The Tech Guy Episode 1946 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

(00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is your Tech Guy podcast. The show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Sunday, November 20th, 2022. This is episode 1,946. Enjoy. The Tech Eye Podcast is brought to you by Kolide. Kolide is an end point security solution that uses the most powerful untapped resource in it end users. Visit Kolide.com/twi to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. 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@twi.tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here. Yes, I'm sorry. <laugh>. You were listening to a nice gardening show and all of a sudden some guy comes on a geek and he wants to talk about tech.

(00:01:15):
That's it. That's what's happening. This is it. The show where we talk about computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography. We talk about smartphones, smart watches, augmented reality, smart cars. You know, all the, the future that we're living in today. It is kind of, isn't it, a little science fictiony the world we live in. It, it creeps up on you. So gradually you don't really No, but I mean, we're talking about cars that drive themselves. Uh, Waymo, which is Google's, uh, self-driving, uh, car company, just got permission in San Francisco for even more, uh, you know, self-driving. No driver inside. Fully, fully driverless rides. Now that's science fiction. That's straight outta Westworld.

(00:02:08):
The California Public Utilities Commission, granted Alphabet owned Waymo a permit because you have to have a permit. <laugh>, you have to have a permit to cut hair. Of course, you have to have a permit to drive a car without Tracker, uh, to participate in, uh, the CPU C'S driverless pilot program. Uh, you can transport passages. So this has gotta be a weird experience. I think Sam talked about this. He had the experience. Well, he'll be joining us a little bit. Our, our car guy, uh, of, you know, you, it's like a, I guess it's like an Uber where you have the app and you, and you call it, and it pulls up and there's no one in it. It still looks like a car. I mean, they, they still have steering wheels and brakes and stuff. And I guess if you had a problem, you could leap over into the front seat and take a, I don't know.

(00:02:54):
I don't know what you would do. I see. To me, that would feel very helpless. You're in the backseat of a vehicle with no human conducting it. Waymo can't charge you for those rides. <laugh>, okay, fine. What a silly little thing. No, you, you could do it, but you can't, you can't charge anybody for it. Well, that'll be safer for sure. Yeah, I'm, I don't understand that. I don't understand why you can't charge, uh, dmv. The California Department of Motor Vehicles had already given him permission earlier in the week. So now it's done. Uh, there will be no safety driver. That's scary. Uh, Francisco Los Altos, Los Altos Hills Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale in the coming weeks. S Waymo says you can have the, it's like a, it's like I don't go on roller coasters either. It's like, I don't, it's like an amusement park ride.

(00:03:55):
Let's see what happens. Get in the back seat. Let's go for a ride. Now, the there <laugh>, there are humans at some point in the chain, the robot's driving you. But if the robot at any point gets confused, there's somebody back at the home office who get on Zoom with the car. Well, it's not, probably not Zoom, but get on, you know, get on something like Zoom and, uh, this happened to Sam. Cuz there's also, and I like this, a big safety button. I wonder what it looks like. I, I haven't seen a picture, but I imagine it's like <laugh>, a big red button in the passenger area that says, get me outta here or something. And you hit it and the car stops. I, I presume stops safely. It's not just gonna stop in the middle of the road, but it stops. And a guy comes on the screen, says, uh, are you, what's that? Uh, hello, hello. What's going on, man? And you say, yikes. Now get ready for this. The cars are allowed to travel up to 65 miles an hour now. I'm really scared. <laugh> 65 miles an hour. And here's a good, uh, good, uh, line from the Verge article about this. And while avs, um, avs are what automated vehicles, autonomous vehicles avs typically struggle to perform in poor weather conditions. Waymo's working to address this. How are they addressing it? By collecting data about different conditions, <laugh> and then using it to inform the computer.

(00:05:38):
You can now, you can in San Francisco. You can get any, there's competitors. GM has its cruise, uh, autonomous vehicle program. So you can get in a cruise vehicle. I think they don't have drivers either. Ain't doing it, but I'll ask Sam. I, I just, what do you think? Is that, it sounds, seems like a bad idea. <laugh>, that sounds scary, sounds really scary. Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. That's all we've been talking about in tech. I just wanna reassure people, tech is not dying. It's not going away. Well, I don't know. Does that reassure you? Maybe, maybe, maybe that's the opposite. I don't know. But, uh, uh, these kinds of things happen when you have a giant buildup. And that's what happened in January, 2020. Well, March is when I guess the pandemic really hit, right? Uh, companies didn't know what was gonna happen. We, you know, everybody's all worried, well, what's does this? We're gonna shut. But the one comp, the companies didn't worry about it. Where the companies you use for Zoom, the internet, all this stuff. Cuz suddenly you're stuck at home working from home if you're lucky. And, uh, so tech companies literally made trillions of dollars during the pandemic and hired commensurately. So they all grew like topsy, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. They all just grew. And then, okay, the pandemic's over.

(00:07:08):
Uh, and, and all those people are gonna get fired cuz they, they don't need 'em anymore, I guess. And the tech stocks come crashing down. Although if you look at the tech stocks, they're still higher than they were in January of 2020. So they went really, really high cuz everybody thought, oh, texted x, this is savior is next big thing. And then pandemic ends. People go, oh no, it's just the world is back a little bit back to normal. And yeah, some people are still working from home and stuff like that. So the companies kind of let go of those people, but, uh, they're still, you know what? They're still making money. In fact, they're making a lot of money. They're just not making as much as they did during the pandemic. Well, one exception, I guess I have to say the T word Twitter <laugh>.

(00:07:50):
What the heck is going on with? I mean, this is a, this is, I can't wait to watch this. The TV series about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. It is, it is the best soap opera. But I have to say it's sad, uh, in one respect because, you know, and I wasn't a huge Twitter fan. I really wasn't ever, uh, I had, I mean, I wasn't the early days, but, uh, but after a while, it became obvious that, you know, it, it, I don't know it, it was bubble gum for the mind. And it, what really became obvious is that the company that was running Twitter, this is pre Elon Musk, and this happens everywhere. It happened to Facebook too, realize that the way for them to make money was to get to grab you and keep you as long as possible, right? And so they, and YouTube does the same thing.

(00:08:41):
They turn the algorithms loose, the computer software loose, uh, and they said, uh, whenever you see somebody spending more time on something, that's good. TikTok does this better than anybody. Whenever you see somebody spending more time on that thing, oh, give 'em more like that and then go out and look at what other people who also spend more time on that thing they like. And, you know, so it's this great computer program that's analyzing all the data and, and optimizing. What's it optimizing for you spending more time looking at the site. Meta does it, Facebook does it, Twitter does it. YouTube does it. TikTok do it. They all tick do it. <laugh>. They all do it. All of 'em. There is a side effect to this though. If you just let the computer do it, untrammeled is, it gets more and more outrageous, you know, because it turns out what keeps people watching is when you get that feeling and you, you get angry and you're, and you, I'm outraged.

(00:09:38):
And that's what ended up happening at Twitter. I said, oh, everybody on there is outrage. Hot takes after hot take, after people fighting and hour it turned into a bar brawl. So after a few years ago, I kind of really backed off. In fact, for a while I just left. And I said, well, I, cuz there's other, there's, here's the thing, there's valuable stuff on Twitter. It's a great way to see what's going on in the world, to get the news to, to hear from friends. And if you have a, a group on Twitter of like-minded people, it's a great way to communicate with them. So Twitter has a lot of value. Uh, unfortunately, that value is being burned fast. Uh, and here I, here's a crazy theory. My friend Wesley Faulkner suggested this. And when he said it, I said, oh, yeah, I think you're right.

(00:10:21):
So Elon, in a fit of peak last spring, he bought a bunch of Twitter stock and then in a fit of peak, I don't think he really thought it through. He said, all right, I'm gonna buy it. And he made an offer way above what Twitter was worth, $44 billion way. So it's like, uh, how could we make this like the real world? So, uh, you see this car driving and you think that's a beautiful car. This happened to me. I saw a car at one of the trade shows. I, that's a, I want that car. Can't afLaporte it. Can't afLaporte it. I want, I finally said, I'm gonna buy it. And that's what happened. Then Elon, you know, and furthermore he said it, bad thing, <laugh> Elon does not listen to the lawyers, obviously, you know, he does his own thing. I'm the richest man in the world.

(00:11:04):
I can do whatever I want. I'm going to buy that thing. I don't care how much it costs. In fact, and this was his mistake, I don't even wanna do what they call due diligence. I don't need to look at the books. I'll take it as is. So it's like, you saw this car, you drive my, you know, can I have that? I'll buy that car. I'll pay twice what it's worth, and I don't care if there's any mechanical defects. I'll buy it. Then just like any normal human, the next day he goes, what a, what did I do? Oh my goodness. And he starts going back to the owner saying, this car, it has no wheels, <laugh>. And the owner says, you said you didn't care. Uh, we got a contract. No, but the car steering wheel is on the right. I can't, doesn't matter. You said we had a deal. And he says, I'm not gonna buy it. I'm not gonna buy it. I can't drive. I can't, I I know I told you I would spend twice what it's worth without, without any, uh, you know, mechanical inspection. I don't care. I I made a mistake, I'm out of it. And the seller says, no you're not. And went to court. And this is where it got really hard for Mr. Mosque because it was becoming more and more apparent the court was gonna make him buy it.

(00:12:13):
Oh man. Now Elon already got the loan for the car. <laugh>, he's some of his own money. Some of it from banks, some of it's from some sketch places like the, the Saudi Sovereign Fund from Saudi Arabia. Not sure I really want them to own Twitter. Uh, they do. Uh, some of it from his buddies. Larry Ellison, the guy who owns Oracle, said, how much you want, Elon? You want a billion? We've seen these messages. Uh, Elon says, I need two. He said, no problem. Here's 2 billion. Can you imagine <laugh>? Yeah. Here's $2 billion. Elon, go burn it. Do whatever you want. I don't care. Can you imagine being that rich? It's wild. Anyway, Elon has to buy the car. So he buys it. It's a clunker. He can't drive it. It's a problem. He spends all his waking hours worrying about this thing as a nightmare. What am I gonna do? Problem is he has these big loans. So this is what my friend Wesley said, and I think he's right. Elon says, the only way to get outta these 13 billion in loans. He's got 1.3 billion in interest to pay every year on the loan. Just the interest, not the principal. Imagine having that every year. You have to pay a billion dollar. You know how you get outta that bankruptcy?

(00:13:25):
Bankruptcy. So there are, there's a school of thought that says, this is what <laugh>, it's really hard looking at what Elon's doing with Twitter to even understand it. But this is the school of thought. He's just gonna drive it into the ground. He's going to make it bankrupt, and then he can default all those loans. I don't know, I don't know how finance works. I, I couldn't say. Yeah, here's 2 billion in the text message. So I'm the wrong guy to ask. It's just not looking good. I said 88. 88. Ask Leo, is the phone number? (888) 827-5536. We will talk cars with Sam Bull coming up at the bottom of the hour. We're gonna have a great day today. Rod Pile on space. The Artemis launch. I can't wait to talk about that. That's later in the show. Your call's next. <laugh>, <laugh> da. Hello, Sam. So Waymo got permission. So now that, now you can get into two empty vehicles in San Francisco, Waymo Cruise. But you did it. Yeah. It wasn't too terrify, did it? I,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:33):
No, it wasn't, wasn't terrifying at all. But I mean, I've, I've done this a lot over the last 15 years. Um, so it, you know, it was not, it was not, uh, it wasn't really something new for me. Uh, and it wasn't, wasn't a particularly shocking experience for me. Um, but, uh, yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about how the rules are set up, why they can't charge right now. Cause C P C has a two stage approval process. So the first permitting stage, they're allowed to do driverless testing and carry passengers without charging for it. And then at some point after that, they can grant them the, the permit for actually carrying, um, passengers, um, that they charge.

Leo Laporte (00:15:20):
That's the funny thing. They can't charge 'em. Like somehow that makes it better <laugh>. You can, you can put people in a two ton tin can without a driver, but you just can't charge

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:30):
<laugh>. Well, in the case of Cruise, for example, you know what Cruise did is they didn't, they didn't bother to carry members of the public while they were in that first phase where they couldn't charge. They, they made the service available just to their employees. That's fine. Um, yeah, yeah. Waymo has their trusted tester program, which is basically kind of a closed beta, um, where it is members of the public, but you have to sign up and, and get approved. There's a wait long waiting list, um, to get, you know, to get into the trusted tester program. Um, but prob my guess is within probably three or four months, uh, C P C will give them the permit to actually charge for rides. And, and the reason why the 65 mile an hour, uh, is, uh, you know, for doing runs down to the airport, for example, to go to SFO and heading down to 1 0 1.

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
Oh, yeah, that's, that's a big business, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:27):
They can, yeah, they can drive at highway speed.

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
Yeah. 65.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:32):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
Yeah, that, I was wondering what the 65 was for. You can't do that anywhere in the city. The fact you can't do it on a lot of the freeways, but you can't do it on two 80. So that makes sense. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:40):
Yeah. 2, 2 80 and, and 1 0 1, uh, you can drive 65 as well. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Interesting, interesting. Well, I don't, I don't know what you wanna talk about. I like that vehicle behind you, whatever it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:56):
Is. That, that is the, uh, that's the purpose Built Robo Taxi that Waymo's been developing with a Chinese company called Zeer. Cool. Um, so that's gonna eventually replace the Jaguar I paces and the Chrysler Pacificas that they've been using. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:17:10):
Just gonna vent a little bit about my Laporte dealer,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:13):
<laugh>. Oh, okay. So

Leo Laporte (00:17:18):
Now a big light has come on, uh, in my car. Let me see if I can find a picture of it. Uh, that says, um, well, it says something completely silly. That's the funny thing about it. Uh, it says that there is a fault, a fault, uh, a fault in my front. And, uh, so I go on a Reddit, uh, you know, cuz this is like kind of scary to see what this is. And they said, yeah, if the dealer had read the manual for the update they did, they would've known you update both systems or you will get this message. So now, oh, because the morons didn't, they didn't do, they didn't. Yeah. Okay. I, I think I can explain what this is all about. Oh, you know, well, you don't have to. I, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're gonna, we gotta go talking to 10 oh oh oh oh oh oh baby. Oh baby. Call me. Actually don't call me. Call her. Kim Scher is at the other end of 88. 88. Ask Leo. You're just gonna sit there and look funny at me, aren't you <laugh>? You're mad, aren't you? You're mad at me, aren't you? For retiring? I can tell.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:37):
I'm sad. Yeah. And it's funny how a choice you don't make affects me more than probably everybody else. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:44):
Yeah. I'm sorry about that, but yeah. But you don't work for me.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:49):
No, and there's definitely blurred lines and confusion there.

Leo Laporte (00:18:52):
There's blurred lines. Cause

Kim Schaffer (00:18:54):
A lot of people think that I

Leo Laporte (00:18:55):
Do. No, you work for the radio company and

Kim Schaffer (00:18:58):
I haven't even been informed by them yet. <laugh> just how radio goes.

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
Yeah. I'm sorry. Well, that's why I told you ahead of time. So you would, you would have time to find out. I'm

Kim Schaffer (00:19:07):
Really expecting yesterday to happen the way it did because I wasn't either. I thought that I would hear from, you know, my boss.

Leo Laporte (00:19:13):
Well, maybe that's not their fault. I kind of jumped the gun because they said we're putting out a press release on Monday. And I thought, well, I wanna announce it before they do. Yeah, well I didn't blame you actually. And you know, I didn't even announce it. I let somebody else <laugh>. Yeah,

Kim Schaffer (00:19:26):
You did. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:19:27):
Kim, who should we, uh, start the show is,

Kim Schaffer (00:19:30):
Uh, let's go to Chip in Newport Beach. He's got some dash cam.

Leo Laporte (00:19:34):
Dash cam questions, dash cam questions. <laugh>. Thank you Ms. Shaffer. Thank you. And we'll stay in touch. We'll, we'll we'll let everybody know what you're up to because everybody loves you. Chip on the line from Newport Beach. Hi Chip. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy.

Speaker 4 (00:19:51):
Hi Leo. Uh, first thanks for all the years of help with technology. My pleasure. It's been great.

Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
You know, I, we use the word retired. I'm not really retiring, I'm just leaving the radio show and, uh, my wife keeps saying, are you okay? Are you okay? I said, yeah, cuz I'm gonna, I still do six podcasts a week. I'm, I'm plenty busy including a tech guy podcasts. So we're not, we're not going, I'm not going away. If you like hearing my voice, I don't know why, but if you do, you there's plenty of opportunity anyway, what can I do for you?

Speaker 4 (00:20:21):
Um, well I'm 71 and, uh, driving, I haven't had a ticket in over 30 years, but I have had two accidents in the last seven years. Neither was my fault, but in each case they tried to point a finger or blame at

Leo Laporte (00:20:36):
Me. Oh yeah. The insurance company, the first thing they do say, well it's your fault cuz they don't wanna pay. They want the other guy's insurance. Yeah. Yeah. So, um,

Speaker 4 (00:20:45):
So if I had a good dash cam yes, that would be something on my side. Yes. Now, a few years ago you talked about the owl cam and then you told us that they were having some problems and they sort of kind of went away, but now they're back and their website is up and they're selling cameras and I was just wondering, do you think they're good or maybe somebody else? And if somebody else has an idea in the chat room, I've got the chat room open.

Leo Laporte (00:21:11):
Oh good. The chat room's always good. So here's, yeah, I don't know anything about this new company. I'm glad they brought it back cuz a lot of us, me included, spent a lot of money on the dash cam, the owl cam because it was, uh, included, uh, cell service. So it was more expensive up front. I don't know anything about this new company. I don't know, you know, I would hate for you to buy it and then go through the same thing again. So I think it's good news for anybody who already owns that owl cam, but I wouldn't recommend it anymore. What I would recommend is a visit to the wire cutter wire cutter.com and look at their dash cam, uh, reviews. They say they like something called I've never even heard of, called the van true n four. But the reviews are valuable cuz it tells you what you're getting.

(00:21:56):
So do you want parked car monitoring? Do you only want monitoring while you drive? Do you want monitoring going forward and looking at you? Do you want GPS tracking? There's all sorts of features and different cameras have different features. The owl cam I liked because it had built in, uh, cellular and so it would upload pictures. So even if it got stolen, you'd have pictures of the person stealing it. If, if there was an accident it would be uploading pictures immediately. So even if, uh, the, the camera and in the long run got damaged by the accident or whatever, there would be, uh, images right up to that point. So there were a lot of nice features about that. But I, I hesitate to recommend them cuz I don't know about this new company and what the long term future holds. So it's good news for those of us who own owls, but not good news. I think in general, Garmin makes an excellent one for about $110. That's about a third. What o was charging, I don't know what they charged today. Uh, there's a van true for our $80. So my suggestion, I'm not an expert, but I think you're right to get one. I think that's really smart. Uh, go to the wire cutter and look at their dash camera views. I think they're trustworthy. Speaking of cars, salmon will, salmon coming up.

(00:23:10):
Yeah, I think that's, I keep meaning to do that. The funny thing is, I had the all cam on for three years or something and I never, nothing ever happened. <laugh>. But I guess that's what you want. Uh, right. You know, chip, you want, you want it to be there in case something happens. I

Speaker 4 (00:23:25):
I I like all those features. That's really nice. Yeah. And uh, and my car is electric. Uh, it's a freest prime, uh, and I drive it mostly electric. Uh, it's nice hybrid backup too. <laugh>. Yeah. Uh, but you know, around here where I live, there are a lot of burglaries, a lot of car thefts. And it is just getting like the wild west here and with something like the all cam that sort of got somebody on my side.

Leo Laporte (00:23:54):
Exactly. Cause cause

Speaker 4 (00:23:56):
A bunch of other cameras

Leo Laporte (00:23:57):
If somebody stole your car, because the all cam's always is uploading, uh, even though the car's gone and the camera's gone, you would have the images of it being stolen. So yeah, there's a lot of reasons. Park car monitoring is one of the features you definitely want. I wonder if there's anybody though offering. Yeah. See I don't think a lot of 'em offer what the owl cam did, which was that, that 3G connectivity, that's such a nice feature. Yeah. Um, because then it's uploading, even if you don't, if you lose the camera, I have no reason not to trust these new owners. They, it seems like they, you know, they've put money into it. So now it's $225. Well that's not bad for one cam. Does that include the

Speaker 4 (00:24:38):
Yeah, it used to be 300.

Leo Laporte (00:24:39):
Yeah, I spent a lot of money. 300 spent a lot. Uh, does it upload though, these days?

Speaker 4 (00:24:46):
The annual is higher,

Leo Laporte (00:24:47):
That's it. Cause they have to pay for that. Yeah. That connectivity, that's the deal, right? Yeah. They still have 4g, which is great. Sam, do you have an opinion on these uh, dash cams? Do you have one that you like?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:01):
Um, I don't use a dash cam. Um, and I haven't really spent any time messing with them. I actually have one that I got that I've been meaning to try out but haven't really done anything with yet. Um, but you know, the thing is, like you said, you know, it's kind of like insurance. You know, you pay for it and pay for it and pay for it, but you hope you'll never actually have to use it. And you know, that's kind of what you're doing with this. You, it's cut, you're treating it as as insurance. Um, you know, where you're, hopefully if something happens, if somebody steals your car or vandalizes your car, you'll catch it. But, you know, ideally you don't actually want to have to deal with that.

Leo Laporte (00:25:39):
I think probably Chip, the owl cam is probably what you want because it has those features if your car gets stolen.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:45):
Yeah. Most, most of them are not connected. Yeah. So, you know, they're, you know, they just store

Leo Laporte (00:25:51):
Onto, that's what put 'em outta business. Cuz they basically, you paid once and you got this LTE connection. They didn't charge a subscription. So I think they're smart now. They've kind of, you know, 15 bucks a month for the connection. The cameras are cheaper. Looks like the same camera by the way. It doesn't look like they've changed the, uh, the hardware.

Speaker 4 (00:26:09):
Yeah, I think it is.

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
Yeah. I loved the hardware. You know, I have to, I've been meaning to, uh, re-up. Right? Uh, and so I should try that. The problem is this, they have the same kind of problem that the original WL cam had with the business model. Um, and if this company decide, you know, their real business as it was with the Owl, I think is for fleets. And if they decided, ah, we don't wanna support consumers anymore, um, that could then you could be another, you know, expensive camera. That's not, I feel burned. Can you tell

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:42):
<laugh>? Yeah. It's it's not like, uh, with the Kindle and

Leo Laporte (00:26:46):
Not 32. Yeah. How many times have I been burned right now? So, um, yeah, you know, you kinda learn these tech companies, they don't, they're not required to stay in business. So a hardware investment is a big deal. The A cam five is new, uh, says CJ and has night vision and more storage. So there are, there's uh, kilo Tech and our Chatman you're seeing this too. Chip, you said you're in the Chatman says there is a 5g, uh, camera called the Ye Yor <laugh> some Chinese company. Anyway, I gotta run Chip. Uh, chatroom will be a good help for you. We're gonna do a Sam, but we have some other things to talk about, I think.

Speaker 5 (00:27:24):
Thank you so

Leo Laporte (00:27:25):
Much. Thank you. Great to talk to you. Have a good one. It's time for Sam, a Bull Sam, our car guy, principal researcher at Guide House Insights. His podcast Wheel Bearings is a must for anybody who loves automotive technology and cars. And he joins us every week to talk about cars. Hi Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:44):
Hello Leo. Good to see you. I'm really sorry to see you go from the show. I've missed. I'll miss doing this every Sunday with you.

Leo Laporte (00:27:50):
Well, and I, I've told people we're gonna keep doing a podcast on Sundays called Ask the Tech. I it it's just one show instead of two. So, uh, we won't be able to get every contributor on every week, but I plan to call you anytime. There's a question that's in your, in your, uh, so you, we may see every Sunday, cuz a lot of card questions out there, but we'll definitely you on the new, the new podcasts. Uh

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:12):
Right. Sounds

Leo Laporte (00:28:13):
Good. And if people are subscribed to the podcast to tech eye labs.com that just hang in there cuz after the holidays we're going of course take Christmas and New Years off, but after the holidays, the show will come back and it'll be a podcast that's all just won't be on the radio. Yeah. So, uh, you're sitting in front of a car that looks like a Waymo.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:32):
It is. Uh, this is, um, it was shown in, in physical form this week. It was originally announced about a year ago. Um, you were talking earlier about Waymo getting a permit or doing driverless rides in San Francisco. And, um, last year Waymo announced to deal with a Chinese manufacturer called Zeer. Zeer is part of the GE group. Uh, and GE is the Chinese company that owns among other brands, uh, Volvo Pole Star, um, uh, Lotus now, uh, as well as, uh, a number of other Chinese only brands. Um, and Zeer is one of their newest brands focused on EVs only. And they're, uh, collaborating with Waymo to do this purpose built robo taxi vehicle. Uh, and we've seen, we've got a number of companies now that are going down this path of purpose built robo taxis. Um, cruise has shown the origin, uh, which we've talked about previously.

(00:29:30):
Uh, zoos has their own little purpose built, built vehicle. And the advantage to these over, um, over using a converted vehicle, you can optimize it a lot more, more. Um, these are obviously designed without human control, so there's no steering wheel and pedals and things like that. Um, and it has power sliding doors, uh, front and rear. Uh, unlike the cruise origin and the, and the zoo's, uh, robo taxis, which have what we call carriage seating where everybody's facing the center of the vehicle in this one. Um, everybody's facing forward. So it's like a little minivan, but you know, much smaller than the Chrysler Pacificas that Waymo's been using for a number of years. Um, but also a lot roomier than something like the Jaguar Ipace that they run a lot of in the Bay Area. Um, and so they showed one of these, um, in LA this week as part of the LA Auto Show, uh, and sometime probably in the middle to the later half of, uh, 2023, uh, we'll probably start to see these on the roads. They have actually been testing these. Um, and I pulled up, um, a picture here that I wanted to show you is that when I was listening to, uh, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:30:45):
What do they call this? Camouflage, they put on these cars. It's, it's really weird looking,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:50):
So Yeah, well, it, it, it, when I was listening to last week's, uh, edition of twit, you guys were talking about, uh, like World War I, uh, naval ships, you know, they, they did some of these weird, uh, paint schemes on a black and white paint schemes. Yeah. And you'll, if you ever look on car websites or car magazines, you'll often see spy photos of vehicles out testing that have this kind of rap. And for those who are just listing on the radio and, and don't see the video stream, uh, they have this, it's got this, these swirly patterns and it's just a vinyl wrap that they put on the prototype vehicle. But what it does, uh, you know, like, like what they've done with like, what they did with Naval vessels back in the First World War, is it confuses the eye and also confuses cameras. It's much harder, uh, for camera to focus on this, uh, on these patterns. And it also hides, you know, I mean in this case, in the case of this vehicle, it's a pretty, you know, plain vehicle. There's nothing particularly fancy about it, but for a lot of regular production vehicles, it tends to hide a lot of the design details, uh, because you see all these random swirly patterns, um, and you can't, you get less of an idea of the details of what it looks like, I

Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
Guess. I mean, I can see what it looks like

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:08):
<laugh>. Yeah, well, I said with this particular vehicle, but when you look at some other, um, you know, more conventional vehicles, uh, you, you're not gonna see the details of the surface, uh, contouring and things like that. Or at least it's more hidden. And it's also a lot harder for a camera to focus, uh, on this when you're using the auto focus. Uh, so in war

Leo Laporte (00:32:29):
Too, they called this, uh, camouflage on these ships dazzle camouflage. Yeah. Because it was supposed to dazzle the viewer or confuse the viewer. Uh, and you know, it's an interesting concept. I didn't, I mean, didn't take over really. So it mustn't have been very effective.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:48):
Yeah, no, I mean, and the, you know, the, the reality is if, if anything, um, you know, it, you know, when they use it on vehicles that are out testing and around here, I see vehicles with this stuff all the time because yeah, a lot of, a lot of manufacturers around here in southeast Michigan, uh, a lot of, um, uh, suppliers that are out testing vehicles and, you know, when they're out on the road, they're running around in this stuff. And so I, I see these things on a regular basis and what it probably, what it does more than anything else is it actually calls attention to the vehicles. So it's almost like they're trying to use theri sand effect in reverse, um, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
So it's like, look at me, look at me. I'm driving down the highway. Woo. Yeah. I could see how it might work, uh, you know, in World War II when somebody's using a binoculars to look at a ship, but, you know, nowadays all I'd have to do is take my camera and turn the dazzle into something else, you know, in my computer and I can see all the details are still there.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:48):
Yeah. So, uh, but, and it's kinda,

Leo Laporte (00:33:51):
Anyway, and I think you're right. I think it's more like, Hey look, we got something secret and new. Look at us

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:56):
<laugh>. Yeah. And you know, I mean, it gets them attention, you know, when, when these cars get photographed when they're out on the road. Yeah. Um, you know, then they show up in, um, on, you know, on sites like Nik and Auto Blog and Motor One. It works. Uh, yeah. You know, and, and it, it says, Hey, we got something new coming, you know, so everybody gets excited about it. That's pretty funny. Um, but, uh, you know, and uh, you were talking about, you know, what it's like riding in one of these vehicles and it's when it, when it's working correctly, you

Leo Laporte (00:34:25):
Did it. Yeah. You're very brave. I've,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, not really. Uh, you know, I mean, I know the people that are working on this stuff. Did you go 60? There's

Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
Vehicles five miles an hour though in it?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:35):
No, we, we didn't go 65 cuz, you know, where we were operating in, in a portion of san in the city was, you know, obviously the speed limit, I think the maximum speed limit anywhere in that area was probably about 35. Um, and so, you know, it wasn't going 65 the vehicles capable of doing that. But, you know, because of the area where they're, where they've been permitted to operate, they, they can only go, you know, whatever the speed limit is. The, the 65 for the Wamo vehicles, cuz the Waymo vehicles are operating in San Francisco and San Mateo and Mountain View. Um, and one of the things that, that, you know, WAMO and other companies wanna do is be able to provide ride to the airport, for example, to SFO. And, you know, that require, that's gonna require some driving on the highway. Um, so 65 is the speed limit on the 1 0 1 and on the two 80, uh, depending where you're coming from, you know, that's, that's the way you're gonna go to get to the airport. So it needs to be able to operate at, at highway speeds along, you know, go along with the flow of traffic.

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
So somebody in our chat room asked a very funny question. I think they were being comedic, but it's actually, who does the, who takes the driver's test for these, these, how do they, how

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:40):
Do they, this this is one of the big questions Yeah. That remains unanswered is, uh, we don't have regulations for this right now. So, and, and this is something I've been advocating for and been writing about for a number of years, is that we need to have some sort of regulations, you know, that is effectively the equivalent of a driver's test for an automated vehicle in China. They do have some standards before a company can get a permit to even test on public roads. They have to demonstrate certain capabilities on a closed track. We don't have that here. Here, basically you file the paperwork, uh, with the, the DMV or CPU c uh, or whatever, you know, whatever state you're operating in and pay your, pay your fees. And then, you know, they eventually, uh, give you a permit, which is what the, what the, we're gonna have public. We're

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
Gonna have to work on this and we're gonna really have to figure this out before there are some horrific wrecks. Mr. Samma, bull Sam, principal researcher at Guide House Insights, always a pleasure. Thank you. More calls coming on the tech guy right after this. Somebody's asking, will Chad still be around after, uh, Leo leaves the show? Yes. The Chad is actually, uh, more of

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:56):
A, and that runs 24 hours a day,

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
Doesn't it? Yeah. That ain't going nowhere. <laugh>. Uh, yeah, there, I think the word retire was probably the wrong word, but I didn't wanna say I quit. Yeah. Um, but, but basically, you know, I just, uh, I get Saturdays back, that's a benefit. I'm still gonna do six shows a day, which is a week, which is more than any radio host normally would do. Many, many more hours on the air than most full-time radio host. Um, I just, I thought, I don't need to work. This will be the first time in my life, by the way, that I haven't had a job.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:28):
That you don't have a full-time

Leo Laporte (00:37:28):
Job. That I haven't worked for somebody. Right, yeah. The first time, no, W two, um, it took me, so it took, it took me 19 years to trust that Twit was gonna be able to support me <laugh> before I quit my day job. That's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:42):
All I'm doing. And so now you're doing it just as the advertising market is collapsing?

Leo Laporte (00:37:47):
Well, the, okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:49):
Just, but at least you have Lisa just

Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
Yeah, thank you. She can

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:51):
Keep the, she can keep the lights

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
On just between us. The real problem with the radio show was that I was, that it was going negative. Uh, they were so unable to sell ads on it that I wasn't getting, I was getting a stipend and then I would get my statement and say, minus $25,000 minus 25,000. And it was like, um, I don't know if I'm liable for this. I hope I'm not, but I can't, this is not, I'm not doing this for nothing and I'm definitely not doing it if I owe you money. So, um, that was, that was really the precipitating thing. And yeah, I mean, I love, uh, I love doing what I do and keep doing it. I just don't have to do it for a company anymore. I've gotta, I've got my own, I've got my own affairs, my own business. And of course you're not gonna kill the chat.

(00:38:35):
In fact, we're just adding things. We, we've got MAs on, we've got a forums, we've got the Discord and we've got the chat. There's plenty of ways and those will all survive. The only thing of the radio show is, is I won't be on the radio, but I wonder how many people listen to that anymore. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know what your numbers look like for the podcast. Podcast. I don't either. I never got numbers for the podcast. Yeah, no, for the podcast. My guess is the radio show and they never, uh, told me. Uh, but I'm gonna guess I'm gonna be conservative. I think at one point somebody said a million people a weekend. Uh, let's say it's half that 50 500,000 a weekend. The podcasts were 50 to 60,000, uh, an episode of down in a per show. So it was about a 10th as big.

(00:39:24):
But those are the people who I want to talk to more than the radio listeners who are very casual and mostly older and, uh, have much more kind of generic printer problems. <laugh>. Yeah. You're probably gonna get more interesting questions. I'm gonna get much more interesting s on the podcast. Exactly. And we're gonna still, we're gonna, we're working on the technology, but we're gonna be able to do video calls and stuff. And so it's just gonna be fun. And it's Mike and me, Mike and I love doing this together. And people like you. It'll be really more of a group. I, I wish we could name it, ask the tech guys, but, uh, maybe, maybe over time, cuz it's really gonna be about all of us, uh, helping people in the same way, uh, which I think is a, is really a better forum. It's gonna be, it'll be fun.

(00:40:09):
I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. I, I hope to be able to continue participating in that. Of course you will. And of course you'll be on Twitter and stuff too. You know, you're, you're a regular, uh, would you like to stick around for the top of the hour? Certainly Silently wise guy. Hey, and you're on the Mastodon too. I see you're on the ma on I'm on, I'm on the Mastodon. And what do you think? I I like it, uh, you know, grow. I'm growing the number of people I'm, I'm following and people that are following me and getting a richer feed in there now. More stuff that, uh, I like it a lot. Yeah. For a long time, like the last three years, it was a ghost town, but we did it. It was fun, I liked it, but now it's much more like, it's pretty much what Twitter was. It's a fast paced, interesting conversation with a big variety of people, um, minus the hate and hour h. All right, we'll talk at the top. All right. Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number if you wanna talk high tech. I'm here for you baby Mike on the line from Culver City, California. Hi Mike.

Speaker 4 (00:41:12):
Hi there. I have followed you, um, for a long time. Really appreciate you and your latest advice to go to Macon. I've done it. I get there. I've gotta set up my account. In fact, I'm looking at my, uh, my, um, uh, profile and that I've set up for your TWI zone. Yeah. And it's this verification and it gives me this big long thing to copy and put in my website. Now, I am a writer, not a HTML programmer, so

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
You don't need to be an HTML programmer. Do you have, uh, you have your own website?

Speaker 4 (00:41:47):
Google Blogger. Okay. I just, I'm,

Leo Laporte (00:41:49):
So you can use

Speaker 4 (00:41:50):
Like monkey,

Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
You can use Twitter to, to, so the difference on Macon, which is a very much more kind of people's network, which I think now that Elon is destroying Twitter is probably a, a valued thing. The difference about Macon was, uh, is that it's, you know, it's, there's no central authority, so there's nobody to verify you. But in a way, this is better because you verify yourself by linking back to things that you do that people would say, oh yeah, well, I, you know, I, I read his stuff. I know that's Mike. So you could do that with Twitter, you could do that with a blog, and it's not as co it sounds complicated. It's not as complicated as it sounds because anything that you could put a link, uh, to this. I know that the way they've done this is confusing, but this big piece of text is really just a link in HTML to your Mastodon page. And the only thing that you do different than just pure, pure link is these, is this two little words. R e l equals me. And this is a signal to the world that this is my site, this is me. And so you're, you're taking a, you don't, I know if you don't know html, it looks all like gobbly go. But what you're doing is you're taking the, the link that you put on Blogger to other things. Like, to you, do you already put links in Blogger to, to your Twitter account and other places?

Speaker 4 (00:43:16):
Yes, I do. Yeah. When I, when I put this, uh, I did the copy from my, my definition, the, uh, rather my, uh, your

Leo Laporte (00:43:24):
Profile. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:43:25):
They gave, it's really nice because they give you the whole string to

Leo Laporte (00:43:28):
Right. You just paste it in, put in there.

Speaker 4 (00:43:30):
Yeah. Well, when I put it in there, uh, it, my website doesn't leave. Um, when you click on it, like I, I have, I have, here's my Twitter account, here's my Facebook account, all that stuff, right? And you see the words. And in the back of it, I did that on one of, uh, Google blogger's widgets. And in the backside of it, of course, is all the HTML stuff, which I copy like a monkey. So I put the word mastodon in English to see for my viewers. Yeah. And you click on that. If I have that whole real tag in there, it goes completely. Um, the one that was given to me by Macon, it just, it goes to a dead page and says, can't find this page no matter what within my blog. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:44:08):
So, so here's, here's probably what's happening. And this is, you know, in order to make a blogger or WordPress or Square space, or Wicks or any of these sites easier to use, the, the page editor you use to set up your page, uh, does a lot of translation. What you wanna find is a way to paste it in without it doing any translation to it. You wanna say, and now, sure, in the, the editor or somewhere, there'll be a button that says, I'm, I'm pasting in html. Now I'm not pasting in text. So you want it to paste in raw html. HTML is the hypertech text markup language, the language of the web. And in order to make this easy blogger, everybody does this, they assume you're just typing English <laugh>. You're just, and it's gonna make a link based on it. What you wanna do is paste in untranslated, don't translate this for me html.

(00:45:01):
So I, I haven't used blogger in a while, I can't remember. But there is gonna be a way to do that. It, it's the same thing on Twitter. When you set up, uh, when you set up a, uh, Twitter account, you can put links to stuff in and you can paste in html and then it will, what happens is your ma on account will go look at your Twitter, see that rail equals me tag and say, and make it green. It'll say, yeah, he's verified. And what it's, what it's all it's saying is I control this. I control it enough to put in rel equals me. And by demonstrating my control of my Twitter account, my blogger, it could be anything that you can paste a link into in pure html. That's the key can be used to verify you and somebody who's then looking at you on ma it on, which we should explain is this kind of open source Twitter replacement.

(00:45:52):
A lot of people, 7 million people now have joined it leaving Twitter. I would say probably half of that, leaving Twitter to join it. Uh, and so it's fun. And we, we've, we have our own Macon. That's the other thing is, uh, anybody can set up a Macon server and they all federate, they all can communicate with one another. So you can be on any server and follow me, uh, and I can, and, and I can follow you on whatever server you're on, Mike, as long as I know what server you're on and what your handle is. So if you're at mike@twi.social, and I can follow you. And then anything you post, I will see no matter where I am in the, in the, they call it the Fed averse, the Federated Universe. So the key is to figure out on your blogger how you paste it.

(00:46:35):
I know it confuses people. I prefer this system because I'm not dependent on Twitter to author, to authenticate me. You know, so many people complain. My wife could never get a blue check on Twitter. Twitter, you know, you provide all the documentation and they still ignored her. Uh, I have a blue check, but, uh, but Elon's gonna take that away from me in the next couple of months because I'm not paying eight bucks a month for it. So, uh, the blue check in a centralized system, whoever runs the system determines what the blue check means. And I think that's dopey on, on Mastodon. It's up to you. And then the, your reader will can go to your profile and say, well, I see it's a green length. That means that he controls that site. Then they still have to go to that site and make sure that that's the person who says they are.

(00:47:21):
So, if you're a famous, if you're a famous celebrity, if you're George Decay of Star Trek, um, you have to, you know, somewhere that you control that only George Decay would be, it's like knowing a secret that only George Decay would know, knowing a secret, only Mike would know. Uh, and, and I'm gonna say, well, I'm gonna ask you, Mike, what's the name of your second oldest child? And if you know that, I know it's you, that's all this is. It's, I understand it's really complicated. It's kind of silly, but I, I prefer it because you're in charge of your own verification. And I don't think that that way anybody who wants to verify themselves can. So the trick is on your blogger, look for a way to paste in pure HTML in the editor, not let them translate it. And you'll know cuz it'll show up.

(00:48:03):
It's just the word masked on. You can change that by the way. You can make it be whatever the text is in between that left angle bracket and that right angle bracket that could, that's the text that's gonna show up. You could say Mike's masked on page, you could say Mike's Social Network, whatever you wanna say in there. The key is that HTML first part, which is an A equals, you know, a h ref re about me and then the the link, right. Those things, those things in the angle brackets. I know it's kind of complicated. Yeah. The problem is people like me who've been doing this since I was like, kid <laugh> know it, know it intimately and we forget that normal people go, what is this gobbled? Go.

Speaker 4 (00:48:43):
Well, lemme tell you, you and Jeff and aunt and and, uh, Stacy at the, uh, this weekend Google show. Yeah. I'm telling I'd like to tell everybody, if you have not found that show, it is a free for all <laugh>. Really, really. It's super smart. People like it. I tell my wife, it's like the view, uh, if you were, it's a view for geeks techy and really cared.

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
You just gave me the tagline. That's beautiful. That's exactly what it is. Mike, thank bless you for saying that. And for people who are sad that I'm leaving the radio show, that's one of six shows I do every week. There's plenty of Leo, believe me, you're never gonna get sick of it. And you can go to tech guy labs.com and you'll see everything is there. Thank you for the very, I

Speaker 4 (00:49:27):
Subscribe, I subscribe to most of them and they're, they're available in all your podcasting. They're free. It's wonderful. But you, you guys, you guys made me less fearful about trying to, uh, to get into Mac on. And now that I'm there, I gotta tell you, it's so clean. It feels clean or something. It does,

Leo Laporte (00:49:46):
Doesn't

Speaker 4 (00:49:46):
It clean

Leo Laporte (00:49:47):
About it? There's none of this stuff that, that was in the background noise of Twitter that made you feel a little creepy, creepy, uncomfortable. And by the way, it's gotten more so it's gotten much more so in the last couple of days cuz most of the quality people have gone elsewhere. And the people who are left, you wanna take a shower? Mike, I just have one question. Am I Whoopy Goldberg or Barbara Walters in this metaphor? <laugh>.

Speaker 4 (00:50:13):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
Mike, thank you Leo. You

Speaker 4 (00:50:18):
Really

Leo Laporte (00:50:19):
Rowdy. I'm the rowdy guy, the tech guy. More calls after this <laugh>. No, that's you. I never thought of that. That's exactly what she

Speaker 4 (00:50:30):
Is life. But it was, she heard all these people yelling and talking to each other and I said, it's okay. These guys are all cool.

Leo Laporte (00:50:38):
We all love each other just like Whoopi and Yeah. Well, yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's the view for geeks. Yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you <laugh>. Hey, have a great day and I'll see you on, uh, this week in Google and, and you know, if you, if you have any, uh, problems getting the real me working, um, I will, when I go home, I'll look at Blogger, at least as a blogger said, I'll look at Blogger and I'll see if I can, uh, uh, figure out what's going on. I think there's gonna be a way to just the plain html and I bet you could figure it out before this show's over, but if not, ask me on ma it on it, I'll tell you.

Speaker 4 (00:51:13):
Okay. Well, I'm, I'm on. I just joined your, uh, uh, TWI social. Okay. So

Leo Laporte (00:51:19):
What's your handle on there?

Speaker 4 (00:51:21):
Michael GRE at TWI Social. Okay. Mike. Mike G.

Leo Laporte (00:51:26):
Mike G I'll look for Mike G Yep. Leave me if, if you don't figure it out before the, the radio shows over. You leave me a question there. Uh, you're not alone. Everybody wants to know this. It's complicated. It shouldn't be.

Speaker 4 (00:51:37):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:38):
Okay. Drove Jeff crazy, as you remember.

Speaker 4 (00:51:41):
<laugh>. I do. <laugh>. Maybe kinda brave enough to go there. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:51:46):
Yeah. Good

Speaker 4 (00:51:48):
Handle it, you know. All

Leo Laporte (00:51:50):
Right. Hey, have a great, have a great day and, uh, we'll, we'll see you on the Mastodon.

Speaker 4 (00:51:55):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:51:56):
On the, on the, uh, on the, uh, the extinct, uh, elephant mammal site, <laugh>, along with Sam, all yours for eight minutes, Sam, if you want it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:07):
All right. Yeah. I mean, there, there's a whole bunch of us on twitter.social, uh,

Leo Laporte (00:52:11):
On I don't,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:12):
Massive

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
And I kind of not trying to promote it, uh, on the radio cuz um, at some point we're gonna get swamped and I want it to only be people who listen to, like anybody who's listening now should join. And just make sure you say this equal words. Say, uh, you know, I listen to Twitter, I love Sam, happy Sam or something, uh, when you apply.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:31):
Yeah. Or, or, you know, just go to, you know, uh, was it join mastodon.org, I think. Um,

Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
But there are other ones you can join. Exactly.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:37):
Any server. Yeah. There's thousands of servers out there. Yes, exactly. So, yeah. Uh, there's lot, lots of them available.

Leo Laporte (00:52:43):
We, I work really hard. I spend many hours a day looking at our, uh, our mastodon to keep it clean. And, um, family's family friendly, and I really does make a difference. It's quite a pleasure. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And we have some nice people on there. S on there. You're on there. Denise Howell. Uh, Micah now is in there. So, yeah. All yours.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:03):
All right. So, um, let's see. Uh, who was it? Uh, somebody here, uh oh. Ty atl, uh, was asking, uh, in the chat, uh, he says he's looking at a used 2022 Porsche TA cross charisma wagon, uh, which is excellent choice. Um, what can I do to ensure a non-certified used Porsche is a good deal and not a lemon? So, uh, what, what, uh, what he is referring to, or, or what they, uh, since I don't know, ATL might be a woman, um, and, uh, non-certified used vehicles. So one, one of the phenomenon that we've had in over the last 10, 15 years is, uh, what we call certified pre-owned vehicles. Um, which is where, um, automakers when they get, uh, vehicles either as trade-ins or coming back off lease, um, they put them through a certified pre-owned program or CPO program where they go through and they, essentially, it's let's refurbishing it, uh, going through, inspecting everything, cleaning it up, uh, replacing anything that needs to be replacing.

(00:54:09):
So it's basically almost like a new car. Um, and then they offer the, they sell these, uh, through their dealers, you know, as used vehicles, uh, which is what they are. Um, and typically when you go to a dealer and you buy a CPO used car, uh, it's, you pay a little bit higher price for it because usually almost always comes with a warranty of some kind. And, you know, it's been, it's been gone over by the manufacturer, uh, at, they have special facilities where they do this stuff. Um, what, uh, ta ATL is asking here is about buying a non CPO Porsche. And the is, uh, Porsche's first electric vehicle. Um, the cross tourismo version is a wagon version of Theon. The original was a sedan. Um, and then the, the wagon, I, I personally, that's my favorite one, is the, the cross tourismo or the, actually the new sport tourismo that's coming out.

(00:55:04):
Um, and how do you ensure that it's, that it's both a good deal and that it's not a lemon? And what I would say, and, and this is generally a good practice, whether you're buying a used Porsche or a used Hyundai, is if you're buying it, you know, from a private party, uh, you know, not buying it from a dealer with a, with a warranty, um, is to take it to a, uh, service facility that you, that you like and you trust in a place where you, preferably, where you've done some business before and you know that they're gonna do good work. And most of them, um, you know, they, they will do, uh, an inspection, uh, a pre-purchase inspection. It might cost you a hundred, 150, $200, you know, and they will go through and check everything out. Um, you know, take a look at things that, you know, might be problematic, um, and, you know, take it, take it somewhere to a, a trusted mechanic.

(00:56:00):
Um, have, have them go over it, um, and spend some time, you know, and especially something like the, you know, you're probably talking even for a used, you're probably talking a hundred thousand dollars in help, uh, for that car. So it's worth spending a few hundred bucks to make sure that you're not getting, not gonna get burned on that. Um, and, you know, even if you're, like I say, buying a used Hyundai or a used Laporte or a Honda, uh, from a private party, um, you know, unless, you know, unless you're getting a very good deal on it, uh, or unless you know what you're doing when you're inspecting a vehicle, it's a good idea to, you know, spend a couple hundred bucks, um, to, especially if you're spending, you know, 15 or $20,000 on a used car to, um, to have it inspected properly before you buy it.

(00:56:50):
Uh, and then, uh, you can have, you can have a little more confidence, uh, in that. So, uh, that's what I would suggest. Um, ta atl, um, sticking with, uh, EVs with the EV topic for a moment. Um, this morning we recorded, uh, the next version, uh, the next edition next episode of, uh, wheel bearings. And one of the questions I wanted to share with the, the listeners here that we got from a listener, um, was about, uh, long term EV storage. Uh, so this, uh, this particular person is soon going to be buying a Cadillac lyric. Um, and, uh, he lives in, um, in, um, New Hampshire, um, where, uh, like many people, uh, like many people in northern northern states, um, so snowbird, uh, and spends the winter months in Florida, and for whatever reason, they've opted not to send, not to take the to Florida with them.

(00:57:48):
They're gonna, or the, the lyric to Florida with them, they're gonna leave that in New Hampshire. And I was wondering whether it's a good idea to keep it plugged in for four months while they're in Florida. And what I would say to that is, no, that's probably not a good idea. You don't wanna just plug it in and leave it for weeks or months at a time. Um, lithium ion batteries, uh, are actually really good if you have them partially charged, uh, usually somewhere between 50 and 75% charge. Um, they will actually last a long time that way. Um, and so what I would suggest is to charge it to some, you know, probably about 75%, uh, if it's gonna be four months, and then, um, unplug it. Um, but you don't wanna just leave it like that for four months, because one of the challenges that, you know, EVs have two batteries in them.

(00:58:41):
They have the high voltage battery, which is what moves the vehicle. And then they also have a 12 volt battery because, uh, they still have, uh, a lot of systems that run on lower low voltage, um, all the, all the computers and everything in the vehicle. And so the 12 volt battery, um, powers all that stuff. And with modern vehicles that are connected, uh, you know, there's going to be things in that car that wake up on a regular basis and go out and reach out to the cloud, you know, to download OTA updates or whatever it might be. So what I would suggest is you charge the high voltage battery to about 75%, uh, un, uh, and then disconnect the negative terminal of your 12 volt battery, um, so that it doesn't drain, get, uh, a battery tender, uh, which is just a little trickle charger, hooks that up to the 12 volt battery. And then, uh, by disconnecting the, the negative terminal of the battery, none of the computers or anything else that the car's gonna wake up. So it's not going to drain your high voltage battery. So it'll be in good shape when you come back from Florida. And then just when you get back, reconnect the negative terminal and you're good to go.

Leo Laporte (00:59:52):
And there's, your people are asking, what's this ma on handle? You have two, do you mostly use, uh, this one or do you use the other one more? Uh,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:01):
Yeah, that's, that's, that's the only one I'm using right now. Um, I'm also setting up one for wheel bearings as well. Oh, good. Move wheel

Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
Bearings. Oh, good. You're gonna have a wheel bearings, bass on. Yeah. Awesome.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:11):
Yeah. Yep. We have a wheel bearings on Twitter and, and we'll move that over to Macon as well.

Leo Laporte (01:00:22):
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo, is the phone number (888) 827-5536 toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada outside that area. Maybe a little bit, uh, more difficult, but you can use Skype or something like that to call in 88. 88, ask Leo website. And this website, by the way, will continue after the, uh, end of the year, tech guy labs.com. So keep that in your bookmarks, tech guy labs.com. That's where you'll find the show notes for every episode. This is episode 1946. Show notes, include links that, uh, to things I've talked about. Uh, the transcript of the show will get up there after a couple of days, takes a while for the computer to make that, uh, <laugh>. We also, we have a human look at it. That's what, that's what takes it a while. The computer's pretty quick. Uh, we also have a, um, uh, audio and video from the show. Tech guy labs.com, no charge. It's, uh, it's no sign up or anything. It's wide open. Dana's on the line from Taboo Canyon, California. Hello, Dana.

Speaker 6 (01:01:36):
Hi Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (01:01:37):
You? I am well. How are you?

Speaker 6 (01:01:39):
Great. Uh, gonna miss you, but I'll find just somewhere else as we've

Leo Laporte (01:01:43):
All been, I'll be on the internet, you know, that thing called the internet,

Speaker 6 (01:01:47):
The worldwide web? The

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Worldwide web <laugh>. Yeah. Tech guy labs.com will continue to work, and that will have a link to, uh, the podcast, which will be, I enjoyed

Speaker 6 (01:01:57):
Similar Martin being the, uh, the, the, the announcer of that information.

Leo Laporte (01:02:02):
If you didn't hear yesterday's, uh, show, uh, Steve very kindly, uh, came on and, uh, cuz I didn't want to say it, <laugh>, he said it for me that December 18th will be the last tech guy. Uh, it's kind of, uh, fun. I met Steve, uh, on Twitter because of this show. He, uh, he listened to the show, I guess in Los Angeles and DMed me, this was some years ago, I'd say about 15 years ago on Twitter. Uh, sent me a message saying, Hey, you know, you don't have to respond to this, but I'm a fan. <laugh> says Steve Martin, so of would I, I've, we did. Would I? Of course I responded. You pretty crazy. And we've had kind of a good long distance friendship ever since. He's a great guy.

Speaker 6 (01:02:46):
Good for you.

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
Yeah. I really appreciate him being willing to do that yesterday. It was very nice of him.

Speaker 6 (01:02:52):
Yeah, that was great. I was fortunate to hear it.

Leo Laporte (01:02:54):
Good. I'm glad you heard it. What can I do for you?

Speaker 6 (01:02:56):
Well, I, I have, uh, been using Apple for a long, long time and I currently have an, uh, iMac 27 inch 2017. And that may be my issue in itself, but with a fusion drive and I, I, it, it just seems to start exceedingly slowly. Once it's up and running, it seems to function. Um, uh, and I'm wondering, but, but, but I sometimes have to restart it twice to get things to open.

Leo Laporte (01:03:31):
That's weird. So when you first started and it doesn't work, what hap how far do you get?

Speaker 6 (01:03:36):
Well, it'll, it'll take, you know, several minutes to actually display all the icons on the desktop.

Leo Laporte (01:03:43):
Yeah. Your hard drive is failing. So what happens, and this happens on all computers, not just Max, but, uh, spinning drives, especially prone to this. After a while, you build up, uh, areas of the drive that are hard to read, not unreadable. That's important. If we're unreadable, the system would just stop booting. It'd say, well, I can't, I can't start up, I'm, I'm missing something I need. But what, what it is, is they're hard to read. So the system spends time reading it. Now maybe it only spends an extra second on each sector, but if you have a thousand sectors now you can get to minutes. So that's just a sign. It happens in all computers that when it really slows down like that, it usually is a sign that the hard drive is failing. Hard to replace on an iMac, unless you really are handy and have a giant suction cup. I kid you not, I don't really recommend it.

Speaker 6 (01:04:36):
Well then that I guess brings to the next question. Do you believe, I like the all in one format of an iMac, um, uh, over a separate computer and a monitor. Do you believe they're going to come back with a 27 inch iMac?

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
Yeah, I think they have to. I, I was very disappointed. They did not do that this year. I was, I was, you know, and I, it must be supply chain issues. I don't really know what's going on. Uh, they did a 24 inch iMac, which is kind of like an iPad on a stand with a keyboard and mouse. It's not my favorite form factor. It's pretty, but it's not for pros. Uh, they really need to do a higher end iMac and they with a bigger screen and they certainly have the capability. You know, you never know With Apple, they don't, they don't tell me anything. Um, but, and the rumor mill implied that Apple had a number of M two updates for its devices, including an iMac Pro, a mini Mac mini Pro, uh, and a couple of MacBook Pros. Normally they would've announced those, uh, in October. I guess they'll announce 'em in, uh, in the spring. Is, uh, you know, that's the current speculation.

Speaker 6 (01:05:50):
Do you think there's any value or is it just a waste of effort to completely erase and clean

Leo Laporte (01:05:56):
Install? That might, yeah, that might, that would probably fix it actually. Yeah. Oh, so, uh, I mean, the thing is, it depends on what's wrong with the drive. If it's just age, it's a reinstalling would refresh it. So back up all your data, you should be doing that anyway now, cuz this is a sign back up all your data. If in fact there are some more serious problems with the drive, then it'll start again. You can bring it into a repair shop and have them replace that drive. In fact, I would replace the fusion drive with one, you know, which is, by the way, two drives a spinning drive and a small ssd. This is because when Apple made this computer a solid state drives are very, very expensive. Now they're not. I would just replace that fusion drive with one big solid state drive. It'd be much faster and ultimately more reliable.

Speaker 6 (01:06:45):
Well, maybe that's the step. Cause the, the monitor's great and everything works fine. Um, there's

Leo Laporte (01:06:50):
An inter there's an intermediate step, scooter X and the chaps reminding me that actually isn't too bad. Which is get an external s d and use a program like carbon copy cl or super duper and make a cl a clone of your internal drive, a bootable clone. And then from then on you can press the option key, uh, boot to that external drive. It will boot to that from now on. It'll act as if that external drive is your internal drive. You'll basically be no longer using the internal draft. I would certainly do that first, cuz that's gonna make a good backup of everything inside and see if that's acceptable.

Speaker 6 (01:07:28):
Well, I currently do that with super duper to a, to a perfect

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
Boot to it.

Speaker 6 (01:07:33):
I just, it didn't occur to me.

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
Yeah. Boot now put it on the, on that computer, the fastest connection is probably USB two. So it's not super, it's not as fast as the internal drive, but it'd be worth a try if for people with, with newer Macs that have thunderbolt ports often that's almost as fast, if not as fast as the, uh, internal drive.

Speaker 6 (01:07:52):
Okay. I'll try both of those things.

Leo Laporte (01:07:54):
Yeah. I don't know what's, what's the fastest thing in the, coming out of the back of your computer? Do you have Thunderbolt three?

Speaker 6 (01:07:59):
You know,

Leo Laporte (01:08:00):
No, it's probably usb. Yeah,

Speaker 6 (01:08:03):
I think it's, well there's a little image that has a, like a, like a thunderbolt,

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
A lightning. Ah, you probably have Thunderbolt too. That would be the one to use. So do some investigation on what's the fastest out, you know, outport and, uh, and buy a drive that matches that and that will be bootable. Hmm. Yep. Okay. Yep.

Speaker 6 (01:08:24):
And then gimme some time until they come up with a new iMac,

Leo Laporte (01:08:27):
I guess. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I agree with you. I like that form factor. I can't imagine why Apple doesn't do it. If they don't announce that this spring, then you're probably gonna do, uh, what maybe this is Apple's new plan, which is get a, a Mac Mac A Mac studio. The naming is, it's getting, it's getting complicated. Get a Mac Studio, which is like a Fat Mac Mini or even a Mac mini. Uh, if they, if they put out a new M two Mac mini with an external monitor and just hide the mini and then, you know, yeah. Then it's like, it's terrible. It's not the worst. It's like an all in one, right? Yeah. Right. All right. Okay. Hey, have a great day. Thank you for the call. I appreciate it. Eighty eight eighty eight Ask Leo, is the phone number? (888) 827-5536 toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. Uh, website, tech guy labs.com. More of your calls coming up. Stay right here. Ben is on the line from appropriately, Louisville, Kentucky. Hello, Ben.

Speaker 7 (01:09:29):
It's been a while. Leo, how

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
You doing?

Speaker 7 (01:09:33):
Oh, I'm good. I'm gonna miss you.

Leo Laporte (01:09:35):
I'm not going anywhere. I'm just not gonna be on your radio station. I'm

Speaker 7 (01:09:39):
Just saying, you know, I wanna congratulate you on your, uh, somewhat moving

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
On. Yeah. Lisa calls it retiring. <laugh> my wife, uh, mostly cuz I get to have brunch with her on Saturdays. <laugh>.

Speaker 7 (01:09:51):
Oh, I get you. Well, I'm calling today because I have some interesting project to, uh, talk with you.

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Oh, good. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:10:00):
So I have, um, I'm starting a Linux from scratch install, actually.

Leo Laporte (01:10:07):
<laugh>, are you nuts? Why?

Speaker 7 (01:10:10):
Uh, well I decided, you know, I've, I've done gen two a couple of times. Okay. Distros, et cetera. I said, what the heck, I'm gonna take up the guns and, uh, good for you. Build distro from absolute zero.

Leo Laporte (01:10:26):
Can I make a recommendation? I mean, look, this is a great project. You'll learn a lot and you obviously have have a lot of experience. Have you looked at Arch and building an Arch Linux distro instead of

Speaker 7 (01:10:37):
I actually already did

Leo Laporte (01:10:38):
That. You've already done Alright, Ben, you're way ahead. All right, so good. So you're gonna start, you're gonna put the kernel on there. Are you gonna create your own package manager? How are you gonna handle that?

Speaker 7 (01:10:48):
Well, I'm taking Pacman and putting it in there.

Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
Love Pacman. That's the arch. So this is, so just explain what's going on cuz this is, this is black diamond level. This is, this is no bunny slope.

Speaker 7 (01:11:00):
This is very high up.

Leo Laporte (01:11:02):
Well, to explain what's going on, he's gonna build his own operating system outta components based on the free open source, uh, operating system called Linux. Linux. You know, you're sure you've all heard of Linux. Really? Linux is just a kernel. It's just the smallest piece of the operating system and everything is put up on top of that. And the Linux

Speaker 7 (01:11:22):
Actually made my own kernel. You

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):
Know, you, you built your own kernel.

Speaker 7 (01:11:26):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (01:11:26):
Sir. You're not gonna, well, you can't, you're not gonna call Linux then It's gonna be called uh, Benex.

Speaker 7 (01:11:31):
Well, actually, actually I made my own Linux kernel version.

Leo Laporte (01:11:35):
Perfect. Yeah. So Linux, the nice thing about Linux cur kernel is modular. So you, you can kind of put it, it's it by itself. You can add the components you want and leave out stuff you're never gonna use and make it, just tune it to be just what you want. Which is, that's one of the beauties of open source. If you, if you are at your skill level, Ben, and that's, you're, you're obviously very skilled.

Speaker 7 (01:11:59):
Yes, yes. What I did was I went to a, a, a repo on GitHub and I found, uh, some premade package builds that were, uh, pack Man related. And I downloaded those and, uh, I've just been combining different pieces and, uh, how fun,

Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
How fun is this? Are you this is, this is, so this is in software, the equivalent of building your own pc and it's the, it's a, it's probably the geekiest thing I can imagine, except for maybe writing your own operating system from scratch

Speaker 7 (01:12:33):
That I actually did try to do that's

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Next.

Speaker 7 (01:12:35):
Ethical, bombed on me.

Leo Laporte (01:12:37):
<laugh>, uh, I, all I could say is I admire your fortitude, uh, and, and your skill. Cuz that's a hard thing to do. Good for you.

Speaker 7 (01:12:46):
I actually did find APO out there from the Chaos Project, but also is doing a similar thing where you can actually build your own ISL out of your lfs as a matter of fact. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
Wow.

Speaker 7 (01:13:00):
Yes. And I actually, once I get it the way I want it, I plan to respin this, uh, LFS into something actually. And I'm calling my, so

Leo Laporte (01:13:12):
We will be seeing Benex soon. Oh, what are you gonna call it?

Speaker 7 (01:13:16):
Xanax.

Leo Laporte (01:13:17):
How do you spell that?

Speaker 7 (01:13:18):
N ix.

Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
Okay. With a Z or an X.

Speaker 7 (01:13:22):
X

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Xe. N I X?

Speaker 7 (01:13:25):
No, X I N N I X

Leo Laporte (01:13:28):
X I N N I X because Xenex is already, uh, it's already used. That was, um, a long ago Microsoft Unix. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 7 (01:13:36):
Yeah, yeah. It's Xanax.

Leo Laporte (01:13:38):
Xanax Xi Nnx. I will be looking forward to installing Xanax someday on one of my computers. What a great project. Is it fun?

Speaker 7 (01:13:50):
I actually have a project out there already based on ours called Storm os. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:13:56):
So is, do you have a GitHub page?

Speaker 7 (01:13:59):
I actually have a website for my Storm os Tell

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
Tell us that.

Speaker 7 (01:14:04):
Well, storm Os started in 2018 with, uh, my buddy Matt Matthew Moore from YouTube, and, uh, which I do recommend you look him up at some point when you get a chance. Um, so what he and I did was we started a project called Arch Bmm, which unfortunately after we did a huge live stream on YouTube, a our live stream together where he was on Windows seven remoted into my, one of my laptops, which I no longer have, unfortunately. And he and I sat there with him just customizing XC for me. And we put it together and we finally got it all said and done. And unfortunately the ISO did not put it to Exor. And we just for a few days and then we finally using a installer <laugh>. And,

Leo Laporte (01:14:59):
Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop you because we gotta we gotta, we gotta we gotta take a break for Chris Maror. But I just wanna say for people who are, uh, sad about the, uh, end of the radio show, this is the kind of call you're gonna hear on the podcast going forward. Uh, it's gonna be those high end callers rich on text taking over in the new year. I doubt there are gonna be a lot of people saying, well, I wanna build my own, uh, Linux

Speaker 7 (01:15:24):
Awkward

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
<laugh> Storm Os is on source for the video. If you Google Storm Os that you were talking about is, uh, on YouTube, I think it looks like a lot of fun. I will be, I'll

Speaker 7 (01:15:36):
Be is Storm Linux do com.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Storm os lenux.com. Hey Ben, I, you know what this is, this is exactly what I love about modern technology is that you can do this. You mentioned, uh, something called GitHub. This is a, a site, Microsoft now owns it, uh, for open source software where people can download the actual programming code. And if you're somebody like Ben who has some skill, you know, and some experience, you can take that and make it your own. And, and, and

Speaker 7 (01:16:09):
Actually I do have my code up there as

Leo Laporte (01:16:11):
Well. Nice. I I just feel like this is, uh, I I understand this is well beyond the, the reach of most people. The good news is there are people like Ben doing this and then making it available so you don't have to be a Ben to do, to, to use his, the bene. In fact, your whole idea was Storm Os was a beginner friendly, uh, arch, right?

Speaker 7 (01:16:33):
Yes, it was my friend. Yes. Yeah. And I tell you, I tell you, I I just love screwing around with Linux and making it easy for people to get into because I mean, I gotta tell you, the way Windows is going these days is just not,

Leo Laporte (01:16:48):
I agree. I think we're actually all learning a lesson that these giant centralized corporate or worse billionaire owned systems are not friendly to us. They're, they're designed to make money for the owners and barely. <laugh> seems to be these days barely tolerate the users. Uh, they certainly don't act in the interest of users, but the good news is we don't have to take it. Uh, thanks to people like you Ben, we can stand up and say no, we're gonna do our own thing. Thank you very much. Uh, see ya Elon. Bye. Byebye. Ben bless you. It's great to talk to you. Thank you. Have a great day. Chris Marwat photo guy coming up next. I love that. I love that. That's what's great about open source. Viv, uh, Chris Marwat, how are you today?

Chris Marquardt (01:17:49):
I am doing good. How are you?

Leo Laporte (01:17:52):
Do you have an email for me sir?

Chris Marquardt (01:17:54):
Yeah, nothing for you to do. We wanna talk about, well, open source pretty much. Uh

Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
Oh, perfect.

Chris Marquardt (01:17:59):
We'll continue our virtual AI based photography discussion. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:18:04):
Good. Oh good. I've been playing with uh, stable Diffusion. It's so much fun.

Chris Marquardt (01:18:08):
Have you playing, have you played with Dream Booth?

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
Uh, no, that's the one for Mac.

Chris Marquardt (01:18:15):
No, that's the one where you can train the model on.

Leo Laporte (01:18:18):
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, that's on my to-do list cuz we wanna make our Christmas card with stable diffusion. I

Chris Marquardt (01:18:24):
Will. I'll show you. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:18:26):
Awesome.

Chris Marquardt (01:18:27):
On on today's segment. On today segment. Can't

Leo Laporte (01:18:30):
Wait. Okay, good. We'll talk in a minute. That's fantastic. I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee before it's uh, too late <laugh>. Sure don't you take my coda chrome away. Mr. Chris Marwat is here. That music always gives me chills cuz I know we're gonna talk about one of my favorite things in the world. Photography. Chrissy is my photo sensei. It's sensei.photo teaches us all how to get better photography. Um, and he's here right now. Hi Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:19:01):
Hi Leo. Welcome thing with you.

Leo Laporte (01:19:04):
Uh, it's going great. What's up, uh, in your world?

Chris Marquardt (01:19:08):
Um, it's getting colder at snow today. Just a little bit though. Just a little. I know there's a lot of snow in some parts of the US right now. I've seen the pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Yeah. Especially if you're in the upper New York state. Oh yes. Our Buffalo listeners. You have my, my deepest, I guess they're used to it. I don't know what I should say. My deepest, uh, congratulations. Well done.

Chris Marquardt (01:19:31):
Oh, happens quickly. Um, so I do, I don't really wanna talk about photography in the traditional way today. I wanna talk about different kind of,

Leo Laporte (01:19:40):
Let me set this up, what we wanna do here, and you can help me do it. Okay? Sure. So we decide every year we do something different with our Christmas cards, uh, for the company. And this year I thought, well, all of the, all the rage now is this AI generated art. I I wanna do a Christmas card. That's us. But that the AI painted the problem is, when I first tried it is it doesn't know what we look like. It's great with celebrities cuz it has lots of celebrity faces, but it doesn't have ours. Can you help me, Chris?

Chris Marquardt (01:20:11):
Well, you remember when I tried, when I made this dolly picture of you, of the cubist painting kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:20:17):
Didn't look like me. Was

Chris Marquardt (01:20:19):
Well, it was a bit of a likeness, but there's, there's a process now that is, is actually available to everyone, um, that's called Dream Booth, which lets you train the ai, the one that pretty much is behind stable diffusion, which is open source and yeah, accessible to people as well. And lets you train a model on a bunch of pictures of yourself. So you can throw in, um, 5, 10, 20, 30 pictures of your, of yourself selfies or portraits that someone took. They have to be all different, different lighting, different settings, not all straight on some from the sign and so on. But go through your folder in, in your, in your smartphone that has your pictures in it, and then that, that'll usually work out quite well. And then you upload them to a service. Um, and it'll cost you a few bucks. Um, here's one, one service. It's called, um, let me put this on the screen. astria.ai. They will charge you for a training run. They will charge you $10 and then you get to make, I don't know, few hundred pictures of yourself. There's another one that's a bit harder to use because you have to prepare the pictures in a special way that's called, um, a eye painter. But again, it, it does the same job. It's just a bit more techy. It's

Leo Laporte (01:21:39):
So cool. Look at this picture, this guy. Now how, how many pictures of yourself do you have to upload? What do you need me do? Let

Chris Marquardt (01:21:45):
Me, let me show you. Yeah, I I uploaded 30 pictures and here are I and, and then you give it a prompt, as in, in this one, it's a concept. Our digital art manga drawing of, uh,

Leo Laporte (01:21:56):
This looks just like you actually

Chris Marquardt (01:21:57):
Not No, no, it doesn't, it doesn't that well. But if you keep going

Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Now it is you,

Chris Marquardt (01:22:04):
Then you if if you, you have to try and try and try. And then at one point you end up making pictures of yourself. Okay, I wanna do this. It's like psychedelic pictures of myself. Awesome. Um, this one is the is is is me as Marty McFly right. And

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
Stuff. Let me explain for people who are listening and aren't seeing these pictures, and we'll put links on the show notes to the pictures. It started off, it sorta looked like you had your beard, but after you trained the AI by giving it pictures of yourself, now it's perfect. And you can put yourself in anything.

Chris Marquardt (01:22:40):
You can put yourself in any setting, in any light situation. Some of them are a bit weird looking. I mean, here, that's me as a scary clown <laugh>. And these, that is me. If you look, look here, I'll switch back and forth. This is me. It's Chris. This is the scary clown. That's me.

Leo Laporte (01:22:56):
So it really is a good like this. I mean, anybody who saw this and knew you would say, Chris, you're scary that that looks, it looks like

Chris Marquardt (01:23:04):
Chris Mark or who made that picture of you who took that picture of

Leo Laporte (01:23:07):
You. Yeah, it looks like some great artist drew a cartoon of you.

Chris Marquardt (01:23:12):
Yeah. And if you, if any, it can be photos, it can be in any art style. You can add like a prompt as, as I think I, I have here, here is me as, uh, an SKS though, the man in Fort Wright. So,

Leo Laporte (01:23:26):
So the way these work is you give them these, these generative art solutions. Which one are you using? Stable diffusion or Mid

Chris Marquardt (01:23:34):
Journey? Um, well, what, what you do is, this is based on stable diffusion. What you do is, and these services hide that complexity from,

Leo Laporte (01:23:40):
So you don't even know pretty much, but you're giving them a text, but they call a text prompt accessible to you. You give them a text prompt. Now here's what you description of what you want, and then it draws something. Okay?

Chris Marquardt (01:23:50):
Here's what you do. You go to a website called lexi.art, art lexi.art, which is a collection of hundreds of thousands of pictures and the prompts that made those pictures. So you look for something that looks similar to what you want. Like in this case, I gave it a cyberpunk, uh, uh, prompt. And then you get pictures of it and you open those pictures and then you can copy the prompt for that. Created that picture or that style of picture. So you copy the prompt, I'm, I'm doing this right now. And then you

Leo Laporte (01:24:26):
Drop it. So then you don't even have to know enough to write the prompt. You just copy somebody else's prompt and apply it to you, your

Chris Marquardt (01:24:35):
Pitch. So here's, here's what you do. When, when you train one of these models, it generates a token for you, which means the, a little term that makes it, that allows it to recognize you. In my case, that is called sks Man. That's something unique that doesn't, uh, mesh with anyone. That doesn't, that's not Brad Pitt or anyone. And then you click Generate image and that'll take, I don't know, a couple minutes might be, might be done before we are done. And then you end up with, um, yeah. Stuff like this. Min and black posters and whatever you wanna do. Now,

Leo Laporte (01:25:09):
This is all done without installing software in your computer. It's all done at the Austria website. Asst

Chris Marquardt (01:25:15):
AI is is a service again that costs you about 10 bucks. Um, AI painter without an e ai painter.com costs you, I think that starts at two bucks. There are ways to do it for free, but those are, you have to be very techy.

Leo Laporte (01:25:30):
Yeah, I installed, uh, cuz we wanna do our Christmas card. So I installed Stable Diffusion and it has on my PC and it has a system to take an image and create a new image called Image to Image. But because it didn't know our faces, it really ended up very creepy and weird.

Chris Marquardt (01:25:47):
Here's the cool thing. Those trained neuro networks that you train on these systems, you can download them, put them in your own stable diffusion, and then generate as

Leo Laporte (01:25:57):
Many pictures. That's what I'm gonna do for

Chris Marquardt (01:25:58):
Free as you

Leo Laporte (01:25:59):
Like. So we took, uh, I I took a bunch of pictures of our, our staff. Now, how, what do you recommend for the base images that you should feed to these things?

Chris Marquardt (01:26:07):
What you mean the amount?

Leo Laporte (01:26:09):
Yeah. To 12 pictures. What? 30? Okay.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:12):
20, 20, 20, 30 Max 20 is fine. If they are, if they are very different, you just give it a try and see how it turns out. How

Leo Laporte (01:26:20):
Many did you do? Cause yours worked really well and did you make faces? Did you turn your head? Do you do different pictures or

Chris Marquardt (01:26:27):
I just went to my selfies folder on my iPhone and chose the one that I thought was suitable that

Leo Laporte (01:26:32):
I You chose one?

Chris Marquardt (01:26:34):
No, 30 of 'em. 30. And then I uploaded.

Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
So since you already have a bunch of your selfies, you just upload those. You need to Oh, you

Chris Marquardt (01:26:40):
Go picture, go into your selfies folder on your iPhone. You will have plenty of them.

Leo Laporte (01:26:44):
Very interesting. See, I love this idea. Now for the Christmas card, I, you know, we have 15 employees that have to get 30 images of each of them, uh, and upload it. I wonder, could I do a group? We have a bunch of group pictures. I wonder if I could upload those. Now should be the

Chris Marquardt (01:27:02):
Individuals. You'll you'll have to in these systems. There are ways, but those are very complex. Okay. In this case I would, I would take those, those, uh, individual pictures, train individual networks, create them, and then use something like Photoshop too. Awesome. Uh, to put 'em together, have someone put them into the same setting.

Leo Laporte (01:27:19):
I, you know, I send us a link to some of these, uh, images of you. Because I think when people see these and they compare them to the actual picture of you, they're gonna go, that's like some, you commissioned Ken Ru Kowski to do a portrait of you. I mean, it's really good. We now all can have Rembrandt picture portraits of ourselves hanging on the wall. Bad news, by the way, for artists, but we'll talk about that another time. Chris, mark,

Chris Marquardt (01:27:46):
That's a different story.

Leo Laporte (01:27:47):
Sensei.photo. S e n s ei photo. Thank you so much. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy. More calls right after this. Yeah, Ken Murkowski's not too happy about it.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:01):
Yeah, but you don't though, the interesting thing is that they, um, that many of the prompts that Lexi Cut art don't really go for one single artist. They combine,

Leo Laporte (01:28:12):
They put a bunch of 'em,

Chris Marquardt (01:28:13):
4, 5, 6 different artists. So you get a, you get a, you get a combination of different styles. So it's often, it's not even down to one specific artist. But it's,

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
I was thinking though of doing our Christmas card as a Renaissance painting, which would be

Chris Marquardt (01:28:26):
Hysterical. Um, let, let me, let me check. I had, I had Rembrandt here somewhere.

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
I'm sure

Chris Marquardt (01:28:31):
I could do that. Find, let me find, I

Leo Laporte (01:28:34):
Love all of these, all the profile pictures are gonna be very interesting from now. And I, so, so you could, can you use Astrid to create a checkpoint file and download it?

Chris Marquardt (01:28:44):
Yes, that's exactly what you get. You get the checkpoint, you get, you download the checkpoint right here on the top. There is a,

Leo Laporte (01:28:50):
So that's all I need is a checkpoint to download it. Okay, good.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:53):
And then, and then again, I mean, this is, I mean this is, it's wild what you can get from here. I mean, these are great. Look at these murals. Look at these murals. I that is just mind blowingly good.

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
And I could download Dream Booth, I presume, and do it locally.

Chris Marquardt (01:29:12):
Ah, yeah, it's quite involved. Is it? So, um, there is, there, there, there is a CoLab, uh, Google CoLab, uh, book.

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
What they with Dream Booth? Yeah. Collab, yeah, yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:29:23):
With a dream booth in it. So you get to, um, you get to run it on their systems. Um, you'll, you'll, you have no issue doing that. Um, they usually like 5 12, 5 12 pictures. And then, um, for some of those you'll have to crop 'em up front for the, for astri.ai does all of that for you. So you just give it pictures and click go, which, uh, makes it

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
Very cool. Pretty cool. Very cool. Thank you. Chris. Stay up on

Chris Marquardt (01:29:52):
My blue sweet shoes.

Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
Is that the color? Oh, I forgot. Thank you for reminding me. Blue is the assignment. I, we didn't even mention the photo assignment. I was someone tranced by what Chris was talking about. Every, every month we do a photo assignment with Chris Mart, where this will be our last one, four more weeks to take a picture illustrating the word, the concept, the idea of blue, whatever that means to you. Could be a color, could be a mood, could be whatever it means to you once you get an image that you like. And by the way, it doesn't have to be with a fancy camera. Uh, it could be with your, your smartphone. In fact, very often it is. But once you get a picture, you're like, upload it to flicker flicker.com, which is a photo sharing site, great photo sharing site. It's free tag. It flicker, allows you to tag photos with TG Blue for tech guy blue, TG blue, and then submit it to the tech guy group. Uh, we'll still have the tech guy group that's gonna, that's gonna continue and they still run our moderator. We'll accept your photo, put it in the pool. And then in about three or four weeks, Chris will look at those all and give us his, uh, his comments. He did send me a picture of himself painted, uh, as Rembrandt would paint him. Uh, it's kind of uncanny.

(01:31:07):
I, I, did you understand what he was talking about? I, I probably was went pretty fast. But, and maybe if you haven't noticed all of the computer generated art of late that's been appearing, uh, on the internet. You're not even aware of this. But what's happened, it started, uh, when open ai, which is a, uh, an AI group funded by Elon Musk and others, uh, to do AI research, put out, um, a program they call do E two d a l l dash E two, which could given a text, they call it a prompt, but just a, a sentence describing a picture. Draw the picture. And in the early days, it was exactly like a four year old drawing a picture wasn't very good, but this is the way of artificial intelligence. It got better and better. But the big breakthrough was when somebody, somebody released a program to the public called Stable Diffusion Dolly, uh, was limited invite only, uh, the companies running it really didn't want it to be looked too human, for instance.

(01:32:15):
So they limited what it could do. No limitations on stable diffusion. It was open source. Anybody could download it. I did put it on their computer and run it or their services that do this for you. And all of a sudden there was an explosion of computer generated art everywhere. It's all a little odd, right? A little weird. But what happened because it was put out to the public, is the evolution became exponential because millions of people were trying it. Many, many programmers trying to improve it along come new features like this Dream Booth feature ai, the way AI is works is it's trained on many, many, many images. It goes out, uh, Dolly and stable diffusion both go out and scan images on the internet, just, you know, as many as they can find and add them to the artificial learning database. That's how ML machine learning works.

(01:33:10):
You take a lot of data sets and then you can kind of project what the next point in the data set would be and the next one and the next one. And so, uh, they're trained on these many, many different images. But Dream Booth, which Chris was talking about, lets you to train it on your own images, train it on your own face. So suddenly the artificial intelligence knows what you look like and can generate new images of you based on what it knows from the training data. And it turns out you only need to give it a dozen to 30 photos of yourself. Chris just used all the selfies that he had already taken and uploaded 30 of them. Uh, and it came back. Now, now the, now the data includes you that it's trained on. And so you can ask stable diffusion or any other AI art generator.

(01:33:58):
Now, now make some paintings of me and they're uncanny. Now, one thing Chris didn't do, <laugh>, I should mention this. He didn't show any pictures of his hands, cuz for reasons I don't fully understand computer generated art, they can't do hands. So <laugh>, maybe, maybe we need to train it better on hands. I guess the hands always look a little weird, but if you just take your face, they, they're pretty, it does a good job. Does a good job. Anyway, very interesting. Very, very interesting. Uh, blue is the subject uploaded to Flicker. Uh, and Chris has put up a, a gallery of all his generated art. When you see it compared to his own picture, you'll understand how amazing this is. And he's put it up on his website. We put a link on our show notes@techguylabs.com. It's tf ttf.com/generated. Chris, all one word, TF ttf.com/generated. Chris, I know that's a little hard to remember, so we'll, we'll put it@techguylabs.com. You can remember that right? Tech guy labs.com. Derek next on the line from Seattle, Washington. Hi Derek.

Speaker 9 (01:35:11):
Hey, how are you? Hmm,

Leo Laporte (01:35:13):
I'm great. I always, I always take a sip of coffee right when somebody asks me how I'm doing. I'm great, <laugh>. Very good. How are you?

Speaker 9 (01:35:20):
Good. Uh, long time listener. First time caller. Wow. I started listening to KGO back in the early nineties and throughout tech TV and, uh, you're leaving the radio, but not the media in general. And I, this is gonna be, this is the first time I've ever call two radio, uh, stations and last time I will. So here we are.

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
Thank you. You know, I lo I grew up in radio. I started in radio in college. I love the medium, but, uh, you know, fewer and fewer people are listening. And, uh, fortunately by chance I started doing podcasts in 2004. Turns out there's a lot of podcast listeners, so I'm pretty happy doing podcasts, you know, and I'll keep doing those.

Speaker 9 (01:36:00):
Yes, exactly. Um, I have a question for you. Um, I have a, uh, Mac Mini, uh, not Mac Mini. I'm just nervous. MacBook Air, M one. Love it. I bought, I'm loving it. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, it hasn't slowed down at all. It's the best computer I've ever had. Um, but I'm having a hard time picking out a docking station for it because I live in the apartment complex and I have a lot of interference from other, uh, and so I'm trying to get, uh, to a point where I can use, uh, gig ethernet and just have some USB ports. Uh, I'm not using, I'm only gonna have one display. Um, I don't have a dual setup. Um, but

Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
You can't actually with that MacBook Air, um, you're really limited to one external display unless you jump through a lot of hoops. So as long as you're happy with that, that's good.

Speaker 9 (01:36:45):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
I, I'll tell you what I use and I'm not sure about the interference, that's an issue. I, I'm not sure you know how to solve that issue if it's so bad. Like if you live next to a radio antenna <laugh>, then you would, it would be difficult. But normal interference, household interference, you know, maybe there's a refrigerator on the other wall, you know, of the other apartment or whatever. Uh, I think a well made dock is gonna be fine. You really do want a dock with these MacBook Airs. They only have two ports. Right. And, uh, and if you wanna do anything, you know, you're either gonna get a, you're gonna live the dongle life or you're gonna get a, a dock. The one I use and recommend is pricey. Um, but, uh, I use a cow digit, uh, Thunderbolt, uh, for device. But you probably don't need that. I'm thinking you don't need that for your MacBook. Air M one Cal Digit makes excellent docs. I use the TS four, but they have all kinds of docs. I, I would not hesitate recommending, uh, their stuff. They're well made. They're, they're metal, which will help with the interference and they'll give you a variety of choices. You have Thunderbolt, do you have Thunderbolt four on the M one? I think you do.

Speaker 9 (01:38:04):
Um, it's whatever it came.

Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
Yeah. I can't remember. But, uh, uh, I think that's, uh, you know, the fastest port. And so a fa if you wanted the maximum performance, you'd, you'd want the fastest port. So that's a good one. Anchor makes one that looks exactly the same. That might be the same. Okay. The anchor docking station, uh, that's a little bit less expensive. And there's a third name, a third brand I like a lot called Plugable. So those are the three brands I'd look at. Cal Digit high priced, but probably the best quality plugable. Much less expensive. Very good anchor because you know, it looks to me like they're doing the cal digit without the cal digit name. Uh, so that I haven't tried it, but that might be a good one. It looks like it might not be a full metal case. Um, these are all hundreds of dollars though, I should warn you. Um, and that's what the problem is. Thunderbolt is expensive. You have to license it.

Speaker 9 (01:39:01):
So I do, uh, I like the window shop, so I don't mind some link wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:39:04):
Yeah. So those are the three, all three are on Amazon. Uh, they also have their own website. Um, any of those would be a, I think a must have. That's why I got it. A must have for the MacBook. Hes, cuz they just have so few ports and these will give you every port you could ever imagine. Leo Laport, speaking of ports, the tech guy calls right after this. I'm so glad you called. I know it's a little scary the first time

Speaker 9 (01:39:29):
I was, I'm, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's a pleasure to speak to. I, I remember, uh, I specifically got digital cable Oh. In, in Humboldt County to get the, the, the screensavers Oh. Day. And uh, it's been a journey and uh, my grandmother actually, um, recommended you back when I was taking apart her iMac, ramming it, I was like, what do you mean this tech guy on the radio? Like what do you mean <laugh>? Um, and so, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:39:58):
Well that's where I'm, that's what I'm gonna miss is that we get the grandmas obviously, cause it's older people who still listen to the radio and they need me more than you do, frankly. Yes. But Rich is gonna do a great job with them. He's a, he's really got a very gentle and and smart way of doing this. So I I feel like I'm leaving it in good hands. Yeah. And now I get to talk to the geeks, which I kind of prefer

Speaker 9 (01:40:20):
Anyway. Well, I'm excited. I actually, I, uh, when uh, Kim asked me what the question was, I just kind of had to pull something out of my

Leo Laporte (01:40:26):
<laugh>. Oh, you just wanted to say hi <laugh>. I

Speaker 9 (01:40:28):
Say hi. I'm actually set up a Macon server now and I'm actually, oh good. I'm calling you from my fo server that I have in my apartment. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
You're pretty tech. You know what you're doing, Derek. That's

Speaker 9 (01:40:38):
Awesome. Yeah. So I just wanted to see how

Leo Laporte (01:40:40):
It was just an yeah, just an excuse. I don't mind that I would say at least half of the callers don't really have a question. Yes. <laugh>, you, you start to recognize those, those calls <laugh>. Yeah. But I, I feel like, like that's a good opportunity for us to disseminate this information anyway. Everybody who's, you know, very few people ever call. You never called in your whole life. Most people don't, but they, but the information is useful to them, so.

Speaker 9 (01:41:04):
Exactly. It's been, it's it's been fun

Leo Laporte (01:41:06):
Much. Yeah. Oh Derek, I really appreciate it. We might be living up, uh, we might be neighbors at some point. I think, uh, if we retire, lace and I have been looking at Seattle. I love the area,

Speaker 9 (01:41:16):
So Yes, it's very beautiful. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:41:18):
Uh, do you live in town or,

Speaker 9 (01:41:20):
Uh, I live about 15 minutes north, uh, of downtown. Nice. So, um, I, yeah, so, um, just uh, do your research. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
We're saving, well we won't do, we won't move until we, uh, do air Airbnbs, you know, for a, a few years to really get to know it right now. Uh, if I could afLaporte it, I would live in Mercer Island. I think just because of the co just cuz of the trains and stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:41:41):
Or go over the Bainbridge for um, I can't remember

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
Her. Well that's where Stacy lives. Yeah. And I have family. I have family up in Whidby Island way up north. Okay. In the San Juans. Uh, I love the area. It's beautiful. Um, I'm not sure I wanna be on an island in case I have a heart attack.

Speaker 9 (01:41:57):
Exactly. No, that's what paranoid me is I was to Hawaii for the same reason. I just Yes. Uh, nope. Nope.

Leo Laporte (01:42:04):
I was getting an island fever cuz we were thinking Hawaii cuz of the climate. But then I thought, I don't want, I don't wanna be in 3000 miles in the middle of the ocean.

Speaker 9 (01:42:10):
Nope, no thank you. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
That's why Seattle's great because Seattle has great medical. We a lot of medical, great medical. Yeah. Yeah. So I just don't wanna be on an island <laugh>. I don't wanna have to be medevaced. Stacy actually Stacy and her husband pay for medevac insurance.

Speaker 9 (01:42:26):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:42:26):
Wow. For that reason. Right?

Speaker 9 (01:42:28):
Yeah, that's true. Um, sometimes if hers don't work, so

Leo Laporte (01:42:31):
Yeah. And yeah, I mean Bainbridge has a road but it's the wrong way. You have to drive all the way around. Yeah. Hey, a pleasure to meet, meet you Derek. I will. You know what? You so much. You don't have to call the radio show, but I hope you'll call in on the new podcast.

Speaker 9 (01:42:43):
Most definitely. Thank you so

Leo Laporte (01:42:44):
Much. Good, thank you. Have a great one. Bye. Uh, the Tech Guy show has a great sponsor this week. Let me tell you about, I said let me tell you about Kolide. You know, this, uh, Kolide is a great sponsor for us because, uh, I really love the vision behind it. Kolide is endpoint security. So we know we need that. Right? Especially, you know, if you've, nowadays with remote work, hybrid work, people using their phones, their laptops, they're all around. You need endpoint security. But this is endpoint security with a difference. It uses the most powerful untapped resource in it. Now hold on, it pros, you're not gonna like this End users, A lot of IT professionals see end users of the enemy, right? <laugh> the ones that were letting bad guys in your network and stuff. But, but give me a hold, listen for a sec.

(01:43:44):
I understand that when you're trying to achieve security goals, uh, whether it's for third party audit, your own compliance standards, just, you know, cuz you wanna lock things down, the conventional wisdom is to treat every device, uh, like Fort Knox, right? There are, there are people who put crazy glue in the USB ports and I believe me, I know why you do that. I understand it completely. The problem is old school device management tools like MDMs ultimately bug users. And if users are not on your side, you're gonna have a hard time. You put those, those agents on your, on your employees devices, they slow performance privacy. Forget about it, you know, and users know this. I ain't got no privacy on this device now. Uh, it turns, it admins you and then users into opponents and that's not good because then what happens? Well the users turn to shadow it just to do their jobs.

(01:44:38):
They start using their own laptops or their own phones and now you've got a real problem cuz those aren't locked down at all. There's a better way Kolide. K O L I D E instead of forcing changes on users, they don't want Kolide works with your users, it sends them security recommendations via Slack. It explains what's going on, why it's a problem, and it enlists the users into helping. So instead of becoming enemies, they're allies now Kolide will automatically notify you and your team when devices are insecure, then talk to the employees, give 'em step by hand step instructions on how to solve the problem. Something like, and you go to the Kolide website, K o l i d e.com/twi and look at some of the examples. But you know, the, I think one of the examples they give the user got their SSH public key in plain text in their download folder.

(01:45:30):
Now you and I know why that's problematic, but a user probably doesn't even know it's there. So instead of you going in and changing things or whatever, Kolide sends them a dm, it's a private message in Slack. Say, Hey, I noticed this. Let me explain what this, why there's a problem and how you can fix it and it, and it has them fix it. Now they're on your team, you know, employees, you know, wanna be secure. Uh, reaching out by a friendly Slack dm, educating about company policies lets you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security because they understand it. How and why to do it for IT. Admins you're gonna love the Kolide dashboard, lets you, one dashboard lets you monitor the security of your entire fleet. Mac, windows, Linux, doesn't matter. It's completely cross platform. You'll see it at a glance.

(01:46:21):
Things like, you know, which employees have their discs encrypted os up to date, who's using a password manager and who's not. Makes it easy to prove compliance. This is great to your customers, to your auditors and your leadership. Very simple reports. So that's Kolide user centered, cross platform endpoint security for teams that Slack. You can meet your compliance goals by putting users first. You really can visit K O L I D e.com/twi to find out out how. Follow that link. They'll hook you up with a goody bag, including a great Kolide t-shirt. I've got one of them right here. Uh, they give you stickers, all sorts of stuff. A beer coaster, <laugh>. I have the sticker on my laptop, and, uh, they have a couple of t-shirts. This is one of 'em. This is one I like. Bunch of Pinocchios with long noses, all except for one.

(01:47:14):
And next to that honest security, it's a great t-shirt. Just for, just for, just for, just for, to try and Kolide, just for activating the free trial, no credit card needed. Kol ide.com/twi. Thank you Kolide for supporting the tech guy. We really, I thank all of our sponsors, uh, who keep us on the air. Thank you. And I thank all of you Club TWI members cuz you keep us on the air too. I really, uh, really appreciate that. Uh, actually I shouldn't say it now, cuz the Club TWI members aren't seeing the ad. This has all been cut out for them. They don't get ads. If you're not a member of Club Twi, can I encourage you to join TWI tv slash club twi? It's less than a Twitter blue check. It's seven bucks a month and you get so much more. You get ad-free versions of all the shows.

(01:48:00):
Uh, you get, uh, shows we don't even put out in public, like hands on Windows with Paul Thera, hands on Mac with Micah Sergeant on titled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett, Stacy's book club, the giz. There's gonna be more. The club is so important to us to keep us going because times are tough. Um, I don't know if you've noticed this, but we <laugh> if you, if if I look, uh, you know, a few years ahead, I know that it's gonna be club twi that's gonna keep us going. So if you like what we do and you wanna support it, seven bucks a month, uh, you can give more if you want, but seven's all you need. Uh, and there's a yearly plan. It'd be a great gift for the geek in your life. Uh, and it also is, uh, it's also a, there's a corporate membership you can give. I, I just, uh, I feel like more and more nowadays we realize we have to support the things we love. Uh, I know. And if you, if you can't, don't worry. We're still gonna do all the free stuff we do. The Mastodon, the, the forums, the shows, those will continue irc. Uh, but if you can, if you can, twit TV slash club twi. Thanks so much. Now back to the tech guy.

(01:49:18):
Well, hey, hey, how are you today? Leo LaPorte here now. Caffeinated <laugh>, the tech guy. Time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography. Smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. 88. 88. Ask Leo. This is the tech show. Your questions answered. I can't make your dreams come true, but I can't answer your questions. Marcos, Waddell, Arizona, you're next. Hi, Marcos.

Speaker 10 (01:49:45):
Hey Leo. How are you? You today? I'm

Leo Laporte (01:49:47):
Wonderful. How are you?

Speaker 10 (01:49:50):
Oh, man, fantastic. I start with you when you just took over. Kfi never called you before, and now I'm here when you're gonna retire. But six days a week, not really Retirement, is it? It

Leo Laporte (01:50:01):
Isn't <laugh>. It isn't. I love what I do and Rich DER's gonna take over the show who's starting in the new year, and he's great. And he'll still be on kfi. And if you, if you, if you miss me, there'll be plenty of podcasts you can listen to. So thank you though. I appreciate it. Yeah, KFI has been great to me. 19 years. Long time. That's a long career in any business, but in radio especially, 19 years is a long time.

Speaker 10 (01:50:25):
I wish you the best man. Thank, I'm gonna keep up

Leo Laporte (01:50:27):
With you. Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Speaker 10 (01:50:30):
I don't know if Kim told you about where I'm calling

Leo Laporte (01:50:32):
From. No, it's a mystery. I don't like to know ahead of time. I like to be surprised.

Speaker 10 (01:50:35):
Okay, awesome. Um, I'm looking for retirement as well for next year.

Leo Laporte (01:50:40):
Congratulations. I'm

Speaker 10 (01:50:41):
Gonna thank you, sir. But I'm retiring my own. No, because I'm getting, you know, I I don't wanna wait until retire to, I cannot walk anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Yeah. My, my feelings. Exactly. Yeah,

Speaker 10 (01:50:51):
I know. Yeah. And I'm a, I am a PE teacher, so I don't know if you guys say, you know what, a PE teacher

Leo Laporte (01:50:58):
Stands. I know what a pe phs Ed, we used to call it back east, but it's ed. Exactly. Yeah, phys ed. And that's great. And that is a hard job, I'm sure. Oh

Speaker 10 (01:51:06):
Man. Yeah. But you're, I'm from k I did high school. I do K away and, um, everybody wants to implement STEM on that. And I tell 'em,

Leo Laporte (01:51:15):
Wait a minute, PE and stem. How do you do science and math and pH ed

Speaker 10 (01:51:21):
<laugh>? You have no idea what they do. Kitchens going with us. Some people think about besides the point.

Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
Well, I, I wish you the best in retirement. That's wonderful. What can I do to help?

Speaker 10 (01:51:31):
Okay, I'm gonna be moving out the country.

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
Okay, where you going?

Speaker 10 (01:51:36):
Uh, I can't tell you because, um, I guess, um, it starts with PS with L Oh man.

Leo Laporte (01:51:46):
I'm very good at Wordle. I should warn you, <laugh>. We have, we have other, other listeners who live in Portugal who love it because it's very afLaporteable. Oh yeah, it's in the eu.

Speaker 10 (01:51:56):
Go

Leo Laporte (01:51:56):
Ahead. And, and you get a Sheen passport and you can travel around and I think it sounds like a wonderful life.

Speaker 10 (01:52:03):
My wife is Portuguese, I'm Brazilian, and uh, we've been here for 30 something.

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Oh, well you both speak Portuguese, so gosh, that's a natural. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:52:11):
Espanol.

Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
Yeah, Espanol and Portuguese. You're set.

Speaker 10 (01:52:15):
Exactly. And a little broken English. That's where my, my girlfriend,

Leo Laporte (01:52:18):
Your English is not broken. It sounds fine to me. <laugh>.

Speaker 10 (01:52:22):
Yeah. You don't have a,

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
Do you wear a whistle when you, uh, when you work, you blow the whistle?

Speaker 10 (01:52:27):
Absolutely. <laugh>. <laugh>. What a pleasure to be a PE teacher to have no whistle. What is

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
My pleasure,

Speaker 10 (01:52:34):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:52:36):
So what can I do to help you in this move?

Speaker 10 (01:52:38):
So let me, I'm very practical. I'm gonna go straight to the point. I'm gonna tell, I wrote some stuff in here. I'm gonna just tell you what I'm thinking and I'm gonna ask you if you are my shoes, what would you do? Okay, so I have a T-Mobile. I wanna keep my phone. I'm worried about security because I have all documents that come to me, uh, from, uh, mailing and all the stuff I have. Um, these are my house, of course. I bought a Chromebook just to use up there. I listen to you, uh, with over tuning, but tuning in, I'm sorry, I'm gonna say it's not very good where it just put ads

Leo Laporte (01:53:11):
On. Hey, here's the good news is the podcasts work everywhere in the world. You can easily listen to any of our shows, uh, uh, in Portugal. Just use the podcast. You don't need to use the streaming service. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:53:22):
Okay. So I go to, uh, the twi twi,

Leo Laporte (01:53:24):
Right? Twit. And we stream the audio and video at, uh, tech guy labs.com. Yeah. twit.tv. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:53:30):
So if you are my shoes, you're gonna move. We don't wanna carry any papers. You wanna be very

Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
Secure. Here's what I would recommend. Here's what I'd recommend. Uh, you could have a copy of it. You could encrypt it and put it on a thumb drive or whatever. That's only one copy. And as you know, one copy of anything is not safe. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> I would use, and I, and I'll tell you what I do this, I would use your password manager for this. So password managers, we all know create and save passwords to log into sites. But they also, all of them have an ability to store documents and notes. They're encrypted so no one can see 'em except you. They synchronize to all your devices. So you have it on your phone. If you're crossing through customs and you don't have your passport, you can pull it up. Uh, you, you always have access to them. They, it's in effect always backed up by their servers.

(01:54:17):
And because it's good encryption, it's absolutely secure and private. So I think that's a good solution. I put my, my passports, my driver's license, my social security numbers, all that stuff that I would be tax returns that I would really be in trouble if I lost them or they were leaked to the public. I keep in my password manager. Now, tax returns probably not a good example. That's a big, but if it's a single page, the password manager no. Can take care of it. Yeah. If you're gonna do tax returns, then maybe, uh, encrypt them and put 'em on one Drive or Dropbox or iCloud, but encrypt them before you upload 'em there. And they'll be safe there. But the problem is you put 'em on any drive and you have one copy that's risky. So, so a cloud solution is a good solution for you.

Speaker 10 (01:55:01):
Okay. I had, I put that a cloud in a password manager as well. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, what about having a, I just bought a, a Chief Chromebook brand new, uh, just to use from my financial out there. Was that a good idea?

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
Yes. Great idea. You'll have internet Portugal, you probably have better internet for less money in Portugal. Um, yes I

Speaker 10 (01:55:18):
Do. I

Leo Laporte (01:55:18):
Will have it. Yep. And so, uh, the Chromebook will work just great. Uh, you, you know, the only drawback to a Chromebook, and actually Google I think is fixing this if you have a Google one account. But the only drawback is if you wanted to watch American TV in Portugal, which a lot of expats do, they use VPNs to do that. So they'll vpn, you know, back to Arizona and watch from there a Chromebook. Right? Now, you can't go out and get something like our sponsor express VPN on a Chromebook, but Google is offering a Google vpn. I'm not sure how it works for going around geographic restrictions, but that's the one thing I'd investigate. You're gonna want something that'll let you watch. Yes. Uh, international programming that you can't get in Portugal.

Speaker 10 (01:56:04):
That leads to my second question. Uh, of course I'm gonna buy a small laptop to take it with me. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So the Chromebook is only for the financial perfect. What

Leo Laporte (01:56:12):
Would you suggest? Oh yeah, that's a good secure solution.

Speaker 10 (01:56:14):
Hey, nothing, nothing like, I mean, I'm a teacher. Remember, please <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
Think of all the money you're gonna save. Actually, I take it back. Oh my God. Yeah. I take it back. Our sponsor Express Vpnn. I don't even, I didn't even know this has a Chromebook app, so nevermind. You're good.

Speaker 10 (01:56:29):
I'm not using this one. So

Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
Yeah. But yeah, I think that's smart. Keep the Chromebook just for the, for the banking so that it's absolutely secure.

Speaker 10 (01:56:38):
So what, uh, kind of, uh, laptop you suggest something simple. I'm not very geeky, but I could go.

Leo Laporte (01:56:44):
I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I think a Chromebook's great. You might look at an iPad. They have one for 329 bucks. Uh, a 3 29 buck iPad's gonna be better than any Windows or Mac. Well, they can't even get a Mac laptop for that press. But any Windows laptop at three, 300 bucks is not gonna be any good. You'd need to spend at least 500 bucks for a Windows laptop. And I'd say probably more. Okay. Max started a thousand bucks. I would look at an iPad.

Speaker 10 (01:57:11):
Okay. Uh, well, you know what, I'm retired, but my wife wants, keeps teaching online, so. Oh, she a laptop. Good

Leo Laporte (01:57:18):
For her. Yeah. Uh, okay. So I like Dell, HP, Lenovo.

Speaker 10 (01:57:24):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:57:24):
Yeah. If you say what are your top three? Those are my top three.

Speaker 10 (01:57:28):
That would be fantastic. That's what I'm gonna be looking for. And, uh, one more thing. Um, of course, every time you log in something you have, uh, two, uh, uh, two-factor case,

Leo Laporte (01:57:38):
Right? Yes. Absolutely.

Speaker 10 (01:57:39):
What I gonna, where I gonna have problem receiving that? Nope.

Leo Laporte (01:57:42):
Just don't do it on the phone. Do it, uh, on an authenticator app on your phone. Don't do it by text message. That's not safe.

Speaker 10 (01:57:49):
How would that work? So I need to download that

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
On app. Yeah. Uh, I use AY A U T H Y. Yeah, there's Google Authenticator, there's Microsoft Authenticator. Any of those work fine. And they're much more secure than text messaging. I see.

Speaker 10 (01:58:04):
What about the, what, what is it? UBI key.

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
UBI Key. UBI key. That's, now we're getting really fancy. UBI key doesn't store anything, but it does unlock things. That's a really better way to do two fa but you're almost always gonna have an authenticator in case you lose your UBI key. But UBI key is a great hardware unlock. I keep one on my key chain. I'm holding it up right now, like you could see it. Okay. I keep one on my key chain. I use that for the most secure stuff. I use a YubiKey like my Twitter account.

Speaker 10 (01:58:37):
Okay. So would you suggest that?

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
Uh, not necessarily. No. I, okay. I think you're fine. And it's really useful for somebody, uh, who might be attacked. And because I am supposedly the tech guy on the radio, I always worry about extra security. You're probably fine with it. Just use Athie. Don't use SMS text messages, use

Speaker 10 (01:59:00):
Auie. Okay. Auie, anything else? Think about yourself.

Leo Laporte (01:59:03):
Yes. One other thing now, because lower your whistle and tell me to drop and give you 20.

Speaker 10 (01:59:08):
Oh twenty's too little.

Leo Laporte (01:59:09):
Whoa. How many should I do?

Speaker 10 (01:59:12):
Oh, depends. How old are you? You,

Leo Laporte (01:59:14):
I'm old man. I'll do, I'll do, I'll do, I'll do, uh, I'll do radio host pushups. How about that? Thank you. Thank you, Marcus. Have a great trip.

Speaker 10 (01:59:23):
I appreciate

Leo Laporte (01:59:24):
Leo LeFort, the tech I 2 3 88 88. Ask Leo 57, 58. Give us a ring. More of your calls coming up. 99, 100.

Speaker 10 (01:59:36):
Let me whistle. Leo, thank you so much.

Leo Laporte (01:59:41):
Thank you Marcos. I think you're gonna have a great time. Congratulations.

Speaker 10 (01:59:45):
Yeah. What?

Leo Laporte (01:59:47):
Take care. Bye-Bye Artemis. Now do you lose the, uh, the chair? Yeah, I lost the chair. <laugh>. Damn. But on the other hand, I'm thrilled. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Oh man, I, I, I started using a new term. I call myself a book ender now cuz as I was there for Apollo four, I was, I was there for Apollo eight and now I've seen Artis. Did you see the launch? Yeah. You was there person. No, no, no. Oh no. I mean I was there as a, oh, you were alive on the planet. You and I are the same age within a couple of months. So I was on the planet watching, Hey, we're lucky. That's pretty cool. I had a reporter there, a writer, and I had two photographers, all worked great. Had to, had to yank the magazine on a layout to update the cover.

(02:00:37):
Cause I didn't think it was gonna go this soon. The only sad thing is I know I'm cynic, what can I tell you? You are. I was the same though. I thought they're never getting this thing off the, the launchpad. But I was wrong and I'm glad I was wrong. The photographers put out, uh, you know, the robotic cameras down range to get the automatic snap stuff. For some reason they all missed the rocket actually in the frame and got the, the pillar of flame shot. So I have to get that somewhere else. But hard working guys. I mean, I can't complain. Yeah. Pay 'em. I just set 'em out there. But, um, hey, you know, I had a gag worked up that was gonna do a visual gag of big cutout teardrops on both eyes yesterday. Aww. But my wouldn't work <laugh>, so I thought, oh, well instead of that I can ask about my printer, but I won't <laugh> God, I'll kill you.

(02:01:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I still have my t-shirt from you, your t-shirts, he said, and then I thought, Hey, can I dig out my HP 500 C black and white only and put that on my, my desk or something. But I have no idea. I really, uh, it was really my plan. And I, I know this is cruel, but it was really my plan not to say anything until December 18th. Yeah. Uh, the last segment of the last show. I was just gonna say, Hey, by the way is my last show. Bye. But, uh, <laugh>, cuz I, the worst thing, and it's already starting to happen is, you know, people going, oh yeah, we're gonna miss you. What's happening? And I, you know, it's nice though. Well, I mean, how many, it's nice for me. Computer, I probably have about, I don't need, I don't need that kind of affirmation and I think it makes it pretty bad radio show. So. Really? Yeah. Can you teach me how not to, I'm not a fan of long. Goodbye. Yeah, I just wanna, just wanna get out of there. Um, we, you know, we, we have let show hosts go on and on and on for weeks <laugh>, and it's always been a mistake. I'm just gonna say that. All right. Are you about how I'm gonna miss you guys and all? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will talk to you in 10. Okay, sir.

(02:02:38):
She's, you know, do you think that she was thinking Ticketmaster when she wrote this song? Leo Laport the tech, I, what a mess. But everybody who's ever used Ticketmaster to buy tickets to a concert knows what a horrible system that is. We all hate it. And then after you buy, you know, Taylor Swift tickets, $300. Okay. Oh, by the way, <laugh>, it's gonna cost you $50 each service fee. What did you do, <laugh>? What do you It's $50. Uh, uh, 88. 88. Uh, ask Leo if you, if you don't know what I'm talking about, ask your kids. I'll tell you about the whole Taylor Swift Ticketmaster saga. Vic is on the line from Vista, California. Hi Vic.

Speaker 9 (02:03:23):
Hi Leo. Well, we are gonna miss you so it can accept the adulation. Thank you. But you're gonna have your podcast and

Leo Laporte (02:03:29):
I'm not going anywhere. Yeah. It's just, I'm not, it's just the radio. Maybe

Speaker 9 (02:03:32):
You can, maybe you can fill in from time to time when the host leaves, you know, if

Leo Laporte (02:03:37):
Rich, if Rich asked me to fill in, I will gladly do that. Absolutely.

Speaker 9 (02:03:41):
That would be great. Yeah. And then you could have your brunches the other Saturday

Leo Laporte (02:03:44):
<laugh>. Yeah. How many brunches does one guy need? Really? Oh

Speaker 9 (02:03:47):
Man, you've missed a lot.

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
<laugh>. 19 years of brunches. <laugh>.

Speaker 9 (02:03:51):
It would be nice to hear you from month, once a month or once every two months.

Leo Laporte (02:03:55):
Oh, I, I'd never even thought of that. That's a, that's a good point. Yeah. Ask him. I'll make, I'll make myself available. You bet.

Speaker 9 (02:04:01):
Yeah. Okay. You've already covered Twitter, but I agree with you. It's become even more of a

Leo Laporte (02:04:06):
Cesspool. It's gotten worse and worse. And I'm not talking about, uh, president Trump's account coming back. It has nothing to do with that. It's just that it's the people who are staying are people who even more than usual love the chaos. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:04:21):
And, and they've lost more of the ad revenue CBS pulled out. And so he's probably in worse financial position now because all the big advertisers are just pulling away.

Leo Laporte (02:04:31):
So it really makes you wonder what was, what was the plan? I <laugh> I don't know. What was the plan? Plan,

Speaker 9 (02:04:38):
Yeah. But anyway, okay. My main, uh, comments were on cryptocurrency. I don't think you've covered that. Uh, there's a lot of talk now among the politicians and the industry about regulation, but I think what they're trying to do is get government bailouts. And I would be against any

Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
Oh, I agree with you.

Speaker 9 (02:04:59):
It's, it's a money pit and it's,

Leo Laporte (02:05:01):
I never thought of that. Yeah, but you're right. I mean, uh, they look at what happened, uh, in 2008 and all the, you know, financial services companies that were quote, too big to fail that got government money. And, uh, and most of that went to the paychecks of the executives.

Speaker 9 (02:05:18):
And what'll happen is these people that they'll say, oh, the government will back us up so they'll be more inclined to put, keep money flowing into it and speculating. And then if it does crash, we're supposed to pick up the bill. Yeah. But a lot of the politicians have been, uh, getting donations from the crypto industry, the private crypto industry. And, uh, I think that's part of the motivation.

Leo Laporte (02:05:41):
Yeah. Sam of the broker, Sam, Sam, Bankman Fried, who was of course is the poster boy poster child now having gone from being worth 92 billion to zero in about a minute, uh, he was a big donor to the Democratic party, although, I have to say, he also donated to Republicans, anybody in, in a business like that's gonna donate to whoever they think is gonna be in power, because they want, you know, they want their ear. And unfortunately that's the political system in this country, is that you buy their ear with money. Uh, and I'm, I'm sorry to say that cuz I think that doesn't work very well. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:06:13):
But I think that's the motivation. But let me get just one final point. I think there is a future for blockchain currencies in the government sector. The Federal Reserve at some point may want to supplement or replace cash, uh, paper money with crypto. But it has to be reg, you know, within the government sphere, these private, uh, cryptocurrencies are, uh, a playground for bad actors, I think. And I don't think the government should get involved at all. There are, uh, criminal, uh, possibilities. If something goes wrong, there's liability.

Leo Laporte (02:06:49):
I I'm a hundred percent behind you. It'd be like bailing out Bernie Madoff.

Speaker 9 (02:06:53):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
It would be, it would be insane. And I, I don't think anybody's proposing that. I do think the government would like to, and probably now in hindsight, wishes it had regulate crypto. Like it regulates all securities. Right. Because FTX wouldn't have collapsed if it had been regulated and prevented from investing. It's, it's, it's users' money. Cuz that's what they did. They had two branches, ftx, which had its own cryptocurrency, and then they had Alameda Research, which was a trader. And it turns out he was taking money, depositors money. Your money and my money and giving it to Alameda to make speculative trades. When those trades failed, that money disappeared. People wanted their money back suddenly crash. And that's

Speaker 9 (02:07:38):
Where the cri the criminal codes come into place. And, and if he was doing that,

Leo Laporte (02:07:42):
He should go to jail. I think so. But, but good, good reg, good securities regulations would've also made it impossible from from day one. Right. He was lobbying for that. But you're right. He may have had an ulterior motive. Um, the real interesting thing will be, does this, you know, adding to all of the existing crypto crashes, does this turn people against the whole notion of cryptocurrencies? And is that a bad thing? And I agree with you. I think governments are gonna, there's gonna be a digital dollar at some point. Uh, but,

Speaker 9 (02:08:13):
But here's the thing. If there is even what a limited regulation, people may feel more safe in putting their money into it, and they shouldn't feel that

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Way. No. It's still speculative,

Speaker 9 (02:08:25):
You know, so, okay, well, great show. Enjoy your lunches or brunches, whatever, <laugh>. And don't be a stranger. Come back and host the show for

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
I love that idea. Yeah. Yeah. You'll be one of those. I'll be like, Frank Sinatra retiring. I I'll be calling, I'll be calling Rich saying, Hey Rich, it's Leo. I just want to talk to you about something. <laugh>

Speaker 9 (02:08:43):
You remember Tom Sawyer, you've read Tom Sawyer Absolutely. To, uh, Huck. And, uh, Tom went to their own funeral and they heard all the people saying how great they were. And yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:08:52):
Thanks for inviting me to my own funeral. I appreciate it, Vic.

Speaker 9 (02:08:56):
No, no, no. Your own, uh, departure. But I mean, you're hearing the love that people have.

Leo Laporte (02:09:01):
I know. And I, you know, I, I've always appreciate that and I, and I, and I welcome it and, uh, and thank you for it. And as Mark Twain said, the rumors of mind to mind are greatly exaggerated.

Speaker 9 (02:09:14):
Exactly. Okay. Enjoy your, uh, your leisure time.

Leo Laporte (02:09:17):
Ok, Bob, I'll, I'll raise a mimosa to you, Vic. Yeah. <laugh>. I'll have an ExpendIt in your, in your honor. 88. 88. Ask Leah. We're gonna talk space just a little bit. Boy, this is exciting. Artemis, uh, successfully launched this week in a beautiful, uh, night launch. And we are back on our way to the moon. But just what does that mean? Rod Pyle, who is the editor in chief of Ad Astra Magazine from the National Space Society, author of many Space Books, hosts of this week in space, will join us in just a little bit to talk about the moon stay here.

(02:10:09):
Hey everybody, it's Leo LaPorte, the, uh, founder and host of many of the, uh, TWIT podcasts. I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. Uh, our mission statement at twit, we're dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. That's our audience. And you, I guess, since you're listening, by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. To do that, we also create partnerships with trusted brands and make important introductions between them and our audience. It's how we finance our podcasts, but it's also, and our audience tells us this all the time. A part of the service we offer, it's a valued bit of information for our audience members. They wanna know about great brands like yours. So can we help you by introducing you to our highly qualified audience?

(02:11:07):
And by you get a lot with advertising on the TWI podcasts. Partnering with TWI means you're gonna get, if I may say so humbly the gold standard in podcast advertising. And we throw in a lot of valuable services. You get a full service continuity team supporting everything from copywriting to graphic design. I don't think anybody else does this or does this as well as we do. You get ads that are embedded in our content that are unique every time I read them, our hosts read them. We always overdeliver on impressions and frankly, we're here to talk about your product. So we really give our listeners a great introduction to what you offer. We've got onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. We give you a lot of reporting so you know who saw your advertisement. You'll even know how many responded by going to your website.

(02:12:00):
We'll also give you courtesy commercials that you can share across social media and landing pages. We think these are really valuable people like me and our other hosts talking about your products sincerely, uh, and informationally, those are incredibly valuable. You also get other free goodies mentions in our weekly newsletter that's sent out to thousands of fans. We give bonus ads, uh, to people who buy a significant amount of advertising. You'll get social media promotion too. But let me tell you, we are looking for an advertising partner that's gonna be with us long term. Visit TWI tv slash advertise, check out our partner testimonials. Tim Broom, founder of it Pro tv. They started it pro TV in 2013, immediately started advertising with us and grew that company to a really amazing success. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years.

(02:12:55):
And they say, and I'll quote Tim, we would not be where we are today without the TWI network. That's just one example. Mark McCrery, who's the CEO of Authentic, uh, he was actually, uh, one of the first people to buy ads on our network. He's been with us for 16 years. He said, and I'm quoting, the feedback from many advertisers over those 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm proud to say that the ads we do over deliver. They work really well because they're honest. They have integrity. Our audience trusts us and we say, this is a great product. They believe it, they listen. Our listeners are highly intelligent. They're heavily engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's partly because we only work with high integrity partners that we have thoroughly and personally vetted.

(02:13:51):
I approve every single advertiser on the network. If you're ready to elevate your brand and you've got a great product, I want you to reach out to us, advertise@twit.tv. So I want you to break out of the advertising norm, grow your brand with host Red authentic Ads on twi.tv. Visit twit.tv/advertise for more details, or email us advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign. Now. It's our rocket man. Mr. Rod Pile joins us every week to talk about space he should know. He's the host along with Terry Malik of space.com of our this weekend space podcast. He also is the auth, the editor in chief of the, uh, at Astra magazine@spacedots.org, the author of many fine books about space You live in space rod pile. We all do. We just happen to be standing on a planet that's moving <laugh>. So yes, as you and I discussed off air, I, uh, you know, I wasn't as, you know, we've been having this discussion for, for months and I thought, eh, Artemis is gonna launch in 2023.

(02:15:03):
I'll, I'll put the, the last issue of ad Astro in 2022 in the layout. And no sooner do I get the first proof than the launch happens. Don't get me wrong. It was spectacular. I stayed home, had a glass of bourbon that waited until last second until it got off the ground. And I thought, okay, this is great. You know, some Artemis fast trans quarterback to 1968. Yeah. The most powerful rocket ever, uh, used. Yes. By about 1,000,003 pounds. Yeah. Uh, thrust the, so a lot of thrust, why is it, is it more powerful than the rockets than the we sent to the moon last time? Yeah. So the Saturn five was about 7.5 million pounds and it used less advanced fuels. It used kerosene liquid oxygen instead of liquid hydrogen in the lower stage. But an Artemis is about, I think eight point, uh, 7 million pounds, 8.5, 8.5 million pound to thrust.

(02:15:53):
But it can't carry as much mass to lunar orbit. Why might that be you? My As why doesn't make any sense. God. It's got this really wimpy upper stage called the interim cryogenic upper stage or something. I'm not getting it right. I p s interim cryogenic propulsion stage. And it's got instead of the, you know, and the whole rocket's very different than the Saturn five. It's, it's got this, this huge core stage and these enormous solid boosters doesn't have the kind of second stage the Saturn did that had the S four B stage. Saturn's upper stage was over 200 pounds, 200,000 pounds with rust. This one's is about 25,000 pounds. That's a lot. This is kind of a weird Yeah, it was kind of a Oh, we're we're outta time and money years ago. Let's just do this as an interim and then we will, we'll build a bigger one, uh, for the block one b Saturn, uh, excuse me.

(02:16:48):
So when we actually go to the moon, will we use a better second stage? Uh, well, for the first couple of journeys we're gonna use this one. And I mean, we are going to the moon, right? In fact, it's, it arrives at the moon tomorrow, right? Yeah. Tomorrow morning at, uh, 7 44 Eastern, 4 44 Pacific. Uh, so there's no humans on this. There's just a stuff Snoopy doll, which floats free, which is really cool, by the way. Of course we have a L E X A inside there. Yeah. That's just because Amazon astronauts have a bunch of money. Well, yeah, but you know, <laugh>, when you got a $40 billion system you've been working on for between 10 and 20 years, depending on how you parse it, you, you need every nickel you can get, right? Yeah. That was prior to Amazon announcing this week that it was gonna lay off half of the uh, A L E X A team.

(02:17:36):
Yeah. Anyway, I am on a website That's pretty cool. This is the Artemis one website from NASA that lets you kind of play with it, right? Yeah. So you can actually go and interact with a little bit and choose your view. And, uh, oh, there you go. <laugh> tried to reconnect, try. We've lost our signal. I hope it's nothing serious. But this is a picture there behind it is, is that the sun? Yep. And then you can turn it around and you can see Moon will be around the other way. <laugh>, it's, it's actually is that, that looks like the u uh, but I can't tell. And then their moon, that's how I looked at it. It was based the other way. Well, <laugh> and we lost ourselves. If you refresh it, it should come up with, with the moon. Okay. And then, uh, but you can, yeah, you can go look at the trajectory.

(02:18:22):
You can do all kinds, of course, people listening to the radio art seeing this, but there's this cool website. Give us the address so they could play with it. Like I, right. It's at nasa.gov/specials/track Artemis all one word. Wow. Now, you know, NASA please, you know, give us a shorter URL so that we can say it on the radio, but that's okay. You know, but it's very worth checking out. And it, it gives you all the dynamics. Now you see that weird lunar orbit, right? Yeah. So this is, uh, called a distant retrograde orbit. And they, they've been talking up, they being NASA have been talking up. Well, it's stable. It doesn't require as much energy to reach or maintain and all that. But you know, part of that discussion is they don't have the delta V or the thrust to get to and stay in a low lu orbit, at least on this flight.

(02:19:08):
Okay. So at any rate, um, it does this weird kind of, that's what's special about Monday morning. It'll be a pass about 80 miles over the surface, lickety split, and then it goes up into this really high weird looping orbit that goes as high as 40,000 miles. Was this the orbit that they use if there were people on board to land on the moon? Uh, no. This is cause you wanna have, you wanna be nearby, you know? Yeah. And, and don't forget, you know, that orbit is, they're, they're gonna either link up directly with, uh, SpaceX's lunar lander or with the, the gateway, depending on when that gets built. Probably for the first flight, just directly dock with the lunar land and then go down on that modified star ship down to the surface. All there's a lot of dancing left to do. This is like, uh, Apollo eight, right?

(02:19:53):
The, the preliminary visits to the moon, Apollo eight was manned. Uh, yeah. And, and actually Artemis two is the fly by the moon with a crew. So that's more, that's Apollo Hollow eight even. Okay. Okay. But they're not going into orbit, they're just slinging by us. So it feels kind of like, well come on. You know? Well if you get all the way there least get us up to 1968. But yeah, I mean it's, there's a lot of cool stuff happening on this. Well, that's a good question. Why are we doing this? We already did it. Do we need to do it again? Yes. Okay. Cause I want to partly that's cuz we wanna go to Mars and this is Yeah, this is the proving ground. So this lets us test out technology. We haven't done this for a really long time. We haven't left earth orbit with people for a really long time.

(02:20:35):
Plus more than that. Um, aren't they thinking to build a base on the moon? So that would be Yeah. Part of a martian next stage. So you got, you got this whole evolutionary workup. So you've got first these, these early Artemis flights. Then the lunar gateway goes in as part of Artemis four, we think probably 20 24, 20 25. And that's the orbiting lunar space station. And that's in this weird thing called a ha orbit that's going north to south actually over the poles. So now you've got access to the south pole, which is where we want to build this base cuz that's where the resources are and there's other instinct things about it. And as you point out, that also lets you test the technology and evolve systems for going into Mars. Wow. And maybe if we invest properly and private industry really steps up to the plate, maybe start using resources on the moon to create fuel and even components for the Mars bound rocket if we do it right.

(02:21:31):
That makes sense. It's kinda stepping stone to Mars. Yeah. When will we put human feet on the moon? Well, Leo, that's an interesting question. Uh, the date is still 2025. It was 2024. It got slid to 25. Seems a little soon to me. I mean it's a little soft. Yeah. I'm not rocket scientist, but, oh, you're close. Plus the nice thing is 27. I'm saying 2027. It might even be, thank you for your chair. 27. You can have my chair. I'd say very uncomfortable. So 20, 27. And it would, and we are thinking a man, a woman maybe, and a person of color mm-hmm. <affirmative> in addition, which would be nice, you know, kind of little diversity on the moon. Yeah. And, and, and women, you know, women on average have less mass than men and the same brain power. Some women I know would say superior, but at least the same brain power.

(02:22:24):
So we should send women. So it makes sense, right? Yeah. Because you get more for your, more bang for your buck. Yeah. But of course we didn't do that in the space. We didn't think of it that way. So by the way, on, on Monday morning, and I think you and I should do that live at 4 45 in the morning, but I'll bet you don't agree, <laugh>, he spits his coffee <laugh>, there's going to be views from many of the 24 external cameras they have. So this fly, they put really good cameras on this. That's the biggest change since 1969. We've got great imaging devices up there already. We've seen a beautiful picture of earth rise. Yeah. The seventies. Beautiful. When you compare to it, Apollo, you know, I think a lot of younger people don't realize the only camera, they had two tube camera systems. They had the TV camera that they used in the capsule and then on the lunar surface, two different ones.

(02:23:13):
And then all the rest of it was 16 millimeter film. Yeah. That to be returned and process. Now imagine being the guy at the processing lab, they hand you this real, that a can saying, okay, this just came back from the moon, don't mess it up. So when do the images start coming back? Uh, four 40, uh, our time. What day I not get before Monday morning. Monday morning. I'll look for Monday morning. You enjoy. That's spaceman rod pile this week in space@twit.tv slash I'm gonna call you at four. No, well, no. So blow that whistle. All the more pushups. And by the way, two things when I, when I said that chair, I meant your, your cling on. I You don't want, you don't the studio. You don't want this chair. Not that one. No. The cling on chair. That is the worst, most uncomfortable chair that riveted chair you've got.

(02:24:06):
You don't get that Dr. Evil chair. That's a, that is a, uh, that's going to the Smithsonian buddy. A priceless classic. Yes. With you in it. Yeah. And I have to say, when your coach called in it, maybe reflect on horrible moments in junior high and high school, Jim, when we were kids. Was it, why was it that every coach you had was a former drill sergeant and acted like it? Oh God. It wasn't just get down and give it 20 is like getting in your face and screaming and then they'd hit you in the head with a book or smack their whistle on your inside. Your Did you, or you might have been, you're a little younger than me, you might not have had experienced this. Did you guys play? Oh, we were both born in 1956. Oh, we're the same age. Yeah. I thought you were younger.

(02:24:47):
You look so young. I was born Do you dye your hair <laugh>? No. You look so young anyway. Yeah. But but look here. Here look. Look at the skin around the eye. No, I don't wanna look at that. Thank you. Please. <laugh>. Anyway, we broken, used to play dodge ball and there was always one kid who was threw a stinger. Right, right. And you'd always, it'd always be for some reason, you know, I'm the last guy on my team, so there's one person across the line and Dwight who threw the worst dingers, you remember his name? Oh, I hated dwi. Oh my god. Somewhere Dwight is is cringing right now. And you go Yeah. Now. So if if he, if Dwight was young now, he'd be the guy that would uh, would freeze the paint balls before putting in his paintball gun. Yeah, he was So it's like hitting you with a ball bearing, right?

(02:25:37):
Yeah. He was the sadist <laugh>. So I don't know about you. I was always the last guy chosen for any team. Oh. With good reason. My you. Oh absolutely. Yeah. But it was so embarrassing. And then, you know, trying to play football without understanding how it worked. An and I talk about this all the time when we have our Tuesday link up call before we do the Friday show, cuz you know, he'll start saying something about football and I'm, look, I know it's a little skinny brown one. That's as far as it goes. When my kid was playing football, I had to get football for dummies to be a waterand. We call it, uh, call it hand egg. I have football for dummies actually. <laugh>. Yes. As a matter of fact, I have that when I first, when Lisa and I first got together, she's a, you know, massive, a serious football fan.

(02:26:21):
And I bought a whole bunch of books including football for times. A good husband. I tried to figure out how this works, but when I was a kid, I used to play, I'll find that picture of me in pads I used to play, not not in school, but just with my friends, like when I was nine. Yeah. Uh, we'd play pickup and I got the Frank GifLaporte playbook and there was only five of us. You really couldn't, you couldn't run any patterns or anything. Right. But it was, I loved it. And that's the thing. It was a great game. But then it got, so Henry played, uh, pop Warner. Oh, intense. That whole year. I was so, I mean, you know, the quarterback in practice think about fib and had a case case cast up to his hip and I was just like terrified he survived it.

(02:27:06):
Uh uh. But we only did one year, thank God. <laugh>. We talk about scary drill sergeant, uh, coaches. Who, oh man. All the kids were, my son was pretty serious. Uh, Catholic school. Yeah, same thing. Catholic. They take it seriously, you know, in our town. They were serious about this. Oh, here too. Had helicopter flyovers and all. Oh yeah. Cardinal Newman up here. Very, they're the football power. Yeah. Well, not now that aunts at Rancho Kata, they own the world. I think they beat Newman like 47 and nothing. Is he coaching there? No, but his son is like the star. He got seven touchdowns. He got all the touchdowns in the 49 and nothing. Victory. Oh my God. Fatherly pride. Could he even fit through the doorway? He came to work three rushing. Yeah. All right. Gotta go see you Rod. Know what that means cuz you have the book. See ya. Bye. Yeah, I got the, I got the book. <laugh>,

(02:28:08):
Thank you for letting me be your tech guy this week. I really appreciate it. Thanks to Professor Laura, our musical director. She's the best, the best in the biz. Uh, thanks to Kim, Kim Shaffer. Nobody answers phones like our phone. Angel Kim Shaffer. Thanks. Of course. Most of all, to those of you who listen to the show and call in, couldn't do it without you. I really appreciate it. And I will be here next week. Don't worry, I'm gonna be here next week. We'll do more talk more tech. Uh, I, it's gonna be the week after Thanksgiving, the day after Black Friday. I, I, I've been remiss haven't I should have been giving you all these great Black Friday deals and stuff, except these days, black Fridays, all months continues on and on and on. Uh, but you know what? We'll get Rich. You know, you knows good at this Rich de Merle's.

(02:28:54):
Great at this. We'll get Rich on <laugh>. He does it on K t a in Los Angeles on his tv, uh, bits. And, uh, we will get him, um, uh, to give you some holiday gift ideas. How about that? Next couple of weeks. Uh, I think he's traveling for Thanksgiving, but we'll try to get him on, on, uh, on, uh, next week. And then if not, we'll get him on the week after 88. 88 <inaudible> time for a couple more calls here. Uh, reminder though, uh, real quick before I go the, uh, to the calls, uh, the website, it's important to keep track of that Tech guy labs.com, lots of links there. Stuff we talked about on the show. We put audio from the show and video up there, a transcript as well. And that's free, easy to access Tech guy labs.com. This is episode 1946 and there is at least audio for every one of those 1,946 shows. We didn't start doing audio until I think the second century <laugh> ad. So, uh, we have audio for the first few hundred shows and then, uh, video after that, Mark's on the line from Los Angeles. Our next caller. Hi Mark.

(02:29:55):
I think you're muted. Mark unmute. I hear that you hear that. Hum.

Speaker 9 (02:30:01):
How about now?

Leo Laporte (02:30:01):
How about now? Yeah, baby

Speaker 9 (02:30:04):
<laugh>. Okay, I'm calling because, uh, I need to get a new laptop. Okay. And I would like to get a laptop that I can edit some 4K video.

Leo Laporte (02:30:14):
Oh, 4K is the hard part. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 9 (02:30:17):
And I, I, I don't know if what kind of specs I should be looking at. Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (02:30:25):
If I could, I would recommend, strongly recommend a Macintosh for this. But are you, are you comfortable with Mac?

Speaker 9 (02:30:32):
I am, but I just hate to pay extra for something that I don't know. When are they gonna come out with the next one? Is it gonna be next year and then Well, that's

Leo Laporte (02:30:40):
True of everything <laugh> all computers get updated yearly. Yeah. Um, I'll tell you why. I think once you get to things like 4K editing, the Mac is not more expensive. In order to do 4K editing on a laptop, you're gonna need a, a graphics processing card, probably a gpu, uh, laptop graphics processors are expensive, hot and, uh, and not as good as the desktop cars. But if you want to edit high resolution video on a laptop, you're gonna need some horsepower. By that time, you're spending a couple of thousand dollars anyway,

Speaker 9 (02:31:15):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:31:16):
You could do what you wanna do with a thousand dollars or let's say $1,200, uh, MacBook Air, because Apple has built into, uh, its new microprocessor, the M one or M two microprocessor video capabilities. They have a separate chip for video for encoding and decoding video. So it's even better than a graphics processor card. They do have graphics processing capability, but the, the, the decoder and en coder is really very efficient and very good. So I would look at, uh, a MacBook. Do you want, is thin and light important or no?

Speaker 9 (02:31:56):
Say that again. The

Leo Laporte (02:31:57):
What? Thin and light. Do you want it to be a thin little thing or do you care?

Speaker 9 (02:32:01):
No, that's, that's not really important.

Leo Laporte (02:32:03):
Okay. So the advantage of the Mac is thin and light and extremely long battery life, plus dedicated video and coding and decoding hardware. That would be very, and and of course it comes with iMovie, which is an excellent video editing program. So you don't need to buy one. However, if you want to go to video, uh, on a, on a Windows machine, there are plenty of good choices out there. You'll have to buy a program. I'd probably go out and get Adobe Premier Elements, uh, about a hundred bucks. And you're gonna wanna make sure that you get, uh, a lot of Ram minimum 32 gigs of ram. Okay? And you're gonna want a graphics processor either from AMD or Invidia. And specifically you're gonna really wanna look at the specs and make sure it can handle 4k, uh, video because that is a very challenging thing.

(02:32:54):
The good news is, you know, when we first, my friend Alex Lindsay, uh, when we started the Macintosh podcast, we do Mac Break Weekly, back in 2005, went out and bought a very expensive camera from Lucas, the camera. They used to do the model shoot shots in Star Wars. It was a 10 adp, it was an HD camera. And we shot the first episodes in hd. It was so hard to edit that it took him weeks because he couldn't, at desktops high end, couldn't get enough power to edit in real time. And then the resulting video, we put it out, but no one could watch it cuz no laptop in the year 2005 could play back fork, uh, not even 4k HD 10 80 p video, half that resolution at any reasonable speed, it would just drop frames. So we've come a long way in 15 years now 4k and you even see eight K, that's a lot of bits you're pushing.

(02:33:53):
So you really want something that can handle all of that. Often you'll be going and getting something, uh, like a gaming laptop, like the Lenovo Legion laptops because the same hardware that makes gaming possible makes video editing possible. So I would look at Lenovo Legion Series. That's a good choice. Okay? They call 'em gaming laptops, but really they're just laptops with excellent graphics. Uh, 32 gigs of ram, you're gonna get an Intel processor. The new Intel 13th generation processors are not yet out in laptops, but they will in a couple of months come out for laptops and will be probably better in terms of efficiency. Otherwise, you're gonna get probably an I nine, 11th or 12th generation and that's gonna give you the speed you want. Plus, uh, you know, Nvidia, uh, graphics card, uh, you know, the laptop cards are, you know, gonna give you the best that they, they can. They, there's limits in what they can do in that hot confined space of a laptop.

Speaker 9 (02:34:52):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:34:53):
Fork's doable though. No problem.

Speaker 9 (02:34:55):
What I had read online, and you know, online, everybody's got their opinion, but, uh, it's what I had read is that those gaming laptops, the video cards are good for video gaming that has, because it's good with 3D and with, with video you don't use that, that technology cuz it's not

Leo Laporte (02:35:18):
Three. Yeah, no, you don't use that technology, but you will use a gpu. I'm looking at laptop magazine's, best laptops for video editing. For instance, they recommend a Dell X PS 15 O led, which actually I'm sitting right behind right now. I have a little bit more recent one that has a Invidia GForce RTX 30 50 TI card. That's the same kind of card you'd get in a gaming laptop. It's a, and so that's all I'm saying is you, yeah, you, it doesn't have to say for gaming, but you do want that kind of level of graphics.

Speaker 9 (02:35:49):
Um, okay. And so for those graphics I've seen 30, 50, 30, 60, 30, 70,

Leo Laporte (02:35:55):
Any of those would be fine. 30 50 is fine. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:35:58):
Is higher better?

Leo Laporte (02:36:00):
Uh, no, not, not for 4k. If you wanted to go, uh, higher resolution, right? You know, what you're buying is not the ability to do it. You're buying the speed with which it does it. You're buying time.

Speaker 9 (02:36:12):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,

Leo Laporte (02:36:13):
Uh, so time, your time, the time it takes to render the video, the time it takes to import the video, all of that stuff. Their number three pick is the, uh, MacBook Pro 13 inch. Um, they also like Alienware, which is Dell's Gaming laptop. Right? So that's why you're seeing gaming in there. You're right, you don't need 3D gaming, but it turns out it's the same hardware that does the 3d. Oh, okay. So, yeah, I, I certainly wouldn't disagree with their recommendation of the Dell Xbs 15. I'll put a link in the show notes to this review. It's a recent review and Laptop Mag is reliable on, uh, best, uh, laptops for video editing. My son uses, you know, he's a big TikTok guy, does a lot of very high end video editing 4k. He just uses a, uh, an old, um, 16 inch MacBook and is very happy with it.

(02:37:02):
So that's probably why I recommended that. Hey, thanks for the call. Thanks to all of you for joining us. I'll see you, uh, at tech guy labs.com and I'll be back here next week with Professor Laura and, uh, the lovely Kim in to, I hope you'll join me too. I'm Leo LaPorte, your tech guy, at least for the next few weeks. Have a great geek week and I'll see you next time. Bye bye. Well, that's it for the Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twit, T W I t. It stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twit.tv, including the podcast for the show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh, a Mac Break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on 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@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.