The Tech Guy Episode 1918 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts. You love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast to show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, August 14th, 2022. This is episode 1,918. Enjoy the tech guy podcast is brought to you by unify meeting from MIMO monitors. Unify simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable universal user interface. Visit unify meeting.com and enter the code tech guy for 25% off a year's subscription. Or use the same code and get 25% off any of MIMO seven inch displays and by CacheFly. Deliver your video on the network with the best throughput and global reach making your content infinitely. Scalable. Go live in hours. Not days. Learn more at cachefly.com. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphone smart watches, augmented reality NFTs.

Leo Laporte (00:01:22):
Anything on your mind? Eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo is my phone number (888) 827-5536. That's toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, 88, 88. Ask Leo outside that area. You could still use the number, but you'll have to use Skype out or something like that. 88 88. Ask Leo website. Good to know. In case you hear something you go. What was that? I didn't what I, didn't what we put it all there. All you have to do is go to tech guy labs.com and that's free. There's no sign up nothing. Just go visit, say hello, tech guy, labs.com.

Leo Laporte (00:02:03):
Ah, let's you know, what would really change the world? You know, what would really change the world? Here's from the annals of science. Are you ready from science? If we could figure out how to create power, the same way the sun creates power, not nuclear vision. That's the stuff that atomic bombs and nuclear power plants these days are made of. And of course that's a dirty technology. Somewhat creates a nuclear waste that is dangerous to humans and other living things. Nuclear Fu nuclear fusion is what the sun does. It takes hydrogen of which there is a few of them together, heavy, heavy hydrogen in forms, helium, which, you know, just floats up <laugh> into the sky. Actually we need helium. We're running low, too many balloons, apparently. So wouldn't it be cool. If scientists could figure out how to create nuclear fusion, it would. If, if you could, if you could do it, it would effectively make power free and pollution free, widely available, no more digging up old dinosaurs. It, it would be a trans a transformational thing.

Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
Well, they've made a very critical step researchers at Lawrence Livermore, national labs, national ignition facility, just up the road, a piece, the national ignition facility, which is best known for igniting bombs. <Laugh> I think they got the name, the N when they were blowing things up, but they, but they also ignited the first fusion reaction a year ago, but they have now published the results in three peer reviewed papers. Now this isn't, this isn't the step to cold fusion, which everybody talks about where we could actually use this, but it is a first step, a critical first step to creating a fusion reactor ignition during a fusion reaction means that the reaction produced enough energy to be self-sustaining. We've known how to make a fusion reaction, to start it with a lot of energy and get a little out. But that's, <laugh>, that's not gonna produce anything of value.

Leo Laporte (00:04:26):
That's gonna just use up energy, but, but they've now done it in such a way. I think it was I think they they fired a hundred mega jewels. No, no one. What is, I don't know what they fired a little bit of <laugh> a little, I can't, I don't know what they shot at it. A little bit of energy and they got 1.3 mega jus. Now it was only lasted for, you know, a nanosecond, but just so you know, a mega Juul is known is a non-trivial amount of energy. One mega ju is the kinetic energy of a ton mass moving at a hundred miles an hour. Imagine a ton of something like a, oh, I don't know, small vehicle ha traveling at a hundred miles an hour hitting you. That's a lot. That's a lot of energy. So this is huge.

Leo Laporte (00:05:16):
This is a big first step, not the only step, but the big first step in creating fusion. Wouldn't, wouldn't that be amazing if sometime in our lifetime we could solve that and, and just energy would be plentiful and effectively free, cuz there's plenty of hydrogen and, and pollution free too. Oh, that'd be so cool. We can dream. So from the annals of science ignition, now we just need lift off big, big story. Q2 we've, you know, remember last week we were talking a lot about quarterly results from all the big tech companies and you know, there's a mix of re results based, you know, a lot of problems from a variety of sources, not just supply chain problems, but inflation, recession, currency, fluctuation, things like that. But one of the things now we've seen from the top seven us cable companies, a first in the quarter ending in June, April, may, June, they lost broadband customers in that quarter. This is, I mean, for years it's always been up, up, up more and more customers for cable broadband for the first time ever last quarter, a negative negative growth, partly cuz Comcast, which is the number one internet service provider and cable company was flat, no growth charter number two, lost 21,000 customers Al tease number three 39,000 customers.

Leo Laporte (00:06:54):
So for the first time anyone can remember cable operators, lost market share in internet service. Don't worry too much about them. They're still <laugh> 69.6% of all internet service providers. They're still pretty dominant, but you know what? I don't think anybody's gonna SI and say, oh, too bad for the cable operator. Aren't they? I don't, no, I don't think anybody's gonna go, oh, port cable op, Google's gonna pay fine. Or to Australia. I'm just giving you some of the top stories of the week. You, you understand, just, you know, just to give us a, something to talk about, Google paying kinda, you know what, this is a pitance for me, it'd be a lot of money for Google, not so much over collecting data from Android phones because Google has said, and they say it here too that, oh, you just turn off this switch that says, you know, don't collect any location data and we'll stop. And they don't.

Leo Laporte (00:08:00):
So the Australian competition and consumer commission mate accuse Google of making misleading representations to consumers about this and find them, wow. A whopping 60 million Australian, which about 43 million in real money. Not that's that's I don't know somebody should do the calculation, but I think Google that's probably less than 10 minutes profit for Google. I don't think it's gonna <laugh> it's not gonna break the bank. So, but, but you know what, any, any kind of spanking like this they pay attention. They pay attention. Maybe you shouldn't have done it. Google, you should have said, well, you can turn off location services, but we're gonna still know where you are and we're gonna, we're gonna keep track of that.

Leo Laporte (00:08:48):
Let's see, the us has approved a plan goo. So Google has Gmail has spam anti spam, right? Pretty good anti spam. There's a problem. It sometimes catches email from political candidates and that you should not do that's protected speech fundraising and you know, mm. Wrong, not spam, but that's the hard thing for any, any automated system to say, well, that kinda looks like spam. So the federal elections commission has approved a plan, a pilot program to test a new Gmail feature that authorized candidate committee's political party committees, committees packs can use to say this is not spam. This is not spam. The Google wanted permission to do this after Republicans accuse them of, of giving Democrats an edge. <Laugh> so, so they're gonna, they're gonna give 'em, I don't know, some sort of key some button they can push that says, no, this is not spam.

Leo Laporte (00:09:57):
It might look like spam. It isn't spam. So this is good. And this is all, cuz we got an election coming up. You knew that, right? We got the primaries going on right now, but there's a big one coming up in November. So this is good. And finally NASA is sending an iPad to the moon. Wow. This seems to me, somebody, somebody paid for this <laugh> I'm gonna think the space launch system Artis one is is about to launch. When is that gonna launch John? Pretty? They haven't announced it yet, but like this month, right? Sometime, sometimes soon. They're basically trying, trying to prove that the rocket and the spacecraft can, can put people on on the way to the moon. So they're gonna send an unru spacecraft, the Orion spacecraft to the moon. But inside Orion, something extra special, an iPad with Amazon's echo because somebody paid for this.

Leo Laporte (00:11:00):
There's no way NASA thought this would be a good <laugh> oh, we can't send astronauts to the moon without Alexa. They gotta bring Alexa with her. So yeah, they're gonna bring Amazon's echo technology. Oh and WebEx by Cisco <laugh> okay. Now I know somebody paid for this Howard. Who, who? Howard? Who? Deputy O Orion program manager almost read onion, but it says Orion. Yes. Yeah. Deputy Orion program manager at NASAs Johnson space center in Houston says now I can imagine a future where astronauts can access information on flight status and telemetry through simple voice commands. Alexa, how hot is it going to be today on the moon? This somebody paid for this apple. Cisco. Amazon. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Here it is. In the, in the NASA blog post the industry funded payload. Yeah. No astronauts are not saying, how do I know what to wear today? If I don't have my Amazon echo to tell me, they're not saying that it's an industry funded payload. <Laugh> so now I Amazon say you see Alexa's on the moon. Eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Let's talk high tech. You and me. Hello Sammy.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:31):
Hello Leo. How

Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
Are you today? How are you? My friend.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:35):
I am doing well.

Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
Good, good. I,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:39):
I got back from a trip to North Carolina this week. I was hoping, yeah, I'm gonna have enough miles to hit platinum status for next year.

Leo Laporte (00:12:48):
Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:49):
$7 short. Oh well you, cause now, now it's not just the miles you travel, but how many dollars are spent on the airline? You

Leo Laporte (00:12:56):
Gotta go. You gotta go on a little trip.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:58):
Well I got, I got another one coming up at the end of the month. I'm going

Leo Laporte (00:13:01):
To huddle jump in the green bay or something and then you get,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:03):
Well, I'm go. I'm going to, I'm going to Santa Barbara for a couple days at the end of August to drive the new Lexus RX. So,

Leo Laporte (00:13:09):
Ooh. Is that electrical?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:13):
No, it's gonna be hybrid.

Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:16):
The the electric Lexus. The is called the RZ. Yeah. And that's gonna be coming up a little bit later in the fall, I think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:24):
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:27):
But yeah. Was down in Asheville, driving around in the Newville Hyundai, Palisade and nice. Any ionic five that's the first time I've been there.

Leo Laporte (00:13:43):
It's beautiful country.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:45):
It is. Yeah. Driving up blue Ridge Parkway. Have

Leo Laporte (00:13:48):
Some hush.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:50):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:50):
I always focus on the food. That's you know? <Laugh> good. Well, we will talk soon.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:58):
Yep. 10

Leo Laporte (00:13:59):
I'll be here. 10 minutes. All

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:00):
Right. I'm just editing wheel bearings.

Leo Laporte (00:14:02):
Edit your wheel bearings.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:04):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
BA I don't see disk first aid. I think I have to do it in disc utility. Right. All right. Utility. Okay. There's the disc and I should do repair, right? Yeah. There's first aid. I see it. All right. First aid. First aid. Do it, baby. Do the first aid. Well, that was fast. Didn't do nothing. All right, everything's fine. Let's do it to the container. D ah, running first aid on container. Oh no. This may take last for several minutes or hours. It's going through all the snapshots. Oh, YYY. Yay. Well wrong volume. Well, I'm gonna run it on a bit by bit. So first I did it on the top level and then I'm gonna do it on the container. Then I'm gonna do it on the HT. Gotta do it everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen, Kim candy girl Shaer is here. Hello?

Kim Schaffer (00:15:30):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:15:30):
How are you? I wouldn't dare call you that. Do you have, do you have a small animal in your lap?

Kim Schaffer (00:15:34):
I do. It's my lap warmer.

Leo Laporte (00:15:36):
<Laugh> oh, isn't he cute? Or she, what? What's this is Sadie. She's been here. Oh, I've met Sadie. Yeah. <laugh> Sadie is a limp blanket. She just wants to sit there and, and,

Kim Schaffer (00:15:46):
But she barks at John. So I, I keep her on my lap. She kind of calms down at me.

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
<Laugh> and as long as she doesn't bark at our callers, Kim is our phone angel. She's the one who answers the calls, your calls for help at 88 80. Do you see, we have a new, I have a new button and I can we have a Q oh, the QR QR code. Yeah.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:06):
It's a little creepy. It's floating around the screen. It

Leo Laporte (00:16:09):
Is a little creepy QR code. John made this up. So if you're watching a video of this radio show, you can, and

Kim Schaffer (00:16:16):
It

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
Works. It does work.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:17):
Yeah. You tried it yesterday.

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Yeah. It's kind of cool. Cuz you point your phone at it. And at least on my iPhone, it will pop a phone number immediately in your camera app. You tap it and it calls it

Kim Schaffer (00:16:26):
Dial.

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
And then I called you. Should I try it on my on my pixel? On my Android phone. You should see if

Kim Schaffer (00:16:32):
It works. You'll probably get a busy signal, but you should. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
Gonna fly in. Let's

Kim Schaffer (00:16:36):
Fly in, fly in, zoom in

Leo Laporte (00:16:38):
Zoom in. Oh yeah. <Laugh> now on the Android. It doesn't show the one. It just shows the 8 88 maybe. Cuz it knows I don't need it and see if it if I call, oh, I have to press extra buttons to call

Kim Schaffer (00:16:51):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
Calling with direct my call. Your Google assistant. Transcribes your call to toll free numbers. Oh yep. Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. I guess that means I should talk to somebody instead playing with my marker.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:06):
You should David David in orange county. He he's having some trouble with his Android auto. So, and if you can't fix it, maybe Sam

Leo Laporte (00:17:13):
Sam's around already. He's here. He's getting ready for his appearance on the radio. Okay, good. Thank you Kim. You're

Kim Schaffer (00:17:19):
Welcome.

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
Hello David Leo Laporte. The tech guy

Caller 1 (00:17:24):
Leo, Leo, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:17:25):
Oh David David, David.

Caller 1 (00:17:28):
I'm one of these oldtimers that holds onto things forever. And I've had really good success with my Samsung S six. Yeah. Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago, the Android auto quit working and says it's not supported and there's no.

Leo Laporte (00:17:44):
What version of Android is that? S six have on it. Is it pretty old?

Caller 1 (00:17:49):
What kind of,

Leo Laporte (00:17:50):
What Android version is it? Android. What do you know off the top of your head? You may not

Caller 1 (00:17:56):
Know that. No, I don't. I looked, I looked up the, the latest updates, which was 2018 and there's nothing new since then.

Leo Laporte (00:18:03):
It's weird though that the car which doesn't get updates, which suddenly say, well, I don't know. <Laugh> why would the car do that?

Caller 1 (00:18:11):
Even, even with, even if I hold the phone outside of the co car and hit Android auto, it says it's not supported anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
Huh? Well, it'd probably be time to get a good time to get a new phone. Do you wanna, or you really want this at six?

Caller 1 (00:18:24):
Oh, I really, this thing's gone through the washing machine for a couple of minutes and it still continues to work. I mean, it's, it's such a good phone. All right.

Leo Laporte (00:18:32):
I'm gonna make a case though. I'm gonna make the case for why you should get a new one. Are you ready besides this? Okay. Obvious case it's outta date. So it's insecure. It's not getting the latest software patches. So as good. And you know what? The S six was a fine phone, but phones, these days are designed not to really be used for more than two or three years. And with Android, especially they don't update it after a period of time. So that's why I was asking what version of Android you are. You are probably a pretty pretty added date right now. And so I would,

Caller 1 (00:19:08):
So I love the feature of, of the headphone Jack, all the new phones seem to be,

Leo Laporte (00:19:13):
Oh yeah, I don't blame you.

Caller 1 (00:19:15):
And I use that every day on my words.

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
This makes me so angry. So angry. Cuz there was no, there really is no reason to take the headphone Jack out. That's just, that's just dumb. That's just being, that's just petty, greedy. There are modern phones that still have the headphone Jack. I think the pixel five a has a headphone Jack. I believe there are few you, it with Android though really is the case that an old phone it's kind of like using windows, XP, an old phone. It could be risky for you cuz you just don't have the patches and there are exploits out there. But since, since you don't wanna do this, let's see if we can figure out a way it's probably the case. Android auto will not. It's so strange. The car didn't get updated. The phone just decided not to do it, I guess. Cause the cuz the car right

Caller 1 (00:20:08):
When I went to Verizon, they, they said that yeah, Android auto wasn't supported by older phones.

Leo Laporte (00:20:13):
Yeah. But it was before or no, it was, it

Caller 1 (00:20:17):
Was. Yeah. So it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago I I've been using that's

Leo Laporte (00:20:20):
What's weird. Maybe the Bluetooth I'll ask, you know what, Sam's coming up in a minute. I'm gonna ask Sam, see if he knows you still should be able to Bluetooth parrot and use it as an audio source. It's just, you don't get the Android auto, but there may be a fix. Let's ask you Sam car guy coming up. So the chat room is saying this was a recent change by Google, according to Aaron.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:55):
Yeah. Hey Leo. Yeah. Am I live? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Is the caller still on? Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:21:01):
Yes

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:01):
I am. So question for you. Are you, are you using Android auto on your phone screen or in the car? On projecting to the screen?

Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
Oh, you're using it on the phone?

Caller 1 (00:21:11):
No, I'm using it in the car.

Leo Laporte (00:21:12):
Oh yeah. But it, but you're using a screen in the car that shows up.

Caller 1 (00:21:17):
Right? My, my my okay. Infotainment screen. Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (00:21:21):
The cause it's true. They did take the Android auto app out of Android. I remember that. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:26):
Right. That, that was my question. Yeah. it, yeah, it even, even though what, what kind of car do you have?

Caller 1 (00:21:35):
It's a Honda civic. A 2019.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:40):
Let's see.

Leo Laporte (00:21:41):
Honda. I seem to remember issues with Honda and car.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:46):
Well, we've got a Android, we've got a 2017 civic that has the same infotainment system in it and it works. And it's yeah, it works fine. Okay. But you know, we, all, my wife is also using, you know, a, a current generation pixel six. Right. oh. And it's it, it is, it it's possible even though the car has not been updated and I, and I know they haven't been updated that there's just you know, some security things in there and Android or at Google has decided to disable older versions of Android auto Google

Leo Laporte (00:22:19):
Has silently updated the system requirements for Android auto. This is from auto evolution.com to state that users need at least Android eight to run the app. And you'll get that message that you're seeing. David phone system is too old app needs Android upgrade soon,

Caller 1 (00:22:36):
But it won't allow me to update. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
So previously 6.0 was supported for wired auto Android auto. But now they're saying eight is required.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:46):
I mean, if you wanted to root and rom the phone. Yeah. That's a good idea. You can probably find a newer version of Android. Yeah. Root and Ramit you. I mean, that's, you know, that's a non-trivial thing to do if you're not,

Leo Laporte (00:22:58):
How, how comfortable do feel doing that?

Caller 1 (00:23:01):
What, what is that root and

Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
Rootin? So, so you can put a newer version of the operating system on it without Google's help. And if you go to a, a forum called xta-developers.com, xta-developers.com and search for your Samsung S six you'll. Now you need to get the exact version of it, by the way. So you get that version number from the about this phone. But if you get that exact version number and search the forms for that, there'll be a forum for that model. That explains how you can. And it's a little tricky sometimes with the older Samsung phones, they have this triangle thing they do, but you can, you might be able to put a new, more modern firmware on it. Looks like you can get an Android 11 rom run on the S six. Nice. Then that, then, then that'll fix, that'll fix this probably. And it'll make your good news, your S six secure again.

Speaker 5 (00:24:01):
Oh nice.

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
But it's kind of a geeky thing to do. You need to plug it into a computer with a USB cable and follow the instructions very carefully on the forums because if you do it wrong, you can break the phone. But if you do it right now, you can play with the phone. You've basically you can, could I

Speaker 5 (00:24:19):
Do it from an iPad?

Leo Laporte (00:24:21):
No, you need to do it from a usually from a windows machine. You can't do it from an iPad. You, you can do it from a Mac. I've done it from a Mac in the past. Yeah. You need special, you know, a little more software to do it on a Mac. So, okay. It's doable though. Route and rom, just go to xta-developers.com and find your model of phone and they will be pinned at the top. At the very top of the page. They'll be a explanation of what you need to do. Thanks, David. We gotta do Sam. Now. Sam time, by the way, first day did not fix this computer. Our our, our show today brought to you by MIMO monitors and unify meeting you know, MIMO. I know MIMO. I've had MIMO monitors before. These are great extra monitors.

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
You plug in the USB or another port and have a second monitor on your laptop or your desktop. They have little seven inch monitors. Perfect. For instance, for conference calls. And that's where unify meeting comes in. MIMO monitors is the global expert in video conferencing solutions. And this unify is exactly what you want. And here's the scenario. And I, this happens to us all the time. We use video meetings all the time and sometimes it's zoom, but sometimes it, we use Google meet. Sometimes it's Microsoft teams had a teams called just the other day. That means you have to load different program. Make sure it's up to date, got a different user interface. You gotta remember, oh, I don't click effect. Every time I start a Google meet the, at the very beginning, I, I hang up by accident because on Google meet the hang up key is where the mic mute key is on zoom.

Leo Laporte (00:26:02):
So I invariably I'm trying to unmute my microphone and I hang up on the call and everybody on our, on our staff meetings knows Leah's gonna call. He's gonna call. And he is gonna show up and he is gonna disappear for a minute. <Laugh> he's gonna come back. He's gonna be a little bit <laugh> red on the forehead, where he slapped himself, unifies the solution. It simplifies your work life by combining all of your favorite video conferencing solutions, zoom teams meet into one reliable user interface, same interface for all of them. That's why it's called unify meeting. It's your intuitive software solution to simplify your work life by combining all your favorite video conferencing solutions into a single reliable universal interface, which eliminates the hassle saves you time. All you have to know is I got a meeting, click the button and go. And since we're all spending so much time on meetings these days this is a huge, huge benefit.

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
And it's reliable. Every time is the buttons that command's always in the same place, no matter what you're using. It's great for working in the office remotely hybrid. It makes video conferencing something we're spending a lot more time every day now, right? Doing so much easier. You can navigate between meetings on different systems easily. You have to keep track of changing video conferencing apps or changing commands. And by the way, it's always on your desktop. It's always displaying your calendar. So, you know, when your next meeting is, and when it's time for meeting you tap the calendar invite, you don't have to know which software. It just, it just runs. It opens a video conference call and it's standardized format. I think this is just brilliant. I, I wish we'd had this for the last two years. Unified works best on a second or third display.

Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
That's where MIMO monitors comes in. They have great little monitors. You can make your permanent, you know, unify meaning monitor. So you always see your calendar there. And then when you're in a meeting, boom, you're gone. You're good. You're doing it. It takes up less desk, real estate, but provides you with enhanced convenience. And for added accessibility, you could see the video conference applications, original UI on the primary screen. In case you wanna do a setting, you know, that's unique to that program. So you get the best of both worlds. Unify runs on windows. It's PC compatible only costs 35, 88 for a year. They could charge a lot more for this convenience. Tell me, and with a purchase of any MIMO monitors display it's free. So maybe that's the thing to do is just go. That's what I did. I bought a little seven inch monitor.

Leo Laporte (00:28:30):
That's my meeting monitor. Try unify for your team@workorforyourselfatunifymeetingdotcomunifymeeting.com. Enter the code tech. I there you'll get 25% off a year subscription or with the same code tech I 25% off any of Nemo's seven inch displays. That's what I did simplify with unify. I think it's such a great idea. And we thank unify meeting for supporting the tech guy. You support us when you use that special offer code, you'll get 25% off either a year of unify meeting or one of Nemo's seven inch displays. When you go to unify meeting.com and use the offer code tech guy. Isn't that cool. Thank you. MIMO monitors. Thank you. Unify unify meeting.com. Now back to the show, let's go low riding with our good body. Sam apple, Sam principal researcher at guide house insights, hosts of the wheel bearings podcast@wheelbearings.media joins us every week to talk about cars real quickly. We talked off the air, you talked off the air to David and turns out Google changed the specs for Android auto. It wasn't the Honda, it, it was Google. Google says, now you have to have Android version eight or more recent to use Android auto. He has a phone that won't go past whatever it is, Android six or seven. So he needs to, and this was good advice from you, Sam root and RO

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:02):
<Laugh>. Well, I don't know if it was necessarily good advice. It was advice it's

Leo Laporte (00:30:07):
It's, you know, if you wanna keep using a really old and Android phone, it is so insecure. Plus you lose features and this is Google. They don't, they didn't have to do that. This is them pushing, nudging you into the future.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:17):
Well, I, you know, I, I, I don't know. I wouldn't necessarily totally agree with that. You know, there are probably changes in you know, in Google play services and, and other aspects of Android that prevent, you know, they're designed for to improve security in there. And, you know, one of, part of Android auto and the same also applies to CarPlay is authenticating the phone to the infotainment system in the car because what you don't want is any phone, any device that you've connected to your car to be able to potentially inject some malware into your vehicle, or, you know, do anything else unsafe to the vehicle. So there are, there are valid

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
Reasons that's reasonable, reasonable. Yeah, yeah. That's reasonable. And it is connected via a wire to his car. So yeah, that could be mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. So route and Ram simply means, and we told David this go to a website to find out how to get root access to your com your phone. And then once you do, you can change the firmware. It's something more up to date. You know, Google does not approve neither approves nor prevents this. Samsung may, some manufacturers do, and Samsung has in the past, but the forums@xda-developers.com should have instructions on how to do that. Now, Sam, I see you're, you're trying to drive with your rear view mirror again, <laugh> this is unsafe.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:46):
I, you know, it's just not as much fun looking through the windshield. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
What are you doing?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:51):
Challenging what's what's going on? No, this is, this is this is the a picture of a GM vehicle with the OnStar buttons that are on the the mirror. And since GM was the first manufacturer first automaker to to launch a telematic system in the vehicle. So having a cellular radio in the car that could communicate with various services outside of the car and their system is called OnStar. Other manufacturers have their own branding for this pretty much everybody has this and it's available or standard on most new cars today. So having a cellular radio and they've gone from those original GM OnStar systems were using analog one G cellular systems. They went to two G 3g and we've talked recently a few months back, I think about some of the vehicles that have 3g radios in them now that are going to lose their connectivity.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:47):
As the 3g networks are shut down. GM's been installing 4g LTE in their vehicles, and most others have since about 20 14, 20 15 timeframe. But this week and CR one in the chat room asked about this. So I decided to talk about it. This week announcement came out of GM that starting with 2023 model year cars, which are the ones that they're, they're, they're selling now starting to take orders for now customers that buy either a Cadillac, GMC or Buick model will be required to pay for a three year subscription to OnStar's premium service, which is a $1,500 option. In the past, when when you bought a new GM vehicle for the last several years, they typically give you a three year trial period of their most basic service. And one of the reasons why they've done this is when they started off, they were doing three month trial periods.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:52):
And the, the number of people that actually converted to paying customers after that three month trial period was pretty low, is usually, you know, less than 10%. They started doing three month trial or three year trial periods a few years ago. And that conversion rate is now somewhere in the 30 to 40% range. And if, if you don't sign up for a paid subscription after the trial period, the radio gets turned off. And basically the, the automaker gets loses access to the vehicle to be able to get things like diagnostic information and vehicle health data from the vehicle. And so everybody wants to keep that, that radio on that accelerated radio turned on so that they can get that. And they also collect a variety of telemetry information about how vehicles are being used, and that gets fed into their product development process so that, you know, they, they wanna understand, you know, how far are people actually driving for EVs?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:53):
How, when are they charging them? How are they charging them? Because that helps them understand, okay, what, what level of DC fast charging do we need to build into vehicles? How big a battery do we really need for the way people are actually driving? So there's some valid reasons for having that, but this <laugh> is is a little more dubious to me. You know, I mean, I talked to somebody from, from GM this week and they said, you know, it's all about trying to provide an improved, more seamless onboarding experience for customers, you know, so that it'll all be automatically enabled. You know, you have, you ha you have to pay for the subscription. It's all gonna be turned on when you buy the car. That seems like a dubious proposition. They're following though,

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
The, a trend in the industry, right. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> where it used to be. They would put a blank button on a feature that you didn't buy in the car. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> now O's been doing this BMW's done it for a while. Now. They put all the buttons in, but when you press it, it says, oh, you haven't paid for that feature. Would you like to now?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:57):
All right.

Leo Laporte (00:35:57):
That's, that's a trend.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:59):
Well, and, and, you know, GM's taking a step further and they're just saying, yeah, when you buy this vehicle, you're gonna pay for it. Like it or not, whether you, oh, you have to, or not, you have to pay for it. There's, it's no longer an option.

Leo Laporte (00:36:10):
So really this is like restaurants now. And a lot of them are doing this who basically build the tip into the bill or they add a, a search

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:19):
On automatically adding a tip, a tip. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:21):
It's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:22):
The

Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Same. They don't wanna raise

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:23):
Price a not so hidden price increase.

Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
Yeah. Interesting. How much is it?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:28):
$1,500 for three years which is a slight discount. I mean, the, that, that premium service plan is usually $49 a month. So this wor actually works out to about $41 a month. So you do get a slight savings, but still, you know, it's an extra $1,500 that maybe you weren't planning on spending. That's

Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
How much more your car costs than the sticker price. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:48):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:36:49):
Which is a little annoying. And so they said it was optional, but now, now they're forcing you to buy it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:54):
Yeah, it was optional up until the 20, 23 model year. And now it's now it's mandatory. And,

Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
And by the way, most people,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:02):
It doesn't apply to really

Leo Laporte (00:37:03):
Vehicles. Many people really don't need OnStar. I mean, it's not necessarily a feature you need, is it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:08):
Well particularly if you have a, have a an electric vehicle having the connectivity is actually really valuable and you know, this, this

Leo Laporte (00:37:17):
More than just

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:18):
On start

Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
It's, it's also just fulltime internet on the, on the vehicle.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:22):
Yeah. Having, having that connectivity to get software updates, especially now as we're moving to vehicles that have OTA update capabilities. Yeah. Yeah. You know, being able to, to having that turned on so you can get those updates. There's, there's a lot of other features, like, for example, in this premium plan if you have teenage drivers in the house, you can geo fence where they're allowed to drive, so you can set a geo fence. And if they go outside of that geofence, you will automatically be alerted. If they go over a speed over a certain speed, you will automatically get alerts. You know, there's the vehicle health reports, there's, there's a wide variety of things that you get remote locking and unlocking managing the charging of your EV from an app. That sort of thing is all enabled through this connectivity.

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
Mm. Very interesting. This is a trend. This is and I,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:11):
You know, yeah. And I, I expect everybody's gonna do this in the next couple of years.

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
Yeah. I wish they would just put it in the sticker price. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> as long as they don't make me pay for serious XM that's I don't, I don't want that Sam and bull Sam listen to wheel bearings. I'm sure they'll be talking about@wheelbearings.media or wherever you get your podcast SLE LePort D tech guy.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:34):
See you.

Leo Laporte (00:38:37):
That's very annoying. I, I must say it's very annoying.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:44):
It, it, it is. You know, and I, I would understand it a little better if, you know, they were requiring you to you know, pay, you know, get one of the, the more, the lower cost tiers, but they're going for the highest tier oh, wow. On these vehicles. So, I mean, there are tiers that, you know, are like 15 or $20 a month, and you could maybe make that case, but really what this is all about is you know, for the financial markets that, you know, everybody's looking for recurring revenue streams. Yeah. back at their investor day, last fall G or Mary Barra talked about GM doubling its revenues by 2030 in part, you know, through connected and, and software services. And this is one step in that direction, you know, adding an extra $1,500. And, you know, they, I think they hope that, you know, at the end of that three year period that you like it so much that you keep paying for it. But you know, to me, not, you know, not allowing it to be optional just does not seem right.

Leo Laporte (00:39:43):
Doesn't sit well.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:45):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:47):
Our P it's all about our P

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:49):
You bet the whole

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
Industry every day, and you can blame, you really can blame wall street cuz they're the ones who think this is a good thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:56):
Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, and twisted Mr. And the chat you know, mentions, I think BMW charges $10 a month for connected drive. And that's, I think that's, again for BMW's most basic plan, they have every pretty much every auto maker's got multiple different tiers of service with different functionality in there. I don't think BMW's cheapest. One is $10 a month. I think it's higher than that most are on the orders of at least 15 to $20 a month. But they're you know, everybody has paid services, but GM is the first one to make, you know, the premium plan a mandatory requirement on all the vehicles, at least from three of their four brands which is, which is too bad. It's, it's a real shame. Yeah. Let's see. User 1774. Hello. Fisker. Not sure what he's talking about there. 

Leo Laporte (00:40:54):
You don't have to read every chat message.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:56):
Yeah. I'm just, I know saying, yeah, <laugh> table, table dash mentions is cousin was in an accident and was unconscious OnStar called 9 1 1.

Leo Laporte (00:41:06):
And there's a real reason for it. That's a very,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:08):
Yeah, this is one of the, the great features, you know, and this is something that, again, GM was first to do this because they were the first to introduce OnStar in 1996 mm-hmm <affirmative>. And one of those headline features when they launched it back then, and that, you know, everybody's doing now is automatic 9 1 1 assist. So if you get into a crash where your airbags are triggered what happens is the it'll, it'll come on the, your you'll on your speakers in the car and your audio speakers in the car, the OnStar system will ask, are you okay? Do you need assistance? And if you don't respond or if you respond that you do need assistance, it will automatically call 9 1 1 for you. It will send your GPS location to the 9 1 1 operator so that they can come and provide assistance. So if you, you know, if you get into a crash and you lose consciousness or you become incapacitated in some way then you know, have that, that ability is really valuable for saving lives.

Leo Laporte (00:42:09):
My watch does that though. I mean, it's not, you know, I mean, nowadays people have other ways to do that. Yeah. Your phone in your watch.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:17):
That's true. Yeah. but you know, I mean, your watch doesn't necessarily know, you know, if you've been in a, in a car crash you know, your phone may, or it may or may not trigger. Yeah. Well, and again, it's not necessarily as reliable. Right. You know, OnStar, you know, or, you know, telematic,

Leo Laporte (00:42:34):
Cause it's getting more information from the vehicle they've

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:36):
Got access to the vehicle information. Yeah. Knows exactly how fast that vehicle Des accelerated. It knows if airbags have activated.

Leo Laporte (00:42:42):
Do you wanna stick around for the top? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you. We'll talk in a bit, Leo, LePort the tech guy, phone number eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo, you've got call a question, a comment, a suggestion. This thing about GM and OnStar. Sam said an interesting thing and it really isn't just the auto industry now that this is happening and this is happening everywhere. This, he says is a result of wall street. So the stock market, looking to companies to have a recurring revenue, the, the term they use is R P average revenue per user. And you're gonna start to see this everywhere. Apple, for instance, no longer reports, how many iPhones they, they sold. They don't say they don't tell the market that they tell the market what their average revenue per user was and the market somehow, they just love that.

Leo Laporte (00:43:41):
They love the idea of no, instead of selling something for one, you know, once and you get a money and that's, that's your revenue. We want you to sell something every month, the same sucker hu human U user over and over again. And that's that consistent revenue. We like that. So really this is the financial markets telling companies like GM and apple and everybody else think of a way to get a recurring revenue from your users. Don't think of 'em as customers. One time only buyers think of 'em as users. And, you know, I guess it's not just wall street. You could kind of blame the tech industry for this because cuz they kind of invented it <laugh> and made it possible, right? If it weren't for easy ways to charge you every month you know, none of this would be possible when Henry Ford sold model Ts, there was no way to, to say, well, and we're gonna charge you a gas usage tax every month.

Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
They, you know, they didn't have a way to do that, but we do now. Sure do. And I think I think customers are getting a little upset, to be honest. They're not so happy. You're not so happy about it because for the same reasons that wall street is wall street loves dipping their hands into your pocket every month. You may not like that so much, man. I know what we're gonna do about it, but I think what will happen eventually is people just say no enough, Uhuh, mm-hmm no more 88 88 ask Leo Travis's next Rancho set on Margo, Rita, California. Hi Travis.

Caller 2 (00:45:23):
Hey Leo. Welcome

Leo Laporte (00:45:24):
Going. It's great. How are you?

Caller 2 (00:45:26):
Great. Thank you. God, hopefully a simple question for you. Working on a start up a YouTube channel with a buddy of mine and we're looking to find a microphone to use for videoing and just out and about we do different quests where we go different places, do different experiences, kind of show people what it's like. I love it. Try to bring some humor to it. I love

Leo Laporte (00:45:46):
It.

Caller 2 (00:45:47):
But we're trying to find a microphone solution for that. And I don't know if you have any recommendations for something like that.

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
This is, you know, this is so interesting. This is another thing that technology has brought us that I think is a good thing. Used to be, you'd have to go to the travel channel or the food network and pitch 'em and say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'd have to have a budget of millions of dollars to do something like this. Now you just, you, you don't need anything. You need a camera, you need a, a microphone and YouTube and you can start your own thing and you know what? It could be huge. It could be hugely successful. My son has 2.1 million followers on TikTok. He doesn't have a cooking show, but he has a larger audience watching his cooking on TikTok than he'd have on the food network. It's it's really kind of interesting. So the first question is how you're gonna shoot this. Are you gonna do it with just smartphones or

Caller 2 (00:46:35):
For starting smartphones, then we'll probably move to a camera if it, we can get any kind of traction.

Leo Laporte (00:46:39):
Yeah. So I mean, obviously the smartphone has a built in microphone, but you can also improve that. And one of the things I think that makes it more like a real TV show is having a, a lapel mic. They call 'em Laier in the business. And so that way you can be the camera operator with this, with the smartphone, you can even be zoomed in, but you could be 50 feet away. Obviously that's too far for the smartphone microphone, but there are wireless microphones that you can use to make that work. So that in fact, the one that I use and I think it's actually pretty good. It's it's not cheap. It's called the, they call Mike me M I K M E. But this will give you an idea of what, what it will do. M I K M e.com. They sell a little portable wireless pack that you put on your belt and it goes to a lapel mic.

Leo Laporte (00:47:40):
Actually, you can go to a variety of different kinds of mics. You can even buy it's a standard connection, so you can buy third party microphones and then it connects to the app on your phone, a hundred feet away. You know, your, your guy could be down on the gold or could be up on the golden gate bridge climbing the, the cables. Don't try this at home. You could be, you know, on the shore watching this, he's a little spec, but with perfect audio and Mike be does some really interesting things. I, I have it. So I kind of know about this does really interesting things. For instance, it has its own storage. So one of the problems is if you're connected via Bluetooth, that's gonna be low quality. It's not gonna do a great job. But the mic me will allow, will record locally.

Leo Laporte (00:48:21):
And then when you get near the phone, it will send the good quality recording over. So you get a kind of a, initially a bad Bluetooth recording, but at least, you know, you know, what's going on. And then it will update that after the fact. So that's one to look@mikme.com. It's not cheap, Sam, you do this sometimes when you record reviews for us, Sam just did a review of the Rian versus the lightning, the Ford F-150 lightning. And you had a lapel mic, right? How, how do you, what do you use for that?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:48:53):
I just got a, a cheap lapel mic off of Amazon that I plug into my little zoom H one N.

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
So it has a, it has a wire going, it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:02):
Has a wire. Yeah. So I tuck it down my shirt and have the the recorder in my pocket. And so

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
That works fine if you're not,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:09):
I remember and turn it on

Leo Laporte (00:49:10):
If you're not on the golden gate bridge, that works fine. Yeah. <Laugh> but that's a, that's a lot cheaper by the way, a lot easier way to do it. Road makes a similar device to the mic. Me the chat room's telling me the road wireless go to dual channel wireless microphone system. It's two hundred fifty, two hundred fifty bucks, but I have to say my experience with wireless microphone systems is not great. Remember the scene in spinal tap, where the guitarist has a wireless guitar and they're on an air force base performing and they're getting air traffic controller. Oh, I got no draft on farmer coming in. That's what happens with inexpensive wireless mics. That's why I like the mic me because it's not relying on the wireless connection. It's actually recording locally, but then the app will sync up with a video and you really get great video. So the mic me's not cheap, depends on how committed you are to this whole process. But I have U I have it. I've used it. It's about 300 bucks. It's not, not the most expensive thing in the world. 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:12):
And some friends of mine use that road and they've had really good success with

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
It. Good, good. The, the road is a little less expensive. The only thing that makes me nervous about the road is it's truly wireless. And so if there is interference, if there is noise, we, we went down to the E three conference about 10 years ago to record. This was the big video game conference. And we were going we went over to the the G4 tech TV booth, cuz they were still in business then and they shoot us away. They said your wireless mics are, are killing. <Laugh> are killing our wireless mics. They're battling. Can you move away please? And you know, that's a problem. And I think so I think my experience, we use very, very expensive ER, wireless mics, but those are thousands of dollars and they work. They tend to work very well. In fact, they work too well in this case, they blasted G four S cheap mics off the air. So I, I would look at the mic me at 319 bucks. I think it's, it's well worth it. And then, you know, you can, you don't have to worry about a wire connecting you and you can use your smartphone, which is great. I use it with the excellent iPhone. So that's what I'd recommend. Yeah, what's the, what's the channel gonna be called?

Caller 2 (00:51:23):
It's big belly quest, plural, couple old, bigger guys here and just going out and doing different things.

Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
I love it. It's on YouTube already. And are which big belly are you? <Laugh>

Caller 2 (00:51:38):
I am behind the scenes though.

Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
You're behind the scenes. So this looks really, so you've already got quite a few videos on here. That's great. I love this idea. I'm

Caller 2 (00:51:49):
Trying to feed some videos. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:51:51):
Cool. The big belly crew

Caller 2 (00:51:52):
Recommendation. We'll check it out.

Leo Laporte (00:51:54):
Big belly quests at YouTube. I, this is what I love. This is why I, you know, sometimes technology's a negative thing you get RPU and you gotta pay for your OnStar. Sometimes it's really cool. Free YouTube means you can do your own TV show, Leo Laporte tech guy, the road is encrypted and likely spread spectrum. So that is definitely better. So maybe the road, you know, maybe the road is worth checking out that's that's good to know. Yeah. All right, Sammy. All right. This is your time.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:34):
All right. So first let me answer a question from Richard C which was about Toyota Camry hybrid and why the engine is on when it's above 50 miles an hour on, on the highway. And the reason for this, you know, hybrids are, you know, they, as the name implies, it has both an, a gas or it could be diesel, but generally a gas engine and an electric motor. And so it's using a combination of, of the two and in the case of the Camry hybrid and most of the, the Toyota hybrids you know, there's no plug. So these things tend to have a fairly small battery. It's usually somewhere between one and one and a half kilowatt hours. And what it's designed to do is collect energy, recuperate energy during breaking from regenerative breaking and, and then provide some boost you know, to take load off the engine.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:30):
So provides, fills some of the, the torque hole from the engine. Give you a little bit of acceleration boost when you're accelerating and maybe short periods of electric only driving. If you're going at relatively low speeds and you get the battery fully charged up from regen in something like the Camry or most other mainstream hybrids, you can go maybe a mile mile and a half on electricity alone. It speeds up to about 25, 30 miles an hour, maybe a little bit more than that. Once you get up above 50 miles an hour or so, get up to highway speeds, especially for non plugin hybrids, which is what the Camry is. It doesn't have a plug and, and particularly the Toyota hybrids, they tend to have a relatively small electric motor. So they don't really have enough power from the electric motor to propel the vehicle for any length of time at those higher speeds.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:25):
So your engine's gonna be on what you will find if you watch the energy flow meter on the cluster is, you know, sometimes if you are, if you lift off and you're coasting, you know, at highway speeds at, you know, 65, 70, 75 miles an hour, or you're going downhill, you lift off, you will see the engine will shut off in those, in those instances for a period of time when the, when it, when there's a, when the load is low enough that the electric motor can keep up with it, once it gets up, you know, as soon as you get back on the gas, the engine's gonna tend to come back on. Some hybrid vehicles have more powerful electric motors. I'm not sure what what model your, your camera is. Richard you know, the older ones in particular, you know, tend to have less electrical power available.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:13):
Then some of the newer ones do have more powerful electric motors. And so they can do a little more work. But that's, that's really the reason why highway speeds your motor is likely to be on most of the time that said that doesn't mean the motor, the, the, the electric, motor's not helping you, you know, when you're going up a little bit of a grade you know, instead of putting more gas into the engine to get that extra power, you're gonna get some of that power from the motor instead. So you're still gonna be more efficient overall. See big island says when away, away on a trip, how long can you leave an electric car unplugged before you kill the battery? So this de it, it varies you know, certainly, you know, a week or two, shouldn't be a problem.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:55):
In most instances you know, one thing to be careful of with Tesla vehicles Teslas will typically lose about 1% of their charge per day, under normal conditions. If you turn everything off, but Teslas with their cameras that they have as part of the autopilot system they, they offer a mode called century mode, which is basically a, you know, surround sound security camera system. And if you turn on the century mode you know, it's gotta keep computers, turn, keep a bunch of computers turned on and keep the cameras powered up. And, and various the ultrasonic sensors to detect if somebody's coming around the vehicle and, and record all that stuff. A friend of mine who owns a Tesla found that he had a model three and he found that when he left his car at a, at a, in a parking garage, in an airport a few years back with the century mode turned on, it lost about 10% of its power per day.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:00):
That's probably on the high side but you, you can you know, you, you will lose probably several percent per day if you're using a feature like that, that's drawing on the power from the battery. So if you're, if you're gonna be gone more than a week you know, it's probably a good idea to, you know, have the battery mostly fully charged before you leave the vehicle. If you can, ideally you don't wanna park it somewhere where you're leaving it plugged in because, you know, especially if it's in a public place, you know, then you're taking up that, that charger you know, unless, you know, it's a one day trip you're gonna be taking up that charger that others could be using. So you don't wanna leave it sitting there on the charger for a week. But I, I would definitely you know, consider turning off features like that if you're gonna be gone for more than a few days, and then, then you'll have no problem at all.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:51):
If you're talking, you know, several weeks then you might want to consider parking the, the vehicle somewhere where, you know, maybe somebody can plug it in for you from time to time you know, for an hour or so. Let's see, Daniel is asking if I've had experience with the Subaru Crosstrek plugin hybrid, I have not. But my, my co-hosts on the wheel bearings have driven it. They quite like it. It's it's generally quite good. So it's, it's a good choice for you if you're interested in, in something like that, you know, if you like Subarus you want something with four wheel drive, all wheel drive capability and a plug-in hybrid. That's not a bad choice. You can definitely go for that. So there's been several questions in here about the inflation reduction act and the changes to the tax incentive program for EV buying.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:46):
So it's pretty complicated but let me kind of par it down for you as much as I can. The current program, if you buy an EV that has a a battery pack with more than 16 kilowatt hours of energy storage you are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit on the first 200,000 vehicles sold by the manufacturer. Tesla and GM have both hit that threshold a couple of years ago, and they're no longer eligible. That 200,000 threshold goes away. And there are some new criteria for what vehicles actually qualify now. So to qualify for the, the new tax credit program, first of all, the vehicle has to be built in north America. So Canada, us, or Mexico if it's built anywhere else in the world, it does not qualify end of story. Then if it's built in Canada, us, or Mexico, then the next step is they, they want to encourage domestic content of the batteries.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:44):
So the $7,500 is split into 2 37 50 each one for battery components, one for critical minerals in the battery, things like lithium cobalt, manganese nickel, and, and so on. There's about two dozen materials that, you know, maybe in, in various combinations in different batteries from now through the end of 2023 the vehicle has to have 40% north American content of the critical min minerals to qualify for the 37 50 for that, and 40% north American content of battery components, which is cells, modules, and so on. And and then after that it go after 2024, it goes up 10% a year up to a maximum of 80%. So right now we don't know which vehicles are gonna qualify <laugh> if any because we don't know what the, the content is of the materials from various sources.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:47):
Most likely ones that may qualify right now are the Ford F-150 lightning because, and the new, the 2023 Volkswagen ID four, cause they're both being built in north America, both being built in the us, and they both are getting batteries from SK innovation in Georgia. The Chevy bolt Bolty UV are another one. They're getting their batteries from LG in Michigan. And then over the course of the next few months and next year or two others that other GM vehicles that are getting their batteries that're domestically produced will also start to qualify. Most of those will probably only qualify for the 37 50 for the battery components, not for the materials. Most of those materials are still being imported. And so those vehicles probably won't qualify the

Leo Laporte (01:01:35):
Chevys probably gonna be right. The

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:37):
Which one, the Chevys, the, the Chevy bolt probably will, but we don't know for certain what percentage of domestic components is. So we won't know for a few months probably which one's qualifying

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Very happy with our 2020 bolt. It's been really great. Hey, thank you, Sam. Talk, talk to you next week. Yep. Have a great week. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hello everybody. Or is mic as Sergeant would say hello, friends. It's <laugh> it's time to talk tech 88 88, ask Leo 8, 8, 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 to free from anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. Well, you could still call, but you'll have to use Skype out or something like that. That eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo is our phone number website where all the things I mention, all the links go transcripts and audio from video from the show as well after the fact that website is tech guy labs.com. It's free. There's no charge. This is episode 19 18 9. We're gonna get in the 21st century pretty soon, 1918 back to the phones we go and on the line from Greensboro, North Carolina. It's John. Hello, John.

Caller 3 (01:02:57):
Hey Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
You? I'm great. Welcome.

Caller 3 (01:03:00):
Yeah, it's been about 20 years since we last spoke. <Laugh> I called? I called you on the screensavers. That's

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
Hysterical on the three Threecom net cam network.

Caller 3 (01:03:10):
Oh yeah, no, I wasn't a video call.

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
Oh, okay. I

Caller 3 (01:03:13):
Remember. Yeah. Oh, I remembered a phone and a video. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:03:17):
Remember those days.

Caller 3 (01:03:18):
Oh yes. Very well. In fact you and Patrick actually started me on this long, strange, foggy trip that his windows.

Leo Laporte (01:03:27):
Oh, I hope it's. I hope it's not fully our fault, but okay.

Caller 3 (01:03:32):
No, no, actually I have not been beaten by a Hunka Silicon or

Leo Laporte (01:03:37):
Good. No, you're the human you're in charge.

Caller 3 (01:03:41):
You damn right. <Laugh> yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:44):
Silly, silly humans.

Caller 3 (01:03:45):
I, I, I have, I gotta thank you and Patrick, a whole gang for start me on this thing, but I basically able to fix everything's come across my desk. Nice. But our desktop is nice.

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
He's talking for those who don't know, he's talking about 20 years ago. Well, in 1998, we started tech TV went through 2004. Patrick Norton, my cohost and I taught people a lot about computers. And you must have been a youngin at the time, but

Caller 3 (01:04:14):
I'm only five years behind you.

Leo Laporte (01:04:16):
Oh, okay. Well then you weren't a youngin. Yeah. Were an olden. No,

Caller 3 (01:04:20):
No. I'm getting olden every day too.

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):
<Laugh> 

Caller 3 (01:04:24):
But it makes this today the HDR toggle switches missing in windows 10. Now I believe this just happened before, but I forgot how it fixed it or fixed itself. And I've Googled enough Bing to blue in the face and there's no, you know, it's a

Leo Laporte (01:04:42):
Thing. Alright. This is your problem. Not their problem because I have windows 11 running on my HDR screen and the toggle is there.

Caller 3 (01:04:53):
Yeah. This is windows 10.

Leo Laporte (01:04:55):
Yeah. and I don't, well, if it's in windows 11, would they take it out of 10?

Caller 3 (01:04:59):
No, no, no. It's been there. It just disappeared today. Ah, it's been on the computer since 2019.

Leo Laporte (01:05:05):
Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

Caller 3 (01:05:06):
I got, I got a 55 inch display.

Leo Laporte (01:05:08):
Yeah, me too. I got that alien wear. Oola incredibly expensive. Oola display. So I could play that. I have

Caller 3 (01:05:15):
The, the incredibly cheaper PTL,

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
But it's nice though. Isn't it to have a giant display once you get used to it at first, it's like, wow, I gotta sit back here. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:05:25):
You're you're like sitting in the front row around everywhere.

Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
Yeah. But I was that kid that used to go down to the front row of the movie theater. So I'm happy. Yeah. I

Caller 3 (01:05:32):
Know. I didn't want anybody in front of me. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:05:35):
Well, there's nobody in front of you with this that's for sure. So it may be there are a couple of things could happen. I noticed that it's grayed out on a screen. That's not HDR, but it should still be there.

Caller 3 (01:05:47):
No, no, it's gone.

Leo Laporte (01:05:48):
It's completely gone. I wonder if they took it out

Caller 3 (01:05:50):
All, all you see is it says windows, color settings, but you know, below night night, the nighttime switch, it should be between that and the HDR color settings. But the switch is gone. There's no toggle. So you can't turn it on. And you did a DX. It says it's not supported. It's it's been working since 2019. It just disappeared overnight. So,

Leo Laporte (01:06:14):
So I'm looking at Microsoft's support. Yeah. HDR settings in windows and they have a tab for windows 10 and windows 11 mm-hmm <affirmative> select the start button, select settings system display. This is where you're looking. You're looking in the right spot. If you have multiple displays. Nope, no select window HD color settings under display capabilities. Make sure it says yes. Next to use HDR. So you're looking in the HD color settings.

Caller 3 (01:06:43):
Yeah. There's there's no use HDR. That's what's missing. The toggle is missing. And like I said, I, I did a DX dag and it when you go into advanced color settings, or it says not supported, I'm like it's been supported the past two years. What happened to the I, the TV, the TV works on Netflix and Hulu and all that. So it's definitely

Leo Laporte (01:07:04):
Windows. Yeah. So you're doing, this is exactly what they say. You press windows are and you type DX diagnos, which is the diagnostics and you select, okay. And that's gonna do the direct X diagnostic tool. And it will tell you both, if your display and your PC support HDR, now I'm wondering, is there a switch on the display that you could turn HDR off and on? Because it may be that the display has accidentally turned off HDR. And so the windows is saying, well, you don't have that capability. You also wanna make sure you're using a HDMI 2.1 cable to connect to the computer. I know you didn't change cables, but maybe, you know, cables go bad. So maybe that's a problem. So if you have another HDR capable HDMI cable lying around, I would try that.

Caller 3 (01:07:48):
Yeah. I've been looking for that. It's in a box somewhere. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:07:52):
That's no place for it. Just

Caller 3 (01:07:54):
Moved here about a month ago. So it's like everything still.

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
So, so make sure you got, make sure you got the latest drivers for your, your video card and your, and your monitor. So something has decided it could be windows or it could be the monitor or just could be the cable. But for some reason, something has decided, eh, you can't do it. So I'm not gonna show it to you. Exactly. Yeah. But I'm gonna put a link to this support document, cuz it has a lot of possible suggestions. I don't know if, if you've seen this,

Caller 3 (01:08:24):
I'm hop somebody chat may have you yeah. Entries, but nobody has come up with a, it says, does the same thing go to the display and turn the switch on? Yeah, the switch is missing

Leo Laporte (01:08:39):
<Laugh> yeah. So, and I, and I'm trying to remember when I didn't have the driver for my HDR capable monitor, it didn't offer me that switch, but I think it was there, but grayed out is what I'm saying. So I know it should be there and grayed out if it's not capable, I would think. And I, I'm pretty sure that was my experience with, and again, this is windows 11, but I'm pretty sure that was my experience with windows 11. So it, you know, cable cable could have gone bad and, and it's not sending enough bandwidth to do HDR for some reason. Windows decided. Yeah, you can't do it. So why show you that switch?

Caller 3 (01:09:21):
Yeah. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (01:09:22):
That's by guess

Caller 3 (01:09:23):
Set guy.

Leo Laporte (01:09:24):
<Laugh>. Yeah. And do you have do you have an Nvidia GPU?

Caller 3 (01:09:29):
Yeah, I got a 20, 80 T so

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
That's another thing to go into is the Nvidia control panel and, and really dig through those settings and make sure those are all up to date. You know, it could be, you got a new driver for instance, for the Invidia video card. And all of a sudden the driver decided you know, came to default without HDR. There's some, you know, I have to say HDR is good for some things, but it's not good for other things. And it's great for movies, obviously TV shows video, but I think sometimes with a general computing environment, HDR isn't ideal. So it may, you know, it may be that the, they default to off in the in video settings. I don't, I don't know, that's worth, worth a try it, you know, I turn it on cuz, well I paid a lot of money for that monitor <laugh> as you, as you did.

Leo Laporte (01:10:20):
I, it ought to be on, I paid for that. Why isn't it on it, and yes, John, thank you a for calling us 20 years ago and now it's, it's 20 years later. You're calling again. I hope you'll call again in the next 20 years. Maybe don't wait a whole 20 years for that. I don't know if I'll be around for that long. And if you if you're in the chat room or you're listening to the show and you say, oh, I know what's going on, please mention it. And John monitor the chat room, I will as well. And we will keep the ear, our ears to the phones, look for an answer. That's one of the beauties of this show. It's, you know, obviously I can't answer every problem. I don't even know what some of your problems are, but that there's somebody out there listening to guns.

Leo Laporte (01:11:04):
Thank you for reminding me. There is no Chris today, Laura, or next week E either. It's just, just be all the time and I'm not sure about rod. He, as you know, was in, is in the Arctic, he called in last time. Yeah. So we may or may not have him. Yeah, I'm sure I have a I could try that. Let me try. That's a good idea. So I will log out of the Mac and I will log into, instead of my profile, I will log into the profile. I always make, when I create a new Mac, which is the ghost profile. Hello? Wake up. Woo. All the cameras at once. Okay. Oh, wait a minute. I didn't make a ghost profile. Oh, Leo. I don't know what the password is to this Micah's was changed me, but I doubt he's I'm sure he's changed it. <Laugh> oh, he didn't. <Laugh> okay. Micah's worked, but the windows server did quit, but Micah's did work. So that's interesting. Let me log out. So that, that was a good, good test. So now let me try it with me. Notice that it went through a bigger thing when I logged out. So there's something going on here now. There's the happy smiling Leo and crash crash.

Leo Laporte (01:12:50):
Yeah. I might have to rebuild this machine. Our show today brought to you by those good folks at cash fly. And you know, when I say brought to you by cash fly, I mean, quite literally cash fly is our CDN, our content delivery, a network. Whenever you download a an episode of our shows whenever you watch an episode of our video on the website, you're getting it from cash fly. We, we actually been using cash fly for more than a decade now. So when I say I am a cash fly fan, you can, you can believe me. We really love them. Now you can do video with cash, fly low ultra low latency video, incredible less than one latency. You can go live in hours, not days, it's time to ditch that unreliable web RTC solution for their web socket live video workflow.

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Leo Laporte (01:14:35):
Recapitulate,

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
What do you get with cash flow? Well, great people giving you 24 7, 365 priority support ultra low latency video streaming that can deliver video to more than a million concurrent users. If you do gaming, you'll love it. Lightning fast gaming will deliver downloads faster, zero lag glitch, glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization that makes see your site loads faster on any device. And of course, because they have 50 points of presence. They have multi CDNs for redundancy and failover. Your traffic is intelligently balanced across multiple providers, giving you the shortest route and mitigating against performance glitches. How well is it work? How about a hundred percent availability in the last 12 months, 100%, 30 times faster than major CDNs with a 98% cash hit ratio. Cash flow is 10 times faster than traditional methods and on six continents. And, and we just love them cuz they've saved us.

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
I'll tell you we wouldn't exist without cash fly. So they'll always be there when you need 'em 24 7 365 days a year. Find out more at cachefly.com. Thank you. Cash fly for all you do for TWI C a C H as I've often said@thebeginningoftheshowsbandwidthprovidedbycashflyatcacheflydotcomca…. I think they'd be right for you. Check 'em out now back to the tech guy, Leo Laporte, the tech guy eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo D phone number. If you wanna talk high tech. Well, let's do it. Let's do it. On the line right now. Our next caller, who is from Fresno. David is on the line. Hi David. Hello

Caller 4 (01:16:22):
Leo. Hi, thank you for taking on my call. I appreciate it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:25):
Thanks for calling in. I think you have some expertise to share.

Caller 4 (01:16:30):
I was in law enforcement for 38 years. We recently retired my last assignment for the last four years of my career. I managed what's called a pap public safety answering point. The public would know that as a 9 1 1 center. Wow. the particular pap I managed was the largest between Los Angeles and Sacramento, about 105 dispatchers. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:16:56):
Is it anything like the TV show? <Laugh> no,

Caller 4 (01:17:01):
I don't watch it. I mean the 9 1, 1 operators are trained first of all, to be very, very calm. Yes. you let your, your voice calm down, excited people. You're not allowed to, to use the, you, you're not allowed to tell people to calm down.

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
Right. Because that's the worst thing you could tell somebody who's head up. I know cuz when I tell my wife to calm down, she slugs me. So <laugh> not a good thing.

Caller 4 (01:17:26):
So

Leo Laporte (01:17:26):
Yeah, no, of course. And they stay on the line. I mean it's really impressive. It must be a very, very tough job, but they do it very well. And it's an, it's a

Caller 4 (01:17:35):
Very tough job. Yeah. It's a very rewarding job cuz if you consider in when someone needs help. Sure. The very first person they talk to is that 9 1, 1

Leo Laporte (01:17:44):
Operator. You're a lifesaver in many cases.

Caller 4 (01:17:47):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to call, I've been hearing your really interesting conversation on you were talking about G GM OnStar. Yes. And one of my issues, not only with their particular commercials, but with commercials, for medical alert, bracelets apple

Leo Laporte (01:18:06):
Watch, you've seen the apple watch ad or you know, no. Oh they, yeah, they, they had a whole series of ads. You know, the apple watch will also call 9 1 1, as you probably know. They have a whole series of ads. There's one, it's actually a little traumatic, a woman's in an accident and the car is filling with water and she can't reach your phone. But her watch has said, I see you're in an accident. Should I call 9 1 1? And she's communicating, they have the actual recording, I believe on the apple and she's communicating and it, and it's, it's, it's a whole play in 30 seconds cuz at the end she says, we okay, the, the operators still on the line, as you said, very calm. She's saying they see you are, can you see them? Yes. Okay. We're gonna get you out. And they save her life. It's very dramatic and it makes I'm sure. In fact, I know it souls, apple watches because we were watching a football game and we had a friend over and he bought an apple watch after that ad immediately like while the game's going on. <Laugh> so yeah, but the job you guys did, you did and they do thank you. Thank you very, very much. Thank

Caller 4 (01:19:13):
You. Yeah. Well that commercial you just talked about really makes my point. And the point is if any of your listeners needs emergency services, whether it's medical or law enforcement or rescue, they need to call 9 1 1 themselves. My concern about G GM OnStar or any of the medical alert bracelet companies or a lot of the alarm companies that are willing to make that call on your behalf. Their call to a pap in California is secondary is a secondary an answer line. So once oh the 9 1, 1 calls are answered then before the non-emergency calls are answered, they will answer it from those vendors. None of those vendors are allowed to jump ahead of our local citizens and our community who are also calling 9 1 1,

Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
Which is a shame cuz they may be calling on behalf of the local citizen in distress. Right? Absolutely. Now the watch, the way the apple watch works, it does not call on your behalf. It connects you and you can then speak to 9 1 1 directly. But one thing it does. And I'm curious about this and I know not all centers do it, but it also sends GPS coordinates.

Caller 4 (01:20:31):
In fact that GPS coordinate is so sensitive that if you're on a surface street and if you take an on ramp and go on a freeway, you'll be connected to California highway.

Leo Laporte (01:20:43):
It knows wow.

Caller 4 (01:20:44):
Upper local. It knows. It knows within 50 feet.

Leo Laporte (01:20:47):
That's that's good. Isn't it?

Caller 4 (01:20:49):
That's great.

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
It's great. And was your center connected? I know that the centers have, have to implement the, the GPS system. Yes, but yours did yours use it?

Caller 4 (01:20:59):
Yeah. In fact, if you call, if you use a cell phone and you absolutely don't know where you're at we immediately can get a triangulation wow. On where you're located. It is, it is fantastic. You know, the old days, if you call from your residence, your address comes up on the screen. It still does that for all landlines. Few people use landlines. Everyone uses a cell phone. Right. But we can still find you.

Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
Yes. So this was a big transition to E 9 1 1 mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I remember one of the concerns was because it doesn't have your street address, it was calling a regional center, which would then have to route you. Is that still the case?

Caller 4 (01:21:45):
So when I left, when I retired, about three years ago, we would get a, a cell would come in and we would have an immediate, immediate ring down to that particular carrier who can give us the LA and the log. Nice,

Leo Laporte (01:22:01):
Nice.

Caller 4 (01:22:01):
The map automatically.

Leo Laporte (01:22:03):
Fantastic

Caller 4 (01:22:04):
Points. Exactly where, where you're at takes a little, it takes a little longer than a landline call. Yeah. but nevertheless people can still be located on their cell phones.

Leo Laporte (01:22:16):
Do you guys get psychotherapy or anything? Is it, is it, I imagine there's some PTSD. If you do this for a long period of time

Caller 4 (01:22:27):
That is correct. What we started to do, a lot of agencies is we'll walk a dog through they're usually.

Leo Laporte (01:22:36):
Oh

Caller 4 (01:22:37):
Yeah. We will walk dogs through just to give them someone to pet. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:22:41):
<Laugh>

Caller 4 (01:22:42):
But yeah, it's pretty cool. Now the dog can't really linger cuz some people do have allergies, but we, and you know, the, the employees that reach out and clearly would like to, and you see that in airports too, to compete down.

Leo Laporte (01:22:55):
So yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness for our 9 1 1 operators and for our four footed furry friends,

Caller 4 (01:23:02):
<Laugh> correct. We

Leo Laporte (01:23:03):
All have a purpose in this, this world. That's great. That's really great. Well, I'm, I'm I'm really appreciate your calling David. It's great to hear from, from the experience voice, hear the, this the case. And so ideally you would talk directly to 9 1 1 and not we encourage citizens to call 9 1 1. Do it yourself. Yes. Thank you. David Leo Laporte the tech guy and bless you for the work you do.

Caller 4 (01:23:30):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
I wonder if that's why Kim has a dog in her lap the whole time. Is that, is that your, is that your comfort? Dog's her comfort dog. Doug. <laugh> what a great call. Thank you, David. I really appreciate it. A great call. And now back to fixing my Mac. Well, I like your idea of logging into Mike's account and creating. I could tell you're going through withdrawal, Chris <laugh> well, I see you, man. I see. And I'm having some in fact, just cuz of you, I'm gonna go get some coffee in a little bit. I got this. You might th think this mug this year of the monkey mug, you might think this was this was a mug of coffee, but it was actually tomato soup. So this mug, I guess, came from 2016, but the good news is it'll be good again. In 2028, I was born in the year of the monkey. So I am charming, lucky, bright, versatile, and smart. There's only one catch to this whole idea. Are you telling me everybody born in 1956 is charming, lucky, bright, versatile, and smart. I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
It's not been my experience. No, no. Chris, we're having fun. Having all new callers. I was getting feedback from the audience saying, we feel like we can't get in because you know Chris and Micah and Trevor and all the regulars hog the lines. I don't think that was the case, but I understand the

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
The feeling. So this is working, I think is working pretty well. Aw, that's a sad story. Sad song. Olivia Newton, John Leo Laporte, the tech guy. She was too young, too young, 88, 88. Ask Leo let's no, Chris mark work. This week he is he is doing a caravan in his Tesla model three, getting ready to start up his workshops again. So he is doing a little test run, which is great, but he'll be back. I don't know if he'll be back next week or the week after. I think it, I think he's gonna be gone a, a couple of weeks. I should mention that we still have the assignment with whether or not Chris is here. He gives us every month. He gives us a word to take a picture of. It's really just a way of, you know, an excuse to get out there and take pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:26:17):
And I have to say every time I bring my camera, I find a, I find, you know, I come back and I find one shot where I go, oh, I'm really glad I had the camera that time. So this time bring your camera and it can be a camera phone by the way, doesn't have be anything fancy at all. And look for images that illustrate the concept, the word friendly. I like that friendly and that you can you can if you find one, you like, you could post it once up to one a week on flicker, flicker.com. Actually you could post many, if you want to flicker.com, but submit one a week to our tech guy group. And if you would tag it with the tag TG for tech guy, TG friendly that way we'll know it's your submission, Renee Silverman. Our moderator will say, oh, oh good, thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
We'll put that in the pool. And when Chris gets back in a few weeks, we'll review all the submissions of friendly photos that he'll pick a few to talk about on the air. Just it's really, it's not a competition, there's no prize. It's just really excuse to go out and take pictures friendly. I've been actually having some last a few weeks. I've decided to take just one simple point and shoot camera with me. And I've been setting it into black and white mode so that I'm taking only black and white images. This is an exercise, you know, I mean, obviously still I will want color pictures. In fact, this camera's nice because what I see in the view finder and the image I see on the, on the screen is black and white, but it's secretly behind the scenes. It's taking a color image as well.

Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
So if I look at it and go, boy, I wish I had that in color. I can get it, but it makes, makes me kind of composed in black and white and I'm and actually I'm pretty happy on my Instagram. I posted the picture I took the other day and I was so glad I had the camera and it was just fortuitous, a father and son bicycling by they had a <laugh> they had a couple of dart sets on the, on the front of the bicycle. The kids on the back he's staring straight at me. <Laugh> like, what are you taking a picture of? But the father he's he's he's he's on a mission. And I was just very happy with how it how it came out. So that was an example of saying, yeah, I'm glad I had the camera that day friendly, friendly. That's the picture? 88 88 ask Leo, Michael on the line from Downey, California, our ex caller. Hi, Michael

Caller 5 (01:28:43):
Pleasant. Good afternoon to

Leo Laporte (01:28:45):
You, Leo. Ah, pleasant. Good afternoon to you, Michael.

Caller 5 (01:28:49):
In a nutshell by the way, I'm also a year of the monkey, 1956.

Leo Laporte (01:28:56):
Smart, smart. What was it? What I was reading my mug. You, that means you are charming, charming, lucky, bright, versatile, and smart.

Caller 5 (01:29:03):
Oh man, that's me.

Leo Laporte (01:29:05):
<Laugh> all of us, everybody born that year, amazingly enough, according to Chinese astrology

Caller 5 (01:29:12):
And drinking way too much E and J Brandy for this time of <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:29:17):
You know, we've earned it, we've earned it. We are the boomers. We're the senior citizens. Now we get to have our E and J

Caller 5 (01:29:24):
That's it, man.

Leo Laporte (01:29:25):
Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:29:26):
In a nutshell I'm a lightweight gamer. I don't do any online gaming and since 2014 I've had an Ms. I C X 61, 2 P C, which

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
Well that says it all right there.

Caller 5 (01:29:49):
<Laugh> yeah, keyboard.

Leo Laporte (01:29:53):
It's a lap. It's an MSI laptop. And I should point out that our our photography host on the podcasts, the wonderful amp Pruitt we gave him, you know, when he joined the company a year ago, gave him a choice of computers. I even gave him my old windows studio surface studio, which he poo-pooed immediately. And he said, I'm buying an MSI. So he was, he's very happy with his MSI. Now yours is, is not brand new. When did you buy it?

Caller 5 (01:30:21):
I think I bought it early 2015 anyway. Okay. That's kind of a moot point. I, I fell on it one night when I was boozed up. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:30:31):
See. E and J and MSI. They don't go together.

Caller 5 (01:30:35):
I think that night it was so old Forester,

Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
Old whiskey river <laugh> so okay. You fell on it. That's not good. Did it break the screen?

Caller 5 (01:30:46):
The oh, the the screen is is dead anyway shot. Yeah. <laugh> it's history.

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
It's history. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:30:56):
My point or a question is I'm on a limited budget. $700 were under, I don't do any online gaming. Most of the games I play are, you know, for example, Hitman from back in 2002.

Leo Laporte (01:31:12):
Oh man. That's a fun game,

Caller 5 (01:31:14):
Isn't it? Yeah. And you know, I don't, I don't, I, I don't attempt to obtain ninja status. I can still let be, I kill

Leo Laporte (01:31:23):
Everything that we you're, you're an assassin. And and I'm sure that, you know, their pacifists who are listening, this will be appalled, but you creep up on people with your sniper rifle and you take 'em out.

Caller 5 (01:31:35):
My current to my current status is massive mass murder.

Leo Laporte (01:31:39):
Oh, nice. Something to it, something for the kids to aspire to. Yeah,

Caller 5 (01:31:43):
Exactly. So

Leo Laporte (01:31:44):
You're looking to for a, and that, yeah. That's not a super challenging game. So you're looking for another laptop that can play play Hitman <laugh>

Caller 5 (01:31:52):
Yeah. Another unfortunately windows Beed

Leo Laporte (01:31:58):
You really like that windows? I mean, it's fine. And you know what, in that price point, you're probably gonna have to get a windows machine because, you know, that

Caller 5 (01:32:06):
Was my guesstimation. Yeah. And as I said my other PRI primarily I do a lot of internet browsing. I do a lot of YouTube video, but, but as far as gaming old school games, you know, I don't do anything up to date and I don't do any online gaming. And as I said, $700 are under something that was at least

Leo Laporte (01:32:31):
Did you, did, were you happy with that MSI

Caller 5 (01:32:34):
Until the keyboard started until the quote rock solid keyboard started dying? Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
They still, I mean, you can get, I think it's a CX 70 now, but they still make decent laptops and they make 'em in that, that, that laptop you had was around 600 bucks then. And I think there's still roughly in that price point.

Caller 5 (01:32:55):
Well, the only thing that I found that was, you know, a so-called, what could be called a loss leader was the HP 17 C zero zero. Yeah. Yeah. Zero, zero.

Leo Laporte (01:33:10):
Yeah. <Laugh> yeah, the HP, the HP are fine. They used to, I used to not recommend the pavilions because they came with so much extra try. They call it trial where I call it junk, junk on the, on the hard drive, but they've toned that down. They still do come with a lot of it. And I think the HP's ever, since they split off from the enterprise division, HP's PC's have gotten very, very good. So I wouldn't, if you found a nice HP, was that at a big box store or that you saw that or online or

Caller 5 (01:33:40):
Oh, online and I file

Leo Laporte (01:33:42):
Take a look. I wouldn't hesitate to go down to your local Costco or Sam's club or any of the big box stores. They often have very good deals and excellent return policies, which for you might be important. You know, you can often even after a few months say, yeah, I don't want it and they'll give you your money back. And they have usually they, what they've done to get that price down to your price point is they're selling last year's model, which for you is fine. I mean, if you can get a 12th generation Intel, they are certainly better, but I don't, you don't need it. You can get an I five at 11th or even a 10th generation. I five, make sure you get 16 gigs of Ram. That's the thing they'll probably, you know, skimp on hard drive size. Probably doesn't matter if you're not storing a lot of stuff. You should be able to hit that price point pretty easily at your big bucks store. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Yeah. Everybody still puts you know, McAfee on it. You know, but it, I just uninstall it. I just uninstall it.

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
Yeah. She had breast cancer first living in John for six or seven years, Chris. And so I have now created an administrative account for B a recreated. Let me shut the computer down. We'll see if this fixes it. Yeah. Costco has, you know, some really good deals. Yeah. New egg still sells the MSI. I, I don't know what model T has, but he loves it. I ask him every time I see him, you still like that laptop? He says, yeah. I said, really,

Leo Laporte (01:35:39):
Oh, you remember

Leo Laporte (01:35:43):
That sketch physical, physical, she did. You that movie roller skating movie. She she made leg warmers, headbands and spandex body suits look good. That's what we, that's what we just played hopelessly devoted to you. All right, accessibility. Now I have to start all over again with a fresh account. Continue sign in with your apple ID. Oh, I have different IDs. So this is iCloud. I'm gonna have to reinstall all my apps. Aren't I have read and agreed to the iCloud terms and conditions sign the app store. That's a different one. Yeah. The apps are still there, but I, but all of the you know, login data and stuff is gone.

Leo Laporte (01:37:09):
Leo. LePort the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leo. Oh, some good calls today. Thank you. Everybody's called in. Let's get some more eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536. That's toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. You could use Skype out to call anywhere else in the world should still be toll free. 88, 88, ask Leo. And when I say I'm gonna put a link on the website, that kind of thing. The show notes live@techguylabs.com and that's free. There's no sign up. You just wander in there. This is episode 1918. There will be not only notes and links, but after the fact there'll be audio and video from the show. And on Sundays, we put the playlist from professor Laura, our musical director, all the songs she's been playing all day today and yesterday, we'll put that playlist up on the show notes sometimes takes us a day or two to get it all together, but it'll all be there by Tuesday tech guy labs.com. Rob's on the line from Brooklyn, Arkansas or, yeah. Arkansas. Is that Arkansas? Yeah. AK. Or is it Alaska?

Caller 6 (01:38:14):
That's Alaska.

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
Alaska AR I should know the difference,

Caller 6 (01:38:18):
Arizona.

Leo Laporte (01:38:19):
A Z AR a L, but you're an AK

Caller 6 (01:38:25):
AR

Leo Laporte (01:38:26):
I was, you're an AR

Caller 6 (01:38:28):
Alaska's AK Arizona's AZ. Arkansas is AR

Leo Laporte (01:38:32):
Did you get that, Kim? Did you get that? You wrote AK, but he is in Arkansas. Okay. hello, Rob, what can I, what

Caller 6 (01:38:41):
Can I, since I saw that on something I ordered, I started writing out ARRK

Leo Laporte (01:38:47):
A R K. That helps. Yeah. AK is as Alaska. AR, Arkansas. Yeah. Hello, Rob from, and did I say Brookland, right? Or did you say Brookland or Brooklyn?

Caller 6 (01:38:57):
Well, it's, it's spelled out Brookland, but with our Southern accents, it sounds like Brooklyn,

Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
Brooklyn. I like it. What can I do for you, Rob?

Caller 6 (01:39:09):
Ever since I had a windows update on my HP leap book, 84 70, that was refurbished with speaker volume, went from blasting at a hundred percent to barely audible at a hundred percent. And when I right click on the on the speaker icon, the and hit the test, it blasted me away. I contacted the company. I bought it from they, the things that, that that they suggested all, but one of the things they suggested I'd already done of uninstalled and Rens installed V C and windows, windows, media player.

Leo Laporte (01:39:49):
And yeah, that's not them. That's not them. It's the computer. So it's interesting. So the test sounds normal, but, but the volume control on your little mixer, you're talking about in that little mixer, in the task bar and the lower right there, you're using that volume control and that volume control there, you turn it all the way up and nothing.

Caller 6 (01:40:08):
Yeah. And, and, and I found a, a program which helps out a lot when I'm online. And when I'm watching your program, where it increases the volume 600%. It helps some, but not a lot. Yeah. And if I put my earbuds in, it's just like, like the listener, the speakers before the update.

Leo Laporte (01:40:31):
Ah, that's interesting. So an external

Caller 6 (01:40:34):
Around 30 it keep it from blast me, which is way I had

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
It. Yeah. They, so if you plugged in external speakers or you're using Bluetooth headphones, all of that's normal, the only time it's not normal is when

Caller 6 (01:40:47):
You we're using the actual physical speakers

Leo Laporte (01:40:49):
On the laptop speakers. Interesting. 

Caller 6 (01:40:54):
There was one thing that, that they had me do, wanted me to do, and I can't get it due. I, I would go down to the, the to the search icon and I would type, type it in and it'll show it as either open run as administrator or open file location. I click on it and nothing happens.

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Did this start when you when you installed, I mean, what, how did it didn't do it from the beginning? It's what happened? That changed it.

Caller 6 (01:41:31):
When is update wonderful windows update

Leo Laporte (01:41:33):
When windows messed it up? Yes. Okay. So I'm just curious if you've done this, not

Caller 6 (01:41:41):
A computer geek.

Leo Laporte (01:41:42):
So I understand I will, I will attempt to speak English here for you. <Laugh> okay. When you click the speaker in the lower right hand corner, you know, where you would normally do that if, if you open the sound settings is what you wanna do. So I think if you right, click it, you'll get open sound settings.

Caller 6 (01:42:04):
Right. I've hit troubleshoot. It says everything's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
Well, but I want you to go to sound settings and okay. Make sure that you are the proper speaker is chosen, cuz I think that's what's going on. Because when you use

Caller 6 (01:42:20):
Output

Leo Laporte (01:42:21):
Device, yeah. Look at the output device cuz when you use your, when you use your headphones, it works fine when you use your I bet you, when you plug, if you plugged in speakers, it would work fine. So it sounds to me like it's confused about what your inbuilt speakers are. So make sure that those are correctly chosen.

Caller 6 (01:42:41):
It only gives me one option. It says speakers, high definition, audio D V device.

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Good. That's correct. And you, and is that where you do the test? If you go into the sound and then properties, there's a test. Is that where you did the test? Do you remember? Cause I, this is, this is the, the control panel. I'd be spending some time looking at, it tells you which speakers, it, it, you can check for driver updates there, maybe that driver's outta date, maybe windows, this is an unusual installed a the wrong or old or a bad driver and as a result and, and again, it's the speaker driver, not the, not the driver for the sound card, but the speakers, because the sound card works fine.

Caller 6 (01:43:26):
Hold and reinstall that,

Leo Laporte (01:43:27):
Oh, you have, okay. You should also look at left channel and right channel, you know, one thing that sometimes I've done that and those are both

Caller 6 (01:43:36):
At, at the I put the, the SP the sound window popped up and showing speakers, which has ache check by it. Yep. And and I hit the test that they have

Leo Laporte (01:43:53):
I'd play with all of those little, you got a lot of settings in there. Well, that sounds pretty good. That's the test

Caller 6 (01:44:00):
That come out. That's, that's the way it was before I had that update.

Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
So the test is correct. It's the volume that's not, and right underneath the, underneath the volume and the volume for you is set the decent volume. Yes.

Caller 6 (01:44:13):
Before that date, it was when I was using the laptop speakers, it was about 30%. Now I have to have it a hundred. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:44:21):
That's you shouldn't need that. Mine set, for instance, mine set right now it's 62%

Caller 6 (01:44:25):
Before

Leo Laporte (01:44:26):
The update. Yeah. So set it at 50 just to, you know, and make sure that the left and right channel are both working. Now, what you might do is turn off the left channel and turn off the right channel. One thing that sometimes happens is if one of the speakers got damaged at some point or turned off and it, and the, the sounds you're listening to are coming in, in the other channel, you will sound like it's extremely low. So make sure I would make sure that both the test, both the left and the right, and the way you do that is turn the left all the way off and test it, turn the right all the way off and test, make sure both of them are working at the proper level. I have, I don't know if you'll have at audio enhancements and spatial audio and things like that.

Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
Try different settings on those. If you have those I turn off spatial audio and I turn off audio enhancements. I don't, I don't want any audio enhancements. I think this is the only thing you can do. It may well be that there's sounds like a, I mean, honestly, since it works fine in the test, I'm using my, I put on my thinking cap. I'm thinking here, I'm thinking and everything works fine in the test and it works fine on headphones, but it does not work fine on those speakers. I'm thinking there's some setting in these, in the sound property settings. That's wrong. You've got the right speakers check again. Make sure you got the right driver. Maybe even go to an older driver. Maybe that's what happens. Windows update, put a new driver on that. Doesn't work. You know, windows update can get it wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:46:00):
It's not perfect. And often the fact that this changed after windows update sounds to me like windows update, did something. You know, my mug says I'm a thinker. So I'm, I'm just thinking right now <laugh> anybody has an idea. Give us a ring that we can help. Rob 88, 88, ask Leo. That's all I can, I can help you with at this point. Rob Leo. Leport the tech guy. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo? LePort here. The E tech guy. Yeah. Time tuck computers, the internet home theater, digital photography, smartphone, smart watches, augmented reality, virtual reality. Real reality. And why your speakers won't work? Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is the phone number (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You can still call us, but you have to use Skype out something like that website for the show notes, tech guy labs.com. This is episode 1918, 1,918. We are now in the 20th century. Let's go on with the call. Shall we? Todd's on the line from Idaho falls, Idaho. Hello, Todd.

Caller 7 (01:47:13):
Hi. I have a problem. I I've been a Nikon 34 or D 3,400 user for years.

Leo Laporte (01:47:22):
Nice. And

Caller 7 (01:47:23):
I, and I got a Z five.

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Very nice. That's a good gift for yourself. Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:47:32):
Yeah. But I'm finding that there's just a lot of settings that I'm really struggling with.

Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
<Laugh> yeah. So this, the Z five is their entry level full frame mirrorless camera. It's a very, very nice camera. They have also a Z seven Z nine. Nikon's going all in. In fact, I think I've heard that both Nikon and cannon are both abandoning mirrors and they're all gonna go mirrorless. So you're in with the cool kids now. <Laugh>

Caller 7 (01:48:06):
Well, it'd be the first

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
<Laugh>, but I, I completely understand when you sit down with these very fancy. Now these are really pro level cameras. There are a lot of settings. What, what I generally, what my wife, for instance, I just got her a new camera, the om one and I'm, it's a really fantastic camera, but these days, even, even these, you know, pro cameras are really computers first and foremost. And so like a computer, they have page after page, after page of settings. So the first thing I usually do is I go in, I set the date and time you gotta do that. And then I pretty much leave it as is for a while generally. You know, after you use it for a little while, you'll start to feel like, yeah, there's some things I wanna modify. You might initially want to choose for instance whether it takes JPEG images, which are the images coming right outta the camera, you could post anywhere don't require any editing or use a format that pros use, which is called raw, which gives you every, every bit, always

Caller 7 (01:49:19):
Too

Leo Laporte (01:49:19):
Raw. You shoot raw. Yeah. Cuz you're serious. Now the only draw back to raws you have to then put it in an editor and, and, and clean it up before you use it. But if you really care about your images, I usually do both that's my new thing is JPEG plus raw. And that way I've got a quick and dirty version of the image. The camera did the JPEG, but I also have, if I say, Hey, you know, that's a pretty good image. I have the raw that I can work with. The next thing I do is I go to YouTube and I don't know if, if somebody's done this yet for the Z five, but almost every camera. There's a video by usually a pro. You wanna get somebody, you know, who's, who's good at, at what they do and really knows what they're doing.

Leo Laporte (01:49:59):
Like Steve Huff or somebody, and they'll make a video or they'll have a document on the best settings for the Nikon Z five. So, okay. That's what, that's what I off often will do. There's no point in looking at that right away. Just like anything, when you're learning it, you gotta play with it for a little bit before you, you will even understand what there's, what they're talking about. But once you kind of do so, so I see photography, life has an article recommended Z five settings. There's several YouTube videos on this. You won't wanna do everything. They say, obviously the thing to think of it is it's like in onion, you, you kind of have to peel it. You're gonna learn a little bit at a time. And as you get deeper and deeper with more and more will make sense. Are there some specific settings that you you're just curious? What does this mean? Cuz maybe I can help you with, with those. Well,

Caller 7 (01:50:57):
I was trying to take a picture of running water. You know, how you could blurred out like put a filter on the end to, to make the, make it stay open longer. And it was just messing up. I couldn't get the F stop down low enough. And it was, I don't know, I couldn't get it to work.

Leo Laporte (01:51:19):
So the, I don't remember if your old camera had this. I think it did. It had manual settings, right?

Caller 7 (01:51:26):
Yes. Oh yes.

Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
So you know that you can have aperture priority, which is to set the priority for how wide open the, the camera's aperture is how much light it lets in, or you could set shutter speed priority, which automatically adjusts the aperture, but lets you manually adjust the shutter speed. And this is a case where you want to go in a shutter priority because you want to have a longer shutter speed. So you can get that soft water look and let the camera decide. There's three settings. It can change to make the exposure work, aperture, shutter, and ISO or sensitivity. And so you pick the one you want in this case because you want a slower shutter speed, say around a second. You were gonna put it on S on that dial and you're gonna set it to a second and let the camera decide what aperture and what ISO to use, depending on the brightness of the day. You don't need a filter for something like this. You just need a, unless it's such a bright day that it can't possibly narrow the aperture enough to take the picture.

Caller 7 (01:52:32):
Okay. All

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
Right. ND filters are nice because then it gives you more latitude. But honestly I think unless it's a super bright day, you should be able to get a soft, pretty good soft water picture just by setting the shutter speed.

Caller 7 (01:52:47):
Okay. All right. Well, I also wanted to tell you, I called you, I don't know, months and months ago with a issue about cuz I had an old cannon flash and I wanted to know if it would work on my yeah. Nik camera. Yeah. And you gave me the solution. It worked very well. I put a remote control device on the top and it worked great. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:14):
Cause the remote control device is specific to the camera and the, the strobe doesn't care. It just, as long as you can see the remote control device, it goes, okay, whatever you say, I'll fire whenever you want. Good. I'm glad that worked. That gives you also the advantage of putting the flash off camera, which is gonna be a much better look, right?

Caller 7 (01:53:32):
Yeah, yeah. Especially for, I mean, I, I don't use it very often, but I try to take pictures of like water droplets and things like that. And you have to have the, the flash in a separate place. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:53:45):
You want it to cuz then you get the light coming from the side and those droplets look so much better. Yeah. So I'm seeing a number of articles. If you just look for Nikon Z five settings, I'm seeing some YouTubes there almost every time I get a new camera, I have the same issues you do. Especially if I change from one company to another, in your case, you went from a, a completely different Nikon camera SI to the mirrorless. That's gonna be such a shift.

Caller 7 (01:54:17):
So yeah, I, I can't seem to stay in the same place. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:23):
You, I think you're gonna love this. And I I'm thrilled that Nikon has finally seen the light <laugh> and, and they're starting to invest in mirrorless cuz I'm a big fan of mirrorless. These, these are really the future and and Nikon of course has great lenses. Are you able to use your old lenses?

Caller 7 (01:54:43):
Yes I can. I have a, an adapter. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:54:46):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
Here's one on DP review, which is a site I loved for digital photographers, digital photography review. There's a post on their forums, your user settings, master your Z that literally has every single setting. And again, master your master, your Z I'll put a link in the show notes to this. I would, I wouldn't immediately, you know, it's always good to learn the camera kind of as its default settings first. And cuz then it will make more sense to you? You know, some of these settings, they're gonna say it's gonna, well, I don't, what, why am I what, what's the defraction compensation and why is it supposed to be on <laugh> right? Yeah. These are computers now. I mean, they're so complicated

Caller 7 (01:55:36):
And there's, there's a point where I have to just go. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
Whatever. Yeah. What I, what I would definitely learn is your auto focus cuz that's one of the things Nikons are so good at. And then yeah, if you wanna take pictures of beautiful, soft water learning how to get the, you know, the exact right shutter speed. You probably, I don't think unless it's a super bright day, you're gonna need a special filter to do that and try different, try different shutter speeds. 1, 2, 3 seconds. Cuz you'll get different effects each time. It's that's a fun thing to do.

Caller 7 (01:56:07):
That is well, thank you very much. I

Leo Laporte (01:56:09):
Appreciate it. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. I envy your journey. It's so much fun to get a new camera and then kind start to play with it. Chris mark, our photo guy who was missing an action this week, he'll be back in a couple of weeks. Told me a very important thing, which I remember now every time before you go on that trip, it's not unusual to buy a new camera or a new lens for a trip, right? I'm going on this great trip. I wanna get the greatest pictures. He said, don't Leo. Don't make this mistake before you go on that trip, spend a month with the new camera, with the new lens, using it around town, get used to it, get to know it before you, you know, take it on that trip. You don't wanna be learning a camera when you're, when your opportunities for great images are are high. Learn the camera first. And then you can go on that trip. Eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leah the phone number, tech tech, eye labs.com. The website, Leo Laporte, the tech guy. More of your calls coming up. Yeah, honestly, I, I agree. Edmonton oiler guy. He says I've been using Nikon for 30 years. I go through the manual for everybody. I go through the manual multiple times.

Leo Laporte (01:57:28):
Cause it's like I said, it's like an onion. It's you know, you, you peel it layer by layer. All right. I want west coast

Leo Laporte (01:57:43):
Full.

Leo Laporte (01:57:45):
There we go. There's my wallpaper. All right. Should we test this? I created a new a new account, as you could tell, because of this crazy doc, all the junk apple puts in the dock. My God, my got, I don't want this. I don't want that. Why would I use maps on a desktop? I don't need FaceTime. I don't need the calendar. I don't need the address book. I said, I don't need the address book. I don't need the reminders. Come on. Maybe keep notes. I don't definitely need apple TV, apple music, apple podcasts, apple news, keynote

Leo Laporte (01:58:36):
Numbers, pages. There's an entry in the menu for the app store and this you don't need either. Okay. Now let's see. Let's see if, oh, and also I always like to set this to list and folder and then add applications down here and the most important one, which is documents and again, list and folder list and folder. All right. Now let's log out and see if I can log back in. All right. Hey. Hey, he's smiling. Oh, same thing. Oh no. Hey, it worked. Thank you. So I deleted the old Leo account and created a new one and it Vik. And that's why you have a ghost account. It's totally why you have a ghost account. The heat is on. How hot is it down there? And the beautiful Sherman Oaks home of iHeart media, 93 degrees, 93 degrees. The heat is on. I always, you know, professor Laura and I communicate through the universal language of music <laugh> she could just, you know, push the button and say, Hey, it's 93 degrees down here. But no, instead she plays some Kenny logins and I go, oh, I get it. It's hot yesterday. You played hot, hot, hot <laugh>. So I know hot town summer in the city, David on the line from Charlotte, North Carolina, our next call at eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. Hello David.

Caller 8 (02:00:41):
Hello Leo. Thank you for taking my call. I, I don't, haven't known many Leos, but I have fond memories of when I was a boy, the, the guy that owned the gas station that my dad always went to. His name was Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
Oh, nice

Caller 8 (02:00:55):
Memories of that.

Leo Laporte (02:00:56):
Did he always have a dirty rag in his back pocket and wear coveralls?

Caller 8 (02:01:01):
Oh yeah. Always, always, always

Leo Laporte (02:01:03):
My kind of guy, my kinda Leo of

Caller 8 (02:01:05):
Course it was, it was full service back then. Sure.

Leo Laporte (02:01:09):
Can I check your oil and clean your windshield?

Caller 8 (02:01:12):
Yeah, this, yeah, absolutely. This was back in Minneapolis though, but we're not there anymore.

Leo Laporte (02:01:16):
Not anymore. You're nice. Nice warm weather in Charlotte.

Caller 8 (02:01:20):
Yeah, actually it's gotten a little cooler. We've had a whole rush of 90 plus days, but it's 87 here today.

Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
Oh, it's balmy, nothing easy peasy. <Laugh> what can I do for you today?

Caller 8 (02:01:33):
Leo? That's probably a dead end, but I, I enjoy hearing you wax eloquently from a to Z and just really enjoy, enjoy,

Leo Laporte (02:01:43):
Well, I specialize in dead ends so good. <Laugh>

Caller 8 (02:01:48):
This one? I, this one might be one that possible a couple years ago I had to get rid of my laptop and the hardware guy in our organization that put a all of my stuff on a Western digital, external hard drive.

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
Nice of him. Yeah. And yeah.

Caller 8 (02:02:09):
And so I didn't get into it for quite a while, but when I tried to get into it, it said I had to use a password. So I called the guy and I said, I didn't remember that you put a password on there. You said, well, I don't remember. I did either. And so I don't suppose there's any way around that. Is there

Leo Laporte (02:02:28):
No hard drive passwords? Weirdly enough are actually pretty good. You would expect since so many other passwords <laugh> you can set are easily cracked. Let me just, you said Western digital, let me just see if anybody has put out a a crack for the Western digital hardware password. Usually those are pretty strong. Let's see.

Caller 8 (02:02:53):
I called and they said, oh, they said you can't do anything.

Leo Laporte (02:02:58):
Yeah. There is a Western digital security app, but you know, need to know the original password to change that. Yeah. Let me see if, let me see, but you know, hackers, you know, they're, they're devious. Let's see if there's any way. Yeah. I see a couple of YouTube videos, how to unlock password protected new WD sat hard drive how to unlock WD to hard, hard disk remove HTD password. It looks like there might be some hacks they're using, they're using 256 bit AEs, which is strong encryption. So if there's a way around it, it's gonna be that there was some flaw, not in the encryption technology, but in the way it was implemented. Sometimes there's a, okay. A back door, things like that. It may be that the only way to unlock it is to erase the data, which is exactly what you don't obviously don't want to do.

Caller 8 (02:03:58):
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:03:59):
So as far as I know it's always been my understanding that hard drive passwords are good. They're in other words, bad for you. Is there anything super vital on there or is it just memories? I don't

Caller 8 (02:04:15):
Think so.

Leo Laporte (02:04:16):
It's probably just memories. Yeah. Yeah. Don't go to too much. <Laugh> spend a hundred dollars unlock it. And it's just a bunch of spreadsheets from 1979, who cares. Right. right. It does look like there are ways to do it. Maybe brute force it the problem is it, wasn't your password. It's his. So if we're your password, you could try some of the ones you've used in the past, but it's his, you don't know what he, what he uses, right? Yeah. and there,

Caller 8 (02:04:43):
Well, there's, there's no YouTube things I should look at then. Right. Well, there

Leo Laporte (02:04:46):
Are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. As I said, there's at least three videos. I'll tell you. What I entered in is hard drive password, Western digital. And here's the secret crack. <Laugh> you wanna crack your Western digital password? And I was able to find a number of YouTube videos that promised that, you know, beware sometimes they'll say, oh, you need, is this $120 program? That kind of thing. Certainly don't, don't don't spend any money on it, but it looks like there are ways I'm seeing quite a few videos. So there might be some, you know, you might spend some time watching these videos and see if there's a common thought.

Caller 8 (02:05:23):
Well, that gives me at least something to look at. Anyway. Thank you very much. And I really enjoy your broadcast. Hey,

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
I'm really glad you listen. And I hope it cools off even more. David, you don't get snow in Charles. Charlotte, do you?

Caller 8 (02:05:35):
We do about once or twice a year. It lasts for a day. That's

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Not bad. So you get some seasons? No,

Caller 8 (02:05:42):
No, no. Yeah. Especially when you're from Minnesota, like I

Leo Laporte (02:05:45):
<Laugh> the coldest

Caller 8 (02:05:48):
We spent we spent 20 years in the Amazon jungle basin and 10 years in. No kidding in Africa. So kidding. Were

Leo Laporte (02:05:55):
You doing missionary work? What were you doing?

Caller 8 (02:05:57):
Like Minnesota winter at all?

Leo Laporte (02:05:59):
No. What were you doing in the jungle?

Caller 8 (02:06:02):
Missionary with wick, with Bible translator. Wonderful,

Leo Laporte (02:06:05):
Wonderful. 20 years. Wow.

Caller 8 (02:06:10):
20 years in Amazon jungle basin and 10 in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's a Brazil and most, most Umbi Africa.

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
That is a, that's a real commitment. Do you miss it at all?

Caller 8 (02:06:21):
Oh yeah. Yeah, we do. But we've got grandkids here now, so nice.

Leo Laporte (02:06:25):
Yeah. That's a special thing. Well, pleasure talking to you, David. I hope that helps. Maybe you could find something on there. Some way to unencrypted, eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number. Leo Laporte. The tech. I wanna, you can call the Arctic. See if we can get a hold of rod pile. When we come back. M the wick Mick, the wick is today. Steve Martin's birthday. Aw. Okay. We got to rod pile. I will wish Steve a happy birthday. I don't think he still listens to this show, but I will still wish him a happy birthday. He'd be 77. Yeah. 76 or 77. Yeah, 77. I'll tell you what got so much energy. I hope, I hope I'm as nimble as Mr. He's only about 12 years older than me, but I hope I am as nimble as he, when I reach his advanced stage. Yeah. I saw that interview, Kim.

Leo Laporte (02:07:25):
We'll see. Okay. Last time I, I talked to Steve, I said, what do you do these days? He says, I write one joke a week. <Laugh> but he did mention that he was gonna do only murder in the building. So I guess he's busi busier. <Laugh> at the time he says, I write one joke a week for my my show with Marty short. And and that's it. <Laugh> oh, good luck, Mick. Oh, M God bless. I'll be thinking of you. I'll be praying for you. God, doesn't listen to me, but I'll still, I'll still be thinking of you love youm take care. Okay. On the line from the Arctic circle, should I pick him up? It says unavailable. What does that mean? Let's see. I'm gonna pick him up and see if it's Mr. Rod pile from the great white north. Yes, it is ladies and gentlemen via Iridium satellite phone. Hello rod.

Rod Pyle (02:08:30):
Hi Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
Ya? I guess I don't have to shout <laugh>.

Rod Pyle (02:08:35):
This is,

Leo Laporte (02:08:36):
Are you getting, are you getting sick of life in the architect circle?

Rod Pyle (02:08:41):
No, it's fantastic. So today we're about 25 miles south of the mountain Mars project base. We took ATVs over hill and Dale and valley and gully and large river rocks and all kinds of other obstacles to get down here. There's six of us and two shotguns in case the polar bear show up. And we came down to Rono with a, an all trained vehicle that was stranded here, back in 2018 and left behind because you know, this is a neighborhood where you could leave things around and nobody messes with

Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
Them. <Laugh> except the polar bears. Yeah,

Rod Pyle (02:09:17):
Well, and a red Humvee that they were driving down the coast to try and identify a trail they can use for testing larger Mars rovers. So they had a Humvee, they were using to blaze that trail. And that ended up winter set in and they had to leave it here in 2018 too. So we found the the Humvee, but it's got claw marks in it.

Leo Laporte (02:09:38):
Oh my, oh my how long had it been there?

Rod Pyle (02:09:43):
Some angry bears went after that and the side of the ATV. So holy

Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
Cow, holy cow. Did they get in? No

Rod Pyle (02:09:53):
They it's, it's a Humvee, so it's pretty well armored, but the area ran is a valley that just, it's just low kind of orangeish red Hills, as far as the, I can see there's a little bit of a river running down the middle, some, some runoff in the snow melt, but I mean, if you didn't know any better aside for the fact you could breathe, the radiation isn't killing. You you'd think you run Mars. It's really very amazing up here the whole time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:19):
And we should explain rod is up there as a journalist covering this for the space.com website and his own magazine at Astra for the national space society. This is where NASA goes, because it is so much like Mars that they can test out rovers and other technologies.

Leo Laporte (02:10:42):
Are they te do they, are they testing, planning, potatoes up there?

Rod Pyle (02:10:48):
<Laugh> they did actually have a greenhouse experiment. I don't think potatoes is it, it was leafy vegetables, but they do have a greenhouse behind the main base, which is another six or seven buildings. I mean, there's little bits and pieces of experiments everywhere that have been run, and then either gonna be cycled through later or mothballed for subsequent use. So, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff happening here. It's pretty

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
Exciting. It's the middle of summer. The sun does not set. It is a 24 hour day. How cold is it?

Rod Pyle (02:11:17):
It's a little above freezing right now without the windshield, but I think probably if the wind starts blowing a little more, it'll be below. We've had some really cold gusty nights. They tell me that the wind was only blowing between 25 and 30 miles an hour. But when you're staying in a framed tent building, that's pretty cold.

Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
Yeah. Do you <laugh> yeah. You just bundle up, you you've got a good sleeping bag and you bundle up.

Rod Pyle (02:11:45):
I got lost.

Leo Laporte (02:11:47):
Oh yeah. It's coming and going. The satellites are flying overhead. Is there, there last time we talked, there was no internet access up there, right? Oh, and he is gone. Well, there you go. I mean, what better thing for a technology show? It's actually easier to talk to people on the moon <laugh> than it is up in the north pole. But there you go via the Rium satellites, which you might remember were a satellite system that was launched quite well long ago. It feels like Iridium was the eighties. Right. And then the company went bankrupt because it turned out there really wasn't much of a market for satellite phones, except for maybe people like rod pile who is in the Arctic. And he's back, he's back.

Rod Pyle (02:12:33):
I'm sorry about that. Yeah. Really's a little sketchy. It wasn't, I thought it was gonna be a little more profound than this anyway. So today, besides seeing Humvee here Pascal, who's the guy who operates this whole thing, and a couple of associates are flying drones. And one of the things they're doing, you know, their commercial drones, like the ones you've used, but one of the things they're doing is testing, doing remote sampling with them. So setting down with adhesive pad and picking some little bits of grit and gravel and bringing 'em back and then looking at 'em and seeing what they find. So it's a lot of fun. It's, it's neat to be here to see it firsthand.

Leo Laporte (02:13:08):
Well, do, did you bring a photographer or you could take in all the pictures.

Rod Pyle (02:13:13):
I'm the picture guy. So, yeah, me and eBay had a couple of very long dates about three weeks ago while I replaced my can D 70, which was not quite up to snuff. So I brought a long way too much stuff, but I'm trying to use most of it, but you know how it is, iPhones work great. And in a pinch, you just pull 'em out, right.

Leo Laporte (02:13:33):
And it's not too cold for an iPhone, or even actually an a Nik icon camera. If it's only freezing, it's not too bad. When will we see these images? How are you gonna, how are you gonna let us see 'em?

Rod Pyle (02:13:44):
Well, I I'm sending some with the space.com stories and they're being posted about every two days on space.com. Oh, nice. But I had to really down REM cuz we're paying $7 a megabyte <laugh> oh, so

Leo Laporte (02:13:59):
We get better pictures from Mars than we do from you. <Laugh>

Rod Pyle (02:14:03):
I know. And they probably cost less too. They'll be more on in a Astra in a couple of weeks. So yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
I think you're doing, you're having fun. You're probably, this is the closest you or I will ever get to space. So I think it's pretty exciting.

Rod Pyle (02:14:22):
I think you're right. And I have to say, after being here, I know there are a lot of people that think they wanna live on Mar so long term, but you know, I, I can do it here and I can breathe and I'm not getting baked by radiation or going by PROCO to the soil. So it's pretty darn close and I kind of feel like I've been there. It's really something

Leo Laporte (02:14:40):
<Laugh>. That's so cool. That's so cool. Rod pile. What's what parallel are you at? Or is it a, it's not a parallel it's long it's latitude. What? Latitude

Rod Pyle (02:14:50):
Rod? 75, 76 degrees north.

Leo Laporte (02:14:53):
Wow.

Rod Pyle (02:14:54):
Wow. So still 15 degrees off the pole, but it's cold enough to convince you it's the pole for sure.

Leo Laporte (02:14:59):
Yeah. Will you get a chance to go to the pole or this is as far north as you're gonna get,

Rod Pyle (02:15:04):
This is, we'll do a little excursion, a little further north, but I mean, we're talking just probably 20 miles or something. So this is about as close as we'll get, but honestly, it's close enough, you know, with all these, these rocks and ice patches, having it be continuous ice that that's for the Hardy adventures. I'm, I'm not made of stern stuff like that. So I'm quite happy to stay down here where it's a little less severe.

Leo Laporte (02:15:27):
I'm looking at right now at your article from a couple of days ago. And I, I know you say this is a low, low res, but it's actually a beautiful image of the hot and Mars project site on Devon island, the beautiful sky. If everybody wants to know more about this space.com, I'll put a link to Rod's articles. It's I guess it's in the section human space flights, but very, very cool rod. Very, very cool. 

Rod Pyle (02:15:57):
I'm so glad you found it. I wasn't sure they were getting opposed.

Leo Laporte (02:16:00):
Yeah, you probably don't know. Do you, so five

Rod Pyle (02:16:05):
Other than, than S phone is by GPS text, which gives you 140 characters. So it's not very verbose.

Leo Laporte (02:16:11):
Yeah. Yeah. So, no, I, you know, this is good. It's getting there. The, this is the most recent one is two days ago, a month on Mars, first journeys in our Arctic home. I expect more from you and more pictures. I cannot wait, keep, keep up the the good work.

Caller 9 (02:16:28):
Thanks. I'll see you next week.

Leo Laporte (02:16:30):
Rod pile spaceman getting as close to space as we're ever gonna get via Iridium satellite phone, 66 satellites up there in orbit giving us L band communications with some of the most remote spots of the earth. I, you know, I'm glad that Iridium survived. I know it was touch and go for a while when they first launched in the early nineties. But but I'm, you know, it's great that we can talk to rod. It's really cool. And again, his articles are on space.com. Rod is also that are in chief of the, a Astra magazine and his articles when he gets back with probably higher resolution photos will be@spacedotnss.org. If you're not already a subscriber, this'll be good time to subscribe Leo. Leport the tech guy. We'll get some calls from closer to home next, thank you to sly and the family stone. Thanks to professor Laura. Who's always got the perfect musical selections. Thanks to Kim Schaffer, the phone angel who puts you on the air, thanks to all of you who call and all of you who listen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy. Once again, Leo Laporte, the tech guy, we got a little more time last segment of the day, last segment of the weekend. Let me take some more call Steve in Los Angeles. Hello Steve.

Caller 9 (02:17:51):
Hey Leo. How are you? Hmm,

Leo Laporte (02:17:53):
I'm great. How are you?

Caller 9 (02:17:55):
Great. And then this is to you for a long time and you've helped me out in a lot of bad situations. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:18:02):
No. Well, I'm glad you listen. Thank you. I'm glad I could be there for you. What can I do for you today?

Caller 9 (02:18:08):
What I'm looking to do is get, and I've heard you talk about it before is getting my own modem for my internet service. Yes. is, is that, is there a benefit to that? And if so, what would it be?

Leo Laporte (02:18:22):
So the first thing to ask is how you get your internet if you have a cable provider. Yeah. Okay. So most cable providers will let you do this. Many other providers will as well, depending on how your internet comes into the house, there will be a device connected to that input port. In the case of your cable, you have a cable Jack and that's connected to usually it's a single device provided by the internet service provider, right? That combines two things, a cable modem, and then a router. But honestly you know, you're for a, you're renting them often for 10 bucks a month. So it's expensive and, and B they're not necessarily the best routers out there. You can usually get a better router if you're willing to spend some money with more capabilities than the one provided by the cable company.

Leo Laporte (02:19:13):
So take that whole box out <laugh> and provide your own modem. You've the first thing to do is check the cable company. Cox will let you do this. Comcast will let you do this. Spectrum will let you, you do this, but they'll have a list of approved. Yeah, you have spectrum. Yeah. They'll have a list of approved modems. I use the net gear CMS 1000, which is a very good one. You're gonna want one that supports the latest cable modem protocol that that protocol is DOCSIS D O C SSIS. And the most cable companies are currently using Dous three, but at some point they'll go to three, one, the newer protocols allow higher speeds. So for instance, you'll need Dous three at least to do a gigabit cable service. So always get, and Dous four is coming. So it's always get the, I would get, at least a doc is 3.1 modem. The CMS 1000 that I use is docs 3.1. You, you can see@wirecutter.com or wire.com mere magazine, or the New York times wire cutter both have reviews of cable modems. Once you get the modem, now you're still gonna have to get a router, but that opens you up to a whole, I have I'm you have that, that, okay. Yeah. And it opens you up to a world of much better routers than the one the cable company usually gives you. You can use mesh routers like E or Orbi from neck gear, things like that.

Caller 9 (02:20:38):
So yeah, I have the nest, which is fantastic.

Leo Laporte (02:20:40):
Yeah. Perfect. So yeah, this way you get your own modem and by the way, the law requires them to stop charging you. As soon as you get your own modem, they don't always do it. So make sure, you know, check your bill the next month, make sure they're no longer renting you something you're no longer using. And it was only last year that Congress finally passed a law saying, oh yeah, by the way, you can't charge 'em for that modem. If they're using their own by then, you know what it depends with they're charging you. But usually it takes about a year to two years to amortize the cost of your own, but you're gonna have a better one. So I, I think that's the way to go. And as I said, I use the cm 1000 on my gigabit from Comcast. I'm very happy with that. That's a net year modem, but there are others out there. Mine is about 200 bucks. It is doc's 3.1. You know, which is something you absolutely want. I think also you're gonna get a more modern device often. That means fewer bugs, glitches and security problems. The cable companies, aren't really incentive to give you the best device. <Laugh> just the device that, that works well enough so that you don't bug them.

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
You can, you can do better.

Caller 9 (02:21:50):
Okay. Okay. Now, can I ask you another question?

Leo Laporte (02:21:53):
Sure. Steve

Caller 9 (02:21:55):
With email, I, I heard the call yesterday about the lady who lost the,

Leo Laporte (02:21:59):
He, oh, I felt so bad for her Yahoo mail. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Caller 9 (02:22:03):
Yeah. So as far as transferring, which I do wanna do that, I wanna get rid Yahoo and put everything in Gmail. It it's just a matter of falling the steps. I looked up the

Leo Laporte (02:22:13):
Steps it's easy. Here's what I would suggest. Keep the Yahoo account, cuz people still have that as your address, but you can set it up in Gmail to periodically check that and move the mail over. So it's continually moving it over. So you go into the Gmail settings, into the pop and IMAP settings of Gmail and you'll give it the Yahoo credentials. It in effect is gonna log in for you, download the mail from Yahoo. So that way, you know, at some day Yahoo goes offline or whatever you have all the mail people. But until then, people who email you at your old address will get through to Gmail. You know, now you want the black diamond tip. The one extra step that is a good one to do is to get your own domain name, you know, Steven la.com. And then that way, when you do that, you can have the, the domain company forward your email to Gmail or anywhere else.

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
And if someday Gmail becomes like Yahoo mail, add a date, antiquated, you go to the next one. You don't have to change your address again. It's always gonna be Steven la.com. That's a little, that's a little high end tip, but that's what I do. I have a, actually a number of email domains and that makes it so that I don't have to contact anybody and say, oh, my address has changed again. So start using this one, right? If you still have access to your Yahoo account, please don't, don't get in the situation. Our caller yesterday got into download all of your contacts, everything that's in Yahoo, download it to a local copy. Now in case they should for whatever reason disappear.

Caller 9 (02:23:46):
Right? Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:23:47):
She was a good cautionary tale for all of us.

Caller 9 (02:23:50):
Y yes, that is very true. Oh man. And one last thing that the caller before about the Western digital. Yeah. The password. I just did that yesterday. I put a password on my the hard drive. It asked you for a reminder. Yeah. You know, like a nickname. Right? So if, if that's bill, if, if he can put,

Leo Laporte (02:24:13):
Ask the guy who put it on, Hey, did you put a reminder on there? He doesn't even, right. The problem is the tech who did it. Doesn't even remember putting the password on. Oh, so you know, who knows what happened there? Most hard drives. There's actually two passwords. There's a physical password for the hard drive. And then there's an ATA bus password. Right. So it gets complicated, but it's a good idea. I mean, that way, if, if somebody steals the computer they can't get into that hard drive and that's pretty good. Right. That's a good idea. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:24:41):
Yeah. That's why I did it. Well, thank you, Steve.

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
Thanks for listening all this time. I appreciate it.

Caller 9 (02:24:48):
All right. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:24:49):
One more call. We are gonna go to the real Alaska Fairbanks and say hi to John. Hi John.

Caller 10 (02:24:56):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:24:57):
Hey Johnny. I was just up your way. Didn't go to Fairbanks, but went to Juno Sitka, Ketchikan. Beautiful, beautiful up there. At least in the summer.

Caller 10 (02:25:05):
Yeah. When it's not raining.

Leo Laporte (02:25:07):
Yeah, it was a little, it was raining most of the time. It was pretty gloomy, but it was okay. What can I, what can I do for you today? We only have a couple of minutes, so I wanna get, get this in here.

Caller 10 (02:25:16):
Okay. I just found out from, is it Lisa, your screener that you have a son who is a to star?

Leo Laporte (02:25:23):
He's a celeb on TikTok has more listeners on TikTok than I do on this show.

Caller 10 (02:25:30):
Okay. Now divorce yourself in that. Okay. And, and tell me why TikTok should be legal in the United.

Leo Laporte (02:25:37):
Why should it be illegal? Is my question. Why do you think it should be illegal?

Caller 10 (02:25:42):
Everybody has criticism of it, but nobody is defending it

Leo Laporte (02:25:47):
And I'll defend it. The only people,

Caller 10 (02:25:49):
The only people that are defending it seem to be tied to the Chinese government.

Leo Laporte (02:25:53):
No, no, no, no. Look, your phone is made in China. Your computer is made in China. The fact that this is a company in China doing the social network is not in and of itself. Should make it illegal. I mean, are we gonna ban everything from China? If that's your plan. Okay, good luck. <Laugh> is there a problem with TikTok as far as I know, not what, first of all are they spying on you? Well, they only have the information you give them, which is far less than you give Facebook. No, maybe a risk that they could somehow use their algorithm to feed you propaganda. That's legit. That's that could happen. So don't buy into the propaganda. Just watch my son's cooking shows. That's safe. I have no fear of TikTok. I really don't Leo Laporte, the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (02:26:55):
Oh, I wish I had more time. Cuz that's actually is a, is a great question and loaded question with a lot of possible, you know, ins and outs. So the longer answer on that is keep an eye on it right there. So there are few things that people worry about. They're spying on you. Every app on your phone is spying on you. And we know for a fact that all the Facebook apps, not only spy on you, they know a lot more than TikTok does well. Is it bad that it's a Chinese company doing this? Well, you have other apps on your phone from Chinese companies. Your phone is made in China. Your laptop is made in China by, by itself being made in China. Isn't NEC no, I understand the, the PRC, the people's Republic of China and the Chinese communist party there. Repressive regime, not nice people. I agree with you on that. We are not though in a position at this point to say, well, let's ban everything from China.

Leo Laporte (02:27:59):
I would be really an interesting project to go through your house and take everything out that's made in China. Should we move more manufacture the us? Absolutely. Have we done it yet? Not yet. It's a social network. So it's not exactly, you know, the end of the world. And I think there are a lot of people defend TikTok. I'll defend TikTok because it's a great opportunity for creators just as YouTube is. There're not a lot of, I mean, it's like, I guess YouTube's the next, I guess you could say Instagram, they wanna be TikTok, but it's a great opportunity for creatives. And I I'll take my son out of the mix, but I know many, many other creators. It's a great opportunity for them. So yeah, if they do something illegal, then they, they should go. They should get in trouble for it. They're not doing anything illegal. You wanna ban 'em cuz they're from China, that's problematic. That's by it and of itself not illegal yet. I think the thing probably would be worth paying close attention to, and it's not just TikTok it's with every social network, with the Facebook and YouTube as well, Twitter as well. Is, are they being used to promote a hidden agenda gender? And I think there are enough people keeping an eye on that. That if that becomes the case, it'll become obvious. I don't think that's clear right now. Certainly when I look at TikTok, I'm not seeing political content at all

Leo Laporte (02:29:33):
At all. If their political agenda is to get people dancing. Okay. Yeah. It's working 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 this week@techandyoufinditattwit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh on Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.