The Tech Guy Episode 1907 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.
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Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte:
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks on Saturday, July 2nd, 2022. This is episode 1,907. Enjoy. The TechEye podcast is brought to you by userway.org. UserWay is the world's number one accessibility solution, committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you're ready to make your site compliant. Deciding which solution to use is an easy choice to make. Go to userway.org/twit for 30% off, UserWay's AI powered accessibility solution. And by Cisco Meraki with employees working in different locations providing a unified work experience seems as easy as herding cats. So how do you reign in so many moving parts? The Meraki cloud-managed network. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work, work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit and by ITProTV, finally, you can enjoy getting an IT education with ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/twit for an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions for the lifetime of your active subscription, when you use the code TWIT30 at checkout.
Leo Laporte:
Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy. Tech guy, number two Micah's away, you should be equal. Another tech guy.
Mikah Sargent:
Tech guy also.
Leo Laporte:
The other tech guy.
Mikah Sargent:
There we go.
Leo Laporte:
Tech guy also Micah Sergeant with me. We're here to talk tech, what a surprise? 88 88 ASK LEO. What is tech? Obviously computers, the internet, but we also talk about smart cars. We'll talk about home theater. We'll talk about space. Really we could talk about pretty much modern life, is technologized in extreme ways, right? These days, everything is tech. So I guess we're talking about everything.
Mikah Sargent:
All things-
Leo Laporte:
88 88 ASK LEO if you want talk with us. 888-827-5536, toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada, outside that area you could still reach me, but it's going to have to be reach us. It's going to have to be Skype or something like that. Skype out, should call that number. 88 88 ASK LEO, you know what I brought you not to keep, you can't have it.
Mikah Sargent:
Fine, fine.
Leo Laporte:
But you reviewed the Steam Deck, which is a portable game playing machine that weighs about 12 pounds and is the size of a shoebox.
Mikah Sargent:
12 pounds, four ounces.
Leo Laporte:
And I think that they were just copying this. This is a Nintendo Switch. You don't have a switch?
Mikah Sargent:
I don't have a Switch. I've never used a Switch.
Leo Laporte:
So I wanted you to have an experience of how light, slim and I think equally playable. Now it doesn't have as enough horsepower to play the games that Steam Deck can play. That's really designed to play top PC games, but I-
Mikah Sargent:
Where do the games come from? Where can you get them for?
Leo Laporte:
They're Nintendo.
Mikah Sargent:
So it's the Nintendo store?
Leo Laporte:
What I'm playing right now is, yeah, the Nintendo store. Believe it or not, it's so old, they have a cartridge slot. They look like SD cards-
Mikah Sargent:
Oh my goodness.
Leo Laporte:
... in there. But mostly now we do it online, modern era and all. I'm putting a game on here, I called Portal, which was a great PC game. One of the best PC games of all time, just came out on the Switch. Totally playable. Totally cool. Just as much fun. And this is about half the price of the Steam Deck.
Mikah Sargent:
Half the price, half the weight.
Leo Laporte:
Here-
Mikah Sargent:
Let's see.
Leo Laporte:
... plus you can hook it up to your TV. It's got an HDMI.
Mikah Sargent:
The docking ability is.
Leo Laporte:
You could take those controllers off and they give you a little plastic holder and it turns it into a regular controller.
Mikah Sargent:
It actually looks quite nice too.
Leo Laporte:
The screen's good. That's not even the best one. There's an O, so anyway, I just wanted to add to your review of the Steam Deck, that there is something out there that the Steam Deck is essentially copying and not as well.
Mikah Sargent:
That's right. I was going to say trying to improve upon, now that they have.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. For gamers and if you're a parent of a gamer and you're saying, "Oh, maybe we should get Johnny, Little Johnny loves these games." Maybe she get little Johnny, a Steam Deck, no. Spend half as much, about $259-$299, depending on how it's equipped, about 300 bucks and get a Switch.
Mikah Sargent:
This is the Animal Crossing one.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, Animal Crossings in there. You should-
Mikah Sargent:
And this is the version.
Leo Laporte:
So you were playing Stardew Valley?
Mikah Sargent:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
If you like Stardew Valley...
Mikah Sargent:
I have fond memories of Animal Crossing-
Leo Laporte:
Animal crossings, the game and-
Mikah Sargent:
... back in the day.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, this is the newer one, but similar. Very similar.
Mikah Sargent:
I've known how to crouch.
Leo Laporte:
Look how smart you are. He's immediately crouching boys and girls. Crouching tiger.
Mikah Sargent:
Hidden dragon.
Leo Laporte:
Hidden-
Mikah Sargent:
Hidden-
Leo Laporte:
... Portal.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, there we go.
Leo Laporte:
I don't know why I just thought, especially since I just put Portal on here and it's really playable, you carry this around, better-
Mikah Sargent:
I was going to say, it's more portable than the other ones.
Leo Laporte:
It's got a case if you want.
Mikah Sargent:
I don't feel as concerned, the other one. You got to put it in its case.
Leo Laporte:
I feel very nervous about it.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
So we talk about social media and we talk often about how awful social media is, but I have somebody here who says social media is great. So I don't know if you watch the testimony, congressional testimony, the January 6th committee. In one of the first days, a federal judge testified Judge Michael Luttig. And if you saw it, you probably didn't. But if you saw it, you noticed he spoke carefully and slowly. And at first I thought he's had a stroke. I really thought, "Oh, he's having a hard time talking." No he's capable of jabbering away as quickly as I am and you are. No difference. But he wanted to speak carefully because first of all, his is first time was ever on TV. But also he knew it was historic and he wanted make sure it was clear what he was saying.
Leo Laporte:
But here's the interesting thing to me. And the only reason I bring this up on the tech show is, he's 68 years old. He saw a tweet who said, somebody tweeted, "I like how this guy treats every line", guy named Vanity Fair writer, Joe Hagen wrote in a twitter thread, "I like how this guy treats every line of his testimony, like he's engraving it on a national monument. And frankly, he really is engraving it for history and he seems to know it. Judge Luttig, who had received many emails and messages."
Leo Laporte:
He says, "I saw so many tweets saying, I must have had a stroke. My friends started to call me saying, "Are you all right?"" Judge Luttig saw that tweet and he said, "I decided to respond to your at once astute and understanding tweet finally this afternoon because I've been watching the tweets all day, suggesting that I'm recovering from a severe stroke and my friends out of their concern for me and family have earnestly been forwarding these tweets to me and asking me if I'm right. Such is social media" Judge Luttig wrote, "as I understand it. But I profoundly believe in social media's foundational." Now this is a 68 year old Federal Court judge who is old fashioned. He's a staunch Republican, old fashioned constitutional guy.
Leo Laporte:
"I profoundly believe in social media's foundational. In fact, revolutionary value and contribution of free speech in our country. And for that reason, I willingly accept the occasional bad that comes from social media. And no one denies that right? In return for the much more frequent good that comes from it. At least from the vastly more responsible, respectful speech on those media." I thought that was really amazing. I was impressed by this guy when he testified. But here's a guy who you would just assume, "Oh yeah, he's going to hate social media." He's going to hate Twitter.
Mikah Sargent:
Right, yeah. That they'd write it off for something.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. That's just the kids, these kids. He says, "That is why after 16 years after my retirement from the bench, even then is a very skeptical curmudgeonly old federal judge, I created a Facebook account and then a Twitter account slowly, very slowly, one account first and then followed by the other", which is by the way his speech cadence, he put in ellipses to show that he's doing it the same. "All of this said, I am not recovering from a stroke or any other malady. I promise. Thankfully I've never been as sick or so debilitated as that ever in my life and would not want that for anyone knock on wood. I've never even really been sick a day in my life" he revealed. So I just thought that was fascinating to see somebody praise.
Leo Laporte:
And I think maybe I'm critical of social media. I'm not a fan of Facebook and how it spies on you and how it's used to spread paranoia and weirdness. But on the other hand, I think he's making a really good point that these are very valuable tools for us that we should not ignore. So I'm going to stand corrected by a very wise man, Judge Michael Luttig. Thank you for that thoughtful piece. Steve Jobs getting the medal of freedom.
Mikah Sargent:
This is yeah posthumously as well as quite a few others I read-
Leo Laporte:
17 list people, yeah. This is normal. They do these in a batch. It's not unheard of to have posthumous medals of freedom. This is the highest civilian award in the United States. And I feel bad because Steve jobs passed away 12 years ago. Would've been nice-
Mikah Sargent:
If it had happened sooner.
Leo Laporte:
... if it happened in his lifetime and certainly everything that they're giving him medal of freedom for is stuff he did in his lifetime. So it's not like-
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, while he was still around.
Leo Laporte:
Oh wait, we just noticed Steve's pretty cool. Anyway, he deserves it. I hope that his wife, his widow, I should say.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh yeah, that would be good.
Leo Laporte:
Laurene Powell jobs can go in and receive the award. At least his family, Reed, his son and his daughter could have that experience. They deserve that much. And I agree Steve jobs, if anybody deserves a medal-
Mikah Sargent:
I was going to say, I think this is what an absolutely well deserved award for him.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. 88 88 ASK LEO is our phone number 888-827-5536. We are here. Why are we here, Michael?
Mikah Sargent:
We are here to answer your tech questions.
Leo Laporte:
I've been sitting here for 17 years wondering that, thank you for filling me in.
Mikah Sargent:
You're so welcome.
Leo Laporte:
The tech guy show continues after this. Yeah. That's a good one twisted Mr. Ironic that Steve Jives couldn't be repaired. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. He tried, he tried.
Mikah Sargent:
He did.
Leo Laporte:
Couldn't do it.
Mikah Sargent:
There's some odd ways.
Leo Laporte:
He was anti-Western medicine, which some say, and I don't know. But had his pancreatic cancer been treated by traditional medicine. What happened? TriCaster just went boom.
John Slanina:
It seems I did a hard reboot and it seems to have come back.
Leo Laporte:
Boom.
John Slanina:
You may take control.
Leo Laporte:
All right. We keep going because it's really a radio show. So it doesn't really matter if you can see us.
John Slanina:
I put this camera on the stream.
Leo Laporte:
Oh good. Thank you. Is this going to have anything to do with you?
Kim Schaffer:
I don't know. Vienna.
Leo Laporte:
Vienna calling.
Kim Schaffer:
Vienna's calling.
Leo Laporte:
If we get a call from Vienna, that will be prophetic.
Kim Schaffer:
Vienna, please call.
Leo Laporte:
Let's hear from Vienna.
Kim Schaffer:
I could-
Leo Laporte:
It could be Vienna, Virginia or Vienna, Austria. Any Vienna. Is that Falco? Did Falco pass away? Is that what happened?
Kim Schaffer:
No, I'm just.
Leo Laporte:
No. You're like Twitter now. Professor Laura musical director. When she plays a song, I think-
Kim Schaffer:
Somebody's dead.
Leo Laporte:
... "Are they dead? Did they just die?" Falco passed away in 1996. So it's in the Dominican. So it's not, nevermind. 98, hi Kim Schaffer.
Kim Schaffer:
Hi.
Kim Schaffer:
Welcome home. I was enjoying your stories over.
Leo Laporte:
I left Monday, came back Friday, went to visit my mom in Providence, Rhode Island. And with my daughter, it was great, beautiful visit. And I've only been gone a few days, right? But I feel like it was time travel because we moved out. I moved away when I was in ninth grade. So I haven't been there since then.
Kim Schaffer:
Different house though, right?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. She's not in the same house. She's in a new house-
Kim Schaffer:
But somebody you know lives in that house.
Leo Laporte:
That's the funny thing. So-
Kim Schaffer:
I love that story.
Leo Laporte:
... I walked over to see the old house I grew up in from the age of about eight to the age of about 15. And it was beautiful old colonial house which my folks had restored from nothing. They had no pipes, no electricity, anything. Made it beautiful. And I walked over just to see it and I thought weird. This fence is the same. The back fence, the same fence as when I was kid, I went and over and touched it. Then out the door comes an old friend.
Kim Schaffer:
Alex.
Leo Laporte:
I knew he lived there, Alex Wilhelm. And I say, "Hey Alex." He said, "What?" I said, "It's Leo." He said, "Who?" I said, "I know I was out of context", because I never see him. We only see him on Skype. I said, "I know it's out of context, but hi, I'm Leo." He said, "Leo?"
Kim Schaffer:
He forgot you?
Leo Laporte:
No, he knew who I was. But he was just so weird. You ever have that happen-
Kim Schaffer:
Because he didn't expect you to be in town.
Leo Laporte:
Because I didn't call ahead or anything. I didn't want to bother him. In fact, I wasn't going to knock on the door or anything. I was just going to see it and walk on. So they gave me a whole tour of it. You know what's cool? And I said nothing to do with tech, but you know what's cool? And I have a picture of it. My dad in 1966 planted a little thin pin Oak they called it. Brand new baby tree. That tree is now more than a hundred feet tall, three feet around. It's huge.
Kim Schaffer:
That's awesome.
Leo Laporte:
There's an old Chinese proverb but that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.
Mikah Sargent:
Yes.
Kim Schaffer:
That's so true.
Leo Laporte:
The second best time is today, right?
Kim Schaffer:
Like all my avocado trees. I wish they were 30 years old.
Leo Laporte:
55 years ago, dad planted that tree. I have a picture of him, which I just sent to Alex, planning it and now-
Mikah Sargent:
Wow, that's so cool.
Leo Laporte:
It's mind boggling.
Kim Schaffer:
I love that.
Leo Laporte:
I got to send my dad the picture of the tree, he won't believe it. So I feel like I just came back from the past. I feel like-
Kim Schaffer:
Nine years old again.
Leo Laporte:
... back to the future. Yeah. It's wild. Anyway. I'm here. You're here. I guess that means we should take some calls.
Kim Schaffer:
Yeah, let's go to Karen. She's having an email syncing issue.
Leo Laporte:
Email is the number one. Is it now the number one problem? Printers-
Kim Schaffer:
Printers.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Now it's email. Thank you, Kim.
Mikah Sargent:
You're welcome. Let's press the button here and put Karen on the line from Temecula. Hi Karen, Leo Laporte, Michael Sergeant.
Karen:
Hi.
Leo Laporte:
Welcome.
Karen:
Hi.
Leo Laporte:
Hi.
Karen:
Thank you. Thank you. What's happening is that, when I read my emails on my computer, on my phone, they are not showing as read. So emails on my phone, it shows I have 45 unread messages. And then I was also having a problem with, when I go to correct an address in my contacts, it would not take the new address. It would take it all. And then I go out of it and next time you go back to look at it and the old address is in there. So I went into the Spectrum store and that was my mistake. So.
Leo Laporte:
I hate cable companies too. What did they do?
Karen:
He just messed up my phone completely. I don't think I have some contacts left. I still have the same problem. He said, "I haven't really seen this. And I think maybe you have your contacts in iCloud and Gmail." And he said, "I'm not real familiar with Gmail." I said, "Maybe somebody else, one of those other people over there could help." And he said, "No, I'm the phone guy." And I said, "Okay." And then he went back into the back room and said, "I just checked with a girl back there who has an iPhone." So apparently he wasn't familiar with iPhones.
Leo Laporte:
Oh boy.
Karen:
So I'm still having the same problems. I can't get them. I just don't know what to do. And so I think probably I just need to go to the Apple store or unless you have a-
Leo Laporte:
Oh my. No, I'm glad you called us because clearly that Spectrum guy was a buffoon.
Karen:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
How can you be the phone guy and not know anything-
Karen:
I know.
Leo Laporte:
... about iPhone?
Mikah Sargent:
You need somebody else about phones yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Study up guy, study up. So maybe Spectrum should give him an iPhone so he can become the phone guy.
Karen:
Don't you think?
Leo Laporte:
Don't you think? Now let me ask a couple questions. Who gives you your email? Is it spectrum?
Kim Schaffer:
I have spectrum. Yes.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So you're using karen@spectrum.net or whatever.
Karen:
No, I have Gmail.
Leo Laporte:
That's the question I was asking. So.
Karen:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Leo Laporte:
No, no, no, no. Spectrum is your Internet service Provider.
Karen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I have Gmail.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. A lot of people confuse this. Gmail is your mail provider. And then why did you go to the Spectrum store? Because because did you get the phone from them?
Karen:
I did.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. Okay. So that's why you went to the Spectrum store.
Karen:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
And Spectrum provides your service as well on the phone as well as your ISP.
Karen:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. Got it. So the problem is not with spectrum. This problem is with Gmail. What mail app are you using on your iPhone to get your Gmail? Is it the Apple mail app?
Karen:
I don't think I understand what you're saying.
Leo Laporte:
So, when you open the app on the phone, is the app called Mail? How do you get to the mail?
Karen:
How do I get to my mail?
Leo Laporte:
On your phone? You're looking at your phone. You're getting your mail. Do you open the browser Safari to get the mail?
Karen:
No, I have an icon.
Leo Laporte:
You have a button that says Mail.
Karen:
Yeah. I have an envelope. I have an envelope.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. That's the Apple mail app. So, that's an app called Mail comes from Apple.
Karen:
Okay.
Leo Laporte:
Gmail also has an app. You might try that. If you use the Gmail app will for sure mark those messages as read.
Karen:
Okay. But why would it all of a sudden start doing this?
Leo Laporte:
It's a setting in Apple Mail, unfortunately this guy sounds like he really screwed up your system. But it's a setting in Apple Mail. Probably I'm going to guess Gmail is set up not as an IMAPClient, but as a top client. This gets really technical and to no real purpose, Karen. But that's my guess. I'm not sure why it's not marking that mail as seen. It will for sure do that if you use either your Safari browser to look at Gmail or the Gmail app. There's a Gmail app and that will solve that. Just hang on because I got to take a break. Scott Wilkinson's coming up, our home theater guru. We'll talk about home theater and I will spend a little more time with Karen. Leo Laporte, Michael Sergeant, your tech guys.
Leo Laporte:
It's so complicated, Karen and that's why it's hard for us to in two minutes cut through the Gordian knot of email. So let me see if I got your issue properly stated. You open them and read them on your phone.
Karen:
No, on my computer.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. You open and read them on your computer.
Karen:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
But on your phone, they're not showing up as read.
Karen:
Correct.
Leo Laporte:
Got it. And when you use your computer, what are you using to read the mail?
Karen:
Leo I'm 83.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, I understand. I just spent a week with my 89 year old mom. Believe me. I know
Karen:
I know, I heard you.
Leo Laporte:
And it was wonderful.
Karen:
I know.
Leo Laporte:
It was wonderful. I gave up by the way. She has a remote control for her TV that I couldn't figure out. And I said, mom, "I am so sorry I sent you this TV. This is terrible." So, probably with Gmail, it's going to be similar to the problem on the phone. You might be using Apple's Mail program which would be a button.
Karen:
How would I know that?
Leo Laporte:
It'll be called Mail. It'll be an icon on your computer whether it's in the doc or-
Karen:
I have it in the doc and it's called Mail.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, so that's the Apple Mail program. It's a similar issue. It's how the Apple Mail program is set up. It's supposed to work, see Google stores the mail on Gmail. You don't store it on either your computer or your phone. And that's why you do it this way so that when you've responded to a message that sent mail shows up in both places, when you read a message it's marked read in both places. There are reasons why it might not be marked read. There are settings, for instance. In Gmail that you can say don't mark messages as read when I read them. There are settings in Mail that could do the same thing. You brought your phone in, the guy screwed up your phone. It had nothing to do with your phone. It has to do with your computer and how it's set up.
Karen:
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte:
So, I'm sorry that, that happened. Because the phone guy completely not only wasted your time, but trashed your system.
Karen:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
And if he just asked you these questions that I asked you, he would've said, "Oh yeah, this has nothing to do with your phone."
Karen:
Okay.
Leo Laporte:
It's the signal being sent from your Mac to Gmail this message is read and there are multiple reasons why Gmail would not mark it read.
Karen:
But why is it showing that it's read on my computer? But not on my phone? My computer shows it's read.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, if you click on an email on your computer at that point it will mark as read. What's happening is there's some issue whenever it gets to the sync part. But what I'd love is if after we say goodbye to you, if you stay on the line for a moment, Kim will take down your email and I'm going to reach out to you after the show and we'll see if we can-
Leo Laporte:
I warned Micah never to do this.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Leo says, "Don't do this ever", but-
Leo Laporte:
In 17 years, I've never once did this, but Micah is a nice guy. I don't understand it.
Mikah Sargent:
My grandma's name is Karen as well.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, Micah is a sweetie. I'm going to say the same thing though, which is there is a Gmail app for the Mac as well.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. I think it is the better.
Leo Laporte:
If you use the Gmail app on the Mac and the Gmail app on your phone, I bet you this would solve that problem.
Karen:
Okay.
Leo Laporte:
So just go to the App Store in both places on the apple App Store and the phone App Store, iPhone App Store and download the Gmail app, all you'll have to do is log into your Google account and it will automatically be set up and everything. And my sense is that's probably going to be a preferable way to use your Gmail.
Karen:
Okay. Now, when you say to do that, I go to the App Store on my phone.
Leo Laporte:
And the app store on your Mac. You have App Stores in both places. Both of them will have an app called Gmail from Google.
Karen:
Okay.
Leo Laporte:
I have to run, but I'm going to give that. Hang on. We're going to get your email. The very kind and foolish Micah Sergeant is going to help you.
Leo Laporte:
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Leo Laporte:
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Leo Laporte:
It changes colors. Now you've got your Pantone color for your business. Of course, we do too. Doesn't change that. But it adjusts human luminance, so it's easier for people with vision issues to read. So UserWay will generate all tags. That's one of the reasons it needs AI. It can actually see the picture and generate an all tag that matches the picture automatically. You can go in if you want, you can modify it. Of course, it fixes violations like vague links, fixes broken links, makes sure that your website uses accessible colors and you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed on your website. So you know exactly what it did. Plus you can work with it. UserWay integrates seamlessly with your site builder software. Let UserWay help your business meet its compliance goals. Improve the experience for your users. UserWay can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant and everyone who visits can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs.
Leo Laporte:
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Leo Laporte:
The number one accessibility solution worldwide userway.org/twit. u-s-e-r-w-a-y.org/twit. Visit them today. Thank you UserWay for the good work you're doing. We're happy to be be working with you on this. Now back to the show.
Leo Laporte:
It's time to ask the musical question. What is hip? Scott Wilkinson is here, home theater geek. Hello Scott.
Scott:
Hello Leo. Hey Micah.
Mikah Sargent:
Hello Scott.
Leo Laporte:
He's our expert in home theater. Surround sound flat screen TVs. I had a punch list when I went out to visit mom this week of things to do.
Scott:
Of course.
Leo Laporte:
My June oven has the wrong time on it. Fix that. It's in the wrong time so. Things like that. "I can't hear the TV." I sent her a TCLs for her bedroom and her living room. I sent because they had Roku built in. She doesn't even use the one in the living room because she can't figure it out. So I thought, "I'm the tech guy. I'm going to go over there and I'll just solve that whole thing for." I couldn't figure it out.
Scott:
What?
Leo Laporte:
She has a Vizio sound bar, I ordered an optical cable. I ordered triple A batteries for the remote controls, Amazon. Fortunately next day delivery, I had them all for the next day. This TCL remote is the goofiest and I don't know why it's so goofy.
Scott:
Really?
Leo Laporte:
I now know how to do it, but it took me a day to figure out.
Scott:
To figure out a remote?
Leo Laporte:
What buttons to push.
Scott:
Oh, man.
Leo Laporte:
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a picture. I'm going to get a picture of the remote and the other remote and because she's going to use the Apple TV too. That's what she wants to do, so.
Scott:
Oh, now you're getting really comfortable.
Leo Laporte:
I know now it's crazy. I've been doing this by FaceTime. So I say, "Mom, turn your phone around, point it at the TV. Now press the top button till it jiggle jiggle jiggles." And she says, "What button?" I said, "It doesn't look like a button, but it's a button on the Apple remote." Oh crazy. Anyway, I figured it out. It is not usable. I don't know how any normal human could figure this out. I felt like a caveman.
Mikah Sargent:
I was helping my family recently with WiFi stuff and that's even more impossible because in the middle of the college, you're trying to get it all ironed out. Then they have to reset things. And so they go away.
Leo Laporte:
Boom, don't press that button.
Mikah Sargent:
I wish that there was some sort of thing where you could send someone trusted to someone's house to help them out. You know what I mean?
Leo Laporte:
How many times if we wanted some sort of computer handholding but it's just the person who's good enough to be able to do that properly costs $150 an hour at least. Because, that person can get a job in the tech industry. That probably-
Mikah Sargent:
Someone who's on the level of you and I-
Leo Laporte:
You call them-
Mikah Sargent:
... who know as much as we do.
Leo Laporte:
They say, "What kind of stock options are you offering? No, I'm sorry. I just need help with the remote." Anyway.
Scott:
It's been a long time since I've tried a TCL TV and I don't remember the remote, but I'll take your word for it that it's not the best designed in the world.
Leo Laporte:
Or somehow it got screwed up the menus. You press the left button, it goes down, you press the up button, it goes left. Something is so weird with it. Anyway, I figured it out. I'm going to print out instructions with pictures-
Scott:
Smart.
Leo Laporte:
... arrows, lines, dots. Those will be confusing but at least if she follows it like a cooking recipe, she'll be able to figure it out.
Scott:
Basically you're writing her a manual.
Leo Laporte:
A manual, of course it came with a pamphlet.
Mikah Sargent:
You've to read with the tiniest text.
Speaker 3:
Tiniest of text.
Speaker 1:
Came with a yeah. So anyway. I'm very-
Leo Laporte:
Anyway.
Scott Wilkinson:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
I'm very sympathetic. One of the reasons I've always done this show is to help people, but what I realize now is the tech industry doesn't give a-
Mikah Sargent:
They don't. They really don't.
Leo Laporte:
... good, gosh darn.
Scott Wilkinson:
All they want is your money.
Mikah Sargent:
And it's harder to reach out to these different folks and ask for help-
Scott Wilkinson:
Really hard.
Mikah Sargent:
... because Instagram or any of these social media networks.
Leo Laporte:
But the customer service reps or this phone guy at the Spectrum store, they don't know anything.
Mikah Sargent:
They're pressured to act like they do.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, but they don't. So they mess you up, and they go, "Well, she has an iPhone. I'll ask her." What? You're the phone... Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm going to calm down. Anyway, Scott, we live in this world, so help us.
Scott Wilkinson:
We do.
Leo Laporte:
Help me, Obi-Wan.
Mikah Sargent:
You are our only hope, Scotty-Wan. Scotty-Wan Kenobi.
Scott Wilkinson:
I've been watching Obi-Wan Kenobi, by the way. It's pretty good.
Leo Laporte:
Good.
Scott Wilkinson:
Well, listen, I got an email from a listener. He goes by the name G. Melconian. And he's in the market for a pair of powered active speakers with Bluetooth for his desktop, under 200 bucks. He wants woofers in the 5.5" to 6.5" range. It doesn't have a size restriction. It's not like he's got to fit them into a particular place. Well, I recommend certainly for 200 bucks, you're really not going to get that large a woofer. That's a big problem.
Leo Laporte:
Boy, truer words were never spoken, "For 200 bucks, you're not going to get that large a woofer." Just remember that, kids.
Scott Wilkinson:
That's right. Now, for 200 bucks, I looked for 200 bucks and I found the Audio Engine A1.
Leo Laporte:
I love the Audio Engines.
Scott Wilkinson:
Audio Engines are great.
Leo Laporte:
I have those as my computer speaker. I really think they're great.
Scott Wilkinson:
I have the HD3s as computer speakers, and they're really good, but they're 350 bucks.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson:
So, for 200 bucks, you can get the A1s, but they only have a 2.75" woofer. They only go down to 65 Hertz, so you're not going to get much bass.
Leo Laporte:
I have an Audio Engine sub. They make subs.
Scott Wilkinson:
Sure, but that's another few 100 bucks.
Leo Laporte:
That's a lot of money.
Scott Wilkinson:
Sure, you could, and I would recommend it with these speakers, absolutely.
Leo Laporte:
These peoples. Mom has two of those little, I think probably A3s Audio Engines, for her TV in her bedroom. One of them was just disconnected. I said, "Mom, who set up the ... Who got up there?" Said, "The cable guy when he set up the new cable," because she got fiber everyone. Like, "He got it all set up." I said, "Mom, yeah. Okay, fine."
Leo Laporte:
So I connect though. She said, "Ooh, I can hear it both ears." but then she said, "Well, is this so loud my neighbors will be bothered?" So I went outside to listen. I said, "No, it's fine, Mom." But she wants some good TV headphones and-
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, I remember you talking about those.
Leo Laporte:
The problem is, I helicopter in. I'm a helicopter son. I mail her technology and I say, "Congratulations!" So what should this person do? Is there some way to solve this conundrum?
Scott Wilkinson:
Well, there is. The Wirecutter came up with a list of their favorites and that was written by Brent Butterworth. One of my friends in the industry-
Leo Laporte:
Brent's great, yeah.
Scott Wilkinson:
... he's great. He came up with a Pioneer DJ DM-50D for 199 bucks. Five inch woofers-
Leo Laporte:
Are there enough D's in that name?
Mikah Sargent:
Could you repeat that?
Scott Wilkinson:
Yeah I know, I know. The actual-
Leo Laporte:
The DJ DM-50D.
Scott Wilkinson:
Actually the company is Pioneer DJ. It's their DJ division. And the speaker is the DM-50D.
Leo Laporte:
For DJs.
Scott Wilkinson:
It has no Bluetooth. It has no Bluetooth, this speaker. But there is a Bluetooth version for $219. So if the guy, if G. Melconian can push his budget by $20.
Leo Laporte:
Well, I think that's fair.
Scott Wilkinson:
That's I think that's fair. He can get the DM-50D. The other strong recommendation if he can push it a little farther even is the Fluance Ai41. Fluance is a Canadian company. These have a five-
Leo Laporte:
I understand why Karen is frustrated. This is just-
Scott Wilkinson:
Well, that's why you and I have jobs.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. But I don't think we're helping.
Scott Wilkinson:
Sure we are.
Leo Laporte:
Are we helping?
Scott Wilkinson:
Of course we are.
Leo Laporte:
Oh good.
Scott Wilkinson:
Because in and amongst the ocean of choices.
Leo Laporte:
We're narrowing it down.
Scott Wilkinson:
We're narrowing it down.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Scott Wilkinson:
So you know, the Fluance Ai41 is 250 bucks.
Leo Laporte:
Where do you get a Fluance? When it's-
Scott Wilkinson:
Online. On their website.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. F-L-U-A-N-C-E?
Scott Wilkinson:
F-L-U-A-N-C-E, yes-
Leo Laporte:
Perhaps the worst name in technology.
Scott Wilkinson:
... it goes down to 35 hertz. Yeah, okay. But it goes down to 35 hertz!
Leo Laporte:
I was going to get a pair of COVIDitis headphones with my Fluance speakers, then I'll just need a vaccine.
Mikah Sargent:
What does that mean when you say it goes down to 30 hertz?
Leo Laporte:
30 Hertz?
Scott Wilkinson:
Yeah. 35 Hertz! That means it goes really low. You don't really need a subwoofer.
Leo Laporte:
It goes like really deep.
Mikah Sargent:
That's kind of nice.
Scott Wilkinson:
Which is really nice. Sure, a subwoofer would take you down to 20 Hertz. But okay. So 35 is a lot better than-
Mikah Sargent:
Oh man, they go down to 20 hertz.
Scott Wilkinson:
50 or 60. Indeed. And I have to say-
Leo Laporte:
The range of human hearing they say, is 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz.
Scott Wilkinson:
Right? And most people can hear 20 Hertz. Very few people can hear 20 kilohertz.
Leo Laporte:
You can feel 20 Hertz.
Scott Wilkinson:
Right? Exactly.
Leo Laporte:
As much as hear it, you feel it.
Scott Wilkinson:
Anyway. The Fluance Ai41. I love my Ai60s. They sound fantastic. So I really recommend these if you can spend the 250.
Leo Laporte:
Scott Wilkinson, watch his show at AVS Forum, youtube.com/avsforum. We want a name that combines the word flu with flatulence. Is there a name that could combine the two? I want flu plus flatulence.
Scott Wilkinson:
Oh, Fluance?
Mikah Sargent:
Fluance?
Leo Laporte:
Yes, Bingo! You've done it. Brilliant brand marketers that you.
Mikah Sargent:
Eureka! Flatulence at last. Fluance.
Scott Wilkinson:
Well, at 35 Hertz, you might even be able to reproduce it.
Leo Laporte:
Are they French? Do you think?
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, they are Canadian first.
Scott Wilkinson:
They must be French Canadian.
Leo Laporte:
French Canadian, because maybe that's a good word in French? Fluance.
Scott Wilkinson:
Fluance.
Mikah Sargent:
Fluance.
Leo Laporte:
Anyway. Yes. F-L-U-A-N-C-E.
Mikah Sargent:
I mean unity and majesty.
Scott Wilkinson:
It does?
Mikah Sargent:
No.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, wow.
Mikah Sargent:
Sorry to disappoint.
Leo Laporte:
Doesn't mean anything. So Scott, while I try to get the timer in your corner, I will let you take over. You have three minutes.
Scott Wilkinson:
Thank you so very much.
Leo Laporte:
What do you need, Johnny?
Scott Wilkinson:
Hello, everybody. Can you still hear me?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Scott Wilkinson:
I can't hear anything... Oh, you're good. Okay. Good then.
Scott Wilkinson:
Hey, how you doing? Hey Gumby, you get bonus Scott Wilkinson right now. It's me. Hello. Mike Mon, so good to see you. We haven't talked in a long time. I need to give you a call. We need to catch up because it's been quite a while. Have I lost weight? Well, I probably wouldn't say that, but I am trying. Let's put it that way. Gumby said, "Did I check out the cheap Bluetooth tube amp that you sent me?" No, I haven't had a chance to do that yet. Hey, Loquacious. Good to see you as always.
Scott Wilkinson:
Gumby, I have been a little recalcitrant in my requested and research because of house hunting. And I will let those of you who are in the chat room in on a little secret, looks like we found a house. Yay! I am so thrilled that we have finally after months and months of looking... We actually have been shopping for a year. Now last year, we hadn't sold our house in LA yet, so we couldn't actually make an offer on a place. And I saw one or two places get away from me because I couldn't actually make an offer on them. I'm really sad and bummed that we had to do that. But now we are in escrow. So this is brand new news everybody. Fresh off the presses.
Scott Wilkinson:
It's in the perfect location, right exactly where we wanted to be, very near to our friends, with their kids and their grandkids. Large enough to have music rehearsals, which was another really important criterion. A single level, there are very few houses in Santa Cruz that are single level. Most of them are dual level and Joanna and I, our knees aren't getting any younger and we really didn't want to be traipsing up and down stairs every day. So single level and at a price we could afford and pretty new too. So we are super stoked about it.
Scott Wilkinson:
Tech Dino, no, this was not the house we had an appointment at last week. That was a different house and it did not work out. Although that house was very interesting. It was two story. So that was really a deal breaker, but it was a little bit up in the woods, which was also a little concerning. But beautiful Spanish Mediterranean style. If it had been single level, I would've been all over it. But anywhere...
Leo Laporte:
Thank you, Scott. Want to stick around?
Scott Wilkinson:
Sure. Happy to.
Leo Laporte:
Ain't nothing going to break in my stride except for that stupid remote control, and Gmail, and the way my iPhone works, and I can't figure anything out. Oh no! One of my favorite tunes. Leo Laporte, Mikah Sargent, Your Tech Guys. Desperately, desperately trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Mikah Sargent:
What are we doing here?
Leo Laporte:
Do you feel like it's gotten harder to do this stuff? I thought it would get easier over time. Right? I thought two things would converge. One, a generation like yours grown up with technology, internet natives, it would be in your blood. You'd go, "Well, give me that thing. Oh yeah. Do, do, do, do, doop. See, it's easy."
Mikah Sargent:
The problem is how we have moved to this obscurification of controls. So over time in order to simplify things, we've not given people the power... Like tinkerers, I'm a tinkerer. I want to get at the underlying... The switches to flip the... What are those called? Those dip switches to flip. But technologically speaking now, the most recent version of Mac OS... It's like you have this 12 foot pole and the buttons are on the other side and you're trying to poke those buttons. But the pole is moving up and down-
Leo Laporte:
It's fly by wire instead of direct... You know that's actually a philosophical thing. And I think you can blame Johnny Ive at Apple-
Mikah Sargent:
I'd love to.
Leo Laporte:
... He was the chief too designer for years. Or maybe Steve Jobs because... No, I think Jony actually liked physical affordances. Those are called affordances, the switches, the buttons. And I think he was fond of physical affordances, but I remember Steve Jobs saying, "Why have a button when you could have a thing on the screen that could be anything and change depending on the context that you're in." And that's when things became confusing. Although I have to say part of the problem I had with my mom's TV was this physical remote with a physical button that just didn't behave as expected. So-
Mikah Sargent:
It's all trying to do too much.
Leo Laporte:
Trying to do too much. That's a better... That's exactly it.
Mikah Sargent:
I want to be able to have something go wrong on my computer. That's fine. That happens. But then be able to know very easily, to go into the logs and be able to do that. That's what we used to do. And I think that because all of these companies, the wifi routers, the printers, they're all trying to make it so you plug it in and immediately starts working. But in doing so it becomes harder to get at those underlying troubleshooting stuff, those steps that we know how to do, because they're trying to make it so simple for everyone. And so we don't have as much control over the technology as we used to. And I think that's where the issue comes from, where everything is just being sort of taken out of the hands of the user to make things simpler. And when it goes wrong, it's not simpler to fix because you have to like practically jail break the device in order to get it to respond to the commands that you're trying to give it.
Leo Laporte:
Also, I thought that and I think engineers think, that by now people should understand how this stuff works. Engineers do. This is this genetic difference that people who are inclined this way get it. You know, they, "Oh, yeah, yeah." And we've all experienced that. The nerd who sits down at your computer says, "Well, it just easy. Look here," and boom, it's done. And you go, "What did you do?"
Mikah Sargent:
Right. Well yeah.
Leo Laporte:
"Well, you know, I can't explain it. But it's a..."
Leo Laporte:
I think by now, and those by the way, are the people who are designed the hardware and the software. That's who does it. And I think by now they figure, "Well, you guys must have figured this out." In the early days of computing they made directories look like a little manila file folders and files looked like actual pieces of paper. You'd have a phone icon for your phone because they figured, "Well, people need some connection between the physical world they're used to and this new digital world." But that's faded out hasn't it? Because now they go, "Well, you know how it works."
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. And a lot of systems... There was just that story about the computer professor who was talking about how their students weren't really understanding of a file system and they didn't know what it meant to like download fonts and put them a particular folder because they don't think in that same way.
Leo Laporte:
We thought you guys would understand this. We were hoping. In the early days of the worldwide web, if a piece of text was a link to a webpage, you may not even remember this. It would be underlined and blue.
Mikah Sargent:
I remember this.
Leo Laporte:
Do you remember this? And when you clicked it, it turned purple. And that was a signal that you had been, it was what they call visited. When's the last time you saw an underlying blue link or purple link? No. No, you don't know if something's a link now until you put your mouse over it and it changes to an obscure shape of some kind, this all become hieroglyphs.
Mikah Sargent:
It's the Wizard of Oz. They're trying to put all of that magic, or all the thinking that's going on behind that curtain. Don't make people think about all that stuff. Don't make them worry about all that stuff. But we need to be able to worry about that stuff to get things fixed.
Leo Laporte:
You have a little niece. She's how old?
Mikah Sargent:
She is under a year.
Leo Laporte:
When she, oh, she's two year old.
Mikah Sargent:
No. No, she's not. No, she's not. Nevermind. She's three.
Leo Laporte:
She uses an iPad by now, probably. No?
Mikah Sargent:
She likes phones.
Leo Laporte:
It's okay. Smart phones.
Mikah Sargent:
She'll take a phone and-
Leo Laporte:
Does she get how it works?
Mikah Sargent:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
You don't have to explain it-
Mikah Sargent:
She can hang up. Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Our friend, Denise Howell used to talk about how her son knew intuitively you pick up a iPad and Phineas and Ferb would be running on the iPad within seconds. He didn't know that you go to Netflix and you... he just knew you do this, this, this, this and there's Phineas and Ferb. Ben on the line from Louisville, Kentucky. Hi, Ben, Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent, Your Tech Guys.
Ben:
Hey Leo. How are you today?
Leo Laporte:
Very well. How are you?
Ben:
Having a really tough time with my MacBook keyboard?
Leo Laporte:
Oh, which vintage MacBook do you have?
Ben:
2013.
Leo Laporte:
Ah, let's see. That's not butterfly. That's pre-butterfly. What's going on with your keyboard?
Ben:
Well, it's a 15 inch MacBook that came with Mavericks on it. And the problem with it is that the keys are starting to have to be hard pressed to click on it.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, they wear. The switches wear.
Ben:
They're wearing out.
Leo Laporte:
Yep.
Ben:
And my dad looked at it. He tried to get them back working and whatnot. And-
Leo Laporte:
Did he pry them off and try to clean the con... pry? You can on these older ones.
Ben:
Yeah, he pried off the keys, tried to clean them out. The whole nine yards. With some rubbing alcohol and toothbrushes-
Leo Laporte:
Improve the contacts, right. Yep.
Ben:
Right. And that did nothing about the clicking and whatnot.
Leo Laporte:
So I think they're worn. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I agree with you. So we looked up a repair video on one of my other laptops and it's proving a pain in the neck. So I showed him the video. He was like, "Yeah, we're not doing that." [inaudible 00:49:21]
Leo Laporte:
Your dad sounds like he's the tech guy in the family. It's funny. So I'm going to send you to-
Ben:
You know as well as I do, that's taking apart those MacBooks is a pain in the neck.
Leo Laporte:
Pain in the neck. You can replace the keyboard. I fix it-
Ben:
It's not easy to do.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's a three star difficulty. It's as difficult as you can get. 49 steps takes two to four hours.
Ben:
Holy Cow.
Leo Laporte:
But I'm going to give you the link to this guide. You could at least look at it. They do sell the part. Probably what you should do is take it to Apple and-
Ben:
It's a pretty high difficulty. Huh?
Leo Laporte:
It's the highest level of difficulty on the scale.
Ben:
And my dad and I are not very trained in this kind of a thing.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, this is more for a pro at Apple. I bet you though, that Apple can do it, for a fee.
Ben:
And it would probably be a lot as much as getting a new machine. Wouldn't it?
Leo Laporte:
Not necessarily. For them, they give them tools and training and they have special tools that you may not have. And they don't have to put it in a microwave oven to loosen the glue and things like that.
Ben:
[inaudible 00:50:26]
Mikah Sargent:
I think it's well worth taking it into Apple first, just to see. Because you could end up saving a lot of money if you want to keep using it before you-
Ben:
Well, he said-
Leo Laporte:
People keep those 2013 to 2015 MacBooks because of the keyboard, believe it or not.
Ben:
Right. Well, here's the thing guys, we already talked about it and we are actually already looking at a slightly newer machine. Not a new, new one, but 2017 at the minimum.
Leo Laporte:
Honestly, if I were you, if you're going to get a new Mac, I would not get an Intel Mac.
Ben:
Really?
Leo Laporte:
Because it's really the end of the line. They don't want to support them anymore. The new Apple Silicon is so much faster. What is that 2017 going to cost you?
Ben:
600 roughly.
Leo Laporte:
Okay.
Ben:
And that's as far as he's willing to go for it.
Leo Laporte:
He won't go any farther? Because for 899 he could get an M1 MacBook air, which seems like that would be a lot more headroom, a lot more longevity. But yeah, 2017? Fine. That's going to have the worst keyboard you ever saw. Leo Laporte, Mikah Sargent, Your Tech Guys, more after this. That's the butterfly keyboard era, which started in 2016 and ended in 2020. Nobody is lamenting the loss.
Ben:
No, I get that Leo. Like I said, the highest he's willing to go is 600 at a max.
Leo Laporte:
Maybe. So what does he do with a computer?
Ben:
Well, he's retired from IBM. He worked there for several years and he's not making any money right now, nor am I. And we're just trying to-
Leo Laporte:
Does he want to program computers? Does he want to just answer email and surf the web?
Ben:
No, no, no. All we're doing is getting me a new MacBook. Not new, new. But close enough that we just want to get something that'll last. That won't have the same problem. Nothing like that.
Leo Laporte:
But what do you do with it?
Ben:
And I was going to get an Apple watch, but that we had to push back because this MacBook instance hit us and we're just trying to get something that works and that, like I said, won't have the same crappy keyboard problem that I just encountered.
Mikah Sargent:
You can always plug in an external keyboard or have a Bluetooth-
Ben:
Yeah, I know Mikah. But the problem is that I have really large hands, I'm 6'7" tall and got these humongous hands and an external Bluetooth or USB keyboard is not a really good long term solution. I hate to tell you.
Leo Laporte:
Who's selling the 2017?
Ben:
eBay.
Leo Laporte:
eBay. So that's another issue. You understand the risk-
Ben:
I sent them a... go ahead.
Leo Laporte:
You understand the risk of buying on eBay?
Ben:
Yes. I know that the same problem with this newer one could surface again. I know that plus it's pre-owned and I don't really trust buying pre-owned laptops.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Plus there's a lot of ripoffs on there. I mean, it's very risky. Even if it's not a-
Ben:
[inaudible 00:53:26] And taking your advice and saying, "Hey, as much as I'd love to stick with the price point that we have, I was told by you that we can get a $900 MacBook Apple computer."-
Leo Laporte:
Saving money on eBay is often a bad idea-
Ben:
Yeah, I've heard that. [inaudible 00:53:44]-
Leo Laporte:
Not always, not always. Now the reason I asked you what you do with the computer is because maybe a Mac is not the... These are premium priced. All Mac are overpriced because you pay a premium for the Mac.
Ben:
Yeah. And I don't want do a hack-a-Tosh laptop. That's-
Leo Laporte:
I'm going to say, if you don't need a Mac, you may not need a Mac. You could get a Chromebook in that price range. That would be beautiful would work.
Ben:
Well, you see, I like to do a lot of heavy video games and I already have the games laptop.
Leo Laporte:
I got it. Okay. That's what I was asking.
Ben:
I have gaming laptop. And I do like the Mac OS interface quite a lot. Yeah. And this would primarily be like for studying tests and things like that. Because I am a college student who's looking into getting in the computers.
Leo Laporte:
I remember you Ben. I know. Yeah, I remember you well. Scooter X has found a refurbed MacBook Air from Apple. When you buy refurb from Apple, that's as good as buying new. Yeah. For $850. He put it in-
Ben:
The that's not too bad actually. Is it M1 or is it Intel?
Leo Laporte:
It's M1. It's only going to have probably eight gigs of Ram. Not more, but in a 256 gig hard
Ben:
Eight gigs is plenty for a guy who's just planning to do school work and crap.
Leo Laporte:
Probably. So I would-
Ben:
I'll be looking for that. If you can put it in the show notes for me.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. We will link it.
Ben:
That would be good.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Thanks Ben.
Ben:
Well, I'll look at that and I'll look for it and I'll go from there. Thank you.
Leo Laporte:
I think that'd be a better way to go honestly than-
Mikah Sargent:
Agreed.
Leo Laporte:
... taking a chance on eBay and all that-
Mikah Sargent:
For that kind of thing, yeah.
Leo Laporte:
All right. Back to Mr. Wilkinsony, Wilkinsonian, our Wilkinsine, all yours, my friend.
Scott Wilkinson:
Thank you. I was listening to that conversation and if he got a 2017 MacBook in order to avoid a keyboard problem, he'd be getting another keyboard problem. Because it's a butterfly keyboard.
Leo Laporte:
It's those horrible butterfly keyboards.
Scott Wilkinson:
Horrible butterfly keyboard. Yeah. So I would agree with you a hundred percent. Don't do it.
Leo Laporte:
Yep.
Scott Wilkinson:
Yeah. I would push the budget. I absolutely agree with you a hundred percent. Push the budget, get a-
Leo Laporte:
Well it's hard. I don't want to be insensitive to people.
Scott Wilkinson:
It's hard. I know. Yeah. I know.
Leo Laporte:
They're both out of work. It's you know? It's a tough time.
Scott Wilkinson:
In which case then maybe replace that keyboard in their current one.
Leo Laporte:
That'll be less-
Scott Wilkinson:
How much is that?
Leo Laporte:
That'll be less. I don't know what Apple would charge.
Scott Wilkinson:
It's couple 100 bucks. You think?
Leo Laporte:
He should go to Apple. That might be the right... That actually be the most economical. Yeah?
Scott Wilkinson:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
All right. We're going to let you have the floor. I'm going to go get a cup of coffee.
Scott Wilkinson:
Thank you. Go get a cup of coffee. And hello everyone again. So nice to see you all. I got a bunch of congratulations in the chat room for the new house. Thank you. Somebody asked... Phoenix Warp One said, "Doesn't that mean? You not have to pack up again and move everything?" Yes, it does. "We're going to get Scott Cave 3.0?" Yes, you are. And somebody else said, "I hope you have a good podcast studio." Well, I've got my office, which will be my podcast studio as it has always been. And somebody else asked if we have an amphitheater in the backyard. Sadly, no. There was one house we saw. It was two stories, but it had a ginormous backyard which actually had sort of a natural amphitheater. And I would've been really happy to put an amphitheater in there and that would've been awesome. Just awesome.
Scott Wilkinson:
But it actually sold for a little more than we could afford. And it was two story. We passed on it before we knew what it would sell for. And it sold for a lot, because it was a really great house. So no, we don't have much of a backyard at all. Now we're not outdoor people that much. So having a big backyard isn't that important. It does have room for a hot tub, which we will definitely get, because that's important to me. But we will not be having any outdoor concerts. Except maybe on the cul-de-sac. We've been told that the other houses on the cul-de-sac really love music, or the people that live there anyway. And so who knows, maybe we'll do a concert on the cul-de-sac? That'd be fun. But thanks for all the good wishes for a successful close. May it be so.
Scott Wilkinson:
Hey Himtez, good to see you. Gumby, "Do you have a helipad?" No. Sorry, no helipad. Twisted Mister, I'm virtually certain there's going to be good internet available. It's you know it's right in town. I have no doubt of that whatsoever. Beat Master, thank you so much for your congrats on the AVS Forum Podcast. Yes, it's been really fun and very successful so far. The latest one is just up.
Scott Wilkinson:
I was talking with Chuck Back at Trinnov about immersive audio. And so that was really fun. Graveyard Tuba, yeah, very smart to buy a one story home. Exactly. Now here's the interesting thing about this particular house. It has a ginormous attic. So big that it could be developed into an entire second story. At the moment it's completely undeveloped. And we're not going to use it at all. We're not going to develop it. But when we sell the house we can say, "Hey, you want to build a second story into an existing structure. You can do it." So hopefully that will be a selling point when we sell it, eventually. Somebody else asked if we had a good home inspection. The answer is yes, we do. And it's a pretty new home was only built in 2008. It's got all brand new appliances. And the inspection report is very good. So we're happy about that.
Scott Wilkinson:
Twisted Mister says, "Never assume my office is in the middle of the San Fernando Valley and AT&T's fiber ends at the corner and they won't service my 24 unit building." Yeah, I get that. But here in Santa Cruz, we have Xfinity and I'm getting 600 megabits per second down with copper. I would be shocked, shocked and appalled I tell you, if they did not offer service into this neighborhood, into that street. I think the chance is negligible.
Scott Wilkinson:
CJ, I don't know if they have fiber. I'll have to see if they have fiber to get gigabit. But at 600 megabits, that's still really good. So I'm not too worried about it. Thank you User 1769. Dr. Mom Grandma, Yeah, no, the appliances are brand new. 14 year old appliances aren't new, I agree. But the owner before they put it up on the market, put in brand new appliances. So there.
Leo Laporte:
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The Tech Guy, Mikah Sargent Tech Guy Two.
Mikah Sargent:
Hello? Hello.
Leo Laporte:
Hello Tech Guy Two.
Mikah Sargent:
Hello Leo.
Leo Laporte:
Hello. 88, 88, 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're going to have to use Skype or something like that.
Leo Laporte:
Computers are so expensive. I know Ben, our last caller, wanted to get a computer for 500 bucks and wanted to get a Mac. But boy, you buy something on eBay. That's already five years old. You don't know who you're getting it from or what problems it had. Plus it's already got a terrible keyboard because it's the butterfly keyboard era, which was a very misguided time in Apple's history. And I don't know. I just think it's probably better to just do something else.
Mikah Sargent:
This is a tough one. If I could, I would get my whole family MacBooks. Not only because I trust those systems, but because I know how to use them so I could be able to help with those systems-
Leo Laporte:
Well, that's important.
Mikah Sargent:
... you know what I mean?
Leo Laporte:
Often that's the first question I ask. Who's going to give you tech support and what system do they know?
Mikah Sargent:
Right? What do they know? Exactly. But these devices are very expensive. And as you said earlier, they do come at a premium cost. And so that is something I know that we are always trying to balance, is when someone does come with a budget, you go, "Is there any way you can push it?" In the case where it needs to be pushed. And you're just really running the risk by getting from eBay. You don't know for sure. And you could end up just being completely out $600 entirely by doing that. And that's what's scary.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah and I'm not insensitive to the fact that this stuff is expensive and times are tight. I mean, we're in a recession, inflation's through the roof. You got to buy $8 gas. Yeah, I know you don't have a lot of money to spend on a computer. That's why I often recommend Chromebooks. They're less expensive. Even a Windows machine. You could get a good credible competent Windows machine for 600 bucks. You're not going to get a good Apple for 600 bucks.
Mikah Sargent:
No.
Leo Laporte:
No. 88, 88 ask Leo. That's the phone number. (888) 827-5536. I mentioned the website. We were going to put that link on how to do it yourself... To do a repair on that keyboard. Woo. I mentioned that link. We'll put it up on our website, techguylabs.com. All the links go there. Kind of after the fact techguylabs.com. Also audio and video and a transcript of the show so you can find the information you're looking for.
Leo Laporte:
Patrick's next.
Leo Laporte:
...this show so you can find the information you're looking for. Patrick's next. Redding, California. Hello Patrick. Leo LaPorte, Mikah Sargent, your Tech Guys.
Patrick:
Hello, Leo.
Leo Laporte:
Hello, Patrick. Welcome.
Patrick:
I got the Wyze camera on your suggestion and working fine. And I'm playing with it again right now and I think it's more of a connection problem rather than the app problem, because it's just saying "network not steady" and stuff. Doing the best it has yet, at least today it's connecting. It's trying to connect right now.
Mikah Sargent:
Patrick, do you know which one you have? Which model of Wyze cam? Because there are lots of different versions. [crosstalk 01:04:51] Go ahead.
Patrick:
It was the one you were recommending a few months back, the $30 something one. I don't remember exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Their basic camera.
Patrick:
The basic one.
Leo Laporte:
And you're using it inside. How far away from the router is it?
Patrick:
Right now? 10 feet.
Leo Laporte:
It's in the same room in other words.
Patrick:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
I always say wifi works best line of sight, that's line of sight.
Patrick:
Yeah, I agree with you. It was working fine up until of course right when I'm getting ready to leave, I stick it in the living room. I'm going on vacation, I thought I'd stick in the living room, if somebody comes in the front door I would see [crosstalk 01:05:45]
Leo Laporte:
It senses motion and sound and would send you an alert on your phone saying, "Hey, there's somebody in here." That's great.
Patrick:
Well, it wasn't working at all and I've tried it four or five times since. But now today at least it connects for all of 10 seconds. I've gotten up to about 10 seconds. Connects for 1, 2, 3 seconds, if that. It's trying again to connect right now.
Mikah Sargent:
And have you gone through the whole process of disconnecting it and starting fresh with the setup?
Patrick:
Yeah, I've done that several times. I forced stopped the app, and then I completely deleted the app, reinstalled and logged back in, redid all the updates. So I had the freshest software. I had the freshest everything.
Leo Laporte:
So you're near the wifi router. I wonder, do you have a tri band router? Does a router do 5 gigahertz as well as 2.4 gigahertz?
Patrick:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
And this is especially a problem if both bands have the same name, which most people set it up that way because it's just easier. You really want to share the Wyze is on the 2.4 gigahertz for a couple of reasons. One, probably doesn't even support five gigahertz, but also 2.4 travels better is more robust, more reliable. I think that's definitely another thing to check is to make sure it's using 2.4. That's sometimes a little hard to do.
Patrick:
Yeah, and bear with me. I'm slightly computer illiterate.
Leo Laporte:
No, you sound pretty good to me. Yeah. So
Patrick:
I've only been listening to your show.
Leo Laporte:
Well, good. You're talking the talk., Let's walk the walk now.
Patrick:
[crosstalk 01:07:19] just playing with it and saying, "Oh, that didn't work."
Leo Laporte:
Good, love it. So by walking the walk, let's take that camera far. No, no let's not. You could. That's one way to put something on 2.4 gigahertz because it goes farther. This is the worst case scenario, you move the device as far away from the router as possible so it's not seeing the five gigahertz and then you join the router. And then as you get closer, it'll stay on 2.4. It would explain how it worked for a while then it stopped working is if it saw the five gigahertz. Easier, if your router allows you, for instance, to turn off the five gigahertz radio, turn it off just temporarily, or to name the 2.4 gigahertz differently from the five gigahertz. That's an inconvenience because most devices can swap back and forth without a problem. It's typically IOT devices, internet of things devices, like this camera that really you want to put on 2.4. In fact, on my home system, I've actually got two networks, at 2.4 gigahertz and a five gigahertz, and I relegate all the IOT devices to the 2.4 gigahertz. But I have a fancier router that lets me do that. So that's one thing to look in your router and see if you can just turn off the five gigahertz radio, just long enough to repair the Wyze to the two point.
Patrick:
I have my Chromebook open. How do I get into my router?
Leo Laporte:
That depends on the router manual. I laugh when I say manual these days. The pamphlet might have told you how. What kind of router is it? What's the manufacturer?
Patrick:
Let me see here. Let me pull up my wifi.
Leo Laporte:
Well, just the brand name of the router.
Patrick:
NETGEAR 79 [crosstalk 01:09:17] it's connecting to. It separates it, NETGEAR 79 to NETGEAR 79 5G.
Leo Laporte:
So it does separate it.
Patrick:
[crosstalk 01:09:23] my phone is scanning.
Leo Laporte:
Good. So presumably with the Wyze you joined the not 5G, and I would try that again and make sure you're on the not 5G. You always want IOT devices to be on 2.4 for several reasons.
Patrick:
I wanted to figure out how do I set it up again? Because I just logged on and went right back in. So how do I go back into setups in the Wyze?
Leo Laporte:
I can't remember how you do that on the Wyze. Probably in the app. [crosstalk 01:09:54] I would say in the app it'll have a reset of some kind. And then you'll do the same thing you did with the app, which is you'll [crosstalk 01:10:05]-
Patrick:
Set it up fresh.
Leo Laporte:
Set it up fresh.
Mikah Sargent:
I've got a link in the show notes for you with the support document that talks about resetting that.
Leo Laporte:
Since your NETGEAR is naming 5G separately from 2.4, make sure it's on the 2.4. That'll work better, you'll have fewer dropouts. I can't think of any other reason why that, unless there's a problem with the Wyze. I think their support's pretty good though, right? [crosstalk 01:10:28]
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
[crosstalk 01:10:34] you can call them up and say, [crosstalk 01:10:34]
Mikah Sargent:
Or chat them on their website.
Leo Laporte:
"I got a problem." And it's not doing that. They might even have some suggestions that come from their vast experience with non-working cameras. They're pretty good. I have to say I've stopped recommending Wyze.
Mikah Sargent:
Yes, same.
Leo Laporte:
Because they had a security flaw, which they hid. Now you bought that camera fairly recently, so you're okay. All the new cameras are fixed. But the people who had the original version one Wyze cam, which includes you and me and I presume many people to whom I recommended this camera, a flaw was found. A flaw they couldn't fix that allowed a bad guy to access, not just your camera, but get into your network through the camera. Wyze initially ignored the report that there was a problem, then downplayed it, and denied it. Finally offered a firmware upgrade for their other cameras, but they cannot upgrade this one. And I think their handling of it was so terrible, so inexcusably bad, that I have of late not been recommending them. You agree?
Mikah Sargent:
Yep, I'm right there with you. I stopped recommending after they did that. It's awful. And it's sad because they were one company that I could point to where I could say, "You don't have to spend as much, but you don't have to worry about the quality being less. That you can still get a device or a product that is going to work, but you don't have to spend as much money for it." And that is a rare thing. [crosstalk 01:12:02].
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, $30 camera.
Mikah Sargent:
And so it's really sad that they did this.
Leo Laporte:
Hey, the show today brought to you by Cisco Meraki, the experts in cloud based networking for hybrid work. Hey, whether you like it or not, hybrid work is the wave of the future. It's here right now, whether your employees are working at home, at a cabin in the mountains, at a lounge chair on the beach. The cloud managed network provides or needs to provide anyway, the same exceptional work experience, no matter where they are. You might as well roll out the welcome mat, hybrid work is here to stay. Hybrid work works best in the cloud. And honestly there's perks both for your employees and for leaders. Workers can move faster, deliver better results, they're certainly happier in many cases with a cloud managed network, whether they're at home, on the beach, or in the office, it's the same and that's the beauty of it.
Leo Laporte:
And leaders love it because they can automate distributed operations, they can build more sustainable workspaces, proactively protect the network. Yeah, security's really important too, isn't it with all of this? An IDG market pulse research report conducted from Meraki highlights "The Top Tier Opportunities in Supporting Hybrid Work." It's, according to this study, which is interesting, a priority for 78% of C-suite executives. I think they know it's good for business, it's good for their employees. Leaders want to drive collaboration forward, they want to stay on top of course, of boosting productivity and security. And I think you can do both hybrid work has its challenges. The IDG report raised the red flag about security, of course. 48% of leaders reported cybersecurity threats as the number one obstacle to improving workforce experiences. And part of what makes the Cisco Meraki cloud so great is it is absolutely always on security.
Leo Laporte:
So you can use it with confidence. IT can use apps from Meraki's vast ecosystem of partners, turnkey solutions built to work seamlessly within the Meraki cloud platform for asset tracking, for location analytics, and more. And it's actually really cool because it's so supportive of hybrid work that you can use it to gather insights about how people use their work spaces. You can, in fact, have environmental sensors in a smart space that can track activity and occupancy levels helps you stay on top of cleanliness. It also makes it easy to reserve workspaces to allocate it to have enough, but not too much based on vacancy in employee profiles. You can do hotdesking, which means employees can come into an office, scout out a desk, use it, have it reserved, waiting for them. And because you're in the Meraki cloud, you've got all your data, you've got everything, all your apps.
Leo Laporte:
You've got everything you need no matter where you're sitting. Locations in restricted environments can be booked in advanced, they can include time-based door access. You have absolute control and that's what you need. And of course, MDMs are built in, mobile device management, integrating devices and systems, which means IT can manage, update, and troubleshoot company own devices even when the device and employee are off-prem somewhere else. Really the whole point here is to turn any space into a place of productivity to empower your organization with the same exceptional and secure experience, no matter where they work. And you can do it with Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit, M E R A K I, meraki.cisco.com/twit. Hybrid works here. Let's do it right. meraki.cisco.com/twit. We thank you so much for supporting The Tech Guy Show. Now back we go.
Leo Laporte:
We should make this the theme song for the show (singing). Leo LaPorte and Mikah Sargent, your Tech Guys. That's what we're doing, we're helping. I'm helping.
Mikah Sargent:
I'm helping.
Leo Laporte:
8888ASKLEO is the phone number, (888) 827-5536. No Beatles died, right? I should ask.
Laura:
No.
Leo Laporte:
No. Laura doesn't just play songs from people who've recently passed. Right?
Laura:
Correct.
Leo Laporte:
Good, okay. Just clarifying that. It's that way on Twitter too [crosstalk 01:16:29] you see a name [crosstalk 01:16:32] Yeah, I know. We were listening to Beyonce on the ride home from the airport yesterday. And I said, "I know some Beyonce fans." Queen B. Jeff on the line from Menifee, California. Hello Jeff.
Jeff:
Hey Leo. That was an awesome song.
Leo Laporte:
Isn't that a great song? I love that song.
Jeff:
Oh yeah, that was perfect.
Leo Laporte:
(singing)
Jeff:
So I need help. And longtime listener, first time caller here. I built an Intel chip rig. I built a rig in 2010, first generation I7, first or second. And it still has the original fan on top of the CPU to keep it cool. And that fan plugs into the motherboard, it fastens with those four types of clips where you push them down and they clip in. And they're just plastic little teeth that connect to the back of the motherboard. And well, anyway, one of those broke off and I've been hobbling now with three of those.
Leo Laporte:
So you have a wobbly fan?
Jeff:
Yeah, and I got to be real careful when I put it back into my office so it doesn't tilt. And it works okay. But if my wife comes along and starts dusting and she knocks into it, I get heating issues.
Leo Laporte:
I get hot when my wife dust too, I understand. I shouldn't have said that. You should see the look I got from Mikah. I couldn't resist Mikah, sometimes the chauvinist in me comes out. So you want some way to better attach. I've actually never heard of fans being clipped in, that doesn't seem like the best way.
Jeff:
Well, they've got these CPU fan mounting clips. They're black, they've got a white insert and they're part of the fan.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, I see. So the fan is part of the heat sink. So it's clipped onto the heat sink is what it is.
Jeff:
Yeah, and you clip it down and the whole thing fits over. You put your thermal paste on there and you [crosstalk 01:18:36]
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I have seen that. I know exactly what you're talking about.
Jeff:
So I went online and everything I see is for a socket 775, I think it is. And I go back to what they called I think it's 1366, but I don't know if those numbers are even relevant. I'm just wondering if that clip is universal for all the Intel [crosstalk 01:18:59]
Leo Laporte:
According to a guy named MelonMuck< so I don't know if you want to trust him. People in the chat room have the funniest names. MelonMuck says Amazon still sells mounting plastic pins for LGA 775 socket CPU cooler heat sink fans. 8.99 for a pack of 20.
Jeff:
Yeah, so that's exactly what I can see here. I'm looking at that. Will that work for my 2010 Intel setup?
Leo Laporte:
The sockets are different, the sockets change. But, the hole that's going into is the same. I bet you it'd work and it's only nine bucks to try it. So you're on that Amazon listing? Because there is a picture, the fourth picture down has a picture of it with the heat sink as it would be on the chip. And if it looks similar, then I would say go for it.
Jeff:
Yeah, these clips look exactly like the ones I have. But I couldn't tell in the pictures if they were shorter, stubbier.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. What socket do you have again?
Jeff:
So the one I've got, they say it's a 1366. And everything I see online is 775. But again, I don't know if that's relevant to the side clip.
Leo Laporte:
Again with the chat room, a guy named ScooterX, I don't know who that, ScooterX has found 1366 sockets on eBay. So we're going to put a link in the chat room to that. All the same clips. In fact, you can get a new bracket if you want, and then the clips go in the bracket or you can just get the clips by themselves and it's cheap.
Jeff:
So he did find a 1366?
Leo Laporte:
He found a 1366 socket B computer fan heat sync, brackets, and accessories. And they're a bunch of them.
Jeff:
Okay, cool.
Leo Laporte:
I think you're good. You're golden. This is the beauty. And I have to say people come sometimes say, "Should I build my own computer?" And I often say, "No, because you're not going to save money." But the beauty of it is you've got investment in it. You've got your finger in the pie there and I think it's great to continue. And this is fun so go do it. [crosstalk 01:20:12]
Jeff:
[crosstalk 01:20:12] four or five years. And I keep up that way. It's good.
Leo Laporte:
Beautiful. Leo LaPorte, Mikah Sargent, your Tech Guys. This is why you build your own computer because it's for stuff like this. And it's analogous to classic cars or anything else.
Mikah Sargent:
Got to give it a tune up every once in a while.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I love it. eBay is your friend for stuff like this, Jeff.
Mikah Sargent:
This is where it makes sense.
Leo Laporte:
And if you spend $8 on these brackets, you're not going to get ripped off this. I wouldn't buy a laptop on eBay, but this is perfect.
Jeff:
Yeah, the worst case scenario is it ends up in my box of goodies for the future builds.
Leo Laporte:
For future builds. Exactly. Looks like you can buy any part of this, it's very interesting. So we'll put that link in the show notes and if you're not in the chat room, you can see it in the show notes. Thank you ScooterX for finding that.
Jeff:
I appreciate it.
Leo Laporte:
Appreciate it.
Jeff:
Yeah, take care buddy.
Leo Laporte:
All right, take care. This is where the chat room is so awesome.
Mikah Sargent:
I love our chat room.
Leo Laporte:
So cool. Johnny Jet.
Johnny Jet:
Hey, how are you guys?
Leo Laporte:
Still stuck in Toronto?
Johnny Jet:
Still stuck here. I'm kidding. It was Canada day yesterday.
Mikah Sargent:
Happy belated Canada day Canada.
Johnny Jet:
I got my Independence Day shirt on ready for Monday.
Leo Laporte:
You're wearing your Canada pride shirt.
Johnny Jet:
No, I was wearing my all red yesterday.
Leo Laporte:
Nice, welcome.
Johnny Jet:
So did you go to Rhode Island?
Leo Laporte:
I did, but I can't believe I did this.
Mikah Sargent:
You didn't take your CO2?
Leo Laporte:
I forgot my CO2.
Mikah Sargent:
Leo, the build up.
Leo Laporte:
I know. Well I'm going on another flight in two weeks, so I'll do it on that one [crosstalk 01:20:15]
Johnny Jet:
How was it?
Leo Laporte:
It was easy. I was so prepared for a nightmare.
Johnny Jet:
No delays?
Leo Laporte:
No delays.
Johnny Jet:
JetBlue?
Leo Laporte:
JetBlue.
Johnny Jet:
JetBlue, Spirit, and Frontier have been doing the best because they are the ones that had the meltdowns over spring break. So they learned, so they cut their schedules in advance. Now the other ones, now American and Delta are just getting hammered.
Leo Laporte:
The flights were full, there were no empty seats. Yep. But it was easy peasy. TSA lines were short.
Johnny Jet:
What time did you fly?
Leo Laporte:
10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, something like that. Morning. Not early morning, mid morning.
Johnny Jet:
That's actually a pretty good time because you beat the morning crush.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, and even though it was a holiday weekend it was easy coming home yesterday. Traffic wasn't great once I got home, but the flights couldn't have been easier. Got a rental car from Hertz. No problems at all.
Johnny Jet:
Didn't get arrested.
Leo Laporte:
Didn't get arrested. Drove a nice Jeep, very nice. I hadn't driven a gas car in a few years. It was a little weird.
Johnny Jet:
How's your mom doing?
Leo Laporte:
My mom is great, it was so great to see her. I understand now why you go see your dad so often. And the nice thing for me going back there is that's where I grew up. So it is very resonant. It was really fun, went to our favorite clam cake [crosstalk 01:24:35].
Johnny Jet:
Lobster roll?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Johnny Jet:
There you go.
Leo Laporte:
Well, actually I didn't have a lobster roll. My daughter and my mom did. I'm not a huge lobster fan.
Johnny Jet:
Man I am now, I used to not be growing up. [crosstalk 01:24:45]
Leo Laporte:
It's funny. I was nothing but when I was a kid, that was the treat of the moment is to go, where did we go? I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, go have a lobster, and wear the bib, the whole thing. But for some reason in the last few years I've gone off the lobster, it's so rich. I like crab. We have such good crab here. But anyway, I had my favorite Rhode Island treat, clam cakes.
Johnny Jet:
Yeah, I'm not into that.
Leo Laporte:
Oh baby. You just haven't had the best clam cake. That's all. Dune Brothers, man, they're a newer place, they're not one of the classics. We went there two days in a row. My mom and I just like, "Oh, it's so good."
Johnny Jet:
So when you going back?
Leo Laporte:
Tomorrow? No, I probably will go back in the fall in September. June in the Rhode Island, as I'm sure is true in Toronto too, is gorgeous. It's green, it's beautiful, the birds are singing, the weather's nice.
Johnny Jet:
I'd rather be on the east coast in the summertime.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's a little arid here and it's so beautiful there. So that was nice. He's been everywhere friends. He's Johnny Jet, our traveling guy still in Toronto visiting family and having a great time I bet [crosstalk 01:25:58] Happy Canada Day.
Johnny Jet:
Thank you. That was yesterday. Did a little staycation this week. Went downtown, stayed two nights at the Park Hyatt.
Leo Laporte:
I know the Park Hyatt.
Johnny Jet:
Across from the WOM, the World Ontario Museum.
Leo Laporte:
I love Toronto. I used to go do a TV show there one week a month and stayed in many of the hotels. I ended up settling a place down Queen Street towards the end there called The Drake, which is a hipster hotel but I love it.
Johnny Jet:
It's been a while. I think I stayed there once, but it was over a decade [crosstalk 01:26:36]
Leo Laporte:
They have a rooftop restaurant. When you did the show, I probably told you to stay there. And I loved it and if we did some podcasts from the roof there. And it was so much fun. In fact, I liked it so much I reserved it for the next year and then they canceled the show. So I think I got my money back, I don't remember. Were there fireworks last night?
Johnny Jet:
There was. I looked out the window, they were all over. But I wasn't downtown so I did not see if they were downtown. I'm sure they were, but it was not a great day yesterday. It was cloudy, a little bit of rain.
Leo Laporte:
Favorite thing I ever did, and I almost did it this time, I thought about it is to fly on the 4th of July at night. I flew cross country many years ago, and you fly over every little town's fireworks display and it's the most magical thing.
Johnny Jet:
Thanks for the reminder because I'm thinking about popping down and go see my dad in Connecticut and I fly into New York and I was like, "You know what? I should do it 4th of July night."
Leo Laporte:
You should go via Chicago or something. So you get to see all the [crosstalk 01:20:15]
Johnny Jet:
Listen, I grew up in Connecticut and see the whole Long Island Sound. You would literally see 20 different fireworks shows going off.
Leo Laporte:
It's quite beautiful. You got to time it so that [crosstalk 01:27:49] between 9, 9:30.
Johnny Jet:
9:15. Definitely. It's a way to do it.
Leo Laporte:
I'll never forget [crosstalk 01:27:57] and I only did it once. It's really cool.
Johnny Jet:
So yesterday you were one of the record days for just security checkpoints. 2.49 million people went through, pre-pandemic it was 2.1 almost 2.2. So it was actually surpassed it.
Leo Laporte:
More people traveling yesterday than usual. I was really prepared. We left really early for the airport and I said, "Abby, they were going to have rush hour traffic." We were going from Providence to Logan Airport out of Boston. I said, "We're going to have rush hour traffic. We got to get there early, TSA lines are going to be huge. We just don't know what's going on." And it was couldn't have been easier. There was no traffic, the lines were short. We had a 10:30 flight, we got there at like 8:30 for a 10:30. And I had to return a rental car, and as many airports now, the rental car facility's off airports so there's a bus and it's a big process. But it couldn't have been easier, we were there in plenty of time.
Johnny Jet:
Did you check a bag?
Leo Laporte:
So this was a great teaching moment for my 30 year old daughter. I said, "Honey, pack light. We're going to carry on." She arrived with a duffle bag. As it turned out, after we got home, she said, "Dad, the biggest part of that was a terry cloth robe, which I never wore in the whole trip." She said, "I could have done [inaudible 01:29:28]." So for something that happened at Logan getting off the airplane and it took two hours before the bags came off, there were so many. That was one thing I noticed, there were a lot of flights on a single baggage. You know how they have those round [crosstalk 01:29:43]?
Johnny Jet:
Yes.
Leo Laporte:
There were four or five flights using the same baggage carousel and I think that was probably contributory to the delay. But I had my bag, I got off the plane. I had my bag, I had my stuff, I'm ready to go. But no, we got to go sit there on that carousel for an hour. Wait in front of [crosstalk 01:20:15]
Johnny Jet:
That's the worst part. So do not check a bag if you can avoid it.
Leo Laporte:
She learned. And then getting to the airport yesterday, we arrive, she gets in the wrong line. By the time she gets in the right line, most airlines now do this JetBlue, you check in, get your pass, get a little sticker, you put it on your bag, and then there's a bag drop line. The bag drop line was around the airport. It was huge.
Johnny Jet:
Again, avoid checking bags.
Leo Laporte:
They moved it, but there was only one person at the bag drop. They have 30 kiosks, one person manning them. So I think there was a labor shortage at Logan.
Johnny Jet:
There definitely is. I saw a tweet the other day, I think it was two hours someone waited. I can't remember which airport, just to drop their bag off.
Leo Laporte:
Just to drop the bag, you already checked in. So yeah dude, if you can. And so Abby learned that lesson. She knows from now on, carry on and she said, "I could have done it, dad. I just didn't think." She thought it was better [crosstalk 01:20:15]
Johnny Jet:
And I can't remember, does JetBlue track their bags? I think they do on their app. I think they'll give you an update on the bag [crosstalk 01:20:15].
Leo Laporte:
I had an air tag in my bag.
Johnny Jet:
And how did that work?
Leo Laporte:
I don't recommend it because you get a lot of alerts on your phone when you leave the hotel, when you do anything, "You left your bag behind." But meanwhile, after I checked the bag, I never heard from it again. So I just feel like there's not a lot of iPhones in the baggage check area [crosstalk 01:31:20]
Johnny Jet:
There's definitely not in the baggage carousel area, because that's what they work off of. But I have one in my bag, I never had a problem.
Leo Laporte:
But I did have it just in case if you ever have a problem. And of course I saved the baggage claim. Nobody ever checks the baggage claim ticket. But if you lose your bag, you need that to say, "Hey, this is the bag. I want it back." So thanks to you Johnny, you've trained me.
Mikah Sargent:
It is interesting that people don't just start unloading all the luggage [crosstalk 01:31:51]
Leo Laporte:
No, I thought about that. Why doesn't somebody steal the bags? Because it's full of dirty underwear, that's why.
Mikah Sargent:
That's true. Why would you want [crosstalk 01:31:56]
Leo Laporte:
You do not want that bag. There's nothing good in it.
Johnny Jet:
Always bring the valuables on the plane and pack your dirty underwear and all that stuff in the checked bag.
Leo Laporte:
The other thing I did I was proud of, I brought a little Contigo thermos bottle, and of course they empty that before you go through the TSA line. But every airport now has a water bottle filling station. And it was great. I had plenty of water, I filled it there and I didn't use any plastic bottles of the whole trip.
Johnny Jet:
Way to go.
Leo Laporte:
Proud of myself.
Johnny Jet:
So yesterday was the day the airlines actually loaded their summer schedules. So if anyone has flights booked for this summer, check your flights now, make sure that they weren't changed. The airlines should email you and notify you, so make sure whenever you make a reservation that all your information's up to date and check those emails. Sometimes people think they're sales pitches. A lot of times they're like, "Your flight's been changed." And what I also do is use expertflyer.com and set a seat alert. Most people set seat alerts for the seat they really want, if you book last minute, you only get stuck with the middle seat. Then you set the seat alert for a bulkhead aisle or exit row aisle, or window, and then get notified when that opens up, usually when frequent flyers are upgrading. But I set it for the seat that I'm in. That way I know if an airline has changed the plane, canceled the flight, or moved me. And so that's a good way to figure that out.
Leo Laporte:
That's very nice. I use TripIt Pro. I pay a little bit extra for tripit.com.
Johnny Jet:
I have it too.
Leo Laporte:
And they also will let you. In fact, TripIt's great. It'll say where your terminal is ahead of time, helps you get-
Johnny Jet:
Turn by turn directions.
Leo Laporte:
[crosstalk 01:33:31] And then I do another thing that my mom loves, I share every trip with her. So even if she can't go on the trips, she can at least see where I'm going. She says, "It's practically like going myself."
Johnny Jet:
That's really nice.
Leo Laporte:
Somebody in the chat room saying, tell me if you can do this, he says, "Fill that Thermo bottle with ice. The TSA will let you through with ice, not liquids. But ice is solid, and then it'll melt and you'll have nice cold water in the plane." Does that work?
Johnny Jet:
Yeah, it's got to be solid. [crosstalk 01:34:05] We talked about it before, you can get those frozen bottle.
Leo Laporte:
Wow, very clever. I'll have to try that next time.
Johnny Jet:
It's difficult to do in the summertime.
Leo Laporte:
Yes, because it melts.
Johnny Jet:
Especially around here.
Leo Laporte:
And that's another good tip is to have the app. All the airlines have apps now. In fact, if you have an Apple watch, a lot of times that Apple watch will have your boarding pass on it, will have information on it, give you alerts. That's very handy. I don't have to check flight trackers anymore. I know where I am.
Johnny Jet:
You do. And if your flight is delayed or canceled, get in line, get on the app, and speak to them, and get on Twitter.
Leo Laporte:
We wore our masks from beginning to end. As soon as we got to the airport, masks on, didn't take them off until we left. We were among the few, I would say less than half now, wearing mask.
Johnny Jet:
And call an international reservation center if you get stuck.
Leo Laporte:
Johnny jet.com, that's the place to go. Leo LaPorte, The Tech Guy. It was funny because at Logan our gate was next to a gate with people flying to Fort Lauderdale. The people in the Fort Lauderdale gate, nobody had a mask. The people in the San Francisco gate, it was about half. I thought, "Yeah, that's about right." But we tested every morning before we went to see my mom. I brought a bunch of COVID rapid tests because the last thing I want to do is get my mom sick. And I know your dad's survived now twice.
Mikah Sargent:
Three.
Leo Laporte:
Three times. I don't want to take that chance. So we tested and I think the masks really works because I know there's somebody on that plane with COVID right now. And I feel like the masks, a good mask, an N95 mask, my Donald duck masks, and Abby didn't want to.
Leo Laporte:
Donald Duck masks. And Abby didn't want to wear the Donald Duck masks. She had regular N95's but they work. And wash your hands. All the things you know what to do.
Johnny Jet:
For sure. And were you in Mint, I hope?
Leo Laporte:
No, I wasn't going to spend that kind of money. Although...
Johnny Jet:
I got, listen, sometimes, sometimes you can get Mint for five 30, although this summer is very difficult, if not impossible.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. No, I love mint. I've flown Mint, but I just, it was, it's a short flight. It wasn't so bad.
Johnny Jet:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
Although as we're getting on the plane, Abby looks at the first row in Mint. Guy got on before everybody else and said, that's Bradley Cooper. I said, that's, that's not Bradley Cooper. He's wearing a mask. She said, no, no, it's definitely Bradley Cooper. So I don't know. I don't know. Maybe we were flying with Bradley. I don't know.
Johnny Jet:
Yeah. They usually celebrities get on first or last.
Leo Laporte:
He was on well before anybody else was and he had a mask.
Johnny Jet:
It usually, it was usually 1A, usually get on last.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it was in 1A, yeah.
Johnny Jet:
Yeah. It's usually 1A.
Leo Laporte:
Wow.
Johnny Jet:
Yeah. I mean, I wrote a post actually. I have, I should update it about how to sit next to a celeb on a plane. And that was one of the tips.
Leo Laporte:
Get row one.
Johnny Jet:
Yeah. I mean, I've sat next to so many because I used to fly LA JFK every other weekend. And I was friends with all the gate agents, and they would upgrade me to business or first...
Leo Laporte:
Nice.
Johnny Jet:
...for free. I've paid the cheapest amount...
Leo Laporte:
Nice. Noice.
Johnny Jet:
...And this before 9 11.
Leo Laporte:
So, that's interesting. Huh. I mean, I don't care if I, in fact, I almost don't want to sit next to Bradley Cooper. It's like, well, what am I going to say? Loved you in Silver Lining Playbook. But you know, you really sucked. Well, you know I just don't want to have that conversation. Did you and Gaga really get it on or, or what? I mean, I just didn't have anything to say. So...
Johnny Jet:
I see.
Leo Laporte:
I don't want to say, I don't want to say anything though.
Johnny Jet:
I usually talk.
Leo Laporte:
What do you say? I love you in that movie. What do you say?
Johnny Jet:
No, I actually, one time I was flying New York LA and the woman from Will and Grace was in my seat, which was 1A and she goes, oh, I really like this seat. Can I sit here?
Leo Laporte:
Oh my God. How entitled can you get?
Johnny Jet:
I'm like, no!
Leo Laporte:
I'm a movie star. Give me your seat.
Johnny Jet:
So I was like, you know what? I actually prefer the aisle anyway. So I said, sure, this is, this is back then when they had two, two and two and I sat in 1B, but anyway, we talked a lot. She was from Rhode. She's from Rhode Island. We talked about Rhode Island.
Leo Laporte:
Celebrities are just like you and me. And I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to talk to anybody. I never talk to anybody in the airplane. Sat next to somebody, the whole flight out.
Johnny Jet:
I love talking to people. Easily.
Leo Laporte:
But I prefer not to.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You're I put the headphones on. I put the blinders up. A little TV.
Johnny Jet:
No, I've met some incredible people flying.
Leo Laporte:
I should be more friendly.
Mikah Sargent:
My partner's a talker. [crosstalk 01:38:55].
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah.
Johnny Jet:
But, I know when people don't want to talk to me. I won't talk. And sometimes I don't want to talk if I have a lot of work to do, but usually I do. Anyway...
Leo Laporte:
Johnny, God bless you. How much longer are you going to be in Canada?
Johnny Jet:
Couple more days.
Leo Laporte:
Oh. Give my regards to your dad.
Johnny Jet:
All right.
Leo Laporte:
I now understand completely, because I did not want to... I was balling my eyes out when I was leaving. It was so hard to leave. See you Johnny.
Johnny Jet:
Take care.
Leo Laporte:
Mikah the Tech Guy show brought to you today by ITProTV. You've never met these guys. I want you to meet Tim and Don. They are so great. Lisa and I flew out to Gainesville to see this studio. So the whole idea was Tim and Don went to an NAB show. I was at, I gave a panel with a bunch of other people and we were talking about how we do TWiT and how you know this new form of broadcasting can be used in so many powerful ways. They were IT trainers. And they said, wouldn't it be cool if we could do it training the way we do TWiT. And that's when ITProTV was born. They have since opened their studios in Gainesville. That's where we went out a couple years ago to visit seven studios running nine to five, Monday through Friday, creating the best content.
Leo Laporte:
They have the best trainers. People who not only are experts in the field. They've got to be that first and foremost, but also are so passionate. So engaged, loved IT so much that they are fun to watch. They're engaging. And that's really important. If you're getting an IT education, you want a platform. That's not only going to give you the information you need to get to either a higher level of IT or get that first job. But you also want to have fun doing it. You don't want it to be hard, because then you won't want to do it, right? You don't want it to be boring and it's not with ITProTV. It's, it's entertaining. It's binge worthy content. You get the best possible IT training and certifications with ITproTV, and you're going to get it on your schedule. That's the beauty of it. The programs are 20 to 30 minutes long.
Leo Laporte:
Those are the chapters and the longer, you know, topic segments, which means you could watch it at lunch during a break, you can watch it anywhere, too. Computer, big screen TV, whatever device you've got, you've got ITProTV. So, that makes it easy to get to easy to watch. Over a total of 5,800 hours of IT training. And because they're always updating it five days a week, eight hours a day, they're always creating new content. You're always up to date. That's important, really important. And it's something you can't get, frankly, from books, from YouTube videos, from tech schools, this is this, that is really a focus. And it's important because the tests change, the questions change, the subject matter changes. There's always new versions of software. There's always new software. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot to do.
Leo Laporte:
You got to keep it up to date. Those 5,800 hours of it training are always spot on up to date. They've got virtual labs, which I love. So even if you don't have a Windows server, you can, in an HTML five browser, any browser, you can create a surfer. You can spin it up. You can configure it. You can configure clients. I like it because when I screw up, I just close the tab. No one knows, but it gives you the chance. Even if you don't have, you know, a dozen machines to really do it for real in these virtual labs, they have practice tests. If you're going to take an IT Cert test, you definitely want to take the practice exam first, because then you're feeling like, you know, I know what I'm going to get. I know what to expect. And I'm ready to take the exam, which is really, really nice.
Leo Laporte:
And of course they support you 100% from beginning to end to help you choose the right career, help you train for it and then help you get that job. Our one reviewer said quote "best website to study IT and cybersecurity related courses. I like the part where they make a few courses free for a weekend." Well we got one, a free weekend coming up compTia, which is that basic cert. They have a series of basic Certs that pretty much everybody in IT takes before they get that first job. compTia has a complete compTia weekend. It's coming up in two weeks, July 16th and 17th. So that's free, which is nice, great way to get a taste of ITProTV. I don't want you to wait, honestly. I would like you to sign up today, but okay. If you really want to do that, there's also two free live webinars coming up this month.
Leo Laporte:
You can watch these on demand later, but it's good to go to the live one. Because then you can ask questions. Small business security. That's Wes Bryan and Eric Semal two are their best edu-tainers, Thursday, July 7th. That's just some in this coming Thursday, 2:00 PM eastern. Heath Adams and Daniel Lowry are going to do a cybersecurity webinar Thursday, July 21st. That's also 2:00 PM Eastern. Nice to watch those live if you can. But again, they'll be on demand later. And this month the focus is on compTia. So check out the CompTIA courses, the A plus core one and core two series designed for professionals who support today's core technologies from security to networking, to virtualization and more. The A plus cert, as I said, is a standard for launching it careers. And there's no better place to get your certs than ITProTV. You learn about hardware, operating systems, networking, security, troubleshooting, everything you need to know to be a tech guy and get that first job.
Leo Laporte:
If you've got a team by the way, don't forget it. Pro TV's business plans. Really great for teams. We'll talk about that. Another time itpro.tv/twit. That's the website go there right now. You can get 30% off all consumer subscriptions. As long as you stay active, just use the code. TWiT30, TWiT30 itpro.tv/twit offer code TWiT30 for an additional 30% off for the lifetime of your active subscription. ItProTV build or expand your IT career and enjoy the journey with the best people in the business. I love them. itpro.tv/twit. And don't forget that. Offer code TWiT30. Thank you, ITProTV.
Leo Laporte:
Now back to those tech guys, I feel the need for speed. Do do, do, do, do, do, do do. We're riding into the techno zone. Mikah Sergeant, Leo LaPorte, your tech guys. 88 88 ASK LEO. Wait a minute. You just played Topgun to Gusti.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh no.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, well, no kidding. Just kidding. I know he died. I saw the movie just the other day. I saw the movie. I had never seen Topgun.
Mikah Sargent:
I don't think I ever have either.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You're not missing anything.
Leo Laporte:
I thought if I want to see the new Topgun, I should see the old one first. And it was okay. It's you know, it's people love it because it's nostalgic. Cause they, they saw it in their youth.
Lady 1:
Mustaches and shirtless men.
Leo Laporte:
A lot of shirtless men.
Mikah Sargent:
You can find those anywhere though.
Leo Laporte:
The volleyball game. Yeah. You can see that anymore.
Mikah Sargent:
Wasn't in the past.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Gary on the line from Costa Mesa, California. Hello? Gary, Leo and Micah. Your tech guys,
Gary:
Hello, Leo and Micah.
Mikah Sargent:
Hello.
Gary:
I'm the one who's told you before. I'm sure that I'm old enough to consider these new things as modern inconveniences, but I did pretty well figure out the Roku. What do you call it?
Leo Laporte:
The inconvenience?
Gary:
Remote control.
Leo Laporte:
Ah.
Gary:
Because I have a TCL Roku. So what I'm suggesting is...
Leo Laporte:
Oh!
Gary:
I was able to get a TCL manual off the internet.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's what I need to do.
Mikah Sargent:
You can zoom in.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Gary:
They have, there's and instructions in there for how to use it. And you can print appropriate pages and write notes on them for further instructions to your mom and then send that to her whatever way you do.
Leo Laporte:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. Because the manual itself is probably unclear, but if I could snip little bits and pieces out, add some annotations. Yeah, absolutely brilliant idea. I decided to do that because it took me forever to figure it out. It wasn't so much the remote by itself. It was the fact that there was a cable box remote, the TCL remote and an apple TV remote, you know, the more you get the complexity multiplies, or more like squares.
Gary:
Well, I get all of anything you can get on a TV. Clear 1100 channels and all...
Leo Laporte:
Nice.
Gary:
By without having a cable or a dish or any of those things I just use in her case, she's low income and up. She probably gets whatever her state [crosstalk 01:47:28]
Leo Laporte:
Exactly. Yeah.
Gary:
And that comes for 10 dollars a month. On the phone company.
Leo Laporte:
Roku is interesting because it has more than 2000 hidden channels, you know, on a Roku, you'll go to the store, the Roku store on the app. And then you'll see the main channels or Netflix and Amazon prime and stuff like that. But Roku has more than 2000. They call them private or secret channels. They're not really private or secret, but if you know the code, you don't get it in the app store. You enter in the code in, oh wait a minute. Roku. Private channels do not work anymore as of February 23rd. Oh, nevermind. They, they turned that feature off. That's annoying. That was such a cool thing. You could find the strangest, you know, if you like cricket out of India, you could see all the cricket you could. Oh that's too bad. Well, nevermind. Forget I said anything. Yeah.
Gary:
I watched the construction thing sometimes. Yeah. And as well as a lot of others, but there's 1100 to choose from.
Leo Laporte:
That's pretty amazing.
Gary:
10 dollars a month.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And then...
Gary:
On that same internet for the phone, I have Magic Jack and that's, I forgot, some annual fee that still is only a little bit each month. So you can get phone and TV and computer...
Leo Laporte:
Sounds like you figured... You may call him inconveniences, but you figured it out, Gary. You got it. You're working it.
Gary:
It I've figured out that stuff. Yeah. I've also figured out how to get food and medical and other services for almost nothing. And I live in a tower building where I'm overlooking the Pacific ocean on which I learned to sail in my, in my long years, old years.
Leo Laporte:
And, now you're making me jealous.
Mikah Sargent:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
You got to, you got to, you got it going on, Gary. That's awesome.
Gary:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
We should take care. We should take care of our seniors, right.
Gary:
Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte:
You know, and as, as I'm 65, I'm getting there. I think that, you know, we have to honor the people who made this world for us.
Gary:
Yeah. I've been watching the world for 15 years longer than you have.
Leo Laporte:
I hope I get 15 more. There's a lot more to see still.
Gary:
Yeah, there is and I have a lot more to do myself too.
Leo Laporte:
Nice. Do you still sail?
Gary:
I haven't. No. I family sold boats and I had been doing other things. I went car racing though instead.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. Okay.
Gary:
But, for a while...
Leo Laporte:
You're staying pretty active. That's good.
Gary:
And I continued his sailboat race, winning tradition and some car racing.
Leo Laporte:
Nice. Wonderful. What kind of, what kind of stock cars or what kind?
Gary:
Vintage road racing. I built a historic representation of the 1956 Thunderbird that Chuck Daigh drove at the Daytona speed trials.
Leo Laporte:
What fun? Oh, my.
Gary:
We raced in the vintage road races against in the class A and B against the Mustangs, Cobras, Tigers, Corvette's and Camaros. All 10 year newer cars. And we were right up in the top 10 of those out of 30.
Leo Laporte:
Very few cars more beautiful than that classic Thunderbird. Those T-birds are beautiful. Was it a, you said 59? Very nice year.
Gary:
Six. Fifty-six.
Leo Laporte:
Fifty-six. Year I was born. I could just see Marilyn Monroe driving around in that with her hair flowing in her scarf. Gary, a pleasure talking to you. That's a great tip. I'm going to do that for my mom for sure. Mark on the line from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hello, mark Leo and Micah. You tech guys.
Mark:
Hi Leo. Hey, I know you don't like printers and I don't either.
Leo Laporte:
I love printers. I don't like printer questions. Go ahead. Okay.
Mark:
Yeah. I got an HP photo smart InkJet and years ago we got this error code and it wouldn't print. So I called HP. I called the Big Box squad and they both told me you couldn't fix it.
Leo Laporte:
Wow.
Mark:
So after I fixed it, for a couple years and...
Leo Laporte:
How did you fix it? Just out of curiosity.
Mark:
I rolled up a piece of paper towel and dampened it and put it under the heads.
Leo Laporte:
Oh they were clogged. Okay.
Mark:
Moved it back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. That just dissolved it a little bit.
Leo Laporte:
So you just, they were... That's the problem with Inkjet is they have to be used regularly. Otherwise, the ink dries and then you've got clog. Yeah.
Mark:
And, and my thought was, well, if this ruins it doesn't matter because it doesn't print anyway.
Leo Laporte:
Right.
Mark:
But nurse it along for years and years. I think I got to the point where I may have damaged the one of the heads because it won't unclog and it won't print.
Leo Laporte:
Oh.
Mark:
So my question is, do you know of an InkJet that is less prone to clogging than others?
Leo Laporte:
You know, when Epson was a sponsor of this show, they dumped us ceremoniously a couple of years ago. But when they were a sponsor of this show, and I'm a big fan of their eco tank printers, because you don't have cartridges. You just get big tanks, which saves you a lot of money on cartridges. I asked them about this. I said, look, is there any way you can keep these from clogging? They said, when we coat the heads, we do all sorts of things to keep it from clogging. But it's my experience. If you don't print on an InkJet for a few weeks, you're going to have to run the nozzle cleaning routine, which uses a lot of ink. And if you don't do it for a few months, you're going to have to get a towel or something and do what you did.
Mark:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
They really do clog it. And I don't know of any that don't, if you, if you're curious, read up on Wikipedia on how ink jet technology works, it's remarkable.
Mark:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
It is hard to believe it can work. I mean, these are tiny little nozzles, unbelievably small. It is a remarkable system, but I just think it's in the nature of the ink and the nozzles. You do everything you can, but you're going to have some issue with clogging. And I think what, what Epson does in unclogging, it is good. You know, putting the coatings on the heads is good. For a while and I thought your HP might be one of these, InkJets had replaceable heads. So when you got that that made it even more expensive by the way because when you got a new cartridge, you'd get a new head. That might be a way to go too. But I basically my feeling on InkJet is you really don't, shouldn't get one, if you don't print every day.
Mark:
Yeah. Well I just, you know, once a week print a test page.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You can do that. Yeah. Think jets are great for photo printing. You that's what you were doing, I guess, with a photo smart. But...
Mark:
Occasionally, yeah.
Leo Laporte:
I use laser now because even though the color's not great, I don't have this problem and it's consumer bills are cheaper, too. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Are you printing photos? Is that the main thing you want to do?
Mark:
Well, not necessarily. Well, see right now it's the black cartridge that doesn't work. So...
Leo Laporte:
Well, that's the end of the line.
Mark:
Yeah. We want to print to text more than anything. Yeah. But now, now we can't even do that.
Leo Laporte:
They're not designed, this is the other thing that Epson would never say this, but I think it's true. They're they're designed to be obsoleted. They're designed to wear out. They want you to buy a new one.
Mark:
Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. And, and we got this real cheap, but the cartridges that come with are maybe half size.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. That's why it's cheap, right? Yeah. They're basically selling it below cost.
Mark:
Yeah. I think, and I think we got it for less than what a new set of cartridges cost. Yeah. So we're paying, you know, it's almost cheaper to look at, look for the deals and buy a new printer.
Leo Laporte:
Absolutely.
Mark:
Every time you run out of ink.
Leo Laporte:
Absolutely.
Mikah Sargent:
That's what they used to do.
Leo Laporte:
And Epson was concerned when they did the eco tank. They said because you're paying for that ink that comes with the box, it's significantly more expensive. And they weren't sure if people were going to be able to do the calculation and say, yeah, but I'm not going to buy, you know, a hundred cartridges. So over the two years that I, this ink is going to last, I'm saving 1500 bucks. It turned out, people were able to do that calculation. They only sold them initially in Brazil and it sold so well. They said, okay, I think we can do this in the rest of the world.
Mark:
Yeah. I hate to take this apart and try to clean it out because...
Leo Laporte:
I think you should just, what did it cost you? 90 bucks? It's time for a new...
Mark:
Well, yeah, probably. Yeah. But yeah. Thing is it's the scanner still works. I still use that. So I...
Leo Laporte:
It's a shame. I don't think we should make stuff that isn't going to last, but we do.
Mikah Sargent:
I will tell you a couple of times I've had, I've had an InkJet printer since college and it would occasionally clog. And I did a lot of research on what is the best way of doing it. And the best thing that you can do is get 99.9%. Isopropyl alcohol. So as pure of isopropyl alcohol, as you can, then you get a dropper and you take the dropper and you drop it directly on, you take the in cartridge out, you drop it directly onto the print heads and you let that sit overnight and then you do it again. And you let that sit overnight. And that has helped me twice to unclog the nice print heads.
Mark:
Okay. Well, I've been doing that with the water, but not...
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. See water depending on what water you have. It's not pure. So it will also collect little, little bits of stuff on there that will actually clog it as well.
Mark:
Okay. I'll try the alcohol. See, see if that'll.
Leo Laporte:
Pure, pure, you don't want rubbing alcohol.
Mikah Sargent:
Don't use 70%. Don't use 75%. You need as close to 100% as possible and different sites will sell or even, I think you can get some locally 99.9%, if you can get it. Eventually...
Leo Laporte:
Or ever clear.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I ended up switching to a laser in the end, but for a while, that helped.
Mark:
Yeah. I had an HP laser jet years and years ago and I never had to replace the toner. It lasted a long time.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah, it lasts a long, long time.
Leo Laporte:
The Brother that I bought came with like a mini cartridge, right. Mini toner cartridge. But when I replaced that's a 5,000 page cartridge. Yeah. That's going to be... I'm never going to get another one.
Mark:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Printers. I just was reading about printers. This is dying business because people just aren't printing anymore. You know, I guess at offices we do but...
Mark:
The few things I need every once in a while, I, you know, run on a thumb drive and go to the library and print it, but that's inconvenient.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And I think jet is going to do great color. And if you ever do want to fit print photos, you know that photo smart does a very nice job of that. Epson has some really good photo printers too, but I use mine more for a scanner. You're right. It's funny. I use that as a scanner three times more than often than I use it as a printer. I'm very rarely print anymore.
Mark:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Hey, great to talk to you. Thank you, Mark. Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.
Leo Laporte:
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte, Mikah Sergeant here, the tech guy, too, is a good thing on Saturday. You get double the pleasure, double your fun with Mikah and Leo and your questions. 88 88 ASK LEO. If you want to know more about something, if you want to make a suggestion, we're all here to help each other out 888 827 5536, toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. You can call us from outside that area by using Skype out or something like that. There's a chat room going great fun. IRC dot TWiT.TV. And you should be glad we've got the chat room because they often come up with the answers they do. They're very, the team tech guy is in there helping us out. Thank you. Team tech, guy onto Richard in Chino, California. Our next caller. Hi Richard.
Richard:
Hi Leo. How are you?
Leo Laporte:
Wonderful. How are you?
Richard:
Good. I'm doing great. Hello Micah.
Mikah Sargent:
Hello.
Leo Laporte:
What's up?
Richard:
See, I was wondering if I could assist me with one little problem I'm having. I have Simplisafe and I had it about a month ago I got it. And I bought it from a department store as a kind of a package bundle deal where I got the base and the camera, a couple sensors and so forth. I put that in my residence and probably within two weeks the keypad, the batteries died. So...
Leo Laporte:
Oh, the department store obviously had that on their shelf for a few months, years, decades. And it, yeah, that's not unusual when I get stuff from a store like that. Yeah. They have it in inventory a long time. Yeah.
Richard:
Yeah. And I was thinking the same thing. So I put brand new batteries in there thinking that it was no big deal. And, and then within four days it drained the batteries in the keypad.
Leo Laporte:
Ah, okay. So now we know there's a short, probably in that keypad. The good news. Now Simplisafe if I should mention a sponsor, thank you. Simplisafe.
Richard:
[inaudible 02:00:45].
Leo Laporte:
Have you called them? Because they would send you a replacement right away. I think.
Richard:
Yeah. So I called Simplisafe and they told me to contact the department store first. So I did, they were able to exchange the keypad.
Leo Laporte:
Okay.
Richard:
So they opened up a box. And so they gave me a new keypad. I used their batteries and within four days it killed it again.
Mikah Sargent:
What?
Richard:
Yeah. So I put new batteries there and probably within a week it died again. So I called it Simplisafe. They sent me a third keypad.
Leo Laporte:
Oh my Goodness.
Richard:
And they... Yes. And they guaranteed it wouldn't happen again. And sure enough, within two weeks it was completely dead.
Mikah Sargent:
Wow.
Leo Laporte:
Do you have a small child in the house?
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Somebody pressing on the keys regularly?
Richard:
No. No. We, we got a couple of chihuahuas, but they can't reach it. And...
Leo Laporte:
Wow, Micah has a couple of chihuahuas, too. Have you ever had problems with your keypad?
Mikah Sargent:
They have not killed the batteries on my remotes yet...
Leo Laporte:
Keypad?
Mikah Sargent:
...but I wouldn't put it past them.
Leo Laporte:
I have a keypad right here. That's weird. I don't know. You know, they make a variety of keypads. Maybe try one of the other kinds, like the key fob keypad.
Richard:
Yeah. And, and when we do have the key fob also that came with our bundle, right. It just, the keypad was kind of, you know, where you put in the pin numbers.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You that's how you turn it on and off. Sure.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh, I'm seeing that interference can play a big role in this. If you've got a brick wall or...
Leo Laporte:
It's trying too hard.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. It's trying to get to, if you've got a brick wall, you've got some sort of stucco that has metal in it.
Leo Laporte:
That makes sense.
Mikah Sargent:
That could be causing the issue because...
Leo Laporte:
That's the only thing that could explain it because you've tried a new battery.
Mikah Sargent:
So many different ones.
Leo Laporte:
You've tried three different key pads. So it's like your cell phone. My daughter said, why do I have to turn the cell phone off on the plane? And I said, well, honey, you know, they used to say, it interferes with navigation. We know now that's probably not the case, but you're just going to kill your battery. If you've ever accidentally left your cell phone on the plane, it kills the battery because it's trying hard to reach the cell towers, changing cell towers every second or two, and it's working so hard, the battery's just die in an hour or so. And the Keypad's exactly the same thing. There's something interfering. That's making it hard for it to talk to the base station. And I think you nailed it, Mikah. That's exactly what's wrong, but now what can he do about it?
Mikah Sargent:
Well, so thank you to Scooter Rex for posting in the chat, a suggestion that I'm seeing. And one that makes sense because it's the suggestion I would make if it was a router thing, is to move that base station closer to wherever you have that keypad. So if the keypad is outdoors somewhere, if you get the base station a little bit closer, even though it's working harder to get through the wall, you will have a better connection. It won't have to work as hard to be able to make that connection.
Leo Laporte:
Where is the keypad? Is it right by your front door?
Richard:
Yes, they keypad that is right by the front door. And the base station is in the living room area.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So maybe try putting that by the front entry way. Is it a brick wall, a metal wall. There may be metal in the wall. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
Siding could get in the away.
Richard:
Yeah. It's an older house. So there could be...
Leo Laporte:
That's for sure. Yeah. So drill a hole in that front wall. Just leave a hole not big enough for a burglar. No, I obviously you don't want to do that. But I think you nailed it. I think this is exactly what's going on and it's going to keep happening if the key fob button pad doesn't have a lot of juice.
Mikah Sargent:
Right.
Leo Laporte:
It just needs to send a radio signal to that base station.
Mikah Sargent:
Because you know, you would, this is the thing is that this is actually kind of what you want to have happen because it means that the engineers for Simplisafe said what we want is to make sure that signal gets there no matter what versus other companies who would choose...
Leo Laporte:
And it just wouldn't work.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. It just wouldn't work. It wouldn't make the connection. You wouldn't you press the buttons and it wouldn't do anything.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Richard:
Perfect. Well, I'm going to go ahead and try that then...
Leo Laporte:
Fuss with that. Hey, I'm glad you bought Simplisafe. Thank you.
Richard:
Thank you. You take care.
Leo Laporte:
I'm not a spokesperson or anything, but it's nice. I think it's a good system. And I never even thought about that. I think a lot of modern homes, you know, it's just wood. There's not, but it, but an older home, you don't there's metal in there. There could be all sorts of stuff.
Mikah Sargent:
All sorts of stuff.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And blocking the signal. That's classic with radios. Same thing with a cell phone. If you're in an area... I noticed my battery life in Providence on T-Mobile was much worse than it is here. And I suspect that's because it was working harder to get to the tower. That kind of thing. Yep. Yep. Brett on the line from Madison, Wisconsin. Hello, Brett.
Brett:
Hey Leo. Thanks for taking my call. I appreciate it. Can you hear me?
Leo Laporte:
I hear you great. So does Micah. What's up?
Brett:
Great. Well, you know, my wife and I took advantage of this Verizon special where you can turn in your iPhone 11 for a new iPhone 13.
Leo Laporte:
Nice.
Brett:
Basically zero cost.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Brett:
So we went in last Friday and the guy in the store transferred our data to our new phone and lo and behold, everything seemed to come through fine. But then when we went into our Gmail, every one of our emails was gone and I have tried to get them back and I cannot do it.
Leo Laporte:
Well, here's the good news. You said Gmail, right?
Brett:
Correct.
Leo Laporte:
There's no way those are gone. You, but you can verify this by going to gmail.com, logging into your account in a web browser and everything should still be there. If it's gone from there, something else happened. Have you done that? Have you logged in with your browser? Just to see?
Brett:
You know, I may have. Listen, I'm 69 years old and this stuff just...
Leo Laporte:
I don't blame you. This is a very common question with mail and it's a little weird. So bear with us here. Gmail stores your mail on their servers, on the Google servers. When you're looking at your mail on a phone, on a computer, you're actually not looking at it on the computer. It's almost like you're using the browser and looking at it through a browser, depending on what email program you're using.
Leo Laporte:
It may download some of that mail and what they call, cache it, for faster loading on your hard drive. But the mail officially is stored on Gmail. It's not stored on your computer or on your phone. When you get a new phone, it's not at all unusual, you'll set up Gmail. You'll be able to see new mail, but it's not going to go out and download or cache all that old mail.
Leo Laporte:
So it may well be with the Apple mail program anyway, that the mail isn't all there. That used to be there just to save time and space. But if you go to gmail.com, it should all, if it's not, then something else happened, but it should all be there. And furthermore, you could get Apple's mail to download more of that mail. Right? Mikah, am I wrong?
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. I'm thinking really what happened here is that you just need to re-log in, it could be the.
Mikah Sargent:
What happened here is that you just need to re-log in. It could be that you had your Gmail set up beforehand, so you just need to log back in and it should re-download.
Leo Laporte:
You've lost nothing in other words.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
This is one of the reasons they do this is because people lose stuff. I don't know if you've noticed, but more and more of our data, our music, our books, our movies, our mail is stored not on our computers, but up in the cloud. Partly that's because they make money charging you for cloud storage, but partly it's also because it eliminates phone calls. Where did my email go?
Leo Laporte:
In the old days on email, we would log in to the internet service providers servers, download the mail, delete it from their service to save their space and have it on our computer, but it's not backed up then it's easy to lose. So as we use more devices, as we have more mail, this is just a sensible way. Almost all email providers now do this.
Leo Laporte:
They store the mail on their servers, there's plenty of space there. In fact, Gmail started this when they started, what is it? 20 years ago? That was the selling point. Never delete anymore email, keep it all, we got plenty of room. That really transformed how we think about email. So it's all there, go to mail.gmail.com. Log with your Gmail account, that'll reassure you. You'll see it all there. Then you can probably re-log in on the phone, that will download it all.
Leo Laporte:
It doesn't download all of it, because it may be hundreds of gigabytes and you don't want to fill up your phone with it, but it should all be visible if you scroll through.
Mikah Sargent:
Exactly. As you scroll through it'll load more.
Leo Laporte:
Leo LaPorte, Mikah Sargent answering your calls, talking high tech
Mikah Sargent:
And boogy woogy, woogying.
Leo Laporte:
And boogie or bouchie, as we say, woogie woogieing. 8-8-8-8 A-S-K-L-E-O is the phone number (8-8-8) 8-2-7-5-5-3-6. The only thing weird, my daughter who's California, born and bred. By the time... We were only there four days in a beautiful province, Rhode Island. By the time we left, she was talking like this. She said, "We got to stop at a Dunkins. Dad. I need some coffee." Abby why are you talking like that? "What are you talking about? I always talk like this, what are you talking about?" Oh my God. I've lost my child. Joe on the line from long Beach, California. Hello Joe. Welcome Leo Laporte and MiKah Sargent.
Joe:
Wow. What a great day for me. I get to talk to you Gents.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's a good day for us too. We feel good too. Hey Joe.
Joe:
Hey, listen. I'm going to try to sneak two questions in here. One is about QuickBooks. I have a small business and we use QuickBooks basically for invoicing and reports and things like that. So when Microsoft said no more internet Explorer, I deleted internet Explorer off my machine. Big mistake because QuickBooks won't work without it.
Leo Laporte:
Oh dear. Are you using QuickBooks online or-
Joe:
No, I bought the QuickBooks. So I go out and I buy the new QuickBooks.
Leo Laporte:
This is their... By the way, this is their little... Intuits little scam. In my opinion. Essentially, they want you to buy QuickBooks every year.
Joe:
Absolutely, which is going to be another question I'm going to ask you. They said... And I went through this two hour thing with a chat and people on the phone hanging up. And their last thing to me was, as of the moment, our back end engineering team are working on this and there's no solution yet. Well, why would they sell the program? Because I just updated to QuickBooks 2022. That doesn't work either.
Leo Laporte:
Unbelievable. You're saying that they require internet Explorer?
Joe:
Yes. Yes. Microsoft... It says, since QuickBooks supported browser is actually IE we are moving away, but it's not yet done.
Leo Laporte:
What? Insane.
Joe:
I'm really [inaudible 02:12:02] then because I can't get anywhere with them. So maybe if they hear this, maybe they'll do something, but-
Leo Laporte:
It's not just, IE, IE-11.
Mikah Sargent:
What in the world?
Leo Laporte:
Internet Explorer, 11 is the current browser for QuickBooks desktop. That's their... They don't call it IE. It's their internal browser. But that's what it is. As of June 15th, Microsoft discontinued IE-11. So they do say on their website, as of June 10th, all supported versions of QuickBooks desktop will begin to use their new custom browser.
Joe:
Ain't so.
Leo Laporte:
Ah, wait a minute. Okay. Then there's a footnote. So, okay it says all supported versions of QuickBooks desktop will use our new custom browser, footnote: the custom browser will only be supported in QuickBooks desktop for pro premiere enterprise accountant, 2020, 2021 and 2022. So when they say, all supported versions, they're actually... No, just those. Are you running pro premiere enterprise or accountant 2022?
Joe:
I have Pro. QuickBooks Pro.
Leo Laporte:
Pro? So it's supposed to be-
Mikah Sargent:
The second footnote is even more mind boggling. It says updates will be provided if and when they become available.
Leo Laporte:
If they become available? First, they say, okay, wait a minute. This is hysterical. It says, it's reliable and will include critical security updates. Footnote: updates will be provided if and only when they become available.
Joe:
But in the meantime, the program, the software they sold me doesn't work. It won't even boot up.
Mikah Sargent:
This is not good. This makes no sense.
Leo Laporte:
I'm no friend of QuickBooks. I have to say. We use QuickBooks online for my business.
Joe:
Well, I started to do that and the QuickBooks I've had has been working fine for the last three or four years and we don't use it really... All the book functions-
Leo Laporte:
You shouldn't have to. Yeah.
Joe:
Invoicing and payments. So is there, is there an alternative software to QuickBooks that can open my QuickBooks file? And I can just say to hell with them?
Leo Laporte:
Ah-
Joe:
Heck with him. Sorry.
Leo Laporte:
No, you can say the bad word.
Mikah Sargent:
I think they deserve it.
Leo Laporte:
We used QuickBooks online and about a month ago. Somebody, a fan, a friend of the show, accountancy in Beverly Hills sent us a note saying, "Hey, just so you know, I can access your account." What?
Joe:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
What? So we contacted the QBO and they said, "You must have added them." No. And then we found out many more people had been added. They don't admit to a bug in their software, but they also don't know how it happened.
Joe:
This is Intuit?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. QuickBooks online. And that's a major security problem. If people are being given access to your account, to your books, without your permission or Knowledge. We wouldn't have known about it if she hadn't sent us an email saying "I can see your stuff."
Leo Laporte:
So maybe yeah. Hang on. We'll find you an alternative. Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy. Horrible. Horrible.
Mikah Sargent:
I wonder about it.
Leo Laporte:
Horrible. So the Cranston accent is very different than the New York accent. I'm not sure how.
Mikah Sargent:
I wonder about FreshBooks.
Leo Laporte:
FreshBooks is... Well, it depends, if you're... You said your needs are few Joe?
Joe:
That's correct. We just need basically a way to generate invoices, receive payments and generate reports.
Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah, definitely. This is an online one, but it's a lot less expensive and I think it's very nice. I used it for years. It's called FreshBooks.
Joe:
Yeah. I've heard about that.
Leo Laporte:
It's not a full accounting system, although behind the scenes, it really is. And for somebody like you with what you just described, it's certainly all you would need. Now let me... I'm sure it will import into it, but I'm trying to-
Mikah Sargent:
I'm seeing some guides online for doing it.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. I'll be shocked if it didn't, you can try it free for 30 days. It's an online service.
Joe:
Okay, I'll do that because I want to just tell Intuit to take a hike.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Who doesn't at this point? We would, except we can't. I mean, we're so invested in it. Yeah, we can't. But you can it sounds like, and FreshBooks is really actually great. It's designed for people like you who aren't... They don't want to be... They're not CPAs. They just want to do invoices. Keep track of their accounts receivable, keep track of their income, that kind of thing. I think it's got some really nice features and it's designed to be easy to use. So high recommendation.
Joe:
Can I sneak in one more question while I got you?
Leo Laporte:
Sure.
Joe:
Yeah. Okay. We have a small network. I have one, two, three computers and a laptop that we swap stuff around, but I'm having a continuous problem with computers not recognizing other computers on the window, on the network.
Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah.
Joe:
And I Google it, Google it and Google it and I get all these things to do and I'll do something and then something will work for a day and then I'll come back the next day and the computers are not showing up.
Leo Laporte:
So you're sharing drives from one computer to another over your network?
Joe:
That's correct.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Ideally, honestly, the best way to do this would be to... Instead of doing a direct computer to computer, setting up a network attached storage that all of them log into. It's a little more expensive, but actually you get all these benefits. You can back up each computer to the network, attached storage, just a lot of reasons it's easier. And those shares should be much more reliable. I don't-
Joe:
Okay. Well I have NAS for my backups and for my media server.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, perfect.
Joe:
So I could set up a small one for-
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, and you know, your media server doesn't disappear?
Joe:
Exactly. You can have two NAS on one system, right?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Or you could even take a little portion of your existing NAS and use it for that. You know, just have... You know, NAS's have a way to have multiple users and set up like this.
Joe:
Then I couldn't go buy something new.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, hey, edisonology.
Joe:
Hey, listen. One more thing I want to tell you. I know you have a guy on there that goes around and records concerts and things. We used to do that when I was in high school. When I was in high school, which was back in the 1960s, I scrimped and saved and bought an Ampex 601.
Leo Laporte:
Oh wow.
Joe:
And a Telefunken... Not an Anno, a Telefunken U47.
Leo Laporte:
You lugged a 601 around with you?
Joe:
Yeah, but lugged... They were tiny compared to a 350 or something like that.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. But-
Joe:
That was my setup. And then when I made enough money with that, I bought a 602 and another U-47.
Leo Laporte:
Do you still have the tapes?
Joe:
No. And unfortunately I don't have the U-47s either because I could retire if I did.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, no kidding. Those are incredible.
Joe:
The original tube. So I enjoy hearing the old guys on your show once in a while.
Leo Laporte:
I love it. I love it.
Joe:
Mikah's going to be a fantastic-
Leo Laporte:
Isn't he going to be great? In about 40 years he's going to be amazing.
Joe:
I mean, he's great now.
Leo Laporte:
No, I know. Thank you, I'm just teasing him. Thank you, Joe. What was your favorite concert that you recorded?
Joe:
Chow for now?
Leo Laporte:
All right, bye. Didn't have time anyway. If you wanted to buy an ampex 601 suitcase recorder these days it would be about 2,700 bucks.
Mikah Sargent:
Joe sounded just like Tim Cook.
Leo Laporte:
It was Tim cook? You think? He did? Maybe it was, if he'd said. "Good morning." Yeah, you would've gone. "Oh, it's Tim Cook on the line."
Mikah Sargent:
It's Tim.
Leo Laporte:
Leo LaPorte. Mikah Sargent your tech guys on the radio. 88-88 Ask Leo, the phone number website. And we mentioned this just because this is the easy way. You don't have to write stuff down. We can put stuff up for you to retrieve at a later date. It's techguylabs.com. What you'll find there initially is very little, but in a day or two, you'll see links. You'll see a transcript of the show. We'll put audio and video from the show. The transcript has time codes so you can search and find a portion. Watch it again, or listen to it again. And this is episode 1907. So that's all at techguylabs.com and that's all free. There's no charge to do that. 88-88 Ask Leo, Dick DeBartolo. The gizwiz coming up in just a bit.
Leo Laporte:
Joe told us off the air after our call that he used to go around in the sixties, recording concerts on an Ampex 601, portable reel to reel recorder. And I'm just looking at these and they are still in such high demand that if you went to eBay to get one that was in working condition, it might cost you as much as 3,000 dollars. And he was using amazing Neurmann microphones. Unfortunately he doesn't have the tapes anymore. It's kind of sad. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
That breaks my heart.
Leo Laporte:
It's kind of too bad. Yeah. I have a good friend that worked on Toronto radio for years who had interviewed pretty much every major musician in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Mikah Sargent:
Wow.
Leo Laporte:
And he had the reel to reel tapes in his garage.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh, that's amazing.
Leo Laporte:
I don't want to say his name.
Mikah Sargent:
No.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, because people get mad at him. Oh, because I said, "Please, John Donabie, please, just let me come into your house, your home. And, and I'll do whatever it is I need to do to digitize those because that is a treasure."
Mikah Sargent:
Literally.
Leo Laporte:
It is a national treasure. Never did get to. He started working in radio in 1965 at CKLB, 53 years. Retired just a few years ago from broadcasting. 53 years. Some of the biggest stations in Canada, including Chum. And in that time had interviewed just about everybody. But you know, that's what happens. In my earlier misguided youth, before I was a tech guy, interviewed people, I had more than 5,000 interviews.
Leo Laporte:
I don't have any recordings of those. And so if you... This is a public service. If you have in your garage reel to reel tapes, maybe Joe, you have some of those concerts you recorded in the sixties or some of those interviews, I guess there's some concern about the copyrights, but these tapes are disintegrating.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Maybe if it went through like the internet archive or something.
Leo Laporte:
That's exactly what I was going to say. Reel to reel tapes only last, maybe a few decades, they start to shred, fall apart. Eventually those will be unusable. There is a technique where you bake the tape in an oven. You slightly warm it up, which works once.
Mikah Sargent:
Don't do it after one time.
Leo Laporte:
It only works once. It kind of re adheres the magnetic material to the plastic backing of the mylar. You could play it back, but it's going to then just die completely. So you have one shot to get it off the tape, but I would've been willing to do that. Come over, a little portable oven, little easy bake oven, done all the tapes to record them.
Leo Laporte:
If you do have those, yet, I wouldn't put them on your own website. That's what I was telling John to do, but what you probably be better off doing is go to the internet archive, archive.org. These guys are willing to risk the copyright police and I think there are enough court decisions in their favor.
Mikah Sargent:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte:
It's understood that they're preserving the internet and this history so that future generations have access to it because otherwise, the Internet's disappearing. That's how it started originally. Now they have everything, including old interviews, radio shows, things like that. 702 billion webpages. You know that because if you've ever gone to archive.org searched for an old website, you could find some of my old websites there and the way back machine.
Leo Laporte:
But they also have audio books, poetry, they have live music archived. They have Canadian libraries, John Donabie. They have old video games. That's another one. These are art forms. These are things that people put hundreds, thousands of hours in, large teams, to create these video games. You know, Dig Doug or Asteroids. Did you ever play any arcade games or was that before your time?
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. I mean, it was before my time for the most part, but that doesn't mean that I-
Leo Laporte:
You were the end of it.
Mikah Sargent:
The fans and liked it-
Leo Laporte:
Asteroids.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Asteroids
Leo Laporte:
Pong, Miss PAC-Man, PAC-Man. Yeah. And unfortunately, some of the companies who own the rights to these, Namco and others say, "No, no, no, someday we're going to make money on these. You can't distribute these." But they are being preserved by the internet archive because that is in fact, a work of art and it needs to be preserved.
Leo Laporte:
And unfortunately it's a work of art that won't be visible, usable, playable in a couple of years because there aren't any more N-64s or the Sega Genesis are gone or whatever they were played on. These old arcade machines are gone. So they create emulators. That mean you can play them on the web. You can see them. They have radio show and program archives. Brewster Kahle started the internet archive some years ago, he made money. He was at AOL and made some money when AOL got sold.
Leo Laporte:
I mean, he was at a company called Wais. Pardon me? W-A-I-S, a database company that sold to AOL. He had stock and instead of buying an island and retiring, he created what is, I think, now the Smithsonian of the digital age with that money and created the internet archive. They now are, of course, run mostly on donations. They have a beautiful building. If you ever get a chance to go, San Francisco.
Mikah Sargent:
They do? I didn't know they had a building.
Leo Laporte:
It looks like the old library of Alexandria. It's got pillars and-
Mikah Sargent:
What?
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
I would've visited this long ago.
Leo Laporte:
It's really... I don't know what's inside. Maybe a lot of servers. I don't know, but you can go to archive.org and all of their collections, including old Mac software, there was a game we used to play called Dark Castle. You can't play any modern Mac, but they have Mac emulators there that let you play it.
Leo Laporte:
It's remarkable. They have 8.2 million films, 14 million sound recordings, 2.4 million TV shows, 238 thousand radio shows. Stuff that would be lost forever. And I don't... You know, concerts, images, and they're willing to take the chance... I asked Brewster when he started this, "Aren't you worried you're going to get sued by the owners of these companies, like Namco, who really will go after you, if you start distributing these freely?" And he says, "Well, it needs to be saved. Somebody's got to do it. We're going to take the chance and we're going to do it."
Leo Laporte:
And the good news is, courts have understood. This is part of our... This is the Smithsonian. This is part of archiving. They even have a phone software archive with 118,000 old apps.
Leo Laporte:
Apps that are orphaned, 15,000 Android apps that are orphaned. You can't run them on a modern phone. So just a little plug for what they're doing. It is the Smithsonian. And I think sometimes people treat this digital bit rot, digital stuff as not important. And I think we're starting to realize maybe it was. Maybe those old MySpace pages as goofy as... Did you have a MySpace page?
Mikah Sargent:
Of course.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
Of course.
Leo Laporte:
Did it have a lot of dancing bears on it?
Mikah Sargent:
It had music that played when you went to it automatically and jiffs all over the place-
Leo Laporte:
I think a lot of people, your age, learned how to do internet web development on MySpace-
Mikah Sargent:
That's exactly right.
Leo Laporte:
Because you could actually put some HTML in there.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Make your own.
Leo Laporte:
Does your MySpace page still live?
Mikah Sargent:
I don't know. I don't even know what my name was.
Leo Laporte:
Let's look at the way back machine. You need to know your old name.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. I don't know.
Leo Laporte:
People in the chamber are putting up my old websites from 1999. It's all there somewhere and yeah. 88-88 Ask... Actually don't call because you know what? We're going to take a break. And when the next time we speak, we will be in the presence of genius. Dick DeBartolo. MAD's maddest writer. Our GizWiz coming up. Stay here.
Leo Laporte:
Leo Laporte, Mikah Sargent your tech guys. It's time for the GizWiz segment. Dick DeBartolo is here. Mad magazine's maddest writer. We call him our gizmo wizard. GizWiz for short. Hello? Dickie. D.
Dick DeBartolo:
Leo. How are you pal?
Leo Laporte:
I am wonderful. I was out your way, sort of. I flew over your house. I was in the-
Dick DeBartolo:
Oh, was that you?
Leo Laporte:
That was me. Did you see me waving?
Dick DeBartolo:
Yeah. Yeah. I said, what is that lunatic waving. None of the planes wave to me.
Leo Laporte:
It's a little humid, a little muggy, little warm. Yeah, summertime in the city.
Dick DeBartolo:
It is.
Leo Laporte:
But you're wearing, it looks like you're home.
Dick DeBartolo:
My travel shirt for 4th of July.
Leo Laporte:
Oh nice. Yeah. And where are we going?
Dick DeBartolo:
Looking forward... Dennis and I are going to Riverside park to watch the Petaluma laser show.
Leo Laporte:
They said it's visible from everywhere.
Dick DeBartolo:
We're planning on that. That's our 4th of July.
Leo Laporte:
They said, you should be able to see it anywhere. I thought, well, that's going to be a very bright show. I think. Yeah.
Dick DeBartolo:
I'll let you know next Saturday.
Leo Laporte:
You still have you still have fireworks in the city, right?
Dick DeBartolo:
Oh yeah. Macy's absolutely. Absolutely. And in the east river.
Leo Laporte:
In the old days you would get in your boat, in the Hudson, maneuver carefully so that you could see down over to the East river.
Dick DeBartolo:
Yeah. You had to go to 33rd street, a big wide street.
Leo Laporte:
Big wide street and you'd look down 33rd street and then you'd have your TV with the fireworks on it. And then you'd see the real fireworks emerging out of the TV?
Dick DeBartolo:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
You don't do that anymore?
Dick DeBartolo:
No. Well, first of all, I don't have a boat, so that's really tricky.
Leo Laporte:
You don't want to do it on a raft or swimming?
Dick DeBartolo:
No. Or a piece of lumber floating down the river.
Leo Laporte:
Tom Sawyer raft. No, that's no good. Okay.
Dick DeBartolo:
All right. So, I have a gadget... Mikah might be interested because I know you have one that's 10 times more expensive than this. Okay. So it's another gadget from pep com. That's the exhibit with 40 tables and one new product and the PR person. And usually someone from the company.
Leo Laporte:
If there's only one product, what do they need 40 tables for? There's 40, a product per table.
Dick DeBartolo:
Oh, exactly right. Per table. Exactly. So over at Proctor Silex, this woman had this food processor filled with blue stuff and I said, "What in the world are you making" and she said, "Oh, we're not making anything. I am demonstrating the Proctor Silex Quick Clean food processor." Yes. Yeah. I didn't think anything of this, because I don't own a food processor.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh you know why you don't own a food processor? They're so hard to clean. I just was using mine the other day-
Dick DeBartolo:
Exactly. And so I said, "Well, so how does it work?" And she said, "Well, it comes with a special plastic blade. So you take the stainless blade out, you drop this in. Then you put the stainless blade back in, first." She said, "You see there's two little ridges in the plastic blade? Just put something on there, like Dawn or detergent then drop the blade that you just finished using, put the top back on and hit the clean button. And this thing revs up really fast and then stops for a second and revs up and going backwards. And then when you're done." She said, "Just take it to the sink because everything's spotless. Just run it under clear water and it'll be...
Dick DeBartolo:
I know. And the funny thing is I thought, oh, okay. And you know, at these events you take your food and you go to a little table and whenever a stranger comes over, they say, "So what did you see?" And I said, "Well, I just got here. The only thing I saw was the self cleaning food processor." "Where?, what table? Please? I need a story. I got a file in 30 minutes." That happened three times. It was so funny. So they're evidently onto something.
Mikah Sargent:
Yes, they really are.
Dick DeBartolo:
It's going to be $89 and it will be shipping in about two months. She said it should be out by the middle or the end of August.
Leo Laporte:
Excuse me for being ignorant here.
Dick DeBartolo:
Yes?
Leo Laporte:
It sounds like the only additional feature on this whole thing is the special plastic blade.
Dick DeBartolo:
Well, you had that-
Mikah Sargent:
You could just-
Leo Laporte:
You could do it with anything. Put some soap. I do this with my blender, the Vitamix is how it cleans itself. You put a drop of dish soap in there, some warm water, you turn it on high and go [inaudible 02:34:18]. And it's clean. And I would imagine this would work with any-
Dick DeBartolo:
This also has a special clean cycle though.
Leo Laporte:
It has a button on it that says, clean.
Mikah Sargent:
And it apparently runs in reverse and forward.
Leo Laporte:
Ah, it's agitator. You put your socks in there too. It'd be perfect.
Dick DeBartolo:
Oh, remind me never to come over.
Mikah Sargent:
Next time. Do you offer laundry service?
Dick DeBartolo:
Yes. Make sure we're doing something on the-
Leo Laporte:
When I'm in a hotel, rinsing out my some socks and my underwear in the sink. I'll just bring my Proctor Silex-
Dick DeBartolo:
Bring your clean blender. There you go.
Leo Laporte:
I'll put them in there.
Dick DeBartolo:
There you go.
Leo Laporte:
Don't put the blade in if you put the socks in though, right? I will say that.
Dick DeBartolo:
Exactly.
Mikah Sargent:
I made rack of lamb the other day. It was a Rosemary and garlic and olive oil-
Leo Laporte:
I'll be right over-
Mikah Sargent:
For the rack of lamb. It was incredible. But the food processor is always such a pain to clean. So yeah, this is kind of a nice idea.
Leo Laporte:
I bet though. You might try this with your... I might just do it with the Cuisinart. It doesn't have a clean button?
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. But just pulse it a few times.
Leo Laporte:
Just pulse it.
Dick DeBartolo:
Just take one of the regular buttons and a magic marker-
Leo Laporte:
Put a piece of tape over it, write, clean. Yeah.
Dick DeBartolo:
Yeah. See, see what happens.
Leo Laporte:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah.
Dick DeBartolo:
Also, I wanted to mention that the, What the Heck Is It Gadget is something you both might be interested in.
Leo Laporte:
Okay. Now wait a minute. Now you had a winner-
Dick DeBartolo:
I had a winner and you, like 75 people thought it was a correction-
Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know where you have the-
Dick DeBartolo:
White out-
Leo Laporte:
The white out or whatever. The little tape in there.
Dick DeBartolo:
Exactly. Okay. What it really is, it's a little device called, glue dots and if you're working on projects like foam or glass or paper or plastic, and you want to glue two things together-
Leo Laporte:
I don't know where you find this stuff, Dick-
Dick DeBartolo:
You take the glue dot dispenser and run it across. Yes. And it puts down a row of dots. It's so much easier than double face tape.
Mikah Sargent:
It's like, it's for scrapbookers especially I bet.
Dick DeBartolo:
Yes. Exactly.
Mikah Sargent:
Did anybody get that right Dick?
Dick DeBartolo:
Six people.
Mikah Sargent:
Wow.
Dick DeBartolo:
Six people, all scrapbookers yeah. Yes. All scrapers.
Leo Laporte:
So that means that's the conclusion of last month's, What the Heck Is It? Contest. July 2nd. We've got a brand new one, will run in July and August.
Dick DeBartolo:
Exactly. Exactly.
Leo Laporte:
Let me look at the picture. Oh, it's a Proctor Silex quick clean food processor. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Dick DeBartolo:
Go to, What the Heck Is It?
Leo Laporte:
I'm on the wrong place. I'm on the GizWiz visits. The tech guy. If you go to GizWiz.biz, click the button that says, "What the Heck Is It?" Oh there it is.
Mikah Sargent:
Oh-
Leo Laporte:
I get it. It's a little key chain that's a fluorescent light.
Mikah Sargent:
I was thinking a key chain for toilet paper rolls.
Leo Laporte:
Oh, perfect.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. You kind of keep-
Leo Laporte:
So, who needs-
Mikah Sargent:
You carry one with you.
Leo Laporte:
Carry one with you. Yeah.
Dick DeBartolo:
You know, I'll tell you, if you're old and that works-
Leo Laporte:
You need it.
Dick DeBartolo:
I need it.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte:
Key chain toilet paper roll dispenser is our guess.
Mikah Sargent:
Perfect.
Leo Laporte:
You might have a better one. The way it works. There are 18 autograph copies of mad magazine. Just waiting for your guests. Six of them will go to people who get it right. Which is exactly how many people guessed the last one.
Dick DeBartolo:
Correct.
Leo Laporte:
And 18 of them will go to people who didn't get it right. But were clever or cute or funny. And if there are many, many more clever, cute, funny answers, it'll be a drawing. Judges, or maybe Dick and Dennis will just figure it out themselves. I don't know. The rules are on the website.
Dick DeBartolo:
Pretty much like that.
Leo Laporte:
Gizwiz.biz. There's lots of other good stuff there including all this stuff Dick talks about not only in this show, but on ABC's World News Now. There's Mad magazine memorabilia. There's Match Game memorabilia. It's a wonderful site gizwiz.biz stay cool Dick.
Dick DeBartolo:
Thank you, buddy.
Leo Laporte:
Enjoy the fireworks.
Mikah Sargent:
Yeah. Have a happy holiday.
Dick DeBartolo:
You too. Happy Holidays.
Leo Laporte:
No, it's not that holiday.
Dick DeBartolo:
It is that holiday.
Leo Laporte:
Its that holiday?
Dick DeBartolo:
It's Christmas in July, you know?
Mikah Sargent:
It's the only song he knows. Let him sing it.
Dick DeBartolo:
Thank you.
Mikah Sargent:
Thank you Dick.
Leo Laporte:
The famous Macy's day Thanksgiving parade is going to be-
Mikah Sargent:
With fireworks.
Leo Laporte:
Fireworks.
Dick DeBartolo:
On Christmas.
Leo Laporte:
On Christmas.
Dick DeBartolo:
In July.
Leo Laporte:
Thank you everybody for joining us. Leo Laporte, Mikah Sargent. Have a great geek week.
Leo Laporte:
Well that's it for The Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget TWiT, T-W-i-T it stands for thisweek@tech and you find it at twit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break weekly. IPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security now.
Leo Laporte:
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 Guy Show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.
