The Tech Guy Episode 1945 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.

(00:00:15):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Saturday, November 19th, 2022. It's me and you and Mikah. Episode 1945. Stay tuned to special guests in our number two. The Tech Guy podcast is brought to you by Unify meeting from MIMO monitors. Unify simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable universal user interface. Visit unify meeting.com. Enter the Code Tech guy 50 for 50% off a year's subscription. Or use the Code Tech guy to get 25% off any of mi mo's displays, limited time offer and buy cash. 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@cash.com. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at TWI tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here. The tech guy. Mikah Sargent's here too. Tech guy too. You get double your pleasure. Double your fun. Double your tech guys. It's double min gum. We should do a double mint gum. A people will be very confused,

Mikah Sargent (00:01:46):
Progressing green. <Laugh>. We don't look like twins, so that'll be a problem. It's

Leo Laporte (00:01:50):
Extremely confused. <Laugh> we are here to help you with technology today. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Is the phone number? Eight eight eight eight two. Seven

Mikah Sargent (00:02:03):
Over five. 5 36.

Leo Laporte (00:02:04):
I've only been doing this 19 years. Give me a break. <Laugh>. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. That's it. You got it. You've got it memorized. Thank goodness. Somebody does <laugh>. That's toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. You could still call outside that area. But you'll have to use your your Skype out or something like that. We do get calls from all over the world, which is part of the fun of the tech guy. Show. Look at my wires.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:30):
<Laugh> a little messy over there.

Leo Laporte (00:02:32):
A little messy, you know, so people probably don't know, but we stream video of the show. And the problem with video and technology. <Laugh>, it's wires. <Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:47):
Seeing all the mask

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
Wires. I'm pushing all the wires, but you know, you can only push 'em so far. True. Then they meet the other wires on the other side and you can't go any

Mikah Sargent (00:02:56):
Farther and they all mingle and it's just, oh, it's a mess. It's

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
A mess. So I don't know what to say about

Mikah Sargent (00:03:05):
All the stuff,

Leo Laporte (00:03:06):
All the stuff,

Mikah Sargent (00:03:06):
All the tech stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
It's been kind of cray cray this week. Elon you, I don't even know. I think a lot of the things that come out of you come out in the press and stuff about Twitter are made up wrong. Anecdotal. So I don't even know what to believe.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:23):
Yeah, it's hard, right? Because you have people who are trying to get the story out as quickly as they possibly can. Which it was interesting watching how Twitter was the place where the news was breaking about Twitter. It's funny, <laugh>. But then you have people who are, you know, they take their time but then sometimes get duped by people who claim to have worked for Twitter who didn't work for Twitter. Yes. It's just, it's

Leo Laporte (00:03:47):
A mess. It's a mess. Here's what I'll say. If you, if you use Twitter, and really it's a small number of people. It's mostly a certain groups of people that love Twitter. And unfortunately one of those groups is the media. So it gets a kind of undo a disproportionate amount of coverage right. In the media. And when something happens on Twitter, you know, even though nobody saw it you know, I, I just saw this and I think it's true. 80% of Twitter users are outside the US re Wow. Yeah. So of the say around 300 million users only about 60 million are are us. So that's a tiny number. And, and I don't, you know, anyway I guess I'll just say this. If you love Twitter and you use Twitter, it's fine. Keep using Twitter because even though it seems like even more have left mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

(00:04:41):
 last week Elon sent out, we know this is true. He sent out an email to the remaining staff. He's already fired. Half of them saying we're gonna be hardcore. And if you don't want to be hardcore whatever, by the way, didn't define that. Didn't even say what the mission of the company, what the plan is or anything. Right? Just if you wanna be hardcore, go to this form on Google, by the way, <laugh>, go to this Google form and and say yes, otherwise we'll, we'll start your severance process and you have three months pay. So in other words, say yes or quit. Now, I think a lot of people just ignored it,

Mikah Sargent (00:05:16):
Right? Even though there was a deadline. The

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
Deadline was Friday at about 2:00 PM Eastern Pacific. But I think a lot of people just ignored it. But the story from people who were exiting is that a large number, maybe another thousand to 1200 engineers exited at that point. Which if you already cut it by half, to cut it by half again is a, you know, pretty soon there

Mikah Sargent (00:05:39):
Are only so many halves. Yeah. Well actually, you know, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
That's, so I think there, what happened was through the week, through the Friday night and this morning there was a lot of sad, it felt like people were saying goodbye to each other on Twitter. Yeah. It was a lot of sadness. Yeah. Like, it's all over and stuff. And I just wanna wanna say it's not all over.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:58):
I, I was very careful not to partake in that, because it's true. It's not. 

Leo Laporte (00:06:02):
Even if they lost every engineer, it's engineered to continue to run. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and a and a good system will run, can run for years. There are <laugh>. Is anybody running MySpace? Probably not. But it's

Mikah Sargent (00:06:15):
Still there. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
Unless, you know, unless something weird happens and it breaks it, which by the way, the World Cup starts tomorrow, day after Thanksgiving is England, us

Mikah Sargent (00:06:27):
Could see some farwell happening.

Leo Laporte (00:06:29):
Traditionally, that is a very busy, that will be the stress test if it's, if it gets through the first week of the World Cup. Especially if it gets through Black Friday. Cuz then you also have all the Black Friday tweets. People are home you know,

Mikah Sargent (00:06:42):
Trying to ignore their relatives. So they going,

Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
I think Friday is gonna be the test. And I'm gonna bet cuz there's some very good people worked there and, and maybe even still are some working there. They'll keep it running. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they can do it with a skeleton crew. 

Mikah Sargent (00:06:57):
That's Elon's hope for at the very least. So.

Leo Laporte (00:06:59):
Yeah. And, you know, it seems self-destructive. There, there are all sorts of theories about what's going on over there. It could just be I don't know what maybe he thinks you know, I, we're gonna just, you know how you get a car, sometimes you get a really old beat up car and you just tear it down to the bones. You strip, you take everything apart, you strip off all the rust mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and you reassemble it. And maybe that's his plan. Maybe he's gonna turn it into a 1960 DeSoto, I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:30):
I was gonna say 64 Impala. That's what my dad did at the 64 Impala. Did he

Leo Laporte (00:07:34):
Do that? Yeah, exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:35):
Stripped it all the way down, got the rust, rebuilt the engine, rebuilt

Leo Laporte (00:07:39):
The engine, put new rings in. Maybe that's what he's doing. So, you

Mikah Sargent (00:07:44):
Know, that's what he's gonna have to do, is like, whether he wants, whether that was,

Leo Laporte (00:07:48):
He's already taken the engine apart. So

Mikah Sargent (00:07:49):
Yeah. It's, it's in pieces of stuff. So

Leo Laporte (00:07:51):
Yeah. It's a lot of money to spend for a beater. 44 billion for 60 likes to Impala.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:59):
They buy, yeah. They buy these ridiculous houses that are just torn to pieces. Oh, the, the, the bones. The bones are good, can really

Leo Laporte (00:08:05):
Do this. You know, the bones are good at Twitter. Cause really what you're buying when you buy Twitter is the users. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Now a lot of users have left. We don't know how many have left. Elon said it was the busiest day of in history on Twitter on Friday. A lot of people visiting the sea. Is it still

Mikah Sargent (00:08:19):
There? Right. <laugh>. But, and a lot of people posting their final tweets too. Yeah. You know, you wouldn't have that. Normally

Leo Laporte (00:08:25):
I had, I had left earlier. And that's fine. You know, I, we can, we can live we'll survive in a world without Twitter. <Laugh> in a world without Twitter. 

Mikah Sargent (00:08:36):
CBS News left. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:08:38):
That surprised me. 

Mikah Sargent (00:08:41):
I wonder if we're gonna see more

Leo Laporte (00:08:43):
Brands are leaving, advertisers leaving. I think it's an interesting choice. Here's the pros and cons. On the one hand, if you're a good, a big news organization, stay there. Because if you, as if quality news organizations depart the platform, then what's left? A bunch of propagandists and and it just, it it deteriorates further. But on the other hand, you can understand if you're a brand that you wouldn't want your brand associated as it becomes. And there, you know, there's more hate, there's all sorts of stuff going on. I, I just don't know. I I'm gonna stand back and, and just watch with interest. That's Yeah. That's what I've doing this Facebook every once in a while, you know, kind of teetering as well. Some have said it's the, it's social media's over, but then, but is TikTok social media? I think's more like television fair.

(00:09:35):
Youtube's more like television. Yeah. Most people, vast majority. Probably 99% of it are the consumers watch. Yeah. But don't tick TikTok. Yeah. Or YouTube. They're great content engines. And so maybe that's what we're seeing is cuz that's how people use Twitter, isn't it? As like they post pictures of their sandwich and their, their deep thoughts and their witticisms and try and get, you know, a bunch of retweets from a joke they make or something like that. Yeah, exactly. I guess, yeah, maybe Twitter is a lot more work and that's why people, it's too much work. Yeah, that's too much work. Too much work to read too. I, you know, I always had a problem cause I'd read it and I feel like, am I, am I having a stroke? I don't, I don't understand what is going on. That was my, she if you're missing something.

(00:10:21):
That was my chief reaction to Twitters. Huh? <laugh> what? Scott Wilkinson coming up, he's gonna talk about home theater. We've got Johnny Jet in the second hour. I think we might have a visitor from the east in the second hour. Interesting. apartment 14 C on the aronia. We'll least we'll be stopping by. And and now our number three, Dickie Barto, the gi. It's gonna be a great show. We're gonna have a lot of fun. We're glad you hear your calls too at 88. 88 ASEA website, tech guy labs.com and we'll go to the phones right after this.

(00:11:13):
I didn't mention the maam because I just, I don't, you're kind of protecting it a little bit. I'm protecting it. I don't it's expensive to, I've paid for, it's 389 bucks a month for up to 6,000 users at this point. And we're about 3,500, I think. Really? Well, I mean, roughly. That's what, that's what our host says is that what we've got probably could handle about about 6,000 users. I didn't realize it cost you money to run the, well, it used to cost me when, when it was a ghost town. It was 15, it was 15 euros a month. <Laugh> oh. What's happening? Oh, John, you haven't finished setting up the stuff. I guess you could take back the kindof or No, you don't need to do that, right? Or I don't know

Mikah Sargent (00:12:05):
For what's going on.

Leo Laporte (00:12:08):
Yeah. it was 15 euros for the first three years running, running it, <laugh>. And then two weeks ago I, I'll never forget the day, October 27th.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:24):
Oh dear God.

Leo Laporte (00:12:26):
Suddenly it got, it kinda started get slow and people were having trouble posting photos. That was the symptom. And I looked at my stats and it was like, at the time it was like, well, there's 300,000 requests that haven't been processed. Oh. And it was like, oh. So I, I paid a little more, paid a little more paid, finally went to the top LE Tier mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is 385, something like that. And that's, and, and, and the Hugo guy who runs Mato host, which is our host, said that should probably be good to about 6,000 people. But it's all, it's all roughly depending on how active they are stuff. Got it. So we'll just wait and see. We'll see what happens. Wow. But I don't, but that's why I don't, I really want to be just for TWI listeners. Yeah. And I had initially I was letting people in who just said, I want one out, but now I'm kind of regretting that some of them have bad habits. They're, they don't wipe their feet, things like that.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:28):
<Laugh>. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:13:30):
So I'm gonna, I'm carefully now only approving people who say they listen to a show or they're in close.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:39):
Oh, do you have like a survey that starts? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
You, it's, it's, it's not open. It's you have to say why you wanna, why you want me to approve You got it. And I'm approving about a hundred people a day. Now this looks calm down a little bit. It was about 500 for a while. Well, Dr. Mom, of course, as soon as I saw you, there was no question if you, you know, I just don't want people who don't know what TWI is. I want it to be the community. So if you follow the local type line, then it's the twit community. Right. Which it should be as it should be. Not just kind of randos. Nothing wrong with randos, but they can join a more ran server. So I'm not discriminating exactly,

Mikah Sargent (00:14:23):
But I mean that's part of, that's, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
That's the whole nature of this me

Mikah Sargent (00:14:27):
Is if you do your own server, you get to choose. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:14:30):
Yeah. And I, and the idea is to make a community

Mikah Sargent (00:14:32):
The I would start one where only people who agree with the truth that white chocolate is not chocolate.

Leo Laporte (00:14:39):
You could have the white chocolate maed on

Mikah Sargent (00:14:42):
Yeah. Where we all have,

Leo Laporte (00:14:43):
Which might attracts the wrong sort.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:45):
Right. No, it, it's, I guess it would really be the chocolate maed on chocolate. White chocolate is not chocolate.

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
It's not chocolate. Brown chocolate. Yes. I'm not discounting insulin. It's the brown chocolate Mastodon <laugh> that also might attract the wrong kind people. This is true <laugh>. So yeah, if you say I'm a twi, let me in then that will be okay. But lots of people say I'm fleeing the, the, you know, Twitter, Armageddon and stuff like that. And I don't know if you know what you're going, you may have just chosen it at random. That's why I don't put it on join mastodon.org or any of that stuff cuz just between us kids. Kim Schaffer. Hello. Hi. That's your theme for the day. Okay.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:28):
I haven't heard that one before.

Leo Laporte (00:15:29):
Who is that? It sounds like a fake Paul McCartney. <Laugh>.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:32):
It is Paul McCartney.

Leo Laporte (00:15:34):
Okay. It's not fake Paul McCartney. It's actual Paul McCartney. It's Paul McCartney. Paul McLarty. Paul McLarty. Paul McLarty. Yeah, it did sound a little bit like him, but I guess there's a reason for that. <Laugh>. Hello.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:47):
It was

Leo Laporte (00:15:48):
Hello Kim <laugh>. Obviously before he was the Beatles, he was somebody else. That's all He was. Paul

Kim Schaffer (00:15:55):
Mclarty, right? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:15:57):
Kim Scheffer answers the phone. She puts you on the air and we'll be keeping an eye on the hotline. The hotline. I know when that hotline Blas sometime the hotline in the next 45 minutes. Keep your eye on the hotline again. I expect,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:15):
I have no other screens open. <Laugh>, <laugh>. I usually have screens covering

Leo Laporte (00:16:20):
That little No watch, no watching football. Are you gonna watch the World Cup?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:23):
No, no.

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
I've, I've mixed feelings about it. Cuz of Cotter. Honestly. Cause of who? Cotter. That's the, I'll come back. The welcome back. The country. They're in Cotter. Oh. Or guitar

Kim Schaffer (00:16:35):
If you guitar cutter. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:37):
Because thousands died to build those stadiums. Oh. It's not really a soccer country. It's extremely hot. The stadium has to be air conditioned,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:45):
So I don't think they're allowed to have alcohol there.

Leo Laporte (00:16:47):
Budweiser 12 hours before the start. How Un America Band Beer. Even though Budweisers paid 12 million to be a sponsor and they kind of are not big on human rights.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:58):
No, I, yeah. I don't know why they would.

Leo Laporte (00:17:00):
I don't really like women or gay people or any of that, so I'm not sure. I don't know. The thing is I support the athletes. They, that's not their fault. Not a fan of fifa. I guess. I love the World Cup every four years. I watch it like religiously. So I don't, I guess I'll probably watch it. US England on Friday.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:20):
Well, I know a lot of people who will be frequently frequenting the pubs.

Leo Laporte (00:17:24):
Yeah. Next couple. We have a few English pubs in town. Yeah. Who should I start with on this? Fine.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:29):
Well because you're talking about the Twitter and the Mastodon. Let's just let's just stay on topic.

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):
Let's get right into it.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:35):
Tom, Tom and Keen New Hampshire needs help setting up his mastodon.

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):
Oh, good. Okay. Thank you, Kim. Hey Tom. How are things? Hello.

Caller 1 (00:17:46):
Cold. Very cold, but not snowy. That's a good thing thing. Yeah. You don't want anymore snow for a

Leo Laporte (00:17:51):
While. Let me tell you how wimpy we are. It got, it was like 47 degrees yesterday and, and Lisa,

Caller 1 (00:17:57):
That would've been nice. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
We're so cold. Oh, that

Caller 1 (00:18:01):
Would've been nice. If that was a low, that would've been nice.

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
I know, I know. Yeah, it's 57 right now. Oh, so chilly. I love it. It's beautiful.

Caller 1 (00:18:11):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:12):
Mike is from Missouri. He's used to it. I'm like, ah, bring the chill. So what, what can we what can we do to help you today, Tom?

Caller 1 (00:18:21):
Well, first of all, I am a Club TWI member. Thank you. Thanks and love to love Twi. Listen to you listen to the big show on Sunday was to iOS. Today

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
He's talking about our podcast network twit wwit tv, right? Not Twitter

Caller 1 (00:18:36):
And <laugh>. No,

Leo Laporte (00:18:37):
Not Twitter. Not Twitter. We predate Twitter this week in tech. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:18:41):
Yes. I'm trying to get our master on, I'm trying to figure out how it works. And I think I did it right, but I might have messed up. So I need you tell me one, did I mess something up? And second, how do I get on your server?

Leo Laporte (00:18:55):
Well, let me give you the little the little Mastodon explanation here for people who are wondering what is he talking about? Yes, it's an extinct elephant ancestor, but it's also something that's been around for a long time. In fact, starting in about 2008 when Twitter was only a year old a guy named Evan Promo created something called Lecona, became identical, and then became Status Net. And his idea was we could make a Twitter that isn't owned by one company that isn't even on one server, that a bunch of people run their own little Twitters kinda like, you remember bulletin boards, like they run their little Twitters, but you can interate so that I can follow somebody on anybody else's. It's more like email in a way, kind of in the sense that everybody has different email servers, but we can all email each other.

(00:19:45):
Right on. So this, this Status net then merged with Canoe Social became something a standard called Activity Pub Brow, anything. A lot of things are, are members of Activity Pub. So this is important by the way, because this is the underlying technology. So if you have a WordPress blog, it can be on activity Pub Micro Blog is on Activity Pub. There, there's a, a YouTube clones, there's Instagram clones. There are a lot of different activity pub members, all of which can talk to one another. And you can follow anybody. For instance, pixeled, which is a Instagram clone. I can, I'm on pixeled.social, but you can be on any, there are lots of servers and anybody can follow me anywhere. And there's no advertisers, there's no central owner. And so a lot of people are turning to this. Mastodon is one of many different ways you can do Activity Pub.

(00:20:40):
It's now the biggest 7 million people have left Twitter and joined Mastodon in the last two weeks. Trying to find a Twitter, a friendly Twitter like place that isn't owned by a billionaire <laugh>. It's not owned by anybody. So there are many, many, many Maed on servers that last count more than 5,000. And yeah, I run one I have for years. We used to call it the TWI Army canteen back in the 2000 eights. Now it's just twi.social. But we want it to be for, and this is the thing about these, you join an instance, they call 'em instances. These servers, you join an instance, ideally not the big instance. There are many really big ones, but one that is like your community. Like if you like Teddy bears, it's a teddy bear instance. There's instances for all kinds of things. So the first thing to do is figure out what your affinity group is and join that one.

(00:21:32):
Why? Because when you're on Mastodon, there's a local feed that's everybody on your instance, your clubhouse. So join somewhere where it's your clubhouse, but then you can find out Stephen Fry, for instance, is un mastered on the, the comedian love him. A lot of no, nobody's super famous. George Toay of Star Trek just joined. That's kind of cool. And he's on his own instance run by somebody else. But you follow him by following his name at in the name of that instance. So what the first thing to do is get is choose an instance and get on it. So yeah, come to TWI social. That's fine. If you feel like you'd want to be a part of that group of people, and since you're in Club Twi, I think you probably probably fit the bill and then we'll help you.

(00:22:25):
But, you know, watch, there's two other feeds. There's the feed of people you follow just like Twitter, no matter where they are. That's your home feed. And there's something called the Federated timeline, which is all the people on your server. The, the people. They follow friends of friends. And so that's a good way to find people. There are lots of other ways. There's even tools that'll let you take your Twitter, the people you follow on Twitter and move them over if they have a ma on account. And now, now more people do. So. but the nice thing is it isn't about celebrities. It's not about billionaires. It's a, it's a tightly knit community of, of friends. So find one that fits your interests. Join that ours. You have to ask to join and then I'll let you in. Because we don't want to be overrun by spammers and stuff. There shouldn't be any spam. There should only be nice people saying nice things. It's not, it's, that's why it's not Twitter, is it? And it's just one of many activity pub things. So it's a very cool idea. We'll look for, we'll look for look for you Tom, Leo and Mikah, your tech guys. Scott Wilkinson coming up.

(00:23:35):
So I'll, I'll look for your handle. But it's very, you know, if you look at it, I'll, and I'll pull it up here. It looks very much like this is the, what they call the advanced web interface. It looks very much like Twitter. I'll go to the, I'll go to the non-va. Oh gosh, now it's getting really slow. I think, I think I shouldn't have mentioned it on the radio.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:55):
Tom. If, if you went to twi.social on your browser and chose to create an account, then you done what you needed to do,

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
Then I will file, I

Caller 1 (00:24:03):
Will watch. I, yeah, I opened up the main, the main Macon app and said, what server do you want?

Leo Laporte (00:24:09):
And I, there is, okay, so this is the important thing. I think a lot of people have this mess apprehension. There's a main app. There is not,

Caller 1 (00:24:16):
Well the said Macon, so that's what I signed up with. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:21):
That's run by the guy who wrote Mastodon on, he runs Mato on social and Mastodon do online. I generally don't recommend those because they're so big. They're a hundred thousand people on them and they're sluggish because that's where everybody goes cuz they think it's the official,

Mikah Sargent (00:24:39):
I couldn't upload a photo the other day.

Leo Laporte (00:24:40):
Yeah. On a, it's not the official Mastodon. There's many. So you, because you are a club member should go to twi.social and say, I want to join. This is the home

Caller 1 (00:24:49):
Feed social.

Leo Laporte (00:24:51):
Just just go a website called twi.social. It'll explain every, okay. And then this is the local timeline.

Caller 1 (00:24:57):
I'm shut all over again. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Okay. The local timeline is people who are just on twi social. You don't have to follow them. You, you know, you see everybody who's there. This is the federated timeline, which is everybody. Everybody on Twitter social follows. And this one gets quite busy and fast because you know, there's lots of people. So this is more like the everything on Twitter, but it isn't because it, you know, you won't see everything on here, but it's a good place to look for people to follow. And then once you start following people, you'll have a home timeline, which is the people you follow.

Caller 1 (00:25:33):
And then I can then I can go back and use that app and log into it. Is that

Leo Laporte (00:25:36):
How that works? Yeah. Then you go into that app and you say twit social twi.social. Okay. And then it will go to the website and say, Hey, and you'll log into the website and it'll send a token to the app. By the way, if you, are you on iOS?

Caller 1 (00:25:51):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:25:51):
Don't I recommend instead of the Maed on app, use of app called Meta Text. Meta Text

Caller 1 (00:25:57):
App. And I use that second, but I couldn't figure that one out cause it wouldn't let me sign in. Yeah. Because I already signed up with the main one. Yeah, the other one.

Leo Laporte (00:26:05):
Yeah. Once you, but you can have multiple accounts. You can have as many accounts as you want, but if you want people to follow you, it's good to have one account that you use as you're

Caller 1 (00:26:14):
How long you use one. Yeah. So I'll go ahead.

Leo Laporte (00:26:16):
But you can have many, you can be part of many communities. That's fine. It's just a little confusing. I'm

Mikah Sargent (00:26:22):
Just officially asked to join the TWI server. What?

Leo Laporte (00:26:24):
I know what, but you should keep your old one.

Caller 1 (00:26:27):
I followed, I already followed Mikah. I've already followed Good. You I've already followed.

Leo Laporte (00:26:32):
So you can take, you can, you can, you can also migrate, if you go in the settings, if you're on another server, you can migrate, you can move to a different server. Take all your, take all your followers with you and all that, that stuff. We'll

Mikah Sargent (00:26:44):
Include a link in the show notes. There's this great guide on Mastodon that we'll probably answer all the questions that we can't answer on

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
The radio. There's two, the one I generally send people to is ma iton.help.

Caller 1 (00:26:54):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:26:56):
And then there's Feda Tips, which is@fedtips.org. Both of those are very good. Maybe Masson help is a little more cartoony and easier to understand. Oh, that's cute. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:27:06):
Well, well if you're blind, that won't be such a good idea.

Leo Laporte (00:27:09):
Oh, no, no. This is, that's okay. By the way, one of the great things about Macon, it's very accessible. But there is an instance. There is, there is software you don't wanna use Macon if you, well maybe you don't. If you're blind, there is software that is better for screen readers than Macon.

Caller 1 (00:27:27):
Mm-Hmm

Leo Laporte (00:27:28):
<Affirmative>. So again, this is confusing cuz people think, well, I wanna get on Macon. No Macon's, just software that gets you onto the Fed averse. You wanna get on the Fed averse here. Stand. I gotta go for Scott, but I will explain more stand standby. Hey Scott.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:52):
Hey Leo. Makeup Mikah. How you doing? Mikah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:55):
Mikah Mka.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:56):
Sorry. That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:28:08):
There is fed feta tips, which is f e d I dot t i p s has a lot of accessibility tips. That's a good place to go. What is hip? This cat right here, man. He's the hip man, our own tuba player and home theater geek. Okay. If you can find a connection, good luck.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:29):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:28:30):
Scott Wilkinson. He, he writes from any home theater magazines and of course has his own show on youtube.com/avs Forum joins us every week to talk about big screen TVs and surrounds sound and all that. Hi

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:44):
Scott. All that jazz. Hey Leo. Hey Mikah. Hello.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:47):
Good to see you.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:48):
Good to see you too. What's up? Oh, well, you know, I, i mentioned last week that Black Friday is really black. November. Yeah. All

Leo Laporte (00:28:58):
Month long.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:59):
Yeah. All month long. But you know, next Friday is the actual Black Friday. So I continued to look for some deals and I found some I mentioned last week that the, the TV deals have not been all that great. I mean, 15 to 20% off. Okay. That's, that's not nothing, but it's not. Wow. You know what I mean? And those deals are still there. I mean, <laugh>, like I said, it's black November. But I did find a few others. Well they're all, they're all in the 15 to 25% range. So, you know, go, go look for 'em, you'll, you'll find them. But the problem with that is that TVs already have what we call razor thin margins. Right. The profit margin. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that, that retailers sell TVs and they make a profit. Right. But the profit is so narrow, they're so little profit on TVs that a Black Friday deal can't be that great cuz otherwise they'll lose money.

(00:30:06):
Well just make it up in volume. No, no, you can't do that. So, you know, you, you can get some deals, but they're only gonna be moderate deals. Now I found some other deals that are quite a bit better. For example soundbar, we talk about sound bars a lot, right? Because if you buy a TV and you listen to its internal sound, the little tiny speakers that are built into the tv, it sounds terrible. So we often recommend, I always recommend if you're gonna, if you're gonna buy a TV and you don't wanna listen to the sound to its own sound, but you don't wanna invest in a whole speaker system, get a soundbar. Cause it's gonna be a lot better than what the TV is doing. And Monoprice, you've heard of Monoprice, right?

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
Oh yeah. We love Monoprice.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:54):
Monoprice is great and they make a whole series of soundbars and those are discounted this coming, well I think they're, it's now, it's not just next Friday. They're like 33 to 55% off. So, you know, that's, that's getting serious. In fact, the one that, that is 55% off, the one that's most discounted is one that I actually have. And really like, it's called the SB 300. It's a 2.0. It doesn't even have a, a subwoofer with it. So it's not gonna give you the deep base, but for a bedroom TV or something like that, it does have virtual surround. It, it takes the sound stage and expands it way beyond the actual physical enclosure of the sound bar. And you can get it now for 90 bucks list price. 200. Nice. So that's really nice. That

Leo Laporte (00:31:56):
Would be kind of the minimum you would recommend, I would guess

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:59):
For I it is. Yeah. Correct, correct. It is. You, you, mono price makes less expensive ones than that. They make an SB 100 and 200, which are in the $50 range now down from closer to a hundred. You know, suppose

Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
How speed it's possible to make a great sound bar for 50 bucks. I mean, I don't know. Are the parts a expensive,

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:22):
A good one anyway? Maybe not a great one. That's

Leo Laporte (00:32:25):
What, remember why W Y Z E? Why would you forget?

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:27):
Oh yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte (00:32:27):
We talking that's what they kind of specialize in is, is taking stuff that is overpriced and selling it for closer to the cost of the components. They don't do a soundbar, by the way. But I, I wouldn't be surprised at some point. They're really expanding. They now do mesh routers and more bells and earbuds and all that stuff,

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:45):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:32:45):
So I, I wouldn't be surprised. And that's cuz I often think, and when you look at headphones, there's a huge profit margin in headphones there. Headphones. Yep. Because they don't cost that much to make

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:57):
In the most, for the most ca part That's correct.

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
The speakers. That's probably true too, except that there's such an art to designing them.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:03):
That is correct.

Leo Laporte (00:33:04):
That's what they're paying for, isn't it?

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:06):
Yep, yep, yep. Speaking to speakers, clips always has great deals on Black Friday or Black November, and they, and this year's no exception, many, many models, I won't list them there. 40 to 50% off. Which, which like the soundbar, the mono price soundbar deals gives you a sense that what you just said is true. That there's a big profit margin there and they can afford to slash these prices and still make something. Whereas with TVs you can't, retailers like Best Buy and so on, they, they can't cuz there isn't much profit margin there to begin with. Hmm. headphones, same thing. I found some really great headphone deals at Best Buy. Sony, for example, the w H 1000 XM four, my, they're now up diversion five. XM five. But this is by far my favorite noise canceling headphone, which sounds fantastic. At Best Buy it's now 2 28 down from three 50. That's 35% off. The two other companies I want to quickly mention, one is mono price. Again, they also make headphones and in their monolith line, which is their higher end audio file line they've got a true wireless in ear monitor for 50 bucks down from 130, that's 60% off. That's amazing. They have some other audio file headphones that are similarly like in the 30, 30 to 40% off. So yeah. And one more. You, you, you know the company one more, right? The number one,

Leo Laporte (00:34:53):
You recommended them a lot. I know, I

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:55):
Do love that. And they're great. I do. They are, they're triple driver in your monitor, which is a wired monitor. Maybe not so useful these days since phones don't come with headphone outputs anymore. But if you have a headphone output that you can use, this triple driver is 61 bucks down from 80. And that's my favorite of the one more headphones, even more than the quad driver, which is, you know, ostensibly better. That's down, that's to 110 down from 170. But I, to tell you the truth, I prefer the triple driver. I've listened to them both carefully.

Leo Laporte (00:35:34):
More, more drivers isn't necessarily better. Is it,

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:37):
It isn't necessarily better. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. Exactly

Leo Laporte (00:35:40):
Right. I've had that experience mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:45):
Okay. I, I listened to I I for jogging and what have you, I listened, I don't jog, but I <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:35:52):
<Laugh>.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:53):
That

Leo Laporte (00:35:54):
Was very aspirational of you <laugh>.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:56):
Yeah, it was very aspirational of

Leo Laporte (00:35:58):
Me. You know, when I mc climb mountains and run

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:00):
Mos. Yeah, well, when I walk and when I get on my stationary bike, I listen to one more true wireless earbuds.

Leo Laporte (00:36:06):
I, I like those are the ones that go around your neck, the back of your neck or

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:09):
No, actually no. They're just, they're just two little gizmos that stick in your ear. But

Leo Laporte (00:36:14):
Do you recommend, in the past, and I've really liked the one mos that go around the back of your neck. Correct.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:18):
They're

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
Harder to lose to

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:20):
Be. That is correct. Yeah. My wife uses those all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And those are, I I didn't see those on sale here for Black Friday, but

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
Because they pop outta your ears, you're still attached to them.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:32):
You're still attached to them, right. Yeah. That's a whole, that's a whole category of in years called Neckand. Cause they have this neck band thing and then wires that go up to the little gizmos that go in your ear and, and for exactly that reason, as you said, you, they're not so easy to lose. If they pop out, then they're still hanging there. Yeah. Yeah. And you can, you can grab 'em. They, you don't crush them under foot as you're walking down the street. When

Leo Laporte (00:36:56):
Apple got rid of the headphone jack and then all the other manufacturers Samsung followed, that was, that led to the explosion of these Bluetooth, you know, earbuds and headphones and all that. And I guess that's a good thing. They're more convenient, that's for sure. You don't get tangled. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:13):
But the sound quality isn't as good.

Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
Yeah. Always get wired if you want the best,

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:17):
If you can one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:18):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> Home the geek Scott Wilkinson youtube.com/avs four.

(00:37:26):
Hey, our show today brought to you by a really useful tool for everybody who does meetings and who doesn't now, right? Zoom and Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The problem is, and and we do all three, I always click the wrong button cause I forget that I'm, I'm in Meet and I click the off, what I think is the turn the microphone on button and it's the hang up button and it's terrible. But Unify meeting solves that cuz it's got one user interface for all three. One reliable Universal user interface. Eliminates the hassle, saves you time. And I love, I love it because it, when you're not in the meeting, unify runs in the background. Just a little thing on your screen with your calendar so you can see when your next meeting is. If you're in a lot of meetings, this is such a great tool.

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You click on the meeting and then it knows what program to launch behind the scenes and it opens up unify meetings so you always know exactly how it's working and all that stuff. It's a great way to do all your meetings without worrying about, you know, which video conferencing app you're using, which command you use. And the best way to use Unify meeting I might add is on a MIMO monitor. So MIMO also makes monitors. So if you have a second display like the seven inch mimo that plugs in the USB port, second display, then Unify meeting runs all the time in that. That's your calendar display. And when you're in a meeting, that's your meeting display. And the nice thing is on your other display you can see Zoom or meet or Microsoft Teams. So you can see the real interface, but you're also seeing the unified meeting interface on the second monitor.

(00:39:04):
Now that's a great way to operate. Milo's got a great Black Friday Cyber Monday deal between November 24th. So it's five days from now through the 28th. Remember those dates, 50% off a Unify license and a hundred percent of the proceeds go to support the American Cancer Society. So you're doing a good thing, you get 50% off and you're supporting a good cause. Unify only costs around $20 after the discount for the entire year. But I got an even better way to do this. Buy a MIMO Monitor and then Unify meeting is free. Try unifying your team at work, try it yourself. Go to unify meeting.com. U N I F Y M E E T I n g.com. The offer code for the 50% off is Tech I 50. Remember that is not yet. It's November 24th through the 28th, 50% off for a year subscription or use the offer code Tech I and 25% off any of MI MO'S displays and get unify free.

(00:40:05):
Now it's a limited time offer. It is a great deal. I think Unify meeting is fantastic. You should try it. Simplify with unify unify meeting.com. The offer code Tech guy 50 gets you 50% off a year's subscription. Or use a Code tech guy to get 25% off any of nemo's displays. That is a limited time offer. November 24th to the 28th. And of course all the proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. That's why it's a limited time thing. If you do it today, you'll get a great deal too. So if you're, if you're impatient like I am, I would immediately go to unify meeting.com and use the offer code and tech guy and and get whatever deal is available. But if you can wait for a few days, that's a good idea. Tech guy, 50, 50% off a year subscription tech guy.

(00:40:52):
25% off. Thank you to mimo for supporting the show. MIMO Monitors is a great company and unify meeting is really a really handy tool. Unify meeting.com. Now back to the tech guy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Do you wanna do a thing Mr. W? Yes. You wanna do the top of the hour thing? I mean, you know what I'm saying? Ah, you know what I'm saying? That thing, you know what I'm talking about. <Laugh> the thing. Yeah, that's happy dude. Thank you. <Laugh>. So that way my <crosstalk> Oh yeah man, I get you guys get to go get orange each mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Exactly. <laugh>, its time. All I'll please sir. Are you, are you getting over a cold?

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:34):
No, no, no. Just little, just coffee. Just a little morning crud. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
I know that is, yeah,

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:40):
I, I'm, I'm actually, I have survived pretty well, but a lot of the groups I'm in, the bands I'm in now, a lot of people are out. It's sick. It's

Leo Laporte (00:41:47):
Back Yeah's back Fsv or rsv?

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:51):
Rsv. I'm actually quite nervous. I'm doing Tuba Christmas in, in LA and I'm starting to get a little nervous about it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:42:00):
We should we should mention those. Don't let me forget to mention that next week.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:03):
Okay. No,

Leo Laporte (00:42:04):
No. Christmas. Yeah. When is that? Be

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:07):
December 4th. Sunday. December 4th.

Leo Laporte (00:42:09):
So we have time. Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:10):
We have time. We can do it next week.

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):
<Laugh>, you don't really need the tuba, do you? You just you just do

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:21):
It. Just do it. Yeah. No. Well, you know, that's one of the, what, what you did just now was, you know, the stereotypical but mic right? Well it's Mikah. Okay. Yeah. He's

Leo Laporte (00:42:31):
Surprisingly good at it for a slender

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:34):
Film. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:42:38):
Don't make him

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:39):
Well. Yeah, but the nice, yeah, really the nice thing about the nice thing about Tuba Christmas is the tuba players get to play the melody.

Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
What? Yeah. That's crazy.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:50):
It's nothing but tuba is on the stage, man. Crazy,

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
Crazy. <Laugh> crazy talk.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:58):
So yeah, I will definitely be talking about that. We, let's let's talk about that next week for sure. Cuz that'll be right before.

Leo Laporte (00:43:07):
Yeah. Actually be next week. It'll

Scott Wilkinson (00:43:09):
Be a week before it be

Leo Laporte (00:43:09):
Next, be next week. We should do it. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:43:11):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That'd be perfect. Okay. Perfetto. So somebody said about getting the flu shot. I got the flu shot, I got my latest Covid booster. The Bivalent booster. So I should be good in that regard. But I, I hear these news stories now that, you know, hospitalizations are up and infection rates are up, positivity rates are up. So I'm probably gonna wear a mask throughout the whole day of Tuba Christmas, which includes setup and rehearsal and all that stuff. And just take it off just for the concert.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:48):
I was at a theater last night and I wore a mask the whole time. I was probably one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

Scott Wilkinson (00:43:55):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in the whole theater.

Leo Laporte (00:43:57):
I saw the picture. You were literally the only one.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:59):
Yeah, only one masked. I just, good

Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
For you. I don't blame you.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:02):
I haven't gotten any of that stuff yet. Knock on. And you're not gonna, and I'm gonna do my best to not

Leo Laporte (00:44:06):
Get it.

Scott Wilkinson (00:44:06):
It, yeah. Yeah. I haven't either.

Leo Laporte (00:44:08):
Still the good news is it's still a little okay. In Sonoma County. It hasn't started to creep up yet, is it? I watch the sewage, literally

Mikah Sargent (00:44:22):
He takes a manhole cover off and sits down and

Leo Laporte (00:44:24):
I can tell

Scott Wilkinson (00:44:25):
And you look down there, look,

Mikah Sargent (00:44:27):
That looks a little co What is that new one? AVS or whatever. No, not that rsv. Rsv. I

Leo Laporte (00:44:34):
Can't tell rsv, but I can they do measure the

Scott Wilkinson (00:44:37):
AVS is not a virus.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:39):
Yeah, that's your, that's your deal. <Laugh>

Scott Wilkinson (00:44:42):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:44:43):
Oh, I'm not coming back to a theater. I actually have no desire to go to a movie theater. Oh

Mikah Sargent (00:44:48):
Yeah. Movie theater. Yeah. I've, I didn't even used to be a movie theater

Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
Person. Yeah. Now it's like, no, I'll just wait.

Scott Wilkinson (00:44:54):
I'm afraid. I used to be a movie theater person. I used to love going

Leo Laporte (00:44:57):
Movie. Of course you did. You're the home theater guy.

Scott Wilkinson (00:45:00):
I was the home theater guy, so I wanted to see what was going on in commercial cinema. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
Yeah. That's completely reasonable.

Scott Wilkinson (00:45:05):
But no, not, not, not yet.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:08):
I, I couldn't, I could never focus on the film because, and I know this is ridiculous, but Oh, but we're about to start. We'll talk about it later. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Yeah. Stick

Scott Wilkinson (00:45:18):
Around. Absolutely. Sure.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:20):
I love this song.

Leo Laporte (00:45:23):
A little bit of Monica

Mikah Sargent (00:45:26):
<Laugh>. This song is, you're just my type,

Leo Laporte (00:45:30):
A little bit of Veronica and you're just my type,

Mikah Sargent (00:45:34):
You're just my

Leo Laporte (00:45:35):
Type Mikah sergeant. He's a tech guy and I'm a tech guy too. And we're here for you. Double the tech guys on Saturday 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. We were talking about Mastodon and I think I, I wanna start calling it the fed averse, which is really gonna confuse people.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:54):
<Laugh>. It's all

Leo Laporte (00:45:54):
Confusing, but Macon's just one of many ways you can join the federated universe of social networks. And it's not even, it's the biggest, but it's not necessarily the best. And we were, we were talking before the break to Tom, who's a blind user and there are actually you can use Mastodon. And one of the nice things about the Mastodon ethos as opposed to say Twitter or Facebook is you're really strongly encouraged to consider blind users by putting alt tags on all of your images. Yes, everybody does. It's a nice culture. Not using too many emojis in a row cuz it sounds so dumb. Uhhuh on your screen reader. And and then hashtags are really important on Mastodon. It's something you know, advanced users know that you, you don't just follow people, you follow hashtags, but it's a recommendation for screen readers that you inter cap.

(00:46:47):
So if you're, if you're if you're saying, well I wanna do hashtag my beautiful cat, you would capitalize my beautiful and cat so that the screen reader, instead of saying, my beautiful cat would say my beautiful cat. Got it. And and that's really the three things that can make a big difference for blind users. But there are, there's also software on the fed averse that's designed for blind users. It's a little bit better for screen readers. There's even command line versions of this. And that's why I use the term metaverse cuz Maston is just software to let you access the federated universe of social networks. There's many, many ways to do that, and all of them have one common attribute. You can follow anybody on any of these programs from any other. So I, I, I think there's a lot to be said for the future of this.

(00:47:37):
We've seen what it's like when you have a centralized thing, then you're kind of at the mercy of the person who runs it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we get calls all the time from people who, whose Google accounts have been closed and who you, where you gonna go? You're gonna knock on the door of the local Google office near you. There's nothing you can do about it. There's very little recourse. Same thing if you get hacked on Facebook or, or Twitter decides they don't like what you're saying and they take your countdown because these are centralized places. Their businesses whoever runs the business gets to run it any way they want and even run it into the ground. That's their privilege. So the nice thing about this decentralized network, this fed averse is nobody owns it. Every, everybody who's running an instance, that's what they call these servers, gets to run it the way they want.

(00:48:28):
You pick an instance with somebody you like that runs it the way you want it to be run. There are some instances where anything goes and there's some instances where it's family friendly. So there's, there's a very broad variety of cultures that are, are respected. And I just think it's just the right way to do it. I think we've seen now that centralization is brittle and it, and it operates in on behalf of the owner, not on behalf of the user. In fact, in a sense, you're really the, you, you're the field hands working for the guy who owns the place. Right? Aren't you contributing and putting all your stuff up there. 88. 88. Ask Leo let's go on to Kevin Las Vegas. Hi Kevin.

Caller 2 (00:49:11):
Hi Leo. I got a let you know about an iPad repair strike for repair, you know, self repair and all of that that you've been talking about.

Leo Laporte (00:49:25):
Actually, Mike is the expert on this. He's the guy who actually ordered all those parts

Caller 2 (00:49:30):
<Laugh>. And so, well, I didn't do it myself. I I had it, I have the third generation iPad Pro 12.9 and about a month and a half ago, the port, the charging port wasn't working. It was very spotty. So Brandon, the Apple do a genius bar and they look at it and they clean it out and they do all the gyrations and do different cables. No, it's not working. And they said, well, we don't fix 'em, but we can sell you another third generation for 650 bucks. Is it? Yeah. I don't think that,

Leo Laporte (00:50:00):
That's not a good deal. Wow. Apple says we don't fix 'em.

Caller 2 (00:50:05):
No, they they fix the screens. I know they do that.

Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
Oh yeah, they, yeah, if something internal's gone wrong. Got it. Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:50:11):
It was a port. So I said, all right, well, so I searched on a YouTube just for the heck of it, and I saw this how to repair your iPad in

Leo Laporte (00:50:20):
A while. He's a wonderful guy. Louis Rossman, who owns a repair shop in Manhattan and does great videos and all, all his self repair stuff. He's incredible.

Caller 2 (00:50:30):
Well, I found another one and he went through the whole thing and I said, well, this is well way above my pay grade, but at the end he said, I do fix them myself. You just mail it to me and I'll send it back after I fix it for a reasonable fee. And it turns out the guy isn't here in Las Vegas. Oh. Oh. I don't have to mail it to him. So I, he lives like five minutes away from me. Oh, that's funny. <Laugh>, I was able to drive down there and drop it off and he fixed it and he fixed 199 bucks, fixed the port, which was wrong. He went through little diagnostics, he's got all kinds of equipment and fixed it. $199 later I have my three third generation back again. Instead of spending a fortune and I gotta give him a plug. It's a great, his site is vcc board repairs.com. His name is Jesse Cruz. He's local here to Las Vegas. And like I say, you can mail it in if you don't live nearby, but if you do, boy, anybody in Vegas, just go drop it off and you can pick it up. He did it the same day. As a matter of fact,

Leo Laporte (00:51:35):
We'll put the link in the show notes. VCC repair. Yeah, so it's, this is actually a good thing to know is that most companies nowadays, when they repair something, they don't repair it. Apple's a really good example of this. They do board level, what they call board level repairs. This has gone on forever. I I had a MacBook, I think it was almost 20 years ago that I back before the MagSafe, when you plugged it in, you plugged it in a connector and it fell and it snapped the connector port and Apple wanted you know, thousand dollars at least to replace. They said, oh no, we have to replace some other board if that breaks. I brought it to a friend who had a little shop back in the day when you could have a little Mac shop and he said, oh no, we just soldered that back on <laugh>.

(00:52:14):
So I fixed it with 12 bucks and it's just unfortunate that Apple, and you know what, it's cuz they do such a volume of repairs, et cetera, et cetera. When I spilled coffee into my my MacBook brought to Apple, they said 1300 bucks, it's you know, we're gonna have to replace some other board. I don't have a happy inning on that. Maybe if I knew this guy at VCC board repair sound seriously <laugh> you could see the chip that it melted and that would've had to been removed from the other board. They don't sold him on anymore. They're, what they call surface mounted would've taken some real skill to get rid of it. I'm glad that worked out for you, Kevin. That's great.

Caller 2 (00:52:50):
Yeah, I, I got another question though. I've been having the issues, I think it might have been since I updated to Ventura the desal, first of all that I, a recommendation for desktop icons because they were shifting all over the place after waking up from sleep. So there's a a Mac update, there's a one a d Im, it's called Desktop Icon Manager, and it keeps them where you put 'em and it's, it's worked for the last week. Now I haven't had a problem when it's waiting from sleep, the icons stay where I put 'em and there's, there's all kinds of things you can do to customize that too. So it's a great little app free so I, I swear by that. But the one issue I'm having is my windows won't stay from when they wake up from sleep. I have three monitors. And when one, when they go to sleep for some reason, the

Leo Laporte (00:53:46):
Oh, I see what's going on. He's got different resolutions, huh.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:49):
Well, and,

Caller 2 (00:53:49):
And I, and I've heard also too from the forums that awake from sleep and sleep is at different times for different monitors that could be part of the issue.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:59):
Yeah. So this is the problem is the machine goes into a certain level of, of sleep when it does go to sleep. And part of that sometimes includes kind of shutting down the communication between those external monitors and the main computer that you have. And so when it wakes from sleep, then it realizes Oh, there are some external monitors plugged in. It pushes out the displays to those monitors, and then that causes the tech, the windows that you have to shift a little bit. About the only way that I have seen that's been able to fix this is making some rather drastic adjustments to the energy settings. But that involves using a lot more energy. Of course,

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
<Laugh>, in other words, don't sleep. Yeah, keep your eyes open and you never know, and they're gonna sneak up on you. Leo and Mikah, your tick guys, more calls right after this. Never sleep. <Laugh>, that was your mistake. All right, Scott. It's coffee time.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:03):
It's coffee time.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:04):
Coffee rah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:06):
Coffee times. Okay. Yours my friend. Thank you so much. Yes, sure. Happy to help. And there is the timer. Yay. So, hello everybody. Nice to see you all. Got a podcast coming up this Tuesday. My guest is going to be Rob Brennan. He's the product technology manager for home entertainment products at Sony. So we're gonna be talking about Sony stuff not from AAL point of view. I'm very conscious of, of avoiding that. But Sony does a lot of interesting things and they are worth talking about. So hope you'll tune in. That should be a lot of fun. Let's see. Let's see. Fil the 99, I guess it is. Has the technological advances of AV receivers reached the a ceiling, or would I want to upgrade a 2017 AV receiver? Good question. And the reason is techno, we haven't reached a ceiling.

(00:56:26):
As long as technology continues to improve we will continue to need to upgrade eventually. It doesn't have to be every year like some people do, but 2017, we didn't have HDM I 2.1 yet. And as far as I can recall, Mike, he, you might be able to correct me on that if I'm wrong, but I think yeah, we didn't have, for the most part, AV receivers certainly didn't have H D M I 2.1 capabilities. Now, if you have a TV from 2017 s, then there's no need to upgrade. But if you get a new TV with H D M I 2.1 and which is a faster H D M I basically carries more kinds of data than H D M I than earlier versions, then you probably wanna upgrade your receiver as well. And, and maybe your source devices as well. Do you have a 4K TV currently? If not, and you upgrade to a 4K tv, then Yeah, you might very well wanna upgrade the receiver. Newer receivers will support more high dynamic range formats. So from 2017, did we have Adobe Vision, then? Did we even have hdr Then I'd have to go back and do a little research. That's now five years ago.

(00:57:55):
So, let's see the cop King. What is the best 32 inch TV available? Well, to tell you the truth, I don't pay much attention to TVs below 55 inches or maybe 48. So 32, i, I, I don't know. I don't pay a lot of attention to those, that that's more in the monitor size of things.

Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
Hey, Scott, I hate to interrupt you. Oh, sure. But I have a special person on the line. I want to, I want to go to it real quickly Oh, sure. Before we go back on the air, but I wanna thank that's you. We'll talk next week. Let's do Tuba Christmas.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:33):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
Thank you, sir.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:34):
Thanks. Thanks a

Leo Laporte (00:58:35):
Bunch. Thank you. I appreciate it. Now let me see if I can figure out how to do this. I gotta push this button and say hello. I think Charles Hayden Savage is on the line. Am I correct?

Steve Martin (00:58:48):
Yes. Charles Hayden Savage is here finally alone without those cumbersome, other two.

Leo Laporte (00:58:55):
So annoying, aren't they?

Steve Martin (00:58:57):
Yes. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
Do I call you Charles or Charles Hayden?

Steve Martin (00:59:03):
Well, you know, the actual, we thought it was funnier if my first name was, my first name is actually Charles Hayden. Then my last name is <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:59:15):
From apartment 14 C. It's good to talk to you. Yep. We're not on the air yet. We are on the podcast, just so, oh, okay. You know how it stands, we're gonna go on the air in a few minutes, so,

Steve Martin (00:59:26):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:59:27):
That's fine. But anyway, it's great to hear from you. And have you started taping the new news new season?

Steve Martin (00:59:33):
Not until January. We will, but it's being written and we're on it. I mean, for those of you, your podcast listeners have no idea who's Charles hates. Savage is,

Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
Everybody knows who Charles Brazos. We all know that.

Steve Martin (00:59:49):
Right? <laugh>. I, I will live, I will dwell within your compliment. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:59:57):
I hope it's comfy.

Steve Martin (01:00:00):
Hey, so I should, I, I, you know, be the, the news that I have, we wait of course, till the you're on the air. Yes. And then I'll, I'll just sort of, you wanna go with it sooner rather than later.

Leo Laporte (01:00:12):
Whatever, whatever you want. I mean, I wanna talk about the book. Obviously I wanna talk about the show and I have prepared an answer for your questions.

Steve Martin (01:00:19):
Yeah. Okay. Well, I've given up on a few questions. <Laugh>, it hasn't been, it has been 15 years. It's

Leo Laporte (01:00:27):
Literally,

Steve Martin (01:00:27):
I've never been able to

Leo Laporte (01:00:28):
Correct it. It's literally been more than a decade.

Steve Martin (01:00:32):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I have one solution. Cause I found one app that doesn't do that awful, awful thing

Leo Laporte (01:00:39):
Calendar was, you know, I tried to explain it to Mikah Mikah's here also. I tried to explain it to Mikah and he said, wait, I don't understand. I said, no, look, I don't really either, but this is, this is how, so if I'm correct, this is the idea you would say you would write down no matter where you are, I'm gonna talk to Leo at, what did you write? 3:00 PM

Steve Martin (01:01:03):
Right? Well, that's not a good example. Oh, yeah. The example is I'm going to have lunch with Leo in California at noon. Yes. But now I'm in New York, so I write in I'm gonna have lunch with Leo at noon, but I know it's California, the app, the calendar app does not know. So it either says, well, do you want your time to be based on the iPad or your time zone? Right. So you choose one of those all. And, and so that means that somewhere the time is wrong. It, I just wanted to say 3:00 PM

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
You just live such a bicoastal life that, you know, when you say 3:00 PM it's wherever I am, it'll be 3:00 PM

Steve Martin (01:01:56):
Yeah. Yeah. But I don't, I think it's, it's designed this way for assistance to send out maybe math, you know, calendar meetings or something. So they want it to be all time zoning. But I think it's, wouldn't it be simple to have an option to say, don't change the times time no matter what,

Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
15 years <laugh>,

Steve Martin (01:02:20):
15 years. There's only one app I found. And sometimes it promises, I'll look it up and say, how do you stop it from changing the time they say it's simple. <Laugh>, you just say, use your iPad time. Well, that doesn't work because when you change, go to California, your iPad time,

Leo Laporte (01:02:38):
Right? Well, you can turn off the time change in your iPad, but you don't really want that either.

Steve Martin (01:02:43):
Yeah. Because then, then your iPad won't change time and you want it to change time, right. Or your phone. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:02:49):
So that's why it's complicated. Yeah. You have different things that have different, I've

Mikah Sargent (01:02:53):
Been pondering this one.

Leo Laporte (01:02:54):
Mikah Sargent is here. He, he does a show with me. He's actually an iOS expert. I brought in a true, true

Mikah Sargent (01:03:00):
Expert. And I, I spent some time yesterday fiddling with the built in calendar app using my third party calendar app that I use. And I haven't found one that's a mind reader. And that's what you need. You need one that can sort of know what you want. I, I was talking to Leo about it and I said, well, if he types in meeting at 3:00 PM Pacific, then it will be in the Pacific time zone. But it sounds like you're wanting something that you don't even have to go as far as typing in Pacific afterward.

Steve Martin (01:03:28):
So why would I wanna do that? <Laugh>, I'm, I'm busy.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:33):
Right? Right.

Steve Martin (01:03:34):
And also, if you do that Pacific Time zone, it shows up on your New York calendar, say three hours later,

Mikah Sargent (01:03:42):
Uhhuh. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:03:43):
That's a problem.

Steve Martin (01:03:45):
Yeah. So you've kind of, you have to guess when, when your appointment is, I've had, you know, people miss flights because they'd check into my calendar and then see it in the wrong time zone, that, that go an hour later to the fly. Anyway, that, you know what, I'm gonna stop complaining. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:04:04):
You know, apple made a Ken Burns effect for iMovie. Maybe they could make a Steve Martin calendar. They could do that effect for IAL and solve this. I think we should talk to Steve.

Steve Martin (01:04:15):
You know what, the reason I don't understand why they don't do it is it's so simple. It just says, don't do that.

Leo Laporte (01:04:21):
<Laugh>. Right. Don't do

Steve Martin (01:04:23):
Anything. All we have to write in the code is sot

Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
Be, don't do, just let me handle the time zones. Yeah. All right, Steve, hang on. We're going, we're coming up here.

Steve Martin (01:04:31):
All right.

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here. Mikah Sargent, your tech guys two, answering your questions. 88, 88. Ask Leo all the stuff we talk about on the website. Tech guy labs.com. We're talking Hightech on the line from the aronia in beautiful downtown New York. Charles Hayden, apartment, apartment 14 C.

Steve Martin (01:05:09):
Hey, Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
<Laugh> the beautiful Upper West Side as the, are the, are the leaves changing in Central Park? Is it beautiful?

Steve Martin (01:05:17):
Well, I'm looking out the wrong window.

Leo Laporte (01:05:19):
<Laugh>,

Steve Martin (01:05:21):
But I think, I think they are. And just to, to be clear, for those of you who aren't, you know up to the latest hit thing it's, I'm actually Steve Martin here on the phone with my old friend Leo. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:05:34):
Steve. That's very nice. And

Steve Martin (01:05:35):
I I have a reason I'm calling in is because there's a little announcement that's going to bring people a little bit of sadness, but they'll, they'll have tolerance and they'll have understanding.

Leo Laporte (01:05:49):
I was, I wanted you to tell people so they wouldn't, you know, get mad at me. Yeah. You, you cheer them up.

Steve Martin (01:05:55):
And gentlemen, by the end of this year, Mr. Leo Laport will be retiring from the radio. Is that accurate, Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:06:04):
That is accurate. I

Steve Martin (01:06:06):
Wow. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
I've been doing this show almost as long as you lived in the aronia

Steve Martin (01:06:12):
<Laugh>. Well, you know, you, you have provided so much. You know, I sometimes, rarely only when I have to call tech support for some app or thing or something, and the, there are exceptions, but I'm not gonna mention any names. But sometimes the, the person on the other end of the line is arrogant. They say things so quickly you can't understand where they're talking about. And they just assume, you know, take your usb, download the latest upgrade, and then reload and enter your new password. And there you go. Why? And you just stay with people. You're kind, you're courteous, you're understanding, and you've just helped so many people. And now you're retiring because you're evil. And part

Leo Laporte (01:06:56):
True. This is true. The darkness is coming

Steve Martin (01:06:59):
Out. You didn't wanna help people anymore. Yeah. You're tired

Leo Laporte (01:07:01):
Of helping people. You told me once that you started listening on the podcast while you were up in Vancouver doing my, the big year movie. Yes.

Steve Martin (01:07:09):
Might have been. But I, I'm aware of your television. You know, I screensavers everything. People

Leo Laporte (01:07:16):
Forget or baby don't know that you're quite the geek, actually.

Steve Martin (01:07:22):
I, no, not, you know, things have changed so fast, but you know,

Leo Laporte (01:07:25):
You, you're, you know what you're doing. You know, you asked me for a a na and I said, well get a sonology and I can I help you set it up? You said, no, I got this. And you set it all up.

Steve Martin (01:07:35):
Well, that secretly the company I'm talking about that won't help me <laugh> Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:07:41):
<Laugh>,

Steve Martin (01:07:43):
It's up and running. It's, it's up and running.

Leo Laporte (01:07:45):
Hey, thank you for letting the world know. Take this thing a little bit out. I will. Last show will be December 18th. We're gonna keep doing a podcast, but the last show on the radio will be December 18th and next hour we're gonna talk to my replacement. By the way, he's gonna join us next up. Oh, yeah.

Steve Martin (01:07:59):
Oh, great.

Leo Laporte (01:08:00):
So the, so the, the radio station's gonna

Steve Martin (01:08:02):
Laboratory guy, lemme just tell you're not a, I remember when you did your thousandth show, you sort of went, oh, ho hum. And you did your 2000 show and you did.

Leo Laporte (01:08:11):
Ho hum. I think you're like that too, though, right? You, you don't, yeah. You, you're there to entertain, not to celebrate yourself.

Steve Martin (01:08:20):
I couldn't agree more. Yeah. but you were very excited. One New Year. I remember that

Leo Laporte (01:08:26):
<Laugh>, you didn't watch that. Did you

Steve Martin (01:08:29):
Watch it? But I heard about,

Leo Laporte (01:08:31):
I shaved my head and tattooed my butt. It was, yeah. Yeah. That's,

Steve Martin (01:08:35):
Congratulations. And thank you for helping everybody, including me. You know, just love, listen, I love, I love your I won't call 'em diatribes that start the show, but you're, thank you. Catch up on all that's happening with tech. It's really nice.

Leo Laporte (01:08:49):
Hey, I wanted to thank you. I wanna give you a plug before you ask your question, cuz you're here to ask a question. Believe it or not. I am. And I brought my Mike is the guy for that. But I just wanna say, I just finished number one as walking your, your brand new book that you did with cartoonist Harry Bliss. It, I could not stop laughing. It is really great. Well, thank you. Memories.

Steve Martin (01:09:09):
That's not what I called, but thanks.

Leo Laporte (01:09:10):
No, I, you know, I, you always say that. Don't plug my book, but I, but I, first of all, it's memories from your movies. You know what it reminded me of, and don't take this the wrong way, kind of reminded me of Art Spiegelman's Mouse

Steve Martin (01:09:23):
<Laugh>. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:24):
Which is, admittedly, that's about the Holocaust, so it's probably not the best,

Steve Martin (01:09:28):
No, it's not the best

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
<Laugh>. But it's a, it's a graphic novel, I guess is, and, and

Steve Martin (01:09:34):
Let's put it this way, about half of it is memories. My memories of the movies, and I explain the title. Number one is Walking is the is on the car sheet when you get it in the morning, like the so-called star is number one, and then the second star is number two and number three. So when they're on the walk walkie-talkie and you're about to go to the set, I'll say, number one is walking. And when I first started hearing that, I thought, oh, that's embarrassing. Number one is walking. And then as movies go along, you know, hearing, Hey, number one is walking, number one is blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I did the movie with it's Complicated with Meryl Streep and Al Baldon, and I heard number three is Walk

Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
<Laugh>. And Harry Harry, you know, encapsulates this perfectly with your look. He's gotten very good at drawing you, Steve Perfect,

Steve Martin (01:10:19):
Perfect drawing.

Leo Laporte (01:10:20):
He's really talented. And by the way, that was a great movie. You were number one in my book on that movie. You were fantastic

Steve Martin (01:10:27):
In that movie. Well, let's get to my very important,

Leo Laporte (01:10:29):
Okay, go

Steve Martin (01:10:30):
Ahead. I'm not gonna go over the calendar issue. The calendar issue is my nemesis <laugh> it's been ever since the online calendars have been in existence, you know, and, and for five years I thought I must be missing something, <laugh>. Cause

Leo Laporte (01:10:50):
Now, now you have to explain what it is because I know, cuz you've been asking me this for as long as I've known you <laugh>. But

Steve Martin (01:10:58):
I do see other people complain about it. But in most calendars, if you put in, if you have a, let's say I'm having lunch with Leo at noon in Petaluma, but I'm in New York, so I enter it and my New York calendar or my calendar, and it just says I'm having lunch with Leo at noon. And then when I get to California, it says, nine

Leo Laporte (01:11:21):
<Laugh>. Which

Steve Martin (01:11:22):
Explains with you at

Leo Laporte (01:11:24):
Nine, why I've never seen you at lunch. You always are late. Yeah. Or early.

Steve Martin (01:11:27):
I'm always early. But I, and then I go online and say, what's the fix? I say, oh, it's so easy. You just say, don't do a time zone change. You say, will you trust the time zone you're in? Or you trust the iPad time zone. And then you realize, well, whatever you pick, it's always wrong somewhere. It's either wrong when you're in New York, for example. Or it's wrong when you're, and I'm not gonna go there, but I found an app that I use and it, and, and I asked them before I signed on, cause it's a monthly thing, I say, are you going to have change this feature to time zone coverage? They go, Nope. And then I said, I'm sticking with you

Leo Laporte (01:12:02):
Apple. I hope Apple's listening, apple Univa Switch. You could call it the Steve Martin Switch cuz there's many people that would want this.

Steve Martin (01:12:10):
Oh, Google Calendar, where you just go, somebody change that time. Don't change my lunch to nine <laugh>. All right. And Brent, when I'm in New York, don't show me that it's three. Anyway.

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
What's your other question? Cuz we can't help you with that one, right? Mikah? This is three.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:27):
I tried, I promise I tried. I I couldn't figure out anything.

Steve Martin (01:12:30):
I have two, two questions on a complaint. Is that too many?

Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
No. No.

Steve Martin (01:12:36):
Okay. My complaint is, and I hear other people say this, you get an email and then you, you know, whatever. You, you read it and you say, oh, now where's that email? And then you search and it is gone. <Laugh> every other email on either side of it is there, but the one you want is gone. And I've heard other people say this, it's magic. It's you know, it's outta Shakespeare, <laugh>, you know, stirring Pots of Evil now. But I'm gonna let that one go. Here's my question. When I'm on my iPad in iOS and I get an email from someone I don't know, I mean someone I know, but I don't have their email. And then I tap on their email and I, and they say save to contacts mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and it saves it to contacts. But on my contacts app, on my iPad, it is not there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it saves it to the iCloud, it saves it to iCloud. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but it does not save it to my Contacts app.

Leo Laporte (01:13:38):
Oh, this is good. Additional information. Now that

Mikah Sargent (01:13:41):
Is yeah, that is good to know that it went into iCloud. So what this is sounding like to me, Steve this is Mikah by the way. Is that, this is actually,

Leo Laporte (01:13:49):
You should call him Mr.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:50):
Oh, Mr. Martin, I believe

Steve Martin (01:13:52):
Mr. Martin.

Steve Martin (01:13:55):
Mr. Steve. Mr. Steve.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:56):
Mr. Steve what this is sounding like is a, a problem that I a lot of people do have, and that is a settings issue. So in the settings app, there is a section for contacts. And when you tap on contacts underneath this section, you will see an option called default account. And default account Lets you choose where by default, the Contacts app is saving new contacts that you create. And okay, if you have it set to save to iCloud or save to whatever other email services you might have logged in, then it's likely that the email program, the mail app is saving that contact to one of those places. And then when you go back into the Contacts app either on your iPad, your iPhone, wherever you happen to be, you will notice that there is an option for lists. And the lists section shows you all of the different places that a contact can be. It can be in your iCloud account, it can be in your I have a Twitter account, for example. Or there's the option for all contacts. And what I'm saying,

Steve Martin (01:15:09):
Wait, wait a minute. Okay, go ahead. I'm, I'm looking at the Contacts app. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and you're saying lists. I'm not seeing anything. I'm seeing, I'm on my, I iOS contacts

Mikah Sargent (01:15:24):
Uhhuh, and

Steve Martin (01:15:25):
Now I could, I could press all iCloud, maybe that's it.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:29):
Yeah. So you do see the, the section where it says iCloud and then it says all iCloud? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So when you tap on that, then this should give you kind of the full contacts that you have in your, in your iPad or in your phone or wherever it happens to be. And

Steve Martin (01:15:48):
Okay, I just did that. And here's, let me tell you what happened. I just did that Uhoh and it, and it changed my lunch with Leo <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:58):
Oh no. Now it's,

Steve Martin (01:15:59):
Hey, I think you just fixed it. <Laugh>. I think you just Thank you

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
Steve. You said a second question. Can you hang on for a couple of minutes and we'll do that after the break? Yeah,

Steve Martin (01:16:07):
Sure. Go

Leo Laporte (01:16:08):
Ahead. Yeah. Okay. Steve Martin, I'm sorry. Charles Hayden Savage. Mr.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:11):
Steve

Leo Laporte (01:16:12):
From <laugh>, Mr. Savage, or better known as Brazos, will continue in just a bit. Leo, Laport, Mikah, Sargent, your tech guys, thank you for letting me hold you over.

Steve Martin (01:16:30):
Oh, I don't mind. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
I really appreciate it.

Steve Martin (01:16:32):
We're still, you're still recording. This is now the podcast.

Leo Laporte (01:16:34):
Yeah, it's the podcast. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:36):
Look, he's like a producer on the show. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:16:37):
He knows

Steve Martin (01:16:38):
It. I have a question for you. Yeah. Cause I'm ashamed to ask you this on the air.

Leo Laporte (01:16:44):
Good. Only Yes. Privately. Just between you and

Steve Martin (01:16:47):
Me, I have a, yeah, I have a, a Venmo account, which I almost never use. Right. I've used it a couple of times, three or four times. And I thought, oh, I'll log in the other day. So I log in and I said, I, I know, I said I, I paid my barber, I hate, you know, anyway, paid my wife something. And then I get an email from a woman and it says it says,

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
Send me money.

Steve Martin (01:17:18):
Exactly. It says, can you send this back? I sent it to the wrong person, please. I

Leo Laporte (01:17:24):
Think that's a scam. Mm-Hmm.

Steve Martin (01:17:25):
<Affirmative>. Okay. It was $35. Yeah. But here's, here's the thing. On my in, in the account it says she sent me

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
$35. Okay. So here's, by the way, you didn't, you, you've done like Dirty Rotten scandals. You've done these kind of con games. This is a well known con game where they say they've sent you money, and then you send them the money and they retract the initial sending and they've made 35 bucks.

Steve Martin (01:17:56):
Ah, I see. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:17:57):
And this happened. This is the Nigerian scam. Nigerian prince scam.

Steve Martin (01:18:01):
Could I refer? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:02):
They have control.

Steve Martin (01:18:04):
Could I resend the money I sent? I mean can,

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
Could you get your money back? That's a good question. I, that's an interesting question. I'm guessing they figure you won't probably, but you won't notice until the time has passed that you could,

Mikah Sargent (01:18:18):
That you could. Yeah. And it, it depends on if they take that money out of their Venmo and put it somewhere else, that makes it a little more difficult to rescind the money. Yeah. So as long as it's still in the system.

Steve Martin (01:18:30):
Go ahead. Under this thing it says transfer money, and above it, it says $35 in Venmo. I don't keep any money in Venmo. Right. So here is this $35,

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
Right? There is, it's not really

Mikah Sargent (01:18:41):
There. You have a couple of options there. You can either just ignore it and wait until it goes away. Which is the something that I've done in the past. They do this to me. I use the cash app for this. And the other option is to reach out to support. And of course, we love to talk to support and tell them, Hey, you know, this is probably a scam. So usually

Leo Laporte (01:19:00):
The way this works is they've used a, a, a phony credit card or some sort of false payment system mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So they're not retracting it, but the company that the credit card company will say, Hey, wait a minute. And, and you, they'll have your money, but you won't have any money.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:15):
Oh. And the other tip Steve, Mr. Steve is to tap on the, their name or their little profile icon and Okay. And then up in the top right, there are the three dots for like more. Yes. And if you tap block, that will keep them from doing that in the future. So I do the, anytime I get one of these scam ones, I block anyone that can,

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
It's really common though, unfortunately. It's kind of okay.

Steve Martin (01:19:40):
Yeah. But but I looked at her list and there's only, she's made and had her list of transactions and they're all like, very legit looking like,

Leo Laporte (01:19:52):
But she's, she, yeah. And these guys are pretty good at covering their tracks. It's not real. I I, you know, you didn't send her money. I believe you. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Martin (01:20:00):
I believe you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:01):
Yeah. Right. You, there's a, a good article on Motley Fool, which somebody in the chat room gave us will put it in the show notes. Okay. It's a common scam.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:09):
Yeah. And as long as you don't move the money out of there, then she will be able, they will be able to get that money back anyway. It only goes against the terms of service if you take money that you know is not yours and use it for something else.

Leo Laporte (01:20:22):
Did you on this Harry Bliss book, did you write the captions and he did the comic? Or is it kind of mutual?

Steve Martin (01:20:28):
Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm the writer and Harry is the director, the cinematographer, the <inaudible>, the Liden guy.

Leo Laporte (01:20:35):
They're so cool.

Steve Martin (01:20:36):
Yeah. He does everything else. And I do, I come up with the idea, or sometimes he'll send me a drawing and I will write

Leo Laporte (01:20:42):
A, I recognize, you know, your, like, why Euclid has no friends. That's you in a nutshell. <Laugh>,

Steve Martin (01:20:50):
There's one in there, you might, you might like, it's the two little girls and one is selling lemonade Yes. For 50 cents. And, and she has nobody in front of her stand. And the girl, next little girl next to her is, has a sign that says, buy my data. $20

Leo Laporte (01:21:08):
<Laugh>. I love it. Leo Laport, Mikah Sargent, the tech guy show Steve Martin is on the line with us. Steve, this is a special time of year for Steve Martin fans because planes, trains, and automobiles is kind of a must watch. This week. You talk a little bit about this and number one is walking your new book with Harry Bliss about how what a joy it was working with John Candy and what a sweet

Steve Martin (01:21:33):
It was. John Candy and John Hughes both. It was great.

Leo Laporte (01:21:36):
Yeah.

Steve Martin (01:21:37):
And I know you have a lot of people who have important questions, so I'll ask my last question.

Leo Laporte (01:21:41):
Okay. Alright. Your last question,

Steve Martin (01:21:44):
Mike, you can, this will be your department.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:46):
All right. Stretching. Yep. I'm

Steve Martin (01:21:48):
Ready. I, I have some shortcuts.

Leo Laporte (01:21:50):
Wow. I'm telling you these guy's. Good. Look at

Steve Martin (01:21:53):
Okay. To, to send a, like an email. So I have a little shortcut to send an email, let's say to my wife. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I press the email button, it comes up and there's the email thing. And I might write and say, oh, wait, what time was that appointment? And if I go to my calendar, that email disappears. Everything I've written is gone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> hate that. It's not like when you're on your, in your mail app and it sort of remains in drafts or something. It's gone. Oh, where does it go?

Mikah Sargent (01:22:26):
I see. Yes. So because of the way that the Shortcuts app is doing it, where it's just presenting this screen where you can kind of type in an email, then when you switch windows to get what you need, by the time you get back, that Window's no longer there versus if it opened up the mail app and then opened up to create a new email. I am wondering, Mr. Steve, if there isn't an action in shortcut

Leo Laporte (01:22:52):
To, to save, keep that window open or,

Mikah Sargent (01:22:54):
Well, no, but instead to, instead of popping up a dialogue, actually going to the mailout Oh. And doing it composed from there. Yeah. I'm looking now to see that

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
Was, see we have a, a great show, Mikah hosts with Rosemary Orchard, who is a shortcuts wiz called iOS today. That's a podcast you can get on the, on network. But I, and I bet you that they could do a little something to help you on that. Absolutely.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:18):
Because

Steve Martin (01:23:18):
Oh, that'd be good. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, also when I, I, I downloaded that it upgraded the iPad and had to start from scratch, and those, those shortcuts, I had to like, recreate them all over again. It was a, oh no, that's enough. Ah, don't worry about me. I'm fine.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:36):
Well, if Leo has your email, I do he'll pass it along to me. And we are going to create you a shortcut that solves your

Leo Laporte (01:23:43):
Problem. We will send you a short

Mikah Sargent (01:23:44):
Cut, we'll send it to you. And you

Leo Laporte (01:23:46):
Actually, if you wanna send me your shortcut, Steve, but then I'll send that to them, and then they can modify it.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:49):
Yep. We'd

Steve Martin (01:23:50):
Love to help you. Right. So you're like the, you're like the Venmo.

Leo Laporte (01:23:53):
Just send me 35 bucks, Steve, that's all I ask.

Steve Martin (01:23:57):
Asking me to send you my shortcuts. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:24:00):
<Laugh>, Steve, you are, I would say literally one of the most beloved people in the world. And it's such an honor to, I I'm almost in tears to have you announce. Thank you. My retirement. We met thanks to this radio show one of many great things that came to me of, from doing this show for 19 years. I'm just, I'm incredibly grateful that you could join us today. Thank you, Steve. Well,

Steve Martin (01:24:22):
We are all grateful for you, so thanks for having me on. Thank you. I mail you my one of my shortcuts

Leo Laporte (01:24:28):
And we can't wait for the next season of only murders in the building. Awesome

Steve Martin (01:24:34):
Show. Okay, great. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:24:36):
Thanks a lot. Thanks, Steve. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Charles. Savage Hayden, I'm Charles Hayden Savage <laugh>, apartment 14 C, the Arcon. Yeah, just to fill, flesh out the details of what Steve,

Mikah Sargent (01:24:50):
Everyone's

Leo Laporte (01:24:50):
Blurted out <laugh> yeah. December 18th will be the last tech I show on the radio next hour. And I'm not gonna leave some surprise next hour. The new host will join you. So we the show will continue on. You're gonna get to keep hearing it on your stations many more. I hope once I'm gone I will, Mikah and I will continue to podcast. Of course, we do a whole podcast network. And in a way, I'm not really retiring because I, I love doing what we do. Yeah, it's great. So we are going to take the tech, I turn it into a podcast called Ask the Tech. I, I tried to get an S on there, but it was too expensive, the artists. I,

Mikah Sargent (01:25:29):
Yeah. I was like,

Leo Laporte (01:25:30):
So it's really asked the tech guys. Yeah. Because all of the people that you hear on this show, including Mikah Scott Wilkinson, Johnny Jet, Dick d Bartolo all of our experts will come on from time to time. We're gonna do interviews, but most importantly, we'll be answering calls that'll be Sundays in the same time period. And it's internet only, not, not broadcast. So we're gonna, we're gonna keep doing that. I'm not retiring from Podcasting's. Not really work. I don't even have to show up on time. Plus I That's true. I miss brunch. And it's been 19 years, but is brunch at, at nine or noon? <Laugh>, maybe that's why I've been missing it. It's been I've been doing this show, I've been in radio 46 years, but I've been doing this show for almost half that time. 19 years. Wow. it'll be 19 years next month.

(01:26:15):
Thanks so much. To Robin Ucci, the program director at kfi, who called me in 2004 and said, would you like to do a radio show? And I said, would I <laugh>? I started in radio in college, and I love this medium more than any other. Thank you, Robin. And then, of course, to the great folks Craig Kitchen and my current boss, Julie Talbot at the Premier Radio Networks who syndicate the show nationwide, thanks to every single program director all across the country who put this show on the air. Good news for you guys and gals. The show's gonna continue with a great host. A great host. So no final goodbyes. Don't say goodbye on the, on the calls. I want to answer your calls last day, December 18th. More details to come Stay tuned.

(01:27:01):
Our show today brought to you by, as always, quite literally brought to you by cash at cac e ffl y.com. How can it be that this show's brought to you every day by Cash? Cuz Cash is our content delivery network. So every time you go to the website and download a show, every time you use your podcast application and download a show, you're getting it from cash. The c d n what a difference cash has made to us. Frankly without them, I, I honestly I don't think we'd be doing what we're doing. We came this close to just, you know, collapsing. About 10, 15 years ago, Matt Levine of cash, like, called us and said, Hey, we can help. And they've been doing so ever since. Now Cash's got a new thing, which I think is fantastic, called Ultra Low Latency Video Streaming.

(01:27:52):
This is not that unreliable web RTC many people use. It's a live video workflow using Web socket. It's scales to millions of users with latency below. One second, and you can get this up and running almost instantaneously. Cash's Ultra Low latency video streaming. It's truly amazing. And because Cash has points of Presence servers all over the world, more than 50 of them, your customers, your listeners, your viewers, your players are always getting the content from a server near them. And that makes a huge difference in terms of speed and availability. There's nothing like cash Line. Cash can also help you reduce your origin server bills, your S3 bills with their storage optimization system. A hundred percent cash hit ratio because you're already storing everything on cash flies servers. We've been using that for, I think, since we started, but now they actually offer it as a feature.

(01:28:54):
I think we were just piggybacking on them. But we always, when we're done with editing a show like this, we put it up on cash immediately. So that way everything comes from cash. They don't have to go out and download it from an origin server and then present it to you. Which means it's always speedy, it's always fast. Of course, we use Cashs, fully managed STD and solutions, and you should too. Their elite managed packages give you v i p treatment 24 7 support response times less than an hour. They are the best. And man, their techs are so good. We've never had a problem with cash. So sometimes just call 'em to say hi, but they really are great. So what do you get? You get ultra low latency video streaming for more than a million concurrent users. You get lightning fast gaming, which delivers downloads faster with zero lag glitches or outages.

(01:29:42):
You get mobile content optimization for your website. Automatic and simple image optimization. So your site loads faster on any device. You get multiple CDNs for redundancy and failover. That means they're intelligently balancing your traffic across multiple providers. So you get the shortest route and it mitigates against performance glitches. And what does this mean? Bottom line cash is 10 times faster than traditional methods. The way we were originally getting these podcasts to you, they're on six continents. They're 30 times faster than other major CDNs with a 98% cash hit ratio. And in the last 12 months, a hundred percent availability. Perfect uptime. That's pretty impressive. Best of all, cash has 24 7, 365 priority support. So, you know, they'll always be there when you need them. Learn more at cash at CAC e f l y.com. Cash.Com. Thank you. Cash. Now back to the show. December 18th is the last show.

(01:30:44):
Mike and I, no, Mike, I'll be on the 17th. It'll be me all alone on the 18th. And then, because the following week is Christmas, even Christmas and then New Year's. Even New Year's, they'll be best ofs and reruns and stuff. And then the new host will be January 4th. That person will start I'm sorry, January 3rd is No, the fourth. Let me, let me get my calendar out. I'm sorry. January 7th and eighth will be the beginning of a new show with a new name by the way. Yeah, a new name. Cause we're keeping the tech guy name <laugh>. That's my name, baby. I'm the tech 19 years. I think Possession is. So, so demos we have we've, we've spoken to Dick and we've explained this studio will be dark on Saturdays. That's one of the reasons we're doing this. It's a cost savings for us. Every hour of studio time is about a thousand bucks, so we're gonna be dark on Saturday, but Dick will start doing the show, the gi his on Wednesdays right after this weekend. Google. So we will continue on with the GFIs and yeah, Lisa's in Club Twit talking, which is great. Which is great.

(01:31:55):
Thank you, Lisa, my love. That was really fun. Yeah, it was. Isn't he great? Yes. He is like the most genuinely sweet, decent per normal person you've ever, you'll ever meet. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:12):
And also relatively ticky.

Leo Laporte (01:32:15):
He's writing shortcuts <laugh>. So, and just it was my decision, not Premier's decision. Yeah, I think I'm 60, 66 in two weeks. I didn't I should probably say this on the air. I don't want them to anybody to feel bad. Well, I'll say it when we talk with the new host Next hour. Johnny, you're next. Is Johnny there? He's in the chat. Come on Johnny. Yeah. There will be a post. I will blog it. We'll put it everywhere. I know Dr. Mom. And you haven't retired, have you? But you did move to San Diego to be with your grandkids. So yeah, my contract we did the first deal. It was three years. Three years. Three years. And then the last couple of years, it's been year to year. At the end of every year, I can, either one of us can make a choice. Round July, I called them and said, look, you know, I'm too old for this <laugh>. I just wanna do podcasts. I like podcasts radio's stress, believe it or not, it's stressful. I wake up every morning before the radio show and I not in my stomach. It's stressful. And it's a lot of pressure. So I'm kind of looking forward to just relaxing with Mikah and having fun. Yeah. It could be more fun. Right. Hey, Johnny.

Johnny Jet (01:33:37):
Hey.

Leo Laporte (01:33:37):
You thought you weren't gonna be on, huh? That I was gonna preempt you?

Johnny Jet (01:33:41):
I thought I was already on and I, you know, you Martin got, got me all flustered.

Leo Laporte (01:33:46):
Confused you, huh? <Laugh>. All right, here we go. Hey, he's been everywhere, man. He's Johnny Jet, the traveling guru travels all around the world, except he's not coming to the Bay Area this week. I'm sorry. I was looking forward to seeing you in studio, Johnny, but

Johnny Jet (01:34:02):
I know. Yeah, our flight was this morning and my wife's sick, or she's feeling better

Leo Laporte (01:34:06):
Now, but she Oh, she's feeling better. Good. Right?

Johnny Jet (01:34:07):
She's definitely feeling better, but

Leo Laporte (01:34:09):
She was still sick. No, you don't want travel. Nasty cough. Yeah. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:34:12):
So, yeah. So, so he let the cat outta the bag, huh?

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
Yeah. Yeah. You knew. I, I let, I let all our guests hosts know a couple weeks ago, but yeah, Mr. Martin let the cat out of the bag. Well,

Johnny Jet (01:34:27):
It, it makes it easier for me because I, every week I'm like, do not say

Leo Laporte (01:34:31):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:32):
He's telling yourself in your head over

Leo Laporte (01:34:34):
And over as, as I mentioned, we, you know, we're gonna do a podcast. It'll be called Ask the Tech Guy and you will be a part of it as we'll. All of our hosts. We can't get you all on cuz there's six of you. And it's only gonna be a couple hour show. So when we get travel questions you're obviously gonna be the first person.

Johnny Jet (01:34:50):
I'm always happy

Leo Laporte (01:34:51):
To first person chime in johnny jet.com. There was a lot of travel news this week. I, I saw a lot of stories I wanna ask you about, but let me, let's hear it. You Well, okay. I was gonna let you start.

Johnny Jet (01:35:04):
No, I like

Leo Laporte (01:35:06):
To hear it. Okay. I was gonna let you start cause I don't have it right

Johnny Jet (01:35:09):
In front. Okay, well, I, I'm happy to start. So what am I actually, I just sent a tip today actually, by the way, I've never, I rarely ever quote movies in my travel newsletter. That's a great

Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
Quote tip. I saw that.

Johnny Jet (01:35:23):
Yes. I just put that one from Steve Martin who played Neil in Planes, trains, automobiles. That was the first time I ever quoted that in my newsletter as my quote of the day travel quote of the day.

Leo Laporte (01:35:32):
You didn't even know Steve was gonna be on the show.

Johnny Jet (01:35:34):
I had no idea. Come

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
On. So funny. Should we read it out loud?

Johnny Jet (01:35:38):
Sure. I didn't even recognize his voice when I was, when, when I was on hold.

Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
How am I supposed to go with the flow when the rental car agency leaves me in a 100 acre parking lot with keys to a car that isn't there and then I have to hike back three miles to find out they don't have any more cars. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:35:54):
That's the best scene. That,

Leo Laporte (01:35:56):
That's my audition. Steve, what do you think? <Laugh>? <laugh>. Can I be in the remake? I'll be the John Candy though. I think. Yeah, classic. Classic, right? That is the, the Thanksgiving movie, but also the travel movie.

Johnny Jet (01:36:09):
Definitely. My wife last night said We need to watch Plain Stranger Home movie. Oh, every year

Leo Laporte (01:36:14):
This week. Every year. Yeah. It's it's a traditional

Johnny Jet (01:36:18):
Yeah, if you haven't seen it, you gotta watch it. Yeah. it's gonna be busy this year. So AAA came out last week or this week, said, you know, there's gonna be 54 million people, 54.6 million people hitting the road. They're gonna travel at least 50 miles or more from home, which is an increase from last year. They said it's only a 1.5, which is surprising. I thought it'd be more than that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:39):
I should have had Steve say those aren't pillows. Oh yeah. Just thought of that. I should have asked them. <Laugh>.

Johnny Jet (01:36:48):
Actually, I have a, I have a lined up for a quote for tomorrow, which you can't say on the radio cuz there's a lot of F

Leo Laporte (01:36:52):
Box. Don't say it. Don't say I actually, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but Steve and I were going to dinner once and we're walking down the street and I felt so bad for the guy because everybody goes Steve Martin, and then they go, excuse me, and it must be so hard. So I wasn't gonna ask him to do that. I, you know, he's very shy. Actually, go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, I

Johnny Jet (01:37:14):
This distract, I remember, I remember you telling me that you guys had dinner one night and you, you had a travel question. He said Ask Johnny Jenn, I was shocked that he

Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
Knew who I was. <Laugh> he does, he listens.

Johnny Jet (01:37:25):
Yeah, that that's nice. Makes my day. But

Leo Laporte (01:37:27):
So

Johnny Jet (01:37:28):
Go ahead. Anyway, there's gonna be a lot of people traveling. Supposed to be the third busiest travel Thanksgiving ever since they've been recording it. And

Leo Laporte (01:37:36):
That is normally the, like the second biggest travel day of the year, right? No,

Johnny Jet (01:37:40):
No. It's always actually the Wednesday before and the Sunday after the Sunday after Thanksgiving is usually the busiest and the Wednesday before of all of the second of the whole year.

Leo Laporte (01:37:48):
So this is gonna be the busiest in years of the busiest day of the year.

Johnny Jet (01:37:54):
Yeah, we'll see. 2.4 million people went through TSA checkpoints yesterday in, in 2019 pre pandemic. It was 2.5. So we're there. But I think because so many people are working remote, I think you're gonna see, I don't know if we're gonna break the record this, this week like we did in 2019, but I think it'll be close. But I think people are traveling already. I think they're already getting ready to go to their destination for Thanksgiving.

Leo Laporte (01:38:20):
Wow.

Johnny Jet (01:38:21):
So, but if you are traveling, I do have some tips. You know, give yourself plenty of extra time. You have to because you know, the airlines are only flying like 85 to 90% of their fleet. So the, there's as many people, almost as many people as 2019. And the planes are gonna be packed. If you miss that flight, you could be stuck for days depending on your destination. So get there early. You know, parking lots at the airport are gonna be full. You make your reservations online. You can actually usually get a deal at some of these airports if you do it in advance. So book it you know, obviously packed snacks. Always stay hydrated. Bring a, bring a bottle of water, empty bottle.

Leo Laporte (01:38:59):
There's gonna security a big storm right around Thanksgiving this year. So this might be It is

Johnny Jet (01:39:06):
There, yeah. Is there going to be, cause I didn't, I haven't looked at

Leo Laporte (01:39:08):
The weather. Cross country storm. I'm looking at ACU weather, cross country storm to threaten travel headaches around Thanksgiving. Developing storm system it looks like on, mostly on the east coast.

Johnny Jet (01:39:19):
Well that will mess everything up. One storm just throws it all off. Storms. We got

Leo Laporte (01:39:25):
Storm West with rain and mountain snow on Tuesday. Seattle and lower elevations in western Washington face the brunt of the storms rain. So you get that and then you're gonna have a big storm kind of Florida, Atlanta area. It's just, it's not gonna be great. It's thunderstorms. Lake Charles, new Orleans, Louisiana, Jackson, Mississippi Min, Minnesota. Minneapolis. Pack

Johnny Jet (01:39:47):
Your patients. It's another tip. Make sure you pack your patients

Leo Laporte (01:39:49):
And buffalo. If you go to Buffalo this time of year, you know what to expect.

Johnny Jet (01:39:53):
I mean, you got five feet of snow right now. Yeah. Five feet

Leo Laporte (01:39:58):
And it doesn't go away. Right. It stays all winter. So.

Johnny Jet (01:40:01):
Well, I just FaceTimed with my family in Toronto and they had snow last night, but it's already melting, so Yeah. It, it, it might not be there.

Leo Laporte (01:40:11):
Toronto, like a lot of big cities. I think it's the warmth of the city cuz you get out of town and it stays, but the, but the city, the sidewalks, the buildings, they're warm. It's right. You don't usually get a lot of accumulation in the cities.

Johnny Jet (01:40:25):
It depends. Yeah, they don't, it usually doesn't last long, let's put it that way. Yeah. And if it does, it turns brown and it's nasty. That's when you're like, get me to Florida or California <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
Or are are you traveling for the holidays?

Johnny Jet (01:40:38):
Well, we were, we were supposed to leave today. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:40:41):
So now you're stay home the whole, the whole time, huh?

Johnny Jet (01:40:44):
I might go pop in and see my dad this week,

Leo Laporte (01:40:47):
Next year, this time we're going to Las Vegas for the Formula One race

Johnny Jet (01:40:51):
During

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Thanksgiving. Yeah. That's gonna be crazy. <Laugh> Definitely, definitely 16th through the 19th. It's the week before Thanksgiving, I think. But it's, it's gonna be crazy. But you know, those, those races attract hundreds of thousands of people. The Bellagio is building grandstand over the water by the fountains right in front of the fountains on the strip. And I got tickets baby. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Good for you. I'd love to see it by the way. Pictures, what was your travel news that you wanted to talk about before I forgot and I can't find it now. I've been looking for it this whole time. I, you know, I'm thinking cuz you know, all week long I look at news and I'm thinking, oh, I gotta ask Johnny about this. But then I, you know, I don't write it down or anything. And now I, I have, I don't know what I was gonna ask you, <laugh>.

(01:41:38):
Well, if people don't, aren't sure what they should bring through security. Ask the tsa, they're great on Twitter. Their handle is ask tsa. You can ask them anything during normal business hours. They'll reply usually within 10 minutes you can bring those gooey pies. So bring 'em through. They won't make you dig through your pecan pie. No. They're like, Hey, you know, is there something, won't you eat a slice? They'll put it through the middle detector, but you can oh, okay. So anyway, you, I guess you're not traveling. Oh was no, not this year. No. Was it the person who got the box cutter through That wasn't, that wasn't in up high. But I've, I'm trying to think of those Leos I've seen that wasn't, but I've seen a number of stories like this and maybe it was you who told me.

(01:42:25):
Johnny the TSA is used to seeing things like water bottles. They always catch the water bottle cuz they see so many of them. But they see so few weapons that they're, their pattern recognition isn't really up to speed. So sometimes they go through cuz they're not expecting it. They know they're gonna see water bottles. If you go to the TSA handle on Instagram, they do a great job with what, what's being reported. Like, I think it was today someone tried to go through with a knife inside their laptop. Don't, that was underneath a keyboard. Stop it. Don't do it. Johnny jet.com. Get his newsletter. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Listen to him right here. Thank you Johnny. Thank you. Thank you.

(01:43:17):
 So was Steve supposed to mention it or is it just he just, yeah, so the fir first he emailed me, this is the story. First he emailed me and I said, well you know, the last show's gonna be December 18th so come on sometime. I'd love to plug your book. And he said, okay, well I'll be on Saturday. And I said, he said, can I say anything? I said, no, no, no. It's top secret cuz the one thing I don't want is a lot of calls from people saying we're gonna miss you. Right. So and I hadn't planned to say anything until December 18th, but shortly after I got that email from him, I got an email from Premier saying, this is the press release we're putting out on Monday. Can you give us a quote? Wow. And I said, and they said, said, well, we'll hold off if you want, but we've gotta start telling the stations and sponsors you know, sooner than later.

(01:43:58):
So it's gonna leak out probably. And and plus we're, have the, my successor's gonna be on next hour. And, and so it's just gonna become more and more apparent. So I, I wrote to Steve, I said, Steve, would you do me a favor and would you make the announcement? Cuz that's the best way better than me doing it. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. Yeah. It was pretty sweet of him as he's, I'm really honored. I, you know, I thought I'd kinda lost track of him. And then he sent me the book and he said, the scientist said, Hey Lee, I missed talking to you Steve. And I thought, well, I'm calling him <laugh>. That's how we met many years ago. He DMed me on Twitter. I should tell this story on the air. He DMed me on Twitter and said, you don't have to respond to this, but I'm a big fan.

(01:44:44):
I said, yeah, I'm not gonna respond to Steve Martin saying, right. I'm a big fan. I was gonna ask him, but I thought, you know, he doesn't like to get political or controversial at all. I was gonna ask him, are you gonna stay on Twitter? What are you gonna do? Cause he's one of the, and he even wrote a book with his tweets, but he's of late, been less on Steve Martin to go. He's only tweeting a little bit, but he, for a couple of years, he was the funniest guy on Twitter. He was awesome. He was, yeah. Amazing. Remember

Johnny Jet (01:45:09):
He put like a sign up or something. I can't remember what it was, but it was funny.

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
So funny. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:45:16):
Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
Anyway thank you John. You got three more episodes or something like that? All right. Three more. Who's counting? And, and,

Johnny Jet (01:45:24):
And I kept the secret. I only told my wife, I was just about to tell my cousin, Artie, I said, you're gonna have to swear. You can't tell

Leo Laporte (01:45:28):
Anybody. You can now tell the world it's out. Press release going out on Monday. Let's see, you'll be on, we are doing a show Saturday, next Saturday despite Thanksgiving the third, the 10th and the 17th. So there's four more. Okay, good. Okay. Well I'll I'll be there. Thank you John. Take care. See you Mikah. Always a pleasure. Good to talk to you. Bye. Bye. Is he on the Instagram? Yeah. He, you know, he was, I, you know, I actually should look and see what I should have asked him. I didn't want ask him on the air.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:08):
Yeah. For folks that are asking, I just, I had a accident with a handsaw. It's no big

Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
Deal. Oh, I didn't see

Mikah Sargent (01:46:14):
People Keep going. What's wrong with you

Leo Laporte (01:46:15):
Mike? With a hand saw?

Mikah Sargent (01:46:16):
Yeah, I was saying I was sawing with the handsaw and when it got through what I was working on, it went to the ground and then bounced up and it hit my knuckle.

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
Wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:26):
And so my knuckle just split

Leo Laporte (01:46:28):
Over.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:28):
Wow. Yeah. I'm okay.

Leo Laporte (01:46:32):
He's actually doing a lot of interviews. I see for the book. He was on the View.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:41):
I know Dr. Mom and I usually do. And literally it was this moment of, ah, I need to run like upstairs and get my gloves. And I didn't do it and I

Leo Laporte (01:46:50):
Should have, cause I ran into our the guy who did the whole studios and he had a big cast and I said, yeah, my age, I shouldn't be using Blade sos table, whatever.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:01):
Is this Snoopy?

Leo Laporte (01:47:02):
It sure sounds like it. Doesn't it? Do you think it's kind of sad that Apple bought the rights to all the Snoopy?

Mikah Sargent (01:47:11):
I a thousand percent. I find that

Leo Laporte (01:47:12):
Awful. You know, it's great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and all of those and for the last few years they've allowed public broadcasting to air them. You know, so people could still see 'em if they didn't have an Apple TV Plus account and

Mikah Sargent (01:47:25):
Now they're not.

Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
Yeah. Now the way you have to do it is you have to download Apple TV plus, and there's, and, and you can do it for free for at a certain time to watch those Charlie Brown specials. Don't like that. I don't either. I feel like that's part of our, almost our cultural heritage.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:40):
I Yes. For so many generations too.

Leo Laporte (01:47:43):
Yeah. So Charlie Brown Christmas is not gonna be on pbs. You can stream it. And this is a, you know, let's face it, this is a marketing thing. You can download the Apple TV plus app and stream it for free December 22nd through the 25th. Let me see the great pumpkin. They're gonna do the same thing. Let me see when they stream that. October 28th through 31st. So it's over. Oh, well yeah, I guess it's Halloween, right? So it makes sense that great pumpkin is Not

Mikah Sargent (01:48:20):
Thanksgiving's, Halloween, Charlie Brown. Thanksgiving is the next one.

Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
Yeah. 88. 88. Ask Leo a couple of questions coming in through various media. Like how did this happen? What are we gonna do now? My successor appears next hour. We'll talk and you'll hear what's gonna happen to the radio show. It will continue on. That's the good news. I will continue doing podcasting. So I'm just retiring from radio, but that's a big deal. I've been doing this since 1976, so it's a big deal. But I didn't wanna be one of those radio guys who just kind of trails off <laugh> nothing. And I do love talking and I love talking to people. And so Mikah and I will keep doing an ask. It's gonna be called Ask the Tech Guys.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:04):
Really excited

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
About it. And we're gonna keep doing that on Sundays as a podcast. If you're already subscribed to the Tech Guy podcast or you already go to tech i labs.com that's where it's gonna appear. You won't have to do anything differently. You just, big differences. You won't be able to tune it in on the radio, but you know what? This new guy, you're gonna, I'm or person, I said it was a guy. I've given something away. Ooh, it's wonderful. And you're gonna wanna listen to this show. Somebody asked, is it, was it your decision? Yes, I was not fired. <Laugh> it was totally my decision. I missed having weekends, to be honest. I'm still gonna work Sundays, but at least I have Saturday, I'll be able to go to a brunch and that kind of thing, so, and you'll probably be happy cuz you don't have to to come in here on Saturdays. I like that. Yeah, it'll be Sunday. It's fun though, isn't it, to talk to people. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's do it. Ron is on the line from New Jersey. Hi, Ron. Did I press the right button? I did, did I turn him up? I did. Ron, are you there? Hello, Ron. You know, it's deadly quiet, which always makes me nervous if you're on mute. Unmute. All right, well put him on hold here. I'll put him on hold and we'll try. John on the line for Mopar, California. Are you there, John?

Caller 3 (01:50:22):
Yeah, this is John. Hi

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
John. Welcome in Mopar. Welcome. What can we do for you today?

Caller 3 (01:50:30):
Well, you know, you recommended at one point you said you didn't, you, you didn't like to use Facebook because it had all sorts of requirements and I got invited to use TikTok, and I just wondered if you had the same, same, same provisos about,

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
You know, it's funny because TikTok Yeah, TikTok gets a lot of heat from the government. And from there there's an FCC commissioners that we should ban TikTok because it's a social network owned by a Chinese company. And the fear is that the Chinese Communist Party would somehow use it to, I don't know what spy on you <laugh>. Yeah. But at that point, I always point out, well, you know, who's really spying on you? Everybody on the internet, every app you have exactly. You know, and the Facebook is the worst, right? They, but, but you should understand the way that all of these work. Google, Facebook, apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they don't collect information about John and Mopar and then sell it to data brokers. What they do is they collect information about you and keep it to themselves, and then tell advertisers, Hey, you know, we've got a bunch of people who live in this area who have this, you know, who are this age or whatever, and you can buy ads that they'll see.

(01:51:46):
That's how Facebook makes money. So Facebook knows a lot about you and continues to collect a lot about you. I guess the fear more is that they have that data, so if it, if it leaks or they get a government request, they're gonna have to hand that over. All these companies do a yearly transparency report, met as one of them, Facebook's owner where they tell you how many government requests they got. And it's usually, it's not very many. And it's, you know, usually in an investigation of a crime, leaks are more concerned. And Facebook has a history. This is, by the way, when I left, unfortunately, of being leaky. So for instance, on Facebook, you ever do those quizzes? You know, which Harry Potter character are you?

Caller 3 (01:52:33):
I don't use Facebook at all. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
Good man, good job. But many people do. I did. And you think, oh, that's fun. You know, I'm Dumbledore. But there's a kind of a nasty side effect to that. The whole reason, reason, people who create those quizzes couldn't care less, which Harry Potter character you are. They are by, by you taking that quiz now because they've become friend, a friend of yours, and they can spy not only on you, but friends of friends. Those are third parties. That late, late data is leaking out from Facebook. They have tried again and again to block it. Now's a different matter. Tiktok is like tv. All TikTok knows about you is, you know what your phone lets it know about you. And that's very limited if you're on an iPhone. Mostly what they know about you, and mostly what they care about is which videos you watch. So they can give you more of that. Does that bother you from a privacy point of view, John? No,

Caller 3 (01:53:26):
I, I just, I just wondered whether I should load TikTok as an app or not? And that was my

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
Question. Yeah, it's harmless in my opinion. I think a lot of the saber rattling is from people who are, don't like the Chinese government. I'm with them and somehow are saying, well, we shouldn't use products from China, but your phone is made in China in most cases. Your laptops are made in China. Most of your home appliances are made in China. So if we really wanted to go on a China diet, it would be a tough, tough thing to do. There is no evidence that TikTok is spying on you, particularly, there was a bug in their software. A lot of people bring this up. There was a bug in their software. And Apple, it's funny, people who use iPhones first noticed it that Facebook, I'm sorry, TikTok, when you copied something to the clipboard, TikTok could see it. And Apple warned you. And so that's how people became aware of it.

(01:54:20):
Tiktok said, oh yeah, that's a bug. The reason is so you can copy a URL or some music or some text and paste it into the app when you're making a video. We won't do that anymore. And they don't maybe the most kind of worrisome accusation is that somehow the Chinese government could influence's algorithm to feed you propaganda. But frankly, we know they do that with Twitter and Facebook already and much more effectively Russians too. So, and I don't know how you're gonna be propagandized by an app that shows people dancing and twerking and, you know, doing, telling jokes and silly things. I, I, I I don't think there's evidence of that. Yeah, yeah. Do you, you're, do you, you don't make TikTok?

Mikah Sargent (01:55:08):
I don't make TikTok, but I do scroll through TikTok and Yeah, as long as it's, it's entertaining being used to maintain that, I think that it's fine. You know, there were was concern about, because it's such an interesting app, an engaging app, then you did have people in the military watching TikTok and

Leo Laporte (01:55:25):
Well, that's appropriate. You know what the military, the government should ban any app that could track your location. Exactly. inside the Pentagon, you don't want that. There are plenty of them. Strava, the running app did that and they had to ban it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that's, that's different. That doesn't mean you and I shouldn't use it. Exactly. and you could, could turn off location permissions. Of course we know Google when even when you turn 'em off keeps your location permission. So it's not just TikTok, it's, this is the world we live in nowadays. Do you care if TikTok knows where you are? I don't.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:55):
I don't. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:55:56):
Yeah. It's not like you're gonna aim a bomb at me. I care

Mikah Sargent (01:55:58):
If any app knows where I am. So I have location turned off on a lot of things. But that, that, yeah, ultimately, like you're saying,

Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
There's another side that I really like to TikTok. Much like YouTube. There are a lot of people, creative, talented people who couldn't without a lot of effort, get on tv, radio, get in the movies, who create stuff on TikTok. That's huge. Democrat one of them. Yeah. And he has built a career as a TikTok chef. Couldn't happen anywhere else. So for that reason, I think it's great. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys more calls right after this.

(01:56:32):
Well, hey, hey, how are you today? Leo LaPorte here, the tech guy with Mikah Sargent, your tech guy too. How howdy, how? 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number if you wanna talk high tech with us. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. A surprise guest coming up in a few minutes. Also, Dick d Barto, who is not surprising, but always interesting in about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, back to the phones we go. I should mention Tech Guy labs.com. That's the website where all the information you hear on the show, all the links will go. We'll also put audio and video from the show after the fact. And we will also put a transcript so you can find what you're looking for and go right to that part of the audio or video tech. It's free. No sign up, nothing. We just give it away, aren't we Crazy Tech Guy labs.com. Now let's try Ron again in New Jersey. See if he unmuted. There he is. Hi Ron.

Caller 4 (01:57:25):
Good. Hi. Welcome. Sorry, I let my headphones go on mute after

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
A while. It happens. It's fine. And I, you know, I can always tell cause it's so quiet. I know that you're muted, so I just figured Well, we'll get you, we'll get you anyway. Welcome.

Caller 4 (01:57:38):
Appreciate that. I appreciate it. Thank you. I'm having trouble with Microsoft OneDrive. It's, I've always used it for Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and this works fine, so I can access them anywhere. But lately it started taking over my photographs and just doing all sorts of crazy things. I'll come in from a photo walk or something and stick my SD drive in and start copying them over and it'll, and I can't use my laptop for 20 minutes because it's up loading everything Yeah. To OneDrive. And then I go through and I do my calls, get rid of half the pictures that I don't want, and it'll download them and, oh no, back again.

Leo Laporte (01:58:15):
Yeah, it's doing you a favor, <laugh>. It's protecting you.

Caller 4 (01:58:21):
And I, I I installed Luminar Neo, and it downloaded 14,000 in my catalog.

Leo Laporte (01:58:29):
Holy. Oh, nice. So do you use One Drive at all?

Caller 4 (01:58:34):
I do use it for Word and Excel documents, but I've never used it for photographs.

Leo Laporte (01:58:41):
So One Drive is Microsoft's you know, cloud storage, kind of like iCloud for Apple or Dropbox. And a lot of people, if you have office sounds like you do, you get a terabyte of one drive office by default will save documents to one Drive, not to your hard drive. All of this is, is a coup for a couple of reasons. One, because people lose stuff. And so this is kind of a backup system that's automatic. You don't have to think about it. I think the other reason is that Microsoft eventually really wants everything to live in the cloud and wants to get you used to that. So, you know, and they push one drive on you, boy, do they push it on you? Yeah. When you first get Windows and say, well, you haven't signed up Log, turn it on. But you get a lot of storage as part of your office subscription. I think you need to go into the the OneDrive settings and tell it not to knock it off. Do you want your photos backed up to OneDrive?

Caller 4 (01:59:40):
No, I back them up to Amazon Photos when I'm ready to, to see them. Yeah. I put them up there myself. I don't want anything done automatically. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:48):
Onedrive has a camera upload feature where it will do this automatically, but you can tell it. I don't want you to do this automatically. And it will turn, it'll enable whenever it, it notices an SD card or whenever you plug in a camera directly. Sometimes if you plug in certain smartphones, it will do that as well. But it's, it should be as simple as in the OneDrive app on whatever platform you're using, you choose the menu, you go to settings, and then find the setting that says camera upload and then turn it off to stop it from automatically uploading photos and videos.

Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
It's pretty darn annoying.

Caller 4 (02:00:21):
Said, yeah, its,

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
I have it unchecked for so usually if one drive runs on startup, which is almost always what you want, by the way, you don't have to have that behavior. Even if you want to use one drive, but you don't want to have it always doing stuff in the background, you can just not have it start when you start your machine and start it manually. But most people will want it to start manually if you've started it manually in the task bar down there in the lower right, there's a little puffy cloud, right click on that. Go to settings. In your network settings, there's a checking for, for OneDrive, there's a checkbox that says photos and videos. You can uncheck that. You, I also uncheck screenshots. I don't know why I'd wanna save 'em on one drive. Okay. Okay. <Laugh> <laugh>. 

Caller 4 (02:01:04):
No, I don't,

Leo Laporte (02:01:05):
You, you also can limit this upload and download. So if you did wanna, if you did want one drive to back up your photos, you can say, but don't do it so fast so that you can get your laptop back. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's not, as you know. And then when you're in that not network, did I say network? I meant backup. When you're in that backup tab there's also a managed backup button, which lets you choose which folders are backed up, and you'll also wanna stop backup on pictures if you don't want it to do anything with pictures. So there's a couple of places. What I want, yeah, there's a couple of places you need to change. All of that is in the settings, in the backup tab, you want to uncheck photos and videos and then go into manage backup and make sure that your picture's folder is not being backed up. Probably all you wanna be be backed up is your documents folder. Exactly. You can even get more granular than that. You know, make it a folder within a folder, like just your office documents, that kind of thing. So you know, by default it'll back up documents, desktops and pictures. And that's the behavior you didn't want it to do as the pictures. Yeah. Yeah. So just turn it off. Yeah.

Caller 4 (02:02:16):
I've unchecked, I've unchecked some of that, but obviously there's something else I have to go dig in

Leo Laporte (02:02:20):
For. Yeah, you probably didn't look at manage folder backup. They hide it there.

Caller 4 (02:02:24):
Managed folder

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Backup. Yeah, manage backup. It's, it's also in those settings in the backup tab, it's not just that check box you have to do, you also have to click the manage backup and un a remove pictures All right. As your backup. Okay. Right. Hey, pleasure talking to you. Thanks for the call. Ron, Doug's on the line from Asheville, North Carolina. Hi Doug.

Caller 5 (02:02:45):
Hey Leo, how are you?

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
Well, I'm great. We're both great. Mikah and I, how are you?

Caller 5 (02:02:51):
Hi, Mikah. We're good. We're

Leo Laporte (02:02:52):
Good. Good. Glad to.

Caller 5 (02:02:54):
I've got a, I got a couple questions. This one is, I hear you talk about paid email services, and so we'd like to do that because we're trying to be safer, but we haven't established email accounts that, you know, are all over. So we wouldn't be able to track 'em all to, would we have to get a new email address?

Leo Laporte (02:03:17):
No. so if your email, let's say it's a Gmail, which is probably the number one address, people have LEO gmail.com. You can, if you sign up for an email provider, you have two choices. You could have Gmail forward it to them, or you can have the new email provider get your mail from Gmail, which is probably what I would do. And then everything ends up in one inbox. If you wish, you can even for filter your Gmail mail by saying, if it's to Leo at Gmail, put it in a special folder. So you have, you have absolutely the way to go get it. My preferred solution long term, and you probably don't wanna do this, but if, but if you're, if you were just starting out in life, would be to get a domain that's your family name or something, you know, your business name, and when you own a domain, you can have it send your email anywhere.

(02:04:10):
It's like a, a forwarding number and your domain will never, you know, my email leo@leoville.com will always send it to me because I'd say, you know, when I moved from Gmail, I just moved it to Fast Mail. I just told it Leo and Leoville now go to Fast Mail. Nobody knows the be knows the, knows the Wiser. Nobody's the wiser. It's it does it automatically. So then you can have one email address your whole life which is the ideal. But at this point, everybody has your, your old address. You know, you've been using it for a long time. Right. So keep it, you know, if you, if if you wanted to slowly, gradually move people over to the new system you know, hover.com or what program would you recommend? Well, it depends on how much you wanna spend. Fast Mail is the one I use.

(02:04:52):
It's a little expensive compared to some of the others. There are a lot of other paid email services out there. The reason I like paid email services is a, you're the customer, not the product. So they tend to track you less. You have somewhere you can call for support. Go ahead and try to call Gmail for support or Outlook mail or Hotmail or, or Yahoo Mail or any, or you know, if you're getting free email, they're not gonna provide a lot of support. It's expensive. So but there are lots of other places. Hover, which is one of our sponsors, is a domain registrar. You can register a domain name there and have email there. And that's pretty cheap. I think it's five bucks, 10 bucks a year or something like that. It's pretty, pretty inexpensive. Oh. So shop around. We should at some point, Mikah, put a list together of I would like that of cuz I, I say this and I I really mean it. If you care about email, if it's important to you, especially as a business, pay for it. Pay for it. Because you're not gonna get great service from free companies. That they're not there to give you great service. They're there to show you ads. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to <laugh>, to, to scrape your data. They're there to find out about you are the product, not the customer. 88. 88 Ask Leo. That's the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. A special mystery guest next on the Tech Guy show. Interesting. Hmm. <Affirmative>.

(02:06:22):
Hey everybody. Leo Laport here. I am the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit. Cause I think it's unique and I think for anybody who is bringing a product, product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do here at twi. We've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Already you should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world.

(02:07:14):
And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red adss different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the TWI network. I think the proof is in the pudding.

(02:08:12):
Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with twi. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this. We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ad saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>.

(02:09:04):
That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always over deliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. Gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working. You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans really wanna see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too.

(02:09:56):
So if you want to be a long term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience, visit twit tv slash advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCrery is the CEO of Authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from any advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm very proud of what, what we do because it's honest. It's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted. I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertiseattwi.tv. Break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red Ads on twi.tv. Visit twi.tv/advertise for more details. Or you can email us advertise twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign. Now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring. Hey, mystery guest <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:26):
Am I, am I the mystery guest?

Leo Laporte (02:11:27):
I hope so. <Laugh>. I, well, I did was last hour. We announced that I was leaving and I said, oh, you did? Yeah. And I said, but stay tuned. Next hour the show goes on, our new host will be here.

Rich DeMuro (02:11:42):
Oh wow. So you so the cat's outta the back?

Leo Laporte (02:11:45):
Yeah, well I, yeah, I mentioned <laugh>. Yeah. So I wasn't gonna say anything as you know. Yeah. because I didn't want to field a thousand phone calls saying goodbye. But then I got a message from premier saying, we're putting out the press police on Monday, <laugh>. Oh,

Rich DeMuro (02:12:02):
So you better?

Leo Laporte (02:12:03):
And I said, well, I wasn't gonna say anything until December 18th. I wanted to, you know, kind of play it, downplay it. And they said, well, we can hold it off, but we're gonna have to, we have to start telling the affiliates and people and it's gonna leak out. And I said, cuz I had even said, you know, as soon as I have

Rich DeMuro (02:12:17):
Rich on gonna leak it, <laugh>. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:12:19):
That's what, I dunno. As soon as I have Rich on it's gonna become obvious. Well, you know, some affiliate will put it in their newsletter or something. And anyway and I said, yeah, you're right. So we'll just, we'll just announce it. So announced it last hour. I said the surprise guest. This hour is the new host.

Rich DeMuro (02:12:37):
Oh my gosh. Now there's a lot of pressure <laugh> I should have. If

Leo Laporte (02:12:41):
You think there's pressure now way till January 10th, buddy Boy

Rich DeMuro (02:12:45):
Should have done a better setup. Be like one you do on the right. The

Leo Laporte (02:12:50):
Background. That is pretty pathetic. But this is a radio show. That's the beauty of it.

Rich DeMuro (02:12:54):
I didn't think I'd be on, I signed up for radio so I don't have to be on <laugh>. I'm on every day of the week. I don't, this is the week I don't want, this is the day I don't wanna shave.

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Oh, you know what I have to do for you? I have to create a lower third. Let me see.

Mikah Sargent / Rich DeMuro (02:13:10):
Mikah, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you today? I'm good. Good

Leo Laporte (02:13:15):
Copy.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:16):
Getting, getting ready to give up my weekends. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
<Laugh>. So he's gonna do save and duplicate. There we go. So

Mikah Sargent / Rich DeMuro (02:13:25):
You'll be doing it both Saturday and Sunday? No, just Saturday. Just Saturday.

Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
Oh, you're not doing a Sunday show?

Rich DeMuro (02:13:31):
No,

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
I know. Oh, they didn't, I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, well that's not so bad. That's

Rich DeMuro (02:13:36):
Good. That Yeah, it's just the one day. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:38):
I thought you were gonna be doing both days. Oh, that's good then. That's good.

Rich DeMuro (02:13:45):
It's a little bit better. Cause I am on five days a week at ktla. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:13:49):
No, I,

(02:13:49):
Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. That's

Rich DeMuro (02:13:51):
Good. Hold on, I'm actually getting a call. Hang on, let me go ahead from, this is from Robin. Hold on. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:13:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Better talk to Robin <laugh>. Holy cow. She's the big boss. 

Rich DeMuro (02:14:03):
We see you

Leo Laporte (02:14:03):
Here.

(02:14:04):
 We don't wanna say anything. Can you not say anything rich? Oh, oops. Oops. Is it Rich Capital d e r. And so Inter Cap, right? And then is it Rich on? Yes. Rich on. And I'll do Rich on tech.com and the new host of the show. No, I won't put that

(02:14:43):
<laugh>, that's kind of mean. I won't do that. So he is talking to Robin. So I I won't say anything. Is it? Is everything is everything

Rich DeMuro (02:14:55):
Deals off

Leo Laporte (02:14:56):
<Laugh> deals off. You wanna do a Christmas, you're

Rich DeMuro (02:14:59):
Doing Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:15:03):
This is my proposed lower third for you.

Rich DeMuro (02:15:06):
Perfect. Rich.

Leo Laporte (02:15:08):
On on tech.com.

Rich DeMuro (02:15:09):
Oh, rich On tech.tv. On

Leo Laporte (02:15:11):
Tv. Oh, even better.

Rich DeMuro (02:15:13):
I couldn't get the.com. It's a, some ads. It's it's a Chinese company that it's rich on. It's rich on tech. Very rich, rich on tech. Do you,

Leo Laporte (02:15:23):
Rich on, do you have a Twitter handle? You wanna promote <laugh>

Rich DeMuro (02:15:26):
Neston? Are we using that anymore? No, I don't. I I do Instagram. I Twitter, I'm at Rich on Tech. I mean, it's all

Leo Laporte (02:15:34):
What's your Insta? Oh,

Rich DeMuro (02:15:36):
He's happy. He's feeling it's

Leo Laporte (02:15:37):
Rich on. Right. Here we go. It's the Tech I show Mikah, Sargent Leo Laport, and ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, no, actually, rich has been a regular filling in for me for years. Rich Tomorrow, everybody from KTLA and Rich on tech.tv and the new host of the show starting next year. Hello, rich.

Rich DeMuro (02:16:03):
Hey Leo. Thanks for having me on. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:16:05):
He's a little nervous now. <Laugh>, all of a sudden you got nervous.

Rich DeMuro (02:16:09):
You said we weren't gonna talk about it. And here we go. You

Leo Laporte (02:16:13):
Know, Steve Martin leaked it. I ah, man, you can't win. No, I said it was Okay. January 7th, your first show. Every Saturday in this time slot on on all of the same stations rich On Tech is the name of, of the show. And you're gonna be doing basically the same thing, right? Or no?

Rich DeMuro (02:16:33):
Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be callers, it's gonna be, you know, tech news. It's gonna be gadgets, reviews ING interviews.

Leo Laporte (02:16:41):
I got a travel guy, a photography guy. <Laugh> home theater guy could lend you if you, if you had hadn't used for 'em.

Rich DeMuro (02:16:48):
Absolutely. We will be doing guests for sure. And, and you know, look, I followed the show for many, many years. You've, you've just been an amazing host and I hear that you know, you want your weekends back and I understand that because you're

Leo Laporte (02:17:04):
Giving yours up.

Rich DeMuro (02:17:05):
Congratulations. I'm giving mine up. And so, you know, we'll see how this goes. But you know, to me it's interesting because, you know, I already do a podcast that's kind of similar where I, you know, answer the questions that people send me. And this is a service. This is really, I see it as a public service. Absolutely. People have so many questions about this stuff and nobody explains it to them. And searching on Google, you could say, oh, just search on Google. Have you ever tried to search Google for an answer on something tech related? You get a million different opinions. Many

Leo Laporte (02:17:33):
Of them

Rich DeMuro (02:17:33):
Wrong. Someone that trusts

Leo Laporte (02:17:34):
Yeah,

Rich DeMuro (02:17:35):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:17:35):
Yeah. No, in fact, this was a big part of me being willing to leave. I did not wanna leave our wonderful audience in the Lurch, cuz I know, you know, we talk, you hear it. So many people frustrated at, at wit's end don't know what to do. And, and it's, it is, as you say, it's a public service. And I can't think of anybody better to do this show, to take it over than Rich because you, you have that same ability to make it easy to explain what's going on. And I think you share my interest in really making a difference in helping people underst understand this stuff. You've been doing it for, you started at cnet, right?

Rich DeMuro (02:18:14):
I started at cnet. And you know, I actually, so I get a call when I'm at CNET one day and the person, the caller says, Hey, can you do the same thing you're doing at CNET for this TV station in Los Angeles? And I said, really? What does a TV station want with like a tech person <laugh>? And we, you know, we went there and it's, so that only lasted for a little bit, but then that same person went to KTLA where I'm at now, and we did the same exact thing that didn't seem to work at that station. And we've been doing it for over 10 years now at ktla. So it's been phenomenal. The, the number one thing I realized is that people just, they're busy. You're doing your job, you're raising your kids, you've got things to do. More so than figuring out how to change the wallpaper on your iPhone, right? So that's why you need someone like us to tell you this stuff and to explain it to you. And also to not look down upon you for not knowing, like I'm a nerd. I get it. I I tinker with this stuff every weekend, every day. Practically. my wife today, she said, rich, really now I gotta switch to the Amazon Fire TV cube in the living room.

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
<Laugh>.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:21):
I said, yeah, we're testing it out. We've gotta, you know, she's have Apple TV forever. Oh, oh, I'm, and

Leo Laporte (02:19:26):
I, sorry, my wife says, you can't ever die cuz I won't know how to watch a show <laugh>.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:32):
That's so true. Which remote do I pick up? Well, honey, have to make things easy.

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
Yeah. I printed out a document with pictures that we keep in a drawer where the remotes are <laugh> to explain what to do. It's, it's, it's, its, this is crazy. It's too complicated.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:48):
It is. It's when I sit there, okay, so this is a good indicator when I get, like I, someone pitched me on a tech product. There were these glasses that can kind of translate in real time. And I'm like, all right, send me a pair. Let me try 'em out. They're like, oh, hold on, we'd like to meet with you first before we send 'em, explain this and tell you that and you have to download this. I said, ah, sorry, nevermind. If it's that complicated for me, the average consumer is never going to figure it out. See, you can't, they're not gonna have a meeting with the CEO to figure these classes

Leo Laporte (02:20:15):
Out. It's hysterical. So Rich, I want you to come on the show. I want everybody to get, you know, certainly Rich is filled in for me for years, so I know a lot of you know the voice, know the name, you watch 'em on tv. But I would love for you to come every week on and maybe we can do, like, I was thinking a holiday gift guide cuz, because there, one of the things that happens when you have a geek in your life and you're not, is you buy them the wrong thing, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, and we don't want you to buy the wrong thing for the geek in your life or if you're buying it for yourself. So you, you actually have a whole thing that you do on your website, rich on tech.tv kind of a gift guide. So I would like to do that on the show if, if you don't mind it. And also to get you used to talking to yourself in a small room for several hours a week.

Rich DeMuro (02:21:06):
<Laugh>. Well, I have been married for a long time, so I'm quite used to talking to myself. You

Leo Laporte (02:21:10):
Have has any, you have two

Rich DeMuro (02:21:12):
Small kids. I've two kids. They're not so small anymore. They're eight and 11. Oh my, my gosh. So I remember when they were actually small and now, you know, they're at that stage where they just play Roblox all day. So I don't know if that's like a phase or just a stage of youth, but it's, they don't want anything for the holidays except a new iPad so that, you know, their games play better. They're actually playing this new game on Roblox that I kind of like, cause I'm, I'm kind of against Roblox, but it's a drawing game. So you, you draw stuff. And so now they're all interested in the Apple pencil. And I said, let me see the developer, that game, it was just someone that was funded by the Apple Pencil. Big Apple Pencil. Because now you wanna buy more Apple Pencils kids.

Leo Laporte (02:21:51):
It's big Apple pencil. That's always what it comes down to. Big Apple Pencil. They're trying to do this. So you let your kids play it. But you're not a fan.

Rich DeMuro (02:22:01):
I'm not a fan because it, and I talk to a lot of parents that have this issue is it kind of just takes them in and they become a different person. They're like, they're engrossed in this game and there's no real end to the games most of the time. And so it can present a challenge for parents that are trying to get their kids to, you know, maybe go outside or do something other than playing Roblox.

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
Excuse me, of course. But when I watch things, I just had a hard fall. I just want to say I did not fault the least. Do not call 9 1 1. It does that a lot. Really? Yeah. I think I, I must slam my hand. He slams his hand. Did you see me do that? And

Rich DeMuro (02:22:36):
You did a little one. I did a That's not, that should not be enough to that one should not have that. Should not. I've only gotten that like twice in my time with the Apple Watch. And both times were when I was like wrestling with the kids.

Leo Laporte (02:22:48):
I get it all the time. Rich is also the author. Oh, I did it again. <Laugh>. Wait a minute. He

Rich DeMuro (02:22:53):
Slams

Leo Laporte (02:22:54):
His hands a lot. Slam my hand.

Rich DeMuro (02:22:55):
You've got the sensitivity turned up or you have a, you might, your, your Ultra might be

Leo Laporte (02:23:00):
Oh, you could tell like, I have the big one. Oh yeah, I could. I have the big one. Rich is the author of a book an a wonderful iPhone book, which everybody should get called. I have it here. So

Rich DeMuro (02:23:12):
101 Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone. It, it, you know, it's, that was such a great experience to do that, to write that book. It really was. You

Leo Laporte (02:23:22):
Learn when you write those things, you become an expert. Rich DeMuro will talk to you next week. Rich ont tech.tv. Thank you for taking over cuz I need you. Thank

Rich DeMuro (02:23:33):
You Rich. Thank you Leo. Bye bye.

Leo Laporte (02:23:38):
It's all falling apart. I unplug my headphones. I'm sit off of a watch. I was just, I have your book right here, I think. But anyway, I

Rich DeMuro (02:23:45):
Was, I was like, is Leo like ending the show? He's just like unplugging. He's done. He's getting, he walks away. Sometimes the the 9 1 1 is on their way. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:23:55):
Anyway. Oh my gosh. You know, I did not know you weren't doing Sunday. That's, that's a relief to me. Frankly. I thought he's gonna do seven days a week.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:03):
No, that, that would be insane. That's not, no, that's not sustainable.

Leo Laporte (02:24:06):
And this way we take turns doing brunch. I'll get Saturday. You get Sunday

Rich DeMuro (02:24:11):
<Laugh>. Totally. I'll just drink more on the day that I get it.

Leo Laporte (02:24:15):
Honestly, I don't know why 19 years ago I didn't just say, can we just do one day? One day? I don't know what I was thinking. You

Rich DeMuro (02:24:21):
Thought, well, one day more.

Leo Laporte (02:24:22):
You're smart, rich.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:23):
You were figuring, look, the people that don't get through on the first day, they come in for the second day. They do. And it's just

Leo Laporte (02:24:29):
<Laugh>. They do. Believe me. They do. Anyway, so good. Thank your wife for me. Thank you kids for me. I really appreciate it. 

Rich DeMuro (02:24:38):
Thank your wife for me cuz she you know, she's been instrumental in a lot of this as well. Yes. So thank you Lisa.

Leo Laporte (02:24:44):
Yeah, Lisa. If I didn't have Lisa, I don't know. I don't know what would be going on. So yeah. Thank you Lisa. I appreciate it. She is definitely, in fact, she's in there talking calming everybody down. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:57):
Oh gosh Lord.

Leo Laporte (02:24:58):
She's talking people off the

Rich DeMuro (02:25:00):
Ledge. Oh no. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:25:01):
Thanks Rich. Have a great day. We'll talk to the same time next Saturday if that works. Well wait a minute. It's the day after Thanksgiving. If it doesn't work for you, you could skip it. We'll do it two weeks. You decide.

Rich DeMuro (02:25:11):
We'll

Leo Laporte (02:25:12):
Chat. You have my, you have my number. Thanks Rich.

Rich DeMuro (02:25:14):
Okay, thanks Leo. Bye Mikah. Take care everyone.

Leo Laporte (02:25:18):
Perfect guy to to take over the show. I think.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:22):
Wish you the back from Net,

Leo Laporte (02:25:25):
My friend. Is that what the shoes played? She played that song.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:29):
She did. Lisa played the song in in Discord. <Laugh>. She pulled out her guitar. She played that song in Disc

Leo Laporte (02:25:37):
Closing time.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:41):
<Inaudible> Whiskey and Beer

Leo Laporte (02:25:44):
Closing

Mikah Sargent (02:25:45):
Time.

Leo Laporte (02:25:50):
Do you know the story of that song?

Mikah Sargent (02:25:51):
No.

Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
I always thought it was kind of skeezy. Like I know I wanted to take me home, blah, blah, blah. Closing time. He wrote it when his wife was starting to deliver their child and he wrote it as the, the wife saying to the baby, it's closing time. You can't stay here.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:08):
Oh, like inside.

Leo Laporte (02:26:09):
Yes. Oh. And the baby saying, I know who I want to take me home.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:12):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
Isn't when I learned that. I thought, oh,

Mikah Sargent (02:26:15):
That's so strange. I wonder why there was such a complex metaphor that like that just,

Leo Laporte (02:26:18):
Well, you know how singers are, they don't, they don't write anything normal. Straight

Mikah Sargent (02:26:22):
Babies drinking whiskey and beer. I just, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:25):
<Laugh>. Well maybe he's lying, but that's what he said. That's what the inspiration for the song was. His first child

Mikah Sargent (02:26:31):
Closing time.

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
Yeah. Actually one show is probably enough. A lot like KGO only took the Sunday show. They, and they would tape delay it. So if he does one show, it's the same. So yeah, I didn't, I did not. I should have asked him. I thought he was doing Saturday and Sunday. That's good for us. Cuz in effect we're doing Sunday. We are. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna have the same, we'll be here at the same time. 11 to two Sundays right before Twit. It won't be the same show because it can be a little, first of all, there won't be 19 minutes, an hour of commercials.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:02):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:27:04):
So

Mikah Sargent (02:27:04):
We're gonna have some fun. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:27:05):
And I think we might want to make it a little shorter. I

Mikah Sargent (02:27:08):
Don't know. Yeah. We're talking about some different things and there won't be a number at the

Leo Laporte (02:27:12):
Start of this. Yeah. What we're gonna encourage people to do is use their phones to zoom in. Right. We're gonna use Zoom. Zoom, yeah. Okay. So we'll

Mikah Sargent (02:27:20):
Have a link for you.

Leo Laporte (02:27:20):
Yeah. And it puts Zoom on your phone.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:23):
You don't even, you you should, but you don't even have to. You can just do it in browser. Browser

Leo Laporte (02:27:27):
And it works. And the advantage of that is we know your camera and microphone will work. <Laugh>. We've had so much trouble with people on their PCs getting it working. No, we're not gonna use talk Shoot. We're gonna, we're gonna do video calls via Zoom. Yeah. And everybody knows how to use Zoom now, which is nice. Nice. So now my evil plan is revealed.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:47):
Which

Leo Laporte (02:27:48):
Part? Well people cuz Rich used to do our Fillin, every time I would go away, rich would do the show which was very nice of him. Then all of a sudden you filled in and you're showing up on Saturdays and people are going, well what happened to Rich? Well this was all part of the plan. We wanted to get Mikah used to doing this cuz Mikah and I will be doing the podcast on Sundays. And then I wanted, but so we were working on that, but we knew Rich was in the wings and when they said is is it okay with you if Rich takes over the show? I said, okay. With me. It's, it's a lifesaver. So Rich on tech starting, and I had to check the calendar. I think January 7th will be his his first show. Saturday, January 7th. Am I right on that?

(02:28:31):
Yes. 88. 88. Ask Leo Mic Sargent Leo LaPorte taking your calls episode, by the way, 1945. And there's only one regret. I there's two regrets I have. Okay. Regrets. You've had a few, but then again, too few to mention two. That's not many, but I'm gonna mention them. If we continued doing the show for one more year, it would be 20 years. Uhhuh. <affirmative>. Okay. That is, so that's a regret. It's weird to end in nine after 19. Yeah. But that's, you know, that's what happens. The other one is, I really wanted to get to the year 1956. Something happened that year. That's my birth year. That's when, and we're, I think our last show, I don't know, I'll have to check. It's 1955 <laugh>, I think it is. So we're 50. Yeah. So anyway, that's minor. Those are minor. Doing the numbering though. We could just change it number can't we?

(02:29:21):
Yeah, we can just skip it. We can continue the numbering. Yeah. So 19. Oh yeah, we will continue the numbering. That's right. Okay. Tech guy, 1956, asset tech guy. Yeah. And if you do subscribe to the podcast, nothing's gonna change. You just get one instead of two a week. If you watch the stream, it'll be Sunday. Yeah, two to 5:00 PM Eastern time. But otherwise, and, and we'll probably be a little looser and we'll probably be swearing like crazy because for years I've not been able to use any bad cuss words'. No words on it. No cuss words. Just joking. Let's go to Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota. Bob is on the line. Hi, Bob.

Caller 6 (02:29:57):
Hello.

Leo Laporte (02:29:58):
Hello. Yeah. Welcome.

Caller 6 (02:30:00):
Trying to, trying to stay inside and stay warm.

Leo Laporte (02:30:03):
What's the, what's it like in Duluth right now?

Caller 6 (02:30:05):
It's, it's windy and it's about 12 degrees outside, so it's good weather to stay in.

Leo Laporte (02:30:13):
I was watching the Packers game. They were at Lambo Field in in Green Bay and yes. And it was about 12 degree, I think it was 10 degrees wind chill factor. And the, we were talking to somebody tailgating and and they said, you like the cult? She said, yeah, this is in Minnesota, <laugh>. We like it here. And I thought, you have not spent much time in Minnesota young lady. It gets pretty cold.

Caller 6 (02:30:40):
Yes it does. Yes it

Leo Laporte (02:30:41):
Does. What can we do for you, Bob,

Caller 6 (02:30:43):
By the way, there's a LaPorte, Minnesota that's west of here about yeah, a

Leo Laporte (02:30:48):
Hundred miles. So my dad, when I was young, went to every LaPorte in the country there almost. Well, this LaPorte guy got around. There's a laport in most states.

Caller 6 (02:30:57):
Is

Leo Laporte (02:30:57):
There? Yeah. And it's all, I think it shocked the laport who <laugh>. I don't know what established all these. He was, he was, he was busy. Let's just put it that way. What can I do for you, mom?

Caller 6 (02:31:08):
Well my wife, well this is kind of a pre quote to that. She got caught on a the fishing scam.

Leo Laporte (02:31:20):
Oh no. You heard, you heard what Steve Martin, you know, got these scams are awful, abundant.

Caller 6 (02:31:27):
Well, and this, this might be even more complicated. One, she did another survey and she, I said, what was this for? She thought, well maybe Costco asked a bunch and these as a gift they would send you a, a wear Peter.

Leo Laporte (02:31:42):
Oh, nice. But,

Caller 6 (02:31:45):
But, but the, and I got it and I said, well, we don't need this. We've got one already. I've got a net gear one already

Leo Laporte (02:31:52):
Set. Much better. Yeah, yeah,

Caller 6 (02:31:53):
Yeah. And this is, but this one has no brand name on it. And there's there's no there's, there's it, it just says wireless and, and, and wifi repeater.

Leo Laporte (02:32:09):
And, but, and, and did they ask for any money or they just sent this to her?

Caller 6 (02:32:13):
No, they just sent it to her. And I, and I and I start thinking, what

Leo Laporte (02:32:18):
Could they do if you put that on your network in your house? I wonder <laugh>.

Caller 6 (02:32:22):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:32:23):
This is a pretty kinda

Caller 6 (02:32:24):
Sufficient, that's my fair thought. I thought, you know, I'm not gonna even try. No. Sort of like the it's sort of like the when they were taking thumb drives or, or 

Leo Laporte (02:32:35):
Yeah, never. They call that a candy drop with a thumb drive. They drop 'em in the parking lot and stuff and people plug it in. Oh, free thumb drive.

Caller 6 (02:32:42):
Yeah. And this could be, this could be even a more sophisticated one where you, you do a survey online and we'll send this out to you free and it won't cost you anything. So I'm, you know, I, I I, what I, I guess what I'm getting from you is you're confirming my suspicions.

Leo Laporte (02:33:02):
Yeah. It, here's what I would guess. It's completely possible that the survey was legit and they sent you something worth a couple of bucks. Which even if it's nothing, you know, if it's a, even if it's legit, it's gonna be a junkie. A very bad repeater. Repeater. Yep. So, but, but here's what I would guess. If I were a bad guy, what I would do is I would put a little Bitcoin minor in there. This is a very common infection that's going around. They, they you can go to a website and without your knowledge, they'll install on your browser something that will, you know, the way you generate cryptocurrencies by doing math problems. Now, of course, your computer at this router, these aren't super fast. They're gonna take a long time to make any money. But if you send out a million of 'em, you might make, you know, 10, $15,000 a day.

(02:33:51):
Yeah. So that's the first thing I would suspect is some sort of crypto scam. Little harder for them to monetize. But also possible is it could be used as part of a botnet. A lot of viruses do this. They get on your machine and they, they don't, they don't do anything visibly bad to you. But what they do is they make the machine available to a bad guy who then can harness hundreds of thousands of machines in blackmail schemes. So that's another thing they might do. And here's how the blackmail scheme might work. Super Bowl coming up. Bad guy might call a betting site, quite a few of them and say, it would be a shame if your website would to be down on the Super Bowl. If you give me some money, I can make sure that I will not happen. And the, of course, this is the old protection racket and this, and the, what's going on behind the scenes is he has a hundred thousand computers.

(02:34:45):
He can aim at that site on Super Bowl Sunday. And then the site is inaccessible to, to its customers. So that is a very common threat as well. So that's another thing they might use it for the least likely is that they'd use the spy on you. That's too, that's too retail. That's too much work. You know, they spy on you. What are they gonna do with it? Maybe they, they catch a credit card number flying through the air. Probably not, but maybe they did. They could steal it. That's too hard and too low. The payout's too low to make it worthwhile. So it's more than likely they would use your machine for their own evil ends bit current Bitcoin or crypto of some kind or to attack other machines. But in any event, you you don't want it. You don't need it.

Caller 6 (02:35:28):
No, not really. Don't need it. Don't it? I'm not gonna plug it in.

Leo Laporte (02:35:32):
It'd be an interesting thing. I wish I had the skills. Maybe find some Uber

Mikah Sargent (02:35:36):
Saying to get it,

Leo Laporte (02:35:37):
See I take

Mikah Sargent (02:35:38):
It apart and plug it in in their walled off system and be able to check it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:42):
Yeah. They could, they could do that. They could take it apart. They could see what the software is. They could see what the hardware is. They could see if it's malicious. They could tell by the signals coming out of it.

Caller 6 (02:35:54):
I've got a couple things they gotta take into a couple of tech places. I got an old phone. I need to get some pictures off of 'em and I'd say, Hey, would you like this? Yeah. See what it is. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:36:05):
Just warn 'em, this is how it, you know, it was free. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. It's always free. That's always, to me, that's always the, the warning. 

Caller 6 (02:36:13):
Well that, that was kind of my thought on it. And be, be, you know, be cautious of what's free. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:36:20):
And yeah. Cause there's always a cost. Right? There's no such thing as a free lunch. One of our chatroom guys says, I would take that repeater and introduce it to the underside of my truck Tire

Mikah Sargent (02:36:31):
<Laugh>. Amen.

Caller 6 (02:36:32):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
Yeah. Don't, whatever you do, don't put it on your network. Don't power. Don't power it up. No,

Caller 6 (02:36:37):
I, I hadn't, I hadn't planned it. Good

Mikah Sargent (02:36:40):
Instinct. Do

Caller 6 (02:36:40):
That.

Leo Laporte (02:36:40):
All Really interesting scan though.

Mikah Sargent (02:36:42):
It really is.

Caller 6 (02:36:43):
It really is. Well, and I don't, we don't know that it is, but I mean it's, we

Leo Laporte (02:36:46):
Don't, we don't. But I, it's not worth it to find out.

Caller 6 (02:36:50):
I So,

Leo Laporte (02:36:51):
Hey, pleasure Bob. Stay warm. Stay inside. Keep listening. Dick. Deb Bartolo coming up next. I think my fears were unwarranted.

Mikah Sargent (02:37:09):
Which ones?

Leo Laporte (02:37:10):
I was really worried that the show would descend into this. Oh, we're gonna miss you. And nobody said that, that at all. <Laugh>. So I think maybe that's

Mikah Sargent (02:37:18):
Fine. You missed it, Leo. Actually.

Leo Laporte (02:37:20):
Huh?

Mikah Sargent (02:37:21):
You mean on the calls? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:37:22):
I thought

Mikah Sargent (02:37:22):
We would get was happening in the chat.

Leo Laporte (02:37:24):
In the chat. Yeah, that's fine. Well that's fine. Yeah. You

Mikah Sargent (02:37:26):
Were worried people would call in and say No,

Leo Laporte (02:37:28):
I was feeling bad that I couldn't tell. You know, our club twi people in our chatters Yeah. No, no, no. I want them to know, but I was afraid that the show would be all calls going. Oh right. And so that's, yeah, you don't have to say anything. It's fine.

Mikah Sargent (02:37:42):
I think that that's more likely to happen starting next week.

Leo Laporte (02:37:45):
Well what I'm hoping is we'll get it that most people weren't even listening and won't know. And the regular calls will be

Mikah Sargent (02:37:52):
Fine. Just swiped away. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:37:53):
Yeah. Hello Dickie d

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:56):
Hey Rich. How you

Leo Laporte (02:37:57):
Doing? Rich Deur, rich on tech here. How are you? Yeah,

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:01):
It's great. Thank God someone took over.

Leo Laporte (02:38:03):
I

Mikah Sargent (02:38:04):
<Laugh> Leo guy. He kept slapping his hands down on the desk calling the emergency services

Leo Laporte (02:38:10):
More than once. Set this off. Have we happened on Windows Weekly too? Hitting on the deck?

Mikah Sargent (02:38:15):
I wonder if, because of the metal links, if when you hit it, it kind of bounces against the, the, you know what I mean? If there's more to

Leo Laporte (02:38:22):
It, Lisa and I both have this habit. She also has this habit of like slapping, but she wears this big honk and big wedding ring that makes a huge sound and she'll slap me on the thigh of the hand. Oh. And it's like, ow. That

Mikah Sargent (02:38:34):
Actually

Leo Laporte (02:38:34):
Helps. She knows. I say don't that hurts. But this would probably be Yeah. Similar. And I guess I got the same habit of ing

Mikah Sargent (02:38:43):
Sizing. Yeah. Emphasizing

Leo Laporte (02:38:44):
It. Yeah. Yeah. How are you Dickie Day?

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:48):
I'm good. And you sir?

Leo Laporte (02:38:50):
I am. Good. We are we are wrapping up the show with you and a little bit of disco and very good. So the way it's gonna work, rich isn't starting until January 7th. And you heard I said all the people he could bring back any of our regulars if he wants and I think he might almost send that information off to him. Okay. But you're gonna do move the GWiz to Wednesday after Twig Wednesday evening. Correct. And you don't mind that cuz you stay up really late anyway.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:21):
Yeah, that,

Leo Laporte (02:39:21):
That's fine. It's eight o'clock instead of five o'clock for you. And then and that will be something that the club will have. So if you say, oh, and like Beat Master said I'm, you know, it's too late for me cause I'm in Switzerland. Join the club and you'll get it on the Toit Plus feed. As usual. I believe that's how we're gonna do that. You get your Saturdays back because I know you like to disco on Saturday, <laugh> and and I get my Saturday back and then Sunday Mike, and I'll be in. And then from time to time, we'll absolutely bring you in on Sundays. You know, just for fun. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:00):
Very

Leo Laporte (02:40:00):
Good. Yeah. this is not a surprise to Dick, by the way. Already said it. Actually it was cuz I sent it to your AOL address. It was, yeah,

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:09):
Because you were saying during the show. So are you happy about that?

Leo Laporte (02:40:12):
Yeah. And you said, what are you talking about, <laugh>? What are you talking about? And and I said, well, I sent it to you and you said, did you send it to aol.com? I said, yes. She said, I haven't been on there in years. <Laugh>

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:27):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:40:27):
I'm on B

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:28):
And that's just how high tech

Leo Laporte (02:40:29):
We are. That's okay, cuz you know where Steve sent this book to one 40 Keller Street, the Cottage.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:36):
Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte (02:40:37):
So <laugh>, I said, thank you so much for having your assistant send me the book, but <laugh> you should give her my new address. He is such, I was so touched. Did you hear what he said? In the, in the, in that

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:52):
No, I didn't. I just heard

Leo Laporte (02:40:53):
That you called to make the announcement. Yeah. Which was really sweet. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:56):
Oh, that's great.

Leo Laporte (02:40:58):
It's really nice. Hey, we go. Wow. Can you do that dick? Woo woo. It's too, it's too high for me. Oh, ooh. Ooh. You can do it. I can. Wow. But I did. I need some water. First. <laugh> Dick d Bartolo, disco Dick, we call him. He joins us every week. He is, of course, best known as for five decades. Mads maddest writer, but he's also our personal Gizmo wizard. Our GWiz. Hello, Dickie. D

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:41):
Hey Leo. How

Leo Laporte (02:41:42):
Are you? I am great. I am great. Good. What have we got? I have my I have my chops. My fingert sticks. I just have my order in too. I have my my weird lights my fog machine. What was that thing? You, you got your niece that oh, the bubble. The bubble foam thing. The

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:00):
Foam. Oh, the foam.

Leo Laporte (02:42:01):
She loved that. Yes. So give us something more we can buy

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:05):
Or, yes. Okay. Well now this happened with on the GWiz. Chad Johnson started with this gadget and before he was into the third sentence, I bought it

Leo Laporte (02:42:16):
<Laugh>. Nice. It's, oh, we're talking,

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:20):
You may have known that I sort of like disco. Yes. So Chad finds this pair of disco lights that can be operated by a US B or with three AA batteries.

Leo Laporte (02:42:37):
You've come so far, haven't we? This means USB

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:40):
Can bring them with you to a party and they are really great.

Leo Laporte (02:42:46):
But look, you have it on now. It's like, wow. It's,

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:48):
I have it on now. I made a little video for you for the people who watch this show. And it, it, it really is. You get two of them. You get two remote controls. You can hit flashing, you can hit match to music. Oh. And they have such, and the great thing is they are under 20 bucks for the whole set.

Leo Laporte (02:43:12):
Can you put them on the ceiling? Do they have or do you

Dick DeBartolo (02:43:15):
Yeah. You, you, you know what, it's very funny because people are in the reviews. They've got great reviews. 2,500, almost 2,500 reviews, four and a half stars. But, you know, I spent thousands of dollars when I converted my 50 foot houseboat.

Leo Laporte (02:43:31):
You think he's joking folks?

Dick DeBartolo (02:43:33):
He ain't joking. I can't stop when I, I just played some music so I could see that, that the disco lights would pulse to the music and then I couldn't stop and started. And it's one of the ways I they slam <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:43:51):
Awesome. I love this video. Go Gwi. Do vi and click the button that says the GWiz is the tech guy. And whatever you do, you gotta watch the YouTube video. Dick put up it's currently unlisted. I don't know if you mean to have it be unlisted or do you want it to be called?

Dick DeBartolo (02:44:07):
Oh, you know what I I I I usually have it unlisted. It it is already got a copyright hit,

Leo Laporte (02:44:12):
But Oh, cuz of the music.

Dick DeBartolo (02:44:14):
Yeah, but it's okay. It says you cannot monetize this video. Oh, right. It is okay to use the music. Oh, that's nice. But I don't monetize my videos anyway.

Leo Laporte (02:44:24):
What's the music that you're using?

Dick DeBartolo (02:44:26):
It was my

Leo Laporte (02:44:30):
Love Away. Don't Take My Love Away. Oh,

Dick DeBartolo (02:44:33):
Something like that.

Leo Laporte (02:44:34):
Some something. See, this is why I don't understand. These artists should love it that you're bringing these songs. Exactly. They should thank you.

Dick DeBartolo (02:44:42):
Yes. No, absolutely. Ab absolutely. Well I mean that, that, that's fine with me. All they did is that the, the music company said if the video makes any money, they get it. They

Leo Laporte (02:44:51):
Get it, that's fine. Cuz it's not gonna, I have no problem with that. They get nothing. Bku Zero zilch na gi wiz.biz is the website. G I zw. I Z b I z. If you click the button, the GWiz VI is the tech guy. You'll have the video, the links, all of that stuff. In fact, everything he's ever mentioned on the show plus a lot of other stuff on that site, the gadgets he mentions on World News. Now, a link to the Great GWiz podcast he does with chadJohnson@gwiz.tv. The, oh, let's not forget the, what the heck is it? Contest? Oh yeah. Got a new one for November, December. And it is a closeup of a gizmo or gadget.

Dick DeBartolo (02:45:36):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:45:37):
Can hmm. Huh? What do you think, Mike? I

Mikah Sargent (02:45:40):
Don't, I'm feeling a water bo plastic water bottle crusher.

Leo Laporte (02:45:46):
Oh, that's a good idea. See, I thought it was a breast pump. Oh. But I, you know, it's, it's so hard to know. Anyway, the good news is there are in fact six mad autographed by this guy Mad magazines for the right answer. But there's 12 for the best wrong answers. So you don't really have, look, look at Dick. You got lights on your head. <Laugh>. You know

Dick DeBartolo (02:46:07):
What, it's also great for that, that too. <Laugh>. I know. You know what it says that there's a suction cup. I've been unable to find it. But in places of a mirrored ball, this really works well. Or thanks for that suggestion. When

Leo Laporte (02:46:21):
You're bicycling or scootering, I know you like to scooter around the Upper West Side. Put it on your head.

Dick DeBartolo (02:46:27):
This <laugh> this, this is good.

Leo Laporte (02:46:30):
No one would miss you. It would be obvious.

Dick DeBartolo (02:46:32):
Yeah, it's very safe. That's a good

Leo Laporte (02:46:34):
Idea. <Laugh>. Here he comes. Gears whiz.biz. Do you know yet which mad we're playing for? We don't know yet.

Dick DeBartolo (02:46:42):
We just know that you'll be playing for February, 2023. I have no idea what

Leo Laporte (02:46:48):
The cover is. So when, when he gets a a copy of the cover, he'll put it up on the website and you can see. Exactly. Exactly. It's so nice though. I have a collection of Mads now. Thanks to you. So does Mikah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> nicely autographed. And, and just this, there's, I loved the 70th anniversary issue. So many great memories.

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:04):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:47:05):
Thank you. It was really, it was really fantastic. Can't, can't wait to see what the next one is. Gi whiz.biz. Boy, that was a short one. I have now four minutes and nothing to do.

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:17):
Oh, that's okay. Can you this one about what you're gonna do on your new show?

Leo Laporte (02:47:21):
<Laugh>? Pretty much the same thing.

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:23):
<Laugh> the same thing. Okay. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:47:25):
Yeah. In fact, if you are just tuning in, we did announce for the first time and press release is gonna go out on Monday. That I will be retiring from radio after 46 years. In How many years have you been at mad?

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:39):
55.

Leo Laporte (02:47:40):
So close, right? Yeah. But you're still working. You never retired.

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:46):
Well, you don't get paid for all the years that they did just reprint. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:47:52):
They keep that stuff

Dick DeBartolo (02:47:53):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. No, they own they own everything.

Leo Laporte (02:47:57):
Actually, I didn't Premier owns this. They could keep running the tech guy. The thing is, the stuff I do, it gets outta date pretty quickly. Of course, remember you used to come up to Toronto. We'd do call for help up there for Yes. Rogers in Toronto. They were Aaron. Those, some of those shows were 15 years old. They were still airing them up to last year.

Dick DeBartolo (02:48:16):
Yeah. Well that rave review about the Atari 800 <laugh>. I saw that Friday. You

Leo Laporte (02:48:21):
Joke, you joke. But I would get emails from people saying, I just saw you and Amber and this was last year on tv and Amber was showing you this site she was all excited about called YouTube. And you said, wow, that's really cool. I'd never heard of that. You've never heard of YouTube And you call yourself a tech guy. And I had to explain. No, we taped that in 2004. <Laugh>. That was a long time ago.

Dick DeBartolo (02:48:44):
That's very funny.

Leo Laporte (02:48:45):
These things live on, I remember Amber and I

Dick DeBartolo (02:48:48):
Thing about, about reproductions in me is that people have all seen the movies. Yeah. And so the parodies mad

Leo Laporte (02:48:55):
Is eternal.

Dick DeBartolo (02:48:56):
Stand up.

Leo Laporte (02:48:57):
Mad is timeless. It really is timeless. And that's one of the things that's so great about Mad Go to his website. I guess the book is sold out now. Good Days in Mad. Yes. If you, you can get him to reprint that. But there's other mad memorabilia. Dick's also the guy, legendary guy who saved the Match Game by coming up the Match game when it first started. Wasn't funny. And you came up with a flower name, A flower, a bird. This thing you can do with a potato <laugh>. It was this close to being canceled. And Dick said, why don't we why don't we try Funny <laugh>? Why don't we try to be funny <laugh>? And you saved the show. How many years has it run since then? Like, boy, I I didn't get any royalties, but I got 18 years of employment. That's all that matters.

(02:49:44):
Pretty good. I kinda say the same thing about this. So <laugh> 19, right? Tune in again next week. Oh yeah. 19. Yeah. 19 years as a tech guy. We will continue through December 18th, Mike and I on Saturdays and by myself on Sundays. And then Rich Tomorrow takes over next year with Rich On Tech. And Mike and I will continue in the podcast space where we don't get nearly as much attention or money, but, but we do get to have fun. We, we get to do what we want. That's all it matters. That's, that's, that means a lot. Doing what you want means a lot means everything. Thank you. Dickie d what I always wanted was to work with you and you too, Mikah. Thank you. Lady Laura, our musical director, Kim Shaffer, phone. Angel, thanks to you for joining us. Have a great keep week. Bye.

(02:50:31):
Well, that's it for the Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twit, t I t it stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twi.tv, including the podcasts for the show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh, a Mac Break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches, iOS Today, security and Security Now, I mean, I can go on and on. And of course, the big show every Sunday afternoon this week in tech. You'll find it all at twit.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guy show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.