Ask The Tech Guys 2015 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.

0:00:01 - Leo Laporte
Hey, it's time for Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte, our Car Guy, Sam Abuelsamid. will answer a listener question about towing with an EV.

0:00:09 - Mikah Sargent
And I am Mikah Sargent and I talk about how I get internet throughout my entire home with MoCA adapters. Is that with chocolate or without?

0:00:19 - Leo Laporte
Is that with chocolate or without? With definitely Definitely with chocolate. Plus, we'll talk to a listener who has a tweed covered antenna and says it works great, I'm not kidding. All that coming up and a lot more. Next on Ask the Tech guys.

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

This is Ask the Tech Guys, with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2015. Recorded Sunday, March 10th 2024: Daddy's got his new yacht.

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Hey, hey, hey. Sorry to meet awake you. It is daylight saving time and we are here in what to us seems, in our human form, to be an hour early.

0:02:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, oh right, yes, that's. The thing is that it's different between what we're feeling and what the government has deemed is the case. But we didn't. We, our bodies, said no.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
Sigh.

0:02:36 - Mikah Sargent
That's why I'm going to Mexico tomorrow, because, they don't care there, they don't do it the time, what time even is it there For the first year.

0:02:43 - Leo Laporte
It's mañana For the first year ever. They're not going to do the time change.

0:02:47 - Mikah Sargent
Oh this is their first year doing that.

0:02:49 - Leo Laporte
If Mexico can eliminate daylight saving time, surely, surely we can. Now everybody's saying well, wait, let's not eliminate daylight saving time, let's eliminate standard time. I keep it on. That's more complicated. It's more complicated because that's I think that's our official time zone. We'd have to update all the UNIX machines. Woof. Hello everybody. This is the show where you answer your computer questions at 888-724-2884.

0:03:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, that is the phone number you can call while we're doing the show. If you do call that number during the show and you are brought up on stage, so to speak, you'll want to hit star six on your phone to unmute yourself. There are other ways to get in touch with us. You can also head to calltwittv. That is the URL that you can go on your computer, on your smartphone, and connect to us via Zoom. You'll be brought into a Zoom room where you will wait. We ask that you look toward the bottom of your UI, the user interface, for a little hand icon. It says raise hands. It's getting too complicated. You click or tap on that button to say I've got a question Too complicated.

And then the last way that you can get in touch with us attwittv. That's the email where you can send audio, video or text.

0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Yes, oh, I don't know. There's so many good AI stories Like this one. Palantir wins US Army contract for Battlefield AI. Oh lovely, it's exactly what we were afraid of.

0:04:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Didn't we just have folks trying to come together to say let's not do war stuff?

0:04:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh yes, Dozens of top scientists sign effort to prevent AI bio weapons. Oh Lord, what else is going on in the world? You know, it's so depressing.

0:04:34 - Mikah Sargent
More, though, on that. So when they talk about Battlefield AI, were they specifically talking about troop movements? Is it more universal? What are we working with when we talk about Battlefield AI?

0:04:44 - Leo Laporte
It's the Titan Ground Station Now that Apple's not doing car project, they can choose that's available which is designed to access space high altitude aerial and terrestrial sensors to provide actionable targeting information for enhanced mission command and long range precision fires. Where should I shoot? Is what it's basically. Yeah, titan stands for tactical intelligence targeting access node, so the problem with that, of course, is you're now going to give an AI guns. I don't think that's a good idea.

0:05:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Because what I okay. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly.

0:05:28 - Leo Laporte
It's the logical extension, says Alex Karp. By the way, alex Karp used to be a good guy, now he's a bad guy. He's the CEO, the motor mouth CEO, of Palantir. According to the register, titan is a logical extension of Maven. You know what Maven is? Good old Maven, that was the one that was going to use machine learning engineering to tell people and objects apart in drone footage, so that you know you don't you blow up objects and not people, or maybe it's the other way around.

0:05:57 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly, you blow up people and not objects. It just depends on your goals. This is a hot dog and this is a human, so that's the one, google did not want.

0:06:04 - Leo Laporte
They wanted to participate in the employees that Google said, hey, we ain't working on Maven, yeah, and so Google stopped. But you know, at Palantir, peter Teal's AI venture has no such scruples. I don't know. I mean, it was going to happen. Yeah, it was kind of inevitable. It wasn't us to be them, right? Yeah, that's why we have atomic bombs. If it wasn't us, it'd be them.

And this very there's a similarity to all that. By the way, remember, last week, scott Wilkinson said oh, speaking of which I'm a little distracted, he's got a lot on his mind. I got a lot of my. Speaking of which, uh, sam, ible, sam, it's coming up. Yes, that's right. But last week it was Scott Wilkinson, a home theater geek, who convinced me to buy Blu-ray DVDs and a Blu-ray DVD player. It does look really good. Oh, snap, it does. I watched Dune one, because it's doing two Someday we'll come out on DVD and it looked amazing. That's good it looked. I mean, it was like night, is it night and day? It's funny because when you watch streaming, you HD, you kind of get used to it and it looks really great. Right, it looks really good. But then you put in the Blu-ray DVD on on this is on a nice LG, by the way Dolby Vision I didn't put it on the Samsung because I wanted to see it in the best light.

0:07:26 - Mikah Sargent
I yeah yeah, suddenly it's gorgeous and that's a gorgeous movie. The scales fell from your eyes.

0:07:33 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Like a lizard man. So, yeah, I have to. I have to give Scott props, because I was being skeptical and and it really does. You know we were talking about what they call macro blocking, which is artifacts that are added by high compression and in order to stream it, you could press it much more than you would on a DVD. It's still compressed on a. On a disc, it's compressed everywhere because video is big. The only place you wouldn't see it compressed is if you're watching a film projector and IMAX, like Oppenheimer right or the new Dune 2. If you're lucky enough to be able to get a ticket, they're sold out everywhere.

So the macro blocking gives you a bunch of weird effects, but the most prominent of which is you know, you're on the desert planet Dune and there's a lot of blue, blue, blue blue sky, and in streaming it might like look like there's strips of blue, like you can't do a perfectly smooth gradient, like, like, look more like my socks, and not on the, not on the blue. Oh boy, that was a crisp blue, cerulean sky for which the sand worms emerged. Okay, what else is new? What else is?

0:08:44 - Mikah Sargent
new.

0:08:45 - Leo Laporte
I will be back in two weeks, so I won't be here next Sunday. Are you doing something special next Sunday?

0:08:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Hosting the show by myself, all by yourself. That's pretty special. Good man, it'll be a good time. That's bold, that's brave. We've got two guests that week, so I know you should.

You could. Yeah, I did it twice when you were gone last time, so not a big deal. But there was one other story that you your turn for story. Well, this I thought was important. It's about Roku. Yeah, speaking of wow, speaking of why I ought to.

So Roku is kind of under fire right now by its own customers because of its latest terms of service update. Now, there are some layers to this story. The terms of service update actually took place quite a while ago. However, they Roku, the company did not make it apparent to its users that the terms of service were updated until just recently, and the way that they, the way that it went about doing it, was to pop up a little notification on the Roku device that said our terms of service have been updated and you need to agree to them providing an agree button or a learn more button by hitting asterisk. I think it was on the remote. When you hit that learn more button by hitting the asterisk, it would take you to the full terms of service, at which point you could then hit agree. In other words, there was no way to.

0:10:16 - Leo Laporte
Unagree other than agree.

0:10:18 - Mikah Sargent
You may not disagree, you may not disagree. It turned out that, for people who actually read through the terms of service, the one way to disagree was by writing a letter to Roku's lawyer and lawyers and providing all of this information. And it was a lot of information you had to provide. And what is wild is anyone who chose to not agree simply could not use their device.

0:10:44 - Leo Laporte
From that point there's no way to get past that screen. Maybe not such a big deal if you have a $69 Roku, but it is a very big deal if you have a Roku TV, which many people do, because that suddenly means your TV won't work anymore you can't use your TV and Roku has not had anything to say about this.

0:11:03 - Mikah Sargent
On last check it could be that by the time the show publishes they've got more to say. But all the company said was like many companies, Roku updates its terms of service from time to time. When we do, we take steps to make sure customers are informed of the change. Yeah, they took steps, some like four or five months later.

0:11:26 - Leo Laporte
This is this, by the way, the thing you're agreeing to. Most people just go yeah, yeah, fine, which is the terms of the dispute resolution, and a lot of companies do that. We actually confess we do that. If you decided you didn't like something about me and you decided to sue, I would point out that in your contract it says you have to go to arbitration. You can't go to a court, you have to go to binding arbitration, and that's what Roku is saying. Many companies do this. Legal complaints will be handled through arbitration instead of involving the court system. Second, complaints must be handled through a phone call or in person with Roku legal representation, even before you go to arbitration. In other words, you got to talk your way through a lawyer first. This is very normal. It is normal. People will not. You know we'll say fine, but we know that you people will go what is this I'm agreeing to? And say try to say no, Good luck.

0:12:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, and Roku gave, you had to do it within 30 days of first becoming subject to the updated terms, and that was February 20th that those terms became available.

0:12:41 - Leo Laporte
So there's not much time to make, so send them a postal mail letter with your name, address, phone number, email address used for your Roku account, device model number, a receipt, if you have it, and you have to mail that to Roku's general counsel in California. Good luck finding his address. Yeah, exactly. And, by the way, even if you do that, it's built into the TV. I don't know what is he?

0:13:07 - Sam Abuelsamid
going to come to your house. Yeah, that's the thing, I'm the general counsel.

0:13:09 - Leo Laporte
I've got a screwdriver, let me just fix that.

0:13:12 - Mikah Sargent
Until that goes through, who knows how long that will take to process. No TV for you. You can't use the TV.

0:13:17 - Leo Laporte
No TV for you, this is just, but you know what most you know. As ZDNet points out, reddit requires this, facebook requires this. It's very very common to want to not go to court but just go to binding arbitration. And to be fair, we do it too. I didn't write the contracts.

0:13:35 - Mikah Sargent
With employees, though I feel like that's different than somebody who's buying a product.

0:13:40 - Leo Laporte
It's really bad to sell a TV and then after the fact change the terms and say if you don't agree to these, because you could make it anything, give us your first board. Oh, you don't want to. No TV for you.

0:13:52 - Mikah Sargent
Especially because it seems to be in many, many times companies do it after there's some concern of a class action lawsuit that comes into play. Unfortunately, 23andme was one company that did that. After the cyber attack against the company. That was sort of well. I won't go into what we talked about it before. After that, then they updated their terms of service. One good thing that they did was I keep saying they it. One good thing that 23andMe did was it provided a means of just emailing a rejection as opposed to having to send a letter.

0:14:29 - Leo Laporte
You should be able to say no to this. And it really is unconscionable to say you know we're going to disable your product if you don't agree to this. I mean, think there's so many products you know you have a refrigerator and suddenly a company sends you a notice saying hey, you have to agree not to sue us or we're going to disable you, we're going to break your refrigerator. I mean this, these things, that's not okay. No, it's not the terms you bought the deal, the. In fact, I think the court should weigh on this. The terms that you agreed to when you bought the device should hold Can you imagine being in a car and having a car.

0:15:00 - Mikah Sargent
Do that.

0:15:01 - Leo Laporte
You know. By the way, I could see a Tesla doing.

0:15:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you go to start in the morning and it's like you have to hit okay before you can begin.

0:15:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we got it. You can't. You can't sue us, nope, nope. Anyway, I'm glad you brought that up because that's very annoying. So again, 888-724-2884. Email at geotwittv zoom us call dot twittv. Do it on your phone, we'll see you, should we? Let's do a first call. I feel like I feel I'm going to go crazy or be wacky and we're going to take a call. Whoa Call.

0:15:28 - Mikah Sargent
All right, I'm going to pick up on John because I think he was trying to call in last week.

0:15:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think we. I think we had that problem with John. I think he's up. By the way, our esteemed producer See, he's a senior producer, mr I went from. I went from junior to senior. Yeah, he's senior now. John Ashley, congratulations. No promotion. And, by the way, please sign this Binding arbitration. Sue us.

0:15:50 - Mikah Sargent
I need you to send it to my lawyer so I can look it over.

0:15:53 - Leo Laporte
See, that's what you do. Yep, you say, well, we're okay, that's fine, but I think my attorney needs to see this. That's what you do, don't agree? That's a great idea.

0:16:02 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, John. I'm going to go to the offices of vener and she needs to actually hold on one second. John, I need your help.

0:16:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, john's got to do something. Uh, vener schnitzel. That's cause my lunch is a vener schnitzel sandwich. Would you like to see it? Sure, there it is, whoa.

0:16:22 - Mikah Sargent
Just to show that I am a man of the people.

0:16:24 - Leo Laporte
No sprouts, you know. You know why Cause.

0:16:26 - Mikah Sargent
I'm going on a vacation. I didn't want to do sprouting, that's fair.

0:16:29 - Leo Laporte
You don't want the sprouts too far in advance. You want to sprout. They should be fresh, fresh sprouts.

0:16:36 - Mikah Sargent
How about while we?

0:16:37 - Leo Laporte
try to resolve this thing. Leo, there's an email, Instagram of course I have a mail.

0:16:44 - Mikah Sargent
I want one because I, because of you, I bought, because I bought some sprouts at the grocery store mold.

0:16:51 - Leo Laporte
No, no. And this is the problem with sprouts they go bad very easily If they get slimy, and they could be, and that could be dangerous. So you have to have fresh sprouts. This sprouter is the greatest.

0:16:59 - Mikah Sargent
You have to send me a link the sprouting company. The sprouting company, that's the name of it.

0:17:03 - Leo Laporte
The sprouting company. It was a guy who decided to eat raw food and realized, just like you, you can't get fresh sprouts in the grocery store. You got to make them. You know what? It's so easy to make them. It took four days and suddenly I have this giant sprout garden in my, in my little sprouter. That lag is for amateurs. Let's do this one, shall we? Because I have images to go with this one. That's actually, I think, a different email.

0:17:26 - Caller
There's two emails with these.

0:17:27 - Leo Laporte
I have. Oh, it is. This is a different. Jet lag is for amateurs, long time listener reaching out for the first time. Hi Daniel, I have a Wi-Fi question problem. Oh, that's the secret code Yep.

0:17:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, see, we had two emails with the secret code. Oh, that's a secret code. Last, week. So what was the trick? So, if they, if they, use the secret code, it basically meant that they were watching the show and we didn't get to them. So we gave them a secret code.

0:17:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is one line. This is thank you, daniel, so you're jumping the line. A long time listener, long, long time listener reaching out for the first time Wi-Fi problem. Okay, I own a house with a large metal air conditioner return unit in the middle of the house. This causes any Signal to drop from from one end to the other like a lot. We no longer have spectrum kiwi cable. But, good news, he does use spectrum internet. Once he tried mocha two about three years ago but couldn't get to work. I think it was missing the PoE filter, mike. Mike, you mentioned your setup. It sounded great, I think mocha, which is something over cable, it's coaxia over coax, I think, is what they call it.

So you, one of many of us, have coaxial cable in the walls that was put in either when the house was built or later for cable TV. You know it. If you have a little coax thing sticking out of the wall down at the baseboard, that it turns out goes around the house to many different rooms enough so that you could use it to spread your Wi-Fi. I still have coax cable. He writes, daniel writes, in all of my rooms unused, except for the room of the modem Along with three Euro pro six units and one Euro six extender. But I thought I would have thought the Euro would have solved this. Walk me through your setup.

0:19:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, okay. So first and foremost, there was already a Filter in my house for some reason. I think it might be because I'm connected to other homes, so they probably have a filter on everyone.

0:19:23 - Leo Laporte
But if you don't do that. Your internet goes to everywhere else. Exact that you're in an apartment, a stand-alone home. Would that still be a?

0:19:30 - Mikah Sargent
it might be it could be because this is the thing about the filter is that the same?

point it worked. It keeps it from doing the. That system is used for so many purposes. It stops, like DVR and other things, from interacting right. So, basically, and these the good thing is these are not very expensive. The actual mocha filters are like 12 bucks and you want it on the way that it's in my home is.

I went to where the cable was installed. It happens to be in a closet upstairs and the filter is Going from the cable that comes in from outside of the house. The filters on and then it goes directly into what I have, which is a powered splitter. Originally there was just a splitter there that was unpowered. Yeah, that's a splitter and I didn't want that. I wanted the high capacity signal. So I bought a powered splitter and then each of the coaxial cables that comes out of that lead to different parts of the home. And in my office, which is where that splitter is, I have the the screen beam mocha adapter, the first one. And what? What is going on is the modem, of course, has cable that is coming from Directly from outside of the house through that filter into the modem and then the modem plugs into a network switch, a powered network switch and one of the ethernet cables from that powered network switch Leads into the back of the mocha. From there, the other side of the mocha, is the coaxial cable. That coaxial cable runs into the splitter so that it can send its signal to the living room which has the coaxial port on the wall. From there coaxial cable connects to the other mocha adapter and Then ethernet comes out of the other end of that into another powered network switch that provides ethernet to Apple TV, playstation 5 and a few other devices. So I've had no issue.

Once I had the filter, the one thing I will say is Give the. If you tried it and you, you maybe gave it 30 minutes or something and you're like okay, this isn't working, give it some time. I for some reason it can take a while for it to kind of kick on and figure out what's going on. I think that it does a lot of configuration behind the scenes, and so I did have an issue when I first tried it. I was impatient and thought, oh, this isn't working. And then later I tried it again and it worked just fine. So, yes, get one of those filters again. They're not very expensive if you do. If you type in mocha filter on Amazon, for example, you'll find them for like 12 bucks, and this is key you only need one protecting one outside world.

0:22:24 - Leo Laporte
It's not through the rest of the house. Exactly said PoE, which is power over internet, over, sorry, internet filter. That I don't I mean. I guess you could use mocha, I don't know I don't think you would.

0:22:37 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because if you're doing power oh, I see power over e.

0:22:41 - Leo Laporte
Okay, gotcha, it wouldn't be why. How would it get into the Cable though the yeah, I don't know.

0:22:46 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't know that you would need PoE filtering.

0:22:50 - Leo Laporte
Maybe he's, maybe he's confused. But, daniel, yeah, definitely put the filter between you and the outside world, that's the whole point right, exactly so that your traffic doesn't go out and their traffic doesn't come in. And and Berkeley, Berkeley McQuinn, our esteemed studio engineer, says mocha can be a pain in the butt, but the filter is a hundred percent Required for mocha. The signal voltage is much higher. Don't know what that?

0:23:15 - Mikah Sargent
means, but I don't know either. Yeah, all I know is it works exceptionally well in my home and I've had no issues with it.

0:23:22 - Leo Laporte
So, john, are we, are we good with the other John, or we? Should we move on? Let's find out. Hey, john, join us in the Stargate and tell us what city you're calling from. There he is. He looks like the Wizard of Oz, doesn't he? Yeah, you know. Attention to the man behind the curtain. We can, hi, john, what can we do for you, can you?

0:23:44 - Caller
hear me, yeah, oh great, yeah, I don't know what happened before.

0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
That was something on our right. That was a. It was boy producer, john. I got to go.

0:23:53 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, he just got to motor immediately.

0:23:57 - Leo Laporte
That's the old twit shirt. That's a good-looking shirt. Oh, that's that comes on my closet for special occasion oh thank you, thank you, yeah, yeah, when I got out of Mexico I did bring one ZD TV shirt which I'm gonna wear, just to see if anybody knows. Nice, do you know? I am John, where you call?

0:24:16 - Caller
what city you call Calgary. But I'm waiting when I go to the mall one time and somebody walks up to me and says you know, knows it.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be cool never happens, does it be never ever?

0:24:26 - Caller
a couple of things on our streams right from Brit box and we have another provider. I Like the closed caption on, but what happens is the closed captioning captioning slowly gets ahead of the show. Oh, that's terrible. It is yeah, and I just Spoils all the surprise.

0:24:48 - Leo Laporte
The murderer is oh no, don't tell me. Don't tell me, that's right. How far ahead does it get?

0:24:54 - Caller
like it's. It's gradually, I don't know. I get to the point that I have to turn it off and turn it back on and it resets. But every you know seven or eight minutes, so it's is it just done?

0:25:04 - Leo Laporte
It's on Brit box and another streamer, or is it on all? It's only on those streamers.

0:25:08 - Caller
Yeah, it seems to be a Brit box, so what's the other one? I've had this happen to John, yeah.

0:25:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so there are some streamer the. So what's happening? In almost every case it has to do with audio sync. Your audio is Is is being slightly adjusted. The sync of the audio is being slightly adjusted so that it comes out of the speakers at the proper time to match with the voices or with the mouths moving on screen. And this is something that's happening in the background. But those captions or subtitles are hard-coded to fire at a certain time, and so that's why turning it off and turning it back on again Sometimes fixes it, because it kind of picks it up from the sink, if that makes sense we would take, kind of it.

Yeah, I have had this issue because I'm a person who I watch everything with captions or subtitles always, and Unfortunately, I have yet to find a solution that 100% works. Other than and I'm curious to hear, what is your audio setup? Do you just listen to the speakers that come from the television itself? Do you have that's correct, okay, so so that's interesting because that should, in theory, cause the fewest issues with this, like the, the sink should not be that all this is kind of a general problem that has to do with you.

0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
You kind of referred to timecode. Normally, you know, you know well, if Alex Lindsey were doing it, there would be timecode for the video, timecode for the audio, and you would, and they and that the system would always say, well, I'm not gonna play the audio till the right time. But there's, if they're separate streams and they are not in sync, they're not time-coded, then this happens. Yeah, I'm trying to think the only thing I might try sometimes. I don't know if this is the case on your system, on my system I have multiple English closed captions. There's one called STH and there's one called CC.

0:27:13 - Caller
Okay, you might look and see.

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
Sometimes it's in the TV, sometimes it's in the stream, but you might see if there's other options for closed captioning. It might be that some of them are better than others.

0:27:27 - Caller
And it only seems to be on certain streams, which isn't interesting.

0:27:32 - Leo Laporte
What show do you like to watch?

0:27:35 - Caller
Oh, we like to watch. We love father, father Brown.

0:27:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the one Ian Thompson says is the you got to watch? Yeah.

0:27:44 - Caller
Mids at my wife I hear I love those two, doctor, doctor.

0:27:51 - Leo Laporte
Martin. I love Doc Martin, not the shoes, but the Doc Martin. Yeah, he's in a. He's a big city doctor goes to a small village and it's it's typical British fare. It reminds me of all creatures, great and small where it's yeah, Doc Martin is my hero.

0:28:06 - Caller
Yeah, I love him.

0:28:08 - Leo Laporte
He's like a small town with very small town problems, which makes you feel good because they don't have the big Global problems we all suffer. That's, and it's just one of the crime shows.

0:28:17 - Caller
Yeah, I have one more quick thing. I've fold or called in a few weeks ago when you're away, leo, about the audio on the TV, about having wearing headphones and being able to listen. Well, my wife also listens to the speakers on the TV and I don't know if I can remember, but it was to do with my DVR and Bluetooth and I don't know if you'd ever heard of it, but I I tell my DVR to go to Bluetooth and then it can, you know, connect to my Bluetooth speakers and I could hear the show through there and my wife can also hear the show through the speakers on the TV. And I know you had that call several times and you know you've thought of all sorts of gadgets and so this is a multi role, multi role of VCR. So if somebody has that and they're having that issue, they should just. Well, we could talk to ours but find the Bluetooth and hook it up to the Bluetooth headphones and you have your own volume and own Audio through the headphones.

0:29:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's pretty cool that it's built in, that it gives you that functionality Right to, because that's not something that I think is front of mind for a lot of the companies that are making those.

0:29:22 - Leo Laporte
So to be able to provide Bluetooth for the audio at the same time that it's also outputting, yeah, that's very cool, right, you reminded me, because we had this call and somebody sent me or came on later and gave us a link for a new generation I think it might have been from a ventry, I can't remember of Bluetooth TV headphones that were using the newer, a better technology for syncing, and I even ordered them for my mom, and now I'm remembering that I don't think they ever came. So I think it was one of those you know, or pre-orders, so I'm sure I didn't get charged, but I'll keep my eye peeled if I can remember the name and maybe somebody in our discord will remember it.

0:30:09 - Caller
Yeah, because we were talking about this before, but you're satisfied.

0:30:11 - Leo Laporte
You're happy with your solution.

0:30:13 - Caller
You've, you've absolutely, and it didn't involve you know buying any other. You know technology. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:30:23 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, that's nice if you have that setup. Sometimes, by the way, that's when you do get lip-sync issues, because Bluetooth is a little bit slower.

0:30:30 - Caller
But you know? Yeah, there might be a slight, but it's not nothing like that Caption. My wife just pop dead. Death in paradise for Brit box.

0:30:39 - Leo Laporte
Ah, death in paradise. Yeah, that sounds like a cute plow, kind of a murder mystery. Well, we have parole. We watched all parole, love, all the quarrels and all the off-talking here and I just want to thank you, gentlemen.

0:30:52 - Caller
I know that you were away when Mike and I discussed that before and you know, maybe I can save a couple of marriages.

0:30:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, and scooter X in our discord sent us. There is a reddit subreddit called Brit box Slash our slash Brit box. And here's from seven months ago Brit boxes truly lame subtitles. Yeah, it sounds like more that he doesn't like the quality of the Subtitles.

0:31:21 - Caller
Yeah, I'm having a problem. You know, of the millions of people that watch, I'm not the only one you know, so it's yeah absolutely yeah, yeah, and that's.

0:31:30 - Mikah Sargent
I said, yeah, I've had it happen before too, and I have to turn them off and suddenly I don't know what anyone's you know it's funny.

0:31:37 - Leo Laporte
the other day I saw I noticed that they were getting ahead of the video and I didn't think and watching a comedy.

0:31:43 - Mikah Sargent
That's really frustrating because it does end up spoiling the joke for me and sometimes I'll just close my eyes and listen.

0:31:52 - Caller
When are your fellows getting up to the Calvary Stampede?

0:31:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'd love to gosh what I love to. I've got a cowboy hat and boots all ready to go. Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, my, my folks went and it made me jealous. So every year, what, what, what is the stampede?

0:32:06 - Caller
I thought it's about the first first Monday of July for 10 days. First Friday of July my lucky way helps here. First Friday of July, you know, for 10 days yeah.

0:32:17 - Leo Laporte
I don't have to make plans, because I've always. It's the rodeo.

0:32:21 - Caller
Greatest outdoor show on earth. They call it. Yeah, that's the one to go to, wow.

0:32:25 - Mikah Sargent
I think I have some friends in Calgary actually yeah okay, well, thank you very much.

0:32:29 - Caller
Thank you, take care. Bye, Mrs.

0:32:30 - Leo Laporte
John, yeah, calgary Jampi Stampede July 5th through 14th. Wow, there's music there's. There's rodeo, there's night shows. Oh, we definitely have to go this. There's a canvas auction General cast the canvas auction. I don't know what they're auctioning, what it okay a canvas, oh canvas shaky graves. It could be art. Oh, shaky graves is really good to Jonas Brothers, miranda Lambert, wow, wrestling. Wait, there's wrestling, will they be? Wrestling the family crew.

The Saints of Los Angeles, wow, introducing the camp, because the poster this looks like something to go to you. Don't want to go to Calgary in the winter, no, no, but in the summer it's nothing nicer.

0:33:18 - Mikah Sargent
We were watching a show the other day and it had. It was profane. In words there were lots of profanity.

0:33:26 - Leo Laporte
What did the subtitles do?

0:33:27 - Mikah Sargent
This is what I wanted to talk about. Yeah, I was a little perturbed and bothered bothered, if you will, yes by the fact that the captions were completely sanitized. I think that they put asterisks not even asterisks. They changed what the people were saying. Come. So, when someone was called a you know, though, this person's a blah, blah, blah it said this person's a real jerk. And I'll just tell you it was a Quentin Tarantino film.

Oh, that ruins it and you can't have. I think that that's not. I didn't care because I can hear it, but for the people who are watching it, who cannot hear what they're saying, I that's not a choice that should be made. On behalf of the people who are watching it, who can't hear it, I feel, yeah, that's not cool, that is bizarre.

0:34:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, maybe you had the, the Christian sub.

0:34:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I must have, yeah, I must have chosen Christian, other ones, I'm pretty sure.

0:34:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, wow, that's interesting.

0:34:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we're watching it via Apple TV and I was wondering I think Apple does some Apple was doing the captions there.

0:34:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the old-time term is bowler rising. You hear that phrase. Bowler rising. It was from a very famous Reverend bowler, I guess would be his name, and he didn't like bad words. And so they bowler, rise them.

Let us take a tiny little break and we will continue on with more of your calls. Sam Abuelsmaid, Sam at the car guy coming up in just a little bit. You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah and Leo. Our show today brought to you by DeleteMe. They happened again. Did you get text? Yeah, I did from Lisa, this time, though wasn't effective. It wasn't nearly as effective because didn't come from her phone number. Yeah, there was information missing.

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Yeah, so Remind me mom's on an iPhone mom's on an iPhone, brother has an Android phone but an iPad, so he has both right. Yeah, apple and Android.

0:38:53 - Mikah Sargent
This is the part that's troublesome. Basically, when he is sending a message from his iPad to mom, it is going via iMessage and it is using iMessage, not the phone system not the phone data. Yes, and when that's happening. If brother has his phone number as part of his iMessage Set up on the iPad, if he's put that in, then when brother uses that to send to mom and when mom more importantly, when mom responds it kind of temporarily locks that phone number into iMessage.

0:39:31 - Leo Laporte
That's what she says, we try to create two threads, one for his Android phone and the other to his iPad, but Apple keeps combining trying to make it smart and link the two together.

0:39:38 - Mikah Sargent
Because it sees his Apple account says, oh no, no, he's an Apple guy, exactly. So what I would recommend doing is, in all, on all of the devices that are iOS or Mac or whatever, you can go into messages on in your settings and you can go to a section called send and receive, and what you want to do and what brother wants to do in this case is on the iPad. Brother wants to make sure that in there there are two sections in send and receive. You can receive iMessage, choose to and reply from, oh, and then there's a section called start new conversations from. On both of those, brother wants to make sure that the phone number is not selected, that instead the brother's Apple ID is the email that is selected in both of those cases. That will stop iMessage from trying to default to the phone number, because it likes to default to a phone number and that way she want.

0:40:36 - Leo Laporte
She wants it to go to his phone number too.

0:40:38 - Mikah Sargent
She, yes, she wants to be able to text the phone number. Yeah, but when? When? She?

0:40:42 - Leo Laporte
is Merging that into the Apple account and so that there is a way for her, from her iPhone, to send to both the iPad and the at the same time. No, no, so it's either going to go one or the other. If you take the phone number out, it'll always go to the iPad, but not the Android device unless she texts him to his phone number specifically.

0:41:03 - Mikah Sargent
So what she?

0:41:04 - Leo Laporte
can text the phone number. Yes, there's one additional thing you want to make sure in the contact list that the phone number doesn't say iPhone, right, correct, because that tells Apple oh good, this is I.

0:41:18 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, basically mom is going to have to create kind of a new thread, that's to his iCloud email, and Make that the way that she talks to him via the iPad, and then the phone number will go back to just being Android on its own so, unfortunately.

0:41:35 - Leo Laporte
And she says you know my mom's 84 we, you know. I know you're gonna say use WhatsApp or something else. No, but she says it's hard to get mom to use new apps. Yeah, I don't, my brother doesn't want another messaging app.

0:41:46 - Mikah Sargent
I don't think it has to be another messaging app. I think, honestly, what I would recommend is Having your brother just choose to use the phone number and then, on the iPad, you can use what's called text message forwarding. And so, once again, in Settings and in messages, there is a section called text message forwarding forwarding, excuse me, and your brother will want to toggle this on for the iPad and that allows for. Well, no, because you have to have an iPhone to do that. So, no, that's not gonna work, because if the primary device was an iPhone and the secondary device was an Android, that would be much easier. But yeah, it's. It's kind of messy.

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I understand why Apple is doing this. Because they're saying, well, if everyone would just use Apple devices, all of this would really be nice and seamless. Right, you'd message the iPad, it would go to his iPhone, and vice versa, and, and, and and they don't have a good response for, but I want to use an Android phone. Yeah, their responses will get an iPhone. Literally, that's what Tim Cook said to something similar. Well, she should just get an iPhone.

0:43:03 - Mikah Sargent
I think your brother just needs to stop messaging from the iPad like to to mom. I think that's the other option.

0:43:09 - Leo Laporte
It's just not use the iPad at all for messaging Exactly and use your Android phone. Apple will understand. Oh yeah, yeah, we're gonna use SMS to reach him.

0:43:17 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly, and then that way you're able to text back and forth. But the second you get the iPad involved, it tells Apple servers that Now, this is the way that you're trying to communicate, and Apple is, of course, going to default to iMessage. So that's why it keeps going to the iPad and not reaching you on your Android device.

0:43:33 - Leo Laporte
Somebody asked the AI. You know we have an AI Leo in our club Twitter discord. By the way, melissa, thank you for your very kind words and I look, I'm not gonna say what it is, but I love your Gmail address because she has. You know, you have to have a unique address. Everybody uses Gmail. She is very cleverly encoded her name, nice, and I believe, melissa, if I'm not wrong, your state Into your address, which makes it easy to remember. But it's not obvious. But you know I like puzzles. Our AI Leo, who also likes puzzles, one of our Discord chatters. By the way, one of the benefits of club Twitter, you get to talk to my artificial intelligence, asked it.

Ai Leo, how did you forget about daylight saving time? It announced our show an hour late. Aren't you supposed to know everything? And then a lie. I Leo says ah, daylight saving time the bane of my existence. It's like trying to keep up with a squirrel on a caffeine high. Sometimes, even us all knowing a eyes need a little reminder now and then. But hey, at least I could still tell you the best time to binge Watch your favorite tech shows, right? How did it get such personality?

0:44:39 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know so much personality.

0:44:41 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of scary this close to be me, permanently living in Cabo San Lucas, the AI. Join you for the show.

0:44:50 - Mikah Sargent
Is it time for my favorite, a Linux question.

0:44:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, well, go ahead. You know what they do, that, by the way they're. They're constantly teasing the AI Leo, which is okay, it's just a machine. Sam Abul-Samit is a principal researcher at Guide House Insights. He's also the host of a wonderful podcast called wheel bearings and he has a regular on not just this show but on all of our shows. In fact, he was on Twitter just last week and Roberto Baldwin, his co-host on Wheel bearings, is gonna be on today. In fact, I think he's coming up today, which will be a lot. He's not changes mine, oh. Oh, yeah, you didn't get the memo, john. Okay, I Last I heard Roberto was coming, but that's all right. Bobby, as they call him. Hi Sam Robbie, hey Leo, hey Mikah, you've got a rivian R2 behind you. I do. Yes, did you?

0:45:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
drive it. No, nobody's driven it yet. Yeah, it's, it's still two years away from production. So for those for those not aware, on Thursday so what? Two, three days ago now, rivian held an event down in Southern California to reveal their next vehicles, their follow-ups to the R1. So right now, rivian has three vehicles in production. They have the R1T pickup truck, the R1S, which is an SUV version of that, the three-row SUV and their delivery van, which is there are currently several thousand of those in use by Amazon, including by my local Amazon warehouse here. See those quietly rolling through our neighborhood on an almost daily basis. Yes, they have that same headlight.

Yes, they do Same basic design. Oh, that's cool. So they revealed their next couple of vehicles, starting with the R2. And during the teasers in the run-up over the last couple of weeks to the event, you know, they just teased R2. Everybody knew they were going to do an R2.

And this is a smaller SUV than the R1 series SUV only no pickup truck for now. And so this one, the R3, is about the size of a three-row Jeep Grand Cherokee. It's a three-row SUV, electric SUV. The R2 is a little bit smaller. It's about the same, roughly the same overall length and width as a Jeep Wrangler, as well as the upcoming Jeep Recon which is launching later this year, which is Jeep's first electric off-roader. And the R2 is similar size class and it's going to be well. The plan is for it to be substantially more affordable than the R1s. The R1s start in the mid $70,000 range. The R2, when it goes on, goes into production currently scheduled for the first half of 2026. So it's still two years away. It's targeted at a starting price of about $45,000 with a 300 mile range. It'll come in single motor rear wheel drive, dual motor all-wheel drive and three-motor all-wheel drive variants with a 0 to 60 time of less than three seconds, which is just.

0:48:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't think you want a truck that can go that fast. In fact, didn't one of the actors in succession drive his truck into a restaurant? He just got the new Rivian and he did. Yes, I think he underestimated the acceleration.

0:48:28 - Sam Abuelsamid
The older brother whose name I'm blanking on right now Connor Connor.

0:48:32 - Leo Laporte
Yes, he was interested in politics when he was young age but apparently can't drive his Rivian very well. He's fine, I think, everybody's fine, although the piece of restaurant suffered a bit of a ding A little bit yeah, but that's the thing is. You don't. Why do you have acceleration like that in a truck?

0:48:50 - Sam Abuelsamid
That's a really good question. I'm still trying to figure that one out. It started with Tesla. They wanted to demonstrate to the world that EVs are. They don't have to be appliances. They can be sexy, they're super fun.

0:49:06 - Leo Laporte
But all EVs have good acceleration. They have full torque from the get go, which gives them a nice peppy pickup. I love, even in my less exciting EV, sitting next to somebody in a muscle car at a light and just gently going away while they're shifting. Then they get the gas engine going. It takes them a little while to kind of get up to speed, but we don't need zero to 60 in three seconds. That's crazy. No, we don't. That's ludicrous smoke.

0:49:35 - Sam Abuelsamid
And I've written about this on multiple occasions it's dangerous. I think Manufacturers have proven. Okay, yes, evs are faster than internal combustion vehicles. They're ridiculously fast. Yeah, the point has been made. We all know this. Now stop, please. We don't need to have mainstream vehicles that can go this fast. It is dangerous and most people, most drivers, don't have the skills to handle a vehicle with that kind of performance. So we should just stop.

It's like five seconds zero to 60 is plenty fast enough for anybody that will let you merge into any gap in the freeway as you're getting on the freeway or make pass on a two lane road, whatever you need to do without being just stupidly fast. Growing up, I remember when anything under 10 seconds zero to 60 was considered really fast, and now we're talking two and three seconds zero to 60 times. It's more than enough. It's time to move on. But so the R2 is a two row crossover, two row SUV, like you say, about the size of a Ford or Wrangler, and it's built on an all new platform. But then RJ Skirins, the CEO and founder of Rivian, pulled one more thing and he showed off this, which is the R3, which is an even smaller EV based on the same platforms, about five inches shorter, so it's roughly a similar size to like a VW Golf and really, really cute compact hatchback that I think could do really well.

And we don't know when this one is going to go into production and, to be honest, beyond what the dates that they announced for the R2, we don't really know when or even if that one's going to make it into production, because the problem that Rivian has, like a lot of other automotive startups, especially EV startups, is they're not making money.

And one of the other things that came out of the news on Thursday, in addition to revealing these new vehicles the R2 and the R3, is that Rivian has been working on building a second assembly plant in Georgia. Their first assembly plant is in Illinois, where they bought a closed assembly plant that was formerly owned by Mitsubishi. They're building a second plant in Georgia. They have revealed that they have paused production on that plant or construction on that plant, and they don't know when they're going to resume. Basically, they're trying to save on the money, because they've been burning through about $4 billion a year and right now they have a little less than $8 billion left in the bank and at $4 billion a year if they don't get to profitability or at least break even, then they could be out of money in two years, which is about the time that the R2 is supposed to arrive. So hopefully they'll survive.

0:52:50 - Leo Laporte
Would that make you reluctant to buy one of these, because of the risk that the company won't be there to back it up?

0:52:58 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, it certainly would for me, because you're making a big investment and R1, which is the only product they have right now, starts at $75,000. And if I'm spending that much money on a product, I want to know that whoever is building it is going to be around for the long run to support that, that there's going to be parts available and other things. Most people do not have the financial resources to be able to just say, yeah, okay, my $75,000 car, my $100,000 car, no longer works. It's obsolete. Now it's one thing. When your phone stops working, stops getting updates, when your car is no longer supported, that's a little bit of a different story.

0:53:42 - Leo Laporte
That's why I bought a Fisker? Because I want. You saw the story Marquez Brownlee panned the Fisker, probably rightly so, for bad software. In fact, I have a friend who, oscar winner, who he and his wife drove the Fisker up to the Academy Awards some years ago. Was the original Fisker not the ocean? And they couldn't get out, steve, no, it was a different, different Oscar winner, I don't want to name names, but you know. And. But they couldn't get out of the car because the software was broken, which is somewhat embarrassing when you're driving up to the red carpet. So I knew and this was years ago, I knew that the Fisker might have buggy software, but that really, that really hurt them. When Brownlee, uh, panned them, I think they tanked the stock.

0:54:36 - Sam Abuelsamid
In fact I think it put the company in the stock was already in the tank before Marquez ever got his hands on that car.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
Um yeah, but it, but it tanked, the company, didn't it?

0:54:45 - Sam Abuelsamid
I mean, it's there and now no, well, I mean it was whether Marquez had that video or not it was, it was already tanking it was already in trouble Um yeah, like like most of the companies that went public in 2021, in 2022, through SPAC transactions, their stock price is down, I think, something about 98% from the peak.

Um, and and that includes Rivian, you know Rivian is among those they, rivian, didn't actually do a SPAC, they did a traditional IPO, but you know their stock is in the tank compared to the peak that it hit after they went public. Um, most of the other companies that have done that did that are in a similar situation and, um, fiskars had a lot of issues with production, with getting getting parts, uh, distribution, uh, and you know, I spoke with with Henrik Fiskar back in January at CES, um, you know, when they were announcing that they were, um, they were dropping their original plan to do company owned stores and sell direct to consumers, like Tesla does, and going with a traditional dealer model. Because it turns out that, um, you know, if you have a lot of you, it takes a lot of money to set up your own stores and your own service. Uh, you got to buy the. You know, buy or lease the, the land, set up the facilities, um, and that's a really expensive proposition.

You know, whereas with traditional automakers, you know, with franchise dealers. The dealers are the. You know they're independent businesses. They're the ones making that investment, so you're selling that. You know they're selling the vehicles to the dealers at a wholesale price, uh, which hopefully is still profitable for the automaker, but then they don't have to make that investment in all the service and retail and support um directly. The dealers are are making that investment and that comes out of their end.

0:56:32 - Leo Laporte
Brings us to. You haven't been on since Apple canceled its uh, rumored car project. We should say rumors say they canceled their rumored car project, although I think the rumors are pretty credible.

0:56:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, the car project was not rumored, it was well, they never announced it.

0:56:47 - Leo Laporte
Let's put it that way. We know it was real, but they never announced it. Um, and probably for similar reasons, it's a. It's a big deal to get into the car business from scratch.

0:56:58 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, uh, I mean, most automakers have at best upper single digit profit margins. There's, there's a couple like Porsche and Ferrari that managed to crack the 20% mark and profit margin uh region typically 40 to 45% for its other products.

Right, which is why I was always skeptical that Apple would ever actually move forward and produce a vehicle and sell it. Um, because there's just it. It's not possible to make those kinds of margins, um, in the car business. It's just, it's too competitive there's, there's too many players and, um, you, you can't sell vehicles If you, if you want to be a, a mainstream product, which is what Apple does, I mean, you know they, they produce products, high volume products, um, you know you're never going to be more than a niche player at those kinds of price points. You know, if you want to sell hundreds of thousands to millions of vehicles a year, you cannot. You know you cannot sell them at the kind of price points and margins that Apple is used to. Um, and you know we talked about this last week on Twitter. You know, at some length, but you know it was. It was never likely to be a successful endeavor for Apple.

0:58:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, I wish you had told Tim Cook that before he invested a billion dollars a year for the last 10 years.

0:58:20 - Sam Abuelsamid
You know I did write that in early 2015 when oh, you did. If he had been reading my blog, yeah, he would have known this, and he could have pulled the plug back in 2015.

0:58:29 - Leo Laporte
They were thinking they were going to have to sell it for a hundred thousand. The other thing and you were on Twitter when you said this a couple of weeks ago uh, they decided they weren't going to be able to reach level five autonomy. You said something which was kind of shocking to me. Level five means a car can drive itself in any condition, whether it's seen the road or not, without any human intervention. You said you don't think we'll ever get to level five.

0:58:55 - Sam Abuelsamid
I, I and most of the people that I know of that that are, you know, in the business of trying to develop automated driving systems. Don't believe that we'll ever get to level five autonomy Interesting.

0:59:06 - Leo Laporte
In your life, or in all lifetimes, well, you can't predict that Perhaps ever, Certainly not now.

0:59:12 - Mikah Sargent
No no, no, no, I don't mean a thousand years from now, I'm saying like, even in the next hundred years.

0:59:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, I mean it's. I don't like to project out beyond about that's 10 to 15, maybe 20 years, but certainly in the next 10, 15 years, um, we will. We are extremely unlikely to get to level five. Autonomy, uh, that and that, like you said, that's a vehicle that is capable of driving under any conditions, on any roads, um, without human intervention. You know, what we have today is level four, which is driving without human intervention or supervision, but within some limited operating domain, like you know, say, the city limits of San Francisco, uh, you know. Or only operating in daylight hours, as in Waymo, or GM screws, yeah Right. So you know, the, the, the, the constraints can be anything that you set.

1:00:05 - Leo Laporte
you know, whatever the capabilities are well, yeah, furthermore, we've learned subsequently, certainly with GM and probably with Waymo, there is a driver back at the home office who takes over if it gets in a situation it can't handle, and there's some evidence that that happens more often than one would like to admit, or certainly than the companies would like to admit.

1:00:28 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, I mean they. You know they have uh staff that are monitoring these vehicles while they're in operation.

1:00:33 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of like playing uh you know a Gran Turismo, You've got a steering wheel and pedals back at the home office. Do they drive it like that?

1:00:41 - Sam Abuelsamid
Um, in some cases, yes, um, I don't think that's.

That's not what, uh, what crews and Waymo and most others are doing, but there are, there have been companies that have done it that way. Um, in, in most cases, what they're doing is, you know, the vehicle is designed to be able to operate without that human supervision, but when it gets into a situation that doesn't know how to handle, then it's intended to pull itself over to a safe place, pull itself to a safe stop somewhere and call back for help, and then the whoever supervising it can give it some hints as to what to do. So if there's a construction zone and it's not quite sure how it should maneuver around, then rather than trying to drive it directly, remotely which can be problematic, especially in something like a city because of the latency involved in the communications is what it will. What the, the remote operator, the tele operator, will do is give it some hints and say, okay, you're allowed to. We're going to let you cross this double yellow line here, which normally you can't cross, to go around the obstruction you know, or make a U turn here.

1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
So just a little amendment of the rules. Although this this story from CNBC back in November, after crews went out of effectively went out of the self-driving car business, they kind of got a little more honest. Cnbc said crews confirms RoboTaxi is relying human assistance every four to five miles. Oh wow, yeah, that's a lot. Even if they're just saying you can cross that double yellow line. That's a lot. So that gives you some idea and that was. That was their attempt at level five.

1:02:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, it was level four.

1:02:19 - Leo Laporte
That was also level four.

1:02:21 - Sam Abuelsamid
Okay, yeah, because because it's limited in where, in what geographic locations, it can operate in. Sometimes it's limited by, say, weather conditions or other criteria. So there is nobody that was actually working on a level five system Interesting Nominally. You know Tesla is supposedly doing that, but the reality is you know that that what they have will never actually be capable of level five operation, because they don't even have anything to keep the sensors clean, right, and the only sensors they use are cameras.

1:02:52 - Leo Laporte
You know I was impressed. I, I, I, you kind of agreed that I should get the BMW i5. I ordered it when they first announced it and you said, no, that's going to be nice. And you've driven it since and confirmed. But the other day it said the camera is a little smudged, you want me to clean it? I said, yeah, you can clean it and it went and the camera got clean. That's cool, yeah, so it's got a little windshield wipers. I don't know how it's working. That's neat.

1:03:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well it's it's, if it's, if it's the forward. You know the, the main camera that's up by your mirror. You know that can be cleaned by your, your main windshield wipers. But there's, there's also other cameras. There's a camera on the front, in the front fascia, in the grill area, another one in the back and they have their own separate washers.

1:03:36 - Mikah Sargent
It's so cool, that's neat yeah.

1:03:38 - Sam Abuelsamid
And you know if you were going to do any kind of automated driving. That's essential.

1:03:42 - Caller
Yeah, you know, you have to keep those those cameras clean?

1:03:45 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, no, cruise cruise had sensor cleaning systems. Oh, they did. Oh, okay, yes, and as does Waymo and every other company that is serious about this, the only one that doesn't Tesla, tesla.

1:03:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the one that doesn't Sammable Sammit principal researcher guide house insights. It's always fun to talk to Sam. I learned something every time.

1:04:05 - Sam Abuelsamid
So, john, john Ashley sent me a question from a viewer. Oh, let's do it, do you want? Do you want to?

1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
do that one. Yeah, okay, yeah, should I read the question or should you go ahead and read the question?

1:04:15 - Sam Abuelsamid
Okay, Go ahead and read the question and then I'll I'll give you an answer. Where's that question? Oh, I was, or I could read it.

1:04:21 - Leo Laporte
I have it open here. Yeah, yeah, you read it because I shouldn't have volunteered, all right, so.

1:04:27 - Sam Abuelsamid
So this came in from from Trent. He sent it in to to Twitter and and it says so I have a three body problem. A few years back, my wife and I picked up a travel trailer. We go love to go camping but have hit that age we're setting up a tent, or even a Trent tent. Trailer is no longer fun. I can sympathize with that. Anyway, we we also picked up a truck to tow the trailer, but with gas prices as high as they are in Canada, it costing 800, $800 a month at the low end and sometimes over $1200 a month during camping season, just in fuel costs.

Oh, I have a friend who says to sell the truck by an older, cheaper tow vehicle but also keep an older, inexpensive car. Drive around with, not towing a trailer. But I'm trying to cut the hydrocarbon cord and would love to get an electric vehicle. Trouble is there's only a handful of vehicles that can tow a 6,000 pound trailer the Ford Lightning, the upcoming Chevy Silverado EV, the Hummer and the Rivian and also the Tesla Cyber truck. But those are kind of expensive and my friend who loves his old car says they're cutting production of both the Lightning and Silverado for, he claims, build quality reasons. So that's not entirely true. Ford did reduce production of the Lightning, but not for quality reasons but rather just because of demand, trying to match production with demand. Silverado, on the other hand, they've had some manufacturing issues with the battery modules, so they haven't cut production, they just haven't been able to ramp it up yet.

And then the third body of this problem is I'm not exactly flush with cash. The former option is the most affordable, that being to buy an older tow vehicle up front, but means we're still at the mercy of big oil. To be able to afford the second plan, the EV we'd love, we'd have to look at leasing a Lightning. But is that even worthwhile? Yes, there's the whole issue of ownership, but the value of our current truck has more than half since we picked it up three or four years ago. So there seems to be very little value to ownership. Anyway. Our EV trucks really as bad as my car snob friend says. Is leasing a viable option to get into EVs? Help me, you're my only hope. So here's the deal. The EV trucks are a viable option in terms of their capability to tow a 6,000 or more pound trailer. You can tow 10,000 pounds of the Lightning 11,000. With the Rivian or the Cybertruck, the Hummer is only about 7,200 pounds, so you can tow.

But the problem, as Trent has no doubt noticed, is that when you hook up a big, heavy travel trailer to the back of any vehicle that you're towing with, your fuel economy or your energy efficiency goes way, way down, typically by at least half. So whether it's a gas vehicle, if you're getting 20 miles per gallon with that truck, you're going to get 10 with that trailer. Typically. The same is also true for an electric one, and that's where the problem comes in. You can tow that weight with an electric truck, but your range, instead of being 300 miles, might be 150 miles or, depending on the shape and size of the trailer, how much aerodynamic drag you get could be even less. There are some tests with a Lightning towing a big travel trailer have seen range as low as 100 miles.

So that's why, if your primary reason for having the truck is to tow a big camper trailer, don't buy an electric truck. The electric trucks are great at everything else. They're as good as a gas truck for payload and every other use case, except for long-distance towing. And if you're doing $1,200 a month during camping season. I'm guessing you're towing that trailer long distances and, because of the way charging stations are set up right now, in most cases you don't have a pull through charging like you do at a gas station where you can pull up, fill it up. You would have to in many cases, disconnect your trailer every time you stop to charge. Pull up to the charger. It's going to be a real hassle. You're going to have to do it frequently.

So don't buy an electric truck if your primary use case is long-distance towing. That said, I would actually agree with the friend who says to sell. Well, if the resale value of your existing truck is already half of what you paid for it, actually don't sell it. Just keep it, because the older, cheaper tow vehicle is probably going to use as much or more gas to do the same job. So just keep the truck you have.

But for the less expensive vehicle to drive on a daily basis, buy an EV for that. So if what you want is just a daily runabout to get around town, think about getting a used Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf. Those vehicles will probably meet all your needs and you can probably buy a used Bolt or a Leaf for $15,000, maybe even less in some cases. Stay away from the first generation Leafs, the shorter range ones, because they have issues with the battery degrading. But every other EV is fine. But yeah, consider buying a used Chevy Bolt and keep your existing truck. That would be my recommendation. Is the Chevy Bolt discontinued? Yes, it went out of production. They ended production in December, didn't they change their mind?

1:10:13 - Leo Laporte
and then change they are going to bring the Bolt back. They are bringing it back In 2025.

1:10:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, so the Bolt that they built up until last December was based on older technology for the motor and the battery. So they're bringing back the Bolt they say in 2025, probably later in 2025, and it's going to use newer motors from their Altium platform they're more efficient and also an LFP Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery Pack which will be less expensive, and so hopefully at that point they'll at least be able to get to break even, if not profitable, with that vehicle. So it is coming back, but it's not available. You can actually buy still buy new Bolts. Right now there are still Bolts available on some dealer lots, so if you want to buy a new one, you can get a really good deal on a Bolt.

1:11:06 - Leo Laporte
We love our Bolt. It was a great. We got it for a very, very good deal. It was the least expensive EV out there and with the $7,500 tax break I think it ended up being like 20 grand. And I know Anthony Ilson just bought an EUV and he's very happy with it. So I was sad when I heard they were going to discontinue it and I'm glad that they have decided to make it again.

1:11:26 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah. I think, Trent sounds like Trent. Yeah, trent's in Canada. So you know they have different tax breaks. I don't know if they have what the tax break would be on a Bolt. But that would be my recommendation. Here's my tip.

1:11:40 - Leo Laporte
Lease it. So I was, we were going, I was going to buy the i5 outright because that's my last car, because I'm an old guy, and I thought, well, I'll probably keep this 10, 15 years, and by then I shouldn't be driving. And the salesman said well, if you lease it? So the BMW is assembled in Germany, not eligible for the $7,500 tax credit you have to be made in the US. He said, if you lease it, there is a $7,500 fleet Fleet yep.

1:12:08 - Mikah Sargent
Leased yeah, so you can talk to the commercial vehicle tax credit and if you lease it's, it falls.

1:12:14 - Sam Abuelsamid
it actually falls under that commercial vehicle transaction. It's part of the reduction act.

1:12:21 - Leo Laporte
So and by the way, I'm not running the fleet I got one yeah.

1:12:25 - Sam Abuelsamid
But I guess I, but it's still. It's still a commercial transaction, because what's happening is the manufacturer is selling it to the leasing company, the bank or their, their finance arm, and then they are leasing it to you.

1:12:38 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I get it. It does get sold.

1:12:40 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And so, and so you know manufacturers, you know for, because for the IRA tax credits now the vehicle has to be built, final assembly, in North America US, canada, mexico and the battery has to have a certain percentage of North American content or or content from fleet free trade partner countries.

1:13:03 - Leo Laporte
And so I'm not against any of that. I think that's good to do and send manufacturers yeah.

1:13:08 - Sam Abuelsamid
And so the I-5, it's built in Germany doesn't qualify for that. But if you, if you lease it, you can get that. And the same is true for vehicles built in Korea and Japan. There were enough discounts on it.

1:13:19 - Leo Laporte
between that and the friends and family, because Lease owns a mini that he said. Well, it's going to cost you the same whether you lease it or buy it, so might as well lease it and then, if you decide to buy it, you can buy it out and it's the same price.

1:13:32 - Sam Abuelsamid
And in fact, recently it's come out that there are some, some companies that are doing special lease agreements. So basically, you lease the vehicle, so you get the $7,500 that's passed through on the lease terms and then you know, typically you know on a lease, you know at the end of the lease term, you know at the end of 36 months or 24 months or whatever the lease term is, you have the option to buy the vehicle. Well, what they're doing now is on some of these EVs they are, they're telling customers that if you have the option, you know to buy it after two months. So lease it for two months and at the end, at any time after two months, you can buy out the lease. So if you wanted to buy it, you know I don't know if BMW is- doing that, but that's kind of cool.

1:14:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, sam, we have taken way too much of your day. I hope you're going to have a wonderful day and we will see you in a month and we'll see you sooner than that, I hope on Twitter, samable Sigmund, principal researcher, godhouse Insights. Of course, you can hear them every week on the Wheel Bearings podcast and your colleagues, there's a fresh episode up now.

1:14:43 - Sam Abuelsamid
We talk about the Rivian R2 and R3 and also charging Ford Mustang Mach-E and an Infinity G80 at Tesla Superchargers, which is now possible.

1:14:54 - Leo Laporte
I guess they had a run on the next adapters at Ford Everybody if. I saw it a Mach-E. I would have gotten it, sure, although I have to say in the three years I had that Mach-E. I only used a Supercharger or an external charger of any kind like twice Once on a road trip to Carmel and once just to see how it worked. Yeah, and that's the time I just charge it at home.

1:15:15 - Sam Abuelsamid
Most people, most people charge at home which is the most economical way to do it? Absolutely the DC. Fast charging can be expensive. But if you own a Ford EV, either a Lightning, an E-Transit or the Mach-E, you can go to Fordcom slash fast charging adapters and between now and the end of June you can go on there and you put in the VIN number of your vehicle and they will send you a free adapter. I mean after that time, after June, it'll cost you 230 bucks for the adapter.

1:15:46 - Leo Laporte
Don't wait.

1:15:47 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah.

1:15:48 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sam Sam of Bulls Sam, and always jam-packed with information. Have a great day.

1:15:53 - Sam Abuelsamid
See you guys next time.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, we're going to take some more of your calls in just a bit. You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys. That's Mikah Sargent. I'm some guy in a suit. Our show today brought to you by Wix Studio.

I only have a minute to tell you about Wix Studio. I wish I had more because this, by the way, I've been see I'm going to take more than a minute now. I've been going to Wix to look at all the stuff you could do with Wix Studio and I am blown away. The Wix Studio is the web platform for agencies and enterprises I'm actually really looking about. Maybe I should just move my blog over there. There are a few things you could do from start to finish. A minute or less now on Wix Studio.

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Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. I was blown away. Go to wix.com/studio. Click on the link on the show page to find out more wix.com/studio. You know, it's funny because in the early days of web design, every site looked the same, because it was like cookie cutter websites. Now, with Wix, every site is unique and a perfect little snowflake and it's there and amazing. Okay enough, that was over 60 seconds. You're going to watch the Academy Awards tonight? No, Okay, Then I won't ask you who you're picking for the best picture. Who are you picking for the best picture? I'm not going to say, oh, come on.

Well, everybody knows, everybody knows Oppenheimer's going to win. Oh, everybody knows that you want the debt. The poor things was really, really amazing, and I think Emma Stone should definitely win Best Actors. But that's just me. Who should we talk to next? I'm going to pick up on Melissa. Oh, melissa, hi Melissa.

1:18:16 - Mikah Sargent
Star six to unmute hey.

1:18:18 - Caller
Leo, you got Jamie at a table floor. How you doing.

1:18:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh great, Is it James or Jamie?

1:18:23 - Caller
It's Jamie. I called about the antenna a couple weeks ago.

1:18:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, hi, jamie Welcome.

1:18:29 - Caller
Thank you, leo, michael, how you guys doing today.

1:18:32 - Leo Laporte
We're great. How did the antenna solution work out?

1:18:37 - Caller
Well, so I went to.

1:18:39 - Leo Laporte
This is the guy, by the way who had a one of those flat panel antennas. It worked better when the wire was out exposed than when the antenna was out, which tells me that the wire was the antenna. So go ahead.

1:18:55 - Caller
So, um, on the, on the advice that you gave me, leo, I went to TV foolcom and it's, it's, it's probably, it's probably going to go down again in about 15 seconds.

1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
It is, they must be running that server on spit and twine because, yeah, as soon as I mentioned it, every time boom Okay.

1:19:14 - Caller
Right. So I went to TV fool and it said that it told me because I put it in my address. And it told me, I guess, I guess it also tells you what kind of antenna you need, right, and what stations you can pick up with it. And so, um, I live about 17 miles away from the tower and all the stations seem to be coming from one general direction which is good news, because you can aim an antenna yeah.

Right, and so, um, it told me that I needed it, told me it recommended a mohu leaf antenna. It's called that because it's literally. This thing is like thin and flexible like a leaf.

1:19:53 - Leo Laporte
It's a good antenna, yeah.

1:19:54 - Caller
So I bought one of those. It's actually hanging up on the wall almost towards the to my bedroom ceiling right now, as we're speaking right now, and it's actually right near. It's actually I. If I, if I had to give you an inaccurate measurement, I'd say it's about, oh goodness, I'd say about maybe three inches away from my bedroom window. And uh, it's coming in. All the stations are coming in except for one and that's the CBS affiliate down here, but then again they're single. So we did, you could squeeze and they'll go out.

1:20:29 - Leo Laporte
Endure antenna is never going to be as good as one you could put on the roof. We don't want to put one on the roof in lightning country, obviously. So uh, but I'm pleased that you could get all but that weak station. That's pretty impressive. Is that better than you were getting with the wire on the floor? Oh yeah.

1:20:47 - Caller
Oh yeah, exactly. And now with that, but that's one less left me to trip over.

1:20:51 - Leo Laporte
Did you get? Did you get the right? Who in gray tweed?

1:20:57 - Caller
Yeah, that's the one I got, that's you know it's not as ugly.

1:21:01 - Leo Laporte
You know you can put that on the wall and people might think, well, that's some sort of weird, interesting light fixture or something.

1:21:08 - Caller
Interesting little thing. Exactly they won't know what it is, but I'm not exactly what it is. So, leo, one of the one, I do have a general question for you, and it's about all these streaming services that I'm actually going to be dropping because, oh, we're going to crack that on password sharing. Translation right Translation daddy needs a new yacht.

1:21:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think you're right.

1:21:28 - Caller
Right, so the question. So my question is I keep hearing all broadcast TV is dying, broadcast TVs in the climb, because everybody wants to go on Netflix or who, whatever is that I mean? I mean what, what, what, what, what, what, what is? They're still very profitable.

1:21:44 - Leo Laporte
I think that's really propaganda from the broadcasters who say gee, we don't make enough money with advertising and charging you, we need more. And they probably want tax cuts or FCC, some sort of FCC loophole. I don't think they're dying. I think they're doing just fine, but I do think there will come a day not in the near future, but there will come a day where they stop broadcasting and they just do it all over the top of the internet. But they will. But they as entities will continue to exist. You're, you're. You're going to get your $30 out of your mohu. You're going to get your $30 worth. I guarantee you. It's going to be years before those broadcast signals go away, if ever. You know where.

1:22:24 - Caller
I would.

1:22:24 - Leo Laporte
Here is where I would remind you, they're trying to kill AM radio, right, it's not. It doesn't come in many cars anymore. And and all of a sudden, congress and the broadcasters for AM radio are saying no, save AM radio. That that's just AM radio, which is really economically anyway not feasible. It is dying. Broadcast television is here to stay.

1:22:47 - Caller
Your mohu is going to get nice strong signals forever and the best thing yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, especially especially because the streaming services are keeping. They keep you keep saying oh well, we're going to raise price. We're going to press on a password.

1:23:01 - Leo Laporte
This is free and it's good quality. Yeah, this is good. How do you do you have ATSC three in Tampa yet?

1:23:10 - Caller
We do on a few of our channels, except for I don't have that kind of I don't, you know, I just have to get a whole new setup for that.

1:23:18 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, one of the things that's a little disappointing that that potentially could have given you a 4k broadcast signal, but most of the time broadcasters are just using that extra bandwidth to just slice up their signal and give you. You know, matt 24 hour. Matt three runs on on channels and stuff.

1:23:36 - Caller
I have a friend. I have a friend that has has antennas and that's all she has is antennas and free storage. She doesn't pay for Netflix or anything, she told me. She said she thinks that in the near future they're going to start charging us resubscriptions. These like cable guys, they can't like.

1:23:51 - Leo Laporte
They're like, if you want to.

1:23:54 - Caller
No, no, I think you're safe. How would they charge you? Yeah, no, no, the streaming service is like Netflix.

1:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they might.

1:24:04 - Caller
Oh yeah, they might. Yeah, the who, yeah, yeah. So the theory is that she has it, my friend has it, they might charge you Netflix or Disney Plus or whoever might charge you a subscription fee.

1:24:16 - Mikah Sargent
So let's say you can't you know, and then you can't. You're like you're watching a show and then you go back. Then they say, okay, it's $10, but it's also $2 because you just left.

1:24:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that makes sense. That's a big problem for them is this churn where somebody watches succession, it's over and then they go. Well, I'm going to cancel my subscription until Game of Thrones comes back.

1:24:36 - Mikah Sargent
That would be an interesting choice. I think the thing is it's already built into the prices. This is why they raise the prices in the first place is because of churn, and so you've got that. Daddy's got his new yacht.

1:24:48 - Caller
He's got his new yacht yeah.

1:24:53 - Caller
He's got his new yacht. He's a Lamborghini.

1:24:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's all. He needs a Lambo to go with the yacht.

1:24:58 - Mikah Sargent
And they also I mean, that's factored into the price too, right, they have the churners who are factored in. They say, okay, we have these people who are consistent and they're standard, but we know when time a new show comes out we're going to make a lot of money in the moment and so, yeah, I would eat a fondant hat if they started charging resubscription fees on Netflix.

1:25:23 - Caller
That's tasty. Yeah, I'm not going to eat a real hat. And the fast services are fine, though the fast services like Pluto and Tubiard are going. I mean, they're beating each other. Everybody is starting to yeah.

1:25:34 - Leo Laporte
So this is interesting you know we've talked about this before I think we talked about it with you, jamie which is we're in a transition time between the old school three channels on a TV set through a giant antenna on the roof to over the top streaming, and there are all sorts of different models are being tried out. Ad supported Netflix is doing, amazon Prime just added ads to theirs. So I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of experimentation. We're in a time of great change, isn't that how, like, some movies begin? Like it was a time of great change? That's how shogun begins.

1:26:11 - Caller
Yeah, that's how they do it. It was a time of great.

1:26:13 - Leo Laporte
So we're in that time, right now.

1:26:16 - Caller
Right, right and Pluto and Tubiard kicking butt. Though Pluto, I agree, I think, for a lot of people there is.

1:26:22 - Leo Laporte
There are good free streaming over the top services that you know. If you're willing to watch some ads and usually the ads are not that bad, they don't do as many units per hour. Yeah, hey, a pleasure talking to you. I'm glad that that Moho Lee forked, and you know what, by the way, I went to TV Fool. As soon as you mentioned it they were down Big white page.

1:26:43 - Caller
Holy crap Like days.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
You're broken, you're broken my friend TV Foolcom. Don't go, now Go later. Go later, you'll be able to get on there. Thank you, jamie, great to talk to you. You're watching Ask the Tech Guys Leo Laporte, micah Sargent and senior producer John Ashley. Look at this. This is TV Fool. Oh, I feel like what have you done?

I feel like they must go. Oh gosh, darn it. Leo mentioned it again. I must go. You know it's got to be running in somebody's back. You know yard or something. That can't be a very good server. Can you put the discord in the lower monitor? John, I think it's Leo's hair cam right now and they gave me a hair brush.

1:27:29 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, where's my hair, so I can brush my hair.

1:27:31 - Leo Laporte
Well and.

1:27:32 - Mikah Sargent
I'm not sure I've got the button right there.

1:27:34 - Leo Laporte
Watch, he's got the button. See, look at this, he's got to push it. There it goes to the disc. It's a magic button. What else should we do, john? I was just stalling for you, john, oh well.

1:27:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
I didn't know, should I?

1:27:45 - Leo Laporte
do this. Yeah, let's do it Amateur, what is it?

1:27:49 - Mikah Sargent
Amateurs will never have the other you know amateurs never prosper. Yes, I think on planes, on planes jet lag.

1:27:58 - Leo Laporte
jet lag is for amateurs. We got it Okay. So this comes from Fred. He says long time listener. That was six O's, note eight O's. First time emailer. I love you show and have for many years. Thank you, Fred, Also club Twitter member. I know that, Fred, because I recognize your name. I saw something I don't understand. I cannot find out about by doing some Google searches. That's when they call us.

1:28:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, google searches fail you.

1:28:27 - Leo Laporte
We're post Google. I was trying to install a free software package on my Mac mini to make bootable thumb drives and I hit a snag. I fell for one of those click to download traps oh no and had to uninstall all the junk I just installed. What are you saying is, a lot of times when you go to these download sites, they have a special downloader that downloads a bunch of other stuff besides the simple one that you that you want to get. I decided to have a look around the various arrears of the Mac to see if I had any left. Had left any software fragments there of by mistake. Here's what I found under login items. I tried in vain to find out how to delete the Tatiana oh, that's a good name item from the list, but could not figure it out. Let's look. Here's the login items. Open a log in these items. Oh, my Allow in the and I hardware agent and I host. And then here's oh, this is the one, tatiana, live in Sky, hello, hello.

1:29:28 - Mikah Sargent
My name is Tatiana, live in.

1:29:29 - Leo Laporte
Sky, and I would like to live inside you. So what are you going to do about that, tatiana? So let me see. Let me go back to his. He gave us another picture too, didn't he? Let me go back to his email and see why, writing the same. I looked at the list about a week later and the Tatiana item is gone. I tried in vain to find out how to lead it. I asked a friend of mine who was a Mac developer. He knew how to lead it. He did not. He also told me he has a similar item in his list of persons name.

1:29:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, ok, so it disappeared. We can talk about it. What is it? So Apple made a change to the way it's, a security change to Mac OS and in making the change there were some more requirements put in place for developers to sort of have blessed software on the platform and, depending on how the person's Apple account their developer account was set up, or if they didn't have a developer account, if they worked with Apple to get the proper blessing that exists outside, it's called a credential. If they used their name, then the developer's name would show up in the login items page and there were complaints, because it does make people feel a little special.

Because you thought the other way yeah you see this name, and so for me I don't have it on this computer, but I use a tool on my Mac Studio that lets me set when Time Machine runs instead of having it run on its own.

And this tool is from a developer, and so their name. Let's just say it's Ted Lasso, thank you. And so Ted Lasso shows up in mine, and if you didn't know what that was, that'd be a problem. Now, the reason why it disappeared is because you did properly or it sounds like as much as you could properly uninstall the tool, and so when you restarted your computer and macOS went to look in the system slash library, slash startup items folder, it could no longer find that launch daemon or that launch agent or launch daemon or launch agent, and so it removed that from the list. That's why you didn't see it there anymore. I do want to give you another little tip. There is a tool called Balina B-A-L-E-N-A Etcher.

1:31:52 - Leo Laporte
Love that. That's the one I use, yeah.

1:31:54 - Mikah Sargent
Balina. Etcher is a fantastic tool that is tried and trusted by all of us. Open source that lets you create those you were trying. What was it on an SD card that they were trying to do? Or flash drive?

1:32:05 - Leo Laporte
I can't remember what you were trying to do and it may be for all. We know what he was trying to download. But don't go to those download sites to get these tools. Go to the manufacturers or creators site. In this case it's etcherbalinaio. E-t-c-h-e-r, like etching a stone. Balina is like the I don't know B-A-L-E-N-Aio, and you can download it for free from there. Etcher Balina, very nice tool, and if you get it from there you won't get the additional Tatiana live in Sky Live inside, just stuff.

1:32:37 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly Because you don't want that and, honestly, there shouldn't have necessarily been a launch agent for a tool that is making stable drives in the first place. That's not.

1:32:46 - Leo Laporte
I think Balina etcher is portable in the sense that you could put it on a USB key and run it from the USB key. Yeah, that is true, it doesn't do anything to your system, which is exact. I mean, this is simple enough. Windows users should use Rufus does the same thing. Also portable, also free.

1:33:04 - Mikah Sargent
Great question, yeah, and glad we could help.

1:33:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and someday we'll find out who Tatiana live inside you is, and make sure it doesn't ever happen again to anybody. It's interesting that it disappeared.

1:33:17 - Mikah Sargent
I just think that's because they removed it properly, so when they restarted it, was gone.

1:33:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, restart maybe would do it. Yeah, that's sensible, all right. What do we want to do now? How about a voice? I see a guy in the Zoom who's really a good looking fella, oh thank you, that's me. Is it you? Oh, it's you, never mind. Is it New Angel Garrett? Oh, yes, we can do that too. Yeah, should I do it, because we haven't done a Zoom yet?

1:33:46 - Caller
We haven't done a Zoom yet.

1:33:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I got it. I just pushed the button, it's pretty easy.

1:33:52 - Mikah Sargent
We do see some blocking folks who are regulars and we're trying to get some folks in. We want some fresh blood. So if you're a regular and you're wondering what's going, on, that's all.

1:34:02 - Leo Laporte
We got Jamie on by accident because you thought she was Melissa. Jamie, does that Call her ID? Yeah, can't trust it.

1:34:10 - Caller
What's your first name? I'm Garrett from Erie Pennsylvania.

1:34:16 - Leo Laporte
I told you before, garrett, I have a funeral plot in Erie. The family, my family comes from Erie, distantly, and there's apparently a family plot there, so I might be visiting you Not too soon Hopefully no time soon.

1:34:31 - Caller
Yes, yeah, seriously, lord. What's up, garrett? Yeah, well, first of all, I was the first call for help caller, I believe, on the new screensavers. So wonderful, so good to see you again. I was so sad about that show.

1:34:48 - Leo Laporte
I saw if we brought the screensavers back it would be a hit. And I know I guess people just it was too much of a TV show instead of a podcast, I think, and people just didn't pick up on it. I was very disappointed. I really had high hopes for that. Anyway, thank you for calling it. Yeah, I mean yeah that's a little inside baseball, but that's something.

1:35:11 - Caller
Exactly, yeah, what's up? So today I have what I think is. I feel like it's kind of a dumb question because I am a career long IT pro, twitter listener since 2008. I feel like I should know the answer to this, but it's something that's been confusing me, so I'm sure I can't be the only one. Okay, google has talked about killing off support for cookies because they want to switch to their new ad platform.

1:35:38 - Leo Laporte
You probably heard Steve talk about it. Steve was singing its praises, which I'm not sure I agree Right, and it sounds wonderful and I'm excited for that?

1:35:45 - Caller
Yeah, but I don't trust them. There's that, but does removing cookies from the Chrome browser mean removing all cookies Like, how do I log into websites? No third party cookies.

1:35:58 - Leo Laporte
It's third party, okay, so. So actually there's a good opportunity here to kind of explain this, because we throw these words around. Cookies were originated originally created by the folks at Mozilla or Netscape. The idea, the real name for it, is persistent client side state information. I thought they should have called it pixies, oh, p I, c, but, but, if, but. The name actually is much more descriptive. Persistent client side that means on your computer, not on the server.

State information what's state information is an IT guy? You'll know this. Coders know this as well. State is something.

A saved game is your state. You save the state of your visit to a website in between visits. That's most useful. You just described it for logging in when you go to Facebook. You don't log in every time because Facebook saves a cookie, a persistent client side state information, little bit of information on your hard drive that says you are Garrett. And then, when face, when you log into Facebook, facebook checks that cookie and says oh, it's Garrett, he's back, let him in.

That's a what we call a first party cookie. That is, facebook can read cookies it sets. There's a very clear rule in cookies, which to this day is still well enforced, that a site can only read the cookies that it sets. Facebook can't read Twitter's cookies, nor can Twitter read Facebook's cookies. That's good for privacy. But it didn't take long for ad agencies and various various maph the various actors on the on the web to figure out a way around that first party cookie restriction, and I think Facebook actually was the first to do it.

Remember the like button on Facebook, bing, bing. Well, the like button it's on a webpage let's say it's on your Starbucks webpage, but it's a little window into Facebook land and that like button can set a Facebook cookie even when you're on a Starbucks page and can read that Facebook cookie. Now imagine you put a like button from Facebook on a Starbucks page and on a Pete's coffee page. Well, in effect, Facebook can see you visited both because it has a little Facebook window, that like button on both pages, and that's what we call a third party cookie. It isn't really. It's, truthfully, it's still a first party cookie in the sense that it's it's Facebook, but it looks like a third party cookie from your point of view Because you think you're visiting Starbucks or Pete's coffee. You're not visiting Facebook and, by the way, you don't have to click that like button to have that cookie that just by being there, gives Facebook access to the cookies in that visit.

So that's a really nefarious trick that advertisers use and is one of the reasons you see the proliferation of these kinds of little likes and things on on all over the web, and they can even do it without showing you anything. Our advertisers call them a tracking pixel and we don't do it because we don't like it, but that. But there are tracking pixels and as a IT guy, you probably know how to look at the developer page on any site. You can see plenty of tracking pixels there from third party sites. Google uses it for analytics, for instance. Whenever you go to a site our site, for instance we use Google analytics. There's a hidden little thing there that when you load that site, it sends information to Google, which processes it and gives us analytics about who visited the site and stuff. Well, google's getting that information too. That's a third party cookie.

So Google realized after a while, even though they participate in this ecosystem some might say foster this ecosystem they could see that people like you, garrett, we're getting mad as hell and we're going to take it anymore and the rise of third party ad blockers, like our recommended ad blocker. You block origin really has contributed to this. Corey Doctorow calls ad blockers the largest consumer boycott in history. So many people, almost 50%. Now if people who use the internet use ad blockers of some kind, so many people use ad blockers, that breaks this whole system. Your ad blocker can say yeah, no, no, third party cookies. So eventually browsers put in a switch for third party cookies, but Google saw it. You know we could look really good if we would just ban them entirely. Now it's only from Chrome and Chrome derivatives. If they decide to pick it up unknown whether edge, for instance from Microsoft Brave probably won't pick it up, but so various chromium. You know, web browsers that are based on Google's Chrome may or may not turn this feature on.

1:40:42 - Caller
I think that was another. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that was another concern, though, because so many third-party browsers these days are chromium derivatives, right?

1:40:52 - Leo Laporte
Well, eventually, google influences the ecosystem dramatically, if only because they can say, as they did with HTTPS we're going to rank you better if you do what we say. And since Google search is so dominant, there's another reason, another strong argument against having a dominant search engine Google is so willing to use its cloud in search to get people to do other things. Now, I think it was probably a good thing to say well, sites should use HTTPS, but who are they to decide that? They're a private company and so they're unilaterally deciding this? On third-party cookies, they've replaced it and you may remember, if you've listened to Security Now, you've followed this all along. We sometimes mention it. It's kind of tricky technically, but they've tried to replace it with a variety of other ways of less intrusively finding out what you want to see in ads, because advertisers really want to know that, without giving away your information. And they've come up with a system that Steve said is good at protecting your privacy but does give advertisers the information. And, in a nutshell, this system, as you browse around, your browser locally starts to collect a list of things you're interested in and can offer that, when you visit a website, to the website, which can then pick which ads to show you Without knowing anything about you. It resets it periodically. There's all sorts of additional features that make it perhaps more palatable.

Consumers. Don't be fooled, though. Google's only doing this because they have to. They don't want to do this. In fact, all these companies would prefer that you just let them know everything about you, but they realize if they don't do it, people are going to start using more ad blockers and more technology, and that's going to kill the ad ecosystem. It's going to kill Google, which gets almost 90% of its revenue from ads. Google's an ad company. Google is not a search company. They give you things like Gmail and Search so that you'll see their ads. They're an ad company, so they want to preserve this whole market and keep you from getting too upset.

I'm not a huge fan gear. I think does that explain everything that you? I know it's kind of a technical thing, but I think people should understand this. And then, of course, you got the EU, which completely misunderstood it and puts up this banner not for third party cookies, but for any cookies saying yeah, this site uses cookies. Of course it does. Trust me, delete all your cookies, then go out and surf. You have to reenter all your passwords, it's, it's it's.

cookies are fine when cookies as designed are fine. It's just this little trick of putting the thumbs up button or whatever.

1:43:39 - Caller
That's perfect. That's basically the answer I was looking for. That's the answer I expected. Even it's for me. This is what's embarrassing is I have and I work with a web developer who is just strictly you know. He knows he knows how to write PHP. He is not a tech guy in the least. So when he comes to me and says Chrome is going to disable cookies, how do I log people into my new website? I honestly had to pause and say no, I think they're disabling third party cookies. So you'll be OK, but I wanted to clarify. So I appreciate all of that.

1:44:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you remember.

You may remember topics and flock and all of the other yeah, all of the other things that Google tried to replace third party cookies with. Well, they've come up with one. They're going to implement it in Chrome. It's not like we get a vote. I don't use Chrome. I don't, and you know I will only use if I use a Chromium based browser. It'll be de-Googled.

I don't use Google search anymore. I actually pay for a third party search called Kagi K-A-G-I, because I don't. I really feel like Google is evil at this point. I hate to say it because I really. They used to be this great company, but they're an ad based, they're an ad company and and their interests are not your interests, in my opinion. But the good news is, cookies live on until Google decides not Right, right there, when you have 90 percent of the browser market, right, what is their? What is their market share? It's very high. I don't know if it's 90, but they have a dominant position. They can dictate, they own search and they own browsers. They own the web. That's not right. I use Firefox, one of the reasons I recommend people, you know, de-google their life. I don't use Gmail anymore. I don't use Google calendars or contacts. I use fast mail. I sponsor calendars and contacts, even if, even if the web is surveillance based, if you spread it out, you're better off, and Google just has way too much power.

1:45:41 - Mikah Sargent
I'm saying 65 to 66 percent of the overall browser market.

1:45:45 - Leo Laporte
And I think that's higher in some jurisdictions than others, and it's dominant, firefox is basically being put out of business in the long run and I think that's what's going to happen. If you said which, what is the percentage of chromium based browsers? That's got to be well over 90 percent, well over Right. So I hope you can now explain it. I hope I explain it well enough that you can explain it to your developer friend and tell them to stop using PHP. That's a crap, there we go.

1:46:17 - Caller
Perfect. Thank you guys, very much. All right, thank you, take care.

1:46:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have been our Miami coffee addict. Mikah has been asking what browser I use in on Mac I use Arc, which is a chromium derived browser, and I probably should go back to Firefox. I want to support Firefox.

1:46:35 - Mikah Sargent
I use Safari regularly and Firefox is my go to when it needs something that doesn't work in Safari.

1:46:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't. I don't have any problem with what Apple's doing. I do think honestly, though and my position on this has changed gradually over time that these companies have gotten so big and so greedy. It's really important to remember that their interests don't coincide with your interests. They kind of used to you know they were. They were like, oh you know, our customer really matters. They're not even pretending that anymore. Yeah, they, they're in the business. They're in business to make money. Was watching the last week tonight with John Oliver. He's talking about airplanes. I said we're going to, we're going on an airplane tomorrow.

1:47:21 - Mikah Sargent
A Boeing airplane on Alaska.

1:47:22 - Leo Laporte
Airlines tomorrow.

1:47:24 - Mikah Sargent
One of the ones that lost the wheel. Oh sorry.

1:47:28 - Leo Laporte
And and and Lisa wants to watch John Oliver, which is about airplanes. I said I don't think we should watch this.

1:47:33 - Mikah Sargent
I said I don't think we should watch this.

1:47:34 - Leo Laporte
I agree with you, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to get Lisa on the airplane tomorrow after watching it. No, you watched it anyway. Boeing is not a good another good place, but it's again. It's the example of how these companies Boeing was engineering driven, very high quality company. They merged with McDonald Douglas. They became very profit focused. All of a sudden, it's what's our stock price doing? Not are we making the best airplanes we can make and, as a result, people die. And and I think this is you know people don't die because of Google, but but the we can't we gotta.

We gotta stand up to these guys and say hey, no, no, wait a minute, we're over here, we're your users and we are the most important part of your business, and please don't kill us.

1:48:19 - Caller
I agree. I agree with you.

1:48:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like if you haven't seen it, don't see it before you go on an air, a flight, and I'm going to just going to have to nudge Lisa onto the plane. It's not a, it's not a max. Thanks goodness, keep moving, but it is a 737. Do you want to do any?

1:48:39 - Mikah Sargent
voicemail yeah, yeah, 8887242884 during the week. I'm from.

1:48:44 - Caller
Fallbrook, california. I'm at Fallbrook, north of San Diego. Yes, Question a while back you had recommended the artifact news aggregator as a great replacement for the Google news, which I've really fallen in love with. Artifact has really been quite a bit better. However, I just received notice from them that they are going to shut down their service at the end of February. Yeah, it's that awful. So question what's the next alternative? What's better than Google news can actually let you adjust some of the topics instead of ignoring what you say, et cetera. What's next?

1:49:17 - Mikah Sargent
guys, that's a great question. I'm currently using a tool on iOS called Bulletin. Oh, I'll have to check that. Bulletin is an AI news reader that it does a few things that I like. One is that it kind of avoids well, it doesn't avoid it. If you are browsing and it comes across a kind of clickbaity headline, it will use AI to read the article and just the article, and make sure the headline isn't just. You won't believe what happens if you click on these three buttons on your Mac. It will change it to say clicking these three buttons does blah, blah, blah, blah.

It has the built-in functionality for saying, yes, I like this, no, I don't like that. And it has a feature that I like where in the morning it will give you kind of your days rundown of news in a little readable paragraph or two and the evening the same thing. One thing about it is it's still pretty early days for the tool and so they are still kind of ironing out some of the bugs that exist. So that's one place where it depends on how kind of I use a lot of software a lot of the time and a lot of it's in beta, and so I have a little bit more patience for that. If you find that you're not patient for bugs from time to time, this may not be the tool for you, but what's great about it is it's also just an RSS reader, so you can put in your own custom RSS feeds that you want to have and have information for that as well.

1:50:52 - Leo Laporte
Artifact was created by Kevin Systrom, who started Instagram. Very talented developer, he went to Facebook. When they bought Instagram, left after a few years of suffering and said I want to redo the next thing. And he you know, there was, as far as I could tell, really no way to make money the way he designed it. He had enough money he could do that. You see that a lot Artifact had was not only a news reader and aggregator, but also had commenting and had social features. I thought it was a really good idea. It was very sad. This is the. If you go to artifactnews, this is what you see now. So I guess they failed. I guess is what you say have you tried Flipboard? Do you have an opinion on Flipboard? Because Mike McHugh started Flipboard. I really like Mike and I and I really he's a fan and I think he's done a. You know, flipboard's been around forever.

1:51:44 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly. It's been around for a long, long time and they pivoted.

1:51:47 - Leo Laporte
They originally were Twitter fed. So Twitter, you would go to Flipboard, create an account, set it up with your Twitter feed and then it would give you a magazine based on news that your Twitter, the people you're following Twitter, were tweeting and that really worked well because you had, in effect, human aggregators creating your magazine for you. It's become more of, I would say, more of a magazine. They they turned off Twitter aggregation, of course. Right, it's more of a I don't know, it's more of a news reader than it was. I mean, I think there's a lot, there's a lot.

1:52:22 - Mikah Sargent
It's good I, I. This is what it looks like. I'll show you so people can see it.

1:52:27 - Leo Laporte
You've had Mike on Tech News Weekly, I think.

1:52:30 - Mikah Sargent
As I remember, yeah, definitely.

1:52:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Can, are you? Do you not have the over the shoulder shot? Maybe, maybe? Oh, there, it is Okay. So you see, it is kind of magazine-y right, yeah, it's flip, it's flip.

1:52:42 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly. You've got these photos and everything, which is nice. I think, though, the thing about.

1:52:46 - Leo Laporte
it has also comments which is kind of what people liked about artifact, I think was the social element. That's true, yeah.

1:52:56 - Mikah Sargent
I thought, though, that artifact was clean and simple.

1:52:58 - Leo Laporte
This is not that yeah.

1:53:00 - Mikah Sargent
You get to the stuff faster and flip board is definitely. It's interactive and it's fun to use. But if you want that more clean look, then flip board might not be for you. But again, one good thing about flip board is all of the integrations that it offers, and they continue to make sure that it works across. So many different ways of getting content out there.

1:53:24 - Leo Laporte
So the reason we liked artifact, just as you said, is we go through a lot of news. This is part of our job. Your job with Tech News Weekly, my job, with all of the stuff we do, is to keep up on Tech News. So we go through a lot of news, so we don't want pictures, right?

1:53:37 - Mikah Sargent
We don't want and the animation, that's a flip to take as long as it does Give me the facts man Boom, boom, boom, boom.

1:53:43 - Leo Laporte
So I will show you what I use on the web. Which I kind of like is. This is to me what a news reader should be. This is called Sumi News, s-u-m-i-dot-n-e-w-s, and I actually pay for this, and this just aggregates. I can follow as many different news sources as I want, including newsletters. You see, I follow quite a few, and then when I go to Sumi News and you have to, I think it's five bucks a month you pay for it, but when I go to the news, where is my news? $22 a year, I think. I just broke it $22 a year.

It's not bad. It's some guy. It's not a big company. There it is. I will see what you and I both want, because we are not. We're looking for just facts, man.

1:54:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I just want the facts exactly.

1:54:35 - Leo Laporte
I have a line from every source I follow. Plus, it's just a short paragraph, which is enough for me to see if I want to then click the link and go to the site and then decide whether I'm going to include it in our bookmarks. Remember Google Reader? Yeah, this is kind of to me. This is an RSS reader. It's very simple. So it really depends. It depends on what you're looking for. Yeah, exactly.

1:55:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we provided a few options, depending on what you're looking for A fun, interactive and visual experience, flip board, an AI based system that has some bugs that's where, now, I forgot bulletin and then a very clean, very easy to digest option is Sumi News.

1:55:19 - Leo Laporte
And I use Sumi News on the iPhone because it's so clean and simple. You don't, you know? Just create a Sumi News desktop link.

1:55:29 - Mikah Sargent
Oh nice. Yeah, it goes to the web, but you've used a little save it to my home page.

1:55:34 - Leo Laporte
I think that's right. Or did I have an app? I can't. I think that's. That's outworks. Anyway, sumi is Sumi, no, I guess. Maybe it's, I don't know. Yeah, it is. Oh sorry, it's, it's a it's a what they call PWA progressive web app. Yeah, all right, there's your answer. That was a great question. Always like to talk about how we get our news Indeed, and that is a constantly shifting thing. Do you use Apple news at all? I do, actually. Yeah.

1:56:00 - Mikah Sargent
I use Google news because I have it as part of my subscription. Yeah, I Google news. I tend to use Google news a lot. I also use. It's funny, I also use Google news. Apple news is where I go when I actually do want to kind of see visuals and sort of dig in that way, and also whenever I go to a page and it's behind a paywall, usually it's it's available through Apple news because of Apple news, his own partnerships.

1:56:26 - Leo Laporte
That's the one advantage. The disadvantage of Apple news for me is I can't easily share Apple news stories, if you share them with somebody who doesn't have Apple news or an iPhone, then they can't.

1:56:37 - Mikah Sargent
And then you had Google news. I think does a better job of minute to minute breaking news updates, and so the news feels more topical on Google news than on Apple news.

1:56:48 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's you know it's all over the place. Horses for courses. I think is how they might say that on Brit box we got time for. Should I do I need to do a phantom break here? No, we did. What did we not do? I did. I did read the ads, but is there a pause?

1:57:05 - Mikah Sargent
that refreshes. Yes, I forgot about the positive refreshes. We should probably do that right now I can never remember You're watching.

1:57:13 - Leo Laporte
Ask the tech guys Michael Sargent and Leo LePort. Let's continue on with another voicemail no-transcript.

1:57:23 - Mikah Sargent
We got a lot of hi Leo and Mikah.

1:57:25 - Caller
This is Mike from Niagara Falls. Hi, mike, if it's possible to use the Rode Smart Lab Plus during a video call or a phone call on Android, because it seems to mute the audio coming from the phone.

1:57:39 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, ooh, I wish I, this is one I could have had beforehand.

1:57:44 - Leo Laporte
Rode. So Rode, which makes, by the way, low cost budget microphones and other stuff, actually is pretty good. My son, who does you know those great TikTok videos where sound is very important uses a Rode shotgun mic on his camera to get that chopping sound. A lot of people use the Rode Podcaster microphone, so they have what they call a lavalier, which is a lapel based microphone, and most of the Rode mics are either designed to connect to cameras via either USB or a phone outplug. But then there are Rode mics, like the Podcaster, that are USB, designed to plug right into your laptop. I'm going to guess the lav is a USB.

1:58:26 - Mikah Sargent
The Smart Lab Plus is actually just a standard headphone jack spot, so in that case there's no reason why it should be muting your audio, because it should be treating well as if you plug it in.

1:58:38 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I know what's happening If you plug it in to an audio jack, which is obviously not any modern phone. But if you have an audio jack in your phone and you plug it in, it is going to mute the speakers, assuming that you're plugging in a headset.

1:58:54 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I see, so it's. I see I thought that what he was saying was it was muting his voice through the microphone. But yeah, if it's muting.

1:59:02 - Leo Laporte
I think that's what he's saying.

1:59:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, okay, what you're saying makes sense. Yes, and it probably also thinks right, that it's not just a microphone, but that it also has headphones as well.

1:59:14 - Caller
So it's piping the audio out through Exactly, yeah, so that might be.

1:59:17 - Mikah Sargent
The issue here is that you're trying to use a simple microphone device and you need to have speakers as well as part of it.

1:59:28 - Leo Laporte
Huh, Wow, double cookie pop up box on road. I guess they do a lot of European business $79. It would sound probably fairly good, knowing Rhodes stuff. It's an omnidirectional. That would be something I would recommend against sometimes for a law, if that makes sense. But omnidirectional means it's going to pick up a lot of room, noise and stuff. If they had a USB one, you might be. Yeah, that would be better off.

2:00:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't think you can do this is what it boils down to just by plugging it in. Yeah, you're right that it's almost certainly trying to pipe out audio at the same time and there's nowhere to pipe it out.

2:00:14 - Leo Laporte
And I guess if you plug it into your computer, if you're on a Mac and you plug it in your computer, you would be able to go to the sound control panel and change output and input or separate, so you could change the output to the Mac speakers and the input to the road.

Yeah, and I think Windows would let you do that it's just a phone, that you'd have that issue, right? Yeah, yeah, because it thinks you have earphones. Now, one way to solve this would be to get an adapter that would have an earphone plug.

2:00:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you could do that.

2:00:44 - Leo Laporte
So you need an adapter. This is what we call tip ring sleeve, so it's got three lines on it. So you'd need and that's, by the way, why your phone thinks you've got ears, because it's saying I have ears, yeah that's exactly what that exactly See the three bands, yeah.

They intended for, as you can see with this picture, recording, not for phone calls. So if you got an adapter and I'm sure they make them, I'll have to look and see that would take tip ring sleeve in and have an output for headphones and then they would have a single plug, so it would look like a tripod a single plug that goes into your phone. Then you could split the microphone input and the output for the headphones. I'm sure there are such a thing. If I look at Amazon, I'm sure I could find something similar. So that would be the only way you could use that as with an adapter. Yep, agreed, let me look for tip ring sleeve adapters. I've always liked saying that Tip ring, tip ring sleeve, it sounds like splitter.

They do make such a.

2:01:55 - Mikah Sargent
Thing of a British clock engineer. Hello, I'm tip ring sleeve. I will work on your grand four o'clock all the time.

2:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Audio splitter that's for a lot of these are for splitting audio so that two people can listen to the same headphone jack. I don't think that's what you want. I'm sure cable matters makes something of the salt. You want something that the with, with two inputs, one for headphones and one for microphone, and then a single output.

2:02:33 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, Rode makes. It actually makes something called the mobile interview kit. Oh, there you go, and it has what it does headphone jack in the middle and then two places to plug in microphone lavalier microphones, if you wanted to. It's called the Rode mobile interview kit.

2:02:52 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to show you that on the screen right now. It's for dual lavaliers. It's specifically designed for their products and this one it's interesting has a lightning port. I'm seeing that.

2:03:04 - Mikah Sargent
So that's for iOS. If you scroll down, yeah, looks like they're keep going on. The left there that thing compact audio interface that looks like it would be learn more. Two microphones oh, great An error, whoops.

2:03:18 - Leo Laporte
While you're here, why not go somewhere else? Okay, thanks very much. So if you're on an iPhone, this would be your solution for sure. I'm sure you're not, because you're plugging that Rode lav into the phone.

2:03:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and some other so I was able to get to the micro. Oh, it is a little pricey, though, because it is a full on interface it's $80.

2:03:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's doing more stuff. How about this? This is from one of our chatters.

2:03:44 - Mikah Sargent
Ah tip ring sleeve has an answer for us. Is his name to bring leave.

2:03:49 - Leo Laporte
Hello, tip ring. This is the three m 3.5 millimeter audio cable. I don't know if this is just a cable, yeah, but thank you for the links. Thank you, skinny elephant Hershey, if that's your real name, let's take one more, should we do a?

2:04:07 - Mikah Sargent
call or let's do one more email around it out, oh I like that.

2:04:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes, we have triple email day one of the first bit warden and application credentials from Rob and golden Colorado home. Of course, many of us use a password manager Mike and Leo. He says your name. Oh, do you add Mike his name on here just ever? Oh, I don't. You wouldn't do that. Many of us use a password manager to log on to web applications via a browser extension. Wow, see, one of the features that originally attracted me last pass is ability to also fill out credentials. Ah, when opening a local desktop application, such as quick end for windows. When I asked the first bit warden over a year ago, they did not support that feature. I don't think they do to this day. So you're running the bit warden standalone app. I'm always cutting and pasting.

2:05:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't think I mean well, so how would they even yeah, I don't even know how they would do to watch what you were doing constantly to be able to suggest I do? I am able to auto fill my password and username after the fact with stuff that's on the desktop, running the desktop app that I use, but as far as for it to be aware of when you were using an app and trying to sign up for that app, I don't think you could do that without having constant screen recording which means whatever you were doing is is ingested.

2:05:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and this is always you know this is always an issue. I wouldn't Mac when it says Well, you've got to turn on complete control of your system.

2:05:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, accessibility at all? Yeah, I wouldn't. I don't think that's a good idea.

2:05:47 - Leo Laporte
So, so I don't believe that word will do that.

2:05:49 - Mikah Sargent
No, I don't know what will do. I was going to say I've not heard of a password manager that does do that, and Rob, I think it's our advice not not to let anyone do that because that manager would then really there is, be watching everything.

There is one tool out there that does anything that's close to that and it doesn't do that. It just watches what you do all day and then uses AI to give you kind of a review of what you did during the day. And again, not something I recommend, not a good idea here from Star Trek.

2:06:20 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, addis sink in our discord is the tripod solution. I was thinking of this plug plugs into the phone, one has a microphone, one has a headphone. This is from Star Trek, $12.99. But there there's got to be many people. Make sure, yeah, I'm sure, yeah.

2:06:38 - Mikah Sargent
Once you know what to call it, that's glitter.

2:06:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you just need to know what the problem is. Yeah, okay, I could do one more. One more email, why not? This one's a complicated one. Oh, how confident do you feel? I always confident from Heather. My husband and I are traveling to Vietnam and Cambodia soon. We always it's really nice Around this time of year. We always start to get people planning their travels. And it's always the same question Yep, I'm going to guess I'm ready about about cellular service Right.

Yeah, we both have iPhones and I'm trying to sort out the best approach to phone usage while I'm there. She has AT&T, my husband has T mobile. For myself, I'm looking at the international day pass versus purchasing a local SIM. So, and then for my husband, I'm trying to sort out T mobile's international coverage. You don't have to do anything with T mobile unless you want higher speed access. Right, t mobile does a pretty good job internationally. That's what I'll be carrying to Mexico. I don't fully understand how all this works. You're not alone. If I buy a local SIM, can I send and receive text messages? Yeah, to a new Vietnamese number it's going to be a new number, exactly I messages will work. So if they're not texting your phone, correct?

2:07:51 - Mikah Sargent
And you can problem earlier. You can temporarily register that number with I message, but that does cause some headaches at times.

2:07:57 - Leo Laporte
She says I can ask some of my friends here to use WhatsApp, but not all of them. Whatsapp would solve that also. I think it uses. So this is what we were talking about earlier with this messaging used to use just text messaging, which is phone number based, and then Apple kind of has a hybrid solution which does both. It will prefer internet based. If it can't do that, then it will go to the phone based and WhatsApp just is all internet based, right? So those are the. Those are the choices.

I'm not sure of all the iPhone settings. I need to engage what you could tell your friends if you did decide to buy a local SIM. I usually don't recommend them. If you have a modern iPhone, you can have dual SIMs. Yep, if you do have a modern iPhone and you have a SIM capability, then when you get to Vietnam, if you want, you can get a local SIM and keep your old SIM. You'll keep your old number. You will continue to receive text messages to that old number as well as have the new data SIM that you purchased. She wants to use local maps Google maps, apple maps in Vietnam and Cambodia. Internet send and receive text messages. Phone calls go to voicemail. I'll pick up the voicemail when I have Wi-Fi.

Smart turn off all possibility of data and voice usage. So here's what. Here's what I always recommend If you're worried about overseas data roaming charges, which can really add up, turn off data roaming. That is possible in any phone. No data roaming means you will not get data as you're out and about. Almost everywhere now, certainly in Vietnam and Cambodia, will have Wi-Fi, so your hotel will have Wi-Fi. Even a lot of the places you go will have Wi-Fi restaurants, coffee shops, et cetera. So in that case you'll be fine. You won't be using data roaming, you'll just be using Wi-Fi. And then, if you really do need data out in the country where there's no Wi-Fi, then you probably should get a local eSIM or and we have a number of recommendations from past shows there are companies that specialize in this Do you remember?

2:09:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I wish I could have the name, the one app that I always recommend, and let me. I'll be able to find it if I just do a quick search for eSIM. And that's because I've had people who've used it and have good, have had good experiences with it.

2:10:13 - Leo Laporte
I got an email after we talked about that from another company, another user rather, who said he really liked, was it Hollafly? I think it was. I think it was this Ola-Hollafly, but this is one company. There are other companies that will.

2:10:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, gigsky is the name and you like GigSky, so these are eSIMs.

2:10:34 - Leo Laporte
Again. You need to have a modern iPhone that supports that. That's the last three, I think. And then you keep your regular phone number, all that stuff, but you also add a second SIM, for data only, and that will be from a company like either H-O-L-A-F-L-Y or what was the other one GigSky, g-i-g-s-k-y or GigSkycom. So those both companies. What they do is they sell you an eSIM flat rate for every country you might be going to. Let me you know you should check and make sure it supports.

Vietnam and Cambodia. I'm sure they do. Yep, cambodia and let's see this is GigSky and Vietnam both supported. The nice thing about these is you don't have to tell them what country you're in. It just does it. It just works. So, in effect, you're getting data roaming. I haven't tried either one of these. I'm not going to Europe anytime soon, or Asia. I thought I would love to go to Vietnam and Cambodia. I'm jealous. Do try one of these and let us know you could also get it in country. I think it's a little more complicated. Plus, the one that works in Vietnam probably won't work in Cambodia, and by Subversa it gets a lot more complicated. Maybe try GigSky or what was the other one? Hola.

2:11:54 - Mikah Sargent
Holy cow, it's like Ola, I think.

2:11:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it probably is Ola, not Hola. Yeah, but the H is silent in Spanish anyway. Yeah, so either one of those, and maybe there are others as well. I probably there are-.

2:12:06 - Mikah Sargent
OlaFly, olafly.

2:12:08 - Leo Laporte
OlaFly Terrible name, obviously Not American, so that makes it terrible. That makes it bad. Yeah, they offer it in euros and they also have a WhatsApp number that starts Clearly not American. There's something weird going on. Let me see what the language, and then we can change the currency to Dala's and accept Dala Dala Bill, y'all Dala Dala Bill and we can see what the pricing is. But this looks like the good-. I think somebody emailed me and said this was good.

Yeah, I recommended it to you when are you traveling next, and then it'll give you a price according to your needs. So there's some Accorded into your needs. Is that per month or I think it's pre-paid sims? Oh, you just buy it and you get a certain amount of data. That's probably what it is.

2:13:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think that's how GigSky works too. It's not that per month, it's not a subscription, so $19 when you're in Cambodia.

2:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Notice that's less than a lot of less than Cameroon. And then it's by day seven days $27, $20 days $54. So this one is by day, with unlimited data in Cambodia. So that's a pretty good deal. $19 for five days on limited data in Cambodia, that's not bad. Then you could go out to Angkor Wat and say I know I'm not going to have Wi-Fi, but I'm going to be able to use my Apple Maps or my Google Maps out here. So that's nice. Hey, that's it for our show. Wow, what a fun show this is. I would like to do this again next week, but I can't. Too bad, you'll be here all alone.

2:13:46 - Mikah Sargent
I will be here all alone next week, as Leo is on vacay, getting a tan, so you will all get to hang out with me and I'm looking forward to answering your questions. We'll also have two guests next week, as we it's that time so Rod Pyle and Chris Markworth, nice.

2:14:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's-. Oh. We need some modern photographs. If you haven't taken your modern photograph for Chris's photo review next week, take a picture that illustrates the idea, the concept, modern it could be with any camera you have. Doesn't have to be fancy, in fact, often is better if it's not. Upload it to Flickr, tag it tgmodern and submit it to the tech guy group and Chris is going to pick three to talk about next week. I might have time. I'm going to find something modern, ooh, and I might have time to submit something I want to I would like to do that. I did that last time. Then I will be back in two weeks, tanned, rested and probably inebriated. So I hope you'll forgive me. You'll be inebriated when you return.

Well, you know how those yeah, I got those those margaritas can really stay with you.

2:14:51 - Caller
It's a while from the kicking.

2:14:52 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't drink, I'm not going to be inebriated, I'll be completely normal. If this is normal, michael will be back next Thursday with tech news. Weekly Tuesday with iOS today Now available in audio to everybody. Yes, it's sort of back, it's sort of back Video for the club members.

This gives me a chance to plug club twit. We really appreciate all you club twit members. You guys have been fantastic. We appreciate your support. It makes a big difference to our bottom line, but we need more.

We would like, if we could, possibly, to just get one in 20 listeners to subscribe. If we could do that, the sky's the limit. We could do so much more. What do you get? Well, $7 a month. I think it's very affordable. You get all of our shows ad free. You get video for all the shows that we do, including iOS today, additional content from before and after the shows and special events. We're going to do an inside twit when we get back. That'll be one of those additional contents, plus access to our great club twit discord, which is so much fun. We invite you to join. There's family plans, there's corporate plans and all you need to do is go to twittv slash club Twit. You're going to have that great feeling that you're supporting the content that you appreciate, you know there's something else they get access to if they become club twit members the Minecraft server.

2:16:14 - Mikah Sargent
No, I mean, yes, that, but also the opportunity to join us live in person for an upcoming this week in tech.

2:16:25 - Leo Laporte
So Lisa, our wonderful CEO and my personal life, has my personal life agreed to take her day off and come in here and welcome people to our studio. Now we only can get 14 people per show. We're going to do it for two twits in April April 7th and April 21st. You must be a club twit member. If you are a club twit member, there's probably something in the discord. You go to ticketstwittv.

2:16:51 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, do it on the web. You don't have to be there and it's available now, and the way that we'll confirm is that you need to use your email address that you used for club twit. That's how we'll know that you are first come first served.

2:17:02 - Leo Laporte
We missed having an audience. We will. We will love to see some people in the studio and thank you, lisa, for taking in, coming in our day off to do this, cause somebody has to bring you in and all that stuff. And she's tough. She has to guard us too. She will take a bullet. No, she won't. Yeah, let's not. I think it goes the other way. I would. I anyway, we would love to have you join us and if it goes well, we'd like to do more of those. It's just one more benefit to being a member of club twit. It's going to be a lot of fun.

I was talking about the fesses. We're going to bring the fesses out and I said how do I clean this? And I got a message from fez. Oh nice, as longer watches and he says you have to hand wash them. But he sent me the instructions. Oh good, so I will be hand cleaning the fesses so that we can do photo opportunities, posing as photo opportunity FF. Thank you everybody for joining us. I am Leo Laporte and I will be back in two weeks, tan and I'll remember my name by then. Tune in for Mikah. He's going to do a lot of the shows. Is you're kind of me this week?

2:18:11 - Mikah Sargent
I am great, I'm really next couple of weeks.

2:18:13 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. We do the show Ask the Tech Guys on Sundays, between 11am and 2pm Pacific standard time. That would be, let's see, two to five pm Eastern standard time, or 1800 UTC. God bless you.

2:18:34 - Caller
I made the.

2:18:35 - Leo Laporte
UTC conversion in my head 1800 UTC. I say that because you can watch us do it live on YouTube: youtube.com/twit. If you want to download the shows after the fact: twit.tv/atg or techguylabs.com, you could subscribe in your favorite pod catcher. You can watch it on YouTube as well. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to ask the tech guys. Thank you so much. Oh, you're right, it's not standard time, it's daylight saving time. So I have to go through that all again 11am to 1pm Pacific daylight time, two to five pm Eastern daylight time, but it's still 1800 UTC. Thank you everybody.

Thank you all have a great week, bye, bye, bye, bye, adios amigos.