The Tech Guy Episode 1866 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. 

Announcer: (00:02)
Podcasts. You love from people you trust. This is TWIT.

Leo Laporte: (00:10)
Hi, this is Leo Laporteand this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, February 6th, 2022. This is episode 1,866. Good join the tech I podcast is brought to you by ITProTV. Are you looking to break into the world of IT? Get the introduction you need with ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/twit for an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions for the lifetime of your active subscription when you use code TWIT30 at checkout.

(00:46)
And don't forget, we are doing our annual survey. It really is a big help to, uh, Lisa and the team, uh, help both selling the shows, but also knowing what you want, what you like and what you don't like. We do this survey once a year. We don't want to track people.

Leo Laporte: (01:01)
We don't want intrude on your privacy, so it's completely voluntary, but it only takes a few minutes and it really does help us. So if you're interested, twit dot TV slash survey 22, let us know what you think, who you are, uh, how you listen in that kind of thing. twit.tv/survey 22. And thanks in advance. I appreciate it. You don't have to say you like the tech guy show it's okay.

Leo Laporte: (01:29)
Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo? LePort here. The tech guy. Yeah. Time to talk computers, computers, the internet. Yeah, sure. You betcha. Home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, augmented reality, virtual reality, all that kind of thing. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. You could still call, but you'd have to use Skype or something like that. 88 88, ask Leo website tech. I labs.com. All the shows are there. This is episode 1,866. You'll find links after the fact and audio and video of the show as well. And I know a lot of people want the songs that professor Laura, our musical director performs with her orchestra, uh, during the breaks. And those will all be listed as well. Uh, their tech guy labs.com.

Leo Laporte: (02:30)
Oh, well, let's see. What's going on in the world. I, uh, I feel like at some point I should probably explain what's going on with these new concepts, web three. You probably heard of that. It's all the rage now NFTs, maybe, maybe more likely you've heard of that. I was watching a clip from the tonight show Jimmy Fallon, uh, showing his board ape NFT for which he paid a quarter of a million dollars. Uh, and, uh, I guess he was comparing his NFT with, uh, his guests NFT, uh, I guess Paris Hilton also bought a board ape.

Leo Laporte: (03:26)
Um, let me see, what did, what did, uh, so Fallon bought his for $216,000. Oh, oh, that's nothing. And I think that, uh, Paris Hilton spent a little more on her board. Ape. What is a board ape and why would you buy it? B O R E D. We now know that board apes are created by two, uh, fellas in Florida who, uh, are not artists interestingly, but they hired an artist. They came up with the idea, you know, and I'm thinking, uh, just behind the scenes, kind of, you know, imagining in my mind, this is roughly how, how the conversation went. You know, you can make a lot of money with NFTs. You just put 'em on the market. People buy 'em. Do you see what people are spending for these zombies? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. We should, you know, we got nothing else to do.

Leo Laporte: (04:13)
We're just hanging out. We should make an NFT and sell it. Yeah. You're not an artist store, you know, mid, no, you create anything? No. Well, let's hire an artist. What should he draw? I don't know. Monkeys. Board apes. Okay. They're bored. Yeah. It's the board ape. This is the whole concept board ape yacht club. Great. And then what we paint? Uh, we draw these and we sell the original. No, no, no. This is the beauty of it. You don't sell anything. You sell a link to the board ape and the person who spent like Jimmy Fallon $216,000 can say I own it. But, uh, if he wants to hang it on, the wall has to do like anybody else does, which is printed out and hang it up because everybody can still access it. You just own it. It's yours. Yeah. How much money we can make?

Leo Laporte: (05:04)
Well, here's the deal. The real money comes after the sale. Really? How's that work? Well, somebody buys it for, what's say a thousand bucks or 10,000 bucks, but then every time they sell it, we get two and a half percent. Really? Yes. And because the person who spent a thousand bucks for it really doesn't want it. What can you do with it? He's gonna wanna sell it on it's. It's like buying tulip bulbs. It's just, you know, you sell it on and that's when you make the money. It's a, it's called speculative. Oh, okay. So, and then we get a little bit of everything that yes. And it goes up. So the first person who bought it pay thousand, but he, you know, said, oh, I got the board ape. You wish you had a board ape. Yes, I do. How much? 2000, 5,000, 10,000.

Leo Laporte: (05:50)
A hundred thousand, 216,000 last, November, hundreds of thousands today. And every time it sells these two guys in Florida, get, get a little bit of it. So that's an NFT you've you certainly heard of Bitcoin. And, and Bitcoin is a, one of a number of currencies, like the dollar or the Y or the mark or the pound, my money, money, money. But it's, uh, not backed by a government. And it's what they call a Fiat currency. Like the dollar Fiat being the Latin word for faith. You gotta have faith, faith, faith, because the dollar, I don't know if you've noticed, it's just a piece of paper and the only reason it's worth anything is cuz you and I agree now the dollar's nice cuz the government also agrees and you know, they don't, they don't, they kind of sort of back it, but not, you know, but like, well it's the us government.

Leo Laporte: (06:53)
So the dollar, you know, you still have to have a little faith coin. Well there's no, it's just, we agree. It's worth something. By the way that there seems to be a lot of disagreement, cuz it was at one point worth $60,000 of Bitcoin. Uh, now it's a little bit less, a lot less it's $41,000 still a lot, especially for the people. And this is important who got in when it was 50 cents or a buck or even better when they just, all they did is set up a computer with some software and it, it quote, I'm putting this in quotes mind. The, it made Bitcoin, my friend, Steve Gibson early on in the Bitcoin days. It's pretty easy set up, set up a computer, put thing next morning. 50 Bitcoin popped out. Now at the time that's maybe 50 bucks. Maybe not even that much $25. So you didn't pay too much attention to it. 50 Bitcoin when there worth $60,000, each is $3 million. That's a lot of money. Is that right? Yeah. So it's a lot. I don't know. It's a lot now it's only, oh, nothing. Right? It's only worth $41,000.

Leo Laporte: (08:08)
What, what good is that? Oh, it's a, you know, it's a little bit of money. $2 million. Yeah. It's a little bit of money and he didn't do anything. He just came out so big. But why, how do we know what it's worth? Well, it's worth whatever anybody will spend for it. And that's the key, it's a speculative investment. And of course there's something critical to Bitcoin and NFTs. The people who hold them have a strong incentive to puff. 'em up, encourage you to think they're worth something. This is gonna change the world. It's gonna change the world. So you should buy some from me.

Leo Laporte: (08:47)
Uh that's you know, a speculative market. That's how it works. Uh, Bitcoin is a bad, uh, you know, El Salvador decided to use it as their currency, bad choice because you don't want a currency. That's gonna lose, uh, 50% of its, uh, value, uh, in three days and then go back up in four days and then go back down. That's not a good, that's why people like the dollar it's kind of stable. It's stables. So the Bitcoin bros, there are many who have made billions, where does that money come from? The billions. Oh, it comes from the people who came later and bought it. Hmm. For instance, if you were to buy a Bitcoin today for $41,000, you might think, well, that's good because in, uh, you know, it's gonna go back to 60 at some point, right? Yeah. Maybe only if you find another sucker, I mean person to buy it, uh, and enough people and then it goes up.

Leo Laporte: (09:43)
So anyway, and I mean the dollar's the same, but because it's got this big institution called the federal government behind, it, it kind of is a little more stable than, than imaginary money, Fiat currency based, nothing. The key ingredient to that is called blockchain. And then the idea is, and this is a little hard to get, but I think you can get, I, I don't think it's that I it's taken me years to wrap my mind around it. But if you think about the us dollar, you haven't, you don't for a lot of the things you do these days, you don't have a dollar bill in your hand and go and give a it to somebody. You it's digital, you have it in your bank and it gets transferred. And uh, maybe it's a credit card, but you don't actually hold currency a lot of the times, unless you're buying gumballs or you know, a cup of coffee at Starbucks, maybe even then you just tap in your watch against the thing.

Leo Laporte: (10:31)
So it's bits. So it really doesn't look any different than Bitcoin. Not at all, all, but the difference is it's the value of it. And the money you have is held by a central authority, your bank, for instance, or the federal reserve, or, you know, there's some central authority who has a ledger that says, well, Leo has $5 and 33 cents in his bank account. So don't let him take any more out that kind of thing, blah, blockchain's a little different. The there's no central ledger. There's no bank, there's no government. This is what blockchain of fish autos. And this is all cryptocurrencies. By the way, you could say E which is short for Ethereum or DOJ coin or any of them, uh, it's the, who has what is held in a ledger. Yes, but the Ledger's held by everybody. It's decent. Has everybody who has a Bitcoin wallet, has the ledger.

Leo Laporte: (11:22)
If you have your, you know, your personal possession of your wallet, uh, then you have, uh, on your hard drive, uh, hundred gigabytes or so of transactions grows all the time. Cuz there's more transactions. So that ledger is not held by a bank it's held by everybody decentral lies. And that's what that's, what's kind of interesting about. So that's blockchain. The idea of a blockchain, really, it doesn't have to do with money, has to do with the idea. It's a database, a ledger of something of some kind that everybody has access to and everybody keeps track of. And there's no central authority and FTS, same thing who owns the board. Apes is in a ledger. That's how we know that Jimmy Fallon spent $216,000. Cause we could figure it out. Cuz in November somebody bought that board ape for that amount of money. Yeah. It must have been Jimmy.

Leo Laporte: (12:08)
Uh, it's all in a ledger somewhere. Every everywhere, not somewhere everywhere. We all you all, everybody can have it if they want it. So that's the idea behind this new thing, web three, the web, the web, the way it works right now is there's some centralized location where your stuff is your website, your Facebook, Facebook has a bunch of servers and you know, it's decentralized, but it owns all of them. And so it's all an in some network operations center owned by Facebook, somewhere in the world. Uh, a lot of, lot of companies, our website, if you go to tech guy labs.com, that's on Amazon's web services, AWS. So it's somewhere it's on a computer somewhere, uh, accessible via the internet. That's what the cloud is, by the way, just a bunch of computers accessible by the internet. Web three, the idea is, oh, we don't want centralized servers. This you can kind of, you could maybe see where this is going. We wanna put everything on the blockchain. So websites live forever on this blockchain that everybody has access to.

Leo Laporte: (13:11)
I'm not sure how this is an improvement. People. People like the idea of that. No, I think this just kind of all kind of comes from this, uh, point of view that we don't like authority. It's anti authority. We don't want a centralized authority. We not go, we don't want government. We don't want banks. We just, everybody just let it all hang out. I only mention this. So you understand what, when you see all this hype about this, you understand the hype comes from people who stand to make money from it important to understand you are not gonna make money on it. Probably Jimmy Fallon, maybe he'll make money on his board, ape it's in his interest to go on the tonight show and say, look, my board ape. I, this is worth something. Please buy it, please. It's kind of a little bit looks like kind of a pyramid scheme. You know, early people made money later. People lose money. Everybody's unhappy. Anyway, I, you know, if you say that, by the way, the people who have an investment in this, they're gonna get very angry. They don't like it because why, well then you're making it worth only $40,000. And I don't like that. I hope I've explained that. 88 88 ask Leah, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and we are gonna talk tech right after this.

Leo Laporte: (14:31)
Yeah, I'm a boomer. It's the next big thing. Hello Sam. Hello Leo. How are you today? Oh, the postal service. Yeah. He's sitting in front of a truck today. That is funny. Talk

Speaker 2: (14:50)
About the, uh, the new

Leo Laporte: (14:51)
Eight miles a gallon. Huh? That's good.

Speaker 2: (14:54)
Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I mean you gotta keep in mind, you know, this is a vehicle that is based on a Ford transit. The last time I used a Ford transit to help my daughter move, you know, driving around town. Love the, you got about 12, 12 miles per gallon. Yeah. That's a great vehicle

Leo Laporte: (15:09)
For where the is, but not very yet. Yeah.

Speaker 2: (15:11)
Yeah. You know, this, this new postal truck is quite a bit larger than the current generation ones. It's got a lot more payload capability got better windshield. What? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, you know, it's what they, the postal service, you know, specked out, this is what they said they want because you know, they're carrying more packages doing more deliveries now than before. Yeah. So they, they wanted something thing that, you know, could, could, um, you know, do that kind of use case, but you know, it's still used, you know, the, the use case, you know, it's, you go through neighborhoods and you stop every 50, 60 feet, you know, to put stuff in the mailbox, uh, or drop off a package. Uh, you know, it is the worst possible use case for fuel efficiency. So I'm not surprised that it gets eight and a half miles per gallon. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, this is, they should run it on Bitcoin kinda vehicle. That should be electric. Put

Leo Laporte: (15:59)
It on blockchain. It won so much.

Speaker 2: (16:01)
That'll yeah. That'll work

Leo Laporte: (16:03)
Anyway. I don't want you to use all your material. So hang in there and we will talk. All right. So, oh, just, uh, you probably saw Lisa's tweets, but just an update on the mini Cooper sake. Yeah. It's in San Francisco now because they couldn't figure out what the hell to do in the, at the dealer. We bought it from and in San Francisco guy, very nice guy called up Lisa and said, well, the whole power train shot for some reason. So we're gonna send a Germany for a new, the battery, everything, a new everything. We're gonna put the new everything in and then we'll figure out what's wrong. Cause we can't figure out now cuz the everything's dead.

Speaker 2: (16:45)
Just give her a new car.

Leo Laporte: (16:48)
Well, I think she's gonna go for the lemon law thing because uh, they already said getting the saying the new, what they call em Emme or something from Germany is gonna cost take three to four weeks. So she's got the 30 day thing. So I think that's what we're gonna do. That's very, just insane. Yeah. It's too bad. I mean she really, she really loved that car. Uh, but uh, it only went 800 miles before it, before it

Speaker 2: (17:14)
Dies on this, I'd recommend, uh, go get, uh, Hyundai Kona, EV

Leo Laporte: (17:20)
She now she's I don't want to get a gas vehicle EVs. Aren't ready for prime time. I said, but Lisa look at my Ford. It's great. No, they're not ready for prime time. So she's just gonna get a, some sort of ice ice vehicle and

Speaker 2: (17:37)
That's the, it goes, I, I mean, I can't blame her for being upset, you know? Yeah. I don't blame her. You plus you know, you guys have had the challenges with the, the bolt. Um,

Leo Laporte: (17:48)
Yeah, but we're living with the bolt. Uh, they're gonna eventually get a new battery. They're starting to get some, they got two batteries. They're

Speaker 2: (17:53)
I mean, I mean, I can understand why she feels that they're still not quite ready for prime

Leo Laporte: (17:57)
Time now. Yeah. Uh, it's too bad cuz I'm a big fan, but uh, you know, that's life. She never, she never liked the Tesla. She hated the model X. So that's pretty funny. Yeah. Pretty pretty funny.

Speaker 2: (18:18)
This is crazy. So power, electronics

Leo Laporte: (18:20)
Module, the whole thing. Well, yeah. And then, uh, BMW has a name, some German acronym. Yeah. Uh, and,

Speaker 2: (18:28)
And they, they call it motor electronics, but that's it, especially,

Leo Laporte: (18:30)
This is the, the entire thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2: (18:34)
This is the inverter. This is what converts between DC from the battery. And,

Leo Laporte: (18:37)
But they're taking out the battery too. Apparently. I mean, I don't know how good our information is, but that's what the guy said is we're we're placing everything anyway. We're talking a few it's

Speaker 2: (18:46)
Nuts. All right.

Leo Laporte: (18:53)
I believe in miracles. Where are you from you Kim shot for you? Hello? I only think of

Speaker 3: (19:02)
Male strippers when

Leo Laporte: (19:03)
I hear this song. It's from magic Mike, isn't it right? Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Or is it magic Mike or is it uh, the other one? I don't know. Uh, I like it. Yeah. It's a good song. Is it hot chocolate? Is that who singing is? Yeah, isn't it? Yes. Oh my goodness. Hot chocolate. Very good. You must have been golden star DJ in your earlier life or worked on a lottery. It's funny because, uh, that's amazing. I still remember the, you know, radio stations now don't play now. They played all digitally for a while. I was on a record. And then in between it was on a thing like an eight track called tape cartridge or cart carts. And I still remember the cart numbers for all the high rotation hits. Oh, that's bad from, this is like 1980. That's

Speaker 3: (19:47)
Like the, the people that work at Costco that used to rattle off the numbers when they see the product, I was so

Leo Laporte: (19:53)
Impressed with them, but well you just, you can't help it. You keep that in your head. Yeah. Forever. I gotta warn you useless knowledge. 40 years later, we went, when I told we went to Carmel of over the week, just for a day trip or a couple of day trip and we stopped at my first, uh, commercial radio station on cannery row in Monte Clint, they're playing

Speaker 3: (20:12)
Misty for you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (20:14)
Yeah. Kinda like that. It was fun. We took a picture out front and cute. And then I thought, how long ago was this? And then when I realized, I said, don't, I don't wanna think about that. Who should I talk to?

Speaker 3: (20:26)
Ah, oh yeah. Calls calls. Um, Greg and Monrovia has lots of pictures that he wants a lot of people all over the

Leo Laporte: (20:33)
Place to be able to view. Nice. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's an interesting conundrum. Hello, Greg from Monrovia Leo Laport, the tech guy.

Speaker 4: (20:44)
Hi Leo. I am a long time listener to Mac break weekly and to this show as well. Nice. And um, and uh, I, uh, I have a, a MacBook, uh, with a, in one chip and I have, uh, a, uh, fast photo eon to I ha and I have about 10, uh, banker boxes. Oh boy. Oh

Leo Laporte: (21:06)
And that's oh, that's thousands of photos. So the fast photo is Epson's fast photo scanner and it has a sheet feed that handles prints. So it's actually a good way to scan it. Um, so you're gonna scan 'em all

Speaker 4: (21:24)
Right. And what I, what I I'd like to be able to do is scan them all. And then most of these are for my wife's families, for her to be able to then sit down with her iPad and ID them all. And I don't know what, oh,

Leo Laporte: (21:39)
That's cool. So they would go, oh, that's aunt mod and there's uncle Henry. He was such a scaly wagon like that.

Speaker 4: (21:47)
Yes. And back. And she knows them back generations. Having sat down with people who are now passed, she really knows who they all are. And so for me to scan them with my, um, MacBook and then something that she can easily access on our iPad and, and then easily identify 'em question, what software would be good to do that with, but also what, uh, where these could be stored, where they could be easily access, uh, accessible to her. And then when we get 'em in some sort of O order so that the extended family could then see them all and do with them, whatever they like, because we're gonna be old folks. And so these needs to be able to get to the next generation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (22:33)
There, there're actually quite a few ways to do this. These days. You want a way to store the photos, share them with family members and allow them to comment, uh, are, are the other family members sophisticated enough computer wise, to be able to do that on a computer?

Speaker 4: (22:47)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually the next generation down from us Google.

Leo Laporte: (22:52)
Oh good. So they're all hippy. Yeah. So, um, so, uh, Google photos is a great start. Google photos has face recognition too, which means that once somebody identifies an mod, Google photos will go out and find all the pictures with ant mod, which is very helpful. They shared libraries. Uh, so that's a good place to start. Uh, if you're an Amazon prime member, they have a similar feature, Amazon photos. Then there's also sites like Shutterfly, which are photo printing sites. And the reason I like setting it up to Shutterfly besides the fact that it's free forever is they'll make prints. So family can say, I want that picture of aunt Mo. I'm gonna hang that on the wall and they don't have to come to you. They can literally order it from Shutterfly. So there's three good choices. I wanna tell you some more, but hang on Leo, LePort the tech guy, then the final, the final piece would be maybe uploading once you've identified these people somewhere like ancestry.com to the family tree, because, you know, if you ever get somebody in the family, who's interest, my daughter, all of a sudden wants to know her genealogy.

Leo Laporte: (24:03)
So she goes to answer ancestry.com and she's downloading family. And having those documents there, I think would be a nice, a nice idea, or if not, uh, uh, ancestry.com, which is a commercial entity, which will, by the way, let you upload these, um, not huge amounts, but upload them to family trees and stuff like that. Uh, the Mormon genealogical database or something like that. Um, uh, allowing that, allowing those to be stored there, I think would be nice for future, uh, generations. So family search.org would be, uh, another one. So it's an interesting idea, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 4: (24:40)
I agree. The weakest link in all of this, Leo is my wife who needs to do the identification. So the, the first piece of this is what, what is gonna be the easiest way for her to look at these and identify these? Is that gonna be through Google?

Leo Laporte: (24:54)
Yeah, I think so. So what you'll do is you'll create, um, now, by the way, the free tier on Google may not be enough for tens of thousands of photos. I don't know how many you've got, but Google drives not expensive. Um, and so you might end up paying for some storage, uh, a few bucks a month, not a huge amount. I mean, we're talking in that on the order of that, but what you can do is create a shared album that you can send the link to everybody still private, unless people have access to that. You can even make it, you have to log in, uh, so that everybody has access to it. The nice thing about that is they can also upload to it. So it's a really nice system for events, FA weddings, uh, reunions, uh, travel events, where you have a bunch of people who might be taking pictures. If other family members may also have these images, it'd be nice if you get 'em all in one place, easy to comment. So you can add the comments. Uh, you can also add, which might be interesting geographic coordinates. So if she knows, oh, like my family's all from Holyoke mass, if you put Holyoke as the location of these photos, that's kind of a useful thing. So I think Google photos is a good choice. Um, but again, um, yeah, I think for her that'd be the easiest. Yeah.

Speaker 4: (26:11)
Okay. Yeah. And so it'd be easier for, and how do, so we would be able to log into something that is not my identity or her identity. It would just be the identity for that.

Leo Laporte: (26:24)
You could, well, so it would, could be your Google account or you could create a fresh should count just for this. Okay. And then it would be, you know, family genealogy@gmail.com.

Speaker 4: (26:35)
Got it. Got it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate your show and many of the shows that you have, uh, on your network, but, uh, you so much,

Leo Laporte: (26:44)
Especially, I'm glad you listened to Mac break weekly. That's great. Thank you. I really do.

Speaker 4: (26:48)
I appreciate, I appreciate this show so much. I've sent lot people to the show too.

Leo Laporte: (26:52)
Bless you. Hey, thank you, Greg. Have fun with that project. It sounds like a great project. I will. Yeah. Thanks so much. All right. Okay. Byebye. All right, Sam. Alrighty. Right. Did you guys have a nice time in Carmel? Oh, it was so nice. We had so much fun. We didn't realize that the at and T was that is that it was this past weekend. So there were a lot of golfers.

Speaker 2: (27:15)
Oh, oh, golf tournament.

Leo Laporte: (27:16)
Yeah. The Crosby clam bake as we used to call it. But since I grew up in Santa Cruz and I, my worked in, lived in Pacific Grove. I showed Lisa my old haunts. We went past the high school and the, my old house. And we visited my, uh, place on mermaid lane and Pacific Grove that I used to live. And it was fun. We went to the old radio station, but then Carmel is so beautiful. We thought we wanna move here. We love Carmel. You pro have you been there for the Concord? Degos uh,

Speaker 2: (27:44)
No, I have yet to be invited down by anybody for that. Um, cuz it's too expensive to go on my own time. Yeah. Yeah. But uh, um, we, uh, my wife and I did, uh, spend a long weekend there a few years back and uh, really enjoyed it. Oh,

Leo Laporte: (27:59)
It's so quaint. It is. It's awesome. So pretty, I hadn't been there in a few years, least since the parents honeymoon there like 58 years ago. And so we went and visited the hotel where they honeymoon and oh, it was so fun. It was just, we had such a good time. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. The tech I show brought to you this week, uh, as it often is by those great folks at it pro TV, such a of it pro TV. I feel a little proprietary, to be honest with you. I feel like, um, they, uh, they kind of, when they first launched, they came to us and they said, we admire you. We kind of copied what you're doing, but we're doing it for it training. Can you tell the world about it? And we said, yeah. And we've become great friends with Tim and Don and the, the founders.

Leo Laporte: (28:48)
And I just think it's fantastic. There's one thing everyone knows about it, right? It's it's that it's changing all the time and you, so you need a partner, uh, an educational resource. So even if you're already working in the business, you're keeping up to date. And of course, if you're starting to get into the business, you need to get those initial certs under your belt, the tests and everything. So you can go to your first job and say, look, I got the skills it pro does both as an it professional, it'll help you learn and apply new skills. Uh re-certify if you need to it pro TV keeps up to date with the latest content. They've got seven studios running all day, Monday through Friday because the tests change. The certs change. Microsoft just dumped its MCSE certs for a whole new set of certs, but guess what?

Leo Laporte: (29:37)
It pro TV's there they've they immediately jump on it. Stuff goes from their studios into, uh, their library within 24 hours. So you're getting the latest, greatest instruction. They just released a new, this is really, uh, cool comp tea. Uh, the pen test, plus I didn't know they had this one for pen testers. They just released this new CompTIA pen test plus course EDU tens. They call 'em that cuz they're fun, but they're also smart. I love Ronnie Wong, Daniel Lowry. Uh, they teach this one. They are really smart, really expert, but they also keep it light and fun. You'll be learning pen testing, penetration, testing, vulnerability assessment management skills is an 18 hour course. And what a great course, what a great skill to have, whether you're new to it, it or an it professional. And by the way, you can also, if you're getting ready for exams, let's say you wanna take this pen test plus they have practice exams so you can practice.

Leo Laporte: (30:34)
It's good an idea to do that at least once. So you get to use to the idea of how the test work, but also, so you know whether you're ready for the test, right? Uh, the monthly theme, they do this every month. And I guess this is why pen test plus is, uh, is, uh, on the docket because this month it's hacking month February's hacking month, two webinars for you to catch one called blueprint for a successful pen test is coming up on the 10th tips and tricks to maximize your investment. That's PM Eastern on February 10th. Uh, start your ethical hacking career. A pen testers guide that's February 24th at 2:00 PM. Eastern Philip Wiley will be the host of that. He wrote the pen tester's blueprint, starting a career as an ethical hacker. Wouldn't this be a fun, uh, skill to have, you know, to get into it and be a pen tester, get, get all your hacking out in, in a legit way.

Leo Laporte: (31:25)
Uh, it pro TV's free hacking weekend is coming up on the 19th and the 20th courses it'll be free, uh, for that weekend pen test plus PTO. Oh, oh two hands on with hacking, uh, certified ethical hacker C HV, 11 penetration testing tools and technique Linux, shell scripting basics. So some really great courses. Those are free on their hacking weekend, February 19th and 20th level up your it team too. They've got a great plan for businesses. Check out the it pro TV business plan for your team today. As an individual, as a business, there's nowhere better to learn from enthusiastic experts in the field. Their enthusiasm is contagious. You'll feel it too. You'll be excited. I am. It's really cool. If you're looking to break into the world of it, get the introduction you need with it. Pro TV, visit it pro.tv/twi. You'll get an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions.

Leo Laporte: (32:21)
As long as you stay active, the offer code is to quit 30. Okay. T w I T 30. So two things. Remember it. pro.tv/twi offer code TWI 30. You probably wanna remember all those dates too, but you'll find it. If you go to the website, it pro.tv/twi, please use that offer code TWI 30 for an additional 30% off for the lifetime of your active subscription is an amazing deal. It pro TV builder, expand your it career and enjoy the journey. We thank of so much. We've been, uh, friends for years and I know very, uh, lot of people who watch our shows are, uh, it pros thanks it pro TV. So it's, it's a nice relationship. It pro.tv/twi. Make sure you use that. So they know you saw it here. It's time to talk automotive technology with Sam, a Sam. He is a principle researcher at guy house insights, the, uh, podcast wheel, uh, beloved by car autos everywhere. He joins us every week to talk about well automotive technology. Hi, Sam from Ilan was, it was minus five. Wasn't it? The other day I saw your Instagram. Holy yeah,

Speaker 2: (33:34)
Something like that. Yeah, it was, it was just, uh, just under zero. The, uh, we got a bunch of snow, uh, the other day. Not quite as much as they got in the Northeast. Uh, but uh, we got about eight, nine inches around here. Nice. So it, it was, it was kind of nasty because it started off that morning at about 37. So it was raining and then gradually got colder and colder. Oh, that's the worst. Oh, it is do it in stages. Yeah. Get out there just as it was getting to, to freezing and shovel the shovel, the, uh, slush out of the way before it froze and then I could take care of the snow later. So yeah. But,

Leo Laporte: (34:07)
Uh, that's the worst. Yeah,

Speaker 2: (34:09)
But we survived that through it. No problem. It's another winter

Leo Laporte: (34:13)
Now you're sitting in front of a perfect snow vehicle. Uh, this is a picture of, and I've seen before the, uh, the new ups, uh, us P S United post U United States postal service, the, the post offices trucks

Speaker 2: (34:30)
Delivery trucks. Yeah. It's kind of an odd looking little beast. Yeah. Um,

Leo Laporte: (34:33)
Short, good big window.

Speaker 2: (34:35)
Yep. But that's all based on the specs, the, the postal service, um, provided when they did the request for, for proposals on this back starting. I think the, it started back in 2015.

Leo Laporte: (34:47)
This is a big deal though, because they'll buy a lot of 'em

Speaker 2: (34:50)
Yeah. About 186,000, geez, uh, units. Is it a

Leo Laporte: (34:55)
Done deal? They, when you say bought, that sounds like they already did or

Speaker 2: (34:58)
Well, they selected, you know, they, they started off, there were four bidders in the process. They got it down to two last year and made the final selection with a company called Oshkosh defense who makes a lot of trucks for the military and Oshkosh partnered with Ford. So this thing is based on the underpinnings of a Ford transit van. Oh, um, you know, so the, the way it looks is because of the specs that the postal service gave out, you know, they, the, the current postal trucks, the so-called LL V w or long life, um, uh, vehicle, uh, was designed for a 20 year lifespan, uh, that was 40 years ago. Um, and right now the, the average age of the, the unit still left in the fleet, uh, hundred about 180,000 of these things is over 30 years, really about 32 or 33 years.

Speaker 2: (35:46)
Wow. Yeah. Wow. Well, these things actually have had a very long life, long life is right. And, and, you know, they're not very fuel efficient. Uh, they don't have modern things like airbag line, spot monitoring, air conditioning, um, and you know, the way that the postal service, you know, their, their business has trans transitioned transformed in recent years, they're doing a lot more package and parcel delivery than they used to. So part of the reason why this truck looks the way it does, because it's, it's larger because they wanted to accommodate more, more payload, more packages. Um, and the downside of that is because it's larger, it's less fuel efficient, um, than it might otherwise be. Um, the, the, the, uh, proposal from Oshkosh included both gas engine and electric versions of this, uh, and it would be up to the proposal service to decide what mix they wanted. Oh,

Leo Laporte: (36:40)
Um, see electric seems like it would make a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: (36:43)
It certainly would given that these things, you know, generally only go maybe no more than 40 or 50 miles a day. Yeah. And for the vast majority of them, and, you know, when they're out operating, they're stopping and starting about every 50 or 60 feet perfect. As we go from one mailbox,

Leo Laporte: (36:58)
You want a golf cart.

Speaker 2: (37:00)
Exactly. And so for some reason, Lewis DeJoy is still the postmaster general of the United States. Um, I have no idea why he is still in that position, but, um, it's complicated decision made the decision that, yeah, we're, we're gonna order no more than 10% of these to be electrified. The rest are gonna gas engine. Hmm. And the EPA sent a strongly ordered letter to the postal service this week, um, rejecting their environmental impact statement that, uh, uh, that they submitted for this deal.

Leo Laporte: (37:31)
Well, it seems like it would also be more costly, uh, in the long run, wouldn't it? In, in the

Speaker 2: (37:35)
Long run. Yes. Um, maybe

Leo Laporte: (37:37)
Initially you have to buy the battery. The

Speaker 2: (37:39)
EVs are gonna be a little more expensive. Yeah. Uh, but over the long run, one of the things that, that the EPA specifically cited in here, the, the postal service did not publicly disclose the total cost of ownership for the new vehicles and the environmental impact study and their TCO report analysis that served as the basis for the selection is not transparent and is potentially flawed and out of date. Um, you know, because as I said, this thing is based on the Ford transit, uh,

Leo Laporte: (38:05)
Van, which is a, which isn't the most efficient vehicle.

Speaker 2: (38:08)
No, it's not. I mean, I, I, I used one, uh, about a year and a half ago to help my daughter move and driving around town here. I got about 12 miles per gallon. Um, with this postal service vehicle, uh, they're saying about eight and a half miles per

Leo Laporte: (38:21)
Gallon, you might as well get a Hummer if you're gonna do that.

Speaker 2: (38:24)
Well, yeah. I mean, the Hummer's gonna do even worse you in the type of use case at this incident. Cause you're

Leo Laporte: (38:29)
Stopping, oh, it's starting, stopping and starting. That makes it so bad. Yeah, sure,

Speaker 2: (38:32)
Exactly. Yeah. Uh, you know, if you were just driving it at constant 35, 40 miles an hour, yeah. It's not gonna be anywhere near that bad. Right. But it's a perfect application for an electric vehicle. And for some reason, you know, they, they have decided, you know, that only a very small percentage of them initially are gonna be electric, you know, but Ford is now building and shipping that the E transits, they have version of the transit that has a battery and an electric motor and everything. They could very easily just drop that in here. And really that's, you know, it's up to the postal service. They should be doing this. They should be, they should be ordering these with electric power trains, at least the vast majority of them. Now that also means that they're gonna have to spend some money up front on install, charging infrastructure at the postal stations.

Speaker 2: (39:17)
But again, the, the way these things are used, they drive around all day and then they sit parked at night. Um, so you, these aren't running 24 hours a day, so you perfect application seems like, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can charge these things overnight. Um, so you don't, you don't have to spend nearly as much, you know, as it would be for say, uh, something like a robo taxi where you wanna be operating 24 hours a day, uh, you can, you can do slow charging and it would be fine. Uh, and you don't even need a gigantic battery for these again, because, you know, you don't need, you don't need four or 500 miles of range with this. You can use a smaller battery, it gets you a hundred of range and it, it would be more than adequate. Um, so, uh, you know, the, the postal service really needs to be reconsidering.

Speaker 2: (40:05)
Uh, the, the decision, well, will they, or is it a done deal? Uh, no, it's not a done deal. So, so far the postal service, um, you know, once they made the decis, once they made the choice of Oshkosh over workhorse group last year, they awarded Oshkosh a 482 million contract to complete the development of the vehicle and the validation of the vehicle. Um, and, uh, and they did that before they had done any analysis of the environmental impacts of the project as required by the, uh, national environmental policy act. Um, so, you know, the, the total, the total deal is worth about 11 billion. You know, when you factor in, you know, up to 180,000 vehicles and charging infrastructure. So they've, they've barely spent anything at all so far. Um, and it's, you know, none of these are scheduled, we're scheduled to even go into service and until 2023.

Speaker 2: (40:59)
So they still have an opportunity right now to, you know, to change this and do, um, you know, to make these electric, according to the, the, the postal services on analysis, uh, nearly 95% of all male carrier roots could be operated by electric vehicles. How do the male carriers feel about this? What do they want? I think the mail carriers would love it. Um, you, I mean, it's a lot easier to drive, stop and go with an electric vehicle. I have to say. Yeah. And you know, it's gonna be so much quieter, you know, I don't know if you've ever stood next to one of these. I have old mail trucks. They're pretty loud and noise. That's

Leo Laporte: (41:32)
How our mail comes. Our, our wonderful mail carrier delivers them.

Speaker 2: (41:35)
Yeah. They're, they're, you know, they're not comfortable. Um, you know, they're, they're noise. They steering wheels on

Leo Laporte: (41:40)
The fumes on the right, because she's gotta lean out and feed the rural mailboxes wonder we love our, our mail carrier, but, uh, I'll have to ask her how she feels. I bet she'd loves some

Speaker 2: (41:50)
New, yeah. Next time I air carrier I'll, I'll ask as well. Yeah. Um, but, uh, I, I know, you know, they're definitely looking forward to getting new trucks, you know, just, you know, things like having air conditioning in the summertime. That's awesome.

Leo Laporte: (42:02)
Would be great. That's a nice feature. Yeah. Yeah. Sam Ebel Sam at principle researcher guide house insights, his podcast podcast wheel bearings is@wheelbearings.media and he joins us at week. It's always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Thank you,

Speaker 2: (42:16)
Leo.

Leo Laporte: (42:26)
Now it's time for the Samble Sam segment on the tech. I should

Speaker 2: (42:37)
All yours. Uh, so, uh, let's see. Sophia in the, um, in the, uh, chat room, uh, or in the chat was asking about what happened to the hybrid models. So, yeah, as I said, there were four companies, or there were four different groups that were bidding there. Most of these were partnerships. Um, and one of them was, uh, one of them included a hybrid vehicle, uh, which was from a Turkish company that was, uh, planning to build a factory here in the us to assemble these vehicles. Um, that one got, uh, they actually dropped out of the program a couple of years ago. Um, there was also, uh, the last two companies that were in the, the selection in the process where Oshkosh and workhorse group, uh, workhorse was the only company that was actually proposing a full battery electric vehicle. Uh, and that one, um, they workhorse has had a lot of issues.

Speaker 2: (43:27)
They're not, they're not financially stable. They've never really been able to deliver any significant number of vehicles, even with the, the commercial electric vans that they, that they have today. They last year they had, they had only delivered 42 examples of their most recent truck, their C 1000 delivery truck, um, and then had to stop and recall them all because turns out that they had started shipping these, but had not actually passed all of the required, uh, safety, safety tests and crash tests with it. So it wasn't, it didn't meet federal motor vehicle safety standards. So it was a, you know, they, they got, um, they, they were never really a serious contender for this business. Uh, you know, Oshkosh is a known quantity. They they've worked with, um, you know, they, they do a lot of commercial vehicles, a lot of military vehicles. They know how to build these, these vehicles and they have the facilities. Um, and I'm sure that, you know, they will, they'll do a fine job with this truck. Um, but it's, you know, it was, it was entirely up to the postal service as to whether they wanted electric or gas versions. And it, it, it really should be electrics, uh, not even hybrids for the, the use case that most of these, um,

Leo Laporte: (44:38)
It seems like these are the perfect thing for an electric vehicle.

Speaker 2: (44:42)
Yeah, no, it absolutely is. Uh, as I said, you know, I mean, these things are, you know, generally driving way less than a hundred miles a day. Yeah. Um, they're constantly stopping and starting

Leo Laporte: (44:51)
Electric is low maintenance, especially for that kind of stop start, stop. Yeah.

Speaker 2: (44:54)
Yeah. You, you save a lot of money on maintenance. You save a lot of money on energy, cuz electricity is gonna be a lot cheaper. And one of the things that EPA highlighted, uh, in their, um, in their response to this was, uh, the, um, the total cost of ownership analysis from the, the postal service did not considered a financial risk from near, near complete reliance on petroleum based fuels with volatile prices. Right. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte: (45:17)
You don't know what gas is gonna cost in two

Speaker 2: (45:19)
Years, electricity prices are, tend to be a lot more stable.

Leo Laporte: (45:22)
Um, well, especially I would imagine if the postal service were doing it, they, they could do solar panels and all sorts of ways they could generate that

Speaker 2: (45:30)
Electricity. Yeah. I mean, and you know, know this, this is actually an example of a, of a vehicle, you know, because of the flat roof and everything where you actually could put some solar panels on the roof that would add significant cost. Oh, that'd be interesting. Wouldn't it? Yeah. Uh, but you know, you could, you could do something like that. It's time to be even more creative, just a standard. Yeah. Even just a standard battery power train would be great here. Uh, and as I said, you don't need to do DC fast charging on these. So the batteries are probably gonna last a long, long time, uh, in the kind of use case that they're doing. Um, so it's just, it's, mind-boggling why they did not opt for, uh, way more. Yeah. Uh, reverb Mike says, uh, no Tesla mail truck. Um, yeah. Tesla could do it, but, um, you know, they'll, they'll promise it in 22 and deliver it in 2029. Uh, so, and, uh, and it won't have full self-driving. Um, Sam, you want

Leo Laporte: (46:20)
Stick around for the top of the hour or, uh, yeah. Can you, okay, good. Good. We'll get more with Sam, uh, at the top of the hour during the break then. All right. So stay tuned, kids. Leo LePort the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. If you wanna call 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. Cheryl, on the line from your Belinda, California. Hi, Cheryl.

Speaker 5: (46:45)
Hi there, Leo. Thank you for taking my call.

Leo Laporte: (46:48)
Thank you so much for calling.

Speaker 5: (46:50)
Oh, certainly. I'm so glad you're there to help. Um, my Gmail won't stop thinking it started Thursday evening and it stopped for a little while, but then it started again and it's been going since,

Leo Laporte: (47:04)
What do you mean sinking Friday? Sinking with what?

Speaker 5: (47:07)
Um, it's, you know, Gmail sinking it's um, it's I guess I, I don't know what it's sinking, but there's um, like if you go to settings and you end up where, um, you can force stop Gmail and you can pick what things you want to sync,

Leo Laporte: (47:26)
Are you syncing to a phone or to a desktop computer or?

Speaker 5: (47:31)
I, I don't, I've never seen this before. I knew nothing about,

Leo Laporte: (47:34)
But you just seeing the announcement that I'm sinking and by, by which you mean not S I N K like going down with the ship, right? S Y N C it's synchronizing data. Um,

Speaker 5: (47:48)
Yes. Yeah. Online and I've done everything they said to do, and there's other people with this problem, but that's from 2019, all these people that are having the same problem. And so I've done everything except where it tells you to clear data.

Leo Laporte: (48:04)
Yeah. Um, so you are on a you're on a smart phone. Yeah. That's where you're seeing this is on the smartphone.

Speaker 5: (48:12)
Yes. I'm sorry. Don't explain

Leo Laporte: (48:13)
Things very. No, no, no, no. I'm just trying to clarify. Clearing data will, is harmless on the smartphone. It does not clear your email, but it isn't a bad idea to clear the cash, uh, in the app.

Speaker 5: (48:26)
Um, yeah, I've done that three times and it's, I'm everything.

Leo Laporte: (48:30)
So you you're on an Android device. Yeah. I'm really good at figuring this stuff out. So, oh goodness. So if you go to the apps, uh, in the settings, you go to apps and you go to Gmail, have you done that? And then looked at the settings, there, there is a setting, uh, or a para to, to clear the data on that app. Yes. Yeah. And you say you've done that.

Speaker 5: (48:57)
No, I

Leo Laporte: (48:57)
Haven't done that. That's okay to do. Yeah. I know. You're concerned. Maybe you'd lose something. You won't lose anything. Yes. Uh, that's what we call a data cash. And if it's damaged, it could in fact, cause this reining problem, the other thing to do is to, uh, you're using the Gmail app. Are you?

Leo Laporte: (49:18)
Yeah. Yes. When you, when you wanna see your mail on your phone, you go to an icon that says Gmail, is that right? Yes, yes, yes. So the other thing you can do is remove it. And if, if you can, some phones, won't let you remove it, but most phones will so delete the app. So when you go to the app info on Gmail, there are a couple of settings and probably all of these would be, you know, something you might want to try. You've tried force stopping. In fact, what I would do is clear storage and cash and then force stop it. If that doesn't work, then if you can, and you, you can on some phones, but not on all phones, I would uninstall and reinstall Gmail. Sometimes that'll that'll happen. That'll help it. Um, okay. And that's all of this is gonna be in the app info panel when you go to apps in your settings and you've already been there, so know what I'm talking about. So yeah. Yeah. So you go to Gmail in your all apps and then many of these would be helpful. Now, if nothing fixes it, the only, the only consequence of, of eternal syncing is it might use more data, more of your cell data than you than you expect. Um, but it's not a, it's not a harmful thing. Um,

Speaker 5: (50:39)
Okay. Yeah. If I delete the app and then,

Leo Laporte: (50:43)
Um, you'll reinstall it, it uses your Google credentials, which are already in the phone. Do you have a Samsung phone? Yes. Okay. Again, clues, I'm getting clues and I'm, I'm like Sherlock Holmes. Yes. Cheryl, I believe you will use a Samsung S 10 from 1998. Know, I don't know what kind of phone so Samsung will let you uninstall the Google phones won't but the Samsung phones will. So I would, if you've, if you've done all the others, clearing the cash, nothing works, uninstall it and reinstall it. So what here's what's happening? Just so you know, behind the scenes something's broken. Obviously it could be that the, the cash to data, it saves stuff. So it doesn't have to reload. It could be corrupted could be damaged. And so the application keeps reading it and goes, ah, or it can't write to it and say, I've, I've synced, stop sinking. I got it. It should sink every day. It should sink on a regular basis. But you, but if it's eternal, sinking, eh, it's not the end of the, like I said, it's not the end of the world. It might use a little more data than you. You you're used to. Um, I would just suggest uninstall and reinstall cuz it, you know, after you delete the cash and if that doesn't fix it, then uninstall and reinstall. Cause I, it may just be damaged app.

Speaker 5: (52:05)
Oh right. And that won't um, delete any of my

Leo Laporte: (52:08)
Email. No, cuz the email is stored on the server at Google. It's on your Gmail server. So everything, including your settings, all that stuff is up there. All you're doing is it's a what your Gmail, uh, application is just a window that's what's. That's why it's syncing is just a window to what's up there on gmail.com. So you can still, even if you took that off your phone, you could still go to gmail.com and see your mail there. It's still there.

Speaker 5: (52:35)
Oh, thank you very, very

Leo Laporte: (52:37)
Much. You're welcome. I appreciate your call. Thank you Cheryl. I hope that all helps. Yeah. Uh, I think it's a bug, but it could be damaged to cash data. Somebody in the chat room said I'm gonna, whenever my client's call with something, I'm just gonna say it's broken and send him a bill. I knew it was broken. Why and how do I fix it? Okay. There's there's additional information. Uh, Tim's next from Culver city, California. Hi Tim Leo Laport, the tech guy,

Speaker 6: (53:08)
Leo. Hi. And I just wanna tell you real quick, I've been listening to you since call for help. Thank

Leo Laporte: (53:13)
You. Going back to 1998.

Speaker 6: (53:17)
Yep. Holy moly. You mentioned last week that your daughter, I have a Motorola, a phone and a new one. The Motorola also I decided to stick with it. Um, uh, I got an emergency. I had to get, uh, go to the store and get one about three years ago, 2018. And it's the Motorola revel. And it was the original one. Not the revel plus. Well, uh, you know, you can't change the batteries in these. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (53:47)
Unfortunately it's so sad.

Speaker 6: (53:50)
Right. And it started it won't hold a charge now and it started getting sketchy and it's jumping around and all. So I got a stylist, uh, Motorola stylist. Oh jeans.

Leo Laporte: (54:01)
Yeah. That just came out. Yeah. Those are nice. Yeah. What do you think? And it looked like it go

Speaker 6: (54:05)
A great camera. Yeah. But 90% of my, more than 90% of my texts I can dump. I'm happy to, but you know, like there's ones from the family and stuff. I'd like to keep this, you know, text, uh, stream going. What is the best app I heard you mention that you get a lot of Motorolas for your daughter. Cause

Leo Laporte: (54:25)
They're inexpensive and they're great. Oh great. Yeah. I think they're very, they're really, uh, the best. My mistake last time though, was I got her one with 32 gigs of storage, which she's not enough for a, for TikTok video. So, so you wanna save your, before you go to your new phone, you wanna save your SMS, your text messages. Is that what you wanna do? OK. How do I do that

Speaker 6: (54:50)
By going to in a laptop or

Leo Laporte: (54:52)
What? Uh, there are a number of ways, uh, to do that. Um, you can actually email them might be, do you send 'em to your Gmail account is one way to do it, which might not be a bad, uh, way to do it because then, uh, you can select the ones you want and you can, uh, then search for 'em in Gmail, but it's up, it's up to you. You can also export them. Um, and then, uh, mail them to yourself or, uh, copy 'em to an SD card or something like that. Huh?

Speaker 6: (55:20)
Because seems like there's some apps that you can, uh, there are

Leo Laporte: (55:24)
Also apps. Yep. There's SMS backup and restore app. Yeah. There, there are apps, but you don't need an app to do that.

Speaker 6: (55:32)
You don't. Okay. Um, then what, what would you say is the best and quickest way,

Leo Laporte: (55:37)
Uh, in your, do you have a Gmail account, right? Yes. In your Gmail account, turn on IMAP. And then, uh, there are, are a number of SMS backup programs like SMS backup plus, which will mail you your SMS messages. And you're done Leo Laport, the tech guy, a couple of different apps. That'll do this. Um, I'm gonna suggest I'm not sure what the best one is. Let me see. Um, I feel like you should be able to do this for free too. SMS backup and restore is one SMS backup plus is another. And in most cases, uh, what these will do is they'll let you, um, email yourself or export them as a file, which you can then, uh, you know, do whatever you want with copy to a computer or send to a computer or put on your Google drive and that kind of thing. I feel like you should be. I love that. Yeah. I feel like you should be able to do this without a third party app. Let me, I'm

Speaker 6: (56:43)
Looking, you know, the, the T-Mobile people said use smart switch, but when I started reading it and I think that's a Samsung app, but when I started reading it, it didn't look like that might be the best

Leo Laporte: (56:54)
Option. Yeah. That's for going to a new phone and it'll copy it over. And you said you don't want 'em all anyway. You just want some of them, right?

Speaker 6: (57:02)
No, no, but I wouldn't mind going to the new phone I've been going through and deleting the, the, well, when you get

Leo Laporte: (57:07)
The, when you get the new phone, I'll say, do you have a previous Android phone? You want to copy it over from, and it will let you do that. But I would, I would look at, uh, either SMS backup and restore or SMS backup. Plus these are third party apps that will do exactly what you, you want to. And that way you've got a copy. And I think emailing it to your Gmail is probably the best thing to do, frankly, cuz then it's, uh, and,

Speaker 6: (57:32)
And do that by way of, uh, you said Ms.

Leo Laporte: (57:35)
SMS backup plus is one SMS backup plus is one, uh, that uses Gmail and then SMS backup and restore. We'll let you save it to Dropbox or Google drive or whatever, and then you can restore it using that same application somewhere else. So it kind of depends what you wanna do.

Speaker 6: (57:54)
That's awesome. You know, you're really the only talk radio I can really listen to for any length. No

Leo Laporte: (58:00)
Politics, baby. No politics. No, I'm not Joe Rogan. No humor. Just, just the facts, man. Hey, it's a pleasure. Thank you for calling.

Speaker 6: (58:13)
Thank you. Bye.

Leo Laporte: (58:14)
Take care. All yours, Sam.

Speaker 2: (58:17)
Thank you, Leo. So, uh, Chevy guy in the chat room was asking about the best meter to use, to, uh, detect, uh, drain on the, the battery. Um, it sounds like he's got something that is drain I'm assuming is draining his battery. And, uh, uh, I suggested, you know, I'm not aware of anything that you can use for Mon monitoring the current draw over time, uh, in the vehicle, but you know, any, any basic vol meter or, you know, multi meter that you can get from any big box store, you know, for about 20, $30, uh, should be able to, um, tell you, you know, tell you when the, when the vehicle's off, you can, uh, pop it into various places and, you know, probe the different ports in the fuse box and see if there's current on there, uh, to see if anything's drawing, uh, current from it when the car's off.

Speaker 2: (59:14)
Um, he said, uh, let's see, uh, he said he is popping, uh, the high current fuses, uh, which can cost more than meters. You ask if the car's computers, the biggest drain when the keys removed actually, um, generally on, on most vehicles, um, the computers will only stay on for a couple of minutes, um, after you shut off the car, uh, and usually not all of them either. Uh, there are some like for, uh, the computer that runs your stability control system will stay on for a minute or two after you, uh, after you shut off the vehicle, because one, one of the things it'll do for example, is run, uh, a purge cycle on the, the hydraulic actuator that controls your, your stability control, uh, to relieve the, the pressure and the accumulators. And because that makes some noise. Um, and this is, I know this because this is something I worked on a long time ago as an engineer.

Speaker 2: (01:00:09)
Um, you know, you can, you can hear when that unit is cycling, when that hydraulic unit is cycling. And so when it, um, uh, after you shut off, you know, it waits a little bit, assuming you're going to get out of the, the car. If you actually sit in your car and wait for a minute or two, you will hear the hydraulic control unit cycling as it, uh, cycles down the pressure. Um, but it's, it's designed to wait. So it does it, hopefully after you're out of the car and you don't notice it, so you don't notice that noise. Um, and it's usually things like that that are running, but that that's, like I said, no for no more than a couple of minutes after you shut off the car. Uh, there are some exceptions to that. Uh, for example, uh, Tesla, uh, they have their century mode on there that, um, is designed to, uh, have, keep the cameras, the autopilot cameras on to use essentially as security cameras.

Speaker 2: (01:00:59)
Uh, so if somebody hits your car or, uh, keys it or something like that, um, and so it'll keep the, the, the computer on and the camera's on and it'll look, you know, if it sees anybody walking by your car and doing anything, uh, it will record that. So you, you basically have that as a, as a security system, um, that will actually drain the battery on the, on the Tesla, uh, friend of mine. Who's got model three, actually tried this out when it first came out and, uh, found that, um, when with century mode off, you know, his Tesla would lose about one mile worth of range a day, uh, with the century mode on, it was draining about 10 miles a day, because that's a computer's on. Yeah. Cuz normally the, you know, I say the computer is basically once they're done with all of their diagnostic tasks and things that they have to do after you shut off, they just go to sleep.

Speaker 2: (01:01:50)
And so they're using ver they should be using very little or no power. Now if for some reason the computer thinks that the car is not shut off, if it thinks it's still on, um, then that might keep the computers running. So if there's a short somewhere, uh, you know, in a switch, if you get a bad switch somewhere that makes the computer think that everything is still that the, the car's still on, then it, that could be the problem. So what I would do, what I would suggest doing is, is I take a, take a current meter. Um, and after you shut off the car, wait, wait a few minutes and then go out and go in and, and probe in the fuse box. Um, and see there, you, there should be very, very little or no current on any of those fuses. Uh, if there is then that's, you know, that gives you a hint as to what circuit, you know, where, where the potential problem is.

Speaker 2: (01:02:40)
Um, and then you can start diagnosing from there. What's going on? Um, let's see, uh, there, what was the other one here? Uh, um, and somebody else, uh, had a question, um, about, uh, any Ford news this week. There actually was a little, little bit of Ford news, uh, this week, uh, they had their, um, their fourth quarter earnings call. And, uh, during the call, uh, Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, uh, has actually called out dealers that were doing excessive markups on new vehicles. Um, cuz you've probably seen some reports in recent weeks or months, um, you know, with the shortage of new vehicle inventory, um, some dealers because the dealers are not owned by the manufacturers they're, these are independent businesses and this is a free capitalist economy. Um, you know, they're allowed to charge whatever they want, uh, for the vehicles, you know, they can charge above manufacturers, suggested retail price if they want or charge less, uh, if there's too much de supply and not enough demand, uh, this is the, the, the good side and the bad side of a supply demand economy. Um, but some dealers have been charging as much as 10, 15, $20,000 over sticker for vehicles like the Mokey and, and other popular vehicles that there's limited inventory of. Um, some dealers are in know, as they started now converting. I hate dealers.

Leo Laporte: (01:04:02)
Why don't we get rid of dealers? I think Tesla had the right idea

Speaker 2: (01:04:05)
On that. Well, the, the problem is, uh, the, the states control this and most states have dealer franchise laws, lobbyists control

Leo Laporte: (01:04:14)
It. And the states

Speaker 2: (01:04:14)
Been along. Yeah, but the lobbyists are paid by the dealers because the dealers are become very wealthy over the last couple years. And they got these, these laws. And if you get a good dealer,

Leo Laporte: (01:04:22)
You're lucky, you're good. But if you get a bad dealer

Speaker 2: (01:04:27)
And you know, uh, and Farley, you know, specifically said, you know, they, the manufacturers know how much the dealers are charging because once, once they get, um, you know, the, once the sale goes through, you know, they get a record of the transaction prices and they know if the are charging over. And he said, it's only, it's only about 10% of dealers that are doing this. So the best thing to do for consumers is, you know, if you're trying to buy a vehicle and the dealer's insisting on, you know, a big markup, you know what, there's, there's 3,500 or 3,800 Ford dealers. It's similar number of Chevrolet dealers. Just go find another one there probably unless you live in a very small town. Yeah. Chances are there's more than one Ford dealer or one Chevrolet dealer or Hyundai or Toyota dealer in your city. Just go to a different dealer, just walk away because there's no vehicle, there's no vehicle that's worth paying that kind of premium on. I agree.

Leo Laporte: (01:05:16)
I agree. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you don't like it, just go something, go shop some, I got, I got my Mustang for competition. M S R P and that's, you know, that's I don't paying that. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Hey Sam, thank you. No problem. Have a wonderful week next week, Sam and bill submit. Take care. No.

Hank Laporte: (01:05:46)
Hello. Sorry.

Leo Laporte: (01:05:51)
Why? Hey, Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet at home theater, digital photography, smartphone, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask the phone number. If you wanna talk high tech. I have to mention though, I'm kind of excited. We got a big name celebrity in the studio. Hey dad.

Hank Laporte: (01:06:12)
Uh,

Leo Laporte: (01:06:14)
You're not supposed to say that I'm your father because then it looks like, oh yeah. I'm like nepotism, right? Gosh. Okay. My bad.

Hank Laporte: (01:06:22)
Hey, what's up Leo. This is

Leo Laporte: (01:06:24)
Call me dad. Okay. This is my son, Hank, who is uh, 27. And uh, the, the really interesting thing about Hank. He went to college for broadcast journalism. Got his degree in broadcast, journalism kind of grumbling all the way. Cuz the teachers weren't. I won't mention the school. So you that's. Okay.

Hank Laporte: (01:06:46)
See you Boulder. Go

Leo Laporte: (01:06:47)
Bluff. See you go bus, great journalism program. They do have a good journalism, but some of the professors maybe didn't understand. No,

Hank Laporte: (01:06:54)
I think I wasn't so good at it to be honest. Okay, good. Because there were kids thriving. It just might

Leo Laporte: (01:06:59)
Not have been my school. Hey, you got the degree. That's true. Yeah. Uh, then you got outta school and you thought, well maybe I wanna work for my dad, which was a very bad idea. He sold, uh, advertising for the podcast network for about a year and a half.

Hank Laporte: (01:07:11)
It was great. Getting to hang out with you though. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:07:13)
I really liked that part. And then you ran away to Asia. Yeah. For some months, uh, open ended ticket and then COVID and you had to come back, we made you come back. Yeah.

Hank Laporte: (01:07:24)
You said I'm buying you a flight and you're getting outta there.

Leo Laporte: (01:07:27)
So you were kind of doing odd jobs. You did a lot of drone work. Right? I tried to start,

Hank Laporte: (01:07:33)
Uh, photography, uh, small advertising agency, which I kind of flopped a little bit. And then yeah, I was doing like commercial real state, like drone photography stuff. Um,

Leo Laporte: (01:07:41)
Yeah, but then yeah. You and I remember this. When you were a kid you loved watching, what was that YouTube channel you watched where they made really huge, disgusting food. Like 800 patties of hamburgers. Yeah. Epic picked meal time. Epic meal time.

Hank Laporte: (01:07:56)
You used to love that. Oh yeah. Big time. Still do. Yeah, those guys come. They still around a little bit. They still post like weekly, but um,

Leo Laporte: (01:08:03)
They probably hate that stuff. And now they're all having heart problems. Yeah. But anyway, um, you always wanted to do that, didn't you? Yeah. I liked

Hank Laporte: (01:08:12)
Food videos, love food videos. And then I started a TikTok. That's going well. So that's where we're at. So

Leo Laporte: (01:08:18)
TikTok, you have 1.8 million followers on TikTok, which is by the way more than listen to this show more than listen to all my shows combined. You're doing very, very well. Oh, thank you. That's the videos are short food videos. You also post on Instagram Salt Hank. Yep. Uh, salt underscore Hank. Which if you'd asked me, I would, well, it used to be what saline deficiency. What? Sodium deficiency? Sodium. That was

Hank Laporte: (01:08:43)
A terrible name. The mouthful. Yeah. It was a bad

Leo Laporte: (01:08:45)
Name. I uh, but why the underscore cuz that's you know it's

Hank Laporte: (01:08:48)
Cuz it looks like salt. Thank if you don't have the underscore. See, you gotta put so

Leo Laporte: (01:08:52)
You didn't wanna be salt.

Hank Laporte: (01:08:53)
Thank right. Yeah. People missing. Thank a lot of people were like, why is there an underscore? Who's thanking

Leo Laporte: (01:08:58)
Sal. And why do you know Sal? Yep. So Salt Hank. Yeah. Well, all right. It works salt underscore Hank. Yeah. Um, what happened? How did you think? How did it take off? What made it take off? People are listening who wanna be TikTok stars.

Hank Laporte: (01:09:12)
Okay. Um, I guess just keep filming your SA and do a really bad job at it until you get good at it. You

Leo Laporte: (01:09:19)
Know what you're good at though? Editing? Well,

Hank Laporte: (01:09:21)
I, I became good at editing cuz I filmed some many crappy videos. Eventually you figure they were terrible at first. Exactly. Yeah. You buy lights and then you figure out what looks good and then you keep doing it and eventually something pops

Leo Laporte: (01:09:32)
Did pop didn't it? Yeah. I'm now you have an agent, a manager have a manager. You have advertisers. Yeah. Shout out.

Hank Laporte: (01:09:38)
Cuts most comfortable. Oh I probably shouldn't do ads. Is this?

Leo Laporte: (01:09:41)
No that's okay. So hashtag sponsor. That's uh, that's one of the, uh, people who, yeah, this is cuts. Don't say the name too much. Oh, sorry.

Hank Laporte: (01:09:49)
My bad. I guys, it's

Leo Laporte: (01:09:51)
A lot more expensive to buy ads on your podcast, on your TikTok than it is to buy on my radio show. I'm sad to say no, that's not good. No, you're

Hank Laporte: (01:09:59)
Doing great. Thank you. What,

Leo Laporte: (01:10:01)
How do you get better at TikTok though? What is it? Uh, do you pay attention to the response you're getting? I

Hank Laporte: (01:10:07)
Would say you pick out things that get views and if you can like decipher what it is in the video, that's getting the traction, um, try and capitalize on that and get really good at, at a couple specific things. Find your niche, do something that's authentic to you. I obviously love cooking and I love filming. So that was an obvious Cho like pick for me. But um, just find something you like and you know, if it sticks, then keep doing it.

Leo Laporte: (01:10:30)
You realize that it's your fault that Facebook's dying. I don't, I don't know about that. You're not on Facebook. You don't do your stuff on Facebook. You

Hank Laporte: (01:10:38)
I'm supposed to people tell me. I I know.

Leo Laporte: (01:10:40)
No. Well every, even Mark Zuckerberg said TikTok is killing us. Yeah.

Hank Laporte: (01:10:45)
I'm sure. I mean yeah, of course was the next

Leo Laporte: (01:10:48)
Thing. So you're on TikTok. You're on you do do it on Instagram. In fact people say, well, where's the recipes that's on Instagram. Yeah. If you want to cook the same thing,

Hank Laporte: (01:10:56)
Transitioning to YouTube though soon and

Leo Laporte: (01:10:57)
You're transitioning. No. Well the

Hank Laporte: (01:10:59)
Recipes now aren't on Instagram anymore anymore. Cause I'm gonna do longer form content. Like so that's on

Leo Laporte: (01:11:04)
Fully describing and you're gonna start a podcast. Yeah. That's why

Hank Laporte: (01:11:07)
I'm here picking up some mics from pops.

Leo Laporte: (01:11:12)
I got a few leftover mikes. Yeah. Appreciate it. Well, I I'm very proud of you. Thank you. Um, and salthank.com. You sell salt there. How's that going? It's good. We're sold out. I should mention I'm an investor. Yeah. He is hash hashtag sponsor investor, hashtag investor, whatever he was federal trade commission requirements.

Hank Laporte: (01:11:33)
Do you really have to do that? Yes.

Leo Laporte: (01:11:36)
You can't plug stuff that uh, you make money on unless you tell people. Of course I'm not making any money on it. It just costs me money. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know if I really have to. Well you, you own

Hank Laporte: (01:11:45)
5%. I think. Do I? I don't know. Actually. Technically not on paper.

Leo Laporte: (01:11:49)
There's no paper. That's the problem with your son. You just go. Sure. Whatever. You know here. Buy some salt. Yeah. Enjoy here. Well, you get husband. Is there any left at salt Hank or did you sell

Hank Laporte: (01:11:58)
Out? We don't have any salt left right now. We have some pesto salt, but there's nobody wants it. Huh? No. We only have a couple bottles

Leo Laporte: (01:12:05)
Left. There's two bottles of pesto, salt. He essential salt and go get it. Hashtag I'm an investor and a please buy some salthank.com and follow 'em on the TikTok. Although you don't need me to, to, to plug you. You you've done really well on your own, which is, I'll be honest.

Hank Laporte: (01:12:21)
I'm I'm more nervous on here than I

Leo Laporte: (01:12:23)
Am on TikTok. You're very comfortable on TikTok. Yeah. No.

Hank Laporte: (01:12:26)
Well it's, I'm alone in a room. I guess I'm pretty much the one here you see? I'll be honest. The also the, uh, commentary going on, you

Leo Laporte: (01:12:33)
See the chat room? Yeah. It's live. Yeah. Don't have chat room. Yeah, because then you make, make, make you nervous. No, it's okay.

Hank Laporte: (01:12:39)
I go live on TikTok sometimes and that's fun, but there's only like a hundred people watching, so. All

Leo Laporte: (01:12:43)
Right. Yeah. I love you. I'm so glad you're doing so well. So proud of you. I mocked the mustache, but now it's your trademark now I think I have to keep it. You have to keep it for us. It's like chef boy, R D cuz his logo has a big mustache on it. Yep. I'm stuck. So now yeah. Fashions come fashions go. But the mustache stays forever unless

Hank Laporte: (01:13:02)
I can get like a razor company to sponsor an episode where I shave.

Leo Laporte: (01:13:05)
Oh that would be big bucks. So yeah. Harry's comes along or dollar shave club and says has to get a fake one, $1 million to shave off your mustache. You'd do that. Wouldn't

Hank Laporte: (01:13:13)
You? I could sell the mustache on Ebay

Leo Laporte: (01:13:18)
Oh Hank. I'm proud of you. Good job. Good job son. Good to see you guys. 88, 88 LIO. When you get a celebrity in studio like that, especially somebody who can explain the secrets of success. Can you make money at that on TikTok? Yeah. Yeah, of course. Okay. I'm just curious. Okay. I probably should have asked that up front. Uh, actually you make more ads on your, on your tos. I'm not gonna say any numbers, but they're much more expensive than ads on anything I do. Oh, just I mock I mocked, I mocked the whole thing. I said, oh, you wanna get a real job? You don't wanna be a influencer, a social media. That's no good. And then I realized, wait a minute. When I got into radio 46 years ago, that wasn't a like good career choice. Right? And then I started doing podcast 15 years ago.

Leo Laporte: (01:14:11)
People said podcast, no one knows what those are. Don't do that. So you're just doing what I did only. You're in the modern times. And you're doing the TikTok. Yeah. It's a career now it's a career. Yep. Very exciting. What go? What, what? What's next? You get a job. Uh, I know book deal. Maybe see, see how I'm thinking. When do you get a job part? When is the job? When do you get a job? When do you get a paycheck? I don't know if you ever get a salad. You're working on books. Book, deal, maybe a cookbook, salt. Hank. Hopefully YouTube starts YouTube. Start doing well. Yeah. The podcast is awesome. Awesome goal. So I will no longer mock new media because I realize, oh, that that's what I did. And way back to the old media radio, we're gonna take your calls. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Are you gonna stick around for a little bit? If, if people want to ask you TikTok question, got a lot of fathers like me with kids who wanna do this. So all right. Stay here. Are you sitting out in the car? Yeah, we're getting back from Tahoe right now. Oh, nice. How was the snow? You looked great at that. You look like a came.

Leo Laporte: (01:15:21)
Uh, it's the lighting. It's all about lighting, man. You gotta get your to make you a, for a cake. I gotta grow a mustache so I can with the kids, with the hipsters. That's what I gotta do. You should have a low salt. Hank. Somebody says a low salt Hank account for the old folks on his, uh, website. It says I F and love salt that you got from Jennifer. You got from mom. Cuz yeah. Cuz she's but she actually apparently has a sodium deficiency. Oh really? That's what she says. No, she doesn't. Is that where the name sodium deficiency came from? Yeah. Oh, that's hysterical. Is I? Oh, I have one. She doesn't have a sodium de just like salt. Yeah. That's her claim. That's hysterical.

Leo Laporte: (01:16:21)
Well, salt doesn't hurt everybody. It's only bad for some people and uh, not for us. That was really fun. When can I I'm gonna, I might post that. Oh yeah. Well it goes up as a podcast and you can, uh, put it up. Uh, it goes up. It'll go up in a day today or early tomorrow. Cool. So just go to, uh, the tech eye labs and it's the most recent show? 1866. You'll see. It'll be easy. Yeah. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they make it the thumbnail, knowing our editors taste salty San Diego. Oh, look at that. There's a cute picture, but that's uh, that's you and me?

Leo Laporte: (01:17:03)
The one with me as a look at a what? A good looking boy, huh? I do. I have that picture of you sitting on my lap at K S O I should pull that up. You can sit in your lap right now. We can, you can sit in my lap. We could do a second UHS second. Okay. Next break. Not now. It kinda looks like that. Actually. We should do that. Wow. Actually I just watched the, uh, uh, the movie, uh, the house of Gucci with lady Gaga and uh, Adam driver. And so it starts in the late seventies, but it's mostly eighties and nineties and really is it's. Wow. The eighties. What? A concept? Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. There's the eighties right there. That's the number? 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 cotton town, Tennessee, Kenny cotton town. Kenny on the line. Hi Kenny.

Speaker 8: (01:17:57)
Hi Leo. It's good to be on your show

Leo Laporte: (01:17:59)
Again. Always a pleasure to have you. What's up.

Speaker 8: (01:18:03)
I got a couple of quick things. Um, gonna switch from game tech to say, uh, real quickly go LA Rams in Sioux.

Leo Laporte: (01:18:11)
Okay. All right. Were you a Titans fan? You must have been a Titans fan.

Speaker 8: (01:18:15)
No, I am actually a Rams fan. I go back to 1985. You come

Leo Laporte: (01:18:20)
By it honestly. Well, they beat us far and square, so okay. Go Rams. My wife and I have a debate. She says you have to root for the NFC team. I said, I don't wanna root for the Ram. She says, but you have to your NFC. I said, no, I'm gonna root for the Bengal. So there

Speaker 8: (01:18:36)
There's nothing wrong with that. They may actually pull off the upset. I just

Leo Laporte: (01:18:39)
Love the idea. That's what I like. I like, you know, I always like the, uh, the upsets, so.

Speaker 8: (01:18:46)
All right. Well, all

Leo Laporte: (01:18:47)
Right. Enough of that, what happens enough

Speaker 8: (01:18:49)
Of sport ball to game? Yes. To sport ball, to game ball. Uh, I'm sure you're aware by now the recent acquisitions of not just Microsoft and activism, but now Sony and Bunge. Yeah. And it's kind of got me thinking, is this the beginning of an arms race where all of a sudden we might see Nintendo go. That's what I'm thinking. It

Leo Laporte: (01:19:09)
Not, not the beginning of an arms, the continu. It has been an arms race, hasn't it? Between, uh, Microsoft with their Xbox Sony, with their PlayStation. The interesting thing, Nintendo, uh, which has always been kind of, they've never focused on the state of the art graphics, the triple a gaming thing. They focused on don't know at first with the, we, it was kind of family, even with the N 64, before that it was always kind of a family game machine. And now with the switch they own portable and the switch is outsold. Every outsold, the, we, it is the number one, uh, gaming platform. Uh, and I think they, uh, I think they have a place I don't Nintendo's going away.

Speaker 8: (01:19:54)
No, but it kind of makes you wonder if they're gonna go after studios. Like for the longest, I always assume that they would acquire a Sega or square or even an EA if needed, if they wanna compete against

Leo Laporte: (01:20:06)
Microsoft NTEN, by the way, is nowhere near big enough to acquire EA. So that's the other thing we have to remember. These, these gaming companies are elephants. Nintendo is a wily little Womba, it can't swallow an elephant. So, uh, maybe, maybe some maybe Sega for sure. Sega is already kind of, uh, struggling. They're just closed down all of their arcades in, uh, Japan. Uh, and they, and they are Japanese and they make a lot of, uh, games that Nintendo, uh, has on the switch. So maybe say, I don't think Nintendo's unusual. I don't think they need. Um, so what, so what is on in this business part? It's not necessarily Microsoft saying, well, we're gonna buy, uh, active vision so that we can make these exclusive on the Xbox to kill Sony. I don't think that's the goal nor did Sony. It's somewhat defensive for them to buy bungee.

Leo Laporte: (01:21:04)
Ironically, Microsoft owned bungee for a while. The kids where halo came from and spun it off. I think these companies are really looking at as more as revenue opportunities. They, they don't, I don't think they, first of all, there's the issue of monopoly. In fact, when Microsoft bought, uh, act vision, they were very clear right up front in the announcement to say, this makes us the number three gaming company in the world after Sony and Tencent, they didn't want anybody to think that this made them a, a monopoly, right? So that's one concern and it's one reason they may not make their games exclusive to the Xbox. And why should they, what is Microsoft's look what Microsoft's been doing in general when Satya Nettella became the CEO, one of the very first things he did was announce, uh, Microsoft office for the iPad, which really annoyed the windows division.

Leo Laporte: (01:21:57)
It's like, wait a minute, you're doing a touch first version. Not for the surface, not for us, you're doing it for apple, but, but NA's always has changed Microsoft's strategy to be from a company that said, look, we want everything to run on windows. We want, you know, windows is our bread and butter windows and office. We want everybody to use it two and Satya NAELA has actually said this to be everywhere. Our customers are on any platform, including apple, including I think Sony. So I think these companies are seeing this purely has a chance to build community a revenue opportunity. Minecraft is available everywhere. They never shut that down when they bought it. Uh, and they make a lot of money from that. So I wouldn't, are you, is your concern as a gamer that this might become a kind of a, a, a mono culture?

Speaker 8: (01:22:46)
Well, uh, first of all, I haven't really bought a new video game console since the WEU, but I am more concerned that it's gonna be more like a subscription service, similar to what we see with Netflix

Leo Laporte: (01:22:57)
And Amazon. Well, that is true. Okay. So that's really important when you're talking about revenue selling a $60 game is one thing selling a $30 game pass is another, and it's clear both Sony and Microsoft and everybody else in this business. And Nintendo even announced on the switch, their own subscription service, they all wanna do subscription. And really what I think Microsoft is setting the stage for is streaming. So in this is one of the, one of the ways they put their games everywhere. You don't need, uh, a console. You don't need a fancy $400 Xbox or PlayStation five. You just need an Android phone or even a Chromebook because you could play these games in your browser. And that's what Microsoft's doing with its game pass. Sony had a system like that. A, uh, they, they shut it down and, and Vidia has one which is celebrating its second anniversary.

Leo Laporte: (01:23:51)
Now GForce now and is very successful. Um, I think that might be the future, not only of gaming, but of computing that you don't need a high power computer on your desktop. You just need a window onto a server run by AMS on or Microsoft, uh, or Google. Those are the three big players right now. And there are lots of other little cloud players. That's an interesting way to go. And I, I suspect that's the plan and that's what every company, that's what Microsoft is essentially done with office. It's a subscription product. They don't wanna sell it to you. They want you to pay them annuity, you know, for the rest of your life. And, uh, and that's what everybody wants. Apple wants that apple stopped saying how many iPhones they've sold? They said, wow, we don't care about that anymore. Uh, and started talking about revenue per user. And that's suddenly the metric. Every company wants how much once we've got you as a customer, how much can we squeeze out of you every month for the rest of your life? And I would, you know, I don't, I share your concern about that. That's a lot of, um, that's a lot of subscriptions. That's a, that's a, your credit card gonna start heating up.

Speaker 8: (01:24:58)
Uh, why do

Leo Laporte: (01:24:59)
I know that? Yeah. And so I, I, I, I understand why people don't like that. We're, we're really used to the idea of buying something outright, but the world's not moving in the, that direction. In fact, it's only a matter of time before you don't buy a car outright, you buy a subscription, you don't, you know, you don't buy anything outright. It's all monthly subscription. I don't like it. Yeah, that's real. But I think that's where we're headed.

Speaker 8: (01:25:22)
Yeah. That's a real shocker. And I don't know how much time you got on far as radio goes, but it's kinda like how, you know, being a star Trek, I'm actually watching the first episode of star Trek right now, the man trap. And I can be old enough to remember been a fan since 86. And you used to see it all the time on TV and now paramount plus. Yeah. The only way you can get it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:25:43)
Yeah. Uh, I, that really bothers me. That's another conversation for another day. I agree. A hundred per percent. Leo LePort the tech guy. Yeah. That's um, it's funny because for a while it was all about disaggregation and now it's about aggregating it right back and, and, and siloing it right back. And that's, uh, that's really too bad.

Speaker 8: (01:26:05)
Yeah. I mean, I used to remember when Voyager and enterprise used to be on UPN and that was about the only way you could get new star Trek was if paramount kind of controlled the content. And that's my biggest concern with video games is that it may get to that point where if Microsoft and me just keeps acquiring all of this, that the only way you wanna play like a triple a game, uh, let's say like the new, um, I'm trying to look at some of the best selling PSI games, like, uh, demon souls, or Spiderman or anything of that. You gotta go to the PlayStation. Yeah. Or you gotta

Leo Laporte: (01:26:39)
Go to Xbox. Yeah. I don't think, I mean, we don't know the jury's still out, but I don't think Microsoft is gonna end up doing that. Um, I, but maybe, I mean, I think that their real plan is if they could sell call of duty on every platform, but maybe you have to have a Microsoft subscription, uh, to play it, but it plays everywhere. That's more, they'd prefer that right. Siloing it onto their box. So I think for gaming, it's gonna be sort of like, it is now for TV, where you could watch it on anything, but you have to have a subscription to the right service to get it. You'll be able to game on anything, but you'll have a, have to have a subscription to the right service to play it. And that's, you know, that's from your point of view in mind as well, that's a bummer because, uh, that's, what's happened with, you know, you have to subscribe now to Netflix, Amazon prime, Hulu, you know, you HBO and Showtime, if you wanna watch all the shows cuz they everyone's got their own streaming now paramount plus and peacock and all that.

Leo Laporte: (01:27:44)
Uh huh. Yeah. I it's unfortunate, but I don't know what we can do to prevent that.

Speaker 8: (01:27:50)
All right. Um, also, um, as far as, uh, with the apple, as far as the event in March, any words on IMEX?

Leo Laporte: (01:27:58)
No, in fact I was a little disappointed because the big rumor is iPhone se and iPad air may a Mac. I don't think you'll see a Mac in this March. This the event is probably March 8th. That's what the rumor mill seems to have agreed on. I don't think you'll see an iMac. You might see a mini. I think we're gonna wait till June for the new max, to be honest.

Speaker 8: (01:28:19)
All right. I can wait for that. All right. Well I better let you go

Leo Laporte: (01:28:22)
Pleasure. You talking to you again, Kenny calling

Speaker 8: (01:28:24)
You. All right. We'll say quick thing. Uh, the best fun game I saw all year NFL 49ers, Cowboys on Nickelodeon.

Leo Laporte: (01:28:31)
That was with the, with the slime slime. I don't, I'm not sure. I think the NFL's a little misguided in that, but okay. They're trying to get kids to watch football. I guess. I, I didn't see it. I watched it on the real, I watched it on the big boy network, but uh, but they, of course they threw a little bit in, uh, you know, and I was like, what the, what the heck? All right, well it's too bad. They're not doing a Nickelodeon version of the super bowl that would've been awesome. My favorite game was the Niners, uh, Packers in the snow in Lambo. That was freaking awesome. That was an amazing, it was indeed. Good luck to your Rams. Thank

Speaker 9: (01:29:17)
You. I really appreciate it. You have a good rest of the show.

Leo Laporte: (01:29:19)
You too. Well, I guess listen to the rest of the show and you'll let me know.

Speaker 10: (01:29:24)
Thanks for listening to TWI podcasts. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners who have services and products that will benefit our audience. Do you want customized host red ads that stand out then the TWI network is the perfect place for your next advertising campaign. TWI ads are original specialized in all shows include video, which means we can show off products, websites, and customized videos. Visit twi.tv/advertise and launch a tailored campaign today. That's twi.tv/advertise.

Leo Laporte: (01:29:54)
It's time to talk photography with Chris Markt photo guy, sensei.photo is his website. He is my personal photo sensei and he joins us every week to help us have some fun with photography. Hello, Chris?

Speaker 9: (01:30:09)
Hello. How are you

Leo Laporte: (01:30:10)
Today? I am great. Is it assignment time?

Speaker 9: (01:30:14)
It is assignment review time. Yes. We are going to look at the bright assignment. This one, the bright assign, and we are going to pull another one from the fishbowl at the end of the season, he's holding up

Leo Laporte: (01:30:26)
What looks like a fortune cookie fortune with the assignment. And that's how we do it. These days. You should bake them into cookies. That would be kind of cool. So did we get some good pictures in the bright group?

Speaker 9: (01:30:39)
We did. We did. We actually got, uh, a 55 of them. This is quite a good outcome. And uh, I'm just, I'm just gonna scroll through all of them so everyone can see their, and I

Leo Laporte: (01:30:49)
Posted a link by the way, in the show notes, it'll go up in the show notes and it's in chat rooms and so forth. So

Speaker 9: (01:30:53)
People, lots of good photography there and really happy with, uh, what came together here. And I have chosen three and we gotta have a look at them. Nice. Our first one E is by Cheryl Dobbs, it's titled ice sculpture. And so here's what Cheryl did. She, uh, she found a piece of ice along. I don't even know what this looks like a river maybe or some, some ice field back there and she's holding it up against the sun and this piece has a hole in it. So the sun is shining through the hole. And um, if you look at the ex at the exit data here, she's shooting this as an, at an aperture of F 25, a very small little aperture. Ooh that's and that's what makes the sun be like all these, uh, gives it the spikes.

Leo Laporte: (01:31:40)
That's almost pin hole camera she's using there.

Speaker 9: (01:31:44)
Wow. It is. Yeah, but that's the kind of stuff you can do. So it, it has these, all these layers and the, and the effect of the lens. And, um, it's always kind of nice to have the, and the, and the warm and cold color combination, cuz there's some blueish snow back there. So that looks like, uh, that's a great contrast to the warmish light of the sun. So, but that's a good one. That's good on Cheryl. Well done. Second one is by Gary UN. So what Gary did here, it's a picture of a park. You'll see park benches and you'll see trees and it's, uh, in the dark or in, well, it's not very bright there, but what Gary did is he shot that with the flash on, on the camera. And what that does is it, it brightens up all these snowflakes in the air and it's not just the snowflakes. Like you don't see them as little snowflakes, but the ones that are close to the camera, of course they closer to the flash. So they are getting brighter. It's really cool, but they're not in focus. That's a really cool, so you have this cool effect of all these little discs on the, on the picture. It looks like almost like an apparition of something, but you know, it's

Leo Laporte: (01:32:49)
Supernatural. That's

Speaker 9: (01:32:50)
The neat thing about, but you know, it's small. Yeah. Yes. So that's a good way to make snow visible by just shooting it with the flash in front of something darker. And that will brighten up those snowflakes that are really close. And um, so he, Gary uses the brightness to bring out the snowflake and it adds this really beautiful layer to the photo. Otherwise it would be, uh, kind of a mediocre photo, but that really adds, uh, another level of not just the visual, but it's a mood that you get by having that on the picture. So very happy with that. And then last but not least a picture by Gregory Chesney first look is the title. Uh, what we're seeing is a hand that's that's, uh, pulling apart the blinds on a window. So you, you see this from the perspective of the person.

Speaker 9: (01:33:40)
And, uh, if you, if you look at, if let's zoom in a bit here, if you look closer at the hand, it's lit mainly from behind, from the light that comes in from the outside. So you have the back light and it brings out all these structures, even the, the ridges and the fingerprints. And you can, you can tell the, the, the wrinkles, it's not a hand and it has so much character and the whole picture. It, it leaves, it leaves a lot to the viewer to kind of fill in the blanks. What is behind the picture behind the, the blinds, cuz everything outside is completely overexposed. So there is no detail in the, in the outside. And that, it's interesting because

Leo Laporte: (01:34:19)
Interesting, uh, the reaction in the chat at him is he needs to clean the blinds. And at first I thought, oh yeah, but that's actually fine. Right. That's part of the

Speaker 9: (01:34:27)
Story that that's part of the story. Yes, exactly. It is part of the story, those blinds you, where are they? Are they in a, in a, in a, whatever, a greasy restaurant or yeah. Or some other place that you have no idea, but you can, you can, it's got a story as well. It does have a story. So, um, good photos. All, all of them are amazing. All 55 of them. And I would say, um, that was a, that was an amazing assignment. Good. Thanks everyone for being here. Yeah. So we have,

Leo Laporte: (01:35:00)
So now from the fish, Chris has a fishbowl. I'm telling you, you gotta bake some fortune cookies, put 'em in there, but okay. He's got, 'em all the fortunes in the, in the bowl. He's gonna now pull out a new assignment.

Speaker 9: (01:35:10)
We have adjectives in there and lots of them. So it's just

Leo Laporte: (01:35:13)
Adjectives. Just adjectives. No. Now no verbs. Just tell, okay.

Speaker 9: (01:35:17)
Oh, this, this, what is, this is a good one. This is a good one. Silly, silly. That's the

Leo Laporte: (01:35:22)
Next one? Take that to your forehead. Silly. Okay. So the way this, this works, you've got a month, it takes it. We about four weeks to do this. Uh, and the way it works is you take a picture. The whole point of this is to get you out there taking pictures. That's really the, the secret subversive gen agenda here, because the more you take the better you'll get the more you'll enjoy it. So go out and take pictures to illustrate the idea, the word, the concepts, silly, whatever that means to you. And, and if you look at previous, uh, contest submissions, that that could mean any thing. It could really, there's a variety of possibilities. Once you find, uh, an image you like, and you can only upload a total of four one per week for the next four weeks. So, so make sure you pick one, you really like upload it to flicker. That's a free photo sharing site, flicker.com and you'll need to join the tech guy group. If you're not already a member on flicker again, free tech guy group has, uh, what is it, Chris? 11,000 members, some huge number. So, oh my goodness. Not as many as salt Hank followers, but

Speaker 9: (01:36:28)
13,000 roughly. So it's really a big number.

Leo Laporte: (01:36:30)
Yeah. Hanks cut. Thanks. Cut. How many? 400. How many followers on Instagram? 780,000. So I no longer feel great about 14,000, but okay. We'll take it. We'll take it. Uh, and if you, uh, if you upload a picture to that, make sure you tag it TG silly. So we know it's a submission for the tech guy, uh, show, and it's just for the silly, uh, assignment and then our, our moderator Silverman. Thank you re she does a great job, keeping everything in order. We'll add it to that pool. Chris will review in four weeks and pick three photos. That's your only reward getting, uh, your photo mentioned on the radio

Speaker 9: (01:37:13)
And it doesn't really, it doesn't necessarily have to be something silly on the photo. You could ask the photographer, be silly. What while taking the photo that will maybe even reflect in what comes out. Oh, so silly, silly, silly is good. Silly's good. That gives

Leo Laporte: (01:37:28)
Me some ideas that gives me some interesting

Speaker 9: (01:37:31)
Idea. And in a, in a creative content and a creative context, it's always good to have some silliness.

Leo Laporte: (01:37:36)
Chris, uh, is a, a podcaster. He has a podcast. One of the, I think probably the longest running photography podcast, right? 15 years now. Yeah. Wow. Tips from the top floor about 16, 16 TF ttf.com. You don't you look at day older though. I don't understand how you're doing that. That's amazing.

Speaker 9: (01:37:56)
Oh, it's all video magic. You do

Leo Laporte: (01:37:58)
TF ttf.com. He also, uh, does photo coaching. Uh, he's got a nice site there for that. Uh, sensei, S E N E S E i.photo. And, uh, he's got great books on wide angle, photography, film photography. Um, you, are you still giving away your, uh, thousand photos in an hour, your light room? Uh, uh,

Speaker 9: (01:38:19)
Uh, the website is kind of broken right now. Oh, so in theory I am, if it'll be back pretty

Leo Laporte: (01:38:25)
Soon, that's worth getting, I have it. And it really helped me with my light room, uh, workflow. So lots of good stuff. He's been around doing this for quite some time. And on the flicker, he has his own photo stream under the UN. It's not as bad as salt Hank, but it's a strange N U B U I Nobu, which we still don't know why. Exactly. flicker.com/no thank you. No bow. My photo sensei, Chris Markt, uh, we're gonna take a break, come back more of your calls coming up in just a little bit. Thank you for all the photos, by the way. It was a lot of fun. Leo. LePort the tech guy. Thank you, Chris. Now, uh, uh, now we have to do a photo reenactment because when, uh, 26 years ago, Hank, Hank sat on my lap at KSFO. Yeah. These

Speaker 9: (01:39:22)
Kind of projects are

Leo Laporte: (01:39:23)
Priceless. Yeah. Now I don't know how we're gonna, how we're gonna do this. Uh, let me, let me, uh, you know, what I can do is I can, I think I can blend these, uh, so that there's a little bit of each. There we go. Okay. So is there a way to like, take a still frame of something? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Once, once. So you gotta sit on my lap. Wait a minute. You gotta wear the headphones. Okay. Okay. Kind of know where you have your head has to be. Wait, where's the original picture. Uh, I okay. Okay. Somebody take a picture.

Leo Laporte: (01:40:05)
Okay. Here comes here. Comes John. And take a picture here. Use my pixel six too. This is history. You got a bony butt. I know. Sorry about that. All right. That'll do no, no, no. One more. One more. That'll do pig. That'll do. All right. Look at the camera. Go. All right. I'm gonna does this thing work. I don't know. I'm trying to make the face I was making as a baby. It, it just doesn't send me, send me the picture you took. Gimme me the feedback that I'm expecting. Oh yeah. It doesn't do anything. I'm sure. The one he took pictures. That's perfect. Didn't take any. So I don't know why I'm pushing the button. I'm a pushing the button. That white button, right? Oh yeah. Let's see. Why is it saying didn't he get one here? I'm gonna break your leg. No, I can handle it. Okay. Do one on this.

Leo Laporte: (01:41:08)
He's on a ball. It's true. All we gotta actually look at that picture. Recreate it. I know you gotta, I'm gonna look down at you gets shorter Henry it's. Is that it? Does that look at all? Accurate? Not even close. Well, whatever, but when you get the two of them, it'll get, it'll be good. There's a problem with size. He can't, he can't do it. Send me both of those. I will. I will, especially the original I will. And thanks, uh, John, for getting those mics together, he, he did all that work and, and don't forget to mint it as an NFT. It's gonna be an NFT, a salt, Hank and salt, Hank and salt. Dead MFT must love you. Love you have fun. Let, let me know when the podcast comes out. So I can, I will, I can tell the world that you should be our first guest. All right, Chris, outta here, have a good one. Take you byebye.

Leo Laporte: (01:42:09)
So I don't know how close we got. I don't think, I don't think close, but you know, if you put 'em side by side, it'll make sense, right? Yeah. Oh, that's pretty cute. Let me see. That's pretty close. That's pretty close. That's hysterical. All right. Right. Love you, dad. I love you, son. Take care. Yeah. Have fun. Okay. Have fun. Call me if you, you have any issues and we gotta have a meal. Yeah, I know. Did you drive all the way up just to get those? I'm sorry. No, that's okay. No, it's it's all. You're kind of used to going come up here. I guess it's not a bad drive. It's easy on a Sunday's probably not too bad. Yeah. All right. I love you. In fact, this week on Wednesday, if you wanna go. Oh, good. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Good. Well, I work Wednesday, but yeah, we can have breakfast. Yeah. Hey, you could go to the, the zone workout with me. I 9:00 AM now it's nine now. We'll see breakfast. I right. Have all right, take care. I love you. I'll do some editing and put 'em side by side. Huh? Leo. LePort the tech guy. It's a beautiful world. They recorded that before. Uh, Facebook for TikTok before Twitter. It's a beautiful world. Jack Anaheim, California is next. Thanks for hanging. Not Jack Leo Laport the tech.

Speaker 4: (01:43:39)
Hey, good morning to you. And thank you for taking

Leo Laporte: (01:43:41)
My call. My pleasure. Thanks for calling. What can I do for you?

Speaker 4: (01:43:46)
I had a, uh, gift I got for Christmas. I opened it up on a Christmas day and then just about weeks ago, I took it out and tried to set it up. It's a, it's an HP laptop pavilion.

Leo Laporte: (01:43:57)
Nice. And you weren't in a hurry to use it, huh?

Speaker 4: (01:44:01)
No, no, but I had a computer that was slowing down, so I decided to spend the time and I'm not that tech savvy at all. So it's kind of a pain in my head. That's

Leo Laporte: (01:44:09)
Exactly it. Right. You're looking at the, that box going. That's just trouble. That's just trouble sitting there.

Speaker 4: (01:44:14)
It's gonna save me some time over the old one, but do I really wanna open it up and start it on this? Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:44:19)
Uh, was this a, this was a gift from a somebody nice. Huh?

Speaker 4: (01:44:23)
A a sibling. Yeah. Nice. And uh, yeah, real nice. So I, um, I plug it in and um, I noticed the batteries of charging.

Leo Laporte: (01:44:31)
Oh.

Speaker 4: (01:44:33)
And I clicked on here and it says, uh, not charging 0%. Okay. And I have a couple of different options here, but I look at the bottom and doesn't have a battery compartment. Like some of my older laptops, you

Leo Laporte: (01:44:46)
Know, it's funny cuz I got a phone uh, recently and I plugged it in. It wouldn't charge. I thought I'm gonna have to send this back as a brick. And I, I realized, oh wait a minute. I could take the BA yes. The battery terminals were sealed. So it wouldn't, you know, would be safe in transit, but you can't access the battery. So it couldn't be that.

Speaker 4: (01:45:05)
No, there's no access.

Leo Laporte: (01:45:07)
Um, that's interesting. What's the, uh, model of this HP.

Speaker 4: (01:45:13)
Oh gosh. It says a pavilion. Yeah. Um, on the, it says it's a Intel core. I five eighth generator. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:45:21)
So it's brand new, which is interesting. Um, you're, you're plugged in the adapter that came with it. Right?

Speaker 4: (01:45:29)
Yeah. And it runs like that. But as soon as I pull that out, just

Leo Laporte: (01:45:33)
Crash it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's not, it didn't, it didn't charge at all.

Speaker 4: (01:45:37)
Yeah. So when I go to the bottom and hit that, it, it, it, it says, uh, best battery life on one side of this gray box and the other side says best performance. Yeah. Ignore that

Leo Laporte: (01:45:46)
Settings. Ignore that. Ignore that. Yeah. That's that's for power management once your battery's working. So HP has a diagnostic, uh, tool that comes with the pavilion. I think it's called the, uh, support assistant. So what I would do is, uh, hit the windows key type HP support, assistant and, and return that should launch it. And inside there, there is a battery check. And so it can tell you, um,

Speaker 4: (01:46:17)
Apparently windows, what

Leo Laporte: (01:46:19)
Windows key, you know that key with a windows on it with a window on it. Oh

Speaker 4: (01:46:24)
Yeah. I got it. Just

Leo Laporte: (01:46:25)
Click there. Okay. Yeah. Click that. And that opens up the, uh, menu. And if you just start typing, you could find anything. This is faster than digging through the menus. Okay. All right. So type HP set should get you everything you don't need to type the whole thing if it's installed, which it should be usually HP ships with those installed. Once that launches, you should check, um, the battery. I

Speaker 4: (01:46:48)
Have some choices here. HP set up 1, 2, 3, set up executive set up windows

Leo Laporte: (01:46:53)
10. Oh, I'm sorry. Don't I said set up support backspace till you get to support. All right. Support. I'm sorry. Set up is for, yeah. Obviously setting it up, but you, you it's already set up. Um, but the there's a battery check routine. That's what we're trying to get

Speaker 4: (01:47:08)
When I have, uh, HP support, CWE results, HP support assistance. That's it.

Leo Laporte: (01:47:13)
HP support assistant. That's it run that assistant. Yeah. Hit return on that. And uh, and then in there in menus, there'll be a battery check cuz I, it, I, it sounds like something's broken, but it is apparently possible. And it shouldn't come from the factory this way to disable the battery in your settings, in your bio setting, we used to call 'em bio settings. Um, so, uh, I, if, if, if you, uh, under battery, uh, it should say whether you've got a battery and what its status is and all of that.

Speaker 4: (01:47:57)
So I open up a HP support assistant and I have login printer, support, support, home, window support, computer support.

Leo Laporte: (01:48:04)
Oh, I think you, I think you've gone to the, uh, app, the website, as opposed to the app. You want an there's an app? No, on the you're in an app on

Speaker 4: (01:48:12)
The page in the computer. That just it's the it's. Yeah. It's within the computer. I'm not on any web page. Okay.

Leo Laporte: (01:48:18)
Um, there should be a battery.

Speaker 4: (01:48:23)
Should it be on support drives?

Leo Laporte: (01:48:26)
No. If there's not a battery entry, then maybe they've taken that out. Um, you can also look in the device manager, I guess. Um,

Speaker 4: (01:48:37)
Is that back to the windows icon? Uh,

Leo Laporte: (01:48:39)
Yes. Hit the start button. We call that the start button, uh, type device manager in the device manager. You should have an entry for batteries and you wanna make sure that you've got a battery in there. Uh, what we're trying to find out is if the battery is connected, if it's not connected, it won't show up as a device. Uh, let's see. There's also windows has its own battery report. Thank you. Uh, reccon five. He's an it guy. So, uh, windows, uh, does have a battery report. This is a little bit more typing. Are you ready?

Speaker 4: (01:49:16)
Oh yeah. What do you want now? It's still on the same, uh, little windows icon at the bottom or something. Yeah. You're

Leo Laporte: (01:49:21)
Well, yeah, actually do windows, uh, key, um, and type CMD. Oh gosh, you have to be an administrator to, to do this. Oh, I don't know if I wanna talk you through all this on the radio. Uh, you need to launch an, this is a terrible thing. Yeah. I would call HP because honestly, um, this should not be an issue with a brand new out of the box. It's it should have a

Speaker 4: (01:49:49)
Battery, even if it was purchased three black Fridays ago. Yes.

Leo Laporte: (01:49:53)
Even three black Fridays ago. Yeah. Although that, what that, one of the things that does tell you is it's probably an older model and it, and it may be, I don't know what I mean. It may be that because it's an older model. Could it be the battery has expired. I doubt it. You have to use it.

Speaker 4: (01:50:09)
I'll call HPS a great idea.

Leo Laporte: (01:50:10)
Yeah, they're gonna do what I just said, which is hit windows key. You're gonna go to command prompt and you're gonna, there's a power config. I'll put a, I'll put a link in the show notes, how to generate a battery report in windows 10, the battery report should help, uh, by at least giving you an idea of the battery status. If it can see a battery. So my, my suspicion is that the battery connector, there's a little connector that connects that battery to the motherboard has fallen off that in transit. It got shook around and the, the wire fell off. So if that's the case, you won't even see a battery, the battery report and say, no, you don't have a battery. And if that's the case, then you're gonna have to bring it to an HP service center anyway, for them to open it up, reconnect it. Unless you feel, you know, ambitious, and you don't mind opening up your computer.

Speaker 4: (01:51:01)
I don't have that type of, uh, yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:51:04)
I, I gathered you weren't that ambitious. So, so, but that, you know, you, HP will tell you where to bring it. They'll have a Depot that you can bring it to. And the guy you'll just take four screws out and they'll go, oh yeah, it's not connected there. If you just connect that there it'll work. Otherwise it, it could be something else is wrong. If it can see a battery, then the battery report will tell you if it's a chargeable battery, it could be the battery is somehow the chemistry's gone. Um, which seems unlikely. Uh, but that's, I guess possible. It depends how long it was sitting in the warehouse

Speaker 4: (01:51:37)
Are these lithium batteries. Yeah. They're

Leo Laporte: (01:51:39)
Lithium ion. They, you know, they die. The chemistry dies as you use them, but sitting unused in a warehouse unless they it's possible. Uh, they get discharged so completely that they, they can't be woken up. Um, and that possibly, I think you're gonna have to, I think you're gonna have to get HP, uh, on this one. Okay. And it's under, it's under warranty. Uh, you know, it's not, yeah. You know, it is though. It is three weeks ago. Uh, you

Speaker 4: (01:52:07)
Bought it. No, but it was purchased in probably 2018. Oh,

Leo Laporte: (01:52:13)
Oh three years ago. I three blacks. Oh, I get what you're saying. That's been sitting in your closet for four years.

Speaker 4: (01:52:23)
She wrapped this and gave it Leo

Leo Laporte: (01:52:24)
Laport, the tech guy. Oh, that was very nice of her. Here's a three year old computer. Oh, it isn't under warranty. New,

Speaker 4: (01:52:32)
Yeah. New, old computer.

Leo Laporte: (01:52:35)
Wow. Oh my gosh. Um,

Speaker 4: (01:52:41)
Wow. So I not, it's not under warranties, but I can still call HP.

Leo Laporte: (01:52:44)
You can still call him and just say, look, it was in the box the whole time, you know, in that case, maybe it is that battery is dead. Um, sometimes when a battery gets lithium, mine and battery is charged, goes to nothing, which it clearly did over those three years. Um, it's not, it's like it, you, you can't, you can jump start it, I think. But you, you can't just start it normally. Okay. Yeah. The battery's gone and they can replace the battery. Yeah. I just care for a new battery. If you really wanted to, computer was free. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. I'm sorry. It took me so long to figure this out. You too. Take care.

Speaker 8: (01:53:17)
Yeah. When I said three black Fridays ago, I meant, I, I don't

Leo Laporte: (01:53:20)
Know why I turned that into three weeks ago. It's three years ago. Oh, oh my gosh.

Speaker 8: (01:53:27)
I think the battery is probably just won't wake up

Leo Laporte: (01:53:29)
Because it was sitting on, I think the battery's dead. The chemistry's dead in the battery. The

Speaker 8: (01:53:33)
C's dead. All right. Care.

Leo Laporte: (01:53:35)
Thanks much. You too. Well, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo? LePort here. The tech guy, time talk computers and the internet home theater and digital photography and smartphone and smart watches and all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. If you wanna call and talk high tech, I'm here for you. 8 8, 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. Toll free from anywhere in the us, sir, Canada, all the answers go to the website, tech guy, la.com. Uh, that'll take you to actually our podcast site. So, uh, audio and video from the show will be there. After the fact, we put all the links in there, including links to professor Laura's musical selections, and there's a, uh, transcript as well with time code. So you can search for the part of the show. You're interested in jump right to it. Tech labs.com. Look for episode 1866. We're gonna, you know, another, uh, 150 years will be in the present. 1866. Tom is on the line from Oceanside, California. Hi Tom.

Speaker 8: (01:54:42)
Good afternoon, Leo. How you doing?

Leo Laporte: (01:54:44)
I am. Well, how are you?

Speaker 8: (01:54:45)
I'm doing great. Thanks. Thanks for taking

Leo Laporte: (01:54:47)
My call. Thanks for calling. Yeah. What can I do for

Speaker 8: (01:54:49)
You? Hey, I've got a, uh, I've got a, an LGO led TV that I bought. I think it's a 2018 that I bought on your recommendation. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte: (01:54:59)
You got some four good years out of it. I hope.

Speaker 8: (01:55:02)
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's been great. It's just one, one thing that I can't quite figure out. Uh, the picture's awesome. Um, the one exception is when there's dark scenes, it gets shadowy kind of haily dark. Yeah. You know, and, and I'm, I'm trying to figure out what adjustment I'm supposed to be,

Leo Laporte: (01:55:19)
Making nothing, nothing the TV can do. I'm sorry to say, that's the quality of the stream. What you're getting is something, uh, that's called macro blocking. It's an artifact of compression. So you're gonna see it on streaming things. Probably never on broadcast TV, if you have a antenna or anything, huh. But you will see it on Netflix and other things if the stream bit rate is too low. So this is a all videos compressed, even the best video, you know, in a movie theater or on a Blueray D V, D or U H D V D. It has to be compressed. Video is just, it's just too much data, but the amount of compression and the style, all of compression can make a big difference in the quality. Uh, if your bandwidth is insufficient to bring you the best UHD quality, you'll get something that's compressed a little bit more in the compression.

Leo Laporte: (01:56:15)
One of the artifacts that's most common in compression is with solid colors and, uh, especially solid colors with a slight gradient. Uh, black is a perfect example where it's not a solid, solid black, like all pixels are off for the whole thing. There's some that are on a little bit, it's a black shading to gray and that smooth gradient is hard to do a compression, generally blocks it into chunks, you know, 10% gray, 11% gray, 12% gray. And you'll be able to see, looks like halos. You'll be able to see the, the borders between those colors. That's that is an artifact of compression. Are where do you see it most?

Speaker 8: (01:56:57)
Well, just like I say, it's, uh, you mean whether it's, um,

Leo Laporte: (01:57:00)
Is it, is it, so the question is the streaming service, your, and the device you're playing it back with, so you might get better results. For instance, if you're, are you using the internal, smart TV, uh, functions?

Speaker 8: (01:57:15)
You know, I think I've, I think I've done that. And also sometimes straight through the TV, sometimes through a Roku and sometimes through the, you know, through the cable so

Leo Laporte: (01:57:23)
That you're gonna see different effects depending on how so the better software, for instance, if you have more processor your TV, doesn't have a lot of processor. Uh, an apple TV has a lot, uh, Roku, some have a lot more than others. The newer ones have more, if you have a Roku ultra, which you should have for your 4k, that that's what I've got. You should then if you still see macro blocking it, maybe you don't have sufficient bandwidths. Is, is it worse on like, is it Amazon prime is worse than Hulu is better than Netflix or that's the, uh, next question is which services,

Speaker 8: (01:57:59)
You know, I think, I think that's the case, but I haven't paid that close to the tension cuz I figured it was a setting thing. So

Leo Laporte: (01:58:04)
It's not thet. I'm sorry to say. Okay. Uh, it, it, but it could be bandwidth processor, software, uh, all of that is, and, and service. So some services compress more than others. Some do a worse job if you're getting an HDR signal from Netflix, for instance. And if, and the TV will say 4k HDR, it'll actually, you'll see the little HDR pop up in the upper. Right. Do you see that? Right? Yeah. Then you're getting enough bandwidth for the TV to say, good, I see an HDR signal and you watch something like stranger things they're in stranger things because they knew they were gonna be in HDR. There's a lot of scenes where she's in a black mirrored secret room. Right. And that's the kind of place you'll see those gradients if you don't have enough data, but if you do, then you'll see a nice, solid black.

Leo Laporte: (01:58:57)
Okay. And, and just so you know, I have the same TV. You can see it all in black. It's just, it's just, it's garbage and garbage out, I guess is the, uh, okay. The old tech turn. Well, that helps a lot. Okay. That cool. Great. Well, that's, I'll go check on that then. It's good to under, it's good to understand how that works. Uh, Netflix says, and they have a page on bandwidth requirements for Netflix and I wish you were sent is that, but Netflix does have a page. They, I think that honestly they understate it, but I guess they know more than anybody. Um, their recommendation, if you wanna watch what you're looking for, which is, uh, D high Def is 24 megabits down per second. That sounds like though, if, if I say that, oh, 24 is fine. You're good. That's all you need.

Leo Laporte: (01:59:45)
It's more complicated than that. 25, if no one else is using the internet at all. Uh, and if it's a solid 25, it doesn't fluctuate. So I think a 50 or a hundred really is more realistic, but that's what, that's what Netflix says. They say ultra high Def, uh, D 25 megabits high Def five megabits standard, Def three megabits. That's their recommendation. Honestly, I think that's way low. I think that's way low. And then even if you have, let's say you have a hundred megabits, that's gotten much more common for people. Uh, so you, you're pretty sure your bandwidth is adequate. Then the processor and the device that's rendering, it could be keeping you down, uh, or the system that's sending it to you. So, um, some services can press more than others. My, usually my recomme and by the way, not even just the service.

Leo Laporte: (02:00:43)
And I'll give you an example, Netflix, usually with Netflix, you're not getting it from the Netflix servers. You're getting it from a Netflix server hosted by your internet service provider. Not always, but often Netflix to save bandwidths, to give you a better result, worked out deals with a lot of ISPs to actually host the, the most common movies, uh, in their offices, which means it's going a very short distance, but it also means the ISP could be, could be messing with it. So, uh, there Netflix, if Netflix is one of the problems, Netflix has a bandwidth checker@fast.com and that's how fast your connection is to whatever Netflix server, uh, you're getting your stuff from fast.com and, uh, it might be worth checking that check, try other devices. My experiences, the apple TV generally is gonna give you the best results. In fact, one of the reasons apple gives you good results is apple CAEs, the Netflix content, locally, apple actually, uh, stores that Netflix content on their servers and then sends it to you, which usually is a better result.

Leo Laporte: (02:01:53)
So I have been told by many, the best ex experience with Netflix would be to go through an apple TV, eight, eight eighty eight, ask Leo that's the phone number? (888) 827-5536. I hope I didn't overexplain that. It's good to know though. What's going on. You want the best picture. And these days streaming is the way to go. Leola port D tech guy, a 88, ask Leo that's the phone number? Uh, professor Laura is playing requests today from, uh, our studio manager, John Lenina. And you John, did you ask for Sinatra too? Or did you just ask for the eighties stuff? Yeah, he loves Sinatra too. So good. You got your eclectic, he's an eclectic fellow. 88 88. Ask Leo, Idaho falls on the line. Todd. Hello, Todd.

Speaker 4: (02:02:39)
Hi. Hi. First of all, first of all, you never go wrong with Frank Sinatra.

Leo Laporte: (02:02:44)
That's what I think. All blue eyes man. He was, yeah.

Speaker 4: (02:02:48)
Yeah. All right. My question. I have, I used to be a cannon guy and then I converted to Nikon. Yes. And I have an old, um, it's a four 30 ex Speedlight, uh, flash. Yep. And it was a really good flash. Can I use it on an icon safely?

Leo Laporte: (02:03:09)
Yes. Safely. Yes. Whether it will be smart as another question. So the E ex does a lot of like through the lens, fill, uh, you know, measurements and things like that. It's nice. Those four 30 S are very nice. Um, but I don't know if the ni you know, the Nikon shoe is compatible, so you could put it on there. It'll fire it at the right time. But whether it will do the, through the lens metering, I don't know. Oh, okay. But try and see. It might, I mean, I think, I think Canon wants to sell these to even people who use non cannon gear, I would guess.

Speaker 4: (02:03:47)
Yeah. I would think so. It

Leo Laporte: (02:03:49)
Won't break it. I don't, well, now I should, I don't think it will break it. Uh, I actually have one of those too, but see, I did the opposite direction. I went from Nikon to cannon and actually now I've gone from Canon to Sony. So, um, uh, I, you know, I haven't tried, I haven't tried that. I would guess though, that it'll it'll work it just, again, it's the TTL that may not work.

Speaker 4: (02:04:13)
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For some reason when Nikon came out with the Z series, they didn't put a flash on him.

Leo Laporte: (02:04:21)
Yeah, no, but wants an on camera flash, to be honest with you. Uh, because if the flashlight is too close to the lens, it flattens everything out. That's when you get red eye, it's just a, so pro cameras, they just don't build the flash in anymore. Uh, and in fact, even the speed light, you know, one of the things that's nice about the speed light is you can point it up at the ceiling so you can get ceiling bounce, or you can put filters on it and things like that. So it's not as bad as an on camera flash, but, uh, you know, if you starting to really get serious about your photography, um, you might even want off, off body flash because there's no, it's a much better look, isn't it. When the light source is coming from the side than when it's coming straight on, it just flattens everything out.

Speaker 11: (02:05:09)
So even the distance of your arm being out

Leo Laporte: (02:05:12)
Yes. Even the arm. Exactly. Uh, yeah. And so I think a lot of people there are now quite a few, uh, E even inexpensive solutions for off camera flashes. Um, usually you'll need a remote. Um, that might be one way to use your E ex is to get a compatible remote. You put it on a tripod, you sit it over there, even a few feet away from you. So now it's coming in from the side and you, then that remote has a little trigger that you put on top of the, that that's what you put on the shoe on your camera that would actually probably solve the compatibility issue.

Speaker 11: (02:05:49)
Okay.

Leo Laporte: (02:05:49)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, and honestly, I, I, I mean only, only the consumer cameras now have built in flashes as, as you get more serious. That's the last place you wanna flash to be is next to your lens.

Speaker 11: (02:06:03)
Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate

Leo Laporte: (02:06:06)
It. My pleasure. Yeah. Um, many of these flashes you might even have, I don't, you said the model, I don't remember, but some of the newer flashes don't even need a trigger. They're built. They, they have, they RF built in, they know that's how people are gonna use them. So you might check your, uh, your speed light and see if, if it has its own 88, 88, ask CLE. It's funny. Now all the hipster, I should ask to salt Hank. When he was in here, TikTok star, all the influencers are using these ring lights. Now, the problem is you see, you see the ring light reflections in their eyes or in any surfaces. It's just, it's a dead giveaway. It's like influencer influencer, uh, John Paul on the line, our next call from Roseburg O Oregon. Hi, uh, John Paul.

Speaker 11: (02:06:57)
Hi, my name John Paul. Yeah. Welcome talk through.

Leo Laporte: (02:07:01)
Yay. Bravo. Well done. Yay. What can I do for you?

Speaker 11: (02:07:06)
Well, I have a Chromebook and it's working fine. Yay. And I have a problem with the internet when I go through a website, I get to it, but it involuntarily opens up, um, three other tabs from some on the page. Ooh.

Leo Laporte: (02:07:22)
That and what, just outta curiosity are those tabs? Yeah. Uh, like advertisements and stuff. What are the, what are the tabs that's opening up? No,

Speaker 11: (02:07:32)
They're not really advertisements. The other pages that, that have, that are, you know, linked to the site if I wanted to go somewhere else.

Leo Laporte: (02:07:37)
Oh, okay. So you're on a site after and there, and there are links on the page and it will open up tabs based on the links that you're looking at.

Speaker 11: (02:07:47)
Well, yeah. If they're related without

Leo Laporte: (02:07:49)
You clicking them,

Speaker 11: (02:07:49)
But right. And so if I, if I'm on the computer for 10 minutes, I didn't like a dozen tabs.

Leo Laporte: (02:07:56)
Well, that's no good. I dunno what

Speaker 11: (02:07:59)
I dunno. I, I, I could do it fine if I use, um, use another browser. I'm fine. Like Firefox or opera, but Chrome has this problem. I'd never had this problem before. I'm not sure what's happening. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:08:11)
I'm not sure either. The reason I asked if you were, you know, what was the content of those tabs is if you had a malicious extension and add, you know, extension on there, and it's possible to do that, even on a Chromebook,

Speaker 11: (02:08:23)
I have some me membership sites and it'll open links on some of those pages. So they're not ads they're, they're on the page. But so, so some, some emotional stuff I have. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:08:38)
That's why I was asking. Uh, so there may be a setting. Chrome does one of the things, and I actually have some qualms about it, but to speed things up Chrome preloads pages, when you're looking at a page, it'll actually go through the links and try to figure out which ones you're most likely to hit and preload that con 10, but it shouldn't open a tab.

Speaker 11: (02:08:59)
Right?

Leo Laporte: (02:09:00)
Yeah. So are you, you're not, are you clicking on, you're not clicking on 'em you're not doing anything. It just happens. Right.

Speaker 11: (02:09:07)
Right. Well, I, once I open with website, it opens up two or three tabs and, and yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:09:11)
Cause it's, it's nor there is a setting where you can, you can have it when you click a link, open it in a new tab, but you're not clicking those links. It just does it automatically. Correct? Yeah. I think you gotta look at what extensions you have, uh, installed and see if there is anything that's a little bit rogue, uh, in the, you know, that three line ha they call it the hamburger menu, cuz it doesn't look at all like a hamburger in that three line menu over there. You can down and look at extensions. And um, always we talked about this yesterday. Always look at those, not all, not all the time, but every once in a while, take a look at those extensions cuz sometimes random extensions get installed that do things that you don't want. Make sure everything on there you want.

Speaker 11: (02:09:54)
Um, is there a way, is there a way to like UNS Chrome and reinstall it not on

Leo Laporte: (02:09:59)
A Chromebook? No, no

Speaker 11: (02:10:02)
You can't. I added, I downloaded, I downloaded the Chrome beta

Leo Laporte: (02:10:07)
And yeah. Is it still doing that?

Speaker 11: (02:10:09)
It has the same, same problem. So

Leo Laporte: (02:10:13)
That's really interesting. It's

Speaker 11: (02:10:15)
Just a, it's just that browser, not just a wide. So

Leo Laporte: (02:10:20)
You, you might, you can reset. In fact there's two levels of reset. So you can go into the Chrome advanced settings and uh, and, and reset, which will clear your cash, clear your history, all that. That's the first thing I'd try. And of course there's always the last recourse on a power book, which is a great thing to have is power wash. Do you know about your power wash setting? Uh, that's a good one. So Chrome, one of the reasons I recommend Chromebooks is cuz uh, like kinda like a smartphone. It's very easy to, to do a factory reset. And because on a Chromebook here, ideally not storing all your data there, you will want to back everything. It will wipe your drive and bring it back to factory settings that will for sure fix this. So do a power wash on your Chromebook. See what happens then space next with rod pile Leo Laport, the tech guy

Leo Laporte: (02:11:16)
Sometimes sites will do that. Is it, is it always the same site that does that? Oh, he's gone. Cause sometimes sites will open up. I don't know. He's burning out his thing out there alone. I never will understand that lyric. I hate having burning thing burning out his fuel out there alone rod pile. He is our spaceman written many books about space, including space 2.0 and uh, first on the moon, which is a beautiful coffee table book about the moon landing and editor in chief of a Astra magazine space, dots.org. Also the host, uh, of this week in space, a new podcast that we are, uh, testing out. It's in beta right now. It's kind of private beta, but in it'll go public. I'm sure. Uh, as soon as, uh, you and te from space.com ready to face the audience. Yes. Are you having fun doing it? Oh, it's a blast.

Speaker 12: (02:12:20)
You know, we were a little, we were a little squirmy on the first one I think, but uh,

Leo Laporte: (02:12:24)
That's why Lisa wanted, wanted have a few betas in private and get comfortable with the format and everything. And Lisa's smart. She's a smart woman. Yeah. Uh, rod, uh, also of course joins us every week to talk about space technology. I wanna take you back to late 1978, Rob, when NASA realized 1978, they had a little problem, a 77 ton space station. That was in an orbit that was rapidly decaying. I'm talking about Skylab. You remember this? Oh vibrantly. Yes. Uh, on July 11th, it's 1979. NASA fired the boosters, hoping that they would bring Skylab down in the Indian ocean. They missed actually there

Speaker 12: (02:13:13)
Were, there was no booster

Leo Laporte: (02:13:15)
Firing. Oh,

Speaker 12: (02:13:16)
There

Leo Laporte: (02:13:16)
Was nothing to fire. They just let it go. Well, the plan

Speaker 12: (02:13:19)
Was always to get up there with the shuttle, which was constantly behind schedule as we used to and uh, boosted to a higher orbit, a safekeeping orbit and use it again because it was still in great shape. I mean, other than the problems had, you know, when it launched, lost the solar panel and stuff. So that was the plan or at least to direct the deorbit, but between the shuttle being late and there was abnormally high solar activity. So the atmosphere or the earth swelled up a little bit and started dragging on it. That's what brought it down. Solar, ah, a little earlier that laid plans. Yeah. Over Australia. Yeah. So you remember the hats with a little target on the top? Oh yeah. Sky lab,

Leo Laporte: (02:13:55)
The sky lab Watchers in gourmet diner society. My friend Jeff Jarvis who wrote for the San Francisco examiner had a contest for a piece of sky lab. He neglected to tell his editors about that. He got a little trouble. So did he, sky lab landed in Australia, landed is a not scattered across. Yes.

Speaker 12: (02:14:15)
Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:14:16)
Yeah. Uh, so is it inevitable that all space stations must decay?

Speaker 12: (02:14:24)
Yes. Well you either have to de orbit them or kick them out to higher orbits, which will eventually decay unless they're really high.

Leo Laporte: (02:14:31)
So we learned a lesson from Skylab because yes. Um, uh, we've decided this time with the space station rapidly ending its reaching its end of life that we're not going to crash it into Western Australia,

Speaker 12: (02:14:47)
Not unless they ask or, or are out friendly to. Yeah. So we, I mean, we do have some experience with this. They brought mirror down many years ago, the Russian space station. Um, but that was pretty small. That was 280,000 pounds. Skylab was about 170,000 pounds. The ISS is uh, just shy of a million pounds. Oh, it's kind of big. So it's about the, the mass of a 7 47 size of foot football field that, you know, these are the quote, what you see in the press when you say size of a football field. Yes. But most of that is solar panels. Right. And those are flim

Leo Laporte: (02:15:20)
Off and go away. So yeah. That's one question I have. So if, as it reenters the atmosphere, we know, uh, because they have to put heat shields on space capsules with people in them, it's gonna get hot and burn. Yeah. And meteors burn up, uh, before they reach the earth. Most of the time. Right. Uh, this won't burn up. It's too big.

Speaker 12: (02:15:40)
Most of it will. So it, it's not very, you know, it looks really robust, but it's not very heavily constructed. No. Um, and there's no gravity, it doesn't have to be 42 launches to get it up there. So it was a big effort and this isn't happening until 8 20 31, by the way. That's we got some time. Yeah. They pushed it out. It was 20, 24 and then it was 20, 28. Now it's 2031, um, between now. And then by the way, NASA's big push is to try and privatize parts of the station so they can get some of the financial burden off of them. Could they leave it up there?

Leo Laporte: (02:16:11)
I mean, is it, could they, I mean, why we put a lot of effort into

Speaker 12: (02:16:14)
That it's yeah. But you know, it's aging and, and as you, as you orbit the earth, you go through these thermal cycles, sunshine darkness, this little, yeah. The metal expands it contracts. So it's starting to get

Leo Laporte: (02:16:25)
Cracked sounds like an old, uh, steam heating system.

Speaker 12: (02:16:29)
It is. And the components are now 24 years old. Yeah. They've been occupied since 2020, but it started going up in 2018 and um, you know, it, it's tired and there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of wire

Leo Laporte: (02:16:41)
And a lot, I hope they bring me down in the Indiana. Yes.

Speaker 12: (02:16:45)
Well, I hope they bring us down in better shape. So it's very disgusting over the brain. They're gonna, uh, send at this point, the plan is to set up a Russian progress module, which is one of the cargo delivery, uh, systems. They use fire, the thrust, the thrusters, nudge it into the proper or orbital orientation to bring it down in the, uh, great Pacific ocean graveyard, some call it, which is this big. And, and you know, you, the Pacific ocean on Google earth and it's half the planet from certain angles, right. So you've got a nice big target there to splash this thing down. There's an area called point Nemo that they aim for. And so, um, you know, even if it, if it doesn't break up into as many parts as they predict, cuz it's a little sketchy and when it's coming in, you've got the solar panels dragging. You don't know what part or rate they're gonna break off. So it can change orientation and change its direction a little bit, but it will definitely fall into a safe part of the ocean of all those according to plan. And I wanna see it

Leo Laporte: (02:17:41)
2031, you got some time got nine years, although time flies when you're having fun or S down for COVID. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 12: (02:17:50)
So, so, Hmm. And, and just of, of note, there's a company called Axiom space. That's got a contract with NASA now to set up the first commercial module that'll dock with the ISS, but it will have it'll live there until it's time to decommission the ISS, but it'll have its own separate navigation proposal system. So the time comes that and other commercial module ASLU and planning to do one NX, a couple other companies, um, we'll be able to detach and either go free flying or perhaps link up and, and work together. So you'll have a presence in space that's privately built and funded to some extent, although there's NASA money in it. And then NASA will go back and lease space from them because really the ISS at this point, it is kind of more than they need in some ways and not enough others

Leo Laporte: (02:18:34)
Still pretty cool. The international space station. I mean, it's unbelievable. Has, has it been occupied ever since it got up there? I mean it's every minute since there's never been a time when it's empty. No, it's amazing. Cause it really can't be empty

Speaker 12: (02:18:46)
Very long. Yeah. I mean it needs constant maintenance at this point, even we're, you know, we're eight years out for I'm having it, uh, be over. But at this point about half the astronaut time has been on maintenance procedures. Wow. It needs a lot of money. So maybe it's time to retire. It's like having an old mg or Austin heal. Right? You'll love it. But it's, it's getting a little maintenance hungry and you know, you got other things to do with your

Leo Laporte: (02:19:09)
Money. So my friend Jeff, who announced this because the San Francisco examiner figured it's not gonna land the chances of it landing anywhere near here. So they announced a $10,000 prize. The first person who could bring a piece of Skylab to the San Francisco examiner offices within 72 hours, they thought pretty safe bed. They didn't count on a 17 year old Australian named Stan Thornton who got a piece hopped on a plane. Didn't have a passport, got to the offices, claimed his money. And that's what got Jeff in his little bit. But you know,

Speaker 12: (02:19:44)
Deep downer probably had the last laugh because that turned sky lab now is probably worth

Leo Laporte: (02:19:48)
$150,000. NASA does not like these pieces to, uh, no escape into the private hands. There is, there are museums in Australia where you can see pieces of Skylab.

Speaker 12: (02:19:59)
Yeah. And it's interesting by the way. So the space station was built by primarily the us and Russia, but Japan has a module up there, Europe up module up there. Other countries have pieces of technology. If that comes down and creates any issues on earth, that country is responsible for what happens. Yeah. So we could have a really interesting legal mingle here and to make it even more complicated, the Russians for a number of years are talking about, well, we're gonna come take our modules in 20, 24 and use 'em for something that else, which you know, they're old and creaky and it wasn't the most technological advanced system at the time.

Leo Laporte: (02:20:33)
Make melt them down, make a cigarette lighter, do something, you know, it's a shame. Make him do. Yeah. Yeah. Rod pile. He is our spaceman space. dots.org. Thank you rod.

Speaker 12: (02:20:44)
Thank you boss,

Leo Laporte: (02:20:47)
Boss. He snuck that in. What the hell boss? I know your boss. Boss hog.

Speaker 12: (02:20:55)
Yeah. We'll both just call

Leo Laporte: (02:20:56)
Lisa boss. She's the boss. I call her the queen. She's the real boss. Yeah. So, um, yeah. Yeah, but it wasn't it taco bell who put a, a target out in the ocean. I don't remember. I feel like taco bell was involved in this somehow taco bell. Yeah. Look this up. Wait a minute. Yeah. That's hilarious. Like hit, hit this and win a taco or something. Taco bell Skylab. I might be misremembering. It, it wasn't wasn't that long ago. Yeah. Free tacos. Oh. Is for me. Cause for me, this is for me in 2001. Yeah. A free taco to everyone in the United States. If the mirror space station hit the floating taco bell target, which is needless to say

Speaker 12: (02:21:42)
What a shame, but

Leo Laporte: (02:21:44)
You know, you do these like Jeff, uh, thinking, oh, you know, we'll never have to pay off. It's just a right. And then the kid shows up, Hey, where my money

Speaker 12: (02:21:53)
You're, you're rolling the dice on these things. By the way, on the chat. Before I came on, somebody was talking about the Astra rocket launch. Astras a private company, they got a 43 foot tall rocket for really small payloads was supposed to go up Saturday. Then it was supposed to go up Sunday. Now it's scheduled for between one and four east tomorrow out of, uh, Cape Canaveral. So they they're headquartered up near you in Alameda, you know, the Naval air station building. Oh neat jet engine testing center. Then they were launching out of, uh, Alaska. And now they're gonna move over to Florida. So it's gonna be interesting to see, you know, there's dozens of companies trying to get into this small rocket space and their logic is, you know, we can put it right where you want it. You don't have to go up on a Falcon heavy and then, you know, have thrusters to get where you want to go. But it's gonna be interesting to see how many of 'em last cuz it's, it's a tough racket. It's gonna be one of the toughest places to be, be business wise in the

Leo Laporte: (02:22:45)
Next couple of years. And Artemis is delayed. I guess we don't have to rush. Oh, Shocked what a surprise.

Speaker 12: (02:22:54)
Yeah. But well, so the launch is delayed. The, the, the big question is, you know, when, when can we guess that maybe we're gonna actually make the, the crude landing, right? So the launch is delayed probably till, uh, I think wet test is in March late March or so the, I don't see the launch happening before June personally. Um, tar might have some different thoughts, but you know, the thing about NASA is they, they can't do the SpaceX thing of, well, it's just toss it up there and see if it works. And if it doesn't, we'll figure out what wrong to do you, yeah. They got Congress looking over their should tapping their foot with their arms cross going. You made a mistake. We don't allow mistakes. So yeah, they gotta be very careful.

Leo Laporte: (02:23:35)
And so when, so that these launch, this launch is just a, just a cruel test.

Speaker 12: (02:23:42)
Yeah. So they got a Manne in there, in there with radiation sensors and, and forth. And it's going to go up for about a month actually, uh, make this really weird orbit of the moon, um, test out EV all the systems and then come back and do the first reentry of that speed, uh, a capsule of spacecrafts since the Apollo days. So 25,000 mile an hour reentry. Wow. That tests the, the reentry guidance. And that's cool that, yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be weird. You know, remembering from the first time when all we saw was 16 millimeter film from the flight weeks later, and that fuzzy TV from the surface of the Bo is oh, high Def coming down from Luna orbit again, you know, amazing.

Leo Laporte: (02:24:26)
Yeah, just amazing. Okay. My friend, when's your next, uh, when do you do, when do you record, uh, twists?

Speaker 12: (02:24:34)
We're doing Fridays, uh, as pre-records now, and then, uh, at some point we'll go live good.

Leo Laporte: (02:24:40)
Look forward to that. Thanks to you. Yay. Well, thanks to you suggesting it actually I'm, uh, you know, I would've said, oh, no, we're not launching any new shows. And then Lisa said, no, I kinda like that idea. So thank you. Awesome. Awesome. Have a good one. Great. Thank

Speaker 12: (02:24:55)
You. See you next week.

Leo Laporte: (02:24:57)
Thank you for letting me be your tech guy on the radio every week. Really enjoy doing it. And I don't know what I'd do with my, uh, Sunday afternoons, otherwise, uh, I'd probably have to go to church or something. Uh, thanks so much to professor Laura. This is her church. She's our musical director playing the tunes for us every week. Thanks to Kim Shaffer, our phone angel for, uh, bringing you all on the radio and thank you all for calling for listening. I couldn't do it without you. I really appreciate it. Uh, and I hope we'll do it all again. We got a few more minutes. So to wrap this up with a couple more calls, let's say hi to Steve in Bellingham, Massachusetts. Hello, Steve.

Speaker 13: (02:25:37)
Hello, Leo. How are you?

Leo Laporte: (02:25:39)
I'm wonderful. How are you?

Speaker 13: (02:25:41)
Oh, I'm doing, um, just wanted to mention one thing that under Steve, that, uh, was one of the photographs chosen last month for the lazy assignment. Oh, which

Leo Laporte: (02:25:50)
One was yours?

Speaker 13: (02:25:52)
Sully. Sully laying in the bed, the dog in the bed. Oh, I love

Leo Laporte: (02:25:57)
That. Oh, how's Sully doing? Yeah,

Speaker 13: (02:26:00)
He's doing good. He's right beside me in the car.

Leo Laporte: (02:26:03)
Oh, that's nice. Yeah. There's nothing lazier than a dog relaxing. It's a good feeling. It's inspiring. It's really,

Speaker 13: (02:26:10)
Uh, I was really, uh, flattered by Chris's comments about my photographs. Nice.

Leo Laporte: (02:26:16)
Good. Do you do this for fun or do you, uh, you do it for hobby,

Speaker 13: (02:26:22)
You know, it's kinda kinda like you, if you see something and you catch something with your eye and you're like, oh, that'd be a nice photograph. And then yeah, you take it and you see what happens.

Leo Laporte: (02:26:34)
Well, what can I do for you anyway? Thank you, uh, for the photograph and congratulations for getting noticed. Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 13: (02:26:41)
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Um, well, I, I have an older HP desktop that I've upgraded with, uh, one terabyte SSD drive and a 32 gigs of Ram. So I'm considering, uh, putting, I have, I had Linux on the spinning drive just to try it out, but I wanna do a dual boot on the same SSD drive for windows 10 and a Lennox place. Sure. So, and with a dual boot, I'm using gr to win. I was using grub to win for my dual boot before. Okay. So what would be your re I install windows first or Lennox

Leo Laporte: (02:27:19)
First? Yeah. So windows has a bad tendency. I haven't tried this with windows 10 or 11, but in the past windows had had a bad tendency to think. I'm the only guy in town I'm gonna wipe out the NBR I will be in charge from now on. So it doesn't. So it's always a good idea. Install windows first Linux. Okay. As one would expect, uh, is not so arrogant. It thinks, you know, I might be sharing a hard drive. So if you stall Linux second, uh, and you can choose the whichever boot manager you want grubs fine. Uh, you don't have to install it before you install. Linnux when you start installing the Linux, it will say, uh, you want me to coexist? You want me to be a dual boot and it will install a boot manager that will then go out and say, ah, what bootable operating systems are there.

Leo Laporte: (02:28:05)
I use grub for that. And, uh, when you first turn on the machine, I have Manjaro and windows installed for instance, on an SSD on my main machine at home. And when I first turn on the machine, it'll show me an icon for windows. It'll show me an icon for Manjaro. It'll even show me as is its want with Lennox, uh, older kernel version so that if I'm having trouble with a current kernel, I can go to that. So I'll have three different icons for two operating systems. I, I, I select it hit return in it. Boots. And you, of course it'll remember the last time. So you won't have to hit anything if you wanna walk away. Uh, my suggestion is always windows first, Lenox, second there's ways to recover it. If windows CLOs, your master boot record, but it's easier not to worry about.

Speaker 13: (02:28:49)
Yeah. I'm not too concerned with that. Cause I, I, I backed up. I'm gonna back up all. I have all my files backed up with eye drop. So

Leo Laporte: (02:28:56)
This is the kind of thing you, yeah, every time I do this, I'm not every often I'll find myself doing it again, then doing it right this time. That kind of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 13: (02:29:07)
That's yeah. Learning by uh, yeah, what's

Leo Laporte: (02:29:10)
The, there, there are third party, uh, boot managers that, uh, will, for instance, if you installed Lennox then installed windows and Linnux got clobbered. Lennox is still there, but just the boot manager, it got clobbered by windows that said, no, we're gonna use mine. And I only know about windows. There are third party boot managers. You can then run like, uh, there was one called gag, gag.source.net. That would go, come in, look at both, say fine. I'm gonna rewrite the master boot record to give you a dual boot system. So it's not the end of the world.

Speaker 13: (02:29:40)
Okay. All right.

Leo Laporte: (02:29:41)
Hey, thanks for the call. Enjoy which Lennox are you gonna install?

Speaker 13: (02:29:45)
Uh, well, I, I had tried, uh, uh, the flavor of you Buntu, but uh, I think I'm gonna try the Manja one. Cause I think you had, I'm a big fan things to say about that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:29:55)
Pun is fine. And it's the most used of course, version of Linnux in the world. Uh, I we're used to, anybody's used it can computer with, you know, the commercial OSS, like Mac OS and, uh, windows are used to having the latest, for instance, version of the browser with a Buntu and Debbie and it's it's it's PPY, uh, for, for stability, they don't always have the latest version of the software. I like to have the latest version of the software. So I prefer wrote what's called rolling release. Linux is like arch and it's a derivative Manjaro because you'll always have the latest browser on there. The latest software of, of all kinds. And Manjaro does a very nice job. It's very compatible. I think you'll be happy with it. Give it a try. Let me know what you think.

Speaker 13: (02:30:38)
Okay. I don't remember a few. This woman talked about smart 9 1 1. Yeah. You remember that? Yeah. Well I I'm gonna software a QA engineer for the company that makes that software. No kidding.

Leo Laporte: (02:30:50)
That's cool.

Speaker 13: (02:30:51)
Yeah. Yeah. I don't work on that product, but I do work for the company that makes

Leo Laporte: (02:30:57)
It, I, I think this is such a good idea. Uh, I love it. And I'm, I'm glad to hear, uh, more about it. Smart eleven.com.

Speaker 13: (02:31:06)
Yeah. I won't give you the company name, cuz I don't wanna give them a promotion, but free a free a on your radio show, but

Leo Laporte: (02:31:14)
Well, they kinda got one already.

Speaker 13: (02:31:17)
One of the products, that's one of the

Leo Laporte: (02:31:18)
Products they make. Nice. Nice. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. Have a great day, Steve. You too. Take care. Take care. And we gotta say hi to air show Rob, before I say goodbye. Hi Rob from Cincinnati.

Speaker 4: (02:31:32)
Hi Leo. It's so good to hear your voice in, in real time. That's really fun. I've been it's uh, life is good for you. I can tell.

Leo Laporte: (02:31:42)
Oh, and I hope it's getting better for you. I know you didn't get to do a lot of shows during COVID. Uh, are you back on the road?

Speaker 4: (02:31:49)
I, well, I start back on the road. I just worked with the blue angels this week, uh, coaching their new narrator at, down in El Centro. First air shows they're starting in March. And so I got a good season, so nice. Hey, I got a quick question. I'll try to get this in real quick. Uh, I've got a recording studio where I do a lot of voiceover work and in my control room, I have a cinema display with a webcam in it and, and mirrored display into the studio, but I don't have a webcam in there. And I wanted to know if there's a wired webcam, so I don't have to poke another hole in the wall to get USB into the, uh, to the, you

Leo Laporte: (02:32:24)
Mean wireless

Speaker 4: (02:32:26)
Wireless? Yes. Not wired. I'd like to avoid yeah. Wired in.

Leo Laporte: (02:32:29)
I'd like to get a wireless. There are wireless the ones, uh, they're not cheap. The one I've used and like a lot is the Mevo. M E V O. This was originally designed to stream to face books, streams to anything. Now, uh, Logitech bought them, uh, it's a little pricey, but it is completely wireless and it's very high quality. You can look around. There are less expensive, uh, wireless webcams, but you might have mentioned, you know, when you go wireless, it means you have to have a lot more than just a camera. It's gotta have a little, basically little computer. The other thing that you could use is the nest cams. I use those. Are you gonna, you wanna stream it to a whole bunch of people? How do you, who's it going to

Speaker 4: (02:33:12)
Primarily, it's gonna be one person at a time when I'm doing either coaching with, uh, with an audio book coach perfect. Or with an interview from my, for my podcast. I just it's just like one, one person is time.

Leo Laporte: (02:33:23)
Primarily. I think the Mevo would be better for real time, which is what you need. But uh, we use nest cameras as security cameras and they're pretty close to real time. But if, but if you're doing interviews, no, you need real time and they'll stream via LTE or wifi. So you could even take 'em out in the field.

Speaker 4: (02:33:39)
Oh my gosh. That's great. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (02:33:41)
Yeah, man. Be funded to stream an air show next time.

Speaker 4: (02:33:46)
You know, we've, we've talked about that kind of thing. Yeah. About trying to, to do that sort of.

Leo Laporte: (02:33:52)
It's nice to see him in person. When the blue angels fly a couple, a hundred feet over your head. There's there's no thrill or excitement quite like that. I'll never get it. I gotta run. Rob. Good luck to your Bengals.

Speaker 4: (02:34:06)
Thanks Leo. Appreciate it. All right. Have a

Leo Laporte: (02:34:08)
Great day. You too. I'll be rooting for them. I can't root for the Rams. Hey, I'm rooting for you. Thank you for joining me. Leo Laport, the tech. I have a great geek week. 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's security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.