens to get some more range at least those in, let's say, in, in the garden at your bird feeder, those will those will probably not be too hard, but back to the motion the photo that I'm showing right now that shows the feathers of the birds, the tips of the wings in motion, they're kind of blurry.

Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
They are not that's

Chris Marquardt (01:20:09):
Cool. I like it. They're blurry. They're not frozen. It's a cool effect, but if you want the birds to be like frozen as if they, but like without any blurs, then of course you need shorter shutter speeds. And that's something that again, it helps if you have a camera that, that can set that photographers will often set a predetermined chatter speed and say, okay, I want these at, at a thousand, a thousandth of a second or faster

Leo Laporte (01:20:38):
Professional bird photographers. Like my friend Scott born. I mean, they'll have a lot of gear to do this, including very long lenses, super fast focusing device. And yeah, the ability to set the shutter speed pretty fast,

Chris Marquardt (01:20:50):
And the camera on a, on a what's called a GI that, that lets you kind of swing the camera around. Light is another issue because again, against the bright sky makes it difficult to get good exposure on birds unless you use the sun when it's very low, like in the evening hours and then shoot from the right side where the birds are lit or in winter, if you shoot birds in flight over a snow scape over a snowy landscape. Oh, that is pretty much a natural reflector. It reflects light upwards. Yeah. So you get lights under the bird and that will, that will give you beautiful, beautiful little lit birds. So that is a tip and it's still winter. So there's a good chance that there might be snow in some areas. Light coming from behind can be beautiful, especially when light bird, bird feathers are translucent. So birds and fly. I might have like edges of the wings being lit by the sun from behind

Leo Laporte (01:21:53):
Gorgeous like picture. I have to say, the water is beautiful.

Chris Marquardt (01:21:56):
Like what you can do with yeah. Birds of water. That's, that's a, that's a whole interesting yeah. Genre on itself. The photo I'm showing right now that shows several of the same owl flying just com composite it together. And that might give you a good idea that the, the, the bird flapping its wings has a motion cycle and it will look very different at different stages in the emotion cycle. Now it's, it's incredibly hard to hit like the right spot. The one that you think looks best. So what what bird photographers will do is they will set their camera to the fastest burst mode they can get, and then they will just fire away.

Leo Laporte (01:22:38):
This shows what I can, what I think about, I'm thinking about that. Guy's got some very good, fast burst mode. <Laugh> cause that's a, that's a lot of frames <laugh> very

Chris Marquardt (01:22:48):
Quickly. And if you, and if you, if you're near like a bunch of bird photographers, because birds hang out, especially specific birds hang out in, in specific areas. So you might find a, a handful of photographers waiting for an, a specific owl or something to show up. And if that bird shows up, you will hear like 10 cameras going off in at, at 12,

Chris Marquardt (01:23:12):
It's a bit like a war zone. You know, it's like, it's really, it can get quite intense. And of course you can combine that, love that with blur with it's a very, it's a more artistic thing to, to use the longer shutter speed with flapping wings. And then it, it also does become that important. At which point in the cycle, you, you catch the bird flocks of birds, here's a composition tip. I try to compose them in a way like multiple birds in group. So they are actually contained in the photo. They don't stick out over the edges cuz half a bird just doesn't look that nice. Oh no, no

Leo Laporte (01:23:53):
One wants half a bird.

Chris Marquardt (01:23:54):
<Laugh> I've, I've take, I've taken pictures of flocks of birds where I like where that happened. And it, it was, it, it irked me a bit and I own that out at the edge. Yeah. So there's nothing wrong, cleaning things up just a little bit. And birds and water, birds and water is, it's just amazing how beautiful it, it is. When, when you have reflections of birds in water, especially, especially if the water is, is, is calm, especially if the water isn't is moving much. So play with it, try try the, the different kinds of things you can do a again, smartphones might be at a slight disadvantage, but then on the other hand if, if you ever try to go through the focus through the auto focus menu on a professional camera, that'll take you hours to sus out everything there. It's

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
Tough. Yeah. It's, it's really tough world, but boy the images can be really gorgeous. We, we solve the problem of birds being scared by going to the gala Galapagos where they don't hack predators. So they just kinda sit there and look at you who are these things now overaw these before that's much easier, much easier. And I was able to get some beautiful bird images, but I, it had to have a long lens, a big telephoto lens. It

Chris Marquardt (01:25:17):
Helps. It

Leo Laporte (01:25:18):
Helps nowadays both the pixel six and the iPhone have some pretty good telephoto and the Samsungs, the latest ones. Yep. Pretty good telephoto capability. So it might be possible. Now let's talk about how you can submit to the bright, by the way, I'll put a link to all the bird images that Chris collected from flicker in our show notes@techeyelabs.com. We've also put it in the chat rooms cuz if you probably wanna see these images, they're really gorgeous. If you, if you wanna, if you're ready to take up picture of something bright, whatever that means to you submit it to our tech guy group at the flicker site flicker.com tech guy group has about 13,000 members. So you'll know you're in the right place. Renee Silverman, our moderator will accept it. Don't forget to tag it. T G bright T G B R I G H T. And in a few weeks, Chris will pick three or four and, and talk about him on the radio. Chris is@sensei.photo. That's where he does his photo coaching. And someday soon back to traveling. I hope more photo workshops coming. Oh yes. S E c.photo. And don't forget tips from the top floor, his podcast. Leport the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (01:26:31):
Beautiful shots. Really love those. Thank you, sir.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:42):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:26:45):
Are you stuck? Are you stuck in the view finder Villa unable to move?

Chris Marquardt (01:26:51):
It's it's a voluntary <laugh> yeah, I could, I could go out, but I'm I'm limiting that to the bare necessary minimum

Leo Laporte (01:27:00):
Right now. Yeah. I think we're gonna, we, yeah, we, we were, are supposed to go on a cruise in a couple weeks. That's not gonna happen, but I think we might drive down the coast <laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:27:11):
Anywhere. Not, you know, you know, but re rediscover your backyard as beautiful things in California. Well, we're lucky.

Leo Laporte (01:27:18):
Yeah. Yeah. There's lots of stuff to see around here. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Have a great week. Take care. See you in a week. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Leo Laport, the tech guy. I know what you wanna talk about tech 88 88. Ask Leo. Let's go to Redding, California. Patrick is on the line. Hi Patrick.

Caller #3 (01:27:42):
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:27:43):
How's the snow on my out Shasta. Is it beautiful this morning?

Caller #3 (01:27:46):
Oh, it's beautiful. But it's cold as

Leo Laporte (01:27:49):
I bet it is. <Laugh> 

Caller #3 (01:27:55):
How ironic that I called today, because way, do you hear what I'm trying to take pictures of? Not at birds Flying things,

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
Birds. Okay. All right. I,

Caller #3 (01:28:08):
I have a tripod yeah. In my living room and I have a bird feeder outside the window, a 

Leo Laporte (01:28:18):
So that's perfect because a tripod not normally great for bird photography, if they're moving, but they're sitting there enjoying that bird seed. You're feeding them. So you have a great, great chance to shoot at 'em hummingbird. Oh.

Caller #3 (01:28:30):
And they're coming in landing eating and, and I'm catching them just as they're coming in. I'm just, I've got a little Bluetooth button that I can set on my button. As I land. I can pop the button and photos as fast as possible, but the problem I'm running to is they don't come and I, you know, look away and the phone is timing. The phone is, you know, because I'm not doing anything within two minutes. It's timing out the app. Yeah. And that, well, the TV, the screen's not timing out the app is timing out.

Leo Laporte (01:29:02):
Oh. So are you using a phone to trigger the camera or are you using the phone as a camera?

Caller #3 (01:29:08):
I'm using the phone as a camera. Oh, interesting. Using the gala. It's a galaxy S 21. Yeah. Excellent camera. Oh yeah. And I spoke to you about it a couple of months ago when I got it with some other problem, but that's nearer here, near there right now.

Leo Laporte (01:29:23):
Have you been able to get some good pictures of hummingbirds? I mean, can you freeze the wings and all that?

Caller #3 (01:29:29):
Pretty close. Wow. I mean, excellent pictures as they're coming in. Problem. Yeah. I, I mean, excellent pictures of 'em like as they're cause, cause

Leo Laporte (01:29:40):
They're moving. Not only they're moving fast, but their wings are moving really fast. So that's a Testament to the quality of that camera phone. If it can get that those wings frozen, that's pretty impressive. Or even just a little blur. That'd be fine.

Caller #3 (01:29:54):
It's not, oh, I'm getting excellent pictures. Oh, that's nice. And the motion, and then it has the motion pictures, but they're the quality of, of that shot is not that good. I'm referring the quality of, so if I just pop my pop, pop, pop that button mm-hmm <affirmative> with the it's it's, it's a, it came with the, of tripod. It's a selfie thing. So Bluetooth. Yeah. So I just sit, sit there and pop that button as fast as I can. And I'm getting, you know, shots every, you know, fraction of a second actually, or nice.

Leo Laporte (01:30:25):
Well, you would, I, I tell you, this is a, this is a example of how good these camera phones have gotten cuz E even a year ago, if you'd asked me, I would've said, well, that's probably not the ideal tool to capture a hummingbird. I mean, you need to fast shutter very fast shutter frame to, to, to freeze the motion. Focus has to be very precise. Do you use manual focus or are you auto focusing?

Caller #3 (01:30:49):
I'm still learning. I'm gonna need to I was, that was one of my questions to you is how can I get a video or something? Cause I'm compute illiterate and I need,

Leo Laporte (01:31:01):
So the Samsung like most modern of camera phones has manual settings. You'll have to dig around in the camera app. Yeah.

Caller #3 (01:31:07):
I'm just using the, the basic settings right now. I'm teaching different, different stuff and okay, this doesn't work and this is working better. This is that's on,

Leo Laporte (01:31:16):
On just the stuff. The fact that you're getting a decent shot, just that way with a, with a auto on is really a Testament to that camera. I don't know the answer to your question about the Bluetooth timing out though. That's so you're saying the camera screen stays on.

Caller #3 (01:31:33):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
But you're not able to trigger it after a couple of minutes. You can't get the, get the, the camera to take a picture.

Caller #3 (01:31:40):
No, the app itself just go, it goes away, goes back to the home screen.

Leo Laporte (01:31:45):
Yeah. I think the camera phones do that because as you probably noticed, as soon as you go to the camera app, the brightness goes all the way up so that you could take the picture, but they don't wanna leave it there because it's, that's gonna kill the battery. So yeah. I don't

Caller #3 (01:32:00):
Have a problem, you know, inside I'll believe it plugged in, believe it plugged in. Right. I don't have a problem with, I don't have a problem with that. I I've used other on the camera, on my other Galaxys seven. I can download apps that are for like SP cams or

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. They're better. There are other apps out there. I don't know if they're better than Samsung's camera app. And of course that's what I wanna know

Caller #3 (01:32:28):
That will keep it on.

Leo Laporte (01:32:30):
Yeah. See that. I don't know. And I think that the reason that this turning it off is again, battery life. 

Caller #3 (01:32:39):
No activity. If I don't take a picture within two minutes, it shuts it

Leo Laporte (01:32:41):
Off. It shuts it off. Ah, almost always when it's a brand new model, you wanna use the stock camera app because it's got all of the capabilities that the new hardware can handle. It takes a while for the third party apps to catch up. But there are third party Android apps. And you said it's at S 21.

Caller #3 (01:33:04):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:33:05):
Ultra ultra. So it's been out now for a few months. So the third party apps may have may have caught up by now. I don't know, off the top of my head though, if these apps sleep or not try there's one called expert raw that is designed for the S 21. Which means it might only be in the Samsung app store. But that sounds like the one that's gonna have the most capabilities when it says raw, you understand, it's saying I'm not gonna use any of the auto features. The of the JPEG features I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you really get down to the hardware, which is what you want. It may mean that you have to go in with a photo editing program and tweak it a little bit again, I think that's what you're gonna want. But but as you mean, I'm gonna have to

Caller #3 (01:33:56):
Have Scott, my, my niece's brain <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:34:01):
You know, you wanna, you know what, this is a great project, you know, you're taking the pictures you, well, yeah.

Caller #3 (01:34:07):
You can point him in the right direction here. Show me how

Leo Laporte (01:34:09):
To use this. Oh yeah. There you go. Yes. Teach a man to Phish and he'll have great hummingbird photos. Right? Exactly. So expert raws on the Samsung store. It's free. It's from Samsung spa song. So it is the, it is gonna absolutely be the one that'll give you the best control, but whether it will keep from turning off, I just don't know cuz that's right. That's that's not something they typically put in the specs never turns off cuz again, it's cuz they're bright out that screen so bright. That really can, but you, you, you you're exact right. You're, you're plugged in. You don't care about that. Anyway, I'd at least try that that's in the Samsung galaxy store expert raw and at least of that, of all of the camera apps, that's the one most likely to take advantage of all the features of the S 21. It actually requires the S 21. So at least go look at that and if okay. And if Samsung's smart, there may be a setting in there that says, do not sleep. You should also check you're saying the display does not turn off. It's just that the camera app quits,

Caller #3 (01:35:14):
Correct? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:15):
Yeah. I

Caller #3 (01:35:15):
Suspect I can change my display to turn off at 10 minutes or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:35:20):
Yeah.

Caller #3 (01:35:22):
You know?

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
Yeah. That's so it's not that display's going off its it's this morning. Yeah.

Caller #3 (01:35:26):
Yeah. I, I timed it this morning, right, exactly. At two minutes the app shut off.

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
Yeah. That's yeah. I'm sure that that's to protect the battery looking at, you know, I don't know, off that top of my head, if there's a setting in the in the factory app, there may be not to not to turn off. Look, I

Caller #3 (01:35:43):
Looked, I couldn't find anything about timing out screen or anything. Yeah. I looked all through settings and I, and I even got Samsung pros on the phone yesterday and they didn't know, came back to, it must be touch sensitivity of the phone. He's thinking it's a touch sensitive.

Leo Laporte (01:35:58):
No, you know, it's to protect the battery because your, your screen goes all the way up to a hundred percent brightness whenever you launch the camera app so that you can easily take a picture of you don't want a dim screen. And that means the battery's being drained. And it's just to protect the battery. Look at CF expert raw gives you more set. That's the whole point of expert raw is it's Essent Samsung's camera set app with more cap, more settings in it. So if anything is gonna give you the capability to turn off the the sleep or the, the, the quit let me see here. Scooter X in the chat room has found good for you. Scooter X, a post in the forms that Android central about this issue. And all they say is try a different camera app. <Laugh> so I'm gonna echo that. Hey, have fun taking those pictures. Leo LePort the tech guy, let see, go to display the display timeout. I don't think that's it. I don't think that's it. It's the camera app.

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Keep screen on in the play store. I don't think that's it. I think it really is that the camera app is it's not an issue with screen timeout. The app closes to save battery. I'm reading this thread. We'll put a link in the show notes to this Android central thread. Even random note here from one poster. Even the ancient note, three auto closes the camera app after two minutes it's exclusive to Samsung's app. Ah, the moment camera here's one moment stays open beyond two minutes will not close. The Google app stays on. So other apps stay on it's the Samsung app. That doesn't

Caller #3 (01:37:51):
Moment.

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
Moment is one. And then there, there is the Google camera app, which normally does not come on non Google phones, but, but people adapt it and make it available for download. You. Won't be able to get that in the place store, but if you Google Google camera app for Samsung S 21, you can find one hands hum in this thread says I have a solution install, an auto click pro program and say, tap the screen. Once every minute it tested it, it works <laugh> you need a mouse Jer. <Laugh>

Caller #3 (01:38:27):
That's a little above my <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:38:30):
Anyway, look at this thread, cuz it actually is interesting to read. There are a lot of is programs like click assist auto clicker taper. And what they're designed to do is keep the, keep the thing alive, the screen alive. But we'll also because it'll tap that camera phone screen every minute or so keep the camera open. That's another option. So third party apps sounds like, and by the way other phones do the same thing, it's it's totally the safe battery. Yeah. Other other apps might not have the same. And, and the two that they mentioned in this thread are the moment M O M E N T and the Google camera app, which you'll have to find elsewhere, because Google is not. And I make that available in the Google store for Samsung. I don't think so. May it does. Maybe it does. I don't have my Samsung here, so I, I can't check, but okay. Have fun. And if you get some good pictures, send 'em to me. I wanna see 'em

Caller #3 (01:39:30):
Well, I've already gotten quite a few. That's awesome. And well how could I share 'em with you real quick? Just email

Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
Leo leoville.com unless you've got 'em on the web.

Caller #3 (01:39:46):
Well, I've got a few on Facebook.

Leo Laporte (01:39:50):
Ah. I'm not on Facebook. Yeah.

Caller #3 (01:39:52):
Yeah. I didn't think so. I don't, I I'm old for it. I'm just on, on Facebook

Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
And that's nothing wrong with that. It's just my personal choice.

Caller #3 (01:40:00):
No, I, I don't blame you. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:40:03):
I don't trust that mark Zuckerberg. I wish I wasn't

Caller #3 (01:40:05):
But that's another story I got talked into it. Well, you

Leo Laporte (01:40:08):
Have to though, if you've got family on there, I understand completely if you want. Exactly. Yeah. I understand that. My, my work around for that is my wife's on Facebook and she tells me when things happen, she reaches over, says, okay, look, they posted a picture. It's

Caller #3 (01:40:23):
Funny Leo at Leo tech.

Leo Laporte (01:40:25):
Leoville leo@leoville.com or if it's easier to remember Leo, leo.fm. That's the short one. Okay.

Caller #3 (01:40:44):
Okay. I will send

Leo Laporte (01:40:44):
You something. Hey. Oh good. I can't wait to see him. Thank you, Patrick. My, my wife's family lived up in Redding and we used to go up there all the time, both in the summer and the winter. It's blazing hot in the summer. <Laugh> it's freezing cold in the winter. <Laugh> aint that's the truth, but the nature's beautiful.

Caller #3 (01:41:01):
Springtime in the springtime. It's gonna be gorgeous because I just put somewhere around 30 different plants. That'll attract the hummingbirds. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:10):
What a great hobby. I love this. So you're not just giving him a hummingbird feeder. You're gonna give him plants too.

Caller #3 (01:41:17):
Oh yeah. I put up a whole bunch of hum feeders in the backyard, around the plants right now because they're plants are dormant. So I'm putting up the feeders right now. Fun just to keep 'em around. Awesome. And then the springtime, they were the, the butterflies were following me as I was unloading the, the planet's off the truck

Leo Laporte (01:41:36):
<Laugh> they were excited. They were happy. <Laugh> he's getting some new plants for us. Oh, exciting.

Caller #3 (01:41:43):
<Laugh> and about four blocks, three blocks from a forest, a little nature, preserve that's little pond and sanctuary nature sanctuary that they can all as they're flying over there, like Hey book, pit stuff, food.

Leo Laporte (01:42:00):
<Laugh> how funny? Great. Well, have a great, have a great date. Get some good pictures. I'll look forward to seeing your email.

Caller #3 (01:42:10):
Yeah. I'll send you these and in the spring, I'll send more. Thanks Patrick.

Leo Laporte (01:42:14):
Take care. You

Caller #3 (01:42:15):
Sir. You, you helping for the, the third time now

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
It's my pleasure. I'm glad you call. Thank you.

Caller #3 (01:42:21):
I'm gonna, I've got you logged in the phone now. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:42:24):
<Laugh> all right. Take care. <Laugh> chatroom says wear a red outfit. The hummingbird's love red. Why? Hey, Hey. How are you today? Leo, the port here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz it's tech guy time, 88, 88. Ask Leo anything with a chip in it. The website tech guy labs.com. You're gonna go there. You're gonna go. What the heck happened to my page? It's little, little different. We, we have shut down the old tech guy labs site cost too much to keep it going. Security issues. The update would've cost lots of money, a breathtaking amount of money. So we just moved it all over to site. I also run our podcast website, twi.tv, still tech guy labs.com. Still take you there. You can click any show.

Leo Laporte (01:43:16):
You'll see a little thumbnail image of each of the shows. This is episode 1,858. You click that. Maybe not as quickly as James would've put it up there, but we will get links that I mentioned topics we talk about up on that page. So you'll be able to click those. We are now getting transcriptions done. So there'll be a transcript that you can peruse at your leisure. That takes about a day or two to get up there. Even even audio and video from the show. So it'll all be there. And the good news is still free, still available, easy to use tech guy labs.com. Don't be thrown by the different look. That's. That's why it's just prohibitively expensive to maintain the two different sites. Hey, let's go to Singapore. What do you say? I was supposed to be in Singapore the next month, but I guess I'll just have to visit with mark. Hi mark.

Caller #6 (01:44:07):
Hi there.

Leo Laporte (01:44:08):
Good morning. Good morning. What time is it in? Is it early morning?

Caller #6 (01:44:13):
It's 

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
5 0 7. Oh my, you got up early.

Caller #6 (01:44:16):
Thank you. I got up early just for you.

Leo Laporte (01:44:18):
Bless you. I am so sad that we're not gonna get to go to Singapore. I was really looking forward to it. I know.

Caller #6 (01:44:24):
Yeah, I know. And, and there was one time you made this trip from the middle east to Hong Kong and you bypass Singapore.

Leo Laporte (01:44:31):
Oh, terrible. Well, you know, the reason we're not going to Singapore is our cruise was supposed to start in Hong Kong and they have a three week quarantine. But so they just canceled the whole cruise. But I w I'm actually very much we'll, we'll be in Singapore soon as we can cuz I love Singapore and I haven't been there in 20 years. There've been, there've been a changes since I've been there.

Caller #6 (01:44:54):
There a few. Yeah, a few <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:44:57):
The skyline is completely different. Kidding. <Laugh> yeah. Yeah. I wonder why <laugh>. Yeah. Are you, have you lived there your whole life mark?

Caller #6 (01:45:07):
Yeah, I, I I'm a native born Singaporean. I've been to the us many, many, many times. Yeah. I used to be in the Singapore air force and trained a lot in the us. Oh cool. Out at Phoenix, out at central California. Well and subsequently made a lot of visits to other places in the us. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
Well, I'm glad you listen in Singapore. I'm jealous cuz the food in Singapore is the best food in the world. It's just incredible. The, the cuisine is so amazing.

Caller #6 (01:45:42):
Well, well you have to let me know I will coming up because I will definitely be your volunteer fully dead to a guide.

Leo Laporte (01:45:55):
Awesome. I can't wait now I really have to go. Yeah. Well in, in return, what can I do for you today?

Caller #6 (01:46:02):
Okay. Well just, just to be just to check up on the records, I was your first, I was a caller the first time on episode 15, 12. So we year my again

Leo Laporte (01:46:14):
Wow, wow. 300 some episodes ago.

Caller #6 (01:46:18):
Yeah. Three and a half years ago. I yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
That's right. Yeah.

Caller #6 (01:46:22):
Yeah. So, so here's a question. My wife upgraded her phone to a Samsung S 21. Yeah. And on the Google, on the phone each time she opens it, she gets all Chinese news. Yeah. everything in Chinese in her settings, she has put it in as English only as a preferred language. So she's is driving her nuts. And what she's done as well is checked on her Microsoft swift key keyboard where she installed for the

Leo Laporte (01:47:02):
Phone. And is that in English or Chinese?

Caller #6 (01:47:05):
Ah, that's in English, UK, English. That keyboard also has facilities for a Chinese keyboard. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and Korean keyboard. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so she has uninstalled the Chinese keyboard. There you go. Microsoft swift

Leo Laporte (01:47:21):
Key. It's funny. Cause get Singapore is not Chinese. So Google's making a SI a silly assumption of that. That is just incorrect, but yeah. You know the phone it's so yours is not doing that. I take it is yours in English?

Caller #6 (01:47:38):
No, mine is in English and, and I do not. I also use Microsoft swift key keyboard. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:47:45):
It, so I suspect the problem. There's two possible things. Obviously the phone thinks you're in China, not in Singapore. Yeah. The first thing is when you get the phone, there are different regions for those phones. Samsung has a phone that they make for the Americas, for the, for Europe and the middle east. For Asia. You, I would suspect that your wife got a Chinese version of that Samsung phone. Yeah,

Caller #6 (01:48:10):
No. This, this was going on even in a previous phone. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:48:16):
So that's one thing to be aware of and it's it actually happens all over the place, especially with Samsung phones because they have so many different versions here in the states. I've purchased for instance Samsung phones from the Australian region and the radios are different fortunate. They still speak English. So I didn't, I didn't lose the language, but

Caller #6 (01:48:34):
Well, I, we can't have a debate about that. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
Not an easy language, but now Singapore, the speak, everybody speaks English right. That is that, what is this? What is the, the national language?

Caller #6 (01:48:45):
Yeah, pretty much the, the UA franca is English.

Leo Laporte (01:48:51):
Okay. But, but there's a lot of Malaysia. I know, but there are

Caller #6 (01:48:55):
Four official languages, so you can communicate with the government in four languages. Wow. It's kind of like Canada. It's

Leo Laporte (01:49:03):
Cool. I think that's fantastic. So, one thing to do is to look at the region settings. You can look you can change your Google store, which it may be somewhere it's getting region settings that are wrong. It would not be in Chinese no matter what I think. Even if it knew you were in Singapore, I don't think it would choose Chinese as the default. So

Caller #6 (01:49:25):
The phone was bought from the Samsung store in Singapore. 

Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
So it should be the Singapore version of that phone. Yeah. Yeah. You might take it to the Samsung store and say, Hey, what's going on here? There is a setting. I'm sure that they can change. Look in the Google play store under the settings in device preferences. You can choose a country. Now that's obviously gonna change the Google play store, but it may be because it's a running Android. It may be looking at that setting for all of the Google apps. Yeah. Google search has the same problem. They'll do, they'll try to do a geolocation on your IP address with Google search. And they now, in this case, it's not a problem because when that says, oh, you're in Singapore, it's gonna give it to you in one of the four languages. But if you were in China, it would give it to you in Chinese. And this happens all the time. You get Google dot HK instead of Google dot SI or whatever. So I, I think that's the two places to look are in Google search. Make sure that the country setting is correct. And then Google place store, make sure the a country setting is correct.

Caller #6 (01:50:29):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:50:30):
Very good. Yeah. And then if none of that works, take it to the Samsung store. They must be used to this and say, fix it. <Laugh> fix it. <Laugh> this is, this is the problem you have by being such a cosmopolitan nation.

Caller #6 (01:50:45):
<Laugh> you know, I, at the same time, while I, she was upgrading to high class S 21, I was moving from a note eight to a note nine. Ooh. And I bought my note nine on online from China and yours

Leo Laporte (01:51:04):
Is not in Chinese.

Caller #6 (01:51:07):
No mine is working wonderfully fine. Isn't that

Leo Laporte (01:51:11):
Ironic?

Caller #6 (01:51:12):
Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's really, really befudling what's going on here? It is. It drives her nuts because she doesn't want any of the Chinese, can she

Leo Laporte (01:51:23):
Read Chinese?

Caller #6 (01:51:25):
She can. Yeah. Yeah. But she doesn't want it Chinese she's bilingual, but she doesn't want it. She wants to only have English on the phone.

Leo Laporte (01:51:33):
Yeah. There's a setting somewhere. That's that's doing cuz it's not geolocation, obviously you're in Singapore, so it's not doing it there. Yeah. So I mean, in the us, if that happens and you wanted it, for instance, b.sg, not us you can use a VPN or something like that, but she should, didn't have to go to all that trouble. There is some setting in there that's saying she's in China. Not in Singapore, just

Caller #6 (01:51:55):
Fox. I, I, I've also checked on the Firefox to check on the, does the Firefox

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
Go to go to Chinese or English? Yeah.

Caller #6 (01:52:07):
It's in English. Aha.

Leo Laporte (01:52:09):
So now we me know it's a Google thing. I, yeah, I bet you it's the play store cause Google, you, you know how Google is when you have one Google app, all the Google apps follow the play store has a country setting. Go look in that and then go look at Google search. And those are the two things to look at. It's pulling that setting for all the Google apps, but it didn't change Firefox. That's good news. It's just Google.

Caller #6 (01:52:31):
Okay. Yeah. So, so it's not cookies

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
That no. It's not a cookie. It's a setting. Yeah. Okay. I mean, it might be set as a cookie, but you could change it when you change the country setting.

Caller #6 (01:52:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:52:45):
Mark, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. I I'm sorry. You had to get up so early. Have a wonderful day though. It's gonna be a beautiful day in Singapore. I know I'm gonna want my dog now.

Caller #7 (01:52:54):
So it's

Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
All right. <Laugh> thanks mark.

Caller #7 (01:52:59):
Let me know when you're

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
Coming through. I promise I gotta, I got a friend in Singapore now. I'm excited.

Caller #7 (01:53:05):
<Laugh> thanks mark.

Leo Laporte (01:53:07):
Tour guide

Caller #7 (01:53:07):
As well. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
Take care. 88, 88 as more calls coming up. Don't forget. Rod pile space guy. He is gonna talk to us. I'm thinking, I'm thinking about the web telescope, but we also have an update on the strain object. The Chinese space Rover found on the far side of the moon. Stay tuned. Leo LePort the 88 88. Ask Leo Carlton's on the line or is it Charlton from Los Angeles? How, how do you like saying

Caller #7 (01:53:42):
It's Charlton like Heston,

Leo Laporte (01:53:44):
Charlton, like Heston I'm was just watching Sawant green yesterday.

Caller #7 (01:53:48):
Oh wow. We're heading there. Aren't we? It looks like we're

Leo Laporte (01:53:51):
Heading there. The reason I wanted to watch it is cuz it takes place in 2022 and I just wanted a roadmap of <laugh>. What's gonna be like this year and I gotta tell you not good.

Caller #7 (01:54:00):
<Laugh> yeah. Well we started rolling out the soil and green. Exactly,

Leo Laporte (01:54:06):
Exactly

Caller #7 (01:54:08):
Real cool. I really do appreciate you taking my call, but I don't know if it was intentional, but I did notice you got some hot mic issues. Cause I hear the commercial and I'm hearing a lot of like cross talk within your crew. I don't know if that's part of your show, but you got a hot mic.

Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
So when you're listening, when you're on hold you're hearing all the stuff that's going on, including my conversations with professor Laura and yeah, her mic sounds terrible. <Laugh> but she's not on the air so it doesn't matter. No,

Caller #7 (01:54:36):
I actually like the ban or the back and

Leo Laporte (01:54:38):
Forth. Yeah. You hear, you hear the behind the scenes. Yeah.

Caller #7 (01:54:41):
Yeah. Cause I work for TV and film, but mostly on art department we, I make, I help make the sets for the environment where they actors can perform and do their oh, that's cool.

Leo Laporte (01:54:50):
That's cool. I love it. You do art direction. Do you do the do you like to put props in and stuff like that or you, what, what do you do exactly?

Caller #7 (01:54:57):
It depends on the actual job cause I'm a union set director. So we actually, if you've got a blank room, we would bring in everything on the set dressing piece. Wow. Environ it to the pictures. The SCOs the outlets, everything. So

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
That always blows me away. When I, when I even a 62nd commercial, the detail in the sets it's it's mind boggling and I think, gosh, that's an awful lot of work and then they shoot a commercial and then that's done. You go home, but it doesn't bother you that that's so work. And then it's over.

Caller #7 (01:55:30):
It's so much work. It's kinda like imagine when the time I, I was in the military too. It's lot of it looks chaotic, but it's organized, but then it's kind of wasteful cuz you see, once they spend like I'm working on one show on the bigger show in LA that it's like 10 million in episode. And and the set, the humongous sets they have there, it takes us a week to build it in an empty warehouse and then they shoot it for maybe two or three days and then they gotta tear the whole thing down and it goes in the garbage

Leo Laporte (01:55:58):
And it's 10 seconds on the screen. <Laugh> it is an amazing thing. You know, it's funny. I'm glad you called cuz I've been thinking that watching the, the art direction is so good these days, you know, even watching so and green, which was made in 1973, it's kind of cheesy, you know, but the art direction, these days is so realistic. You feel like you're in a real place. And I think, boy, I I'm, I guess that's where my mind goes. I'm just one thing, boy though, they put a lot of work in <laugh> that I feel better. Yeah.

Caller #7 (01:56:27):
Especially when you're seeing like these like west world and dune and your scale. So amazing humongous. Yeah. They're like so massive. That gives you the idea when you see the actor build the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:56:41):
So, and, and now a lot of stuff now is done with, with computer graphics, but I think still there are a lot of directors that want real what they call practicals. So you're still working a lot.

Caller #7 (01:56:54):
Oh, there's so much work in the city that you know, I'm I haven't had a down day. I've been working 22 days straight. Oh sorry. Well my pay,

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
I know I'm happy for you and I'm sorry for you at the same time. How fun?

Caller #7 (01:57:09):
Yeah, it is fun. The thing is some of the CGI stuff you can kind of tell, but then some of it, the environment where the actor, you still need a basic cause that's environment like theater actor. So just like, you know, spend so much time, you can, you know, talk to a green tennis ball. That's not gonna talk react. It's

Leo Laporte (01:57:27):
Not the, it's not the same. I'm watching a movie like dune and I think that's gotta, a lot of it has to be practical because they, it just, it feels real. It doesn't feel like CGI. You could tell, I still think

Caller #7 (01:57:38):
Some of it is a lot of that is CGI, but the big old landscapes. Yeah. That's all real.

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
Isn't it amazing. Yeah. Oh yeah. Isn't it amazing. Anyway, what can I do for you? I'm so glad you called.

Caller #7 (01:57:50):
Well I've been talking to a couple of texts and I just really need to wrap my head around that. So when I'm not doing, working for TV and film, I actually do my own comedy shows and events. Nice. And, and because of COVID thank you. And because of COVID we had to shut down like my open mics and stuff. So I converted my garage into a studio and I have a podcast room that I have too. But then when I do events and go on to venues, what I'm looking is to get some mounts to do live streaming pod podcast is one thing. I wanna be able to archive that, but I wanna be these shows where I could do my livestream comedy shows in my garage. And if I ever need to get the cameras, leave the mounts there and the wiring there and just pick up the cameras and put 'em in the podcast room. And then if I ever needed to go to a venue I could just bring up my portable, looking for three cameras, set up kind of portable maybe Vil case. I'm not too sure which to go with the cameras, whether USB or HDMI for the quality, I wanna be hard wire and patched into everything because I'm not, I don't wanna do any glitch, get any glitches. Yeah. And I'm looking,

Leo Laporte (01:58:58):
So it really, it's gonna depend, you basically wanna portable and it's gonna depend a lot on budget, but you know, also your needs, I would say in general, black magic, black magic, black magic that, okay. Yeah. Their cameras you know, I was just looking at what Netflix requires for cameras and the black magic Ora mini pros is a requirement. But they also have switchers hardware switchers. The ATEM switchers that can be very portable and are very good. I, I honestly think black magic is, is at least value for dollar gonna be the direction you want to go in. I'm gonna, I am not an expert in this though, but I am gonna point you to some experts who are on the air, 24 7, my friend, Alex, Lindsay, who does this for a living has a streaming thing. He calls office hours, which started just a few hours in the morning is now pretty much 24, 7 office hours.global is the website. They cover everything, audio video at everything. But the best part is you can go in there and you could say what you just said, and you'll have 10 people who are working in Hollywood production, who are working in podcasting from all over the world, chime in and say, well, here's what we use. And I think they're gonna be the experts. Leo Laport, the Teche let's talk space right after this. Yeah. I think office hours is the place to go Alex. But, but I know Alex is a big black magic fan.

Caller #7 (02:00:27):
Okay. That's great. Cause basically what I have to work with, I've got that zoom pod track eight, where it has like built in sound.

Leo Laporte (02:00:33):
That's a really cool device. I'm very, I'm familiar with that. Yeah.

Caller #7 (02:00:36):
Yeah. I've got the SD card, which I like, but my thing is, how will I go about pairing the audio with the video if I'm

Leo Laporte (02:00:42):
Doing well, you're recording it separately. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Caller #7 (02:00:46):
So, so this is

Leo Laporte (02:00:47):
You, you, I am the wrong person to ask. You know, even though we do a lot of this and I did it in the early days, I did it myself. The early days was 15 years ago. So <laugh>, I, I have people who do this now, but the, my, the king of all, this is Alex Lindsay. He really knows. And the office have, have some of the most amazing people in there. I wouldn't on the weekends, they do weird stuff like cooking and things, but you could try going in right now. They're always there, but Monday, tomorrow, absolutely. There'll be a chance to ask questions. Just go to the website, there a link to it's a zoom meeting and it's on all the time. It's amazing. And you could, you could say this and they would, they would love it cuz they would dig down into it. Well what do you wanna do? Okay. Well how about this and this? And they know everything.

Caller #7 (02:01:30):
Oh, that's great. So how to be in contact with Mr. Is there a phone number where I can reach

Leo Laporte (02:01:34):
Out to him? No, just go to office hours. Dot global. You don't want to call him, just ask in the office hours. There's a zoom call, just ask tomorrow morning in the office hours. And it won't just be Alex, it'll be 20 people who are pros working in the biz. Yeah.

Caller #7 (02:01:50):
That's great. I'm looking at somebody maybe could help me put it, build it, you know, bet anybody could come out to help me build it together. Cause I'm looking for something I could put an Avil case. And that could just,

Leo Laporte (02:02:00):
Well, so for instance, I have an at mini, which is little, okay. We put in a Pelican case, we built it into a Pelican case. It's awesome on. And it, it now it takes H DMI, but it also takes audio in it'll mix it all. It, it, some of the ATMs actually will stream directly. All of them can record. There's lots. He likes sound devices for the audio. He likes black magic for the cameras, black magic for the switchers. And then of course the rigs and stuff that you'll get from another person. But if you register tonight, you can get in the zoom meeting tomorrow, go to office hours.global.

Caller #7 (02:02:35):
I definitely will. Well, thank you so much for that. And I'm also looking to see what the at black magic, which you're referring to. Will I be able to export if I wanna have a projector and maybe have it on the wall? Yes. To throw it?

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
Yeah, it has video out. Okay. Tell me what's the 10 million pick show you're working on

Caller #7 (02:02:53):
Westworld. What? The Hopkins. Oh, I'm so

Leo Laporte (02:02:55):
Jealous.

Caller #7 (02:02:57):
<Laugh> it's really great. You know, it's really different now. They changed

Leo Laporte (02:03:01):
It completely different. Yeah. They're out. They're outta the west world. They're in the real world now.

Caller #7 (02:03:06):
Oh well I can tell you this. You're going well. I don't wanna ruin it for you cuz you're watching it. Don't

Leo Laporte (02:03:10):
Worry. It I've ruined it. I love it. And man, what a great show for an art director. Yeah. We

Caller #7 (02:03:16):
Going to prohibition so this time. Oh wow. And we just got picked up for two more seasons. So we're oh

Leo Laporte (02:03:22):
Congratulations.

Caller #7 (02:03:23):
Couple more years.

Leo Laporte (02:03:24):
So congratulations. That is an amazing show. Really

Caller #7 (02:03:28):
Amazing. Yeah. Well it's the biggest show in LA that's you know, I happen to be fortunate and you,

Leo Laporte (02:03:32):
And at least some of the video, I've seen some video of you shooting on the streets of LA. So you're are you, are you out and Mount?

Caller #7 (02:03:38):
We were doing that for one, because we were working at a Hollywood center studio from downtown. We were there for two years, but then we just moved up north towards Santa Clarita.

Leo Laporte (02:03:50):
Nice. What a great gig have fun. I, I will, I will. I will look for your name in the credits Charlton.

Caller #7 (02:03:57):
Don't blink <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:04:00):
All right. Have a great

Caller #7 (02:04:01):
Day. Thank you. Appreciate you, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:04:02):
My pleasure. Appreciate you. Take care. Isn't that awesome? Wow. He's working on the, I won't say hi there, Rodney. Hey, how are you? I am very good. I can look, get your picture here. Oh, if you need it. Speaking of set design. I, I was listening to your best of over the weekend. Yeah. You were talking about the old IBM PC Charlie chap ads. Oh yeah. Remember those? Yeah. I was the head of production for the place that made those. Oh you, you know what you've told me that and I, but when I was talking about that way back when yeah, yeah. I didn't know that we

Rod Pyle (02:04:41):
Made so many boxes for that skating ad. We were at it for three days just taping together boxes, but it was a cool ad. The director was brilliant.

Speaker 13 (02:04:53):
Audible makes it easy to do. You take to I'm out to lose yourself in a sci-fi epic, best selling thriller or celebrity memoir or dive into an exclusive. You can't hear anywhere else, whatever you're into. You can find the best of it on audible with originals, audiobooks, and so much more there's wellness, true crime motivation and powerful new voices to discover with so many included titles to enjoy. There's always something great to listen to with audible sign up for your free 30 day trial today@audible.com.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
It's time for our rocket man rod pile space engineer. He is <laugh>. He is worked at JPL, currently working at JPL, the authors space 2.0 many great books about space. He's the editor inchi@astramagazineatspacedots.org. But really the best thing he does is this thing. Every week he joins us. Hi rod, to talk about hello space. Good to see you. Nice to see you. So before we get to the real story, which is the James web telescope, the Chinese Rover, this is all almost a month ago. Now saw a square shaped object on the dark side of the moon. It looked like it could only be made by intelligent life. What was it?

Rod Pyle (02:06:15):
Well, the intelligent life up there, according to Chinese is Jade rabbit and the moon Godes Chane, but actually it drove over there it two 60 feet. Yeah. And it's a rock. Oh. And it's not a very interesting rock. It's

Leo Laporte (02:06:30):
Not even very square to be honest.

Rod Pyle (02:06:31):
No, it's not that big. You know, I, nobody, I looked and looked, I can't find a, a, a measurement of it tall anywhere, but it looks to be maybe 18 inches, just gaging from what the soil looks like there, but it's hard to tell. So somebody looked at that and said, okay, we're gonna name that Jade rabbit because it looks like a rabbit eating carrots.

Leo Laporte (02:06:49):
No, it does not. Oh,

Rod Pyle (02:06:51):
Really? <Laugh> so, you know, these are the same way we get faces on Mars and Sasquatch on the moon and that kinda stuff, but okay. You know, but you know, it

Leo Laporte (02:07:00):
Interesting. It's not, it's far from what the Chinese called it, which was the mystery hut, the mystery hut.

Rod Pyle (02:07:04):
It's just a rock. Well, and, and that points to another thing, which is it, you know, this, unlike NASA, they've kind of been doing a fair amount of click bait. They have a big public relations operation that sends to Instagram and Facebook, both of which are banded China by the way, to try and get traction in the west quick 80 titles about, oh, we found a gel-like substance, which turned out to be melted glass and other things. So, you know, but to their credit, this Rover's gone about three times as long as the last, the Soviet Luna rovers. So, you know, they're doing some good work. They just need to tone down the that's fine.

Leo Laporte (02:07:40):
The nature of it too, just found a space rabbit, not a space hut, but then there is some real science being done and some very science, exciting science that James web telescope now has now they say fully deployed it. What does that mean?

Rod Pyle (02:07:55):
Means that everything that needs to fold and latch is apparently folded and latch. Now I had thought that there was going to be a longer latching sequence for these mirrors. They deployed the second it, you saw, I'm sure the graphic of the, the mirrors folding out. So it's got a center chunk and then the last two panels on the sides have to fold out to make, get that roughly circular shape. So they folded out yesterday. The last one and apparently has latched or is latching. So, and these numbers keep changing. It's interesting, you know, you read the press releases and depending on where it's from, where there's NASA or north Grumman who made the thing or another NASA one, the number of deployments and single points of failure. Keep the last one I read, which is from Grumman. So it's probably Martha Grumman. So it's probably, you know, I think you can count on it. 50 major deployments, 178 major release mechanisms of 344 single points of failure. Wow. You know, whether it's a few more or a few less doesn't matter, it's pretty scary. But you know, I think the one that everybody was really scared, it was that sun shield, cuz it alone had a hundred. You're gonna love this hundred 40 released mechanisms, 70 hinges or hundred pulleys, 90 cables and eights, it's

Leo Laporte (02:09:05):
A rub Goldberg device, but it works.

Rod Pyle (02:09:07):
It is. And you know, and, and we worry about is our software gonna work? I mean, talk about going back to the electro mechanical age,

Leo Laporte (02:09:14):
But they've been working on this 20 years and obviously did as much testing as they could. You can't test in zero gravity, but they did the best they could.

Rod Pyle (02:09:22):
That's the problem. And, and you know, they were working on the project 20 years, really working on that thing for about eight, so seven

Leo Laporte (02:09:29):
Or eight. So it's amazing. I just, it blows me away. It blows well. And it's

Rod Pyle (02:09:33):
Just, you know, I'm practically quivering when I hear news. I can't imagine how they feel. Cuz of course they've been on pins and needles for months and months and months.

Leo Laporte (02:09:41):
Yeah. You can only hold your breast for so many months before you start to get turned blue.

Rod Pyle (02:09:45):
Yeah. So it's about 75% of the way out to its final orbital location at L two, that's about 674,000 miles from earth, 225,000 to go roughly hot sides, 131 Fahrenheit, cold sides, minus 2 78. Once it gets out to that orbital location, it's still got months of calibration to do. And that's a little scary cuz things can still go wrong. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:10:08):
We remember the Hubble where, when they calibrated, it turned out, be blurry.

Rod Pyle (02:10:12):
Yeah. But you can bet they double check the focus on this guy. Okay. I remember reading an interview with that poor guy who was in charge of the optic for the Hubble. And he said, you know, it's just the skip. We didn't do cuz of money. Oh. And they discovered that it wasn't in focus. The difference is

Leo Laporte (02:10:29):
The hub was in an orbit. You could go to which they did and fix. Right. You're not gonna fly out to Laroche too too often.

Rod Pyle (02:10:39):
It would be tough. You know, there's been talk about the possibility of a robotic servicing mission. Yeah. There's been some speculation about, you know, could SpaceX reach it if they had two. Yeah. But it's a dangerous place to go. It's a long and

Leo Laporte (02:10:50):
You not gonna said humans. It really is. It's almost a million miles out.

Rod Pyle (02:10:53):
Probably not. It is. But you know, this isn't much scarier than the asteroid. Renou they were gonna do back during the Obama administration, which got canceled, but it's a similar kind of a journey, but it's gotta go out, go out there, calibrate cool down, you know, get to its final chill. Most of it's passive, but they do have some cryo coolers and there are some components of the need to be down like minus four 50 Fahrenheit, but they'll do it. And then you know what, we're all looking forward to of course those first images and what they mean. Right. Looking back at the very beginning of time. Yeah. That's what's, you know, just so

Leo Laporte (02:11:28):
Exciting. So let tell me about that. We gotta, we got a few minutes left. So this telescope, when it goes on line about five or six months, is that right? Roughly? Yeah. About five we'll start sending images back. Is it like the Hubble where different scientists kind of have to, you know, Jostle to get time on it and aim it and yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:11:50):
Yeah, yeah. And time is precious and you know, it's interesting by the way, the Hubble over its life, if you adjust the money cost almost as much as this. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:00):
So, but we gotta look at, let's not knock the Hubble. We got a lot of, a lot of stuff out of the Hubble

Rod Pyle (02:12:07):
And the public relations value to NASA with Hubble. I mean, that's the gift that keeps giving. Right. And they've got larger telescopes plan doing some reading yesterday. They've got one called I think it's pronounced lure. It's a large ultraviolet optical. INED surveyor probably a 50 foot primary mirror. Wow. So twice as wide as this thing. So it's huge. It looks a lot like the web and they're talking, you know, between 20, 25, 20 35, but that would be pretty much, it would be able to do a lot of things. But one of the main purposes really is looking at exoplanets and web will do that, but this of course would be much more sensitive. Right. Then I've got number one,

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):
Exo let's explain what an exoplanet is. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:12:47):
It's a planet around another star, another solar system. We wanna see if we can look at the Rocky planets, there's another telescope plant called HAX, which

Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Can do that. Amazing. Cuz we didn't even know there were whether there were other planets until the last 20 years. This is relatively new. Now we're starting to look for not only other planets and other systems, but other planets like the earth.

Rod Pyle (02:13:10):
Right. So, you know, it's, it's kind of easy to find the big ones because they actually affect the star. They're orbiting the Jupiter

Leo Laporte (02:13:17):
Of the you measure

Rod Pyle (02:13:17):
Of the world. Yeah. So if you measure the dimming or if you measure the motion of the star, you could, you could tell indirectly, but spotting, the Rocky ones is tough and that's the next step. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:13:27):
Rocky is good. Rocky's not hockey is good

Rod Pyle (02:13:30):
Because yeah. Now Rocky is not a big ball of gas. Rocky. We think there might be water organisms and more of us. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. More so that's what, so, you know, next 10, 15 years is gonna be really exciting in astrophysics. And

Leo Laporte (02:13:44):
If Starship gets going, cuz we discussed, I think last week you can start launching these telescopes without all this folding stuff, you know, you just jam it in there and go, you could make it outta lead if you wanted and set it up really? There's that, they're that capacious. There's that much room. It's a 30

Rod Pyle (02:13:59):
To 33 feet I think. Oh wow. So you know, for a really big one, you'd still wanna fold it, but you wouldn't need

Leo Laporte (02:14:05):
All these wouldn't have to be so much origami involved. Yeah,

Rod Pyle (02:14:08):
Exactly. There wouldn't have to be, you know, 400 hundred folds there be like three and you could have a crew out there to deploy it if you wanted.

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):
Very cool. It's it? You know, we wanted to get you on the show cuz it's time to start talking about space once again. And boy, I couldn't be happier at the kinds of things we're talking about. Rod pile need either. Thank you. Read the magazine at Astros space dots org. Thank you rod.

Rod Pyle (02:14:33):
Take care.

Leo Laporte (02:14:36):
Boy. Is that good news justice. Isn't that a relief? Oh God. Yeah. I can only imagine how they feel. There's still what they say. 47 more things they have to do or unfold or something like that.

Rod Pyle (02:14:49):
But they're not as mostly unfoldings done at just other steps, but they're not scary ones. Yeah. Like, like that, that big

Leo Laporte (02:14:56):
Mama. Yeah. That was scary. Wasn't it? Yeah, it

Rod Pyle (02:14:59):
Was really, I, I mean, honestly I, I have to say, you know, I had kinda the same reaction when I saw what the web had to do to when I did how I felt the first time I saw how the curiosity Rover was gonna land. And I was writing a book about it. I was shadowing the chief engineer, really nice guy named Rob Manning. And I said, why, you know, there's so many other ways to do this. Why? And he said, believe it or not, it was the fewest points of failure we could find. And we've tested it as far as we can. Wow. And I think the same's true with the web

Leo Laporte (02:15:29):
As simple as they could make it. In other words. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:15:32):
Yeah. Well, simple as they could make it and achieve what they want and be pretty sure things were gonna go wrong because like they, JPL guys were very fascinated with the Chinese Mars Rover because it drove down off a Lander platform. They had done that in the two thousands, but they didn't wanna do it with a big one. And it was a little different than the way JPL did it, JPL NASA did it. So their, you know, really fascinated with the Chinese program as well. Right. But man, what a time to be alive. We're still here to see this, you know?

Leo Laporte (02:16:00):
Oh, that's exciting. Now what about the big bang stuff. So is he far enough that it could actually see to almost the beginning of the universe? Is that

Rod Pyle (02:16:10):
Accurate like two to 300 million years after? So it's, it's pretty early. Yeah. I mean, it's not like, you know, the second hand's about the tick over to midnight. Right. But it's pretty darn close considering how old the universe is. 13 something billion years. That's way back there. So yeah, really early star formation, really early galaxy formation. We'll be able to see kind of the, the temper tantrums of the early

Leo Laporte (02:16:32):
Universe. What, what kind of thing could we learn from that? You

Rod Pyle (02:16:37):
Know, crawling in high inside the head of an astrophysicist is a scary place. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:16:42):
Smart people. Well, I could tell you, but it would you would not understand.

Rod Pyle (02:16:46):
I studied the stuff at UCLA. The 70 is of course all that's nonsense for the most part. But you know, you find out about the early makings of the universe and we answer a lot of questions about how

Leo Laporte (02:16:57):
We got here. I can't wait. It's so exciting

Rod Pyle (02:17:00):
That and the exoplanet thing and by the way that HAX I told you about yeah. That HAX telescope. Yeah. That's actually gonna have a star shield extended out from the front of it. So you've got the telescope tube and then you've essentially got a disc that looks kinda like a sunflower, a Daisy out, however many hundreds of feet in front of it. And that blocks the light from the star. So you can see the faint planets around the edge. So that's, it's not very big, but it's gonna be really, really effect.

Leo Laporte (02:17:28):
Interesting. It's interesting. This little mini mini eclipse it'll be creating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. How cool. Yeah. All right, rod, you've been, you don't have to call in so early you poor guy. You've been on the phone for 45 minutes for seven minutes segment. Well, but I'm gotta listen to you anyway. Well, well, if you don't mind anyway, it's nice. Not at all. And I love you background, man. <Laugh> all right. Take care next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you for letting me be your tech eye on this lovely weekend. Leo Laport, the tech eye here. Of course, thanks to the folks who make this show possible. Chief Lee professor Laura, back at the, my ship. She's pushing the buttons, playing the music, our musical director. Thank you, professor Laura, thanks to the phone. Angel Kim Shaffer. She answers the phones, gets you on the air. Thanks. Most of all, to those of you who listen, those of you who call couldn't do the show without you. We do have a few more minutes, so let's do a few more calls. I've got Christie on the line from LaHabra California. Hi Christie.

Speaker 14 (02:18:36):
Hi Leo. How are you today? I

Leo Laporte (02:18:38):
Am great. How are you?

Speaker 14 (02:18:40):
Well, I'm good. And I'm really hoping you are smarter than Honda corporations.

Leo Laporte (02:18:46):
<Laugh> I don't know about that, but go ahead.

Speaker 14 (02:18:49):
Well, I couldn't figure out why my clock on my car dash is an hour off. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, well, I, yeah, ITT just day came out and went, oh, it's not two seven. It should be 1 47.

Leo Laporte (02:19:07):
So it's an hour earlier.

Speaker 14 (02:19:12):
An hour later,

Leo Laporte (02:19:13):
Later it thinks it's an hour later than it actually is.

Speaker 14 (02:19:18):
Yeah, it seems I'm in Arizona, I guess. I dunno. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
Yeah, maybe it does. Yeah. Cause of course we now this didn't happen when we ended daylight saving time back in November, did it?

Speaker 14 (02:19:31):
No, it did not. It happened right at oh, new year's

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
E oh it's A2 K2 two. What's the date? Just outta curiosity. Do you have a date anywhere on your car?

Speaker 14 (02:19:49):
No, it does not tell me the date

Leo Laporte (02:19:52):
Apparently, but

Speaker 14 (02:19:53):
Interesting. Interestingly as I tried resetting it. Yeah. Well, the reason I'm calling you today as I was driving around listing to your show I heard a news commercial earlier that said, oh, a Honda's having a glitch. Yes. Come back at Y2K.

Leo Laporte (02:20:11):
Yes. And so let me, let me tell you that story. It says older Honda and Acura models. Are you, do you have an older Honda or Acura

Speaker 14 (02:20:22):
2012 Honda tour?

Leo Laporte (02:20:23):
Yes. And it's not a Y two K it's a Y two K two two bug. It's not the first we've heard Microsoft had one that hit on January 1st email from Microsoft's exchange servers stopped going out because it, the date was wrong. The time was wrong. Your, if you have a, a, a calendar in yours, your, your date should also be 2002, not 2020 22. This comes from Nik, which is a great publication online about cars. Apparently, according to Nik, there's not a fix. Did you try though? I'm curious because our chat room says that Honda's saying press and hold the claw button until you hear a beep from your stereo, the clock should start flashing, press four to change the hour. Well, wait a minute. That's just resetting the time. Yeah, I tried it doesn't work. It, it jumps back, huh?

Speaker 14 (02:21:23):
Yep. But I just turned on to my calendar and you are correct?

Leo Laporte (02:21:29):
Yes. Okay. So, so the problem is, and the reason it keeps getting reset is you do have a navigation system in your vehicle and it's getting from the GPS satellites. It's getting what it thinks is the correct time. So your navigation system, even when you reset says no, no, no. <Laugh> oh, no, no. You're in the year, 2002. Oh. And by the way, it also makes your phone hang up on you. I guess we lost, or maybe your battery died. According to Nik, they asked Honda about the cause of the issue. This is a Honda statement. America Honda is a era of a potential concern relating to the clock display in certain older Acura and Honda models, equipped with nav systems we're currently investigating. <Laugh>. What they're gonna have to do is they're gonna have to change your software. The software on the vehicle is misinterpreting the date.

Leo Laporte (02:22:31):
And they say, you're gonna experience this through August, 2022, and then it will auto correct. <Laugh> not just by the way in the us, because I see also in the UK it's happening they're either gonna have to take, bring the car in and, and update the firmware, which is possible, you know, they can do that. It's just software. But unfortunately, I don't think you have over the year updates on your Honda, so you're gonna have to bring it in and the dealer can do this or you can wait till August Microsoft's problem. Very similar. The engineer who had written some code to determine the version of the program, I guess never thought the program would still be used in the year 20, 22. So he set it up that it couldn't get to 2022. It used, you know a calculation that meant it would always be forever 20, 21.

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
Microsoft's fix for this <laugh> maybe Honda will do this was to say, okay, it doesn't ever turn to 2022. We just go to December 32nd, December 33rd, 34th, 35th. We are currently on December 40th, 2021 on these Microsoft servers. That was the fix. <Laugh> maybe Honda will do the same thing. Sorry. That's happening to you. There is no fix it's the GPS, it's the GPS. And and they're just misinterpreting the, the data they're getting from the GPS. It, it's hard to know exactly, but apparently it's misunderstanding. It was set up in such a way that they could, they didn't never think you'd get to 20, 22, I guess. Weird Ellen Rochester, New York. Hello, Ellen. Leo. Leport the tech guy.

Caller #8 (02:24:36):
Oh, hi. Thank you for taking my call. Thanks for calling. Yeah. I'm a 73 year old semi semi literate, very computer person. And I have an iMac 10 who will not allow me to get into my emails. It says frontier captive portal. And it says, you, you seem to reach, you've heard this before.

Leo Laporte (02:25:05):
No, but I know what a captive portal is. So you're you're a internet service provider is frontier. Yeah. Okay.

Caller #8 (02:25:12):
And you seem to have reached this page by mistake. Yes. Depending on the program you use, it may be necessary to clear your cash or restart your browser in order to access the

Leo Laporte (02:25:23):
Website, a captive portal. You know, when you go to a coffee shop and you try to use their wifi, you get a page that pops up that says you have to agree to our terms of services. First that's a captive portal. It's a broken system, but unfortunately one that's widely used. It's not something fi you frontier should be used on a home router ever. So it's probably an issue I'm gonna guess with the frontier router itself. So a couple of things I would do. What version of Mac OS have you gotten to as an older Mac? Can you get it to a more recent version by any chance?

Caller #8 (02:26:00):
Do you know? I's see, I have the model number a 14, 1 41 B or 1 48.

Leo Laporte (02:26:10):
Okay. 

Caller #8 (02:26:13):
It's an iMac. M 1 42 L a.

Leo Laporte (02:26:18):
Okay. <Laugh> wow.

Caller #8 (02:26:21):
I got the box, right? You bought, you

Leo Laporte (02:26:23):
Bought. Yeah, no, that's good. You bought it about 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So two it's late 2009 iMac. So you probably aren't getting the latest operating system. I don't know if that would fix that or not. I think this is actually an error in the router. So what I would suggest you do is you go over to your frontier, you know, the box that's connected to the cable. Yes. Unplug it. And, and while you're doing that unplug anything else that is it connected? Is it sometimes you have a dual cable, modem and router. Sometimes you have separate devices unplug. 'em Both. If you've got two unplug the one, if you do wait 10 can plug it in again, then try again. And I'm gonna hope that that's gonna fix it. Unfortunately, if it doesn't we're out of time, but I will be back next week.

Leo Laporte (02:27:14):
I wanna thank you all for being here. And I wish you the best have a great safe geek week. Leo port D tech on, well, that's it for the tech I show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget TWI T w I T. It stands for this week at tech, and you'll find it@twi.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh on Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all 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 16 (02:28:06):
I.