The Tech Guy Episode 1934 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Sunday, October 9th, 2022. This is episode 1934. 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 user interface. Visit unify meeting.com and enter the code tech eye for 25% off a year's subscription. Or use the same code to get 25% off any of nemo's 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. Yeah, it's time to talk computers and the internet and home theater and digital photography and smart phones and smart watches, all that jazz.

Leo Laporte (00:01:17):
88. 88. Ask Leo, is the phone number (888) 827-5536 toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. If you're not in the US or Canada, well here's some good news. You could just use Skype out or something like that. One of those internet do hickeys to call and it shouldn't still, shouldn't cost you anything. We do get calls from all over the world. It's fun. I like that. 88 88. Ask Leo. 8, 8, 8, 8, 2, 7, 5, 5, 3, 6. The lines are open as they say. Website tech i labs.com. That's a good thing to know about because that's where all the information you hear on the show is gonna show up. We put it, we call the show notes. We put the show notes up there for free. No sign up. Just wander in. There's no, somebody asked about a login page. No, no. I don't know where he was. But there's no login page on ours, so don't worry about it.

Leo Laporte (00:02:12):
Just go to tech i labs.com and this is episode 1934. Very good year. Very good episode. I hope we'll find out, won't we? And then audio and video of the show will be put up there@techilabs.com and the show notes and transcript, all that stuff. Good news if you do. I'm wondering what do <laugh>? So I'm gonna make a big confession here and my friends, my ilk, the geeks, whenever I'm doing a show, when I do a bunch of other podcasts for hardcore enthusiasts like Windows Weekly, it's all about Windows. Paul Thoran, Mary Jo Foley or Mac Break Weekly, or I do all these shows for people are really like into it enthusiasts. And when I mention this show, the radio show I do, I always say the normal people listen to the radio show. I hope that's not offensive, but it just <laugh>, you're good.

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
No you're normal, not it is we who are not normal. We care abnormally about all this stuff. And think about it all the time and all that stuff, the enthusiasts. But one of the reasons it's really great to do this show is to connect with real people in the real world and understand that their view of what's going on in technology is often very different from how we nerds. We geeks think about it. I'll give you an example. Well actually I'm actually asking you as a normal person what you think when you surf around, whether it's on your phone or your computer. You go to a website, you see that thing pops up that says, Hey, we use cookies on this website. And then sometimes it says, what's your preference? Sometimes it doesn't even say that. It just says, you wanna know more, click this link.

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Otherwise say, Okay, the infamous cookie consent banner have you? No, just curiosity. Do you notice that? Right? How annoying is it to you? It's very annoying to me. <laugh>, it comes from European regulations, European privacy regulations. And it's really comes from a complete misunderstanding of how the internet works. European privacy regulations essentially all four. I mean privacy, yeah, good thing. Not a bad thing, good thing. But they had decided some years ago to demonize cookies. And I think a lot of people, you again speaking as a geek <laugh>, we kinda know what those are all about. But I think a lot of people, normal people probably go cookies bad. And so the theory I guess is this site is now warning you. Well, we use them, Good luck, have fun cuz they're required by law to do so, only for Europeans. But it's such a pain.

Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
You don't. Very few sites say, Well is this person from Europe? Okay, I'll show it otherwise I won't. They just go, Yeah, pop it up. It's too hard to be sure if somebody's coming in from a country covered by those regulations. So pretty much all websites do it. The cookie consent banner just for background, just to fill you in a little bit, it's a complete waste of time. It's completely stupid <laugh>. In fact, it's probably a bigger, get this, a bigger violation of privacy than the cookie. What are cookies? I guess we need to understand what cookies are. So when you have a program, you're working on a Microsoft Word document or you're playing Candy Crush or whatever when you close Candy Crush or Facebook and then reopen it, it knows who you are and where you are. It knows what level you're on and things like that.

Leo Laporte (00:06:09):
How does it do that? Cookies, It's in a program on your computer. It's called preferences or save settings or save my current situation kind of thing. So when you're using playing Candy Crush on your pc, it just saves that to the hard drive. When you're on a website, same thing when you're on Facebook, it saves a cookie on your computer that says who you are. So you don't have to log in every single time. And if you wanna know what these cookies do, it's easy. You go in your browser, clear all the cookies, and then you'll see you have to log in again to every site. You has a lot of stuff that the sites don't remember about you, your trouser size or what level of candy crusher on that kind of thing. That's what those are. There's simply preferences and really they've been around since the web started.

Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
The technical term form is persistent client side state information. P C S S I, which really annoys me cuz they could have called them Pixies and everybody would've been much happier. But cuz that's pc, ssi, persistent client side State information. State is your state, State of being. Your state, the current state of your program, you're saving it and it's persistent. So when you come back and it's on client side because you're the client and it saves locally, it doesn't save it on their site, it saves it locally. They're gonna save, Facebook's not gonna save all those settings. It saves some on their website, but most of 'em it's on yours. Okay? So it's useful, it's necessary. Frankly there is a potential privacy problem with cookies because when they were designed, they were originally designed by Netscape, by Mozilla for the Netscape browsers, remember Netscape. And very early on in the mid nineties when the people started using the web, they realized, Oh, we really need a way to remember your state.

Leo Laporte (00:08:08):
So when you come back, it's not, who the hell are you? Hi, welcome back. That's nice, right? Unfortunate. And when they were designed, they knew that there'd be a privacy concern. So the rule is the only site that can look at those cookies is the site that saved them. Only Facebook can look at Facebook's cookies. That's sensible. But of course Facebook being Facebook and other companies, they'd like to know where everywhere you go on the web, let's say you're a coffee shop, Buck Stars coffee shop and that a lot of people go to Incan. No nuts. And so you wanna know <laugh> Buck Star wants to know when you go to Incan, but how would they know that? Well, and here's where Facebook came in and Google and others. It turns out when you go to kin from Buck Stars doesn't know what your favorite app Reno Fino was, but Unin might have a Facebook like button on there.

Leo Laporte (00:09:14):
Oh that's interesting. That Facebook like button is like a little teeny meany webpage. <laugh>. And it's a loophole because it means now Facebook is open on that site and can save a cookie, can look at cookies. So suddenly, if Buck Stars and Ons both have Facebook like buttons ons can see that you've been to a Buck Stars and that you like the Aino wp. So <laugh>, what we call third party cookies. There is actually no such thing as a third party cookie. But it's the idea that you might be able to tell as a third party where people have been put enough buttons on the web, Facebook knows everywhere you've been. In fact, that's the whole idea behind the button. And then later of course the Facebook login and the Google login and the Twitter login and they're all just trying to figure out where you go.

Leo Laporte (00:10:06):
So we call 'em third party cookies and technically they're not. They're still first party cookies. So that's the privacy dam. You know, risk is, yeah, that's not a good thing. The cookie banners <laugh> do anything about that by the way. They just, they're, they make you feel good. Except they don't because trillions of man hours, human hours are wasted kicking, clicking those banners they get in the way. They're really bad on mobile cause you don't have a lot of screen real estate anyway. They're just an annoyance. And in the long run they just make you go Fine, fine, fine. Cookies, cookies, cookies. I don't care anymore enough with the cookies. And there's even a privacy potential because those cookie consent banners hit you before any cookies are set. That's the rule, right? But they themselves can be monitoring you. So they could be worse than a cookie. Okay, fine.

Leo Laporte (00:11:01):
This is all a long way around to say that browsers now are starting to block cookies. Hallelujah. It's probably illegal in Europe. Your Europeans don't use brave. But brave is announcing that it will soon allow users to block those annoying cookie consent banners. And frankly, if you use a ad blocker as many do you often can set those to block those banners to, That's, that's why this law was stupid because it served no purpose. It annoys people, wastes a lot of bandwidth, wastes a lot of time is potentially privacy invasion. And then ultimately teaches people <laugh> how to use and blockers and other technologies to turn 'em off. Exactly the opposite of the intent of the eu. Congratulations your big winners in the stupid law category. Anyway, that was a, sorry about the long explanation. All to merely say the brave is gonna start doing that. <laugh> enough. 88 88 s. I've wasted my whole first segment explaining cookies. But now you know, right? I think it's a good thing to know. And as a normal person, does this annoy you? Sure annoys me and I'm love Leo Laporte. Detective. No, I wanna see you now. Telephone. Hello? Telephone operator. Hello.

Kim Schaffer (00:12:28):
Hi,

Leo Laporte (00:12:29):
I when I wanna get you, that's Kim, She the phone. Angel, I wanna get you that headset. Yes. With the old fashioned microphone on the, and then some jacks that you can plug into a switchboard. Oh, then you'd be a telephone. That

Kim Schaffer (00:12:46):
Would be fun. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:12:48):
How long Wednesday?

Kim Schaffer (00:12:50):
This the person to whom I'm

Leo Laporte (00:12:51):
Speaking? <laugh> just the person. So Kima does such a good job and you her laugh. Isn't it great? People love your laugh. She answers the phone. She's a person who prepares you for your parents on national radio. Yes. Do you, have you prepared someone for me?

Kim Schaffer (00:13:09):
I think that I have.

Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
Are they ready? There's

Kim Schaffer (00:13:11):
A couple of people.

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
<laugh> who shall I?

Kim Schaffer (00:13:14):
Let's go to Rod in LA and not our rod, but a different rod,

Leo Laporte (00:13:18):
Another rod, another rod. A lightning rod if you will, for technology problems. Thank you, Kim. Hello Rod. Leo Laporte D tech guy.

Caller 1 (00:13:29):
Hey Leo, how you doing? I'm

Leo Laporte (00:13:30):
Good, how are you?

Caller 1 (00:13:31):
Good. I got a question for you. I'm not sure if it's solvable or not, but I think it's like a four terabyte portable hard drive. <affirmative> one of those ones that looks a little bit like a large deck of cards and it was kind of working fine and then all of a sudden one day it just stopped being recognized by the computer and I plugged it into multiple computers in multiple.

Leo Laporte (00:13:56):
So usually that's not the drive. Could be a lot of things that can fail, but that's a USB enclosure that you have. And inside that if you opened it up, you'd actually see there's a little drive or sometimes for big ones, two drives and the drives may be just fine, but the USB circuitry or even the USB cable could be bad.

Caller 1 (00:14:19):
So yeah, I tried different cables

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
Too. Good. Yeah. So that's how we fix problems. We troubleshoot 'em by doing the easy things first. So the easy thing is, well let's just see you did, you're good. You try did, let's try it on some other computers. No, no go. No, it's not the computer. Try some other cables. No go. Okay, so it's not the cable. So now we know it's that enclosure and that drive. So two things could have gone wrong. There's circuitry in the enclosure that takes the output of the drive, which is ATA or SATA and turns it into usb. So there's some circuitry that does that you can get tried. What I would do next is try take the drives out. Now if it's two drives, that's problematic because then there's some raid software in the firmware of the enclosure. And usually that's proprietary and it means the contents of the drives will be kind of unreadable without some extra effort. But if it's just a single drive in there, and it probably is four terabytes isn't huge these days, this huge. But it's not. So if it's just a single drive, you take it out of the enclosure, there'll be little screws. Sometimes you have to pry the rubber feet off the bottom to get to the screws. But there'll be little screws, you can take it out and then, well

Caller 1 (00:15:30):
This has no screws on it either. I

Leo Laporte (00:15:34):
Guess it could be clear

Caller 1 (00:15:35):
Pry off the cover of it.

Leo Laporte (00:15:36):
I guess it could be glued. Who makes it

Caller 1 (00:15:40):
Western Digital? Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:15:42):
So look, yeah, sometimes there's a release, there's a way to get into it. If you have to pry it with a screwdriver, I hate to do that cause that'll probably damage the case. But if you really want the

Caller 1 (00:15:52):
Data I need, I don't need to keep the drive, I just wanna get the information out.

Leo Laporte (00:15:55):
You want the data? Of course. That's important. Yeah. So if you go to, there are a number of companies that make these newer tech is the one I usually send people to N E W E R T E C H. They make a USB adapter, which is, it's actually a good thing to have around if you're a geek they call it the universal drive adapter. It's about 50 bucks and it has, it's just a cable, USB cable on one end and then there's a big dongle on the other end that has all sorts of connectors for drives and stuff. And so you can connect it to any two and a half, three and a half or five and a quarter inch drive, whatever. It's got the circuitry inside the dongle to do at usb. So you wouldn't want to use it all the time because the drive is out in the air exposed. But it's really good for this kind of situation. Now, if it's the drive, this isn't gonna solve it and it's hard to know if it's the drive or not. The fact that when you plug it in, usually if it's the drive, you'll still see the USB interface. You just won't be able to access the data. The fact that it's not showing up to me usually means that the USB is what's broken. That's good news cuz that's easily fixed.

Caller 1 (00:17:01):
Okay. So when I do plug it in, you know, plug these things in. Yeah, the computer will oftentimes give you a little thing dong, kinda. Yeah, yeah, it's doing that. Yeah. But then nothing happens.

Leo Laporte (00:17:14):
Okay, that's interesting. Well that means it sees there's a USB device connected, but I still think that that sounds like it's a usb, it's hey, it's worth 45 bucks to find out. And actually the chat room's putting some links to even cheaper devices. I just have never tried them. And also, Oh good. Thank you. Twist to Mr A link to what? The tech.com, How to open a Western digital enclosure. Nice. See the chat room is good at this stuff. Well

Caller 1 (00:17:48):
How do I actually get to your chat room? I've tried that a couple times. Haven

Leo Laporte (00:17:51):
They any web browser? Go to irc.twi.tv. IRC is internet relay chat. That's the old, old, old school chat predates the worldwide web. Actually it's that old IRC dot twit, which is my podcast site. T i t is this weekend tech.tv. And you can do it in a browser, but there's also instructions there. If you really are old school and you want to use one of them old school IRC clients tells you how to do that too. But I will put both these links in the show notes as well. If you can wait <laugh>? Sure. How to open a Western digital enclosure? Yes. Screwdriver narrow, ultra thin flat header credit card. Ah yeah. See there, there's a hook and a thing and a jingga. But you can get into it I think, without damaging it. And then once you're into it, get one of those connecting devices, put it in the computer and if it still doesn't show up, then it's the hard drive then it's a whole nother story. Sam a Bull Sam coming up car guy right after this. So then it's a data recovery issue. What's this? Oh this is that kind of Western digital. Yeah, the boy that looks like you'd have to pry it open. Is it? It's like a really small one.

Caller 1 (00:19:14):
Yeah, like I said, it looks like a deck of cards but it's kind of like a wide deck of cards.

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Yeah, that's what this is, is the passport. Yeah, I think you'd have to, Yeah,

Caller 1 (00:19:24):
That's it. Yep. I think you'd a little thicker than that is all.

Leo Laporte (00:19:27):
You'd probably have to pry it open. I bet you, I mean you're gonna damage the case cuz it's just plastic, so

Caller 1 (00:19:35):
Not really care about the case.

Leo Laporte (00:19:36):
But once you get that drive out, and this is, these are a two and a half inch laptop drives, so you can just plug that in. They get power and data on one cable. The newer tech can handle that. So can probably these $11 versions. <laugh> I just have never tried them. I have the newer tech and I use it all the time. It's very handy. You wouldn't wanna leave the drive out with its exposed forever. But for copying that data off, that's exactly what you want. Then if the drive's dead, okay, now it's a different matter. You gotta spin and various drive recovery tools and so forth. And it may just be nonfunctioning. Sometimes drives just die. There's a lot of heat. If you think about this case it doesn't dissipate heat real well. Right? So the drives are, these are hard on drives. No fan, very tight and closure. And this is because it's not metal, it's really not a lot of, maybe yours is aluminum. I don't know. This feels like plastic. It doesn't, it's not gonna transmit a lot of heat. So Western Digital, they don't care. They want you 'em to die cuz they want you to buy another one.

Caller 1 (00:20:44):
<laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:20:45):
Good old Western Digital

Caller 1 (00:20:48):
<laugh>. Okay, so I will try that. And then otherwise I went to Western Digital website and they basically said, okay, here's these companies that can help you get the

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
Information. So like drive savers, but that's very, very, very expensive. Thousands of dollars

Caller 1 (00:21:04):
And it's not worth that. The not worth that list.

Leo Laporte (00:21:08):
Yeah, they have drives, Savers is a hoot. They have grief counselors, <laugh>, you call and they'll help you. But it's expensive because what they're gonna do is rebuild the drive. I mean, yeah, just the best thing to do is get this drive adapter, you'll use it again. I keep it in a drawer. It's always handy cuz drives die. It's a way to connect them. And if it's just the USB interface, this'll fix it. If it's the drive itself, you can get spin. Now you have to mount it on a set adapter because it has to be fully accessible. USB hides a lot of the details. And so you need something like you need a computer you could attach it to directly with e a or something.

Caller 1 (00:21:53):
So spin, right? That's

Leo Laporte (00:21:55):
My friend Steve Gibson's program grc.com. It's 90 bucks. So it's more expensive than a new drive. But if there's data you gotta have, that's the first thing I would, That's after you get the drive out and it doesn't work. But you know what, don't even buy that. If you put this in a computer on a SAT connector and you can't see it, Spin right won't help spin rights only if you can see it. But it's limping along and you can't read from it. And it says this drive is, if it says this drives unformatted, then spin. Right? But if it doesn't even see a drive with a SAT, direct sat, not usb, but direct sat connection of the drive, then it means the whole thing is completely, and you probably should have had a backup. Hey, I'm, Hey Brad, I hope that helps.

Caller 1 (00:22:45):
Hopefully <laugh>, thank you very much. You're

Leo Laporte (00:22:47):
Welcome. Take care. Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
Hey Sammy. Hello Leo. Where are you today? I'm at home in Iil. Iati. Tomorrow I'll be in Nashville. Oh fun. What will you be driving in Nashville? The new Toyota Crown. Oh fun. Oh, here we go. Here we go. All right. Hey, I do wanna tell you about a great deal on a product you probably need. It's called Unify meeting. It comes from a company called MIMO Monitors. They are the global experts in video conferencing solutions. And they've solved a problem I have, and I bet a lot of you have with hybrid work, remote work. We're spending time, a lot of it at home and on the road in Zoom calls, in Google meeting calls in Microsoft teams calls, and often all three. I mean, look at your computer. Do you have all three installed? You probably do. I do running all the time, right?

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
And there's a problem because each one has a different user interface, a different setup. It's very confusing. In fact, I've, I've told this story before, but it happens every time we at work, we use Google Meet internally, we use Zoom for our calls and occasionally with Premier, Premier uses teams, I'll be talking to Premier on teams, Zoom and Google Meet. So Google, so Zoom has a button that's to unmute your microphone. Google Meet has a button to hang up. It looks the same and it's in the same place. So invariably when I get on the company group calls, I hang up because I think I'm unmuting my mic because it's the same place. It's confusing, right? Wouldn't it be nice to have a single user interface for all your video calls? That's what Unify meeting does. It eliminates the frustration, takes the guesswork out. It's reliable every time.

Leo Laporte (00:24:44):
The buttons and the commands are always in the same place. Whether using Zoom teams are meet by itself, just by itself. That single thing would be the most valuable. But it's better. It's even more because it's a little calendar that sits on your desktop, knows about all your meetings. If it's time for meeting you click the link on the calendar on the unified meeting thing and it launches the right software so it knows, It always looks the same to you. You don't even have to know, but it knows it launches Zoom or Teams or Meet and you're in the meeting makes it very easy to see your daily schedule, your upcoming meetings. It makes it very easy to join the meetings in a standard unit ui. Now, honestly, by itself, that's great. It's even better if you have a second or third display takes up a little real estate.

Leo Laporte (00:25:37):
Your calendar's always there. It's like your little calendar display when you're on a meeting, there's the meeting. And MIMO Monitors sells those little extra USB displays including their seven inch, which is perfect for this, right? So Unify meeting runs, it's at the calendar there. You click there, that's where the meeting is. In fact, if you use the seven inch MIMO display or the externally MIMO display teams or Zoom or Meet will be launched in its normal UI on your big screen. So if you need that, you still have it, but the meeting itself is hold held on the little monitor. Isn't that cool? It's really a perfect best of both. Worlds Scenario Unify runs on Windows. It's PC compatible, $35 and 88 cents for a whole year. And if you buy any NEMO monitor, it's free. It comes with a monitor. So here's here's the call to action.

Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
I want you to try Unify for your team at work or try it for yourself at home. Go to unify meeting.com, U N I FY M E E T I N G unify meeting.com. Use the offer code Tech guy if you would, helps us out. They know you saw it here and you'll get a benefit. You get 25% off a year's subscription or use the offer Code Tech Eye and get 25% off any MIMO seven inch displays and you get Unify meeting with that for free. That's what I would do personally. That's what I did. Simplify with Unify. Unify meeting.com. Use the offer code Tech I 25% off a year's subscription or 25% off any of nemo's seven inch displays. Simplify with Unify. Thank you. Unify meeting for support in the Tech Eye show. And now on we go, it's time for Sam Bull, Sam principle researcher at Guide House Insights, host of Wheel Bearings, the Great Wheel Bearings podcast. And our car guy. My car guy. Hi Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:31):
Hello Leo. How are you today?

Leo Laporte (00:27:33):
I'll tell you how much of a car guy he is. He's in ips, Michigan. That's how much of a car? Is everybody in Ipselani car guy? Maybe not.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:42):
No, not at all. No <laugh>. But this area has been a central hub of the auto industry for better part of the century. We actually have a little museum here in town called the Automotive Heritage Museum that is dedicated to many of the brands that were built in this area. So is

Leo Laporte (00:28:03):
It near Dearborn where the big Rouge River plant is?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:06):
It's about 28 miles west.

Leo Laporte (00:28:10):
So there's probably Workers Rouge from Rouge that lives here.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:13):
But I mean we've had car plants here. The Corver was built here at the Willow Run assembly plant. There you go. But also before that, the Tucker was built here. Oh nice. Oh, what am I blanking on? The name of

Leo Laporte (00:28:29):
The brand is the Tucker Handmade? It feels like it might have been handmade.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:32):
They were pretty much, I mean they only made like 52, I think. Yeah, so they were all pretty much hand built. But there are quite a few brands that were built right in this area here. So it's, it's a pretty cool area for automotive history.

Leo Laporte (00:28:47):
So I see you sitting in front of a Ford charging cable in the, I would guess it's being plugged into a Ford vehicle electric vehicle. That's my guess. I'm just guessing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:59):
And the reason why I've got this particular image this is an example of using the Ford Charge station Pro with the F-150 Lightning because that system has what's known as bidirectional power capability. Oh, that's cool. And this is, Oh, that's cool. So you can use it to back up your house if your power goes out. But you can also do a lot of other interesting things with it. So

Leo Laporte (00:29:24):
When is that a number of electric vehicles, as you know, and <affirmative>, in our case, all we did is we put in one of those RV or dryer outlets, Anema 1450, which you see those are commonplace. It has to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:35):
Have, That's what I have in my

Leo Laporte (00:29:35):
Garage. It has to more, has to have a 40 amp circuit behind it. <affirmative>. And then I bought and I went out and I just bought Grizzly make some, But a lot of companies make 'em just a little box that plugs into that and then plugs into your car. And so that's all we did. But this Ford thing has a lot more capabilities. The only reason I mention that is a lot of companies, Tesla too, sell very expensive <laugh> charging things you don't necessarily need.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:05):
Most EVs come with a charging cable in the vehicle that

Leo Laporte (00:30:09):
You can usually plug into Anema 1450 in many cases.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:12):
And originally early on those were only for plugging into a one 20 volt standard. The bolt

Leo Laporte (00:30:19):
When we got a couple of years ago came with a normal plug. And if you plug into the wall like your regular normal plug

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:26):
Dick, you bought three days to charge it. Yeah, yeah. It's really slow <laugh>. But yeah, now a lot of auto makers are starting to include two 40, or actually they're including cables that have an interchangeable tip on them. So you can plug it into either a one 20 volt outlet or a two 40. If you have one, it's plug into Anema outlet. When

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
You get an electric vehicle, what do you, Cause sometimes it's an upsell, they'll charge you extra.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:48):
Right. But those are mainly just unidirectional. So they will send electrons from your household circuit into your battery in the car.

Leo Laporte (00:30:58):
Interesting about this. So this

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:59):
Is bidirectional.

Leo Laporte (00:31:01):
So this has a lot of extra electronics in it. <affirmative> to do that. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:07):
And you also need some extra circuitry in the car as well. So the onboard charger in the vehicle also has to have bidirectional capability. Oh, interesting. Out.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
I thought all electric vehicles could do that. So this box is in what they call an inverter that takes the,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:21):
Well, no, this particular box is not an inverter. So this works in conjunction with an inverter. So when you buy a lightning, you get this particular wall box with the truck, it comes bundled with it and then you have to buy a separate smart inverter that has a transfer switch because the power coming out of your truck is DC And so you need to convert that to AC for your house. And so what we're starting to see now is more and more vehicles that are equipped with bidirectional onboard chargers. So they can also put out power, put power out. So Ford's done this. The Nissan Leaf has actually had this for quite a while because the chato charging standard, the, it's a Japanese charging standard. These on the leaf has always, or has long had support for bidirectional capability. It's just now becoming standardized with C with ccs, the, which is the typical standard used here in North America.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:22):
And so what we're gonna start seeing is a lot more vehicles coming to market with bidirectional charging capability. So you'll be able to do things like when your power goes out, power your house off, What was that idea? The vehicle battery? Yeah. Or there's a test going on right now that pg and e is doing and a couple other utilities are doing similar tests with some new EVs where the Ford system right now, it's managed locally at your home. So that inverter when it detects a power outage, it automatically switches over. So it's not feeding power back into the grid. But what pg and e's doing with both GM and Ford is they're testing a system where they can manage it remotely. So when they're reaching peak loads on the grid and there's a chance that they may have to start doing rolling blockouts or brownouts, then what they can do is reach out to vehicles that are opted in and switch those over.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:18):
And if they're plugged in, they can switch those over for some period of time for maybe a couple of hours or so to power those homes off of that and take those homes off the grid temporarily to reduce the load so they can avoid the blackouts. And this is something you're gonna see more of going forward. This is one of the things that utilities are looking at is ways to manage when vehicles are charged and be able to distribute power more reliably. But then the next stage of that is actually feeding power back into the grid. And right now none of the consumer vehicles that are gonna have that capability, well none of the consumer equipment has that capability. But what we're starting to see now is electric school buses and they are equipping bus garages with equipment that can actually feed power back into the grid when needed. BEC and school buses are a great use case for this because of how buses are used during the day. They're typically out on runs in the morning, out on runs in the afternoon. Most of the rest of the time they're sitting in the bus barn doing nothing. And they're

Leo Laporte (00:34:31):
Just big old batteries

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:32):
Just sitting there and they're big, big batteries sitting there. And so there's an opportunity there to send power back into the grid when it's not needed by the bus. And that can generate some revenue for the school district that's running those buses and also make the grid more resilient. So this week we talked last week I think about Volvo making some announcements about some of the interior sensing capabilities they're doing. They're continuing to trickle out information on their new E 90 EV that's gonna be released next month or revealed next month. The latest thing is bidirectional charging capability. It will have that built in. The lucid error has that the V I d buzz has this and most of GMs new EVs coming up will also have this. If they have the optional higher power onboard chargers, they'll have that bidirectional capability. So this is something we're gonna see a lot more of in the coming years. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
Very cool. I have the two of those big Tesla power wall batteries in my house cuz.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:32):
And this is basically doing the same job as a power wall except it's mobile and it's actually a lot bigger. The lightning has 131 kilowatt hour battery, whereas your power walls are seven kilowatt hours each. Yeah. So the light, a lightning can keep your home running for several days. Hey settle a

Leo Laporte (00:35:50):
Ben for in the chat. Is a battery or gasoline vehicle a higher risk in terms of explosion and fire?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:02):
So the chances of having a fire with a gasoline vehicle are much higher. But if you have a fire with a battery, it's much harder to extinguish

Leo Laporte (00:36:11):
Because, so it's actually providing oxygen so you can't just put water on. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I don't know if you settled a bet, but you certainly informed Sam

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:23):
This as usual. It's not an easy answer.

Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
Wheel bearings that mean it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:26):
Depends.

Leo Laporte (00:36:40):
Electric vehicles don't catch fire nearly as much as gas vehicles. Actually hybrids are the most dangerous, which is interesting followed by gas vehicles.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:50):
Yeah. So when this whole thing with the bolt battery fires was occurring, I looked up some data from the National Fire Protection Association and I think there were eight or nine bolt battery fires. And in 2019 there was about 220,000 car fires, gasoline car fires. And when you do it on a per cap number of vehicles out there, that's true road. That's true. It works out that the chances of having a battery fire are less than one 10th of the chances of a fire with an EV right. Now that said, there was somebody earlier in the chat had mentioned there was a report out of Florida this week that there were a number of Tesla vehicles that were catching fire after. That's a lot hurricane

Leo Laporte (00:37:40):
Cause it got water damage. How does that happen?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:42):
And Well, it's, the problem is the salt water, it's not so much water damage. So I mean fresh water, not a problem. But the salt water causes a lot more corrosion. It can get into places where it shouldn't be. And back a decade ago when Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast Fisker Automotive, the first iteration of Fisker Automotive, they had something like 250 cars that had just come off a boat that were sitting in the port in New Jersey and the port got flooded. Oh, I remember that. During the hurricane. And I think about 10 or 20 of those cars caught fire again for same thing, salt water getting into places and the minerals in the salt water causing short circuits. So salt water is a lot higher risk factor than fresh water. Fresh water, generally not vehicle EVs can go through fresh water without any issues.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:39):
That's why you can take a rivian and drive it through 30 inches of water without a problem. But you don't wanna do that with salt water. You don't wanna take it to an ocean beach if you can avoid it cuz that corrosive material in error is very bad. Now this is one of the things that major automakers do as part of their durability testing is they do a lot of salt water intrusion testing. They'll run vehicles through a big long salt bath thousands of times during their durability testing regime. And I don't think that some companies who that will remain unnamed necessarily are quite that rigorous with their durability testing. Because so far all of the incidents I've seen in Florida have all been involved. Teslas not any other brand of EVs. So I don't know if there's a particular Tesla problem with salt water intrusion or if it's a more general problem but that is definitely something to consider. Let's see, <laugh> redacted something that 20,000 luxury cars under the sea. And actually earlier this year there was a car hauler that caught fire in the Atlantic coming over from Europe. It was carrying about 2000 Volkswagen group vehicles. That was a bunch of VWs, Audis Lamborghini, Bentleys. And it went down in the middle of the Atlantic after there was a fire that some of the vehicles on there were EVs and they caught fire and it really exacerbated, it made a lot harder to put out the fire. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:28):
Sam, you wanna stick around for the top?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:30):
Unfortunately can't. I've gotta go run a couple of errands. No problem. So a great, I will talk to you next week. See

Leo Laporte (00:40:35):
You next week. Thanks. All right, bye bye. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Little bit of rock and roll. Little bit of what that would be a good song. Maybe I'm a little bit of a geek. You're a little bit of a nerd. <laugh>. Let's get together and start a ComicCon. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. Jay on the line from Columbia, South Carolina.

Caller 2 (00:40:59):
Hey, you doing Leo?

Leo Laporte (00:41:00):
Well, how are you?

Caller 2 (00:41:02):
I'm doing good. The long time listener. First time caller. I always enjoy listening to a lot of your different podcasts while I'm busy working and makes the day go by nicely. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:41:12):
Thank you. I hope we don't bore you over time. I'll try to keep it interesting.

Caller 2 (00:41:18):
<laugh> not at all. Makes the day go by quickly. Yeah good. My wife got a job in England and we're moving over there in a couple weeks.

Leo Laporte (00:41:26):
How exciting.

Caller 2 (00:41:28):
We're very excited about it but it's, it can be as short as three years, but if we could go longer, but all my family members have their phone numbers that they've had for quite a long time and we want to keep 'em when we return to the states and always trying to figure out the best way to do that. Can we port them to a Google Voice service?

Leo Laporte (00:41:55):
I wouldn't recommend it. You should ask the phone company that provides those numbers, if they'll put 'em on hold for you. Most of the time you could say, Look, I'm, I'm gonna be outta the country for three years. That's a long time. But ask if they'll hold those for you and then if they say, Wow, we can't guarantee it for three years, by the way, they may say we want those numbers, but from three years from now, I doubt they'll still, they'll want those numbers. But then you can do that. You can port, do international number reporting and the easiest way to do that is to do it to something like Google Voice or Twilio. So if you look for international number porting, you know, can't go. Obviously a US number with a US area code is not gonna work in jolly old, but there are, Right.

Leo Laporte (00:42:44):
You could port it to submit to various internet providers, but I'd first ask the phone company if they'd hold it for three years. A lot of times they hope to get you back. The other thing you should know is that almost in all likelihood you won't be using text messaging in the uk you'll be using WhatsApp. So you might as well get the family used to that. Especially the younger people probably don't care so much about phone numbers. They care about messaging and text messaging is big still in the US but almost everywhere else in the world. They use one of these internet messaging services like Facebook Messenger. In Japan they use line in the China, they use WeChat and most of the world uses WhatsApp. So

Caller 2 (00:43:30):
I

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
All over. Yeah, that's the other thing you'll notice is that the iPhone, which is much more dominant here is about 50% of the market here. Much less so in other countries. I don't know what it's like in the uk, but much less so internationally, lot more Android phones, a lot more Samsung phones in particular. Yeah. And that's that whole problem if you're an Apple user, if your friends aren't using iPhones they're a little bit of a disadvantage. That awful stinky green bubble or whatever it is. Blue bubble. So I would about in the uk, I'm just looking at some stats, 80% use WhatsApp. So that is by far the biggest. I do see, it's interesting some usage of FaceTime and iMessage, but FaceTime's only 30% of the market. iMessage is only 22% of the market. So the reason people use WhatsApp is for historic mostly because text messaging messaging used to be very expensive around the world. It was here too but it's now essentially free here. Still can be expensive worldwide. So they use WhatsApp because it's just data in and it's free. And by the way, it works great on Android and iOS. So if you can get your family members, especially the younger ones onto WhatsApp.

Caller 2 (00:44:59):
Yeah, we've used it before. We've one, my oldest stepdaughter went to Panama last year for school and we used WhatsApp to communicate with her.

Leo Laporte (00:45:09):
Exactly. We

Caller 2 (00:45:09):
We've been that a little

Leo Laporte (00:45:11):
Bit. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I think that that's probably the most practical shift. Yeah, go ahead.

Caller 2 (00:45:20):
Okay, so we want the phone company to hold our numbers, hopefully to hold.

Leo Laporte (00:45:26):
Yeah, call 'em up and see what their policy is. They all have a policy of and this is mostly for military, right? Very common. Somebody get deployed overseas and they will hold your number as you go overseas. And then when you come home you can get it back. Who's your carrier? Okay.

Caller 2 (00:45:43):
Verizon.

Leo Laporte (00:45:45):
Yeah, I would ask them. Different carriers have different, you, you're with a champagne price carrier, so I would hope that they would be good. They want you back. Right? They don't want you to come home and say, Ah, I don't need you anymore. So

Caller 2 (00:45:59):
Yeah, I called them, asked them if I canceled. We have five lines in our service. And just to hold one line for the oldest daughter who's finishing up college, she, she's gonna be here for another half semester. It was like $80 for one line. So last. Yikes. We heard 15 bucks a month.

Leo Laporte (00:46:19):
There you go. Smart. So I'm looking at the Verizon's page to hold your mobile number. We make your mobile number in active by suspending service for a maximum of three years and 90 days. Don't know why that number, but that might work out. Maybe that's a common period of time for deployment. I don't know. Well suspended your mobile number will not be able to obviously make or receive calls or access the Verizon Wireless network. You basically take that sim out of that phone. You're gonna be using wireless Verizon if you want calls to come in though, that's a good use of something like Google Voice or Twilio or True Call or there are a whole bunch of voice over internet systems that you port that number to. The problem is getting 'em back sometimes is tricky.

Caller 2 (00:47:00):
Okay. All right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:02):
So I'll put a link in the show notes to how to suspend and reconnect your Verizon wireless service for you three. If I'm telling you it's probably enough cuz after three years everybody's gonna go, Oh, nobody ever calls that number anyway. You've been gone long enough, they've forgotten about you. Don't <laugh>

Caller 2 (00:47:24):
Not

Leo Laporte (00:47:25):
Come back and have a new number. <laugh>. That's gonna be fun. What part of England are you gonna be in?

Caller 2 (00:47:31):
Kind of near two, about an hour and a half northeast of London near Cambridge. Kinda sounds

Leo Laporte (00:47:40):
Like fun. Sounds like an adventure. Family adventure.

Caller 2 (00:47:43):
Absolutely. Yeah. The kids are 13 and 16 and 20. So perfect age to be over there to travel.

Leo Laporte (00:47:50):
Although the 13 year old may not think so. Daddy, you're making me leave all my friends.

Caller 2 (00:47:55):
Exactly right. Exactly right.

Leo Laporte (00:47:58):
You know what, he or she will very much thank you in about 10 years.

Caller 2 (00:48:03):
Yeah, well on that note, I just got him a raspberry pie and I'm trying to load up, I think Pop os we were gonna try to load up on that thing to play Minecraft. He's a big Minecraft guy

Leo Laporte (00:48:18):
And I have a wonderful book recommendation Learning to program in Python using Minecraft from no starch press. Microsoft makes a special raspberry pie distribution that includes Minecraft at least they used to, I think they still do. And it has a special API for programming, which means he can write little Python programs and build towns in one keystroke and things like that. It's really fun. But yeah, this is great. In fact, that's how I started with a Minecraft server. I used to run a Minecraft server off the Raspberry Pie and then of course then I needed a bigger computer and I needed more memory more it pretty soon. But it's a great place to start.

Caller 2 (00:49:05):
Yeah, I was able to get him the Raspberry Pi for with the 64 bit. Nice. I able. So

Leo Laporte (00:49:11):
I don't know how That's amazing. Learn to program with Minecraft. No starch press. I don't know if he has any interest in programming, but if he ever wanted to get into programming, if you're already a Minecraft fan, this is the easiest way and it uses a Raspberry Pie. In fact, the book comes with the software and all of that stuff, so pretty cool. Okay. Pretty cool. Get 'em programming. So really what people don't, kids don't know is Minecraft is programming it. You're really learning about how blocks go together and cause effect and it, it's very much a kind of preschool for programmers. So 'em a good skill. Yeah, cuz you know what? Flipping hamburgers is not a living wage. <laugh> have a great time in jolly Old England. Thanks Jay. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. I'm amazed you were able to get a raspberry pie.

Caller 2 (00:50:07):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
Where did you get it?

Caller 2 (00:50:10):
Can I think? Was it a can kit?

Leo Laporte (00:50:12):
Oh, can kit. Yeah, they're good. Wow. Yeah, cuz that's been a huge supply chain problem.

Caller 2 (00:50:18):
I had to get the extreme kit was that eight gigs.

Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
That makes sense. They're just gonna prioritize. People are gonna buy a little more. That's good.

Caller 2 (00:50:30):
And it's got the aluminum enclosure, which is good for a 13 year old not to get it all dusty and whatnot. So good. That's great. We're pretty, and we're got hooked up through Monitor and trying to get it programmed right now. Nice. So the no starch press kit, is that where can I get that

Leo Laporte (00:50:52):
Online? Amazon. I put a link in the show notes. No starch.com/programming with Minecraft, but that has all the information to run Minecraft in this special Windows distribution.

Caller 2 (00:51:06):
Okay. All right. I, well, I use a Mac so I can download all that stuff and then put it on a,

Leo Laporte (00:51:14):
Well, that's on the Raspberry Pi. Yeah, you put it on the Raspberry Pi. Yeah. Yeah. Raspberry Pi comes with a raspy and which is a, Linux is a Debbie and Linux. So he's already using Linux with the default operating system for that.

Caller 2 (00:51:27):
And we tried to download Microsoft Minecraft for Raspberry Pie, but or for Linux, but we kept getting an error message with it. So

Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
Yeah, that's the Java version. But I would look at this, I hope it's not outdated, is it's seven years old. And I don't know if, I wonder, let me see here. If they still are offering the if Microsoft is, cuz they used to have a special distribution just for Raspberry Pie, not only with Minecraft, but also with a plugin that allows you to program it, which is what's really cool about this. Is he at all interested in that kind of thing?

Caller 2 (00:52:06):
Yeah, he does know a little bit. He took computers his first semester in school. Perfect. So he does know a little bit of the programming language, but he loves playing on the servers like murder mysteries and

Leo Laporte (00:52:18):
Oh, nice. Oh, that's

Caller 2 (00:52:20):
Great. Doing all that. Very good. He's very interested in programming and so hopefully this will get him primed and kickstart over there.

Leo Laporte (00:52:32):
They still offer the Minecraft pie edition, Microsoft does. It's called the Minecraft Pie edition. I have a brand racing articles from September. I will put also in the show us from the Raspberry Pie Foundation about how to run that. So yes, this is a little different than what you were doing. You're just trying to put a client so he could play Minecraft, but this is a whole nother level. He'll be running a server that he can then play from another computer on his Raspberry Pie server. He can program it. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do with it. It's really cool. Okay. Yeah, it's really cool. He's a really great gift for a 13 year old if you ask me. No, I'm not gonna give you a pc. I'm gonna give you a raspberry pie. You figure it out.

Caller 2 (00:53:22):
Yeah. Really. It's been kind of shy to get into it, but I think with this, maybe just intimidated by it, but I think with some,

Leo Laporte (00:53:34):
Well, that's the beauty of this. And he's probably gonna have a lot of alone time when you first move <laugh>. I hate to say it. This is the opportunity to jump on that where he's kind of just getting his feet. He doesn't yet have a lot of buddies that he can hang out with and stuff. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great opportunity. Yeah. Oh, you're gonna have so much fun. I'm very jealous. What a fun thing to do with the kids.

Caller 2 (00:53:59):
I'll have a pint and you're honor Leo when

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
Please do. <laugh>. That's awesome. Thanks Jay.

Caller 2 (00:54:05):
Yes, sir. All right, Byebye. Bye

Leo Laporte (00:54:08):
Bye.

Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
Well, hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, Time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphones, smart watches, all that jazz. The new pixel phone, if you wanna talk about it or the Pixel Watch, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is the phone number (888) 827-5536 to free from anywhere in the US or Canada outside of that area. You could still call, but you've gotta use Skype out or something that eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. Love to hear from you if you want to talk High Tech Pixel watch announced by Google this week. It's kind of funny, I have assumed that Google had made a watch before. They haven't. They made a watch operating system called Where os and a lot of other companies like Motorola and Fossil and others make watches with the Google operating system, but Google never made a watch.

Leo Laporte (00:55:17):
So it's a big deal. This new Pixel watch, they also announced the successor to the Pixel six phone. The Pixel seven, which really pretty much is at this point, we don't expect a whole lot from the next generation phone, right? I mean there a little thing here and there. They got a aluminum camera bump instead of a plastic camera bump, that kind of thing. It's pretty minor. Although I still think that probably, it's probably the case that the pixel phones of all the phones may have the best cameras. I mean it's all very close between Samsung's high end phones, Apple's, iPhones, and the Google phones. They're all pretty close. But the matter of millimeters difference. But I would say the Pixel phone could come out on the top. One of the places they've lagged behind a little bit is in video. Now the new phones will have all those same kind of video features that Apple has put into its iPhone.

Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
They should be just as good if, who knows, maybe even better for video. That's how minor difference there. What it's really comes down to more well, whose ecosystem you wanna live in. And that's what I, it became obvious at this Google event on Thursday this week. It's the ecosystem play. And Apple of course led the bunch by doing this. They make a phone, they make headphones, they make a watch, they make a tablet, they make a computer and everything works better if you buy them all. <laugh>. Just if you live in the Apple world with Apple's messages, Oh, don't use those. Those Android messages, Apple messages, Apple, everything. It just works better. Samsung's been doing the same thing with their Samsung phones. They do make computers, but they're not with a Samsung operating system. They're with Windows. But they do work very well with Windows. There's your phone app that runs on Windows that works pretty much exclusively with Samsung phones. It's supposed to work with all Android phones, but it really works a lot better with Samsung phones. They do have an operating system they call decks, but it's kind of a phone operating system that you could put on a big screen.

Leo Laporte (00:57:37):
And of course they have a watch and they have earbuds. So Samsung's got it. Google's got it. Apple's got it. And so now the choice is, well, whose world do you wanna live in? And I think Google's got a big problem since 2015. They've only sold 27 million phones. Now that seems like 27 million I'd take it. But I mean Apple sells more than that in a quarter. They Samsung sells more than that in a quarter, so it's a fraction. They're a distant third in the phone race. And that by itself makes it kind of harder to recommend a Google ecosystem. I mean, they do have some other things. For instance, they showed that if you get a Google tablet, you'll be able to mount it on a base and it'll turn it into what they already, something similar to what they already sell. The Google assistant photo frame, they call the Nest hub Max, which I like.

Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
It's a screen, it's got good speakers, you could talk to it, your little plastic P that you could put in the kitchen or the living room or the bedroom. You can make calls on it, that kind of thing. So they're expanding the eco, we call it an ecosystem play. And of course it's good for the companies if you only buy their products. Not so good for consumers. I hate to say I think it would be better if it was a more competitive environment, but really they figured out sometimes the business folks use the term silo where everything's in a silo. They figured out it's better to be, have a run a silo than it is to run something that's compatible with other things that's not as good. And Apple for a long time had to be compatible with windows and other things, but now they're so dominant they don't have to anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
And so it's better more money that way. In fact, it what they really focus on these days, all three of 'em, Samsung, Google, and Apple is not how many phones they sell, but AR p it's, they're big on arpu. Average revenue per user. See, you're only gonna buy a new phone every few years. They're only get, But if you buy the Google one plan or the Apple Plus plan, or I actually say Apple one plan as well, isn't it? I can't remember. Or the Samsung, I don't know what does Samsung have something some, And you get the music and you get the video and you get them and then they get your $15 a month every month. That's our P baby. And that's what the market Wall Street wants 'em to do. Market rewards, high revenue per user. So that's what they're doing. And of course it's the only way they can grow because they've pretty much saturated the market with phones.

Leo Laporte (01:00:25):
Everybody's got one. And for the most part, when you enter the ecosystem, it's very sticky. That sounds gross. I don't mean it that way. It's sticky because you can't, All your friends are in it, you're in it. Everything works together. Once you buy into Apple, Google or Samsung, you're pretty much gonna stay there. It's like laundry detergent. Once you become a Tide user, it's very unlikely you're gonna use cheer. They know that they want to get you early, get you young. And if you're a Coca-Cola drinker, you ain't gonna be drinking Pepsi If you're a Samsung user, Sorry Google. I think of all of the three Apple's got the really the strongest play. But Google's got some interesting stuff that Apple doesn't do. Like those assistance with a screen on them. They have doorbells now. They have cameras, they have a lot of home automation stuff Apple doesn't have. And Apple's Home Automation initiative Home Kit, it's been struggling a little bit. So it's not, it is a winner take all race, believe me, in the long run. I mean all three can, but one of them's gonna get big fast. And I think Apple's got the inside trap. But Google's trying to their credit now. They've got a watch. They're doing their best. Eighty, eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. Back to the phones. We go. Eric's on the line from Los Angeles. Hi Eric.

Caller 3 (01:01:46):
Hey Leo. Nice to talk to you.

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Nice to talk to you. Thanks for calling

Caller 3 (01:01:51):
<laugh>. This is a crazy Facebook question. In August, in the middle of the night while I was sleeping, my Facebook account gets hacked. Lovely. And I wake up and I get all these messages saying Sean, no unusual activity, blah, blah, blah. And I said, Of course, that's not me. And long story short, I retake my account.

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
Oh good. Congratulations.

Caller 3 (01:02:14):
But thank you on that. But the perp had violated terms and conditions by posting some, excuse me, posting something really bad.

Leo Laporte (01:02:24):
Oh no. And they're blaming you,

Caller 3 (01:02:27):
<laugh>. They disabled my account. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:02:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Caller 3 (01:02:30):
And <laugh>, of course, I requested a review instantly and for a month when I logged in, it just said, Review requested your accounts disabled or review is requested. But now it says, remember this was back in August, now it says Too much time has elapsed since your account has been disabled. It review cannot be.

Leo Laporte (01:02:57):
Holy cow.

Caller 3 (01:02:59):
So it's crazy. It's like, of course I've tried all the hack email addresses I've found through YouTube or whatever. And

Leo Laporte (01:03:07):
Let me tell you, this is a real problem. In fact, yesterday news came out that Facebook is warning a million users. They might have been hacked because there have been apps now on iOS and Android, 400 of them that are exist for one purpose only to steal your Facebook login. Maybe this is how you got your stolen, It looks like a photo editor or mobile game or something like that. You download it and it says, Oh, good sign in with Facebook. As many things do. Right? Except it's not a real sign in with Facebook, It's give us your Facebook login credential so we can sign in for you. And a million people have downloaded these apps now. And so you're in a line, You're in a long line, buddy. <laugh> in there isn't any answer. You don't, there's no recourse, there's no Supreme Court for Facebook either. There's nothing you can do, you're outta luck. Just

Caller 3 (01:04:06):
It seems that way. They're a private company that can do whatever they want.

Leo Laporte (01:04:10):
Right? And they have three and a half billion users. They really don't care. By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but Facebook stock is tanking. Facebook itself is facing some serious existential issues. It may not be around much longer. I know that sounds amazing to say. How could that be? These guys are completely dominant. Well, they're suffering. And this is just one more nail in the coffin, and I feel for you, we get calls all the time for people whose accounts have been hacked. That's why I was so pleased that you got it back, cuz that's rare <laugh>. But then, oh, maybe it wasn't such a good thing. <laugh>, I can't fix this for you. That and I, and I'm just sharing your pain. That's all I can say. Yeah, yeah.

Caller 3 (01:04:57):
You've done everything. It was some sort of other hack or

Leo Laporte (01:05:00):
Anything. No, there's no Supreme Court. No, I'm not. No higher authority. You can't appeal to

Caller 3 (01:05:06):
I, I've had this for 14 years and I don't consider myself like a Facebook social butterfly. But after all this time you realize how much stuff there part of your life is all the connections you had with people. And it's tragic

Leo Laporte (01:05:19):
That I

Caller 3 (01:05:19):
Know.

Leo Laporte (01:05:21):
Well, I think we've all learned something here,

Caller 3 (01:05:25):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
I don't know what it is we've learned, but I think we've learned something.

Leo Laporte (01:05:29):
I hope we've learned something. Yeah. I mean, not that I don't have any sympathy. I completely sympathize, but I just don't have an answer. And this is universal. Wow. And there's 1 million more people who just got emails from Facebook saying, Oh hey, by the way, your account might have been hacked. You're in a very popular group. Yeah. I don't know what you can do. I mean, keep trying. Don't give up. Don't be deterred by that announcement. You just explain to them, Well look, didn't trying to get this back for three months? You didn't respond. It's not my fault. Keep Pat it. Maybe, you know, got through once. That's amazing.

Caller 3 (01:06:08):
Yeah, back in August. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:10):
I'm so sorry. It sucks. Yeah. And it's just a lesson for all of us. If you're putting stuff in Facebook, make copies Save it your not friend graph and all that stuff. If you're not on Facebook, you won't be able to reach those people on Facebook. I just missed stuff because I'm not on Facebook. I was just told there was a big reunion of the radio station in San Francisco I worked at that just went out of business and I missed it. Cuz where did they announce it on Facebook?

Caller 3 (01:06:43):
<laugh>. And probably everyone there was probably at least 50 years old.

Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
Well, I'm older than them, but I still am not on Facebook. I could tell you right now, and you're right, the youngers, the younger people, they're not on Facebook anymore. Actually my kids are on Facebook cuz they see the value of it. There really is how you communicate. My daughter's an aspiring standup comic. Where do you promote your appearances? Facebook. That's where you do it. So it's a huge value. I don't know. I don't what we can do about this. There is a bill in Congress I, that'll make any difference. Call about interoperability. The idea that your data should be portable and movable to another site. There should be a new Facebook, Facebook too that should be run better and you could move all your stuff to there. And I don't think a law will change that. But that's the motivation behind the law. And I think that that is a reasonable motivation. It's a real problem. I was talking about silos. These are silos. They're locked in. And if you should, and this is true, Google, Facebook, every account you have at their whim, they can kill you and there's no recourse.

Caller 3 (01:07:55):
Yeah. Sorry. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, it's not like this, you know, can contact an attorney or something. No private company can do whatever they

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
Want. Right? There's literally zero recourse. I all I could do is commiserate. I'm sorry Eric. That's That stinks. That stinks, man. 88. 88. Ask Leo, I'm sorry Guy. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Chris Marwar photo guy coming up. More of your calls too. I wish there were some wish were a magic bell. I could ring, but there isn't

Laura (01:08:32):
For sure that Chris is

Laura (01:08:33):
Here.

Leo Laporte (01:08:36):
I see a smiling face right now. Oh yay. That's how sure I am. Hi Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:08:42):
Hi there. How's

Leo Laporte (01:08:43):
It going? Welcome back. We missed you my friend.

Chris Marquardt (01:08:45):
Yeah, so sorry for the show and short notice. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:08:48):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Chris Marquardt (01:08:49):
Everything happens at the

Leo Laporte (01:08:51):
Same time. Always, always, always. Okay. It's fine. No, you do us a service by being here. It would be cheerless of me to complain if you know have

Chris Marquardt (01:09:02):
Well I wanna be dependable though.

Leo Laporte (01:09:05):
I'm not dependable. Why should you be <laugh>?

Chris Marquardt (01:09:09):
Thanks for making me feel better. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
No. Glad to be back. It's quite fine. But yeah, we miss you. I'm not saying we don't miss you. We do, but that's always okay for you to take time off. We'll talk in 10

Chris Marquardt (01:09:22):
Will

Leo Laporte (01:09:22):
Do I have an email or anything I need to do?

Chris Marquardt (01:09:26):
You have an email but you don't need to do anything.

Leo Laporte (01:09:27):
That's the kind of email I like. Thank you sir.

Chris Marquardt (01:09:31):
Assignment review. Assignment

Leo Laporte (01:09:33):
Review coming up. Leo Laporte, the tech guy, not a drag. I hope 88. It is a drag though. When Facebook account <laugh>, Facebook might be a drag. When Facebook closes your account for activity you didn't do because somebody hacked your account. Holy cow. What a mess. What do people do? I guess what's my advice? I look, I'm not gonna say don't use Facebook. I don't. I abandoned Facebook. I thought Facebook was great. Really did. I mean, at least in principle, the idea that you could connect with family and friends, stay in touch, share photos, share your life. That's great. That's a brilliant idea. It's not what Facebook is anymore. Thanks to the news feed. You don't see everything Aunt Matilda posts. You see a bunch of other stuff that you didn't necessarily wanna see cuz the algorithm knows that you're not gonna stay online as long if it's just cousin Fred and Aunt Matilda. You're gonna move on. You're gonna read their posts and then go somewhere else. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna feed you extreme content that you will go, I what? I'm outraged. I'm mad. So I would get upset when we faced, we get upset. So I just said this isn't good. And I just abandoned my account and the pictures I'd posted there over the years and the friends in the connections because it's not what Facebook was supposed to be and it's not what I wanted it to be.

Leo Laporte (01:11:07):
Facebook does allow you to back up your stuff, download your stuff. But I know that's weak sauce because there's nothing like else like Facebook you can be on. A lot of families are starting to do, and I think this is interesting as a solution, they're starting to create their own private groups on sites like Discord. That's free. Discord is a, well it was originally started as a way for gamers to chat together, but really it's great. We have a Discord group for our club members. We have a little club for seven bucks a month for our podcast listeners and they go into the Discord and they can chat with each other, they can talk. It's great. And you could do that with your family. One of our podcast hosts Sam Pruitt he has family. He's fr, he's from South Carolina. His family in North Carolina's moved out here to California. His family has a Slack group that's another messaging app mostly used in business. But it turns out the free version of Slack gives you all the features you'd want. And it's like a mini Facebook, but it's just your family just invited family and friends. I think that might be, we can't really know, really measure how common that is. But I think more and more that gives you what you originally joined Facebook for. The problem is there's no discoverability. Somebody has to be invited in to participate in that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Hurst in our chat room says we have a family Zoom meeting every weekend. Yeah, we we've done that for sure. That would be another thing you might wanna do in something like Discord where Discord has video, you could have group meetings periodically and stuff. I just feel like they're better platforms but they're not universal. I don't know what the answer is. Social offers so much but it also hurts. Chris, Mark, am I mellow? Do I seem mellow to you? Well wait, do I drink this Chris in Miami Cup of coffee and maybe I won't seem so mellow.

Leo Laporte (01:13:15):
I'm pretty mellow. I'm a mellow fellow. Early on in my career they said you have a voice for fm. You can't do AM radio. Do you think I have a Laura? I have a voice for fm. I shouldn't be on the AM band <laugh>. Well, but I'm on AM radio so I should be talking like this. I should be talking like Bill handle. Very excited. But I do I say this more like that's Line Skinner agenda coming up just around the corner. What a shade of pale. We're gonna take a 24 hour nonstop music block right here on Yeah. Love kcrw. The great public radio station there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:14):
Yeah. That was Beethoven's ninth Symphony in B Major Oprah six <laugh>. We're really dancing to Steve Iki tonight. So sit back, smoke a dobie and rock out. Not a Dobie. We don't say that anymore. That's from my era. Smoke a blunt and relax. Grab a bull. Let's have some Red Bull baby. A bowl. Oh yes. Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side please. Oh, before we go. Our show today brought to you quite literally by Cash Fly. Cash Fly is our cdn, our content delivery network. And it's amazing. How do I know? Cuz for 10 years, if it weren't for Cash Fly, there would be no twi, no Tech Guy deliver. Now you can do video with Cash Fly. This is really cool. They call it their ultra low latency video streaming. Deliver your video with Cash Fly. You get the best throughput, the best Go Global Reach.

Leo Laporte (01:15:33):
Your content is practically infinitely scalable and you can go live almost immediately within hours instead of days. And the latency sub one second that says Live As Live could be ditch that unreliable web RTC solution for their socket. Live video workflow can scale to millions of users so easy to set up. You'll dramatically increase your sites and application speed for global audiences. It's one of the reasons we use cashflow because when you download a show, you're downloading it from a server that's near you. They have 50 points of presence all over the globe. So you get that show from somewhere nearby. That means faster, better performance. And because they're multiple, they use multiple sources. Very, very reliable. In fact, over the last 12 months, Cash Fly has had a hundred percent availability, 100% there. Multi cdn. So that gives you redundancy and failover. It intelligently balances your traffic across multiple providers.

Leo Laporte (01:16:37):
So you get the shortest route and the zero performance glitches. It's been really fantastic for us. And partly that's also cause of the Cash Life support guys. So good 24 7 support response times and less than an hour. You can reduce your origin server bills if you're using S3 or whatever by using ized storage optimization system. I know we use this, it reduces bandwidth because you store your content on ized servers. So your cash hit ratio is now a hundred percent, no more misses. That's a huge benefit. And of course Cash Fly has something for everybody. Besides ultra low latency video streaming the storage optimization system for games, you get lightning fast gaming, faster downloads, zero lag glitches or outages. If you got a website, you'll love their mobile content optimization. It automatically and simply gives you image optimization, which means your site will load faster on any device 10 times faster than traditional methods on six continents.

Leo Laporte (01:17:42):
Cash flies 30% faster than other major CDNs with a 98% cash hit ratio. And as I said, a hundred percent availability over the past year. Cash fly. Take advantage of their 24 7 365 priority support. They're always there when you need 'em. They've been so great for us. I just want to share it with you two. Find out more@cachefly.com. As I say every show bandwidth for the tech guys provided by Cash Fly at CAC e f y.com. Thank you. Cash fly. Now back to the program. It's time to talk photography with everybody's favorite photographer, Chris Mark Hart, my personal photo sensei@sensei.photo. A great professional photographer who's written so many books and workshops and just does a great job kind of communicating about photography. Joins us every week to do this Wine. Wine. Chris, it's great to see you again.

Chris Marquardt (01:18:39):
Wine. Wine. It's so good to be back. How are you

Leo Laporte (01:18:41):
Doing? I am great. What is the topic of the day today?

Chris Marquardt (01:18:46):
Well, the topic of the day is the assignment that was started. E

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
We're gonna do

Chris Marquardt (01:18:53):
Remember

Leo Laporte (01:18:54):
The

Chris Marquardt (01:18:54):
E assignment. Here we go. And we have well I've taken four four actually today instead of just three out of the 35 that we're submitted depicting.

Leo Laporte (01:19:11):
Oh, these are scary. This is perfect. You did this randomly from the fishbowl and yet it's perfect for spooky month. October is spooky month.

Chris Marquardt (01:19:18):
Well, not too many Halloween references in here, but let's get started with one that well, okay, so T TL Volkman submitted a picture titled A bold ending. And initially I thought, what is evil about this? But then, okay, so what we're seeing here is a very interesting light phenomenon that happens when the sun sets and there are clouds over you. And these are kind of darkish looming clouds. But then there's an opening that the sun can hit the clouds from below. So what we're seeing is clouds that are skimmed by warm red sunlight from below. So it looks almost like a well, so kind of a hellish scenario.

Leo Laporte (01:20:10):
I think it looks like a peaceful easy evening, but okay, I'll take it. Well yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:20:16):
I like the color scheme and the life phenomenon. I'm totally in love with what the sun can do to clouds if it comes from the direction that you're expected to come from. So yeah, it's really quite beautiful. If anything, it's a beautiful picture. Second one is by Doug Bba

Leo Laporte (01:20:36):
And Nevermore the Raven. Wow. This

Chris Marquardt (01:20:40):
Is a crow sitting on a headstone in a cemetery. And for some reason crows crows are associated with the dark and the evil and their swell. And then we have a cemetery. And the things I like about this, apart from it having that evil vibe is that it is back lit. So what you see in this photo is the light just skimming the side of the crow a bit and the headstones, but the side that you're looking at is in the dark and that gives it that silhouette look and that stylized look. And it's a really good fit. It's a very good fit for the subject.

Leo Laporte (01:21:26):
It's evil. This is good. Well done. Yeah, that's really, God

Chris Marquardt (01:21:29):
Is totally evil. Yeah. Nailed it. The last one took me, Yeah, the third one took me a second by Alex Zaki titled Just Like Clockwork. And what we're seeing is a scene looks like New York City and there's a ad on a wall by Gucci and they pick a character from Clockwork Orange. If you've seen that movie, there's something super severely evil about

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
That movie. Yeah, they're all his Drs are sitting in the milk bar ready, getting ready for an evening of VUL Ultra violence. Are they wearing Gucci clothes? Is that what makes this a Gucci? Well

Chris Marquardt (01:22:10):
I think that's happening. I'm not sure, but there, there's certainly a character that looks like Alex from that movie and another character that I don't think has anything to do with that

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
Movie. Oh, the guy on the right ISN isn't from the movie he's wearing Gucci.

Chris Marquardt (01:22:25):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:22:26):
How interest and

Chris Marquardt (01:22:27):
Interesting. Well they're both holding a glass of milk and the right hat and the right makeup and so there, yeah, there's something evil about this

Leo Laporte (01:22:38):
Ad

Chris Marquardt (01:22:38):
Using that as an ad.

Leo Laporte (01:22:40):
This have been better if he'd zoomed come in a little more, walked a little closer. I don't cuz you can't really see this center of attention.

Chris Marquardt (01:22:49):
Well, yes and no. I mean it is very much in the middle and it of course also sets the whole scene by including context. I typically like photos with context and in our context of evil, it does make sense to have this a bit a wider shot cuz

Leo Laporte (01:23:09):
Yeah. Yeah cuz you wanna see the street scene and all that. It's a street

Chris Marquardt (01:23:12):
Photographer. I, I've chosen one bonus photo by Rex Bby which he gets extra points. Extra bonus points for effort because what Rex did is he has set up <laugh> four screens in front of his himself. It's

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Very funny.

Chris Marquardt (01:23:35):
Quotes with headlines with subjects from spam males and one screen saying spam is evil and it has the usual amm Nigerian prints with a special request and the bio 5 cents a bill.

Leo Laporte (01:23:50):
I agree with him a hundred percent

Chris Marquardt (01:23:53):
I must. And then he put himself in the photo. So this is like there he put some real effort into this and that gets a bonus point for sure. So spam is evil. I think we can all agree.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
So we have from Scooter X one of our chat mods in our discord the explanation of that Gucci ad. Gucci has been doing shots from scary movies in their ad campaign, including one from The Shining actually it's all Stanley Kubrick. That's what it is in common. Ah. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut all Stan Stanley Kubrick movies with Fashion Week 2022 outfits added.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:41):
I see. That just gets, now it makes a lot more sense. Yeah, I don't know. Makes a lot more sense. I

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
Don't know if it makes sense to you. I guess it's fashion. What are you gonna say? High fashion is a little strain.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:53):
Well, if fashion doesn't only makes limited sense to me, but I know Stanley Kubrick and his movie, so I

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
Love Stanley Kubrick

Chris Marquardt (01:24:59):
Movie. That's where it comes together. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
So this is Simon thing we do on a monthly basis. Chris comes up with a topic, he's got his big fishbowl there, ready to pull an adjective out of the fishbowl. And it's just an incentive to get you out there taking pictures. Doesn't matter if you do it with a fancy camera or a camera phone, but you wanna illustrate a word or concept. What? Pick the word out there Mr. I think the evil was really interesting that that's the one you came up with for how?

Chris Marquardt (01:25:28):
Oh, this one. This one's a good one. Oh, this one's a good one. We have mysterious.

Leo Laporte (01:25:34):
Oh, even another

Chris Marquardt (01:25:36):
Hal. That's a nice fit for this month. Yeah. Mysterious.

Leo Laporte (01:25:40):
So how does this work? Well, you go out and take pictures. That's really how it works. The whole point of the exercise when you find one that really says mysterious to you, really expresses that. Upload it to flicker.com. It's a free photo sharing site we use and love. We're both pro members, but you don't have to be participate. And then submit it to the tech guy group. Make sure you tag it. Tg, mysterious TG for Tech guy and mysterious for the subject. That way our moderator, Marinna Silverman will know that you mean this for our assignment and one month's. Hence we'll give you about four weeks, right around November, early November. Chris will pick a few to talk about on the radio. So you'll get a little notoriety. But that's all your only reward. Your reward is going out and taking pictures, right?

Chris Marquardt (01:26:32):
Absolutely, Absolutely. How

Leo Laporte (01:26:34):
Come now? I don't participate often. A occasionally I'll upload a picture cuz I don't wanna have an in with the judge. And you don't participate, just mean do you think behind the scenes. I'm gonna take some mysterious picture. I do that, I'm gonna take some pictures. But

Chris Marquardt (01:26:51):
Yeah, of course it sets a mood, it sets the feeling of going into photography and it makes it a bit more of a deliberate thing to take pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:27:01):
I love mysterious cuz that could be a lot of things. And I love the idea of creating a composition with some mystery in it. That's gonna be interesting. All right. Get out there. It doesn't matter if it's your Pixel or your iPhone or your Samsung or your dslr, your fancy Cannon and Nikon or your Fuji or your Om one. Whatever it is, go out, take a picture or to submit him and we'll talk about it in a month. And Chris will be back next week to talk photography. Thank you. Oh, and Chris Sensei photo for all this good stuff. Mysterious last night would've been a good time to take a mysterious picture of the full Moon more. All right, sir.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:51):
All right,

Leo Laporte (01:27:51):
Thank you so very and we'll see you next week. Unless you know, wanna go visit the folks or whatever.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:59):
I, I'll had my vacation. Unless

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
You're in the mood to visit bar, you know, Go ahead. When are you doing? I'm telling you, the one I really wanna do is Bhutan,

Chris Marquardt (01:28:11):
That is still somewhere in the discussion, but it's complic do not have date.

Leo Laporte (01:28:21):
Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:28:21):
It is very complicated right

Leo Laporte (01:28:23):
Now. Well just, it's very count on me when you're going to Bhutan Lisa and I'll join you.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:28):
Well, I'll be doing the Eastern European photo road trip next year.

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
Yeah, that might be fun. So that might be fun.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:36):
Is that is going to be fun. Small Eastern Europe.

Leo Laporte (01:28:38):
A little risky right now, but okay. It might be fun.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:42):
You know, it doesn't matter if you're a few hundred miles closer or right further away. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:28:50):
You're used to it. Yeah, you're used to it. You figure is there. In Germany, the people, are they aware of the madman and the war and the risk? Of

Chris Marquardt (01:29:00):
Course. You kidding? Of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course. There's a lot of discussion around that. There's a lot of discussion around supporting Ukraine with weapon deliveries and that kind of stuff. Right. There's like it's all over the news, unfortunately. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
All right, Chris, stay safe.

Chris Marquardt (01:29:21):
It is what it is right now.

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
Yep. Build that bomb shelter and we'll talk to you next week.

Chris Marquardt (01:29:26):
Will do. See then. See you. Bye.

Leo Laporte (01:29:36):
Oh, you're good. Oh, you're very good. Leo Laporte, the to guy, a tech guy. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number if you wanna talk high tech. I'm here for you. We're gonna talk space with Rod Pilot about an hour. Lots to talk about there. Als on the line from Vista, California. Hi Al.

Caller 4 (01:29:57):
Hi Leo. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more about what you said about Facebook. I think they're kind of getting caught in, or the leader is this metaverse thing that

Leo Laporte (01:30:08):
They are, they've abandoned, but I think it's interesting. Did who abandoned whom? It may be, I think Mark Zuckerberg sees this as their future,

Caller 4 (01:30:17):
But to get to a holograph or Star Trek type could, it probably will never arrive. What I've seen of it, it's like cartoonish figures. I agree. It's ridiculous. A wait time waster. And they should stick to their fixing their main platform. And

Leo Laporte (01:30:33):
I couldn't agree that. Think,

Caller 4 (01:30:35):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:30:35):
I think Mark is all in love with the metaverse because of science fiction, et cetera. But I think you're right. They're spending 10 billion a year. They have more than 10,000 employees working on it. <laugh>, the funny story this week is that their metaverse horizon worlds is so bad that even Facebook's employees are bar barely using it. <laugh>, I heard that.

Caller 4 (01:30:59):
So I agree with your negative opinion. But the other question is on the Twitter Elon Musk deal, he overpaid I,

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
Oh, that's why he is trying to get out of it. He, because 44 billion, well, $54 of 20 cents a share is so much more than Twitter's worth that he 30, I think he had cold feet almost instantly and has been trying to get out of it. The question is why he changed his mind this week and said, Alright, I'll buy, Alright, all right, I'll buy it. Either he's trying to delay it, which he did he successfully delayed the trial? I think so. Or he feels like he's gonna lose anyway. I think my suspicion is it's getting embarrassing for him because in the process of discovery, as before a trial, both sides get to get documents from the opposing side. And in the process discovery, we've seen all these direct messages to Elon that are highly embarrassing. And he was about to do a deposition on Thursday, I think he didn't wanna do that. And I think the real smoking gun is that it's thought there might have been messages between him and the Twitter whistle blower Peter Zko before he whistle blew like maybe Elon incited him to do it, which would be criminal now. Now you're really getting in trouble. So maybe all of those combined and he said, Fine, fine, fine, I'll pay. The question is, will the banks, his lenders agree they're gonna lose their shirts on this deal?

Caller 4 (01:32:24):
Or Larry Ellison, Ellison,

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
2 billion Ellison put in.

Caller 4 (01:32:29):
And that's, Plus he pulls out, Well, must go ahead. I don't know. So

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
Well he could be compelled to, in which case he's gotta sell a lot of Tesla stock

Caller 4 (01:32:38):
So Tesla could fall also. I mean that's right,

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
Tesla. That's right. It's what people are bored with it or hate it. And I understand cuz it's just so crazy. But it is quite a fascinating soap opera, <laugh>. I

Caller 4 (01:32:49):
Mean, it sure is. It's very interesting. Okay, thank you, Leo. Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
It. Okay. Thank you Al. I appreciate it. Well, I

Caller 4 (01:32:55):
Have a little more, Yeah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:32:56):
Go ahead. You got it. Something else. Go ahead. Yes.

Caller 4 (01:32:58):
So I guess you'd say don't buy Tesla or Facebook or Twitter at the company.

Leo Laporte (01:33:06):
Well, you know, you'd be crazy to listen to me for stock advice. I'll say that right up front. And I certainly aren't, I'm never gonna give you stock advice. No I don't invest in tech stock mostly for editorial credibility. I don't want you to think that I'm making money or losing money based on my No.

Caller 4 (01:33:22):
Well, let me ask you about Twitter itself. What do you think about, I'm bothered by the Twitter policing and hacking and bots as much. Does that bother you? I mean, do you have a Twitter account or have you

Leo Laporte (01:33:35):
Yeah, no, I've been, I was, I was a very early user of

Caller 4 (01:33:39):
Twitter. Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
And in fact, in 2006, I was the number one most followed person on Twitter with a whopping 5,000 followers at the time that put me number one. And then this guy named Ashton Kucher came along and took over the role and then a guy named Barack Obama really clobbered me. And so I only have about half a million followers, which is a respectable number of followers. Who knows how many of those are real? That's not really the issue. I have some bots on Twitter that post links and things. Bots aren't necessarily spam. They could just be automated tweets.

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
I think with Twitter, the people I know who love Twitter, and most of them are people like me in the tech tech journalism business, right? Because it's a very fast, reliable signal of information, especially stories about tech. And you create your own Twitter by following who you follow. So you don't have to see something you don't wanna see if you follow somebody. That's interesting. But at the same time, Twitter has been a platform for a lot of negative things because it is open and it's very easy to create an account. It's very difficult to control the content on Twitter. So there's all sorts of junk on there as well.

Caller 4 (01:35:01):
Plus they have difficulty in monetizing the content. I mean, that's the problem. Haven't

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
Been able to, As I said, I don't give stock advice, but I would tell you this, the reason there's some interest in Elon and what he might be doing with Twitter is because he may have a vision for where Twitter could go that exceeds what current management, Current management has struggled for years to make any money on it to grow it. It's just been failing. It's just been what it is for years. But he has this notion, which he's already tweeted about, of taking Twitter as the beginning, the backbone for what he calls everything app in China, they have an app called WeChat, which is used for everything from buying train tickets to getting the news. It's, it is, you live in WeChat. I hear if you're in China, can such an app exist in the us? There's lots of reasons to think it might not.

Leo Laporte (01:35:55):
But remember, investors are looking for the next big thing. So if an investor, how is Uber getting money from investors? They've never made money. They've lost hundreds of millions of dollars every year because people think, well, it's possible that they have a glimmer of an idea about how the future's gonna be, and we're gonna take a chance. A lot of these big investors, venture capitalist and stuff, know they're gonna lose money on nine outta 10 investments. They're looking for one big hit. So he may be able to raise money against this notion of turning Twitter into the Everything app. If he succeeds billions, it's worth 10 times what it's selling for. If he fails, well, he really kind of know where so than you are today, which is

Caller 4 (01:36:37):
We, we'll see if the financing comes through that, that it's up and

Leo Laporte (01:36:41):
No, that's a lot of questions. I think that he was getting the sense that the Delaware Court was going to rule against him and force him to buy it. And so he said, I'd rather do this on my own terms and not have all this stuff exposed. And so he said, All right, all right. But

Caller 4 (01:36:57):
Well, I think what he's hoping is maybe Twitter will come back and say, Okay, we'll sell for 40 or 30. No,

Leo Laporte (01:37:02):
No, Twitter said you have a deal. We want 44 billion. And Elon said, Okay, I'll do the deal. So now we're just waiting to see there's still some negotiation that has to happen. We're we,

Caller 4 (01:37:15):
Final comment, this everything app that he's thinking about he'll have competitors. I'm sure Facebook will try to get in on an Everything app and some of the other, It wouldn't be only him that would be trying that

Leo Laporte (01:37:30):
They already have been many attempts. Well, they have, Yeah, that's what Facebook wanna do with Messenger. That's why they added payments. Apple has definitely hinted that that's the kind of thing they'd like to do with messages. Google

Caller 4 (01:37:40):
Probably too. Okay, thank you, Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:37:41):
You're welcome. It's a different world than China obviously. I don't think I need to tell you that most people agree that the market conditions that made WeChat so successful in China do not exist in the United States. And the notion of creating an everything app. And the thing is, don't, What we don't really ever know is what's going on in his head. We know it's <laugh> a toss salad in there, but we don't really know, is he playing 12 dimensional chess or is he just losing his marbles? It's unclear. And I'll give you a scenario, it's possible he knows perfectly well that Twitter is a money loser. That the only way he's gonna be able to get the money short of him selling stock, which he really doesn't want to do, is to convince people, whether he believes it or not, that he can turn it into a money maker.

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
He's been saying this all along, I know how to make Twitter financially successful. And yeah, he has a track record. So he may in his heart of heart say, Yeah, this is ridiculous. But if he can convince this is how it works, enough people to give him money, Hey, he's golden. Leo Laporte the tech guy. Well hey, hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here I am your tech guy for the remaining hour of this program. 88. 88. Ask Leo is my phone number if you wanna talk about tech. And we cover the waterfront. Everything from, what the heck is Elon Musk thinking <laugh> to what's good about the new Google Watch to how do I get my printer working again? Or why did Facebook cancel my account? All of that. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. Things we talk about, links and so forth.

Leo Laporte (01:39:31):
Appear at the website. The show notes are@techguylabs.com. That's free. There's no sign up, there's no login. It's just you go wander in. You'll see all the shows there. This is episode 1934. By the end of the day today, we should have links to all the things I've mentioned, but we in the couple of days, should have audio from the show and video from the show. So if you miss a show, you can see it there. We'll also have a transcript of the show. So if you said, Well, I knew he talked about this, how do you know? Where do I find that? Search the transcript. It has time codes. It should be very easy for you to find that. All of that is available@techguylabs.com. While you're there, if you don't mind a little self-promotion, you'll be on our podcast site twi.tv this week in tech.tv. And there are a lot of other shows. If for the geek inclined or the geek curious, that's okay too about Mac, Windows security, all the tech news, all of that. It's all there. So tech guy labs.com, come on in, hang out for a while, browse around, be. We'll be talking. We have been talking in the chat room about Apple.

Leo Laporte (01:40:42):
Normally in October. They would usually have an event. They did the iPhone event, the iPhone Apple Watch event. But they have lots of other products, including Macintosh products and iPad products. And they didn't talk about last month. And usually they'd have an event. One of the big Apple rumor guys, Mark Erman says, not because of a source, but just his own nogging up there. I don't think they're gonna do event do. It's not a big deal. I completely disagree with Mark. I think there will be an event because why not Apple, <laugh> Apple, these Apple events get garner millions of views. They get so much attention. You get the press talking about you, you get people talking about you. It's a big ad and it's basically free. All you have to do is make a video. Apple's got enough money to make the video and I would submit they have enough products because this is almost certainly this month, unless they can't get these out for some reason, cuz the supply chain or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
But almost certainly this month, they'll announce a new iPad Pro, They'll announce a new iPad. They'll announce new Macintosh computers, MacBook Pros, 14 and 16 inches perhaps an iMac. They certainly will have a preview of the Mac, very, very highest end. They'll talk about their M two chips. I know they released computers in the spring with M two chips, but they will talk about the M two PRO and the M two max. They haven't talked about those yet. Perhaps even an M two Ultra. It's a chance for them to sell this whole area, whole line. There's other things too to talk about. The Apple tv, the home pods, they may have announcements in those areas too. So we've only, I think, scratched the surface of Apple's products with the iPhone and the Apple Watch and the Air Pods. That was last month. This month we should have an event when, well, let's see, Google had its event Thursday, October 6th, announced the Pixel seven phone and the Pixel watch this Wednesday the 12th.

Leo Laporte (01:42:44):
Microsoft's gotta have an event talking about their new surface tablets and perhaps other products as well as rumors. They will talk about a Surface Studio three, that's their desktop computer that I really like. Beautiful screen. So it won't be this week. And we would've heard by now, if it was gonna be this week, I think the best time to do this for Apple is a week from Tuesday, October 18th. If I'm right, you'll see the apple, the tame apple press announce. Oh, we got our invitations probably this Tuesday, Monday. Tuesday. Oh, we got our invitations. They also have to release their new Macko West Ventura. There's a lot to talk about. I have no concern in my mind that Apple will have an event. I think that's gonna happen. So just a little heads up. The other reason it's good to mention is if you are in the market for an Apple product, that it's not an iPhone.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
Apple watcher, AirPods, wait, don't buy. This would be a bad time to buy a Mac or an iPad. Wait and see what they announce for two reasons. One, they may announce something new that you want and if they don't, reason number two, they'll probably drop the prices and the older stuff. In fact, we're already seeing some price drops. A hundred dollars price drop, for instance, on the headphones, the AirPods Max, AirPods Pro Max, I don't know what they call 'em, They ridiculously priced at $550. You can get 'em for four 50. Now usually that means we're close to maybe an update. That's usually what that means. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Let's go to Kelly on the line from nfi, California. Hi Kelly.

Caller 5 (01:44:25):
Well, seven three. Leo, how are you

Leo Laporte (01:44:27):
Today? Seven three to an amateur radio operator. How are you? I'm great. W six T W T on the line here.

Caller 5 (01:44:34):
And W six K l y.

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
Very nice to meet you. K L Y. So that's

Caller 5 (01:44:40):
K L y? Yes,

Leo Laporte (01:44:41):
For Kelly. Kelly is perfect, obviously. I love that. Yeah. What's up Kel?

Caller 5 (01:44:46):
Okay, so I've got a grounding issue here in the house. Obviously I'm a ham radio operator. You can see my setup@qrz.com. I'm also a 40 year studio musician as a pretty Sable home studio.

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
Awesome.

Caller 5 (01:45:05):
So I just moved into New house, finally have the studio up and running. And the other day I went to record for the first time. And this will lead obviously to the third part, which I think is going to be the issue. But the reason why I'm calling the laptop that I'm working on running my dog and I use pro tools based software for my dog. As soon as I went to start to record, I just got this massive, massive cycle. Hum. Now on my rack gear, I use an ed tech Hum X. I'm also using a line conditioner distro system for the power distribution system for all the rack here. When I went to unplug the laptop from its power supply, it seemed to just disappear, even though I've got that running through an isolated EB tech. Hum. How

Leo Laporte (01:46:06):
Interesting.

Caller 5 (01:46:07):
Directly into the wall.

Leo Laporte (01:46:08):
So the hum only appears the 60 hertz only appears when the laptops plugged in.

Caller 5 (01:46:15):
Yes. And that's gonna go to the second part of the running a ham radio station is obviously going to blow this all apart. I have solar on the roof in this house. Now obviously I didn't have that when I was living in the apartment that I used to have, but now I'm wondering if that is the cause of the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
But when you unplug the laptop, it goes away.

Caller 5 (01:46:45):
It does.

Leo Laporte (01:46:47):
So it sounds like the laptop or more likely the laptop power supply is the source

Caller 5 (01:46:52):
Of, Well, now isolating the laptop, I'm using an audio system, ground loop isolator. It's a specific module that's designed to go in between the laptop

Leo Laporte (01:47:02):
That should take care of and

Caller 5 (01:47:03):
My rack gear, but doesn't, basically I'm running three line conditioners and isolators. Wow. And I just cannot track this down. It's driving me nuts.

Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
You. Yeah. I mean a lot more about this than I do. And it sounds like you've done everything. One thing I would point out is if there's interference coming from the power supply and the laptop, it doesn't necessarily go into the plug where all that isolation is. It could be emanating from the wire. So make sure that could be leaking into your system completely outside of where it's plugged in. Right? So make sure you don't have mic cables sitting next to, or any kind of cabling sitting next to the power supply mate. Kind of isolate that as best you can. Maybe even put a choke, maybe even put a choke on it. So you've isolated what's coming into the receptacle, the plug socket. But that isn't necessarily the only source of the noise. Laptops too, remember, hard to believe. But 20 years ago when we first started getting gigahertz processors, people at the hams especially were very concerned because they are now getting operating at close to the frequencies that we use in radio.

Leo Laporte (01:48:17):
And there was always concerned that there'd be interference coming from not the power supply, but for the microprocessors in these things. So yes, it could be from, of course, it could be from anything. And those, as you know, those solar panels, we have 60 on our house and they come into a big inverter and a big box. And of course there could be a ton of interference coming out of that. So I wouldn't rule that out. Sounds like you've done a lot of the things, but it could, I very well be just weird emanations from the brick, the power brick and that aren't getting

Caller 5 (01:48:53):
Yeah, it's gotta be something. Because when I'm running the guitar gear, I've got massive amounts of stage pedals that I use with the guitar. I don't get that from any of that. I don't get that from the electronic mesh VD drums. I don't get it from the base rig. I don't get it using vocals, the keyboards. It's just weird that it's just seems to be the laptop now that buzz is coming across in the recording.

Leo Laporte (01:49:21):
Yeah. How annoying.

Caller 5 (01:49:24):
And especially when you're doing studio work, everything is in headphones. I've got a 5,000 WA home PA for for doing final mix backs. But inside of the headphones the slightest amount of buzz or cycling it rings through and it kicks up space. When you're recording, you're always looking for space in the speaker. Everything has its own speaker. You

Leo Laporte (01:49:48):
Want it to be airy and open. You don't

Caller 5 (01:49:50):
Want Exactly. And this thing is coming right dead center and I just,

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
How annoying. Knock it out. Oh, so annoying. Yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert on this stuff. This is where a good electrician will be a useful thing. The fact that every time you'd unplug the laptop, it goes away. You know what it is. So I would suggest does the laptop on battery give you that interference if it's not plugged into the wall? No,

Caller 5 (01:50:19):
It does not. But obviously the running on battery is,

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
No, you don't wanna do that.

Caller 5 (01:50:25):
But I'm running into the

Leo Laporte (01:50:26):
With No, I understand. But it isolates two hours. It isolates the noise. It's not coming from the laptop, it's coming from the power supply. That little,

Caller 5 (01:50:33):
It's coming from the power supply

Leo Laporte (01:50:35):
Brick. Yeah. So maybe even just try another one now. That's one of the great things nowadays, thanks to the eu, I was ripping on the EU for their cookie regulation. But I do, I am glad the EU has decided that everything should be charged by usbc. Used to be every laptop had its own proprietary charging. Now <affirmative>, they usbc. So get a new better USBC brick. In fact, I would look at some of the gallium nitro bricks coming from companies like Anchor that give you a lot of wattage for in a very small package. They may also because they are gallium tre not off, not have the same kinds of problems. So you can now gonna type C a charger that just try another one. And it's a good thing to have. Anyway. So that's all I can, I'm the wrong guy to ask on this stuff. This rf as a, every ham knows RF is voodoo. It is. Yes it is. It's voodoo. It's a mystery science and noise can come. I'm amazed actually, that you own that. You have such a nice clear sound. You've done everything you can except when you're plugging in this laptop, That sounds pretty good. That sounds pretty good. Yeah. You're doing a great job. What kind of music do you plug? Well

Caller 5 (01:51:47):
I do classic rock country worship music.

Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
Nice.

Caller 5 (01:51:50):
Been playing since 1980. Wow. Still plugging along. I, I'll be playing in a wheelchair as they were wheeling me off to the grave.

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
We saw Motley Crew the other day and it was so great to see 71 years old. He's got Anglis spondylitis their lead guitarist, Nicki Mars playing. He can barely move, but his fingers are as nimble as ever. He still lays down an amazing guitar riff. It was inspiring to see him. And that's exactly how you want to go, right? <laugh>? Absolutely. All the way to the bitter end. As long as your fingers can move, you're good. I've not much help. Check the chat room. They have a lot of suggestions. irc.twi.tv. A lot of them know a lot more. It reminds me of a story I just read. This is wild. That actually came out from a couple of years ago. But the buzz of electrical current in the power circuitry is often, it's barely audible or inaudible, but it is often present if you know where to look in videos.

Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
And apparently I did not know this, but for 10 years the UK government has been using, and it's by the way, it's not consistent. It goes up and down. Right. The frequency is not perfect. They've been using that as a fingerprint in videos to authenticate them. So, because Who you thought about that? Huh? Who? Yeah. I'll put a Hummingbird clock.info. Fascinating. It's a fingerprint in the video. It not only tells you the exact time the video is recorded, but it can tell you if it was edited because it should sound like this. And there's a disco disco continuity in there. You'll know that there was an edit point. This is in the uk, but I presume it's true everywhere we have. I would think so, Yeah. Fascinating. I'm sorry I'm not more of a help for you. I'm glad you listen, Kelly. Keep listening. Maybe somebody will come along with some good ideas.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (01:53:53):
If I were you, I'd get a new power for Leo Laporte. Wasn't there a Tom Scott S player? I think there was. Hello? Rod Pile. Hey there. How are you? I'm very well. How are you? I'm very good, thank you. Would you like to talk about Falcon and the Dragon crew? Actually, although that's interesting. I've got a couple other stories that are kind of why I care. You know why I care? Because why? Because it's the first, not only the first Native American in space. Yes. But she's a Petaluma native. Yes. Flat back, right? She comes, Yeah. Flat back. It means flat back. Not her <laugh>. Right. That's what Petaluma means. Yeah. She comes from Petaluma, born in Petaluma, went to Rancho Kata High. Where Aunt Pruitt's kids go. <laugh>. She's a local. Katas are really little dad. Kota tiny. Used to be. Still is.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (01:54:49):
Yeah, still is. So anyway, hey I we're happy about that. I wanna say, by the way, I was driving down to my world boat the other day, late at night. And I was listening to your triangulation episode with Oh, wasn't that great. Oh, coauthor. It was fabulous. But my brain hurt by the time I was Oh, he's too smart us. Those two people. Well, both of them. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just like, I mean, you were keeping up. Well I thought, man, he is really nailing this interview. But I thought if I was sitting there, I'd be these long gaps. I was trying to think of what task next. Right. Of course he use a typewriter to write this book. <laugh>. Well, and to be able to write nonfiction and fiction. He's brilliant. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. And particular ability to synthesize complex ideas to understand them deeply and then yes, even more impressive to communicate them.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (01:55:48):
That's a rare and very valuable ability. I just love, Well, and his analogy is are so great. That's brilliant. I mean, he's really truly one of the, they're not a whole lot of people I meet that I go, Wow, that's a genius. And he's one of them. He's amazing. He's amazing. Well, I'm still working on it. <laugh>, I figure I got about another 25. I had an advantage cuz I read the book and that. So I thank God I read the book. I actually <laugh>, if I hadn't, I would've been in deep trouble. Is that a fumble? Oh hey. Oh, sorry. I thought that's what you, I'm not paying attention to anything <laugh>. If I jump up and scream, Not a problem. Oh yeah, they're giving it to Carolina. Oh well. Oh that would be football, correct. That's the skinny brown one. Yes. Sometimes we call a hand egg <laugh> sport ball.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (01:56:41):
Yeah. Amy. Amy Webb, another genius. Yeah, I'm very <affirmative>. I try to get geniuses on the show. But the problem is that sometimes they're so smart that everybody else just kind of sits there. Open mouth to have the panel has to be balanced so that everybody feels like they can contribute. And when Corey was on this weekend, I had Alex Cantits on with him on Twitter and Alex. Yeah, I had Alex on cause I knew he was a good counter foil to Corey and he really held his own, which is damn impressive. Damn impressive. Yeah. So yeah, I know what you mean. And as you pointed out when we started talking about this, not everybody at that level of intelligence can communicate, has a gift. Oh look, we've got a new song for you. Oh hey. Oh sorry. I thought that was the chorus. He's gonna sing it. I love this song. The great the yet. I'm waiting. I wanna keep hearing it. The great Roger McGwen heralding the appearance soon of our own spaceman rod pile. Gonna talk about, there he is. <laugh> Roger's a geek. Roger McGuinn. I've interviewed him many times. He lives in Florida. Last time I talked to him, he talked about how he had made his own cooling system for his computers. He's a wild man. A wild man. The great 12 string folk guitarist, Roger McQuin. Let's move on, shall we? Walter on the line from Los Angeles. Hello Walter.

Leo Laporte (01:58:18):
Hey Walter, you're on. Hello. Hey, welcome to the show. What can I do for you?

Caller 6 (01:58:23):
Yes I have a about a 600 square foot apartment and I'm using at and t's combo router. I want to turn the wifi off and hook up a net gear wifi six model ax 1800.

Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
Okay. Route. So this is often the case, your ISP and it, most people just say, Okay, fine.

Caller 6 (01:58:51):
Well I wanna be able to control it. Either the net gear software.

Leo Laporte (01:58:56):
Yeah. Yeah. So is it you said at and t, Is it fiber, is it dsl? How are you connected? Do you know? It

Caller 6 (01:59:04):
Says dsl.

Leo Laporte (01:59:04):
Dsl. Okay. So it's a phone line that's giving you your internet access. So for that at and t provides you with an interface that takes the signal from the phone line decodes, it turns it into a network interface. And since they gave you the combo router, it's nice, you don't have to do anything else to it. You could just, it's wifi and you just join the wifi. But there are two separate things going on. That's why they call it a combo. And as you pointed out, you do want the at and t interface to the dsl, but you don't necessarily want to use their router. You might wanna provide your own. Perfectly acceptable to do that. Often it's a better router than the at and t router or the Comcast router or the Cox router, whatever. They give you the ISP provided. So the trick on this is the at and t combo is doing something called network address translation.

Leo Laporte (01:59:55):
It's the thing that signs IP addresses to the computers and devices inside the house. You wanna turn that off cause you don't want two things doing that. So you wanna put the at and t combo router in bridge mode, check your manual for how to do that, and then connect your net night neck year and everything should work just fine. Leo Laporte, the tech guy, Rod pile coming up. So you'll have to check with at and t or maybe they've given you a manual on how to do that. Sometimes they don't let you do that. But check the, you know, can log into your combo right from the web. They give you a web address for that.

Caller 6 (02:00:35):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
Yeah. So log into it and what you're gonna look for is a setting that says put it in bridge mode. Okay? Once it's in bridge mode, then it's not doing any routing, it's not doing that nat address translation, network address translation. It's not doing any routing. And so then you can connect to the ethernet port on that with your net gear. And then let the net gear do the routing. What you don't want is to have both of them doing routing. It's called double net. It's not good. It's not the worst, it's not the end of the world, but it causes kind of unexpected problems. So it's best if you can put the router into bridge mode. If not, if you can't, I suspect you can. But if you can't, then you can put your new net gear into bridge mode. Say, I don't want you to do dhcp, let the at t do that.

Leo Laporte (02:01:32):
But I do want you to do the wifi. You'll also, by the way, I forgot to mention this, wanna turn off the wifi radios on the combo. So all of that is gonna require access to those settings. Once you log in the chat room's, giving me some links turn off wifi on a gateway. Let me look and see if this is easy to do. If you have access to the device configuration, it's in home network wifi advanced options. So you'll have to go into the, this is an advanced option and turn off the home. S S I D enable. And the guest, ss i d enable, I'll put this article in the show notes so you can refer to it. So you go to 1 92, 1 68, 1 0.1 login with the password. That's on the combo router. And then you're have to dig through the settings and you wanna turn off the wifi, turn off routing, put it in bridge mode, and then your neck gear can do all of that.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:02:34):
It's gonna do the wifi in the routing. Great. Got it. Thanks sir. My pleasure, Walter. Have a great day. It's time to talk space with Mr. Rod Pile, editor-in-chief of the a Astra Magazine, the official magazine of the National Space Society. subscribe@spacedots.org and the host of our podcast, this in space with ta mallek of space.com. Rod is also the author of many great books about space and we always love seeing him on the show. Hi Rod. Good to see you. Even without a cool hat. Well or worse without, You're not in your space capsule usually you're in your usually you're on Mars, so Yeah, well we're doing a little remodeling. No green screen Studio been compromised for a while. Yeah, that's alright. It's radio only. I saw it anyway, so it's fine. There you go. It's fine. Well, no, you had about 500 other people.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:03:27):
Yeah, well some people watch the video stream. Yeah, yeah, I was watching the earlier today. I enjoy it. Yeah, yeah. Bring you into my living room. Yes. And I do appreciate it. And if you don't mind, next time I'm there, could you bring me a beer? Meanwhile, <laugh>, meanwhile, what's happening in space? Well, as you pointed out, we just had a SpaceX launch, a crew five on October 5th. I was very proud because yes, it was an interesting crew. It had one person from Japan, one person from Russia and two from America. And the commander of the Dragon Crew five was a woman from Petaluma, our little town here, Nicole, a Nabu man, also the first Native American in space. So that's really cool. And a Stanford graduate. Well, okay, if you want represent, I think there are a few Stanford graduates who've been the space, I would guess.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:04:19):
I know, but I'm still looking <laugh>. Anyway, she and the crew are on the space station right now. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And they're there for about that, that craft will rotate for five months. I assume they're all staying that long. But they do sometimes stagger the returns. I have to say, one of the, for all the fun we make of Elon and for all the nuttiness he adds to our lives, that SpaceX is pretty amazing. I mean, to watch that launch go flawlessly after aist, couldn't even get the countdown. And then to watch the first stage booster fly itself autonomously back to earth and land perfectly on that barge. And then everything just goes flawlessly. And it makes you forget how hard this is. He's so good. And he makes it look easy. And this was after decades of the big aerospace companies trying to do similar things and not making the cut.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:05:15):
So when you, you're right, especially when the Falcon Heavy launch in 2018, when those two side boosters touch down at the same, wasn't that mind boggling? The internet lights up, It's fake. It's all fake. It's like, no, sorry, it's real. And now, so this booster was another sorry, not this booster. The one that launched the other day. Another 14 flight veteran. So he's just pushing every engineering limit there is on every front. And the Starship works, man. We are there. So one, the thing that's interesting about this mission of chorus is you touched about two actually. One is Russian Cosmo not. So we did make another seat trade in the middle of this hot war. This is the first time in that a Russian has launched from US soil. Is that right? Shuttle? I think. Yeah. But maybe in a shuttle. But in a, this run of stuff and certainly in a private spacecraft.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:06:05):
And also two of these, sorry, three of the astronauts were reassigned from the Boeing Starliner, which still isn't rated crew yet. Wow. So that's not a happy fact. But there you go. Another news item. Goodbye Mom. India's Mars orbiting mission or Mom ran outta gas dark, ran gas. Well maybe they made that announcement. The Isro Indian and Space Research Organization said it wasn't working. That was one reason that popped up on the internet. They did not say exactly what had gone wrong till a little later. They made some suggestions, apparently depletion of maneuvering fuel. And the fact that it had gone through two solar eclipses as seen from Mars. One of them was over seven hours. And the batteries on that thing, their solar recharge, but they're only rated for two hours of continuous discharge. So we think it just ran the power down. But this mission lasted for over eight years.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:07:02):
It was originally months. Yeah. They didn't expect more, right? I mean, this is normal. Yeah. Yeah. And it was an engineering mission more than anything else. I mean it did some science, but it was a very high orbit. And it was really an engineering look, we can do mission. And that said, not to minimize their achievement at all, they're only the fourth country to make it to Marsh nor but, and the first one to do so successfully. And the whole mission was about 72, 70 3 million, including all the control and everything. They did get some help from nasa. JPL was a partner, but that's about a third of what it would've cost to do. Do it here domestically. Big part of that was because 30% of their executive staff were women at a larger percentage, as I recall, of the technical staff. The actual people that built and configured the thing were women.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:07:48):
And they worked very long hours. And a lot of other places get paid less than men. So it's a great, if so many women were involved, now you just gotta crank up their pay. I just think it's space shouldn't be owned by any one country. It should be apolitical. And I just think it's great and we could all cooperate with one another. Even in this case, as much as Russia has become a pariah state, even with Russia, as long as it's space, it's not war mongering, it's space. I think that it we're all together on one planet, <laugh>, not forget. And so something, the great white hope here might be asteroid addiction. So we know that we're in danger from an asteroid strike at some point. We just had the, I saw them say that there's an asteroid headed our way. Is that just a irresponse?

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:08:41):
Yeah, there's always an asteroid headed our way. It's a matter of how big it is and how wide it's gonna pass. Most of 'em pass. Well, outside of the moons orbit was the dart mission where we launched a satellite against a rock. Successful. In their opinion, did it move the rock? Well, technically it was successful. So it hit the rock. Well, I saw it crash, right? That was quite a shot. But did it move the rock is the question? Well, they're still trying to figure it out. And as we got closer and closer to Dior posts, which was that little 500 foot, it began looking like suspiciously, like it was a rubble pile. Asteroid, not a solid rock. And rubble piles are exactly what the sound, It certainly made a mess. Gravel held by gravity. It left a big trail and there was a big ex.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:09:25):
Yeah. So maybe it was just a bunch of gravel that we blew up. Well, and that brings up another point, which is one of the other things we have to learn besides how to move the big rocks, is how to influence the trajectory of a rubble pile or a gravel as well. Yeah. But even if without just making it fly apart, because then you just gotta potentially a bunch of little ones. Yeah. Littler, but still dangerous, right? You don't want, even if it's a gravel pile, you don't want it to hit us. No, not listen. If it's really gravel, if they're really the size of marbles or less. But if you've got really big rocks back chunks together, that's bad. So that's why. So this approach, the direct impact kinetic impacter would be for good, for solid rocks. When you've got a rubble pile, if this turns out this was, you want to influence the trajectory of it indirectly.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:10:15):
So they have what they call tractor influencing. Oh, you need a tractor beam? We just send the enterprise with its tractor beam. No, no, no. It got us spacecraft big enough that it kind of over time, drags it off course. Or potentially other interdictions. You might be able to, but you have to be gentle agents to it. It's a nudge can hit it. You have to be sweet and loving to it. <laugh>. So. So Tuesday, NASA's gonna have a press conference. We'll find out. Yeah, I guess how successful this was. We still don't, and I'll, I'll for sure. He tuned in for sure. P did it. I thought P did a most Inau. <laugh> P Diddy Puff. Of course. Puff the puff Daddy. Yeah. How much long, longer do we have? We got 54 seconds. Oh, hunting exoplanet. There's a site called Utopia. So cool.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:11:01):
That's you join in Citizen Science along with scientists working on the test program, which was a telescope that identified a majority of the 505,000 confirmed back planets we've seen. So a company that makes telescopes called Stellar got together with Zootopia and NASA and said, Let's let the citizens get involved. So if you go on zootopia.com, you can check it out and you can join into the effort with your own telescope, assuming you have one that's large enough to work. Is that just pretending that citizen astronomy is real? No, no. It's actually been really helpful because there's so much data coming down for probes that the NASA people don't have time to go through it all. So you really can't help. You can Roth space tos.org to subscribe. You sir, add Astra and join him on twists every week. Leo Laporte, Tech Eye, and right here, of course, every week.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:11:54):
Of course, of course. P did Emo. P did amo. That's how I remember the name. Yeah, that's very good. P did dmo. He's the most, Yeah, if you look at Zootopia, they've got probably, gosh, 20 or 30 different programs ranging for oceanography to, Oh yeah, we visited climate change. We've talked about them before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they've done galaxy categorizations and looking at clouds on Mars and all kinds of cool stuff. So it's not zootopia.com cuz that says, May the zoo be with you. I don't think that's zootopia.com. Oh, dog. Got it. I keep, I got it. Yes. Zootopia Science. Let me Google that zoo. No, it's not Zootopia. It's another, It isn't. That's a movie with the swaths in it. And this DMV lady moving room. I'll correct myself next week. I'm sorry, Zoolander, What is the name of it? Chat room help. Chat room steel.com. What is it? Zootopia? That's hysterical. I can't believe it. I'll correct it if somebody gives me the real one. Let's see. Help nasa, Exo planets. Let me look this up. Zoo, maybe that'll, It's all about the <laugh> Citizen science.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:13:25):
There we go. Zootopia, If you'd done that to Bill handle, he would've mourn you. Oh my God. Well that's why I'm only on once a month now, <laugh>. You know, never know what you're gonna get with Bill either. You get on there and usually, especially with science, he's very forthcoming, He's generous, he's great. But some mornings, as I'm sure you know, get the other bill. Right. Depends on his hemorrhoid situation. Is that it? No, I don't know. I haven't talked to Bill in a long time. I love Bill, but he stopped having me in a show years ago. People powered research. Welcome to the universe. Zooniverse. All right, I'll correct. I'll correct that when we get back. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Rod's been drinking. That's a big difference. Day drinking again, Rod, I tell you, I don't drink anymore. I can't handle it.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:14:15):
I'm teasing you. Neither do I age. When I heard you say that, I thought, Yeah, exactly. One drink and I'm just a stupid fool in the corner and the day. Even if it's just one glass of wine, I feel like crap. Yeah. It used to be, I'd never get hangovers when I was a young guy, I thought hangover. So nobody, What's that? They're making that up now. It's Dr. Mom. Grandma said piles affecting piles. First one, P I L E S. Meaning I can't believe that. Oh my God. Well and the other thing about drinking is, and I'm sure you remember this from being a bars and you were younger, although I'm following Lisa's social media and it looks like you guys are out eating just about every night. We went to a caviar bar, but she, I drink water. She drank champagne. Cuz I'm the designated driver.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:15:02):
Yeah, I'm the designator designated non. And by the way, not drinking, I never post world I'm doing or where I've been, but I know I have no privacy <laugh>. Cause Lisa os me every time. But what is it about so many guys when they drink, they wanna fight. Oh, I know. I just get kind of sappy. And mom, Lisa used to be like that. She'd get she Ignatius. Yeah, actually I guess I could not anymore say that. Not anymore. But she used to, when we first met, she'd have a couple of drinks start hitting me <laugh>. She'd be a formidable opponent with those folks. She's much stronger than early on in I would, I'm just kidding. But early on in our relationship, Yeah, she said, let's wrestle and pin and now wait, that's a very promising early indicator. But we were already together. But she pinned me and I couldn't move.

Leo Laporte // Rod Pyle (02:15:56):
And I realized at that time, this woman is much stronger than I am. <laugh>. And we've never discussed. And she knows where you sleep every night. Yeah. So thank you to keep her happy. Have a great week, Byebye. Take care. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy again. Leo Laporte, the tech guy Show every weekend thanks to Professor Laura, our musical director. She does such a good job, doesn't she? With the intervening interval music. And of course thanks to Kim Schaffer, our phone Angel. She gets answers. The phones gets you on the air. Thanks Most of all though, cuz I couldn't do it without you. Actually, I should really thank not only the listeners, I really appreciate it. And all the people call in, but let's not forget you couldn't listen if it weren't for all those great radio stations. So thanks to all of them and those program directors all across the fruited plane coast to coast who say I sounds like foreign language programming to me. But I guess we need a tech show. Thank you. You're right. And I'll try to speak English. 88. 88. Ask Leo. I think of myself as a geek translator kind. <laugh> Joe is on the line from Rebel Stroke Rebels Stoke British Columbia. What a great name. Rebels Stoke <laugh>. Wow. I love bc. I'm not familiar with Rebels Stoke.

Caller 7 (02:17:18):
It's about six hours away from Vancouver eastward

Leo Laporte (02:17:22):
East of Vancouver. Okay. Yeah. We used to go to, I used to go to Vancouver once a month for about a week to do a TV show up there. And that's just love bc. Well I'm beautiful, but I've never been to Rebel Star. Are there rebels in Rebel Stoke?

Caller 7 (02:17:39):
Oh, I'm sure there are, but they stay pretty quiet around here at different populations, like maximum 10,000 people. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:17:45):
I'm sure it's Paradise Species is beautiful.

Caller 7 (02:17:49):
Oh yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte (02:17:51):
What can I do to help you?

Caller 7 (02:17:53):
Okay, so we have a very old 2011 Intel Pentium computer.

Leo Laporte (02:17:59):
Holy cow.

Caller 7 (02:18:00):
<laugh>. Yeah. G 6 9 5 1 Processor is the code name. It's for my aunt's sister who's had it, but it's Windows isn't doing so well on it anymore. Not email isn't working anymore. Web browsers can't be updated kinda

Leo Laporte (02:18:21):
Thing. What version of Windows does she have on there? Just outta curiosity? Must be xp, right?

Caller 7 (02:18:26):
Nope, 10. It got to 10. Oh good. Doing it with seven, but it got to 10 and now things are slowly not working.

Leo Laporte (02:18:35):
So there are a number of things to talk about, not merely the processor. In fact, frankly in 10 years, processors haven't gotten all that much faster. But how much Ram did it come with? I bet four gigs.

Caller 7 (02:18:47):
Correct.

Leo Laporte (02:18:48):
Yeah. And that's really, nowadays that's very, very low. It's kind of, it's not below the minimum. It is the minimum, but you're sure like eight or 16. 16 is kind of the sweet spot in RAM these days. The other thing that tends to happen with these computers from of that vintage is they have hard drives in them. Those spinning discs and those things. That poor guy's been going around 5,400 revolution per minute for the last 12 years. It's getting tired. And most likely the reason it's slow is just the hard drive is unreliable. What windows are all operating systems will do if they, they'll try to read a sector. If it doesn't come back with data, they'll go, Oh, lemme try that again. And you can imagine if it does that every sector, that's one half speed. And if it has to do it more than twice per sector, that's even less. So the first thing that goes is a hard drive. If you could put more memory in that computer and if you could replace the spinning drive with a solid state drive, it might actually be pretty usable.

Caller 7 (02:19:51):
It could be pretty usable. But what we were thinking is like, I'm gonna get a new hard drive for it for her for sure, because she's been running it so long, but swapping Linux on it, because I'm sure Windows and all that other stuff isn't gonna work much longer.

Leo Laporte (02:20:06):
And I'll never tell somebody not to use Linux. It's a free open source operating system I think is every bit as good as Windows. In fact, maybe in many cases better, more secure, more privacy respecting. And they make versions of Linux designed for four gigs of ram.

Caller 7 (02:20:24):
And that's the thing. I'm looking and that's my biggest thing right now is what one,

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
Yeah, there's puppy. There's puppy there's X o Buntu there's damn small Linux <laugh>.

Caller 7 (02:20:38):
Yeah, I've seen that one.

Leo Laporte (02:20:40):
So if you go to distro watch.org, that's where all the distributions of Linux, all of various versions of Linux are listed. And you can browse there and look for one that's designed for older, slower systems for 16 bit and four gigs of ram. You'll definitely wanna, I would say dollars to donut. The real problem is the hard drive. So you'll definitely wanna put an SSD in there that'll make a big difference by itself. Even with a small Linux. Four gigs. Well I shouldn't say that. I mean I run Linux in one gig on a raspberry pie, so it absolutely is possible to do so. Yeah, there a number if you like Buntu which is still probably the number one distribution in the world. X buntu is designed to be smaller. I don't know if they still support 16 bit small RAM systems. That used to be the low memory version, older computer version. So Xu, b u nt u.org one to look at. There's also, Yep. So those are all worth trying. The nice thing you can do with all of these is put them on a USB key and boot to the USB key. That computer will to the USB key.

Caller 7 (02:22:09):
Yeah, it has the option in the buy said I haven't,

Leo Laporte (02:22:12):
I haven't. So the advantage of that is you don't have to install it to see how is it gonna work. Now remember, drive access gonna be super slow cause you're doing it on a USB drive USB T. Yeah. But when it's in it's running, you'll see how usable it is and if everything works and all that. And I always recommend doing that before you install it. Although nowadays it's so much easier to install Linnux frankly than it is Windows usually just a few minutes. So TU is also designed for very, very small computers. Puppy Linux, you've seen 'em all. Yeah. It's just a good idea to download and put it on a USB key and boot to it just to see what happens.

Caller 7 (02:22:54):
Okay. Yeah. And like I say, it's just gonna be the transition for her from Windows to Linux.

Leo Laporte (02:22:58):
That's gonna be hard. And as I said, if you put another eight gigs of Ramin or better yet another 12 gigs of Ramin and a better hard drive, Windows 10 probably run just fine. Guessing the

Caller 7 (02:23:11):
Problem is like I can't update Chrome on it anymore.

Leo Laporte (02:23:14):
No. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. This is the other thing. Windows 10 isn't all the same. Microsoft doesn't even support older versions of Windows 10. So it depends which version of Windows 10. Yeah, try L U B u nt.net. It's really designed to be for minimal, as light as it can be. Very low hardware requirements. That's another big choice. Probably the first one I'd try. And it looks a lot like Windows. It depends on how much she relies on muscle memory how much she can learn. But honestly, well if you set it up right, I think Lennox is a better operating system for novices, believe it or not.

Caller 7 (02:23:59):
Yeah. Well the other problem is the memory with her as well. She's losing it a bit, so well take it as easy as possible for her.

Leo Laporte (02:24:07):
If this doesn't work, get a Chromebook or an iPad.

Caller 7 (02:24:11):
Oh no, my aunt, my uncle here has a Chromebook, so she's been using that for now

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
For most people. And I don't just mean older people like me but for most people they live on the browser. And as you said, if Chrome doesn't work, they can't use it. That's all. A Chromebook is the Chrome browser and it's more secure, more reliable, and it's simpler cuz it's just the browser. Same thing with an iPad. Older people my mom, 89 years old, loves her iPad, loves it. And she's got a Mac, she, she's got everything. Of course, she's my mom, but she lives on that iPad. I think there's a lot to be said for these operating systems designed really just to get the work done and not for enthusiasts or for people who just want to use a computer. Hey, a pleasure talking to you Joe. Tha I think it's great that you're helping out on that. That's fantastic. And I think it's great that you all listened and called and all of that.

Leo Laporte (02:25:08):
I really appreciate getting to spend some time with you every week. Well, I'll be back next week. Maybe by then I'll be saying, Hey, the Apple event's coming up. We'll see, I put it, I'm putting a bet on that. I bet you something. This fine. Dead hard drive <laugh>. We'll announce an event this week. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Have a great geek week. Let's see you next time. Well that's it for the Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twi, t I t. It stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh, a Mac Break, weekly iPads, iPhones, Apple Watches on iOS. Today's security and security now, I mean, I can go on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon this weekend 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.