The Tech Guy Episode 1951 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Saturday, December 10th, 2022. This is episode 1951, and join The Tech Eye podcast is brought to you by Addigy, the only Apple device management platform that combines MDM with live agent capabilities. To manage and secure your Apple ecosystem, visit a g.com/twit for a free 14 day trial. See how Addigy helps you manage your Apple devices in real time. If you purchase by December 31st, you'll get 10% off your first year. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at quit tv and launch your campaign now. Oh, ho ho. Hello. Hello, hello. Hey. Hey, hey. As one is want to say it's me, your tech guy, Leo, on the radio, and it's time for talk and tech with my friend Mikah Sargent, also in studio, but not dressed appropriately for the season. Oh.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:25):
Oh, no, no.

Leo Laporte (00:01:26):
On. Hello. Now you put that hat on. Now there's a, it's a hard hat because there's stuff inside. There's a button in the front.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:33):
In the front. Okay. This

Leo Laporte (00:01:34):
Left front, right, there's a front. Just feel on the, on the, on the irman. I think I found it on the Irman trim. No, that's a battery. A little farther forward. Okay. On the Irman trim on the front. Right. There we go. And now your hat is dancing and singing and jingle

Mikah Sargent (00:01:48):
Belling too.

Leo Laporte (00:01:49):
Yes. <laugh>. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:01:51):
Quite

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
A thing that drives the dog. Absolutely. Bunkers.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:55):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:01:55):
This is the show where we talk about Hightech, not low tech. That's low tech. High tech. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. You can dial 88. 88. Ask Leo and Mikah. It will work, but it's a lot more buttons. <Laugh>, so it's not necessary. Website Tech i labs.com has the answers to all the questions you might have. Mikah puts that up there with all the links to the things we talked about out. He puts video there, audio from the show. Even a transcript written by a not so intelligent computer. <Laugh> not as intelligent as chat. G p t. We should really ask chat D G P T to summarize the show.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:38):
Yeah. Could you please summarize the show for me?

Leo Laporte (00:02:40):
I wonder if it could do it. Can't do that. It could do it with older shows, cuz it, they stopped training it last spring. Well,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:46):
So what you could do is, cuz I've actually done something similar. You, I would take all of my show notes that I had collected for the show. Yeah. And I would say, give me a summary of a show that talks about these headlines. And then you paste the headlines, how'd it work? Work. And then it would work. So I haven't done it with a show, but what I have done is, there was an article I needed to read pretty quick, and it was a long one. I pasted the article in, I said, can you give me some a bullet point summary? And it knocked out five bullet points that gave me the things that I needed to know for that piece.

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
I think this is gonna be really useful in ways, but, you know, we're just now starting to understand. We're talking about an artificial intelligence. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> don't think of it as human. It's certainly not sentient. It doesn't know it exists. It's, you know, it's just a machine, but it's a machine that is so sophisticated that you can interact with it in strange ways. We read poetry last week. We did limericks and stuff. Yes. It's called Chat. G p t. And for a limited time, it's available for free. I don't think it's gonna last much longer. The CEO o of the company that makes it open, ai, which is a non-profit, I shouldn't say open, but is well funded by Elon Musk among others. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the C e o Sam Altman said, the costs are I watering. And I have seen, well, somebody asked Google, why don't you do this?

(00:03:59):
And Google said, oh no, you don't understand. The cost of doing this kind of thing is 10 times or more the cost of am of their virtual assistant, their voices. Holy moly. It's very expensive. Computationally. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And you know, we sometimes we don't think of the fact that when you are using, when you do a Google search, for instance, it, it costs money. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to Google. So because it goes to a server. The server uses electricity, they estimate that every Google search costs Google a couple of pennies. Hmm. every chat G p t query might cost a Bach Imagine millions and millions of dollars flowing. Wow. So at some point they're gonna say, oh, we got,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:41):
We gotta stop. They need to lock it behind credits or something like that.

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
They do that with their doll e doll e their image generator. Of course you can run these things, Dolly. Anyway, in effect, with stable diffusion, you can run it on your own computer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, bring the costs home, as it were for the holidays, <laugh>. But and it's not gonna be that expensive. But you know, you need a fancy computer. That's what's expensive with a Nvidia GPU and all of that. Anyway, it's kind of, it's kind of fun to play with. Speaking of Elon, did you see they're auctioning off? Oh dear. They're auctioning off. The Twitter stuff that all of the swag, everything, stoves, chairs it's kind of a remarkable collection of stuff on this, on this auction house.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:27):
The espresso machines.

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
Why the es? Lots of espresso machines. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:32):
What? What? The, the employees aren't gonna be able to have espresso anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:05:35):
<Laugh>. Oh no, they, in fact, they record, they closed the cafeteria. So a lot of this is coming outta the cafeteria. They're Eames chairs their sculptures. I wonder if he'll sell the sink that he brought when he, when he started, when he came in. It's really kind of remarkable. Now, unfortunately, cuz it's an auction. All the bids appear to be fif 25 bucks. They're not gonna stay that way. The auction doesn't go online until January 17th. It's one day though. Put that in your calendar. Auction starts January 17th, 7:00 AM Pacific ends January 18th, 10:00 AM Pacific. It's 27 hours to buy Twitter's rock. The bike fender Pro recharge station or at sculpture planter

Mikah Sargent (00:06:21):
<Laugh>. I just

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
What? Oh boy. Or they're la a semi espresso machine. They have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 espresso machines. Good ones. You know, Uhhuh <affirmative>, they're all from La Mako, which I think is probably a good fancy. And then they also have a bunch of burger grinders. You gotta have a burger grinder. They have a wearing heavy duty blender. The Kel three 30 M s STD manual Flywheel slicer with Stan. I

Mikah Sargent (00:06:52):
Saw that. That, yeah, I'm getting that one. What is it? Slice. I assume Meat. I think you put meat on it

Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
That you have to turn the

Mikah Sargent (00:06:58):
Handle. Oh wait, no, this is like a, okay, nevermind. I thought this

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
<Laugh>, I don't know what it is. I I'm looking at it.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:03):
Oh yeah. Meat and cheese slicer. It says

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
It is, but you have to, it's like <laugh>. You have to turn the handle. It's, it's, it's not, it's not a

Mikah Sargent (00:07:10):
Lek. I guess it's safer. Huh? You're kind of in charge. You don't run the rescue. You

Leo Laporte (00:07:15):
Keep your hand. It's not a away from this, sir. Yeah. A Hobart Legacy floor mixer. I would love to have that. My house.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:22):
That'd be super

Leo Laporte (00:07:22):
Cool. Could make 800 pounds of cheese. Bologna. I don't know. Alot, B CX 14 G double full size combi oven. Them. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:07:31):
They got a blot. They

Leo Laporte (00:07:33):
Got a blot, man. They, yeah. The, it was sad. The there was a tweet from the cafeteria company that had been feeding Twitter employees for the last decade saying, well, it's been great. Bye. Aw. So Elon put in bedrooms in the conference room, but he took the kitchen out.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:49):
<Laugh>. I saw that and I saw that there was there may be an investigation because the building is coded as a workplace. So to have

Leo Laporte (00:07:58):
A partner, they're just worried about it being safe. It is, it is zoned for a hotel. So you could Oh, it is zoned for a hotel. Yeah. Zoned for a hotel. So you could, I guess, I don't

Mikah Sargent (00:08:06):
Know. There's also an industrial size salad spinner, which, if there's one thing, how

Leo Laporte (00:08:10):
Big is it? Industrial size?

Mikah Sargent (00:08:12):
Yeah. 20 gallons worth of, they call it a vegetable. A lot of lettuce. But it's, it's a salad spinner. As,

Leo Laporte (00:08:18):
As they were, as they say in Vegas. That's a lot of

Mikah Sargent (00:08:21):
Lettuces, a lot of lettuce <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:08:23):
According to Tesla's lawyers, Tesla is being sued by many, many, many, many people. Because you might remember that they offered full self-driving. In fact, I paid $5,000 for it on my Model X. Never got it. They're still charging. Only it's $15,000 now for the full self-driving capability. But, eh, they haven't shipped it. No Tesla on the road today is capable of full self-driving. It's hard to do. Elon's been promising it for six years. In fact, I don't know if you remember this, a couple years ago, he said, by the end of 2020 <laugh>, I remember that there'll be a million Tesla robo taxis on the road. The customers could make up to $30,000 a year hiring them out. That, and your car will go up in value because of that. You could turn into a taxi while you're sleeping and it just goes out and picks up people and drives 'em somewhere and you don't even to do anything. Never did that. So he's being sued cuz people paid a lot of money for that feature. Tesla's lawyers said it's not fraud. It's a mere failure to realize a long-term aspirational goal.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:30):
Now, when you signed up for it, did it have that, all that sort of 

Leo Laporte (00:09:34):
No, I didn't say, Hey, this is an aspirational goal. We may never offer it.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:37):
Essentially a Kickstarter

Leo Laporte (00:09:39):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Not Yeah. A bad Kickstarter. Right. One that never delivers. No. It should have said something like, if we ever come up with this, you'll be able to get it. What it does say is you could pay 5,000 and this is now 15 I should say. But to me, this was many years ago when, six years ago when I bought my model X 5,000 now. Or if you don't order it now, it's gonna cost you even more cuz we'll have to retrofit your car. And that never happened. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:10:05):
It never happened. So where's that money going? Do you get it back?

Leo Laporte (00:10:08):
Have you heard that Elon is richest man in the world? Oh, he's actually the second richest man in the world. So

Mikah Sargent (00:10:14):
You bought Twitter,

Leo Laporte (00:10:15):
You don't Yeah, I bought Twitter. Got it. You don't get the money back. No, you don't get the money back. That's the, that's why they're suing

Mikah Sargent (00:10:22):
<Laugh>. Okay. Well good. I'm glad they're suing then.

Leo Laporte (00:10:25):
There is a <laugh>, the, the plaintiffs included 2016 video that is still on the site, by the way.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:34):
The video is the plaintiff. No.

Leo Laporte (00:10:36):
Oh, okay. The plaintiff en entered into evidence.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:39):
I was So,

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
Your Honor, I would like to play this video here.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:43):
Got it.

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
Got it. From 2016, that purports to show a Tesla driving itself through the streets of Palo Alto autonomously. Ah, the video before the video rolls with the Rolling Stones painted black for some reason, as the background music, a message reads, this is from the LA Times. The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He's not driving anything. The car is driving itself. Tesla workers later revealed the video was fabricated. Oh my goodness. Done in multiple takes. And they cut out the driving systems' failures, including a crash into a fence. The video is, you can watch it now on the Tesla website implying that No, look, it's driving itself. It drives itself.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:29):
Where are you reading this from? Cuz

Leo Laporte (00:11:30):
I'd like to, I will give you a link to the LA Times, the Los Angeles Times business from 12 eight. How about that? That's where I'm, that's where I'm reading it from. Great story. <Laugh>. Well, not so great if you bought it like I did, but I, at the time, I kind of knew. I think there's a certain thing you kind of know. Like I also, the, the air filtration system, he calls it a, a bio weapon defense. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. System has got the bio biological hazard logo on it. And I have to say, when the fires were going on up here, the wildfires, I did Oh, nice. I didn't get in my car and drive around. It was nice. But it was just a HEPA filter wasn't, it wasn't anything. Bio, bio, weapon, device. And I kind of knew, I even said, I probably said it out loud on this show. I believe in Elon's vision for electrifying vehicles, for making the world a better place. And I don't mind kind of kicking in a little bit, cuz the whole plan for Tesla was we're gonna charge a lot for these early luxury vehicles so that we can make an affordable electric vehicle. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:28):
So you were, you were sort of investing,

Leo Laporte (00:12:31):
Buying into the hype mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And by the way, the affordable electric vehicle, they never No. Even the model three is like, yeah, I think it starts at 40,000 or maybe 35. But it's, they've, they never really got to that point. So yeah, that's another thing that never <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:12:49):
Oh

Leo Laporte (00:12:49):
Yeah. Never happened. You

Mikah Sargent (00:12:50):
Know, and somebody's gotta have a list somewhere like the, you know, the sites that Google has killed, the services that Google has killed. It's just all of Elon's lies.

Leo Laporte (00:12:58):
Oh, that's a good site. Somebody do that. Yeah. Elon's lies. But you'll get taken down from Twitter. <Laugh>, are you ready for that? Let's see, what else? All right. I need to go buy. It is big in the news. It's lots of news, you know, lots of news up there. I have to pick and choose the news. Right? In fact, that's the name of this news segment. Pick and choose. Leo's Pick and choose news. <Laugh> pick and pull the news. Why it log me out? <Laugh>. I can't pick and pull if I'm logged, not logged in. Oh, I wanna talk a little bit about something you have used. In fact, you turned me onto mm-hmm. <Affirmative> called Lens. Ah,

Mikah Sargent (00:13:39):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:13:40):
This is, so we were mentioning Dolly and the, and there's a big movement towards artificial intelligence image generation. You've probably seen all the hype around that. Well, you can now do it on your iPhone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's not free. You have to, they have some free, I think, but so I end up paying a few

Mikah Sargent (00:14:00):
Bucks. Yeah. So Lens is made by the Prisma Labs folks who made that very popular Prisma app,

Leo Laporte (00:14:05):
Which I used and loved. Great photo editing app.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:08):
They have basically worked out a way to make a custom stable diffusion model for people, spin up a stable diffusion instance and then crank out some images of them. So it's a rather pricey thing to do. Going into eight. It

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
Was like 35. Yeah. That, remember we just talked about it? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:24):
It's pricey for them. So it doesn't surprise me that it's, you know, between four to $20 or something like that to be able to generate these photos.

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
So I generated I paid I think 35 bucks for a year subscription. And then it was 3 99 to generate a hundred photos. I think I spent 7 99 for 200 photos. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And and it gives you all styles, like mystical science fiction stylish. You give it 20 head shots, 20 selfies, and it does that. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:53):
They've, they've worked out the, so that's one of the big things about using any of these art generation is, is knowing what to say to get good art out of it. And behind the scenes, Len has worked out what they need to do to get these photos that look photorealistic. In some ways.

Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
This looks like me, doesn't it? Yeah. It's pretty good. Yeah. So I did that myself. And it's nice. There's a couple of, like, shots where there's a little bit of, you know, cheese cheesecake. I wish I looked like some of these cheesecake. You guys, you know, muscular, a berry chest, that kind of thing. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:15:29):
Wait, what was the one with your hand on your shoulder or on your chin? It's up right above there. One. Yeah. What is that one? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:15:36):
Bond. James Bond. What's the thing behind me? Oh. Anyway, I'm gonna tell you why I don't like this and why you should be careful about this. Yes. But we have to take a break because Laura is playing the music. <Laugh>. 88. 88. Ask Leo, you're call's name next. I don't think I can show the Lisa pictures.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:59):
Well, please don't. We can at least des can we describe them in, in it's uncertain terms.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:10):
I

Leo Laporte (00:16:11):
It's kind of appalling.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:12):
Yeah, it is. It

Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
Is. So I guess the point I'm making is it's a little sexist. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because you can say whether you're a male or female after you submit the pictures, and then it generates. So my male pictures, it's all, here's a, here's a little cheesecake. One that doesn't even look like me. No, that's not your face. Although that is my chest, right? Yeah. <laugh>. So that's a little cheesecake. But there's only a couple of, I don't know who that is either. Me as a young man. These are, these are not, I don't <laugh>. I,

Mikah Sargent (00:16:43):
I,

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
I, I don't know who that is. I think it's Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm not sure. <Laugh> looks more like you, doesn't it? That looks like me. That's you for sure. Yeah. And obviously I took my shirt

Mikah Sargent (00:16:52):
Off. Right? You're on the

Leo Laporte (00:16:53):
Beach. It's fine. I'm on the beach. But I can't even show you the ones it did to my wife. No, I can't. They are so ridiculously sex sexy. Uhhuh <affirmative>. Not, I'll tell you, every single picture of my wife has is enhanced, anatomically enhanced, if you know what I mean. Yeah. That's a perfect way to say it. She had a boob job.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:16):
The three of them <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
It's shockingly bad.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:23):
It's, it's awful. And, you know, that's not the only thing. People with skin that is darker than mine, when they post their photos, oftentimes the it will come back with a lightened. They're white. Yeah. They're white or

Leo Laporte (00:17:37):
They're brown. It's, it's what they've trained on. And so obviously they're using stable diffusion. It's been trained on sexy, sexy pictures of women and not so sexy, sexy pictures of men. Well,

Mikah Sargent (00:17:46):
And something that Anthony taught me or told me, he had been reading about it, the stable diffusion one point, blah, blah, blah. It was trained with a lot of not safer work imagery.

Leo Laporte (00:17:57):
Oh, that explains

Mikah Sargent (00:17:58):
It. They came out with stable diffusion 2.0. They had the system go in and remove not safer work imagery. And it was terrible at generating bodies at that point. Yeah. So they were tr they're trying to find a balance. It's hard because the, the, having those not safe for work images provided what the machine learning needed to create bodies. You take that out and suddenly you've got nine arms and all sorts of weirdness. And so they're, it's, it's hard to find a balance because at the same time that that's going on, they're going, how can we have this not safe for work imagery in a same machine learning model that has children in it. That those two things shouldn't be in the same bucket.

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
There's all sorts of pr and apparently to do black people, they had to lose a lot of white people images. There are very few people of color, I guess, in the training set. So it's turning people white. Yep. I noticed that when we try to make our Christmas card and

Mikah Sargent (00:18:46):
Oh, yeah. It was always, it

Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
Was always white

Mikah Sargent (00:18:48):
Shaded white. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:49):
Weird. Just weird.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:51):
So, I mean, I, mine ended up, and I, I guess it's, they've got more brown people or they're able to sort of estimate according to that, where mine ended up turning out. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:19:03):
For the most part. So they, they say lens is trying to get rid of the nudes. And it, I think that there are no actual nudes of Lisa. Oh. Unless you, you've talked about her brass body, which is definitely naked.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:17):
There was, yeah. I was gonna say there was one where

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Oh, she's nude in that. Yeah. <laugh> that one. She's nude. Yeah. That's nude. Right?

Mikah Sargent (00:19:23):
That's definitely nude.

Leo Laporte (00:19:24):
Good tan. Yeah. <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:25):
I guess there could be a silk shift on, but I don't think so. No.

Leo Laporte (00:19:29):
<Laugh>. No. So this, these are, so the, the thing, it's even, it's even less than, it's not even that. Because even the non nude pictures, there's lots of cleavage,

Mikah Sargent (00:19:41):
Right? Yeah. So we're, yeah. We're not even going as far as just saying, oh, it just made her nude. Even then the ones where it wasn't that it increased and it, it was bad. It,

Leo Laporte (00:19:51):
It, I'll give you, here's a, here's a safe, relatively safe for work example. This is a supposed to be a painting, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But they all have a lot of cleavage. Uhhuh <affirmative>. That's mild. I just feel like it's not right. No. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Oh, it's too hot to cut now, babe. Now I wouldn't have played this song, but I guess, I guess it's okay if Professor Laura plays this song. Laura, is there a phone in this in some way?

Kim Schaffer (00:20:22):
<Laugh>? Probably not.

Leo Laporte (00:20:23):
No.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:23):
What does it mean to trot

Leo Laporte (00:20:24):
<Laugh>? Stop it.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:27):
I, I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna look it up. Kim

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
Scheffer, the unbreakable phone Angel. Hello, Kim. I think she

Kim Schaffer (00:20:32):
Was going off of the two hot to trot photos

Leo Laporte (00:20:35):
That you were just of my wife. <Laugh>. I guess. I don't, so there is a certain there. So this is the problem with ai, and boy, it's really important people understand this. It can, it only can do what has been trained on mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. And so I'm, you know, I'm gonna give you a chance to try this. I need 20, just your face selfies

Kim Schaffer (00:20:54):
Of me. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:55):
Mm-Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:55):
<Affirmative>. Oh

Kim Schaffer (00:20:56):
Geez.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:56):
Okay. 10 to 20.

Kim Schaffer (00:20:57):
If you wanna do it on your phone, that's

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
Fine. You know what I'll do is I'll come in and I'll take 20 pictures real quick. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:21:02):
They don't like that though. They don't, if they're very similar, they have to be all different. The system will say, eh,

Kim Schaffer (00:21:06):
I'll give you the professional headshot. I have

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
<Laugh>. I need 20, 10 to 20.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:11):
You

Leo Laporte (00:21:11):
Got a lot of them. So, but I'll, I'll, I, but let's, let's do it as an experiment from the neck up. I don't wanna see anything. Right. <laugh>. And we'll just see we're a

Kim Schaffer (00:21:17):
Turtlenecks that you're not getting much

Leo Laporte (00:21:18):
Out. Yeah. But I'm telling you this ai, so it's what it's been trained on. And it's the same thing with people of color, for instance, because it's mostly been trained on white people. It doesn't do people of color very

Kim Schaffer (00:21:27):
Well. Well, I've been curious, but I'm notorious for never paying for an app <laugh>. Yeah. And also once that Cambridge Analytica thing happened years ago, I just don't really do any of those things.

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
<Laugh> the lens of the com, the company owns lenses. Says we, and they even say this, when you submit the selfies, it says, soon as these images are generated, we delete your pictures. Right. They don't keep 'em.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:48):
No, no. They litter. So, so the Washington Post did a really good, kind of deep dive into it. And they spin up an AWS instance, which is, you know, it's a little server somewhere. They do the thing and then they throw that away because holding onto it would cost them so much money. So it's not even worth it for them to keep. Yeah. They don't,

Kim Schaffer (00:22:06):
It's like a virtual shredder.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:08):
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

Leo Laporte (00:22:10):
See, I don't mind doing it. And probably you shouldn't either, Mikah. Cuz our pictures are already, people have our mm-hmm. <Affirmative> know what we look like. Well, you, Kim, you ha No, they know what you look

Mikah Sargent (00:22:19):
Like. I mean, you're on Instagram. You

Kim Schaffer (00:22:20):
Google Me too. Yeah. You're on. I'm not, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
Not anonymous. But if you didn't have pictures in public, I guess it'd be all right. You wouldn't, it

Kim Schaffer (00:22:26):
Is amazing how many people I Google and there's not a single picture of 'em. I'm like, how have you kept yourself off the internet this

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
Long? <Laugh>. I know. In hindsight, that's seems like it was a good idea. It's

Kim Schaffer (00:22:36):
Impressive.

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
Yeah. Like they knew what they were doing. I don't, I doubt that was, I

Kim Schaffer (00:22:39):
Don't think they did. I think they just le lead very different lives.

Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
<Laugh>. Alright, well we've wasted so much time on this that I don't, I don't really wanna take a call with 30 seconds left. So I who should I take when we get back? 

Kim Schaffer (00:22:50):
Let's go to Jeff in Upland, California. When you come back. Alright, well, no, actually, aren't you going somewhere else when

Leo Laporte (00:22:54):
We come back? Is Scott Wilkinson here? I don't know if he's here. We will do Scott Wilkinson talk about home theater. And Jeff from Upland will be our first call. Thank you. Kim Schaffer. Thank you everybody for putting up with us. This is after all our penultimate weekend. Leo Laport, Mikah Sargent, your tech guys. Yes. Scott's in the chat.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:19):
Scott's in the chat.

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
Oh, the Scott's in the chat and the Zoom. Who, who guess what big screen TV about?

Mikah Sargent (00:23:25):
Right. Well, t all I can see is that Trot is firstly something that a horse does. It's

Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
About, it's about

Mikah Sargent (00:23:32):
Horses. And secondly, it is about

Leo Laporte (00:23:34):
A horse

Mikah Sargent (00:23:35):
That can't loose stool.

Leo Laporte (00:23:36):
It is Oh, trot the trots. That's different from your too hot to trot. I think too Hot to trot means the horse is sweaty and has been working really hard and they, they don't wanna make it trot. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, the horse is too hot, too. Trot Baby. That's the original song. The folk song.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:55):
Everyone <laugh>, everyone is Absolut.

Leo Laporte (00:23:57):
And the original folk song The Horse,

Mikah Sargent (00:24:00):
It was a folk song.

Leo Laporte (00:24:01):
No, I'm kidding you. You, you

Mikah Sargent (00:24:02):
Believe, you know what? I don't why, believe what I'm saying, it's cuz I'm half paying attention to you because I'm trying to excuse to gather some photos of Kim

Leo Laporte (00:24:10):
On What does it mean, Laura

Mikah Sargent (00:24:11):
On Instagram? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:24:14):
What does it mean to ought to try?

Mikah Sargent (00:24:15):
Yeah. Laura. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:24:20):
It's sexual Innu Way.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:21):
Oh, well then I was looking at the wrong sites.

Leo Laporte (00:24:23):
Oh, I am shocked.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:24):
I need to go to

Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Shocked Titan.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:26):
Urban Dictionary.

Leo Laporte (00:24:28):
Urban Dictionary. Hold me closer. Tiny Dent. So I should show just you the, I wish I could show just you these pictures, but I, if I put this on the, on the air, it would bite me. Well, Lisa would, anyway, <laugh>, it's horrible what they did. I was really disappointed. Her and I, I gave them good clean. I have plenty of pictures of Lisa from the neck up. I gave them good stuff and they gave me crap. I would not use this as a woman. I think you'd be offended

Mikah Sargent (00:25:06):
And, but we're gonna try it with Kim.

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
I would not use this as a woman except for Kim.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:12):
Got it.

Leo Laporte (00:25:13):
Are you trying it? Are

Mikah Sargent (00:25:14):
You I am getting,

Leo Laporte (00:25:15):
You're gonna edges

Mikah Sargent (00:25:16):
Of her with

Leo Laporte (00:25:17):
Neck up

Mikah Sargent (00:25:18):
Her, I would say with her not, I don't know if it's permission so much as encouragement. So that's good. She says, Hey, no, we're gonna pay for this book. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
I like this one. Doesn't look like me. I told Lisa, should I grow a beard? If, if you look like that, yeah. <Laugh>. I don't know what I'm wearing there or there. That is not me. Destroy that <laugh>. That is a, a flop. These look, some, these look a lot like me. I would say yes. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:44):
I love the, there's one where you've got headphones, <laugh>, that are kind of built into you.

Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
That's me and Pat Oswald

Mikah Sargent (00:25:50):
With a tiny little cape. It's a very adorable

Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
<Laugh> cape. The glasses are not, it does a bad job with glasses. That looks like me. If I were in twin Peaks as Kyle McLaughlin. Oh yeah, that's the Kyle McLaughlin. Me. You like that one? No. Let's not go to Lisa's long white beard Super channel. This one. <Laugh>. This one. The Ernest Hemingway model.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:18):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:26:19):
Pretty good. That's the Ernest Hemingway. Leo Rik. Ah, that's the ya Elderly Yani Leo. Oh geez. That's the orchestra conductor Leo.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:29):
There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:26:30):
Oh, little goatee. How about that

Mikah Sargent (00:26:32):
Art artist? Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:26:33):
Artist Leo. That's Jesus. Leo

Mikah Sargent (00:26:35):
Uhhuh. <Affirmative>. I say you look like a saint there. You really do. Aww.

Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
Like

Mikah Sargent (00:26:40):
What miracle is,

Leo Laporte (00:26:41):
I like this one cuz it's got pens around it. <Laugh>. I dunno. I dunno. Why <laugh>? It's like the artist. It's sketched. You walked away from his easel. Hey, the Tech Guy podcast brought to you this week by Addigy. All right. Mac folks. Actually, the really the best client for Addigy, I would say is a, a big shop at it shop that has a hi, A mix of Windows and Mac, right? And iPhones and Android phones. A Addigy helps you do more than just manage those Apple devices. Maybe you don't even like, I don't know if I can manage 'em. I don't want to. Addigy is the only fully cloud-based multi-tenant Apple MDM platform designed for scalability because they're hyper-focused on Apple. They do the job. So you don't have to, they even have I I this is so cool. They have live agent capabilities. So you can have, you can have your users chat with a live agent and get themselves set up.

(00:27:36):
You get all the features, functionality and flexibility you need to customize and manage your Apple devices, how you want. That way your Apple's infrastructure is optimized to best support your environment, to help your team be as productive as possible every day. If you're all Apple, that's great. If you just have some apples and you just don't want to be troubled, this is a great company to go to. They simplify IT management for Apple by creating a solution that's so flexible, so customizable. Any IT team can use it to easily maintain and secure the Apple devices in their managed networks. Add A G A D D I G Y. They help you ensure every Apple device, max iPhones, iPads, secure, supported and ready to scale. The zero-touch deployment is one of the really great features. You get your new members onboarded securely and under five minutes and you, and you don't have to, you know, get your hands dirty.

(00:28:28):
It's fantastic. Secure authentication with trusted providers. Eliminate security gaps with tested authenticated features your users love and can rely on you. Get real-time device monitoring automated re automated remediation. You can manage your devices in real time and resolve those issues automatically before they cause downtime. That's the ideal, right? They also ha have completely custom compliance features. So whatever your compliance needs, you'll have peace of mind knowing your Apple infrastructure is always compliant and always up today. Complete self-service capabilities means you and your IT team are freed from endless reset requests. You know, I forgot my past, all that stuff. 24 7, user access to resources and applications. And the users can do it themselves. In most cases, that's what they'd rather do. They don't want, they don't wanna bug you. You get patch management very important, right? Prevent delays, fixed bugs early, minimize downtime by rolling out new updates at patches asap.

(00:29:30):
It's easy to customize and scale to meet any need and adapt to any environment with fast free catered migration. It's an MDM tool that works as hard as you, you do, they say at the speed of Now. I love that one user said quote. And this is talking about Addigy quote. We were able to tap into economies of scale and optimize common tasks for all clients and environments. We estimate this will reduce the time our team dedicates to MDM management by at least 30% every week. Every week is creating happier team members and allowing us to more effectively secure our managed end points. Get started today with a's award-winning support. When you partner with Addigy, you get white glove support from a team of experts who live, eat, and breeze Apple. They care about your success as much as you do. You're gonna love Addigy and IT guarantee your Apple success with Addigy.

(00:30:28):
Start your free 14 day trial at A D D I G Y Addigy.com/twit. If you buy by the end of the year before December 31st, you get 10% off your first year, whole year. Wow. So hurry, don't wait. Visit Addigy.com/twit today. You have time to do the two week trial and then get a 10% off for the rest of the year. I would do that right now. Addigy.Com/Twit. We thank Addigy so much for their support. Quite literally <laugh>. We also thank them for helping us out on the tech I show you. Help us when you use that address, add a g.com/twi. Now, back to the show. I'll tell you, tell you if you think you know, it's Scott Wilkinson, that's Mr. Hip. He's on a hip trip, joins us every week. He is the perfect Santa

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:15):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
He's got the white beard and all. How did Tuba Christmas go?

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:19):
Well, tuba Christmas went great without me. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:31:25):
No.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:25):
Oh no. I was tremendously sick. I was sorry. Really, really sick.

Leo Laporte (00:31:31):
It's going around. I'll tell you.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:32):
It, it, it wasn't Covid. Yeah. I'm happy to say No. It's tested negative for Covid Covid. It was this cold

Leo Laporte (00:31:37):
Flu

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:38):
Rs

Leo Laporte (00:31:38):
D thing. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:39):
Oh yeah. It was terrible. In fact, my doctor said, don't get on an airplane.

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
Why?

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:46):
Because they pressurized the cabinet eight pounds.

Leo Laporte (00:31:48):
Oh, your ear. You'd get a horrible ear.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:50):
I was, I was having trouble breathing.

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
Yo, that's nice. Oh, that's

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:54):
So

Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
Sad. I'm so sorry.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:55):
Yeah, I I I was super disappointed. The good news is, I I, there's plenty of people down there I could call on someone to sub for me to, to conduct the whole show. And I have a whole team of people to put it together and make it

Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
Work. So, but is it really Tub A Christmas without, without Scott, without

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:14):
Me? Yeah. No, it's not the same. That's, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
Sorry. Well, you're feeling a little better, I hope.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:20):
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
Back in, in Santa Cruz. You flew home.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:23):
Yeah. Well, I ne I never went. I never left. I've been here the whole time.

Leo Laporte (00:32:26):
You couldn't go. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:27):
Couldn't go. But apparent, I got all kinds of reports. Everybody said it went great and good. They all missed me terribly good. And I appreciate that. But it did go. The show must go on on and

Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
Did Scott, Scott joins us every week to talk about big screen, flat screen TVs, wide screen TVs, surround sound. That's right. Mans sound bars, headphones, all of that stuff.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:50):
All that stuff. Well, today I wanted to, to point out my brand new Home Theater of the Month article on avs forum.com. This is we normally do home theater of the month. Most people submit entries from the United States, but this one's in Essen, Germany. And it is really good. One of the best I've ever done. It it looks like a Dolby Cinema, the guy. And he built everything himself. And it, it's so clean. All the e equip, there's no equipment, no speakers visible. It's all super

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
Clean. Is I'm looking at Novembers. I gotta go to

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:31):
December. No, no, no, no. November. This, it, we, okay, this is it. We posted at the end of the month. I Okay. Label four. So this is November. This is the latest one. Oh, it's gorgeous.

Leo Laporte (00:33:40):
So he, he started in a basement with s Right

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:46):
Concrete walls, concrete wall basement. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:33:48):
Wow. And, and built it all himself. Amazing. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:51):
He built, even built the speakers himself. Wow. now the, the main speakers came from a company that sells kits. But, you know, he built on save

Leo Laporte (00:34:00):
Money by doing that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:01):
You Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And

Leo Laporte (00:34:04):
Really the, you get all the parts, which are probably the same parts that, but isn't, I mean, I would rather have Andrew Jones design my speakers than Leo LaPorte. <Laugh>. Right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:14):
Well, you know, the speakers are designed by the company that sells you the kit. Okay. All you, all you do is, you know, put it

Leo Laporte (00:34:22):
Together and it saves you,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:23):
It saves you, saves you money. Absolutely. Now he did a really interesting thing with his subwoofer. He's got eight subwoofer in that room. Whoa. four of them in the front. Yeah. Facing the audience. Okay. And four of them in the back.

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:40):
Now, the problem with subwoofers always is that they tend to build up what are called room modes. Nodes, where in certain locations in the room, the base, certain base frequencies are accentuated. And in other locations they're diminished by use. So by, just by the fact that, that the room has dimensions and the sound reflects around in it. And so you build up what are called standing waves at certain frequencies, at certain frequencies, which are related to the length and width of the room and

Leo Laporte (00:35:12):
Height of the room. So you might have a seat in this theater where you could show

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:16):
Really big sheet That's right. Super boomy. And in others where you can't hear any bass at all. So he did a, a really interesting thing where the sound waves from the front subwoofer come into the room. They, they reach the back wall and the back subwoofers are tuned so that they cancel, oh. The waves coming from the front so that they don't get reflected into the room.

Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
Is this guy a sound designer? How do you know how to

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:44):
Do that? No. Well, it's a, it's a, it's a concept that's pretty well known called a double base array. Ah, and it's a particular technique for managing base in a room that I hadn't really seen too many people use before. But he did it. And I'm sure what that, what that does is it creates very even base nice throughout the room, which is wonderful. Really, really great.

Leo Laporte (00:36:08):
You know, some, sometimes, you know, I've seen it happen. People have cars with big sub wars in the back. You can hear him coming from a while away. Yeah. I bet you his house is like that, that, you know, when he's watching, you know, top Gun Maverick, you just hear this coming out of his house.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:23):
Well, maybe, maybe he, he did a lot of acoustic work in the, in this house as well. And the basement is, is full of is concrete wall, the

Leo Laporte (00:36:32):
Basement? I'm not worried about. It's the, it's the ceiling of the base of the basement. The floor of the house of, we think it'll go right through that. The

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:39):
Floor. Well, the ceiling is concrete as well.

Leo Laporte (00:36:41):
It is. Yeah. Oh, this is a bunka.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:44):
It's a bunka. This

Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
A Bunka Bunka. Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:47):
Ah, yeah. Okay. So he says it, it contains the, the energy of the room, the acoustic energy of the room very well and doesn't leak into the rest of the

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
House. You could deafen yourself. How much did it cost to build this bunker, this space bunker? He,

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:02):
Well, he, he built the whole, he designed and built the whole house. So it's a brand new house.

Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Ah. See if was sinking ahead when he built the basement, he made the concrete basement. Okay. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:14):
But he says he spent about $67,000 not including his time. And remember, he built this entire room by himself. He built all the framing. He built all the acoustical panels. Well, he bought those, but installed them and, and did all the fabric across. Wow. That's great. The it's amazing. I

Leo Laporte (00:37:36):
Bet you a lot of the cost was the projector.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:40):
The projector is a, a jvc DLA NX nine, which is probab, I think it's on the order of 10 or $12,000. So there you go. Yeah. That

Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
Ain't cheap. Yeah. 20% of it is is the projector. The

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:54):
Projector, yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
Does he call it his basement? <Laugh>?

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:00):
Oh, that would be

Leo Laporte (00:38:00):
Really good. Coming to my basement.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he actually calls it the Nexus one.

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
Yeah, of course he does.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:07):
Which he, which which he says more cinema than cinema. Because if you remember from Blade Runner, the Nexus six was touted as more human than human. And he, he called it that because he realizes, as I do, and many of us do, that when you go to a commercial cinema, you don't get as good performance No. As you do in a room

Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
Like that, you must come to Nexus one. And he was smart. He gave himself lots of room for growth. He didn't start at Nexus six, he started at Nexus One.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:35):
That's right. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:38:36):
That's right. I suspect he will be doing more of this because isn't the the fun of it, the journey, you know, after you go through all of this, you spend $67,000 this beautiful theater, you probably, you know, well, I really wanna watch a movie tonight. <Laugh> So true. He's gonna read a book, you know, and stay upstairs.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:55):
Yeah, no. You know, it's

Leo Laporte (00:38:57):
One of those things you put and the fun is the journey.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:00):
Well, that's true. Yeah. And, and, and there's a never enough ism about home theater hobby because you're gonna replace the projector when a better one comes along.

Leo Laporte (00:39:10):
See, that's why I'm hesitate spending all that money. But I guess a lot of the investment is, is gonna work forever. I mean, oh yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:17):
Speakers, the room is gonna work forever. Speak

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Speakers don't get much better over time, do they?

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:21):
No, that's true. That's

Leo Laporte (00:39:23):
A, that's a pretty simple acoustic technology.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:26):
Yep. Has, hasn't changed a lot.

Leo Laporte (00:39:29):
Hasn't changed since the loop

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:29):
Hundred

Mikah Sargent (00:39:30):
Years. Do the speakers you own get worse over time? Do they still

Leo Laporte (00:39:34):
To break? Oh, they wear out.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:35):
They, they, it's possible that they can, there are certain moving parts. For example, the surround that attaches the, the vibrating cone to the frame can wear out over time. And that needs to be replaced once in a while. But that's years, that's years before that happens. And if you keep the room in at a nice humidity and temperature, that's gonna be many years before that happens.

Leo Laporte (00:39:59):
Scott Wilkinson, you find out more if you go to the avs forum.com and look at their home theater of the Month of November's Home Theater. You can also watch his videos. He does a great podcast at youtube.com/avs forum and joins us right here every week. Thank you, Scott. Thank you. My pleasure. Glad you're feeling better. Thanks Leo and Mikah, you're tech guys now we'll get to the phones right after this. Aw, aw. Aw.

Scott Wilkinson (00:40:35):
I didn't get a chance to say that. Next Tuesday, the podcast guest is one of the preeminent theater designers in the world.

Leo Laporte (00:40:42):
Oh, cool. Wow.

Scott Wilkinson (00:40:44):
And he's gonna be talk, gonna be talking about some case studies. He and his engineer partner are gonna be talking about some case studies of some theaters they've done. And he, he, his theater designs, I $67,000 is a drop in the bucket for, for the kinds of things he does.

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
He does home theaters

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Home theaters, but mega

Leo Laporte (00:41:06):
Home theaters for the billionaires. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:09):
Yeah. So

Mikah Sargent (00:41:12):
Can you open up airdrop on your phone?

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Oh, very exciting. Oh. As you know, because I'm Chinese, I have airdrop. Everyone turned off. I You should be in my contacts.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:23):
I probably am. I didn't know if you had it dis

Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
Disabled. I hadn't tried. I might have it disabled. I don't. No, no. It's on contacts only. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:29):
I'm seeing your Mac Mini, but not your phone

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
Yet. I'll put it to everyone. It's call. Oh, you don't

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:32):
Know, know my phone's called him. Romeo. Romeo Romeo Romeo. Go ahead Scott. All yours. Thank you. Thank you. So nice to see you, everybody. I was so disappointed at not being at Tuba Christmas. I, what it meant was I was home last Saturday, but I was coughing and hacking so bad. I, I did not want to be on the air. It was, my voice was just terrible. It's still a little low, if you notice. It was a bad one. It was a really bad one. Anyway. Hello everyone. So nice to see you. Tech Dino. I did not recover. I wouldn't call it recovering quickly. The symptoms came on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and that's now two weeks ago. And I'm only now starting to feel semi-normal. I've, I've got a bunch of winter concerts that I'm playing in this weekend, and last, last night was the first one.

(00:42:38):
And I went and man, was I exhausted afterwards? I got another one this afternoon and another one tomorrow afternoon. So I'm trying to take it real easy and rest up as much as I can. And let me tell you, schlepping a tuba in, in a less, in a weakened state is not much fun. But once I get there and I'm settled and I'm playing, playing the tuba also with diminished lung capacity is dicey. I just can't play as loud and I can't play as long phrases. I have to take breaths more often. So all of that is impeding me. But what the heck, Macon music is always a good thing. Always.

(00:43:28):
 so anyway. Hello everybody. I'm looking around here. Sy sy Sci ps chops. Chops. Lots of speakers won't hurt your hearing. High volumes will. You're exactly correct. And in fact, that's an argument for having a bunch of subwoofers is that they don't have to play as loud and you'll still get the base impact. And, and it doesn't have to be as loud. So that's that's exactly right. The Burke. Yeah. $67,000 is still a lot of money. That is true. Absolutely. I would not disagree with that one little bit. But that's just for the, that's just for the equipment and the building materials. You know, he built everything himself. I, I'm a quite amazed at that actually, at how well it turned out. And he said the only things that he had help with was his wife helped him put the overhead speakers in the ceiling. And the company that made the speakers actually did the auto audio calibration

Leo Laporte (00:44:34):
In the room. You wanna stay around for the top? Happy to. Thank you. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy with the Not gray yet. Mikah, Sargent <laugh>, probably not gray for a long time to come. At least not fully gray. I not fully gray. Yeah. So you sent me, I don't know how you got 'em. 20 pictures of Kim Uhhuh <affirmative>. So we are now creating on Facebook avatars. We shall see. I will not show these on camera because Yeah. Until they're vetted. <Laugh>. Yeah. I have a feeling. But yeah, we're playing with the lens. Let's get to the phone. So we, I really feel bad we've shirked our duties. Jeff is on the line from Upland California. Hi Jeff.

Caller 1 (00:45:08):
Hey Leo and Mikah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Hello. Thanks for your patience.

Caller 1 (00:45:12):
I'm gonna mishear you guys on K Ffi on the weekends.

Leo Laporte (00:45:15):
Aw. Well, good news. Good tune in on Sundays, Saturdays, it'll be rich tomorrow on K Ffi and the entire Premier Radio network taking over rich on tech from K T L A. He's wonderful. Sundays we won't be on the radio, but Mikah and I will be doing the same show on the internet. We're using the internet. I've never heard that as a fake radio station. <Laugh> should be interesting.

Caller 1 (00:45:36):
I've heard of that.

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
Yes.

Caller 1 (00:45:38):
I still remember the first thing I learned from your show when I started listening on kfi. What's that? How to, how to Clear the Windows icon. Cash <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:45:48):
Those were the day my friend. We thought they'd never end. Yeah. That was a big problem. That was like Windows 90 98 probably. Wow.

Caller 1 (00:45:58):
Yeah. I I don't remember what version

Leo Laporte (00:46:00):
It was. Yeah, it probably was. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:46:02):
Hey, I got a kinda e-waste related question for you. Okay. in it for decades and whenever we do a tech refresh or closed down an office, I was the guy that was in charge of scrapping all the PCs and wiping all the drives. And I would pull all the boards out. And once I had a few boxes of boards, there was a guy who would buy them from me to recover all the precious metals. And I only saw the guy every few years because that was how long it took to get enough boards together to make it worth the trip. But that guy isn't around anymore. And I need to find a new place to get rid of these boards. I've looked online and all the places I've found are, well, yeah, you ship 'em to us, but I think the only person that makes any money in that deal is the shipper. Yeah. Cause these things are so heavy.

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
Yeah. You're probably right. What an interesting business, right? Yeah. there's gold in them though, motherboards and other stuff. But it takes some skill to safely melt it down and recover the metals. Not everybody could do that. And I'm sure you're a local electronics recycler. Well, I don't know. You know, LA has some very good, in fact, they were a sponsor for a long time electronics recycling. So it you know, I, I just don't don't know what your local recycler does. I think I actually have a theory that the recyclers maybe overstate their capabilities. For instance, we know that about 90% of plastics never get recycled. Plastic is very hard to recycle. You have to separate it properly and only some plastics can be recycled. And yet our local recycler swears Oh yeah. Put the, put the milk bottles right in there, put anything you got that's plastic.

(00:47:53):
You just put that right there in the recycling. And I gotta, you know what, somebody should do an investigate. I'm gonna go down there and see what do you do with the electronics waste? What do you do with the plastics? What do you do with the stuff that's so hard to recycle? Cardboards easy if it's stacked and clean and you know that, that's a good one. Aluminum Sure. Glass gets a little harder. So I bet you your electronics recycling people probably for a long time, they just sent it to China where small children burned it. <Laugh>, I hope they don't do that anymore. So let's find somewhere near Upland that you, you could drive to that you could bring these probably every couple of years. Right? Yeah. I think this is really great. I, I wish we would do this. I just feel like I, I feel like it's one of those things we pay lip service to mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, gosh. Bless you for doing it, Jeff. We're actually doing it. 

Caller 1 (00:48:49):
That's why I pull the stuff apart myself is cuz I have some trust issues with the advertised process, just as you said. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:56):
Well, Burke our who is our, the Fixit king around here says you have to put the circuit traces in sulfuric acid to get the gold. That is not something you know, a normal person would do. Have a little sulfuric lion around. Yeah. Just a little bit. Not to mention the toxicity of the gases coming off and all of that stuff. I

Caller 1 (00:49:16):
Not something I'd wanna do in my garage.

Leo Laporte (00:49:18):
No. In fact, it was great. This guy did it. Did he pass away? What happened to him?

Caller 1 (00:49:23):
Just no trace of him. And, and I don't think he, maybe

Leo Laporte (00:49:26):
The sulfuric acid had got to him. No fumes. Yeah, he probably, you know what the problem probably is that, you know, you can only recover a small amount per motherboard. And the setup must be expensive. I, I imagine he started the business figuring, well, I'm gonna get, you know, all the motherboards and all the world and you know, people throw 'em out. People throw 'em out. Or maybe he got rich bought a boat and he's gone. I don't know. <Laugh>,

Caller 1 (00:49:50):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:49:51):
Possible also. How much, what I'd love to know is how much is a motherboard worth? I mean, what is the, what is the reclaim, reclaim value of that motherboard?

Caller 1 (00:50:01):
I think I used to get at least a dollar a pound for this stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:50:04):
Wow, that's really good. So I guess the question would be you do have e-waste recycling somewhere in your community. You do. I know I bring my batteries in. I have a big box of batteries that I periodically give to Burke <laugh>. Right. And Burke, you don't burn 'em, you throw 'em, you bring 'em to the recycler. So if you go to, you're in California, so if you go to cal recycle.ca.gov, they have have an e-waste page where you can search. Let me just look and see if Upland you probably already know, you probably already do this, right? Where you can, where you can search for somewhere that will take it. But

Caller 1 (00:50:41):
No, I have not looked there.

Leo Laporte (00:50:42):
That's, yeah. Okay. So, so I'm gonna imagine this is California, but I imagine every state Yeah, I've been looking at Upland and there's, there's a actually a surprisingly number, a large number of green dots. Not in Upland proper, but if you go over to Ontario there's a few places in Ontario, Ontario's more industrial. So I'm not surprised. In fact, there's four or five places. In fact, there's one that might be the one for you called prudent it Tech Asset Recovery. That sounds like somebody that burns motherboards and sulfuric asset to me. <Laugh>. Oh, right. Prudent it. Tech Asset Recovery. Huh. So some of these are just your, your regular recyclers, but you know, like the greenway solid waste guys do the regular, that's probably the guys who come around in the green truck and pick up your stuff on the curb. But there are some, it looks like in Ontario, I wouldn't be surprised that there are some specialty places. And there may still be somebody who, you know, hyper technology solutions. That sounds like somebody might do it also.

Caller 1 (00:51:41):
Yeah, that sounds great.

Leo Laporte (00:51:42):
Yeah. Yeah, check it out. And, and of course we have listeners all over the world, so one hopes that there is a you know, at least statewide, if not local recycler that will do the right thing with this stuff. But you could see how hard it is and how unlikely the Chinese stopped accepting our recycling for burning. Yes. And that's, that's costing, you know, it happens, it just goes in the landfill now, which it shouldn't because it leeches out all those ugh chemicals come out of it. And that's not a good thing. No. Hey, I'm glad you thank you for calling and asking and doing the right thing. Lewis in Hollywood, my friend Lewis. Hi Lewis.

Caller 2 (00:52:20):
Mr. President,

Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
Cheers to you. Happy holidays.

Caller 2 (00:52:24):
I've been starting my calls that way since you were elected president of the internet in 2009. Holy cow. This is the last time I'll be saying it on the radio. <Laugh>. before my questions, I wanna let you know that after a three year hiatus, the return of tuba Christmas LA was a spectacular success. Scott,

Leo Laporte (00:52:43):
You hear that? I do. Louis went, Hey. Well that's so

Caller 2 (00:52:48):
Great. Yeah. that Hall of Liberty and Burbank seats 1200 and it was almost a capacity crowd. Nice. The only disappointment was that Maestro Wilkinson was only there to conduct, there was an audible sigh of disappointment and concern when we were informed he was

Leo Laporte (00:53:05):
Oh, Lewis, thank you for the report. I'm glad Scott was still here to hear that. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He came running back in <laugh>,

Caller 2 (00:53:14):
Leo for my final call on the tech guy on radio. I have two quick questions. One technical, one historical. First of all, at this point in the development of the Mac and Mac Os is a program like micro mats, tech tool pro of any use,

Leo Laporte (00:53:29):
You know, it is occasionally, these are programs that will, and there are a number of companies that do this. Micro mats, one of the best, that will let you honor erase files, things like that. So for the un erasing feature, yes. You don't need to defrag disks anymore. There's some question about whether the part of the tool that gets rid of temp files and cash files is necessary. I wouldn't buy it if you've got it. Well worth keeping it, Louis. I wouldn't get rid of it. Hey, hold your second part for later. We gotta take a break. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys stay here. And Louis, see that's the problem with radio is the clock never sleeps.

Caller 2 (00:54:12):
Oh. I've been listening at pop radio since I was six years old. So

Leo Laporte (00:54:16):
I love talk radio, I just love it. And you know, one of the, I do too, one of the problems AM radio's gonna suffer is most electric vehicles don't have am radios in them because the of the noise created by the electric motors. Really? and so, oh, I didn't realize that either. That's gonna even further impact KFI and others. It's

Caller 2 (00:54:36):
Well I recently this earlier this year, I got a RAV4 prime plugin hybrid and it still has good,

Leo Laporte (00:54:45):
Yeah, yeah. That's probably going forward. Something you're gonna always wanna look for. Yeah. What was your second question, Louis?

Caller 2 (00:54:53):
Leo I contributed a brick inscribed Oh, to the brick house.

Leo Laporte (00:54:59):
What does it say?

Caller 2 (00:55:00):
It says long-lived dev null ha

Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
<Laugh>. I remember that brick.

Caller 2 (00:55:04):
Yeah. And, but I never ma managed to make it up to the brick house. Did you make any visual records?

Leo Laporte (00:55:11):
We did. There's a giga pan of it somewhere. Boy, yeah, cuz you know, I may or may not have been able to save it. We you probably heard this story that the bricks were mortared onto drywall. Yeah. With real brick mortar. We, if we had known that the mason was gonna do that, we would've stopped him and said, can you use rubber cement <laugh>? But so in order to get those bricks off the, the drywall comes with them often in chunks. Yeah. So we'd have to use a wire or wheel or something to get the drywall off. We did it with a sum. So I have some kind of a sample, maybe a hundred or 200. But there were 1800 bricks in the did we, bur do we still have those in a storehouse or did we finally give up?

(00:55:53):
We might still have 'em in the in the storage, but so I'll look for yours, but let me see if I can find that giga giga pan. Cuz somebody did a, you know, you don't have those giga pans. You use a special camera. Yep. Yeah, if you go to gigapan.com they're set, it's in the gallery twit. Great. Brickhouse bricks. So those are so high res that you should be able to zoom in. Oh, John did 'em, there's five of them. So I'll put a link in the show notes. But I think if you just, just Google GigaPan brickhouse sp bricks. John did those. And you can zoom in very, very tight on those. So you should be EAs I mean, good luck searching. Yeah. <laugh>, there's 1800 of them.

Caller 2 (00:56:36):
I'll

Leo Laporte (00:56:37):
Find it. But John made a copy. Thank you John, for doing that. That's great. Yep. Jammer b our studio guy is the best. So that's

Caller 2 (00:56:45):
Leo, I'm gonna miss you on Saturday. Aw. And I'll be tuning in Sundays,

Leo Laporte (00:56:48):
Well just think of me as eating a lovely brunch. Yeah. <laugh> <laugh>. I'll be at the International House of Pancakes. If you're looking for me, Louis, I'll miss talking to you on a regular basis, but I do hope you'll call him, we're gonna use Zoom for the show on Sunday. So

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:02):
I

Caller 2 (00:57:02):
Look

Leo Laporte (00:57:03):
Forward to it. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, Louis.

Caller 2 (00:57:05):
Take care. Bye.

Leo Laporte (00:57:06):
Bye my guys. Bye-Bye. Oh, I love Louis. Been calling me for a long time. All right, Scott, you got six and a half.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:15):
Thanks. Thank you. How that was, how nice of him to,

Leo Laporte (00:57:19):
He's a really great guy. Christmas. Yeah, he's a really great guy.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:22):
I'm so sorry I wasn't there to say hi to him in person. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:57:26):
Sorry you weren't either. That's such a bummer.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:28):
It was a super bummer, man. I, I was waiting until the last second I was thinking, oh, may maybe I'll, you know, I'll take enough drugs that I'll be okay. And my doctor finally said, you really shouldn't get on a plane. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:57:42):
Yeah. Cuz the pressure really can hurt.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:44):
Really hurt. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
Really

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:46):
Hurt. Yeah. so they, they pressurize that cabin to a, I think a, an altitude of 8,000 feet. Yikes. Which is really low pressure. It's higher than Denver. Yeah. By, by a lot. And I've get affected in, in Denver with asthma. Right. So anyway, I do have it all planned out for next year, December 3rd Sunday. I'm gonna do it by golly.

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Good. December 3rd. You're prepared, <laugh>. I'm prepared.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:15):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:58:16):
You can definitely read every brick Lewis. I'm looking at 'em.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:20):
But

Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
Good luck.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:21):
I do have my brick at, when I, when I did a brick, I you know, they, they had the option of, you know, you can order one that, that they send to you. And I did.

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
There's so many. So

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:32):
I

Leo Laporte (00:58:32):
Have my brick, it breaks my heart. But those bricks built the studio. And so I'm forever

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:38):
Grateful. And that studio was so awesome.

Leo Laporte (00:58:39):
It was. And the

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:40):
Studio was a amazing,

Leo Laporte (00:58:41):
The good thing is all of them have, all of them are, you know, all of the bits of it is here. So Really, you built this studio too? We couldn't have done this like this where I'm sitting, this is all the original stuff. We just took it with us. That's all

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:55):
Uhhuh <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:58:56):
All right. I'll give you your five minutes. I'm gonna get a cup

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:58):
Of coffee. Okay. Go get a cup of coffee. Steve, in San Diego. My brick is in set. Five. Oh good. Thanks for letting me know. And redacted also found my geek out brick. That's great. Yeah. That was what I put on it for sure. My catchphrase. Everybody's gotta have a catchphrase, right? At least those of us on the air. So huh. PS chops was talking about a friend of his that got stuck in the subway with his tuba. And I thought he was just, you know, the subway stopped and he was just stuck in a, in a car. But no, he was physically stuck. They had to extract him. And I asked if he was okay, and he said, yeah, he's okay. But the tuba was a bit dented, thank goodness for cough switches. So that was sad. Hopefully not too dented. My tuba got its first dent about a month or two ago, which I was kind of bummed about.

(01:00:10):
 James asks if I'm, any of my holiday presents are coming to me with the size of a large screen tv. And the answer is not, not for the holidays, but come the springtime when we move into our new house. I am planning to get a new TV and it will almost certainly be the Sony cutie o led loquacious. Yes, indeed. My brick says geek out, which which I was happy to do, happy to contribute to that. I missed that studio. Boy, that was a great studio. And Leo's right. Most of the stuff that was in there is now in the new studio. But there was something special about that, about that studio. The brick had the real brick house with that revolving control center. You had different sets and the whole control center could move and face this set. And then that set, that was brilliant. Just brilliant tech tido. Do I have a tie-Dye Welcome Matt. I don't know yet. We haven't found, we haven't found our welcome Matt yet.

(01:01:23):
 Mike b Yeah. You won't get to see the new house, my new studio. Because this show is ending, unless maybe I get a guest appearance, who knows? Maybe Rich will walk me on once in a while to talk about home theater. That'd be cool. But I'll certainly be I hope to be on Leo and Mikah's internet show now and again. That would be also extremely cool. I would ha be happy to do that. Anytime. Although I must say if Leo, if Leo and Mikah are doing Sundays, Leo was just talking about being able to go to brunch. Of course. Maybe if they do it in the afternoon, you can still go to brunch. I love brunch. My, my Sunday brunch is very important to me. My wife and I, we, we like that very, very much. So I don't blame Leo for wanting to go enjoy brunch now that this long weekend commitment is coming to a closed.

(01:02:23):
Oh. Might be l Leo will brunch on Saturday. Yeah, that's true. You could brunch on Saturday. I don't see any reason why not. Thank you Tec Dino. The success of my own podcast. It's going pretty good. I'm getting a lot of great guests, that's for sure. The guest this week on Tuesday is I told you a world famous home theater designer. His name is Keith Yates, and he runs his own company, Keith Yates Designs very high-end theaters. But the, you know, the, the basic concepts are the same. No matter how much you spend, you, you want good acoustics, you want a good room. And if you can spend the money, great. But we're gonna be talking about pretty high end theaters. Aspirational, shall we say. You know, you read car magazines and Mr.

Leo Laporte (01:03:16):
W

Scott Wilkinson (01:03:17):
Ferrari,

Leo Laporte (01:03:18):
Mr. W

Scott Wilkinson (01:03:19):
And Days.

Leo Laporte (01:03:20):
Mr. W. Geek on man, geeky. Geeky, geeky.

Scott Wilkinson (01:03:24):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:03:25):
Me. Thank you, sir. I'm glad you're feeling better.

Scott Wilkinson (01:03:27):
Thanks.

Leo Laporte (01:03:28):
And we'll talk to you next week. We'll see you next week. The

Scott Wilkinson (01:03:31):
Last, the last one,

Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
Wilkinson. Thank you, sir. Bye.

(01:03:46):
Well, ho ho ho ho

(01:03:49):
Ho. Do you think they can tell that I'm jingling my

Mikah Sargent (01:03:52):
Slippers? I don't know. <Laugh>. I now they know

Leo Laporte (01:03:56):
<Laugh>. Oh, it's the holidays. And you're listening to the tech guy's show Mikah, Sargent Leo LaPorte. And we're kind of dressed for the occasion. Absolutely. I like these slippers. I don't get to wear 'em very often.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:09):
And they make, they, there's a good rhythm to them. They

Leo Laporte (01:04:12):
Have a good While you're walking <laugh>. I kinda scared Mikah coming down the hall. Yeah. I thought what you thought. Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:18):
I didn't know if there was a, a Christmas ice cream man making his way around the studio.

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):
So we're generated images of Kim using some images she sent us. And you know what there's nothing of, of offensive, so I think lens probably, cuz we did, I did my wife in Thursday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> also with similarly normal pictures. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and got some n nudes back. Yeah. so this, maybe they're fixing it, hopefully, because they must have heard from people saying, I don't like what you're doing with my picture.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:49):
Especially since it's in the App Store rated

Leo Laporte (01:04:50):
Four. Yeah. Apple doesn't like that. Yeah. Yeah. Apple didn't like that. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number if you wanna talk to the tech guys. David is on the line from Bel Air Texas. Hello, David.

Caller 3 (01:05:02):
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:05:03):
Welcome.

Caller 3 (01:05:05):
I am delighted to to talk to you. I'm a longtime listener and viewer before then. From what, in the last century?

Leo Laporte (01:05:15):
<Laugh>? Yes, it was. Oh, now when you put it that way, <laugh> back in the 1990s <laugh>.

Caller 3 (01:05:23):
Wow. Yeah. Wow. and, and I had something I wanted to speak to you about, which is not gonna re gonna require more than just a a short answer or two from you, but I am I'm so glad that Scott was on there. I hope he's still around.

Leo Laporte (01:05:39):
We just lost him. No, he's left. The Wilkinson has left the building, but I can channel him pretty well having listened to him for about 15 years. So go ahead and let me see what I can do.

Caller 3 (01:05:50):
So my, my, my father built speakers for as long as I can. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:05:55):
No kidding. That's cool.

Caller 3 (01:05:56):
Yeah. He would be mixing up concrete in the backyard Wow. And wooden boxes and filling 'em with concrete and such. Wow. He he's 94 years old and a geophysicist. Wow. Aist used sound to sure.

Leo Laporte (01:06:18):
Probe the earth, you know. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:06:20):
Probe the earth. And, and, and he was in computers as long as I can remember. He was the guy who led the world's largest petroleum company into the use of, of computers for processing information for geophysics.

Leo Laporte (01:06:36):
No kidding. Amazing. So my dad's a geologist and during the summer he would, he is a professor during the school year and during the summer, he would consult for petroleum companies for the same thing doing searching for oil, helping them, helping find new wells. So maybe they knew each other. That's cool. What company did your dad? My,

Caller 3 (01:06:57):
My, my, my dad was president of the geophysical inter the International Geo. Oh yeah. Professional. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:07:04):
He I'm sure knew my father then. Yeah, he probably did. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, that's cool. I ask him. Yeah. He's got the same name as me.

Caller 3 (01:07:12):
Pardon?

Leo Laporte (01:07:13):
My father's name is same as mine. I am my father's son.

Caller 3 (01:07:17):
And he was the professor in at Santa Cruz

Leo Laporte (01:07:22):
Or, yeah, uc, Santa Cruz. Wow. Yeah. He was the chairman of the geology department. Oh, you, you have been listening <laugh> David. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, yeah, no, seriously. Oh yeah, I knew that <laugh>. Well, anyway, it's apl. Is this your first time Collin?

Caller 3 (01:07:36):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, and it's amazing that I was able to do it today. I've never listened to you on the radio before. I, and I, I've never could find a, a a, a station that, that played it. Maybe there is one in the Houston area. I just never been able to find it. So I've been searching for like K f I trying to, to listen to

Leo Laporte (01:08:02):
It. Well, we can make it easier for you, <laugh>, if you go to tech guy labs.com, all 1,951 shows are on the website. <Laugh>?

Caller 3 (01:08:11):
No, I'm a subscriber. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:08:13):
To your, oh, bless you. Premium serve. Oh, bless you. Thank you, David.

Caller 3 (01:08:18):
And and wanna get on mass on sometime soon. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:08:22):
Well look for you. That's great. Yeah, please do. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:08:26):
So he, I told you he's been being designing speakers forever. Yes. And he has a house he built around the speaker. About 15 years ago he and my mom decided now dead mom decided that they wanted to build a house to retire to on the same place where they lived Mm. On the same property where they had built a house in 59. And and so he designed this, this speaker that, I'm gonna describe this to you. It's, it, it sits in the ceiling of his den. He did not build a, a, a theater room, but he, this, this, the bottom of this, this subwoofer, it sits at the ceiling level and it goes through the second floor into the third floor. And if you can imagine a, a rectangle in the ceiling that's like six feet wide by 14 feet long or so. And then a similar rectangle in the center above that, on the third floor that's on the, and that, that rectangle at, at the center is only about three feet wide by two feet long and two subwoofer mounted there. That, that, and sound downwards into the chamber. That's below that divided in, in half by a wall. And the whole thing is, is packed in concrete, the sides of it. Anyway, it's, it's kind of like a you, you were talking about a boombox car. This is a boombox house.

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
<Laugh>. That's pretty cool. That's really neat. That's pretty cool. I think that's what a great hobby. Did you were you, did you listen, did you, were you living there at the time or was this after you left ho left home?

Caller 3 (01:10:26):
Well, actually I had moved back to Houston while he was doing this and designing his new house. And I actually helped him build the speaker. How quality, how cool. And he built the speaker himself while the house was being constructed, he built it down into den. And

Leo Laporte (01:10:49):
That's so amazing.

Caller 3 (01:10:51):
It's sandwiched wood with concrete that we filled inside of it, and then we had still beans that we hoisted it up into place.

Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. your, your, your dad's still doing it? Or is he kind of retired from that?

Caller 3 (01:11:09):
Well, actually he's still kicking <laugh>. Yeah. And he's doing pretty well. He slows down. Yeah. A lot. My, my mother died about two years ago, and dad kept on one of her, his, her nurses to be his kind of aid. Nice, nice. And good. And we're trying to get my dad to stop driving

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
<Laugh>. He's still driving. Wow. Oh,

Caller 3 (01:11:34):
No, it's, it's a, his aid is supposed to drive him. Yeah. But she's there five days a week. In fact, when I left, I live two doors down from him now. Oh, nice. And when I, and when I left a little while ago, I noticed that he had gone someplace

Leo Laporte (01:11:51):
Snuck out. Huh? My

Caller 3 (01:11:52):
Brother. My brother and I met our, our, my, my one and only brother. And I met with an advisor yesterday about how to address this subject.

Leo Laporte (01:12:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it means freedom to him. In fact, you know, in a way that's why this country has such a car culture. It means freedom and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. You know, it's funny because my daughter, when she was 15 and a half planned to get her license, it meant out of the house, my son. And I think this is not unusual for kids these days. It was about 18 before even kind of bothered to get his driver's license. I remember I was a kid. You, yeah. Did you, did you run and get yours or Mikah? I

Mikah Sargent (01:12:28):
Ran and got my permit and to take me a little bit to get my license. Yeah. Most of that was just because we didn't have extra

Leo Laporte (01:12:33):
Cars or Yeah. It's hard that way.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:34):
Yeah. So, you know, you didn't have, but I wanted that freedom for sure. And once I had it, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:12:38):
It was great. Can't wait. Get in that car. And I imagine it's hard to give it up. Yeah. Yeah. We got our, my mom to give it up sometime ago, fortunately. But she doesn't want to go anywhere <laugh>, so it's Okay. Well, I'm a I'm,

Caller 3 (01:12:50):
There's Uber. There's Uber and whatever, but my Exactly. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
You know, nowadays I figure I can Uber anywhere. It's a little more expensive, but how often, you know, does he go out? Hey, it's a real pleasure to, to to finally speak to you, David.

Caller 3 (01:13:04):
Hold on, hold on. I, I, real quick, I wanna tell you my, my, my tech question.

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
Well, you won't have time to do it on the air, but we've got the podcast. We're gonna Okay. Have to take a break for the for the radio listeners, folks, the ad people. Okay. 88. 88 es Leo's the phone number. We will get back in just a moment with more of your calls and who's coming up in the bottom of the hour? Mr. Johnny Jet, our travel guru stay here. So you're still on? I just, I have to let the, I have to give at least for a couple more weekends, I have to give the radio people their due

Caller 3 (01:13:46):
<Laugh>. Well, thank you for letting me hang on.

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
Sure. David. And you're on the podcast too, just so you know. So you're still part of the show? Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:13:54):
Oh, so, so the tech question has to do with mesh.

Leo Laporte (01:13:59):
Okay?

Caller 3 (01:13:59):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And and several years ago, three, four years ago, maybe you had a somebody onto the life of me. I cannot remember his name,

Leo Laporte (01:14:08):
Jim Salter,

Caller 3 (01:14:09):
But

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
I'm guessing. Pardon? He Jim Salter, who was the wifi reviewer from ARS Technica. Really brilliant guy.

Caller 3 (01:14:17):
Exactly. Yes. And he came to Houston to speak to our Houston area or our Houston area, apple user group by a couple of times.

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
Nice.

Caller 3 (01:14:27):
Yeah. But he was really big on Plume. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
You remember Plume. I do remember. And, and Comcast ended up kind of, they didn't buy 'em, but they gave 'em so much money that it's really become a comcastic company. Yeah, yeah.

Caller 3 (01:14:41):
And, and I'm a tech consultant and I put among other things, and I, I, I have put plume in several of my clients places and plum and ERO usually. Yeah. And I cannot say enough good about plume and about their attention to their clients. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:15:04):
That's good to hear. Actually,

Caller 3 (01:15:06):
24 7, 7 days a week. He

Leo Laporte (01:15:09):
Liked plume. And in fact, I got a plume system because of him, because his, he, you know, his contention was there. There's more interference than you realize, just even from humans and putting a wifi extension in each room. Plume always says that it's like a, a, a lamp. You wouldn't try to read a book from two rooms away. But the problem is it gets pretty pricey. Cuz you, you end up putting those little knobs on every plug socket. <Laugh>. No,

Caller 3 (01:15:35):
No more pricey than Euro.

Leo Laporte (01:15:37):
No Euro's pricey too. You're right. What are the, what are the little plume things cost a hundred bucks?

Caller 3 (01:15:44):
Well no, they're of, are they cheaper? They're are different size ones.

Leo Laporte (01:15:49):
Yeah. You have the base station, and then you have those little knob I call 'em. Yeah,

Caller 3 (01:15:54):
The newest,

Leo Laporte (01:15:55):
Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:15:57):
I'm sorry, go

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):
Ahead. No, no, go ahead. You go ahead. No, you, you'll go.

Caller 3 (01:16:00):
You, no, you So <laugh>. So the newest ones are about 250 bucks. Unless you get some, you know, a a a Black Friday dealer. I, they,

Leo Laporte (01:16:11):
I ended up with nine of them. Holy moly. So I spent maybe, probably close to a thousand bucks on Plume what I do. What? And I ended up replacing it. I, I, I, it was unhappy. I think they were maybe not working well together because I was unhappy. And so then I replaced it with an orbi, which I liked. But it really, we've done the right thing, which is we, we put in ethernet everywhere, and I put in ubiquity. And so we have a, a five ubiquity based stations or WPAs w the wps, I mean, and that really has made all the difference. So we're wired everywhere. We want to be like the TVs and the stations. And then for everything else, there's very, very good wifi. That's been a good solution for us. But that's a, that's even more expensive. <Laugh>, if, I think if I added up how much I've spent on wifi <laugh> over the last few years. But you like those plumes. That's good to know. And, and they may have gotten better. I mean, this was years ago. This is when they first came out, so,

Caller 3 (01:17:14):
Yeah. But thank you so much for taking my call and look

Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
Forward to David. A pleasure meeting you. I'll look, I'll look for you on the umas. Thanks for joining the club too. I, I really appreciate that. Makes a big difference to us. $1 less than a blue check on Twitter. And you get so much more <laugh>. Indeed. Thanks David. Thank you. See ya. Bye. That's cool. As dad built a house around his speaker. That's so awesome. It's wild. This is wild. Hey everybody, it's Leo Laport, the founder and host of many of the Twitter podcasts. I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. 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.

(01:18:10):
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? And boy, do you get a lot with advertising on the TWiTT podcasts. Partnering with twit 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.

(01:19:04):
Every time I read them, our hosts read them. We always overdeliver on impressions. And frankly, we are 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. 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 product sincerely 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 to people who buy a significant amount of advertising. You'll get social media promotion to.

(01:19:58):
But let me tell you, we are looking for an advertising partner that's gonna be with us long term. Visit Twitter tv slash advertise. Check out our, 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, a really amazing success. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years. And they say, and I'll quote Tim, we would not be where we are today without the twit network. That's just one example. Mark McCreary, who's the c e o of Authentic he was actually 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.

(01:20:55):
I'm proud to say that the ads we do overdeliver, 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. 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 twit.tv. Visit twit.tv/advertise for more details, or email us advertise@twit.tv. If you're ready to launch your campaign now. <Laugh> Leo, look forward to Mikah. Sargent dancing to the tunes here. Yo Boogie [inaudible] guy <laugh> eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the US or Canadian. Back to the phones we go as we dance. Jerry on the line from Great Falls, Montana. Hi Jerry.

Caller 4 (01:22:14):
Hello, Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:22:15):
Welcome.

Caller 4 (01:22:18):
You've been talking about the chat G B T Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
Application, the ar, artificial intelligence that chats with you.

Caller 4 (01:22:26):
Right? How do you, how do I engage it?

Leo Laporte (01:22:30):
It's free for the time being. If you go to openai.com, open a, I'm sorry, dot org, I think. No, it's dot com. It's dot com. Yep. openai.com. And I think it's slash chat. Let me just, just see. Yeah, it's chat.openai.com/chat. They say chat twice because it's doubly good. And then you'll, it'll say, well, you need an account. So you have to create an open AI account. But once you've done that, then you can get to the chat G P T interface. And the way it works is much like the art artificial intelligence art, you, you give it a prompt. You type in some text. And what's interesting is if you just ask my, my daughter was doing things like, well you know, what's the meaning of life? That's not good <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:16):
But if you ask it more concrete things or give it really elaborate concrete scenarios, just like the AI art, it does a better job. So I think down the road, it's gonna be a way that people will do what you did, Mikah, which is synopsize articles, I think for documentation for like how do I fix this dishwasher? You could probably make a chat. Use this technology to make a really good responsive, helpful tool. Do you wish? Just wanna play with it, Jerry.

Caller 4 (01:23:43):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:23:45):
Well do it. It's free right now. I can't imagine they're gonna keep this free for much longer. So do it right now. <Laugh>,

Caller 4 (01:23:52):
You tell, you wanna do a poem or a new

Mikah Sargent (01:23:56):
Things. So it looks like a little text box. You'll see at the bottom, almost like you're sending a text to a friend. And there you can quite literally type anything you want. Just the other day I said, Hey, can you come up with a conspiracy theory involving the fbi, NBC's the office sitcom and a slice of lemon meringue pie? And it worked and it came up with an idea involving all of those things. Jerry,

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
What would you, if you were sitting in front of it right now, cuz I am, what would you ask it? And I'll ask it and we can see what happens.

Caller 4 (01:24:25):
Oh, I'm not sure.

Leo Laporte (01:24:26):
It's, it's hard to come up with a good prompt. I mean, lemon meran pie, <laugh>, the office conspiracy theory. Those are a strange mesh of this mesh of things. Why don't, why

Mikah Sargent (01:24:37):
Don't we go with what should Jerry ask a, an AI if he wants to learn more about large language models?

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
<Laugh> <laugh>, I'm sure that Jerry does not want to, but I will <laugh>, I will type that in.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:57):
So, Jerry, why I'm saying that it chat g p t behind the scenes, it is a large language model, meaning that it uses lots of data of different text to kind of come up with an answer.

Leo Laporte (01:25:08):
The, your answer is, if Jerry wants to learn more about large language models, he might wanna ask the AI about the specific training process and architecture of the model. He could also ask about the type of tasks the model is designed to perform and any notable achievements or challenges the model has faced. Additionally, Jerry might want to ask about any current or ongoing research in the field of large language models and how the field is evolving. That's actually a good answer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like if you asked an expert, that's probably what they would say. Here's some areas to ask about. Now I'm gonna say something stupid like <laugh>. Let's see. Tell Jerry the best way to make tomato soup. To make tomato soup. Follow these steps. And there's actually a recipe that looks pretty good and tea to taste. Two tablespoon of olive oil at a chopped onions. Stir a can of diced tomatoes. Bring the soup to a simmer. Use an immersion blender. This is exactly how I make my tomato soup. Wow. It must have been looking over my mother's shoulder <laugh>. So that's, I guess that's not that hard cuz it just could have looked up a recipe. What

Mikah Sargent (01:26:16):
I like about this is that Leo, then you could say, I like it, but I want more spice. And so then it would give some suggestions. It it understands what he's saying. It has the context of, of him asking about tomato soup. And so it says, Hey, why don't you try stirring in some chili flakes or hot sauce when you add the cans, tomatoes, it'll give the soup a nice kick of heat

Leo Laporte (01:26:39):
Or chopped fresh jalapeno serrano peppers. When you cook the onions in step two, it knew what it had just told me. And I didn't have to say anything, but just make it spicier. Okay. Or now I could say, or now make it more festive.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:57):
<Laugh>. Perfect. I love that. Whenever it's kind of ambiguous

Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
To make it more festive, you could try adding some seasonal ingredients or garnishes, stirring some cooked crumbled sausage. Oh, that sounds good. Garnish each bowl with a dollop of pest to nuts. This is good. Ooh, I wanna make this,

Mikah Sargent (01:27:12):
I want a chestnut tomato

Leo Laporte (01:27:13):
Soup. Now. Anyway, there is some u there is some actual usefulness. It's not just a toy, it is toy like. And then you can ask it weird things like Mikah's bazaar Bizarre question. Office slash lemon meringue pie question. And you get bizarre responses on Tek News's Weekly, your news podcast this week. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you had it write what a script.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:33):
I inter inter I asked it a series of questions and it responded to them. And then I just spoke its responses out loud and made it sound as if it was coming from chat G p T. So I interviewed chat g p t essentially, and it was good and it went well. Yeah. And it was kind of funny at times because you figure out it doesn't, I will tell you this Jerry and the tip for everybody, it really doesn't like talking about itself. So it, it kind of has trouble understanding the concept of itself, obviously, because it's not alive. It's not that. But if you ask it questions that aren't exactly related to that, you can get some really interesting and helpful responses, which is what we

Leo Laporte (01:28:08):
Ended up. I'm gonna say, why did Lens make the pictures of my wife so sexy, but not Kim? I don't know what it's gonna make of that. I'm sorry, but I'm not able to browse the internet and do not have any information about Lens or the pictures you're referring to. And if I had seen them, I would never tell anybody.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:32):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
No. I added that part at the end. David, try it. It's free right now. It's not gonna be free forever. It costs them buku bucks. You know, Google said 10 times more than a Google search to do a typical chat G p t query. That's a big expense. You know, maybe it's only a nickel or a dime or a quarter for open ai, but there are millions of people using this right now. In fact, I was playing with it on Thursday and it said, no, no, I'm too busy. I can't,

Mikah Sargent (01:29:01):
You, you know what's funny is I asked it. I said, Hey, how come you're having so many problems? I've your loading times are bad and I can't get in. It doesn't have any concept of that. And so it said I am just a large language model. There's clearly something wrong with your wifi connection. Oh, you need to fix your ne your

Leo Laporte (01:29:15):
Home. You need to buy some plumes. <Laugh>. That's interesting David. Have fun with it. It's, I'm sorry Jerry. Have fun with it. It is a very interesting peek into I think what our future might hold. I mean, there, there really is some question. We were talking at the beginning of the show about how self-driving vehicles just haven't been able to do it. It's just too hard to do that last bit that makes it safe. And, and and, okay. Yeah. Even the ones like Cruz and Waymo that are doing it on the city streets these days get baffled by green lights sometimes. But I do think that these kinds of smart chatbots are in our future. Yes. You know, imagine if you connected this to Amazon's echo, it'd be a lot more fun. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys. Johnny Jett coming up. Pinch of Ground Cinnamon.

Mikah Sargent (01:30:04):
Honestly, the big thing I think about is because when you, if you call into a support com, you know, call and you try to get help, perfect for that. The human being only has so many yeah. Points that they can look at. But this has everything. It has all of it at once. So if you train it to that dataset, I can say this is the very specific thing I'm dealing with with my iPhone. It puts a hundred d billion different points together and goes, oh, I know exactly what this is and I can help you with that. That is mind bogglingly. Awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:30:35):
<Laugh>, let me see. What would be the best way to get the best price on my airline tickets? To which, where should we go? Cabo San Lucas at Christmas. See if it can, it can, it can replace Johnny Jet. Hi, Johnny <laugh>. Hi. Johnny. Can't replace me. What are you talking

Mikah Sargent (01:30:55):
About? No, it doesn't have your charm.

Leo Laporte (01:30:58):
<Laugh>. Here we go. I'm gonna type that in to ch whatever it's called. Chat G p t. And what would be the best way to get the best price on my airline tickets to Cabo for? Oh, you should. I put the year in for,

Mikah Sargent (01:31:15):
It only has Christmas 2020 data up to 2021. So it'll be interesting to see what it says about that.

Leo Laporte (01:31:21):
I'm sorry, but I'm a large language model. Can't browse the internet. Yeah. So that's what it's saying basically is, you know,

Mikah Sargent (01:31:28):
A cutoff date of 2021.

Leo Laporte (01:31:30):
I don't know anything about the future.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:31):
So try asking it without the 2022 at the end. Okay. You can just go up and Yeah. Edit it. On the right there there's a button to click edit. Nope. Ah, still doesn't like, doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:31:46):
Like it.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:47):
Boo

Leo Laporte (01:31:48):
Doesn't like it. It's nice that you can easily edit the the result.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:53):
Yeah. You

Johnny Jet (01:31:53):
Can go LA to Cabo on the 24th and come back the 30th. Yeah. Or 360 round trip on United.

Leo Laporte (01:32:00):
We would want to go to Cabo is

Johnny Jet (01:32:01):
The problem. Not me, but <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
I mean,

Johnny Jet (01:32:04):
I mean I love Cabo. Don't get me wrong, it's, it's been a while since I've

Leo Laporte (01:32:07):
Been there, but I don't think it's it's funny. We have family members who have a restaurant, but not in Cabo San Lucas. Not in the, but in the old Cabo

Johnny Jet (01:32:18):
Santo

Leo Laporte (01:32:19):
I can't remember what it's called, but it's got another name. Cabo something, something something. But that's more, that's not so weird. Not so, so strange. San Jose Cabo.

Johnny Jet (01:32:34):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:32:34):
San Jose. And the, apparently it's a good restaurant. I have to, I have to get down there.

Johnny Jet (01:32:39):
They have some good

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
Food though. Henry goes down there for a spearfish all the time. Cuz I guess they have a house down there. So he goes down there. He just did a, he just did a, a collab with Owen, another sandwich, TikTok sandwich guy. They went down and Spearfish. Who

Johnny Jet (01:32:55):
Has a house down there? Your

Leo Laporte (01:32:56):
Son? My no, he will though. It's only amount of time. No, his his cousins.

Johnny Jet (01:33:01):
I

Leo Laporte (01:33:02):
Gotcha. Yeah. So yeah, I do think we want to get away for we have a week after Christmas of available to just not

Johnny Jet (01:33:14):
Well it's not gonna be cheap.

Leo Laporte (01:33:15):
Is it? Is it gonna be expensive?

Johnny Jet (01:33:17):
I mean, I mean, hotels definitely won't be cheap. That's the most expensive week of the year. Yeah. Between Christmas and

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
New Year's, I'm gonna put some sand in the backyard and get a, a sun lamp.

Johnny Jet (01:33:27):
Go the week after New Year's.

Leo Laporte (01:33:29):
You are can't wear

Johnny Jet (01:33:29):
At work. You'll find crazy deals.

Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
You're at work can't.

Johnny Jet (01:33:32):
Well, the slowest weeks of the year to

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
Travel Really the week after New Year's. Yes. Because we're back at work.

Johnny Jet (01:33:39):
We are back at work. Kids are back in school. Yeah. Everyone spent their money. Everyone's partying out.

Leo Laporte (01:33:43):
Oh, I have to show you Kim's pictures. I forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:33:49):
So this is my last.

Leo Laporte (01:33:51):
You're not gonna be here next week.

Johnny Jet (01:33:54):
I'm gonna be traveling unless my wife is still sick. Cuz she's still sick. She now has covid. All

Leo Laporte (01:33:58):
Right, well you can say goodbye. This is

Johnny Jet (01:34:00):
Great.

Leo Laporte (01:34:00):
No, it didn't do any of the weird sexiness with Kim. That doesn't look like her, but whoa.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:05):
Sort of a, a fighter or something.

Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
I think it did. Some of these are really fun. Whoa.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:10):
Like blue skin.

Leo Laporte (01:34:11):
That's neat. Yeah. I like, I like the fairy Kim. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful?

Johnny Jet (01:34:17):
She looks great

Leo Laporte (01:34:19):
And, and none of this stuff. I think they fixed it.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:23):
I I

Leo Laporte (01:34:24):
Wouldn't be surprised. I think that they heard from people who said, what the hell are you doing?

Johnny Jet (01:34:28):
Which app is this?

Leo Laporte (01:34:29):
This is Lens and it's, so I gave, we gave her 20 pictures of Kim and then it generated these AI art versions of Kim.

Johnny Jet (01:34:38):
I almost downloaded it yesterday.

Leo Laporte (01:34:41):
Everywhere. Man. He is breathing the mountain air man. He's our Johnny Jet. Our travel guru joins us every week at this time. Johnny jet.com is the website. Hello Johnny.

Johnny Jet (01:34:53):
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
Your last appearance on the Tech Guy show cuz next week you're gonna be traveling. Knock, knock, knock on wood. 

Johnny Jet (01:35:02):
Hopefully yeah, my wife will be recovered.

Leo Laporte (01:35:04):
Yay. I hope so too. So, but I told Rich, I've, I I'm gonna give him the names of everybody who's on the show, so maybe he can get you on and we're gonna get you on the internet show from time to time. It won't be every week, but from time to time. Good.

Johnny Jet (01:35:18):
Yeah. Well I love, love the be

Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
Beyond. Yeah. Obviously we love you. Yeah, you're great.

Johnny Jet (01:35:22):
So I love you and thank you so much. I remember, you know, my first appearance was 2013 on this show I was on your Tech Guy show or the

Leo Laporte (01:35:29):
Call for help show out of Canada.

Johnny Jet (01:35:31):
Thousand three. No, outta San

Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
Francisco. In San Francisco. 2003. And then I forgot about you for 10 years.

Johnny Jet (01:35:38):
No, we, then I went to Vancouver with you. I went to Toronto with you and then you forgot about me for about 10 years

Leo Laporte (01:35:43):
<Laugh>.

Johnny Jet (01:35:43):
And then in 2013 you had me on, it was only supposed to be a one-off one week. And then everyone in the chat room was so nice and they, I guess they liked me and they, and you said, do you wanna come back next week? I said, sure. Next thing I know. I've been doing it almost every week. I've only missed a handful of episodes in the last nine years. So thank

Leo Laporte (01:35:59):
You so much. I know. I'm very grateful. I really am. You're awesome.

Johnny Jet (01:36:02):
I'm grateful. Yeah. I really am. I mean, I have people recognize me in the airport because of your, because of the podcast. That's great. And, and and the Skype.

Leo Laporte (01:36:09):
That's great. Well, I'm, I'm it's been a wonderful 10 years and I look forward to continued relationship. You've helped me travel all over the world, given me great advice and tips. Well and travel locally too. You've been just really fantastic. I know it's been a little rough for us all the last few years. Travel really kind of stopped.

Johnny Jet (01:36:31):
I mean, before Covid I was calling in almost every week from somewhere else.

Leo Laporte (01:36:34):
I remember in fact, that was our game. Where the hell is Johnny this week?

Johnny Jet (01:36:38):
There's Johnny.

Leo Laporte (01:36:39):
Who's Johnny. And you haven't done much since then, but I I do hope you get out and about there weren't, I mean in New York City now they're saying inside wear a mask now. So be careful everybody, if you do go anywhere, I feel like you

Johnny Jet (01:36:54):
Travels Covid last week. I had Covid last week. I'm over it. Thank God my wife has it now. My son has it. Now

Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
You got over it quick.

Johnny Jet (01:37:02):
Yeah. Fortunately I had very mild case. I've been boosted. I've

Leo Laporte (01:37:05):
All, that's why. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:37:06):
I had taxed and that really

Leo Laporte (01:37:08):
Helped. Oh, nice.

Johnny Jet (01:37:09):
But my wife had it rough. My son just basically has, it's a cold. And 

Leo Laporte (01:37:14):
Did they, did they all get covid after you? Did

Johnny Jet (01:37:16):
We think my daughter might be patient zero. Just not here. Cause we didn't test her. She's in

Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
It's hard school to tell. Yeah. It's really hard to tell. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:37:23):
But

Leo Laporte (01:37:24):
Anyway they say 42% of adult Americans have gotten it, but only 21% admit it.

Johnny Jet (01:37:30):
<Laugh>. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:37:31):
Which is pretty hysterical. <Laugh>, I admit it. Mikah is still a unicorn. I'm

Mikah Sargent (01:37:38):
Still a unicorn. And not one of those that didn't admit it. I swear

Leo Laporte (01:37:41):
To You're very careful though. I have not. Extremely careful. Yeah. And it's no fun.

Johnny Jet (01:37:45):
I wasn't until this last week. But anyway the big news this week, by the way, it's real. Id got extended again. I know we talked about it like a month ago. So this is crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:37:53):
They keep extreme. I know. So I went out and got one cuz I thought, oh, I'm gonna have to have one to fly. Yep. Nope.

Johnny Jet (01:38:00):
Just, I, I don't even worry about it. You know what? Cause I just carry my passport where Iwhenever I travel.

Leo Laporte (01:38:04):
I all you I do too. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:38:05):
So you don't, if you don't, if you have a passport and you travel with it, then you do not need a real id. But in

Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
California getting it is means, and this is true in most states, I think you go to the DMV when you and get a new driver's license. You have, there's a higher requirement of identification. I had to bring some other documents like a bill to show my real address. And then in California you get a golden bear with a star on it. That's the only way you know, it's real. Id

Johnny Jet (01:38:31):
And mine does not have that.

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Yeah. But just like you, I use my passport or even I got a passport card when I bought the passport. Do they still do that? The passport card? Yes, of course. That's really handy.

Johnny Jet (01:38:42):
Is more definitely the passport you driving across to Canada or Mexico.

Leo Laporte (01:38:46):
But it also, it serves as a federal ID and is good for a lot of just Id purposes, right?

Johnny Jet (01:38:52):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
Yeah. Without a doubt. Yes.

Johnny Jet (01:38:55):
The other big news, by the way, this week it was obviously Britney Griner coming home, but Joe Biden's speech President Biden's speech had a really good tip in there for international travelers. Really?

Leo Laporte (01:39:05):
President Biden's giving international travel tips. What

Johnny Jet (01:39:07):
Was his, you imagine that <laugh> what, what was it? So, you know, he said stay

Leo Laporte (01:39:12):
The hell away from Russia. Right.

Johnny Jet (01:39:14):
Well that's one of them. But always check the country specific state department's travel advisories. And, and you know what I remember, I think it was 2004, I was in Budapest with my buddies in Hungary and we were out for my buddy's bachelor party and we ran into some girls. They were like, let's go to this bar

Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
Uhoh.

Johnny Jet (01:39:30):
We totally got swindled. Yep. I think we, it was like $300 for four drinks or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:39:36):
A known swindle. Yep.

Johnny Jet (01:39:37):
The next day we look at their state that we Google it, it's on the state department's page. Wow. Including the bar that we are at. Wow. Say stay away from this bar and these other bars. Oh wow. So if it's a great tip, just always make sure that whatever, every country you're going to check those advisory. And you know what I would even actually add checking. Australia's Canada's a new case because they're all in English. You know, they're obviously not, it's

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Probably a good idea in case the US state department's being a little nervous. Nelly sometimes they are.

Johnny Jet (01:40:06):
Yeah. Sometimes it's political.

Leo Laporte (01:40:08):
Yeah. And then, but if you check Canada and Australia and they all three say, nah, they're not go to that bar. Then I would try, I would definitely trust it if all three countries say no, no, no. Or Johnny says it. Exactly. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:40:19):
Just, just check their ti just check, check their tips. Because they have, you know, I was watching on Shanghai and someone came up to me, said, would you like to go to a tea party? Yeah. And this is I ever, and I read that and I was like, no, sorry, I don't want to go buy any art or check out a tea party. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
<Laugh>.

Johnny Jet (01:40:35):
But if I didn't I might have. So my point is, it's a really good tip especially for international travelers and

Leo Laporte (01:40:43):
Very good advice.

Johnny Jet (01:40:44):
And it's easy to find those links to the Aust to Australia and UK and Canada, their state departments.

Leo Laporte (01:40:48):
Yep. Very, very good advice.

Johnny Jet (01:40:50):
I also put in the chat room. Did you see, you see that video of this guy named Danny McCaskill? He's a Red Bull bike rider. Just a regular

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
Bike. No,

Johnny Jet (01:40:59):
Going around San Francisco. He's from, he's from the island of sky. Island of Sky. Yeah. Is

Leo Laporte (01:41:03):
Of Sky. Is of Sky. Yes. Yeah. It's not quite an island. It's just an is. You

Johnny Jet (01:41:07):
Got, you gotta look at this video. It's five minutes long of San Francisco. He does the most amazing tricks you've ever seen on a bicycle. And it just makes, it's probably

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
Not legal on the streets of San Francisco. Go, I'm thinking. I

Johnny Jet (01:41:21):
Mean, he's going down Lumbar Street on his front wheel wheelie going backwards. Yeah. He's running across

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
Chain links encouraged that kind of behavior.

Johnny Jet (01:41:29):
No, you don't. But I mean, this guy is,

Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
He's a trained, unprofessional.

Johnny Jet (01:41:34):
It's like cir dule what

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
He does. Wow. Interesting. Oh, all right. You put that in the chat room, huh? I'll have to. I did

Johnny Jet (01:41:40):
Take a look at it. And what I like about it is they actually show him fall a few times and he gets up and do it. Does it again? I mean obviously the falls

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Hurt. No. A lot of times they edit that stuff out and you think, oh yeah, this is easy. So, so easy to do. No, but not easy. No. Check that

Johnny Jet (01:41:55):
Out. Another viral video this week was a baggage handler in Melbourne, Australia for Qantas. Actually. He was for Swissport a third party. And they showed him loading the bags or unloading the bags from the plane onto the conveyor belt. And he's just like body slamming, like he's Hulk Hogan almost. Oh geez. So I

Leo Laporte (01:42:13):
Wrote, I kind of feel like they do do that. Do you remember totally ages ago the Samsonite commercials where they had gorillas handling the baggage <laugh> <laugh> and they said, you need a Samsonite because of this. So it isn't too far off.

Johnny Jet (01:42:26):
No, but it's not. But what I like about it is that, first of all, you gotta behind the scenes of how they really load, unload the luggage.

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
It's interesting they get into the belly of the airplane and pack it in there. It's

Johnny Jet (01:42:36):
Very cool. They do. But, but it makes you a better traveler because it teaches you, first of all, you don't want to check a bag, number one, number one. Number two, that if you are gonna check a bag, make sure that you pack everything right. Like one time I made the mistake of buying a bottle of wine and putting it in my luggage a long time ago from Europe. You know, that bread bottle of wine went all over. My luggage ruined most of my clothes.

Leo Laporte (01:42:56):
Ah.

Johnny Jet (01:42:56):
So now, you know, to put it in one of those wine sleeves and, and, and then put it in plastic wrap it also, you know, get some really good oh, this video's awful

Leo Laporte (01:43:06):
Luggage. Do not, I'm watching the Danny, both <laugh>, Mike and I have seen the Danny McCaskill video. No, just, no, just no.

Johnny Jet (01:43:16):
Oh come on <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
Well, better him than me anyway. I hope people don't see this and get ideas. Cuz you should not be doing, they're

Johnny Jet (01:43:24):
Not this, they're not gonna be able to do it. First

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
Of all. Yeah. This is, that's why you shouldn't be doing it because you're going to jump on that railing and go over the other side. <Laugh>. Oh,

Johnny Jet (01:43:32):
You're gonna die. You're, yeah. Most people will die doing this stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
<Laugh>. Okay. That's good. There's the disclaimer. Don't do this. You'll probably die. Yeah. Johnny Jet love you. Johnny jet.com. Me too. Please check him out. Join follow 'em on Twitter, Instagram newsletter. And we're gonna get in the newsletter. Get the newsletter. And we're, and, and the newsletter will tell when you're gonna be on our internet show. Cause we will have you back. A pleasure working with you, John. Thank

Johnny Jet (01:43:57):
You. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
This video is insane. <Laugh>.

Johnny Jet (01:44:08):
So you agree with

Leo Laporte (01:44:09):
That? Holy cow.

Johnny Jet (01:44:12):
I mean, the beginning is nothing.

Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
Oh, I know. It gets worse and worse. Yes. He's one of those guys that hops on railings and stuff, you know, and can ride down a railing.

Johnny Jet (01:44:20):
I, I just don't know how he does it. I mean, he, he's like hopping on these railings climbing up without even getting off the

Leo Laporte (01:44:26):
Bike. I'm glad they show him falling. So you don't, you don't assume that this guy can do anything. But see that seems like a dumb thing to do. Hey, Alyssa's wearing a helmet. Yeah. It's kind of silly that he's wearing a helmet, to be honest. <Laugh> Huh? Hottest work man. In show business. Hmm. Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent, your tech guy on the radio. 88. 88. Ask Leo is the phone number. Donna is next from San Diego. Hi Donna.

Caller 5 (01:45:00):
Hi. I'm so glad he get a hold of you. I have two kind of short questions. Great. One is, I'm, I'm taking apart production scanner, which is a really fast, heavy duty scanner that's about 12 years old or 13 longer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I can't find the hard drive. I, I wanna recycle it and I wanna remove the hard drive cuz I couldn't find a way to wipe it. Although it supposedly has one and I don't recognize that. I guess, you know, usually they have 'em in a place where you can just pull it out if you have to.

Leo Laporte (01:45:36):
Yeah. It's really good to know that some printers and heart and scanners have storage in them. Significant sometimes and in some cases save everything. You scan a print and that's a big deal, isn't it? What's the brand name of this scanner?

Caller 5 (01:45:52):
It's a Cannon 50 10. Oh DR 50 10 C. Yeah. And it said it one someplace. It said it had like a gigabyte. I don't know how it could have that much

Leo Laporte (01:46:02):
Of a Well, it could, I mean, it's, it's an older scanner and of course a gigabyte at that time would've cost, you know, a lot of money, but maybe it was a very, very expensive

Caller 5 (01:46:12):
It

Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
Was. Yeah. So you know, a gigabyte is an awful lot and yes, I would if I were you absolutely find that before you get rid of the scam.

Caller 5 (01:46:20):
Wait, what I need to know is what does it look like because I've, I mean

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
Probably not like I'm looking at the manuals to see if they say, but I probably not like what you think of as a hard drive. It's much more likely going to be chips. Yeah. A little image board. So it might be a board, you know, modern SSDs are on a on a little sort of daughter board, but depending on how they made this, it actually could be on the motherboard. It might not be something you, you can remove.

Caller 5 (01:46:50):
Well, well, that was the question. If I saw it on the motherboard, how can I damage it enough that nobody could <laugh> pull data off it? Yeah. Before I, but I still want it to look like an electronic device. When I take it to the electronic device.

Leo Laporte (01:47:03):
It's recyclers, <laugh>. You know what, if it's removable then remove it, obviously, and just keep it or hit it with a hammer. But I probably, I don't, you know, this is a good question. You could give it to a baggage handler. That's a good idea. <Laugh>. And just say, I'm gonna check this from a flight to Cancun. You could drill a hole in it. Yeah, that's a good idea. That would certainly destroy it. You know what they do in Mr. Robot? Remember at the beginning, in the first episode of Mr. Robot, he thinks the cops microwave are onto him. He throws everything in the microwave. Now, don't, don't, I don't recommend this. It'll break the microwave. But yeah, I don't wanna do that. But you can fry those chips and a little, I shouldn't even say this, but I'm gonna, anyway, A little chip probably in a microwave, but it's gonna short circuit. It's gonna zap, it's gonna make fire. Probably wouldn't destroy the microwave, but I, I just use a drill. Yeah, just use a drill

Mikah Sargent (01:47:55):
<Laugh>. Basically what you would,

Caller 5 (01:47:56):
Wait a second. So, but how is it gonna look like if it's on the motherboard? Because I can see where the motherboard it is. I just hadn't, I

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
Don't know. All the chips. Yeah. Through all the

Mikah Sargent (01:48:05):
Chips. Make sure it's disconnected, obviously.

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
Oh,

Caller 5 (01:48:08):
It's a,

Leo Laporte (01:48:09):
Yeah, I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the

Mikah Sargent (01:48:11):
Specs. Same. And I've looked at some different third party

Leo Laporte (01:48:14):
Specs

Mikah Sargent (01:48:14):
And nothing's showing precisely where

Leo Laporte (01:48:17):
It is. And you're sure there is a storage? There's storage on it.

Caller 5 (01:48:19):
Yeah. It says it had, well, I, it still was it held the data for a really long time. Yeah. It was attached to my XP computer. Well, just, I think I, I suspect that it's on the motherboard. I just wanna know what, what shape is it gonna be? What's it gonna,

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
And it's unknown. It's unknown. What, what year is this?

Caller 5 (01:48:40):
I, I, I don't know. It was a long time ago. It was at least maybe solid

Leo Laporte (01:48:44):
State drives were not common more than 10 years ago. So if it's pretty old.

Caller 5 (01:48:50):
Yeah. They call it a hard disk. They, that's what it says in, in the manual that I have for it. Interesting. Refer it

Leo Laporte (01:48:56):
To the hard disc. That could be that they didn't want to say anything else cuz they knew you would go. What? Yeah. Or it could be, there really is a disk in it. But that would be spot, you would see a disc. It would, even if it didn't look like a hard drive to you, it would be an enclosure, a sealed enclosure that's somewhere in there. 

Caller 5 (01:49:13):
I'll just crack it up with a pair of pliers or something. And then <laugh>, then maybe, maybe nobody will recognize it.

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
Yeah. if you look, maybe it's a bit of a process, but you could go look at all the chips have printing on them, and you could type that into a Google search and it would tell you Oh, okay. What those chips do. Yeah. Oh, well there you go. Yeah. So if you feel, feel ambitious, you could you could do

Caller 5 (01:49:36):
It. Well, it has some really sensitive data that belongs to, belongs to other people. Yeah. Here, here's an easier

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
I, by the way, Donna. High

Mikah Sargent (01:49:44):
Praise. Yeah. Seriously. Not a lot

Leo Laporte (01:49:46):
Of people, most people just go, go, eh, whatever. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:48):
That is really good for you. Very.

Leo Laporte (01:49:50):
I'm doing the right thing. Good work. <Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah,

Caller 5 (01:49:53):
Yeah. Unsuccessful. Okay. So here's one that I'm sure you can answer. And that is, for years I've been listening to the live stream of TWiTT tv. Yay. On my mano on my Armando radio. Nice. And I wanna know what's gonna happen. Am I, is twit tv?

Leo Laporte (01:50:10):
No, no, no. Twits mine. I own Twit baby. That's, I'm not quitting Twit <laugh>. I'm just leaving the radio show. So if you, the only people this will affect is people who either listen to it on the radio or get the podcast from iHeart. So, will not be on my show, will not be on iHeart anymore. Rich Tomorrow will be And he's wonderful. And you're gonna love him. Yeah. But my show won't be iHeart. Don't

Caller 5 (01:50:32):
Listen to I don't listen to iHeart. This right now.

Leo Laporte (01:50:34):
Yeah. If you're listening to, if you go to twit TV and you listen Stream. Yeah. This, it's gonna say the same. It won't be on Saturday. It'll be this time. Sundays it'll be me and Mikah. It'll be a little more relaxed because we'll have only a few ads cuz you know, we're poor. But <laugh> Well, but they're very good ads. <Laugh>. And it, and it will be a little more relaxed because, we'll, we won't have the time constraints that we have on the radio, but Mike and I are trying to figure out ways to make it, though. We don't do hour long phone calls. Cuz you know me. Well, you maybe don't know me, but I would

Caller 5 (01:51:07):
Do some. Yes, I do. I I listen to Windows. Oh. You know, I listen to Windows Gassy and I, and also Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
Know, Google, you know, <laugh>. So we're gonna try to keep it to be more like the radio show in the sense we'll get through more calls. I bought this little timer thing and I was thinking maybe we could set it for like seven minutes or something. So that would be more like the radio show where we go, okay, you have this much time to answer the question. And, and, and then we'd move on. We're gonna need somebody mm-hmm. <Affirmative> somebody to say, Leo <laugh>, stop, stop talking

Mikah Sargent (01:51:38):
<Laugh>. So that way we're not going. And then go to the next stream. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:51:41):
Right.

Caller 5 (01:51:42):
But I also, I it's the, the, it's the live stream that has the replay. Reruns. Replays, yeah. Yep. That I listened to all day long. Those

Leo Laporte (01:51:50):
Aren't going anywhere. That's, that's my bread and butter.

Caller 5 (01:51:53):
I can, okay. So I can get that off on twit do tv. What? I search on my Mondo radio for it.

Leo Laporte (01:52:00):
Yeah. So you have to figure out what the address is. Your Mondo used to use that radio website to get its addresses. And I, that site went under

Caller 5 (01:52:12):
Right. I had one of those and I bought a new one.

Leo Laporte (01:52:14):
Oh, you have a new Mondo. Good. So they're using a new site. So if that's, so you'll have to figure out where the site is and go look and search for Twit. And there will, there will have a live stream. We're on TuneIn. If you ask your Amazon Echo, you say you know, something like play twit Live, cuz that's what it's called. Twit Live. It should do it on your Echo and your Google Assistant stuff. It's sometimes you have to vary it around, but you know, we certainly, we certainly make it available. Well

Caller 5 (01:52:41):
Here, here, but here's another, I, I listen to it. I watch it when I wanna see the video, I watch it on my computer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, I am the subscriber, but I don't, I don't care about commercials. So I just watch the, the live stream. But on my tablet, I, I watch, I listened to the podcasts of the individual shows. And I was just hoping I wouldn't have to subscribe to any

Leo Laporte (01:53:05):
Single Nope. Same subscription. <Laugh>, you'll only get, you'll only get one show now instead of two a week. But it would be,

Caller 5 (01:53:13):
I'm, I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about the calling show. I'm talking about all the shows daily things. Yeah. Right. Cuz on the replay, you listen, you hear enterprise tech and Yeah. All of

Leo Laporte (01:53:23):
Our shows,

Caller 5 (01:53:23):
All the, yeah. I listened to all those right now. But I I, that won't be Bless

Leo Laporte (01:53:26):
You. That's not gonna change. That's gonna change. New twi slash radio slash eight slash listen. We'll put that in the show notes. Whoa. Somebody in the chat room has the URL that you can enter in. Okay, great. I I wouldn't want to enter that in your Armando, but you could put that in a VLC on a brows on a computer or on a tablet. Yeah. I get it. Right. Okay. Yeah. So in other words, nothing's gonna change except for people who listen to the radio or to listen to the radio company's podcasts. Otherwise. Okay. Thank you. Business as usual. Thank you. Yeah. Seriously. Thank you. Thank you Donna. You're awesome. Leo and Mikah, you're tech guys more to come after this. God bless you, Donna. She's a club member. She listens. She's doing the right thing with her drives in her cannon. Dr. 50 10 C. You're great Donna. You get a gold star. Yes. Real Id. Oh, thanks <laugh>.

Caller 5 (01:54:21):
It's just enough. I mean, I can't live without the, well, truthfully, sometimes I use the radio at night. Armando has a, I

Leo Laporte (01:54:29):
Put you to sleep. <Laugh>. I put you to sleep. You go sleep. Yeah, yeah. No, I don't. In fact,

Caller 5 (01:54:33):
Wake back up and turn it back

Leo Laporte (01:54:34):
On. <Laugh>. Seriously, I've been thinking that I should do a late night podcast. That's not about anything. Cuz the problem with, at least for me when I'm gonna sleep listening to something is I feel like I'm missing. Like, oh, now I have to go back and listen. I listen to audio books. Yeah, audio books. I miss a whole chapter. Wait, how far back do I need to go? So now what I wanna do is a show that's inconsequential. It's just me talking about stuff. But none of it, if you didn't hear it, would bother you in the least. And you'd just go back to sleep if you woke up. And be very relaxing like that. And I'll probably do it at about 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM every night. How about that, Don? Would you like that

Caller 5 (01:55:08):
<Laugh>? I already, I have it on the, on my tablet already. So I do that because it, the Samsung <laugh>, the Samsung tablet has, if you listen to pocket casts Yeah. You can set the Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:55:19):
It's gotta sleep time.

Caller 5 (01:55:20):
Cut. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:55:21):
Yeah. I just wake up and move it back. But the light wakes me up. <Laugh>. So

Leo Laporte (01:55:27):
I'm just looking at, this is a 23 pound scanner. This thing is huge.

Caller 5 (01:55:33):
Yeah. It was really good though. It, it double, it did dual feed, dual side and Oh, that's nice Color and everything. And it was so fast. And people, well, they would 50

Leo Laporte (01:55:43):
Pages a minute.

Caller 5 (01:55:44):
I have very, yes. And I needed it cause they gave me piles of

Mikah Sargent (01:55:48):
Are you an attorney to people or something?

Caller 5 (01:55:51):
I, I, I yeah, I didn't, I didn't really want to give my profession on the radio cuz then they'll know who's <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:55:57):
Oh, don't say anything. You're still on the podcast, so don't say anything. Anything. Again, <laugh>. But you have reason to scan lots of documents. Let's put it

Mikah Sargent (01:56:05):
That way. Yeah, we'll go with that.

Leo Laporte (01:56:07):
All right. And you have very good instincts about privacy and we've seen a lot of stories about printers and scanners you know, on eBay and stuff containing all this stuff. I am looking through the specs. I don't see anywhere where it's got a hard drive.

Caller 5 (01:56:22):
Yeah, I know. I, I, I already tried all that, so I'll just, I'll just <laugh> I'll just start destroying it.

Leo Laporte (01:56:29):
Yeah. I mean, if you hit the chips with a hammer and cracked them oh yeah. Yeah. Just do a good job. Cuz it will be, and then a signal that there's something on here that somebody might want. So in a way, you know, it's the Streisand effect. You're letting people know there's something, something here

Caller 5 (01:56:47):
Must be really hard to retrieve. I'll just pound it. I'll put on a, a mask. A a Protect.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:52):
Protect. I was gonna say, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:54):
Don't do what I did. Armor up. Keep your eyes open. Get

Mikah Sargent (01:56:57):
Some glass of technical specific and all that kind stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:57:00):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:01):
If you hit it with a, with the hammer, it will, you know, crack them. And that's what you need to do, at the very least.

Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
So you're pretty sure it had storage in there?

Caller 5 (01:57:09):
Yes. I I I was still able to even retrieve things a few years.

Leo Laporte (01:57:16):
So one thing companies, and Xerox does this and is they sometimes don't tell you like, they hide the fact that they're storing stuff. There's a lot of copiers have hard drives in them. Yeah. 

Caller 5 (01:57:28):
Right. I always take all those out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
Oh, you're so good. Yeah. Yeah. You're so good.

Caller 5 (01:57:32):
Well, well, it's frightening when you think of who, who has your Right.

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
Oh,

Caller 5 (01:57:37):
It's terrifying. And <laugh>, things like that. I know. You know. Well, I,

Leo Laporte (01:57:41):
I'm just telling you Donna, the next time I need acupuncture. Oh shoot. I told him what you do. <Laugh>, I'll be coming to your, to your place. <Laugh>. Hey, it's a pleasure meeting you. Thank you for being a member of the club.

Caller 5 (01:57:53):
Yeah. Well, well thank you for having the club. That's a good thing to have. Thank you. From Mikah and aunt, and I know your other

Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
Oh, we have good Jason. Don't we have great, a great team. We, we all went out for drinks on Thursday. I was thinking what a great team we have. I just love every single person in works for us. Yeah. Yeah. She's really wonderful. Yeah. I'm very fortunate. Yeah. Yep. I give credit to, to Lisa cuz she put together a heck of a team. She really did. Thank you, Donna. Donna. I hope we'll see you in chat or in a discord or somewhere on the Mastodon somewhere. We'll chat.

Caller 5 (01:58:25):
I'll be listening. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:58:26):
That's it. That's all. I'll,

Mikah Sargent (01:58:28):
She's

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
Listening. You know what, she's, she's a secret agent. I figured that out.

Mikah Sargent (01:58:31):
No, I think so. Cia, something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:58:33):
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Don. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Well, hey, hey. How are you? Or ho ho ho. Should I say ho ho ho. How are you today? Leo LaPorte. Mikah Sargent, your tech guy too. We're here to answer your calls. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Eight eight. Eight eight. 2 7 5 5, 3 6. Hopeful free from anywhere in the US or Canada. Website. Tech guy labs.com Been pasting stuff in like crazy today. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:03):
A lot of,

Leo Laporte (01:59:03):
Lot to cover. Lots to cover. Let's see. What else? I have I have a hundred pictures. Artificially intelligent pictures. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> of Kim. Each

Mikah Sargent (01:59:14):
One of them is an individual personality. Each

Leo Laporte (01:59:16):
One is unique in its own right. Did I center this one? I hope. Well, let's see. All right. I'm gonna send her some more because I made a hundred of them Wow. In an attempt to figure out, you know, what's going on with the sexy mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And they didn't this time, not so much anyway. And I think maybe they've improved the algorithm. I would in the PA and, you know, I would've hesitated recommending this program if they hadn't, to be honest with you. It's called Lens Lann essay. It's on the, on the iPhone. And I, I'll we'll get Kim's reaction. We'll see how she feels about what, what we generated. But I think they look pretty good. I think they're nice.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:58):
A lot of fun ones. A lot of fun ones. Yeah. And, and that was the experience for me. It, it, I I've liked many of the ones that are generated, but yeah. Seeing what it did with Lisa's photos on Lisa, that

Leo Laporte (02:00:09):
Was shocking.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:10):
I, yeah, I was shock.

Leo Laporte (02:00:10):
I was shocked to be honest with you. Shocked. I'll tell you. Shocked. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Back to the phones we go. And it's Jay from Bellflower, California. Hello, Jay.

Caller 6 (02:00:23):
Hello.

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
Welcome. Bill. Leo. Good to see ya.

Caller 6 (02:00:27):
Good. Good. I'm good. Hey I have a Lenovo a idea pad flex. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Flex five. Yep. And I have two issues. First, my touch screen went out. I've I've gone online and I've tried into the control panel. And there's, it hasn't come back.

Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
Yeah. That's not good. That's a, that digitizer is a separate layer in the screen. If it goes out, it could be that the circuitry connected to the screen. And this happens a lot in laptops. You got the, the flex flexes. Right. It can go all the way around. And so there's a ribbon cable connecting the, the, the guts of the laptop where all the stuff is that's doing the work to the screen, which is thin and doesn't do a lot of work. That ribbon cable is being bent flexed, if you will, all the time. Sometimes just that, you know, maybe just one of the pins on that broken it, you still see a image, but you can't do the touchscreen. If that's the case, that's a cheap fix. That's easy. Not probably anything you can fix yourself though. Cuz you'd have to open up the machine. I can't think of any I mean, I, I guess it could be software. Yeah. But I think it's hardware. Yeah, it feels like hardware. Yeah.

Caller 6 (02:01:55):
Oh, okay. So I was to bring it into a tech place.

Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Yeah. Now before you do that, the thing you might check is to see there is a driver, I think for that touchscreen. And maybe that's failed. In other words, let's li make sure it's not software. One way to do that is to boot it into a, in Windows installer disc. Or you could even use a Linux installer disc. Something other than your hard drive and see if the touchscreen still doesn't work. If it doesn't, that's almost certainly hardware. But if it does, then it's a driver issue With Windows, you can go into the Windows device drivers and see if you know, look for yellow checks or with a triangle, yellow triangle or Red X next to a driver. That is something you'd need. If you click on the start menu, right click on it. You can select device manager or do Windows Key X. You could select device manager and see all the devices. I don't, I don't remember if a touch screen has its own, it'd probably be under human interface devices. I'm not sure though.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:00):
I, if you consider yourself, you know, after you do these software ideas, if you consider yourself handy I'm including a link in the show notes. I fix. It has a full guide on this Lenovo idea pad Flex five, which I'm surprised cuz this seems like such a obscure but there's plenty of information about the display of display assembly. And if it's a matter of just a, yeah, I guess you

Leo Laporte (02:03:20):
Could table how, how how handy are you Jay <laugh>?

Caller 6 (02:03:26):
<Laugh>, I, I'd say tech light, light test.

Leo Laporte (02:03:29):
The nice thing to do is to, if, the nice thing about I Fixit, which I love, they call it the repair manual for the internet, is if you go there and at least look at what it would take, you can get, you know, kind of see whether you feel comfortable with it or not. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> almost certainly though, I think, I hate to say it. I think you're gonna have to bring this in.

Caller 6 (02:03:46):
Sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:03:47):
Sorry, what was your other question?

Caller 6 (02:03:50):
The other question is my, it's failing to recognize my when I connect a mouse, and now when I connect my phone it's failing to recognize me

Leo Laporte (02:04:04):
Now. Oh. All, all the same laptop.

Caller 6 (02:04:07):
It's on the same laptop. Oh. The only thing you recognize is, is external hard drives, which, okay.

Leo Laporte (02:04:13):
Yeah. Yeah. No, there's something going on with that laptop. In fact, that almost sounds like for sure now you, that it's a hardware issue. Those are all inter input devices. However, human interface devices. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it could be, you've got a massive failure software failure there. But boy, that sure sounds

Mikah Sargent (02:04:29):
Like, sounds like sounding hardware.

Leo Laporte (02:04:30):
Look at the device. Look at the device manager, make sure you're, you don't have any yellow triangles or red Xs. But I suspect that it's something a little bit more, a little bit more serious. Unfortunately. I'm sorry to say that. But this happens. Laptops especially, they take a kind of a beating. You throw 'em around. Unlike a desktop pc, you get a lot of dust inside. Shaken and stur and stirred. Exactly. Dan is on the line from beautiful Gratton, Connecticut, home of the submarine base. Hello, Dan.

Caller 7 (02:05:04):
Hi Leo. Thanks for taking my call. Oh, we're up. And you're right. I was in Grotton. I'm driving. I, so that was, I'm on my way south <laugh>. I have a

Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
South of Grotton, elder

Caller 7 (02:05:17):
<Laugh>, but you can see the submarines.

Leo Laporte (02:05:20):
All right. There you go. There you go. <Laugh>. What's up?

Caller 7 (02:05:25):
Elderly parent question. My father just turned 98.

Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
Oh wow. That's wonderful. Congratulations.

Caller 7 (02:05:33):
Doing, doing pretty good for 98.

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
That's awesome. But

Caller 7 (02:05:37):
He's getting a hard time, let's say, making phone calls. Yeah, he's, he's, he has like a, a regular, you know, landline and a flip phone. And he, you know, it's like he's gotta look up phone calls that he wants to make manually.

Leo Laporte (02:05:57):
Here's something you might try, here's something you might try. A lot of seniors like this the Amazon Echo, you're familiar with it, right?

Caller 7 (02:06:05):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:06:06):
You can have, you can have it place calls. And so he could do it with his voice and he doesn't have to hold anything. This speaker and the microphone and that are usually pretty good. So he can, you know, he can say Echo call Dan and it'll call you and you say Hi dad. And you can talk to him just like you're coming outta that tube.

Caller 7 (02:06:29):
So, but what is that connected to? I mean, it,

Leo Laporte (02:06:31):
The internet baby <laugh> the magic of the internet and it if you use the Amazon, they don't call it, they have the a word in the app name, which bugs me cuz I'm trying not to say the A word, but you know who I'm talking about, right? A L E X A. If you have the A L E X A app on your phone, you can actually get your contact list in there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I wouldn't put a whole contact list in there. I just put some stuff. Right. He can dial numbers, but you know, verbally as well. You can also set it up to call 9 1 1 if you want. I think I'm pretty sure maybe not. But you certainly could call for help. So I would, I would definitely look into that. I think that's for a great way to go for seniors, you know? Does he have an echo? Has he ever used an echo?

Caller 7 (02:07:12):
He hasn't. And that's, but that's okay. Mean

Leo Laporte (02:07:15):
It's my mom who's 90 loves her echo. She has set an alarm to remind her to take her pills when she turns on the water and is waiting for it to warm up so she doesn't forget in the shower, she'll say, echo, remind me to check the shower in 30 seconds. It's, it's, mm-hmm. <Affirmative> surprisingly useful for older folks who have poor shirt term memory and maybe some physical challenges. I think it's, there's a lot to be said

Mikah Sargent (02:07:41):
For, and if he's got an at and t or Verizon account, there actually is the option.

Leo Laporte (02:07:45):
It'll tie to your phone.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:45):
Tie to your phone. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:07:47):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Nice.

Caller 7 (02:07:48):
So, so would that be tied to like, but again, like, it's like, does it have to be a, would you plug in the,

Mikah Sargent (02:07:55):
You don't have to plug in the cell phone. No, it just, it uses your account. It uses the account. So it'll say, oh, you know, we can ring here. As well as

Leo Laporte (02:08:01):
That phone call. It gives him a number, which is nice. So you can call. Yeah. So, okay. This is pretty cool. I would look at that for sure. That's a lot easier.

Mikah Sargent (02:08:09):
I'll include a link tech guy labs.com for more information about linking at and t or Verizon accounts.

Leo Laporte (02:08:15):
Nice. I didn't know you could do that. That's really

Caller 7 (02:08:17):
Good. And well, I have a question about the show. Notes. Yes. You're putting link in. Yes. Because I've tried to look for them sometimes and I don't know where they are. Like, are they

Leo Laporte (02:08:27):
Where are they? I've been wondering that myself. Mikah, where the, where, so here's what happens. We say show notes. Where do you, where do you go when

Mikah Sargent (02:08:33):
You, whenever you type in Tech Guy labs.com. What happens is the URL is going to redirect you to our page. The tech guy. When you go to that page, you will see a list by scrolling down, you'll see a list of our episodes. 19 50, 19 49, 19 48. You find the number, which this one is 1951. It will be there. And when you click on that specific episode, you just scroll down, you'll see all of the headlines of the articles that we covered, and then all of the links to the different things. So you can actually do a shortcut. You can type in tech guy labs.com and then slash 1951 in this case. And that will redirect you. Nice to where you need to go. We'll

Leo Laporte (02:09:14):
Put a link in there too to a service Amazon offers called AM Alexa Toge. Oh, I said

Mikah Sargent (02:09:18):
It, you said it.

Leo Laporte (02:09:19):
<Laugh> Echo together a remote caregiving service to help care for those you love. It's 20 bucks a month, but it offers check-in activity, check-ins. It's designed for seniors design. It's got 24 7 urgent response.

Mikah Sargent (02:09:32):
Fall detection. Fall

Leo Laporte (02:09:33):
Detection. And apparently you can do yoga with it. I don't know. That's what's in the video. I don't know what they're doing. But it also lets you know what activities dad is using his echo for. So you can kind of keep an eye. That's, by the way, the simplest value of that is to know dad is up and about and is moving around, you know? And I think that's hugely valuable. We're gonna take a little break. 88. 88. Ask Leo's the phone number when we come back. It's a visit from Santa. No, not Santa. Somebody much like Santa, A guy named Rich DeMiro joins us with some holiday gadgets. Next. Hello Rich.

Mikah Sargent (02:10:15):
Hello. Can you hear me

Leo Laporte (02:10:17):
Okay? I hear you. Great. You're actually in a room with a microphone. <Laugh>. You're not sitting in a car with a microphone taped your cheek. This is, I can't Good. Is this where you're gonna do the show? This is not where I'm doing the show. Did you hear what? No. Did you hear what happened that you got? No. So the

Mikah Sargent (02:10:33):
<Laugh> Uhoh what? <Laugh>. Uhoh.

Leo Laporte (02:10:36):
So Laura, can I tell him

(02:10:42):
He saw the studio. You're in the, what's his name? Studio, then Colin, you're in the Colin Cowherd studio. The Colin Memorial studio. Colin died in that studio. Not, not literally. Oh my God. Not literally, metaphorically. No, he doesn't use it. But when he's in town, I guess he uses it, but apparently that's why it's dusty. It's, it's, she says it's about the worst studio we have. Oh, perfect. He might ask for a better one. <Laugh>, but they may be planning to fix it up, you know, put in some, some carpeting and, and some nice lights. Something

Mikah Sargent (02:11:16):
Like that. Probably not. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:11:17):
<Laugh>. I want 'em to take care of you, rich.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:23):
Well, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
Take care of. We'll, my friend Rich here buddy. Take

Mikah Sargent (02:11:28):
Care of it. It's fine. It's all good.

Leo Laporte (02:11:30):
It's all good, man. In Hey,

Mikah Sargent (02:11:33):
If you can keep 'em from installing lights, then you less likely to have to do video. So, <laugh>, maybe that's worth

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
It. Yeah, apparently it's kind of dim.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:40):
Did your kids win the basketball game? How do they know that my kids are in the basketball

Leo Laporte (02:11:43):
Game? Because you said so on the car.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:46):
Oh yeah. No, my kid is playing basketball right now. You actually made the championship, so, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:11:50):
You gotta tell the world about that.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:52):
So. Well, they just lost. I was watching it on so full disclosure, <laugh>, I, I've got Covid and so I am home

Leo Laporte (02:12:00):
Balanced. Oh no. Rich.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:02):
And so I had to, so, but anyway, a coach actually let he live streamed the game, which was amazing. So

Leo Laporte (02:12:08):
He just Oh,

Mikah Sargent (02:12:08):
That's great. Called up his phone on Facebook and I watched the whole game from home. It was amazing. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:12:12):
How fun. What, what, what is this high school?

Mikah Sargent (02:12:16):
Nope. This is just, you know, fun weekend stuff. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:12:21):
Is your wife is your wife now okay with you working?

Mikah Sargent (02:12:25):
No, we were just realizing today how it's gonna, it's gonna be really cut into your life. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:30):
Tell me about it. 19 years, my friend.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:33):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:12:34):
My daughter was 11 when I started. My son was nine.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:38):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:12:39):
Now they're grown.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:40):
Wow. Well that's, that's how, that's actually how old my kids are. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they're eight and 11. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And now, now they're having kids of their own. You said, huh? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:12:48):
Exactly. Grandpa. Yeah. That's alright. You're gonna have a great time. It's so much fun to do it.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:57):
Wait, let's save you. What? Is that true? Did I miss that? What? Oh, okay. <Laugh>. I was like, I did not hear that You're gonna be a grandpa.

Leo Laporte (02:13:05):
No. God no. That scared me. Heaven for f

Mikah Sargent (02:13:08):
I was just kidding. Oh God.

Leo Laporte (02:13:10):
I'm too young to be a grandpa. No, I'm not.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:14):
Yeah, so anyway, all's good here. 

Leo Laporte (02:13:16):
We're gonna talk about, sorry you're sick. You don't seem like you're feeling we poorly.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:20):
No, I'm not so good.

Leo Laporte (02:13:21):
She's a very mild case. I'm glad to

Mikah Sargent (02:13:23):
Hear that. Legalities. I, you know, I had a, I had a pretty like a fever the first day and my wife actually got it at the same exact time. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
Yeah. Yeah. So

Mikah Sargent (02:13:31):
Something we did, I don't know what it was. In

Leo Laporte (02:13:33):
A way that's good because Yes, the worst thing, and I had this happen is if your spouse gets it and you don't or vice versa. No. And now you're going, oh, you're I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get it. How do you not get it?

Mikah Sargent (02:13:45):
Yeah, well, I didn't last time. She got it last year and I did not get it, so. Oh wow. What's, what happened with me in my this time? I think we were both at the same thing and, we'll, I don't know. Who knows what happened.

Leo Laporte (02:13:55):
I'm sorry.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:56):
That sucks. Anyway, we were outta

Leo Laporte (02:13:57):
Rams game. Every Johnny, Johnny Jet got it too. He's Oh, wow. Johnny

Mikah Sargent (02:14:00):
Jet.

Leo Laporte (02:14:01):
Got it. Everybody. Yeah. Everybody's got it. Oof. Everybody's getting it. It's the new thing.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:04):
Johnny Jet has it now, or he got it.

Leo Laporte (02:14:06):
Yeah, he just got over it. Or he is getting over it. He just got over it. He took Pax Lovit. He got it. He was really feeling cool. Oh wow. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:13):
I, I took an Advil,

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
<Laugh> probably better. Santa Claus being Rich tomorrow of K T L A Rich on Tech and the author of this fine book, 101 Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone. My Christmas gift guide. That's it. It's over. Get this book and it's over. But Rich, you have more than Hi Rich.

Rich DeMuro (02:14:35):
Hey, how's it

Leo Laporte (02:14:36):
Going? It's going great. How are you?

Rich DeMuro (02:14:38):
I am doing fantastic. Happy Saturday to you.

Leo Laporte (02:14:42):
Holidays one of your last Saturdays, my friend.

Rich DeMuro (02:14:45):
Well, it's the beginning of a new crop of Saturdays. I

Leo Laporte (02:14:48):
Guess. <Laugh> a little bit different. Rich is gonna be taken over the show January 7th and you'll be doing in this time slot right here.

Rich DeMuro (02:14:58):
Yeah. I'm exciting. 11 to two Pacific. It'll be exciting. I I, it'll be fun. I've, I've listened to you for many, many years, Leo. And obviously I I filled in for you for a bit, so I'm looking forward to

Leo Laporte (02:15:10):
Yeah, yeah,

Rich DeMuro (02:15:11):
Yeah. It just continuing the legacy here. Let's hope

Leo Laporte (02:15:15):
So. I wanted you to do some holiday gifts cuz I hate doing gift guides. I hate it. And I refused. My wife said, are you gonna do a gift guide this year? I said, no, we're gonna have Rich tomorrow do the gift guide this year. So it's on you. But fortunately I'm looking at your website. It's loaded with good stuff.

Rich DeMuro (02:15:32):
Oh, I'm telling you. Here's the thing. This is my, my secret weapon in everything is the viewer emails. Because Leo, you know, like the viewer calls you get or the listener calls when, when you've got that pulse on like what people are asking for and you hear the same thing over and over, you kind of know people are looking for. Yeah. So, all right. First thing that I love is this aura Digital photo frame. You've probably talked about this on the show. It is the number one gift to give because it's such a crowd pleaser. They make 'em in several different styles. And what's great about this frame is that it's a digital photo frame that takes a photo from your phone and puts it on. Let's say you give this to your significant, or your, your par grandparents, whatever the photo from your phone can show up right on their frame through wifi. You don't have to put any u sb drives or anything into it. And literally, this was the gift we got everyone last year because for grandparents, for anyone across the miles, it is such a fantastic, or it's

Leo Laporte (02:16:29):
Super easy. R a

Rich DeMuro (02:16:31):
And, and the app is well designed. It's just a really slick experience. Nice. And so when you take a great picture, you can immediately go into the Aura app and you can send it right to the frame or you can even email it. And you can share this with friends and families. So you can all give them access to the frame. See, so

Leo Laporte (02:16:46):
You know this cuz you have cute kids and, and everybody wants to see 'em. So that's, that's a, that's a good thing.

Rich DeMuro (02:16:52):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:16:53):
Kind of like you have a lot of gadgets here. Holy cow. You've

Rich DeMuro (02:16:55):
Been, okay. Let's see what else. If something catches your eye, let

Leo Laporte (02:16:58):
Me know. And now I went to this, went to your website and then it took me to Amazon. Is that the best way to do that

Rich DeMuro (02:17:03):
Or, yeah, so if you go to Rich on tech.tv, look for Rich. Rich recommends. Rich recommend. All right, let's go down to these Nord Budds people always, you know, we always hear about the AirPods and all these expensive earbuds. These one plus Nord Budds down at the bottom there, 39 9. And they are some of the best earbuds I've ever tested at this price tag. So 40 bucks for a great pair of wireless earbuds and here's why I know they're good, Leo. We put these on tv, we put 'em on K T L A and of course I tried 'em out myself and you know, I, I fell in love with them. I said, this is fantastic for $40. But when people bought them and I started getting emails from people, they were everyone, everyone said, rich, I love these things. I love these things. I think I got one email from someone that said I didn't like them. And so I can easily recommend these. They don't have all the frilly features, like there's no noise cancellation or anything like that, but they're just a great pair of inexpensive headphones that, I'm not kidding. For $40, you'll be so impressed.

Leo Laporte (02:18:01):
No kidding. I mean, you, the, you know, the other ones like apples are 250 bucks. They're crazy expensive, so

Rich DeMuro (02:18:08):
Oh yeah. Some of them could be very, very expensive. Yeah. Okay. Let's see, what else do you want to talk about? Let's go back to that page there, <laugh>. Okay,

Leo Laporte (02:18:17):
You got two minutes. Rich <laugh>. Okay, by the way, I will give you, I have, I have something for you. This little bit of software that use, which tells me stop talking. Leo, Laura wants to play some songs or something. I will send you this

Rich DeMuro (02:18:30):
So that you can use, I need that software.

Leo Laporte (02:18:32):
I know. Okay. I know.

Rich DeMuro (02:18:34):
Let's go to this. Okay, so let's say you're on the higher end of things. You have the iPhone, you have the Apple watch, you've got a pair of wireless earbuds like AirPods. This S t m charge tree go is my absolute favorite thing for travel because it charges everything all at once. So now it is a little bit more expensive, it's over a hundred dollars, but the quality of this device I found is way better than some of the really cheap knockoffs that you see on Amazon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:59):
There's some really crappy, and I love this cuz you could put this by your bed, right? And, and then you've got everything charging in one place. So it's one of those all in one stands for your phone. Does it? It looks like it even does the AirPods. That's great.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:12):
Yeah. It'll do everything. But the great thing about this, and I'd probably recommend a cheaper one maybe for your bed that's gonna be fixed. This one, what's so great about it is that you plug in one plug and you can bring it for travel and it folds down to flat. Oh. I mean it's super, super easy.

Leo Laporte (02:19:26):
This is your Yeah, Lisa brings a very big nomad charging thing that weighs about 10 pounds when we travel. This would be so much better. I'll get this for her for Christmas.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:35):
That's good. So much better. We have, we have time for one more. One

Leo Laporte (02:19:38):
More.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:38):
Okay. okay. You know what I'm gonna recommend? I'm gonna recommend I think you'd like this. Leo Ha have you had a laser pointer in a while?

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
<Laugh>? We had to take it away from the kid. He was okay. <Laugh>. So I have one now. Yes.

Rich DeMuro (02:19:53):
<Laugh>. So my kid found this laser pointer. He did, he did all of his own research and he said, dad, can I please have a laser pointer? And I said, fine. After, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:20:02):
You've taken your chances buddy. Yeah.

Rich DeMuro (02:20:04):
You're gonna shoot your eye out all this stuff. Yeah. I'm not kidding. This laser pointer he found it's, it's less than $20. It is the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. This is the kind of stuff that I wanted. Is

Leo Laporte (02:20:15):
This the denied by Long Range Green Laser pointer? That is it Rich Tomorrow, rich on tech.tv for all of these? And we'll see you next week and then brand new next year. The Rich on Tech Show. Thank you Rich.

Rich DeMuro (02:20:29):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:20:32):
This is Plague the Magic music, which means we gotta stop talking. I hate it when that happens. Thank

Rich DeMuro (02:20:39):
You have. Alright, so, so I gotta figure out how to time this show. You're gonna send me this software.

Leo Laporte (02:20:44):
I will send you this software. Windows or Mac, which do you use?

Rich DeMuro (02:20:48):
I'll probably be using Mac. I'll

Leo Laporte (02:20:50):
Send you both. In fact, I have a small one. So I have, so the one I use, let me show you the screen so you can see, you can have it on your, it's on your computer screen and what button is the computer there? And so it's pretty big. You could see cause that's, oh, perfect. And then it just tells you. And so the, what it tells you when I'm in, when we're blue, we're in commercials. When it's green you can be talking and then a minute beforehand it starts to count you down and when it turn, it turns red. And then that's when you gotta stop talking. So it just helped. It helped. I may, I wrote this cuz it's like, I, I was so bad at hitting, I, you know, I just could never hit the brakes. So this is useful, but I have a little one for a laptop I gave Mikah. Mikah has a little one. I can make it any size you want. <Laugh> <laugh>. I can change the colors. I'll make it say Rich's showtime. I'll make it change. So it's just for you. And if you have any suggestions,

Rich DeMuro (02:21:44):
No, maybe this a little, maybe it's a little inside baseball. But if you have three minutes, can you explain the brakes to me?

Leo Laporte (02:21:51):
<Laugh>? Yeah. Yeah. Let me go to the lemme go to the KFI.

Rich DeMuro (02:21:57):
No, but I clock. But basically the brakes, there's two breaks that you have to hit hard and then two that you don't. Right?

Leo Laporte (02:22:03):
Yeah, but I hit three hard because if I don't do that, I'm in trouble at the end of the hour. So what I do is the floater is the first break, which is somewhere around quarter after. And that can float, although if it gets too late, Laura will play the music because then you won't have enough time when you come back to say something, it'll have to hit the next commercial break. So you can't, you can't float too much. You can float a few minutes. Got it. All of this is in that clock, bottom of the hour is fixed. Okay. And she'll play that sounder. And there's a, the thing to know about the sounder, the little, you know, the, is there's a stab in it. And that's actually covering up the tone that sent to automated stations to start the commercials. Ah. So you can't talk past that stab. We just did you and I, so on some stations it'll cut us off mid-sentence. Most stations kfi doesn't do the do it, but, but

Rich DeMuro (02:22:57):
And this is all in the handbook you're sending me. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
Yeah. I'll put this in the giant binder I've prepared and then Perfect. You know, maybe the first day or two I'll, I'll come in and, and, and, and and coach you. Ah, then perfect. It took, it only took me 18 years to figure it all out. And then this quarter of is a floater. Technically I would try to stay on time and I put, because okay. In fact, I tell Laura, hit that sounder for that one. Cuz otherwise if you let that one slip, you don't have anywhere to go. It's the, it's the, you're screwed. And then top hour's fixed as well. Okay. And so the clock is a little deceptive. You're probably, they're gonna actually sell your show. So you may even have live read ads. And so that changes things a little bit with when the, when you get out or not. So the, the it the top of the hour can change. But, but I will send you a timer that does all the things you need to you need to try to hit. And I, yeah, my advice is try to stay on time. That's my hardest thing. Well, but you did these, done this so many times. It'll straightforward. You've done this, you've done this. You know,

Rich DeMuro (02:24:02):
It'll be great. It'll, it'll be fun. I'll, I'll, I have you on text so I will text you when I need the help.

Leo Laporte (02:24:07):
Seriously. Can. All right. I gotta run. Okay.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:10):
Bye-Bye. Bye-Bye.

Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
Oh, no. I guess I didn't have to run. I'm still here. <Laugh>. Oh, well I'm still here. <Laugh>. I I thought I had to run. That's the other thing. The clock is great for. Okay. To let you know, you know, I got 49 seconds before I have to talk, so that's really actually quiet.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:25):
Well, I've got five more days at home, so

Leo Laporte (02:24:27):
Yeah. Go have your days at home, please. I beg of you. I'll see you all later. All right. Feel better.

Rich DeMuro (02:24:31):
Bye. I've watched more movies. Bye-Bye.

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
Thanks. Bye. Thanks. Oh, that is George Clooney's mom <laugh> back from 1951. And it's a, this is good. You got a double, you get double bonus for this one, Laura, because it's not only a song from the years 51. This is of course the episode 1951, by the way, that made it very hard back in the 19th century to play any music. But finally we're in the modern times. And it's a holiday song. So you got 'em, you got 'em both. She's tap tap tapping on the window. I have to be honest, I don't want anybody tap Tapp tapping on my window.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:05):
No, please don't, don't I

Leo Laporte (02:25:07):
<Laugh> I don't care if you're bringing presents. Stay away from my window. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. Mikah. Sargent Leo Laport. Another half hour to go on Z Tech Guy Show Larry is on the line from Monrovia, California. Hi Larry.

Caller 8 (02:25:22):
Hi Leo. How are you?

Leo Laporte (02:25:24):
I'm well. How are you?

Caller 8 (02:25:25):
I am okay. Actually, I have a nickname for you, Leo, the sport.

Leo Laporte (02:25:29):
Hmm. It's because I'm so sporty.

Caller 8 (02:25:32):
Exactly, yes. Any rate, I'm having a problem. I just bought a new Galaxy phone, but I'm required to return my old phone and I have a lot of important text messages that I would like to upload to Google Drive or something like that to back it up. And

Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
Do you wanna, you, you could move it to the new phone. In fact, when you first got the new phone, you had the opportunity to do that. But you can also back them up. Do you use, is is the old phone of Samsung as well?

Caller 8 (02:26:06):
Yes, it is.

Leo Laporte (02:26:08):
And you use the Samsung Messages app when you when you do it? Yes, I do. Okay. Correct. So it's fairly easy to do this. You can get a third party program. Fact, if you search in the Play store, you'll see a bunch of 'em. If you just look for text and backup there's even, there's even manual ways to do this without getting a third party program. But since you wanna put it on a computer I think I would use a third party program and export it into a a file. And that way you can have it on the computer.

Caller 8 (02:26:38):
There used to be one. And back in 2013, I was able to do that and it went into my Google Gmail.

Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
Yeah. That was the old way. Yeah, I remember that one. That would mail it to you. Yeah, this, so let me recommend one that doesn't do that. <Laugh>. Okay. That's not so great. The, the one I use is sms. It's simply called SMS Backup and Restore the company's sync tech. S Y N C T E C H. I've used this for years. It does not use email. It also encrypts the data as it goes off your phone, which is actually pretty nice. That's a new feature.

Caller 8 (02:27:19):
It's backup and restore because I was using Backup Plus.

Leo Laporte (02:27:23):
Yeah. There's about 8,000 of these programs. That's why I didn't pick one. But since you want don't want it, this Gmail thing I I would just, this will back up to one of the things this'll do is back up to a cloud drive, which

Caller 8 (02:27:37):
That's what I want

Leo Laporte (02:27:38):
To do. Yeah, that's the easiest, right? Yeah,

Caller 8 (02:27:40):
Yeah, that exactly. Then I'd want to view it on my computer. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
You always have a copy. Copy. Yep. Yep. You'll always have a copy. Yep.

Caller 8 (02:27:48):
The Samsung, what they wanted to do was back it up to your old, your new phone and the new phones have less memory than the old phone. Ah. So you get clogged up with 10 years worth of Got it. Got it. Of, of

Leo Laporte (02:28:00):
Old me. So you didn't do that. Yeah, that's what I was saying is if you, if you just wanna move it the phone, that's part of the install process. Yeah, I understand that. Se SMS backup and Restore will back it up to a cloud drive where you can get it forever and and it doesn't care. You know, you don't, ca messages aren't huge. So even if you had a gigabyte of messages, that might be too much for your phone, but it's not too much for a a, a cloud storage at all. Exactly. Okay, I will try that one. See, see how it works. Alright, give it a shot. Let me know if it works well for you. Chatroom, are they actually recommending SMS plumber or is that a joke? That must be a joke. I think that was a joke cuz it got clogged out.

(02:28:37):
I saw SMS back up and restore like you that you mentioned one from, I've talked a couple of times. So yeah, that's the, that's the one I've used for a long time. So I, I know that works works pretty well. You know, they should, I I feel like Android should have a way to do that. I think they do have a, let's see if you go to backup under your Android device. I have my pixel here. I think you can back up SMS messages, but it depends. The problem is if you're on Samsung, I don't know where it goes on a Pixel phone. Lemme just look. I think it goes to Google. It goes to Google Drive. Right. So under the, again, this is a problem with Android is everybody's got different, you know, system, the names of this system, settings and everything is different.

(02:29:26):
It's not like an iPhone where everybody's got the same phone. Let me see, for under system backup see I'm paying for backup one. Backup by Google one. Google one. Yeah. But there is an SMS and messages 16 megabytes that is being backed up to my Google one. I don't know if that's because I pay for Google one or not, but that goes to my Google Drive. It also backs up apps, photos and videos. Call history, device settings, Google account data. That's really, that's really, that's what I'm using on my pixel is Google one. Yeah. Backup. So Google one is there all in one subscription where you get storage and you know, other things as well. And I guess that's it's kind of a bummer that it, I hope, I wonder if you can use it without paying for it. Just the backup part because you have, you know, what is it 15 gigs free? Yeah. On Google Drive. There is, I don't know, I could turn it off, but <laugh> Yeah. I'm afraid to something. Yeah. it says your device backs up automatically over wifi after it's been idle and charging for two hours. In other words, overnight. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> basically overnight. So that, that is built in. But it's not as flexible. Perhaps not as flexible. 88. 88 sk Actually, if you have a good solution, let us know. We can, we can help Larry out. Let's go to Joe and Hello Joe.

Caller 9 (02:30:45):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:30:46):
We're great. How are you Joe?

Caller 9 (02:30:51):
Hmm. I tried to get in last week on Sunday because it was 1950 <laugh> and that's the year I was, that's the year I was born. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:31:00):
I don't think we're gonna make it to my birthday. <Laugh>. It's 1956. We're gonna fall just a few shows short. I think one show's short.

Caller 9 (02:31:08):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
But we're gonna keep the, just for that reason by the way, we're gonna keep the numbering on the podcast. So the first podcast will be my birth year, 1956. That'll confuse people. <Laugh>, what can I do for you, Joe?

Caller 9 (02:31:22):
Before the question, I wanna make a recommendation for you. I retired about 10 years ago and we started traveling and we couldn't be happier. And so Covid hit and that kind of stopped us. But yeah, I would like you like to recommend you cuz I, I'm sure I know you like to travel, just travel as much as you can.

Leo Laporte (02:31:45):
Oh, believe me, that's the plan. <Laugh>. I, I, you know, I think some people don't feel that way, Mikah, you've never been outta the country. But for me, tra and I think you feel the same way, Joe going to see a new country, new people taste new food, sea sites. That's to me the most invigorating thing there is and I'm looking forward to that.

Caller 9 (02:32:07):
And it's, you know, you don't have to do anything exotic. Even you can just like we a couple of years, couple three years we drove cross country, you know, and took like two months

Leo Laporte (02:32:20):
And yeah, I would like to do that. I don't know if my wife would without any, she doesn't wanna be stuck in a motor home with me for more than a day. <Laugh>. I think

Caller 9 (02:32:29):
We never, we never did. We never did motor

Leo Laporte (02:32:31):
Home. Oh, you stayed in hotels. Oh, that's clever. There you go.

Caller 9 (02:32:36):
And you made a little more convenient. Anyway, my question is I have a MacBook Air, an external external drive that I use for a backup. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, I upgraded to os Catalina and now the external drive doesn't work.

Leo Laporte (02:33:00):
Mikah, you're the, I'm gonna make you do this one <laugh>, you're the Macka

Mikah Sargent (02:33:04):
West guy. Yeah, this is <laugh>. When, so when you say the external drive doesn't work, can you tell me a little bit more about what that means for you?

Caller 9 (02:33:11):
Well, I, I I, what they said was that the external drive needs to be

Mikah Sargent (02:33:19):
Reformatted.

Caller 9 (02:33:21):
Yeah. Reformatted.

Leo Laporte (02:33:23):
Ah, so it must have been formatted in a, in a way that for some reason Catalina doesn't read. I mean it should read everything, the old stuff. I've never seen that.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:31):
No. Unless it's an error, it

Leo Laporte (02:33:32):
Must have been damaged. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:33:34):
That's what I'm thinking is something got damaged there.

Leo Laporte (02:33:37):
Let's, let's get the brain trust on this one for you Joe. I'm not sure what's going on. Probably it's unrecoverable and you have to format it. I say you could use

Mikah Sargent (02:33:47):
A drive recovery system of some sort to see

Leo Laporte (02:33:50):
The GWiz next. Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent (02:33:54):
<Laugh>. I thought we'd already gone a break.

Leo Laporte (02:33:56):
<Laugh>. Now you can say that.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:01):
So I plugged in a hard drive that wasn't connecting to anything windows or Mac into the Linux machine that you gave me. And I was able to pull it up there and then get everything off of it and then format it and then it worked for my Mac. So

Leo Laporte (02:34:19):
That's interesting. So it's just,

Mikah Sargent (02:34:21):
That's a tough thing cuz not everybody has a Linux machine sitting around or like a raspberry pie

Leo Laporte (02:34:24):
Or something. Or a or pc, some other machine maybe could read

Mikah Sargent (02:34:27):
It. Yeah. That's, that's gonna be what I would suggest more than anything else is try plugging it into a different type of operating system to see if it's not that it's, you know, makos or if it's not the drive itself or if it's just makos not being able to read it for whatever reason. Yeah. Because you said it's pretty old. So it could have been you know, what is it Master boot record versus the other one whose name escapes me at the moment And if it's formatted in X fatt or oh

Leo Laporte (02:34:54):
Man. I had the weirdest problem. It took a computer from work that was no longer in use for Michael. And I wanted to wipe it and start over and I stupidly chose mp, I think MBR master boot record to format it and it would not install o s 10 on it. Yeah. It has to be Mac, Mac Goey has to be a goey formatted drive, which is one of three choices. They don't tell you that ahead of time.

Mikah Sargent (02:35:22):
Right. They don't, that's the, that's the annoying thing is that they don't

Leo Laporte (02:35:24):
Tell you so formatted wrong and then it still wouldn't do it. And then it's, and I figured, oh, it's gotta be a P F S. So I had to f I went through several bouts of trying to install O s 10. I finally, but if you make it a goo a I think it's G P t Good Partition table. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (02:35:39):
That's right. PT G P T versus mbr. Yeah, nbr and then,

Leo Laporte (02:35:43):
And then uses to format. Yep. Which they don't tell you anywhere. That's how it likes it. And, and somebody's saying in the chat room, which is true time machine wants a, a PPFs at too now. So a PPFs is the future Disco time. Woo. Everybody dance. Okay, now Girls dance. Okay, now Boys dance. Okay, now Dick DeBartolo dances. Hello, Dickie d Leo. How you doing? Mad magazine's. Madis writer and a disco fool. Okay, Kim, I'm sending you pictures. Say, okay, it's gonna send Kim all of the AI generated images of her, of her. Have you been playing with that dick yet? Thank No, I have not. Gotta make some AI generated. Dick de

Mikah Sargent (02:36:31):
That would be fantastic.

Leo Laporte (02:36:32):
I'll send you some Do that, please. I'm making it for everybody. Yeah. Ho ho. Oh, ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. This is your gift. What happened to the rest of Santa Claus in your hand? <Laugh>. It got chopped off at the waist. It took some sort of a terrible accident. This is a Santa mug and half Santa, but it's only from the belt down <laugh>. Yeah. I'm sure the other half is somewhere. They

Mikah Sargent (02:36:55):
Do have, you could get a head or the legs. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:36:57):
You had your choice. Yeah. The thing about this, I'm not sure if I like it, this, the, the boots are hollow so it holds more coffee, but it's harder to clean. Oh, okay. Oh yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:37:06):
Yeah. Dishwasher clean.

Leo Laporte (02:37:08):
Yeah. But the top half has the presents. <Laugh> Nick do, do you recognize?

Mikah Sargent (02:37:12):
Yes. Is that

Leo Laporte (02:37:14):
Familiar to you? I have the new fire clock, mister from oh, whoever.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:22):
Yoko lab Bon. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:37:23):
Yoko lab. Bono.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:25):
<Laugh>. Exactly. I got, is it fired up? I got two of the small ones for gifts for some people. They arrived. Oh, I did too. Yeah. I'm looking forward to giving those. I I sent out a couple of those too. There we go.

Leo Laporte (02:37:38):
There's,

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:38):
There you go.

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
I didn't turn on the light.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:41):
They are, they're just great. That's a really neat idea.

Leo Laporte (02:37:43):
It's a great way to warm up your coffee

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:45):
<Laugh>. It's really

Leo Laporte (02:37:46):
Good.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:47):
Yeah, we did, we smores over them earlier.

Leo Laporte (02:37:49):
Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about last week's Gizz whizz pick of the day which was a humidifier. That looks like it's on fire, but it's great. Yeah. Really cool. It's fire. Cool. I love it. What do you got for us today? That,

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:02):
That's a, that's a good trade name humidifier.

Leo Laporte (02:38:05):
Oh, ooh.

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:06):
They should have called it. Let's

Leo Laporte (02:38:08):
Trade. I can sell this one really

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:10):
Quick.

Leo Laporte (02:38:10):
<Laugh>. Everybody who wants a humidifier.

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:13):
Yeah. okay. Little l e a little l e d projector. And the funny thing is, I had done this on GIZ Whiz, and when I was looking for info on it for the website, I found something I like better. So I'm gonna talk about that. So it's a little l e d projector. It's waterproof. So you can use it and shine it on your house, and then you can pick it. There are two projection lenses. One of them is a background color, and then the other lens can, will be rotating snowflakes or Santa Claus or a reindeer. But what I found better is that there's one, and that's the one I put on my website, that you can actually change slides in the one side of the projector. So you can put in a 4th of July slide or a happy birthday slide, which will be like clowns and birthday gifts that will travel around. So it's just a real easy way to shine on a wall or around your house and have like some instant decorations. And like the little humidifier. I paid 26 bucks from mine. It only came two hours ago. So I, I just made a quickie video so that you could see that it, it's kind of a very effective little way to decorate a wall or a ceiling. Here.

Leo Laporte (02:39:41):
You're gonna turn your apartment into the disco boat that you sold, aren't you? Yeah. I'm slowly doing a secret ambition <laugh>.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:47):
I, I, I'm slowly doing that, that, that big. Yeah. And, and then the little slides, some of the slides you

Leo Laporte (02:39:54):
Call that in the business. That's called a gobo.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:57):
A gobo, yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So this is like an undersea gobo.

Leo Laporte (02:40:02):
Oh, what these dolphins and octopuses and, yeah. Giant. What? There's a megalodon. Watch out, Dick. Oh no, sorry. I got over. Excited. That's cool. That's

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:12):
Okay. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:40:13):
It's really great. So do you leave this on at night in your bedroom to re to make you feel better?

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:17):
No. You know what? But, but that watery thing, I, I did have a sea projected, I used to have in my bedroom, but I'm, I'm using the fireplace now in the bedroom, so I like it. The bedroom dock, <laugh> and that little mini humidifier in there. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:40:31):
That's cute.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:32):
Yeah. My whole world

Leo Laporte (02:40:33):
Is So does this now you're projecting on a piece of wood or something? Could you project it on the wall? I mean,

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:38):
Yes. That, that's what it's made for. I projected it on the seal. I can fill the whole ceiling. I mean, the room, this room is not big at probably

Leo Laporte (02:40:46):
Oh, that's cool.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:47):
16 by 20 feet. Oh, that's cool. But the, the ceiling's white so that

Leo Laporte (02:40:51):
It makes a perfect backdrop. So you can aim it at anything. It, of course, white will work at

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:56):
Anything. If you have a white hou you have a, some white space on the side of your house, a way to look like you've done some decorating like in five minutes to set this thing up. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:41:08):
What is that? You, you, a fire alarm just went off? I don't know. Is it, should I be worried?

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:17):
<Laugh>? Oh, no, no. You know, you must have the, the, the clock must have been set for an alarm time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:41:23):
Maybe you, the alarm. I'm saying it's time for Dick de Bartolo. I don't know. I

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:26):
I think it is. Yeah. I, I'll

Leo Laporte (02:41:28):
Give this to

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:28):
Rich. I'm John presets him. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:41:30):
I'll leave it for Rich.

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:31):
He's gonna, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:41:33):
He's gonna come into the studio and boy, is he gonna be amazed at all the junk. Oh

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:37):
My. You know what remember think

Leo Laporte (02:41:39):
Geek. Yes. I loved think geek.

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:41):
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Well, they had a device and they wanted me to do it. And I said what are you crazy? It was a little tiny little device that made beefs like that

Leo Laporte (02:41:52):
Made beef

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:53):
And you were suppo

Leo Laporte (02:41:54):
Beeps. Oh, beeps. Little beeps. Beeps. Uhhuh

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:56):
<Affirmative>. And you were supposed to, when you visit someone, throw it behind their couches.

Leo Laporte (02:42:02):
Oh, that's gonna drive them crazy.

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:03):
Yeah, exactly. And that's what I told them. I said, you know what I have that's mean

Leo Laporte (02:42:08):
A

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:08):
Wall of gadgets. And when I hear that beep,

Leo Laporte (02:42:11):
Oh, that news, you don't know where it's, I

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:13):
Have Daz

Leo Laporte (02:42:15):
You're liking a Swiss clock shop at midnight. There's no way to stop

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:19):
It. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. E Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And then always, always thought it's kind of weird when the battery's gonna die. It beeps.

Leo Laporte (02:42:26):
Yeah. Like that narrows it down. You

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:28):
Well, yes.

Leo Laporte (02:42:28):
Yeah, exactly. Those smoke alarm beeps. You can't know. You can't figure, you can't echolocate those. You just know there's a beep. You know where that's coming from.

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:37):
Exactly. And when, when one goes off in the hallway, it takes a long time to find out what floor it's on.

Leo Laporte (02:42:44):
<Laugh>, tell me about it. Oh, that's why you, that's why you have to go around the house and change it every time the clock changes, so you don't Yeah, because that's of course, inevitably that's gonna beep in the middle of the night and it's gonna make you crazy. And your wife's gonna make you get up at three in the morning, get on a very tall ladder and change the batteries. I'm not speaking specifically

Dick DeBartolo (02:43:06):
Of anybody, you know

Leo Laporte (02:43:07):
Anybody I know, but boy, I was very unhappy that night. But it could be someone in your house, <laugh>. It could be somebody in my house. This is the l e d projector equipped with two heads for 10 R G B W color with a water rave ripple effect at 14 wheeler ha winner themed slide patterns. But you don't, it's not just winner. So you could have it all year round. Yeah, exactly. 26 huts Halloween slide. Yeah, I know. Stuff is amazing. If you wanna get that can keep my little fire humidifier. The Flame Diffuser humidifier. There're that and everything he's ever mentioned over the last 20 years of the Tech Guy show is on this site. Giz whizz.biz. G Z W I z.bi z. Click the button that says the GI whizz visits. The tech guy right below it though, after you've browsed and bought, go to the, what the heck is it contest cuz it's almost up.

(02:43:59):
We got three more weeks for the end of the year to identify this gizmo or gadget and get in the running for six autograph copies of Mad Magazine if you get it right. 18. If you get, or 12 if you get it wrong. Do we know what mad we're playing for yet? We're playing for the February issue of May, which is not out yet, so we can't show you, which, which just came out this week. Okay. So you'll have yours by next Saturday. Oh, Dick is so nice. That's so nice. For our final show. Right. Our final show. Although I, if I were Mr. Rich tomorrow, I would get this cat on here. I I'm sending 'em all the names of all those wonderful people who do the radio show with us, cuz I'm really hoping you'll Okay. He will catch you, pick you up, pick you up, as they say in the business.

(02:44:44):
Right. I got picked up. Excellent. Yeah. Season, season 20 of the Gizz whizz Dick d Bartolo has a great podcast too@gwiz.tv. Website. GWiz, do Isz, Dickie d Have a great week. Thank you. You too, Sarah. Thank you. Bye bye-Bye. Thanks to Mikah Sargent for filling in today. Happy to. This is your last Saturday. No, one more. One more Saturday. One more Saturday. Yep. Then you and I will do it on the internet. Only on the internet that twi slash Thanks, professor Laura Kim Schaffer. Thanks to all of you. Have a great Geek Week. Oh, why?

(02:45:22):
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 this show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh on Mac Break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple Watches on iOS today, security and Security now. I mean, I can go on and on. And 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 guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.