Ask The Tech Guys 2018 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey hey, hey, how are you today? It's time for Ask the Tech Guys Leo Laporte here. Coming up in just a little bit, Scott Wilkinson and I will talk about physical media versus streaming and I will ask the philosophical question how many times you want to rewatch that movie?

0:00:15 - Mikah Sargent
I am Mikah Sargent Sargent and we talked to someone who wants to know how to BCC via text message.

0:00:22 - Leo Laporte
Then a great mystery why is Jimmy Kimmel so much quieter than every other show I watch? All that and more coming up next on Ask the Tech Guys. This episode is brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Cyber attackers are now using AI and creative ways to compromise users and breach organizations. In a security landscape where you must fight AI with AI, the best AI protection comes from having the best data. Zscaler has extended its zero-trust architecture with powerful AI engines that are trained and tuned by 500 trillion daily signals. Learn more about Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI to prevent ransomware and AI attacks. Experience your world secured. Visit zscaler.com/zerotrustAI.

0:01:18 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:01:27 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mike Gassarjan and Leo Laporte, episode 2018. Recorded Sunday, March 31st 2024. Heck Yeah! This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Wix Studio. Look, I've only got a minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less on Wix Studio.

You can adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI. You can expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with backend and frontend APIs. You can generate code and troubleshoot bugs with built-in ai code assistant. You can switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages. That means fonts, layouts, colors all in a click. Add no code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. You could start a design library. You could package your code and ui in reusable full stack. Oh, and one more thing Deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. Time's up, but the list keeps on going. Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com/studio or click on the link on the show page to find out more. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you? It's time for Ask the Tech Guys that there good-looking fellow over there is Mike Sargent and that there good-looking fellow, little boy. I'm dressed like an Easter egg today. Happy Easter.

0:02:53 - Mikah Sargent
Happy Easter and happy Trans Day of Visibility. We've got two reasons to spread love and compassion today. It's pretty cool Wow.

0:03:01 - Leo Laporte
Normally, trans Day of Visibility is the last day of March, so it's. It's normally Trans Day of Visibility is the last day of March, so just coincidental that it can.

0:03:05 - Mikah Sargent
I don't think they planned it, no, it just happened to be yeah, because usually Easter we celebrate in April.

0:03:10 - Leo Laporte
I know this is a really kind of weird day to be celebrating the last day of March. So what happened this week? Well, there's a big story that I guess you probably want me to talk about.

0:03:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, sure, let's do it.

0:03:27 - Leo Laporte
You have any guesses. I don't know what, which story this is. This is a huge one and yet it's very obscure and so. But it does affect you because you use a macintosh. Do you use homebrew? This, I do use homebrew. Okay, so you absolutely want to update? Just do homebrew upgrade right now.

It will downgrade a program called xz which you never installed but unfortunately a lot of other programs do. It is one of those. It's a you know kind of a zip library. It does a unzipping and a lot of libraries use it, including, unfortunately, a very important security library called OpenSSH. Oh well, yeah, the interesting thing about this story is this guy put a backdoor in it but started very subtly four years ago. There's really so many interesting pieces on this. First of all, it is serious if you use SSH because it does backdoor SSH, which is used to. I use it, a lot of people use it to log in securely. You may not even know. You use it. Synology, nasa's use it. There are a lot of places where it's used About four years ago, so ZX. This is very commonly the case, by the way, in open source libraries.

One guy was a maintainer for years and everybody used it, but it was. You know, one guy was running it. He fell behind, kind of lost interest, or maybe he fell ill, I'm not sure what happened. And another fellow said hey, I'd like to help you as a maintainer this is years ago and got maintainer privileges, contributed to the library for a long time. The original library creator said great, you know, I've handed it off. And this went on for some time. It was only a few days ago that a Microsoft guy not a security researcher, but apparently somebody who is extremely ocd was benchmarking the performance of his secure ssh is used to log into computers. Secure shell is what it stands for. Uh, he was, and he said well, this is half a second too slow. That's not right, half a second that's a whole.

That's not right 500 milliseconds off what's wrong and kind of thought, well, there's a whole lot of time that's not right. 500 milliseconds off what's wrong and kind of thought, well, there's something I can improve in the code I found a backdoor, and a serious backdoor, a remote code execution backdoor that allowed a bad guy to get your keys and intercept your SSH traffic and eventually you know you'd be so compromised It'd be very, very, very, very bad news. Now, why am I? I mean, this is a general technology show. This is not for the geeks and the insiders, except that it's so widely used. Yes, and the other thing that's very interesting is that the persistence and patience of the bad actor is remarkable. Years in the making, he slowly got more and more trust, slowly got to the point where he could inject this. It was obfuscated, which means it wasn't obvious what it was doing. It was very clever. We think at this point, we security researchers think at this point it was probably a nation state actor. Wow, I am sure Steve Gibson will do an entire episode on this because it's such a fascinating episode. So listen on Tuesday to Security Now.

But the important point is more of us use it than thought. I thought, oh, I don't have to worry about that. And then I realized I do have to and you have to, and anybody who uses Homebrew on a Macintosh, anybody who uses Linux and most of the Linux's are vulnerable to this needs to just update, because everybody knows about this. For instance, homebrew they're downgrading your implementation of XZ to a four-year-old version that doesn't have the backdoor code in it. Wow, and most Linux distros will do this. So the real point is do it Now. If you're on Windows, you probably don't have to worry about it. If you're a Mac user and you don't use Homebrew, which is used to install, you know, high end kind of command line weirdnesses Most users probably don't use Homebrew, but I just wanted to put the word out.

0:07:36 - Mikah Sargent
This is a little scary Because, yeah, this could be any of these packages that I have installed right and that's the problem, and Steve's talked about this before.

0:07:52 - Leo Laporte
This is called a supply chain attack, where you're not attacking you directly, excuse me. You're attacking the source of the libraries that legit code uses and the way coding these days works. Every program you use uses third-party libraries, a library of tools written by somebody else, every program. There are so few programs that don't and we just assume well, these are safe. But we have seen in the Python repositories, many other repositories, we've seen these exploits, thousands of them. Now the bad guys realize you know, the great way to get in and affect a lot of people is to get into the libraries, which are then bundled in. People don't really look at the libraries and this is a problem, a very difficult one to solve. So Steve will talk about it if you care about it. I only mention this because I want to make sure everybody you know a lot of people listening are highly technical people who will probably already be aware of this. But if you are a Mac user using Homebrew, like you were, you might not have known.

0:08:56 - Mikah Sargent
Well, that, and, too, I know a lot of people who maybe not even be super technical. At some point in their life They'll come across something that they want to do. They'll go, they'll look up how to do it, and they may not know exactly what they're doing, but they're following the steps, and maybe those steps do include installing some sort of. Maybe they want to take DVDs that they own and put them into a digital library, and maybe the means by which they do that requires some kind of code that might be compromised. And this actually reminds me, while you were out, or worse, use a library that's compromised.

0:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Even the code is legit, yeah, but the library isn't.

0:09:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, almost all.

0:09:35 - Leo Laporte
Python programs use libraries from PyPy, which has been many times compromised, so this is a real problem. It's something we have to be aware of.

0:09:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, speaking of that, it did remind me too. I wanted to bring it up on this show. Steve Gibson talked about it while you were out. Another place that we have to be paying attention to are browser plugins. Oh, really bad. There was a great story that he talked about where this one developer kept a running track of all of the times that they were offered a bunch of money to basically compromise their plugin with all of these. Then this was just analytics. This wasn't even going as far as to inject code that was going to do something nefarious, but to track the users, and so they've kept from that point on a running list of now 96 or more I can't remember how many just dozens upon dozens of times that different people have reached out offering huge, vast sums of money to inject code into a plugin that otherwise already existed. So, yeah, we've, we're. What is it? We're getting it from all sides.

0:10:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah we sure are.

Yeah, I don't know what the answer is. Now there's another virus going around that I want to nip in the bud. Are you ready? I'm ready Now.

I interviewed some years ago a professor named Jonathan Haidt, h-a-i-d-t about his book. At the time I thought it was quite good and he was quite interesting. He's written a new book that is getting a lot of attention. That shouldn't be.

It's called the Anxious Generation how the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. This is that trope that Congress is buying into. That a lot of people who should know better are buying into that. Congress is buying into that. A lot of people who should know better are buying into that. The kids staring at their phones are suffering from mental illness now that we're raising a generation that is going to be screwed up forever. Now, look, that sounds reasonable, which is one of the reasons this is spreading. Right, it does sound reasonable. Those TikTok adult children, of course. Course, it's terrible for you.

I just want to point out and I'm reading this from nature, which is a well-respected science magazine, and, and a, and a guy who's an expert in this field, who says there is very little real evidence that this is happening and he points out rising hysteria about screen time could prevent us from tackling the real issues. So there are many, many researchers who are looking into this. There was an analysis done in 72 countries which showed no consistent I'm reading from the Nature article or measurable associations between well-being and the rollout of social media globally. Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the US. No evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use.

Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University and very popular. He's one of those just so story guys. People read his stuff and go oh, that makes sense, it's true, like Malcolm Gladwell and the late Daniel Kahneman who just passed away. But just because something feels right and sounds true doesn't mean it is. You've got to look at the science. You need to examine it. Yeah and there is no. I want to say this very clearly because it yeah and there is no. I want to say this very clearly because it goes. This is a problem. It goes counter to our gut instinct. There is no science that shows a link. There are other reasons why people have problems and we should maybe address those, but it ain't scrolling through tiktok, yeah and that's kind of the point here.

0:13:23 - Mikah Sargent
If we keep focusing on something that thus far has not proven to be the case, we're not digging in deeper and trying to find what the root of it actually is no one's denying that, that there we have a troubled generation.

0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
Suicide rates are up there. That's a fact chronic loneliness that kind of figuring out.

The cause is much more complicated. And just because it feels right that, oh, they're spending too much time on insta, yeah, does not mean it's the case and and it's very. I mean, of course there's the side effect that we, we kind of ban big technology. I'm not so much worried about that. These are big companies, big deal, right, right, but there are. There's a much more significant side effect, which is you'll ignore the real problems or not try to figure out what the real problems are, because we'll say, oh, I got it. It's like when, when the homicide division says I know who killed the guy and put him and throw him in jail, just to solve the case without really looking at the evidence. Yeah, we don't know what's causing this.

There are other reasons more likely and part of it is that people are talking more openly about their mental wellness exactly, yes, we, that is.

0:14:29 - Mikah Sargent
One great example is uh, you are more likely to actually hear about something that someone's going through than we ever have, because there's, fortunately, good news less stigma than there has been. Still a lot of stigma, but less stigma. And then we just have to understand, too, that we are still on the cusp of these generations that have truly grown up from day dot with technology. So this is a new field that we're still researching, that we're still studying.

0:14:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and research should continue to see if there are side effects, but so far, lots of very, very, very, very good studies say no, there's no correlation at all. Uh, one other thing to point out we don't have enough school psychologists. We don't have enough treatment facilities. There is, on average in the united states, one school psychologist for every 1119 students. That's not enough. So you want to address the issues, work on that end. Don't say oh, it's easy, we'll ban TikTok and or Insta, or Facebook and or Snapchat or whatever it is. You know, we'll ban smartphones. That's. That isn't going to solve it. In fact, it's going to make it more difficult to figure out what's really going on. Recommend the article it's in Nature by Candice Ogers, who studies this stuff. The great rewiring is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? The answer is there's no evidence of that. Just like you know, people have thought oh, my cell phone, that's going to cause brain cancer, isn't it?

0:16:00 - Caller
Right.

0:16:01 - Leo Laporte
But we've had these now for a long time and no, it doesn't. There's no incidence, no rise in the incidence of brain cancer. All right, I want to show you something Now. This is more useful than anything else. By the way, Scott Wilkinson's coming up our home theater geek in about half an hour. We're going to answer your questions to 888-724-2884.

0:16:21 - Mikah Sargent
That's the phone number to call. You can also add to calltwittv on your phone or your computer to join the Zoom and of course, you can email us atg at twittv with text or your audio or video.

0:16:34 - Leo Laporte
So I use this to get in, as you do, into our.

0:16:37 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, yours has seen some days. It's kind of beat up, isn't?

0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
it. Yeah, I keep it on a little leather thong so that I can get back from the bathroom, because I have been locked out.

0:16:46 - Mikah Sargent
That has happened Resulted in doorbells.

0:16:49 - Leo Laporte
I just this week I put something new on. There's a little QR code on there. Go ahead, get your phone out.

0:16:53 - Mikah Sargent
I would love to get my scan my QR See what happens when I scan my QR code. This is called a ping tag.

0:16:59 - Leo Laporte
We were talking the other day about how useful QR codes turn out to be compared to things like NFC tags.

0:17:07 - Mikah Sargent
All right, I'm going to a website, mypingtagcom, and it says I'd like to use your current location. I'm not going to do that for now, but I imagine I wish you would.

0:17:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I should have done that. No, no, you don't have to.

0:17:19 - Mikah Sargent
I imagine that it would probably say, hey, it's been, but it says I am lost. Did you find me? Thank you for doing the right thing. Please contact Leo Laporte at an email.

0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can also text me without getting my phone number. You can contact me without knowing my name or my email or my phone number and I will get, which is really cool. I will get a text and if you did approve location, it would say yeah, somebody at 1351 b redwood way in petaluma, california, just scanned your tag. This, this was created, the company's ping tag p-i-n-g-t-a-gcom. It was created by a guy named amir. He says my car got towed, cost me 500 bucks, because I accidentally blocked somebody's driveway. Had there been some way? You know, sometimes when you do that you put a note on the windshield, call me, I'll move it. Yeah, he said I wish there'd been some way. So he made these ping tags.

Now, it's not cheap. Uh, you can get them for free. It does require that he continues to run the service, right, which is kind of, I guess, iffy. It's one of the reasons I don't mind paying for it. I paid $100 for life, oh, lifetime purchase, yeah, and I got a bunch of tags and I can make my own, which is kind of cool. Here's one for the inside of my car windshield Nice, which I have. Now. These tags are right now, generic, right? So the way you make them work is you scan them with your phone, log into your ping tag account and say here's what I want people to see. You can even have it with a premium account. Have them see a video.

0:18:54 - Mikah Sargent
Oh neat. Or a picture of you saying hi, I was going to say yeah, to connect with a human being.

0:19:00 - Leo Laporte
They have luggage tags. I just ordered on eBay. They have these luggage tags, but I just ordered on ebay. They have these luggage tags, but I just ordered on ebay some stainless steel luggage tags with it. Don't show this too much because I don't want somebody to scan they could end up getting your code.

Yeah, signing it to their yeah um, okay, then you can show it. Um, that, because I trust the people watching live. So it's really, I think, a very interesting idea. It's not free. Well, they're actually. There is a free tier. What I like is you can even make your own. So, for instance, you can make a wallpaper for your smartphone that has the ping tag on it and then if somebody, if I lose my phone, you see you can scan oh, that's nice, my my little ping tag and it will notify me. Somebody scanned it. If you agree to location, it will tell me where that was. It says something like you know, you can have any message you want, but the default message is you know, hey, be a good guy, return this to me.

0:20:02 - Caller
I did message you.

0:20:04 - Mikah Sargent
Oh good, yeah, I'll log into my ping tag account oh, I was curious if it would forward to your phone. That'd be kind of nice I can't.

0:20:13 - Leo Laporte
You know. Nobody's done it yet, so I don't know. Let's find out. Let me get in here. I should have logged in before.

0:20:21 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, it says to receive sms notifications from your tags, please enter your number, but voip numbers such as google voice will not receive those oh yeah, hey, boo boo, take a look at this picnic basket.

0:20:31 - Leo Laporte
It has your fub in it hey, boo boo, is that you? That was me. Yeah, okay, and look at this, it also isn't gonna like it also says new ping for leo's office tag. You can name this right scan alert sent from santa rosa. So it, without your permissions, at least it knows roughly with where you are from the address and I can reply to you anonymously.

Okay, so I don't know who this is. It's not your number. Thanks, yogi Yogi, and it will go to your text. So without giving out any privacy information, that's cool. So I put this on everything, I put on my cameras, I put on my keys, I put it on my car. I'm putting it everywhere. You can print more. You can order more. I did order luggage tags, nice stainless steel ones, although you know the basic package you can get. I there's, I think I can't remember what it is. You shouldn't look at the website ping tagcom. It's kind of a cool idea.

0:21:33 - Mikah Sargent
This is a really cool idea, isn't it?

0:21:34 - Leo Laporte
it's a very cool idea uh, I think amir came up with something pretty clever. You get a. If the basic package you get a bunch of stickers that you put on stuff and I think I can uh on the. On the 99 package I can have up to 100, or is it 50? Maybe it's 50, it's on says on the website 50 ping text. Let me log in real quick. I can show you.

0:21:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is very cool and I like the idea you could use it with your pets oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you can even order from them or third parties.

0:22:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh, metal, you know, instead of you know, putting a big honking hair tag hanging around your doggy's neck, and you're never that's why I don't.

0:22:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't do that it's not safe.

0:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Um, this way, uh, you, you can uh put a fairly unobtrusive scam code. You could tattoo it on their butt whatever you you want. Now, that's the only thing that, in the long run, worries me a little bit about, about ping tags, which is you know, we're relying on their server. They write it's not. It is going through their site, not not ours. I would love it if he would open source the server.

That would be nice if you could have your own server, and I suppose it would be conceivable as possible that somebody could write something like this and make an open source version of it. I just think it's a very clever idea. Actually, it's mypingtagcom and it's patent pending.

0:23:08 - Mikah Sargent
So if you're going to make an open source, open source.

0:23:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn't think about medical alert medical alert and you can get them printed with some text as well, so it can say different things on it. The default ones say to contact the owner.

0:23:17 - Mikah Sargent
Scan this tag rob j I suppose, but hopefully you wouldn't do that what did rob, could you? Make a code to cause someone to download a malicious file.

0:23:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, okay, so that's a good point. There have been some concern about QR codes. In fact, I've even heard people say maybe even Steve has said don't scan random QR codes. They're everywhere. Now, though, even if you go to a parking meter, these days, you scan a QR code to pay the parking meter in many cases. You go to a parking meter these days, you scan a QR code to pay the parking meter in many cases. So I think you know when you scan it, you're going to see a URL. Careful, I think that the utility of these outweighs the potential risk and you should always consider, like any link that's sent to you, that there is a risk. Exactly, be careful with that. You're looking at the shop right now. There's. There's a lot of different ways you can. You can encapsulate these qr codes. They're meaningless at first. Okay, that's 20. I got the 20 bundle there, but I also did the subscription, so you get all these uh things, but I ended up doing uh, the larger membership of premium membership, because I want this to succeed. Frankly, I want the server to stay online. I want them to continue to do this. They have company plans and so forth. So very cool idea, don't you think?

I love this. I think I saw it on Insta, so sometimes the Instas pay off. Sometimes I forgot to wear my seaweed sweater. I got it, I like it. I will wear it next week for you. I actually forgot to wear my seaweed sweater. I got it, I like it. I will wear it next week for you. I actually wanted to wear it a bunch and wash it a bunch of times to see how it holds up. Yeah, it's very thin and light anyway. Uh, instant location scan alerts. You can customize your tag. Look, this one's named leo this board I saw that the dog thank you, amir.

Uh, you can initiate chat with finers. I just I'm not doing an ad for it, I just think it's very interesting. Uh, it's expensive relatively expensive, I agree, although people really don't?

0:25:15 - Mikah Sargent
I've found anecdotally these days people really like the one-time payment and are willing to pay a little bit more when it's not a subscription.

0:25:22 - Leo Laporte
Remember, in order for this to work, he's got to run this server in the background and he wants you want to keep this. If 20 years, I guess, look, I'll be happy. 99 bucks. If I get five years out of it, right, then it'll be worth it. So, amir, you got to do it for at least five years before you give up. I think he's going to do all right. I think he's way to use, and we were talking a couple of weeks ago about using it. In fact, qr codes. In fact we've set up a QR code for people visiting. We're going to have visitors in studio next week, first week, and I said put up a QR code so they can join our Wi-Fi. And now we've got that there. You just scan it, press a button and you're on the Wi-Fi, which I think is a great idea.

Idea qr. I love qr codes. When I first saw him I thought this is so bad, this is so ugly they were. You were seeing them. I remember seeing them in london years ago in the tube station, on the, on the billboards. I thought that's never going to catch on in japan. They're everywhere and now they're everywhere here and I do think there's some real utility. Uh to qr, I agree. Yeah, yeah, all right, enough said, let's take a call or do an email, or do a voicemail?

0:26:29 - Caller
No, no, I have a call. Oh, there is a call.

0:26:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to pick up on this. Call John Ashley, mr Producer, we should put a QR code on him.

0:26:36 - Caller
Well, okay, you put a QR code on my forehead so for those who are the studio next week, they'll know who you are. Yeah, they can scan it If you're a club member.

0:26:44 - Leo Laporte
you have to be a club member. I think there is still room next week, Am I right? No, we are actually full.

0:26:50 - Caller
We're all sold out now, but no, I believe the 21st we have one spot on the seat.

0:26:55 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, one seat left.

0:26:56 - Leo Laporte
You know, and Lisa said look, fill out the form. If I can get you in, I will. We have 14 chairs. You might be sitting on the floor.

0:27:06 - Mikah Sargent
We'll make sure you're not sitting on the floor, all right.

0:27:10 - Caller
Beanbag. At least Caller, hit star six to unmute yourself.

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
I want that hand chair. That's what we need is hand chairs Cool.

0:27:21 - Mikah Sargent
I want my chair to hang from the ceiling, oh we have one of those at home.

0:27:27 - Leo Laporte
Can you hear me? Yeah, what's your?

0:27:28 - Mikah Sargent
name, please. Yes, who are you? Where are you calling from?

0:27:33 - Caller
Quick, Dan. I'm from Los Angeles.

0:27:34 - Leo Laporte
Hi Dan, Welcome to Ask the Tech Guys.

0:27:42 - Caller
What can we do for you? I have an iPhone and I use uh, the messages app to send, like a message to maybe 20 different people and I don't want um the individuals to know I'm sending the same message to each of them. You want bcc for messages exactly I found that up until maybe a couple years ago, I used to be able to do that with no problem if at least one of the people I was sending a message to was an android user instead of oh that's interesting, that is a nice way to do it yeah I don't think you can do it with Apple's messages.

And then, about maybe six months to a year ago, I discovered that and that stopped working. A couple of years ago, and maybe six months ago, I discovered that if I went into the settings for messages and turned off MMS messaging and then sent the message as a BCC message, that would work with no problem. So I was wondering if there's a way to do this without having to turn off MMS messaging whenever I want to do such a thing.

0:29:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so this is something that you can do using. This is why Apple has instituted the shortcuts app. Well, part of the reason why, on on iOS, you can do this for shortcuts, yeah.

0:29:12 - Leo Laporte
You are amazing.

0:29:13 - Mikah Sargent
So when you do that, so this what I want to say, first and foremost, is good on you for figuring out multiple ways to make this happen.

0:29:22 - Leo Laporte
They'll always see the sending phone number. There's no way.

0:29:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, They'll see who it's coming from. But to have it go individually as opposed to creating a group message um, you are going to choose to send a message, yeah so you say you tell shortcuts.

0:29:37 - Leo Laporte
Send this one message to all these people choose the contacts and they only see, because I think for legal reasons I would imagine you need to see both ends.

0:29:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, right, yeah, it sounds like, let me.

0:29:49 - Leo Laporte
You can say I want to see all the other people's.

0:29:52 - Mikah Sargent
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like what you're trying to do is send essentially individual messages to 20 people, as opposed to having just one group message where everybody can see everybody else. Correct, having just one group message where everybody can see everybody else.

0:30:06 - Caller
Correct, correct, correct. I don't want each individual to be able to see the other individual's responses to the text yeah, so this is able to be done with Apple's Shortcuts app.

0:30:26 - Mikah Sargent
It is not something that I'm going to be able to walk you through quickly over our call, but what I can promise you is that I will create a shortcut uh, that we will include in our show notes at twittv slash ATG and what you'll be, what you'll be able to do after the show is head there. You tap on it, it will pop up on your phone and say would you like to install this? You say yes and it'll pop up in your shortcuts app on your phone. After that, essentially what you'll do is you will write out your message and then it will pop up and ask you what contacts you want to send it to. You select the contacts that you want to send it to, you hit enter and it will individually send that message to those people. Doesn't matter if they're android, doesn't matter if they're ios, doesn't matter at all who or what it is, but instead is just a message that is individually sent to those people scooter x has.

0:31:17 - Leo Laporte
That would be perfect. Send us a apple discussion.

0:31:21 - Mikah Sargent
That covers this a little bit so yeah, if you want to do it, if you want to bypass everything. But it sounds like what you're saying is you didn't want to take this method of going into your settings and turning off all that stuff. But yes, the sort of other way to do this while actually having to affect your settings is to turn off iMessage and MMS in your settings. But it sounds like, as you've said, you don't want to do that. You'd like to keep that stuff going, and so, in that case, a shortcut's the way to go about it, and I'll make sure you've got one.

0:31:53 - Leo Laporte
So that's interesting. So I guess SMS, this is a feature then of SMS.

0:31:58 - Mikah Sargent
Right, because by default you can't. You have to have MMS for it to be a group message. Sms doesn't do group messages, so if you have all that turned off, you have to send it as SMS. It's going to interpret it as I want to send a message to these 20 different people. I can't make a group message and send it all at once, so I'm going to send it to them all individually.

0:32:20 - Caller
So in effect does the same thing as shortcut does Go ahead. Sorry, if you can include in your shortcut. The way I initiate sending this so-called group message to individuals is I go to the contact app and I select a list, one of the lists yeah, okay, and I long press the list and it gives me the option to message everybody in the list Individually. Yeah, option to message everybody in the list Individually. Yeah, that's why I'd like to. Well, but then it fills out. It puts that list on a message.

Yeah, so everybody sees it and then, like I said, the only way, and then the only way for me to make sure that each of the recipients doesn't see the other responses is, before I send the message. I've got to turn off any messages.

0:33:07 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, we can work that into the shortcut as well.

0:33:12 - Leo Laporte
So the Apple thing is-.

0:33:14 - Caller
I try to make my own shortcut, but it's totally-.

0:33:17 - Leo Laporte
It's complicated for sure. The Apple community message says turn off group messaging, messaging. Turn it off, which is kind of counterintuitive, and turn off iMessage not MMS but iMessage. That way you're going to send via SMS a S, what is sort of an SMS group message. The difference is people can't respond to it and see the whole group, it'll only come back to you. So it's in effect, sending SMSs to everybody, but you have to turn off iMessage and turn off group messaging.

0:33:53 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, which is what you said.

0:33:54 - Leo Laporte
You did not want to do so yeah, yeah, I understand you don't want to do that. I mean, the shortcut could probably. You can actually probably write a shortcut. That did that temporarily.

0:34:04 - Mikah Sargent
It will. It'll pop up. It can, at the very least, pop up settings to have you toggle it off. Unfortunately, it doesn't have built-in toggles for that. That would be nice. That would be nice. That's what I'd like to see come to as an aside, apple listeners.

0:34:22 - Leo Laporte
I would love to see toggles for all of the settings come to shortcuts. There's probably reasons.

0:34:25 - Caller
Thank you very much hey Dan yeah uh, there's probably reasons.

0:34:27 - Leo Laporte
Thank you very much. Hey, dan, thank you. It's great to have you as a listener. We appreciate it. Take care all right now what mr john ashley, producer man you know, I think we should probably do a quick little break.

Oh yeah, I forgot about breaks. Breaks, oh those. Yeah, let's do a quick little break and then, uh, of course, Scott Wilkinson is coming up, but I think we'll have time to do a little, a little bit more. I want to mention, uh, one of our sponsors DeleteMe, something that has really been useful. Uh, for us, this is a service that takes your personal information off the internet, and I have to say, we use it because it's not just a personal thing, it's a security thing. In fact, I think every middle, mid-level manager, anybody who has a, has direct reports in any company, should be using DeleteMe, because I'll tell you why.

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We're talking everything my friends Addresses, photos, relatives, phone numbers. Social media addresses your property values, in many cases, your salary. And since privacy exposures affects everybody a little bit differently, they have wonderful privacy advisors because everybody's threat model is a little different. We'll tell you what you need to worry about, what you don't need to worry about. That's really nice. I think DeleteMe is exactly the right service. We've been very happy with it. I want you to try it. Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy. Visit joindeleteme.com/twit and use the code twit. Joindeletemecom slash twit and use the code twit. joindeleteme.com/twit. Offer code twit. That's going to get you 20% off. joindeleteme.com/twit. We have four minutes left. What should I do, john? I want to pick up another phone call. Yeah, let's do a phone call. Good, I like it.

0:38:23 - Caller
We love it. Refresh something on my end and then I can hit a button over here. Boop, there we go, there we go. Don't call or hit star six.

0:38:42 - Mikah Sargent
Star six Don't mute yourself, then tell us your name and where you're calling from.

0:38:48 - Caller
Hey Leo, hey Mike, you got Jamie out of hurricane country. I mean Tampa Florida. There you go, he's in the corner. Friend, what's up Jamie? Hey Jamie, welcome back. Thank, tampa Florida, there you go. What's up, guys? He's in the corner friends.

0:38:55 - Leo Laporte
What's up, jamie hey?

0:38:56 - Caller
Jamie.

0:38:59 - Caller
Welcome back. Thank you guys. It's a pleasure. Thank you guys for taking my call. So I am ditching all of my paid streaming services, all of them. But I'm keeping all of them, every last one of them. I'm tired of raising prices. I'm tired of raising prices. I'm tired of the password change crackdowns that seem to happen once a month. I'm just over it and I'm replacing everything with my beautiful tweed antenna that, leo, is still sitting up here, by the way it worked my beautiful tweed Yep, my low-release tweed antenna, and I'm also going to be using a lot of fast services for this. So, in other words, I'm going to be getting 100% free TV.

But the question that I had is if I keep hearing from YouTube that's probably the first mistake I could have made oh, linear TV's in decline, linear TV's been declined and linear TV is dying and people aren't watching TV anymore. They want to pay for 10 million streaming services and have 10 million different bills every month. So, leo, I got to ask you and Mikah Sargent, you know, is there a reason why a lot of people? I keep hearing that linear TV is dying? But is that the truth? No, no, no.

0:40:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what it I mean. Look, maybe long-term, maybe in 50 years, you won't have broadcast television. What he's saying. By the way, linear TV is a really weird. It took me a while to understand what that is. It's a weird description. It took me a while to understand what that is.

0:40:38 - Caller
It's a weird description of essentially a five hour broadcast television.

0:40:40 - Leo Laporte
That's really what we should say. You're talking about broadcast television, the reason being, nowadays we don't have to watch anything in linearly in sequence, we can watch it whenever we want, anytime we want. It's funny, though, when I was, when we mexico, uh, and all we had was a tv, because I wish, and more hotels need to do this they'd have chromecast or some sort of way to do my computer on the screen, uh, but we couldn't so. But they had hbo.

0:41:08 - Scott Wilkinson
but the problem is that's linear hbo, right you have to watch whatever's on at that time, which means you can never start a movie at the beginning remember those days you'd always it's like what it's like halfway through, uh, some sylvester stallone thing and uh, of course I've seen them all, so we knew what.

0:41:23 - Leo Laporte
We knew what was going on, but it's a little frustrating. So linear is. The is basically broadcast, though, even though the old cable tv is in many ways linear tv as well. Uh, it's not going away, it's not as ideal, and I think content creators are very much more interested in getting a million dollars to make something for netflix than they are, yeah, going through the whole process of getting a tv show pushed through the networks. You know, remember the whole green light thing and remember there used to be in the fall. The new shows would emerge.

0:41:59 - Mikah Sargent
Remember that yeah, you have to say, I really want to know what I want.

0:42:02 - Leo Laporte
What's it gonna be that my mother, the car sounds good, I gotta watch that. So, uh, those that's all kind of gone by the wayside. I think that content creators and the networks will persist as long as there are people and there are still plenty of them in this country who don't want to pay for Internet television and pay for like you don't want to pay for over-the-top television.

0:42:29 - Caller
And Leo, the truth of the matter. You know paying for 30 different bills.

0:42:35 - Leo Laporte
All you've done is basically take one big bill, your chemical and replace it with a bunch of little, tiny, little mini bills. Well, yeah, you're lucky because in Tampa you can use an antenna, so you don't even have to pay anything. Once you get the antenna set up, you get the broadcast networks.

0:42:48 - Caller
I get 87, leo, I get 87 stations man.

0:42:53 - Leo Laporte
There's no question that they are under assault right. There's no question. There's no question that they are under assault right. I mean, one of the reasons atsc 3.0 came out, which is the new broadcast standard, is so they can have some form of yeah, it's stupid. Some form of interactivity, um, because they're trying to compete with the internet so they can have 4k, so they give multiple channels. It's really, uh, you know, a lifeline to broadcasters. I know, I mean, look, radio has been dying for several decades now. It's not dead.

0:43:23 - Caller
And it's not dead yet I think, uh, honestly, in my, in my humble opinion, as a radio listener myself, it's not dead. It's just moving away from the traditional receivers that we've had for 50 years to now. The stations can go anywhere that you go. Thanks for an app on your phone. Well, that's the whole point.

0:43:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, streaming and podcasts are just more convenient for listeners. Radio is a little different because it has this live component right. So if there's an earthquake or a hurricane or a tornado, you want to listen to the radio because it's now yes, which podcasts can't be?

0:44:05 - Caller
And if your power goes out or your internet goes down, then you're going to be up to creep about a paddle at that point, Because I've lived through hurricanes and the first thing that tends to go is the power in the Internet. That's the first thing that usually tends to go. We got to run because we got Scott Wilkinson.

0:44:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm just going to say I don't think it's dying, I think it's going to continue, but it's not going to be flourishing. Yeah, and what's happened to radio is it's become kind of the back alley of content, and I think broadcast television will sort of be that way too. But I got to tell you, lisa watches the Voice and American Idol. They are able and I'll tell you what sports very important, big Oscars very important, Super Bowl had a huge audience, biggest audience, uh, ever, uh. So I think that there's going to be stuff that you will want, just just the same with radio that you'll want that's live in real time. Yes, that streaming and podcasts and over the top can't provide. On the other hand, if you want to watch a great movie or a great tv show, you know know there is I think it must've been because there was a log jam due to the strike, but all of a sudden there's all these shows that I want to watch. I can't, there's just too much. There's so much content. We thought peak TV was over. No, no, it was just sleeping. So if you're a I mean honestly, if you're a content creator you're going to go to Netflix or Apple TV or Max or someone and say give me money and I will make a TV show for you and some of the best writing, the best stuff is happening now over the top. That's that's what happens. Hey, you know who's on the line right now with us Our home theater geek.

Perfect timing, scott Wilkinson joining us from forever weird Santa Cruz, california. Hello, scott, keep Santa Cruz. Weird man. He's the host of Home Theater Geeks, which everybody can hear now. By the way, lisa told me and I'm really pleased that your show iOS Today, hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows as soon as we made them available audio only outside the paywall had huge subscriber counts. People have said, oh, I can listen to this again. So keep up the good work. Remember that man, remember that you know our club members get video, but there's a big audience out there that's getting audio and, boy, they love hands-on macintosh. That's that. One took off like crazy home theater geek. Same thing. Scott covers av for us, not only weekly on his home theater geek show, but monthly here on. Ask the tech guys big screen tvs, surround sound, and I have to give you credit. Oh yeah, you talked me into buying a ridiculously expensive panasonic UHD DVD player.

0:46:58 - Scott Wilkinson
Ah, UHD Blu-ray yeah.

0:47:00 - Leo Laporte
To connect it to my Dolby Vision capable LG OLED. Oh To buy Dune 1 and Oppenheimer 1. Because I wanted to give it a test.

0:47:13 - Scott Wilkinson
Yep.

0:47:13 - Leo Laporte
There is no Oppenheimer 2. There's no Oppenheimer 2. No Oppenheimer 2. Yet Oppenheimer, the sequel. But I have to because I want to say, because you said and I think you're you know it made sense. Technically, streaming will never be as good as having a disc, all videos compressed. It's a question of how much compression Correct and I have to say Dune was mind-blowing compared to the streaming, and I had 4K streaming on Apple TV at good quality. Yeah, but there's nothing that beats that UHD Blu-ray. It's not the same.

0:47:49 - Scott Wilkinson
If you want ultimate quality, that physical disc is where it's at man, so I want to give you props. I spent a ridiculous amount of money for a dvd player and the thing is not a dvd player, it's a uhd blu-ray player well, and the other thing I realized is.

0:48:06 - Leo Laporte
I am not. Some people are, maybe you are. I don't know the type that watches a movie over and over again. Usually I see a movie, that's it.

0:48:12 - Mikah Sargent
I don't want to see it again, and so that's the downside to this yeah, I have a few that I will re-watch, but they're few and far, very but re-watch like once.

0:48:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have discs. I mean, I have the wizard of oz. I'm not gonna watch that over and over again. I have the entire james bond, up to the craig. You know it was the 60th anniversary edition, all the.

0:48:35 - Scott Wilkinson
James Bond.

0:48:38 - Mikah Sargent
Love those movies. Maybe once more I'll watch them Now that you can see them in this luxurious form. Are you a re-watcher, Scott?

0:48:46 - Scott Wilkinson
I am yeah, I'm a re-watcher. I'll re-watch a good movie. I just re-watched Spinal Tap.

0:48:52 - Mikah Sargent
That's a good movie. Yeah, re-watch it. That's a good movie.

0:48:54 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, rewatch it. It's a great movie. It's one of my favorites.

0:48:56 - Leo Laporte
But we were just talking about how much good new content there is. That's the thing. I don't really need to go back in time every once in a while, that's true, that's true, and there's so much good content, and you're right about that.

0:49:18 - Mikah Sargent
Do we?

0:49:18 - Scott Wilkinson
have time to consume it all in the limited time we have on this planet. Yeah, I am a rereader, but not typically a rewatch. See, that's, that's. Uh, that's an interesting point, very interesting point. You know people reread stuff. Oh, actually I am rereading. People listen to music more than one.

0:49:30 - Leo Laporte
That's different. Music is different. Right music is better when you keep listening to it over and over, I think that's what I get from re-. Yeah, yeah.

0:49:38 - Mikah Sargent
I suppose it depends on how you interpret and take in a movie, right, if it's about ingesting the plot, then perhaps it is not necessary to re-watch, because once you know the plot, you know the plot to rewatch, because once you know the plot, you know the plot. But if you, for example, uh, re-watching, there are a handful of documentaries that I re-watch a lot, um, all made by the same uh director and producers. Uh, helvetica, um, that's a great movie, and there's one for city planning the name always escapes me and those I will re-watch over and over again because there are little tidbits of it that I'll get that I can pull out, that you know are interesting.

0:50:20 - Scott Wilkinson
But yeah, for most movies, once I get it, I've got it well but then there, then there are the movies that are so um complex or deep that you you can watch them over and over and get other stuff from them.

0:50:37 - Leo Laporte
This was the 25th anniversary of the matrix this week there you go worth watching one more time, but that one I would like is that a good uhd disc. That might be a one to get. I believe so, yes yes, as I recall.

0:50:50 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, not the movie I was thinking of in that. Yeah, the movie I was thinking of in that regard was Christopher Nolan's Tenant.

0:50:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, you have to watch that 12 times to even understand what the hell's going on, exactly, exactly. Actually, that's true of a lot of his movies. Yeah, yeah, he's a confusing inception.

0:51:09 - Scott Wilkinson
He's crazy.

0:51:11 - Leo Laporte
You know I would own Interstellar. I would never watch it again, but just to honor it I would buy it.

0:51:17 - Scott Wilkinson
I think a lot of it is that it does look fabulous, does it? It looks and sounds fabulous on UHD Blu-ray.

0:51:24 - Leo Laporte
Thing. I need more discs to watch on it. Not that I'm ever going to watch them, because now there's the Gentleman, I want to see that. There's the Regime, I want to see that there's. There's so much good tv going on right now. I I shogun, I'm so excited about I started it. Three body problem is amazing there's so much started.

0:51:44 - Mikah Sargent
Three body problem. I haven't yet but I plan on it it's okay.

0:51:48 - Leo Laporte
The book was better, I think um, this is what I keep hearing. This is good. I think I've only seen the first couple, so it's it's intriguing. I think it's better if you if I think I've only seen the first couple, so it's intriguing. I think it's better if you are not a fan of the book, to be honest with you.

0:51:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I thought you said you didn't like the book, I didn't like the style of the book it's a bad translation.

0:52:04 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't know if it's a bad translation, but it's a translation from the Chinese. It's a little it feels direct, right. It doesn't feel like elegant prose and I think that's probably a bad answer, and I've heard that the TV series adapts it. Some things are faithful, some things are not, yeah, and I think you have to for TV.

0:52:22 - Mikah Sargent
I like that. A lot of people really hate that. I like that. Last of Us.

0:52:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was great Because they took a little thing in the game and made it a whole episode that was amazing. Yes, so sometimes that does. That is kind of necessary.

0:52:36 - Mikah Sargent
Especially for those of us who have trouble rewatching stuff. I need it to be a lot of new so that I am interested in what's going on Now Dune, interestingly, is pretty faithful to the novel, which is interesting.

0:52:47 - Scott Wilkinson
Another one that I thought that went way, way outside the book was Foundation.

0:52:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Couldn't finish that one.

0:52:57 - Scott Wilkinson
Really. Oh, I'm liking it. You know I read the books and I love the books.

0:53:02 - Leo Laporte
The books don't age well, by the way. I tried to reread them, don't age.

0:53:05 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, really, yeah, a lot of older science fiction doesn't age all that well, yeah well, the TV series diverges from the books tremendously, so I just decided to accept it as what it is, right. Not a faithful representation of the book, right.

0:53:26 - Leo Laporte
What is going on in the world of home theater?

0:53:29 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, I wanted to share with you my latest home theater of the month. I love these. They're so much fun On on avs forum. I do these once a month and, uh, this latest one I I think is is beautiful. It's understated. It's very simple the the walls are. It was built into an existing room. It wasn't purpose built, but the installer came in and basically installed these false fabric walls that hide all the speakers. You don't see a single speaker in the room and what you see instead is very, very simple, smooth walls.

0:54:16 - Leo Laporte
So these are the speakers and then they put fabric over the top.

0:54:20 - Scott Wilkinson
They do that in movies. Well, those are the front speakers and they put the screen in front of that, the screen in front of that, the screen doesn't block the sound.

0:54:26 - Mikah Sargent
No, no. Is the screen perforated like it is in theaters?

0:54:30 - Scott Wilkinson
It's called acoustically transparent, and there's two ways to do that. One is by what's called perforating the solid material. It's in a home theater is called micro perf because they're very tiny. But in this case and I think in the best cases that fabric is actually woven. And by weaving a fabric you get natural little tiny gaps between the threads and the sound comes through that just fine.

0:55:02 - Leo Laporte
Really, it's not muffled.

0:55:04 - Scott Wilkinson
Nope, nope, huh, absolutely not. This is a very, very I have to say it looks like a rubber room.

0:55:14 - Leo Laporte
No, it looks very clean. It's a little bleak. No, it looks very clean. It looks very clean. It's a little bleak, but it looks very clean.

0:55:22 - Scott Wilkinson
It's well, but you want the room to disappear. Yeah.

0:55:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, honestly, I'd prefer to see the speakers. Really, yeah, it makes me feel like I'm not hearing. I'm the guy that takes the cover off of speakers, you know.

0:55:37 - Mikah Sargent
I don't want anything to touch the speakers.

0:55:39 - Leo Laporte
My Elacs. I take the grill off. I want that speaker to have a direct drive into my ear.

0:55:44 - Scott Wilkinson
Mm-hmm. Well, the grill, by the way, is also acoustically transparent. Yeah, I know. I mean, if you did a test, say even a blind test you had somebody put the grill on, put the grill off and say if you did a test, say even a blind test, you had somebody put the grill on, put the grill off and say can you hear the difference? You would say no, well, why they make?

0:56:00 - Leo Laporte
it detachable for people like me, probably, huh.

0:56:03 - Scott Wilkinson
For people like you yeah.

0:56:04 - Mikah Sargent
Because we'd never be able to, I think, prove to some people that there isn't a difference.

0:56:10 - Leo Laporte
You do want to protect the cones. They're very fragile and all it takes true a poke.

0:56:14 - Scott Wilkinson
yes, right, so yes, yeah also true, but this guy, the, the owner of this home theater, was very clear about his desire to not see anything yeah, even the chairs are 30 gray well yeah, they're a little lighter than I would. It's kind of a grim room.

0:56:35 - Leo Laporte
To be honest with you, it looks, looks like a torture chamber. Frankly, it does not.

0:56:39 - Mikah Sargent
A torture chamber. There are no chains on the wall.

0:56:42 - Leo Laporte
This is like the kind of place the HR brings you when they want to ask you about your Never mind. It's just oh, look at the rack, now see, this is See. But I'm a tech guy. I like seeing the wires, the racks, the speakers. I want to see the guts. I'm the kind of guy who would buy a transparent phone if they made it right.

0:57:02 - Scott Wilkinson
Ah I want to see the inside, see the circuitry.

0:57:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah and I do see some speakers are visible. Looks like this the front surrounds are visible, which is interesting.

0:57:11 - Scott Wilkinson
I don't know well, that's, that's in an intermediate stage. Oh oh, maybe in that last picture put up that last picture on the big screen here.

0:57:19 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, I see, you see the surrounds there, yeah maybe, maybe you do okay so even he didn't want to go crazy.

0:57:27 - Leo Laporte
What kind of projector did he use? Um, I believe it's a jvc oh, I noticed by the way he's using a playstation 5 and an xbox for his uhd discs yeah, hey, not what I would recommend.

0:57:42 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh, you don't recommend. Oh good, okay, I don't recommend it's very uh formidable isn't it nice? Isn't that a nice player? I I love that player and I.

0:57:53 - Leo Laporte
And what projector looks like? A nice projector. That's a, a. It's a JVC.

0:57:56 - Scott Wilkinson
Isn't that the most expensive?

0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
part of a lot of these.

0:58:00 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, generally often it is. In this case not. It's the Kaleidoscape movie server. He's got 22 terabytes of storage.

0:58:10 - Mikah Sargent
Don't tell Leo about a movie server.

0:58:12 - Leo Laporte
He's a re-watcher clearly, clearly, clearly, or a hoarder I think often it's really hoarders, that people collect these because they want them.

0:58:22 - Mikah Sargent
But hey, if somebody comes over, they go. I've always wanted to see Blank and they're like oh, it's in your Kaleidoscape movie server.

0:58:29 - Leo Laporte
That's right, you have them all. He also has a Seymour screen. Excellence in lighter Neo with auto masking woven acoustically transparent.

0:58:39 - Scott Wilkinson
So there, yep, that's the screen. It's a wonderful screen.

0:58:43 - Leo Laporte
Interesting. He chose JBL speakers as well.

0:58:46 - Scott Wilkinson
Interesting Well and this is JBL's very high end line, jbl synthesis line those are theater style speakers. I think, yes, exactly Exactly. They're really really good. Yeah, um, those are. These are theater style speakers.

0:58:58 - Leo Laporte
I think, yes, exactly exactly they're really really good, this would be great for watching the karate kid 40th anniversary edition it'd be great for watching anything, anything.

0:59:07 - Scott Wilkinson
yeah, interestingly, check those seats that he got. They have motorized headrests, so the headrests can come up and you can rest your head, but they can also come down. And if you're a super home theater geek, like I am, not having a headrest means that your perception of the surround sound is better. Your head is free-floating, exactly, and you can hear the stuff. The sound coming from beside you, and particularly behind you, reaches your ears without having to diffract around a headrest Again.

0:59:43 - Leo Laporte
all these free floating heads makes this a nightmare room. I think any home theater is probably kind of. I've been in some very nice, cozy home theaters.

0:59:54 - Mikah Sargent
Do you think that then those cases they were giving up?

0:59:58 - Leo Laporte
some of that. Yeah, they wanted comfort, yeah, you know, and convenience, and they had little blankets you could put on you.

1:00:04 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh, well Places for the popcorn bucket, bringing a blanket into the room.

1:00:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting, and I might add Academy Awards lining the cupboards on the way in we're dialing in on who this might be.

1:00:15 - Scott Wilkinson
It was a pretty high-end home theater, seriously high-end. Quite a few Oscars.

1:00:22 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I don't know if those Academy Awards are acoustically transparent.

1:00:23 - Leo Laporte
No, they were outside. They were in a nice cabinet.

1:00:25 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, good.

1:00:26 - Scott Wilkinson
As you go in, you walk down the theater. Yeah, you walk down.

1:00:29 - Leo Laporte
It was a beautiful theater.

1:00:38 - Scott Wilkinson
It was very comfy, very nice.

1:00:38 - Leo Laporte
Um, well, I try to. I try to feature different. You know different, different styles and different. No, no, I'm not knocking you know. Look, this is. It definitely deserves the home theater of the month avsforumcom. If you want to see scott's article, I'm all. I'm always interested in what people have done, for instance, that idea that the headrests retract for people like you who want free floating heads, and and go up for people like me who just want to rest a little bit.

Yeah, you have your choice heavy head, yes very nice, very nice avs forum, uh, avsforumcom, and you'll see it I think it's on the front page there uh, the home theater of the month, powered by anthem.

1:01:19 - Scott Wilkinson
Thank you to anthem for sponsoring these articles, sometimes now to their credit, anthem. Uh, you know, they don't require us to only feature theaters with anthem equipment. Right, right, they make fantastic preamp processors and receivers. Nice, really high end Nice. And sometimes, you know, the theater that I feature happens to have it and that's great, but to their credit, they don't require it.

1:01:47 - Leo Laporte
And so I think the way he treated the speakers is very interesting. Really locked him in, yeah.

1:01:53 - Scott Wilkinson
And this is in an existing room too. I mean, he built the house. He and his wife had this house built, so it's a new build, right, but they just used one of the rooms that was in the plan of the house.

1:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Right, it looks like it's like 16 by 15 or something like that.

1:02:10 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, it's a bedroom. Yeah.

1:02:12 - Leo Laporte
Nice Scott Wilkinson. You can hear a lot more of this kind of fascinating theatrical talk. Geekery on the Home Theater Geekery Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast, just look for Home Theater Geeks. And of course, club members get to see the video of Scott in his lovely abode. Scott always a pleasure, thank you.

1:02:33 - Scott Wilkinson
Scott, thank you, I will tell you. This Next week we will be in Mexico to observe the total solar eclipse. You're going for it April 8th. April 8th, we're going to be in Durango.

1:02:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, how exciting. I'm getting my car detailed on April 8th. I wonder.

1:02:51 - Mikah Sargent
What a coincidence.

1:02:53 - Leo Laporte
You're going all the way to Durango, where there will be very little cloudiness.

1:02:58 - Scott Wilkinson
It's why we did it that way. We decided we learned that the further south you go, the greater chance of clear skies. Right, the eclipse is going to be all across the US. It's going to go up from Mexico, through Texas, through the Midwest, and the further north you go, the greater chance there is of overcast. So we said, okay, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it right, we're going to go where there's the lowest possibility of overcast and we're at an elevation of 6,200 feet in a desert kind of environment.

1:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Wow, five days, eight hours, 38 minutes and 30 seconds to totality, and I hope you're bringing your Bill Nye the Science Guy eclipse glasses.

1:03:40 - Scott Wilkinson
Absolutely.

1:03:42 - Leo Laporte
Except no substitutes.

1:03:44 - Scott Wilkinson
Exactly. There are so many fake ones there and they could cause permanent damage to your size.

1:03:51 - Mikah Sargent
Don't do it. I feel so much for the people who experienced these eclipses before we knew what eclipses were and why they happened. Oh man, Can you imagine how terrifying that must have been the sun?

1:04:04 - Scott Wilkinson
Where did it go? It's going out what's happening. It's a dragon eating it Right?

1:04:09 - Mikah Sargent
Oh man, that must have been so frightening.

1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Honestly the whole place was frightening to them, that's true everything everything at all times.

The whole world was the whole world was a really good point yeah that was just one more thing that just piled on of terrifying events you can get your bill nye eclipse glasses at eclipseglassescom. They they are to benefit the Planetary Society. There are other eclipse glasses. Be very careful, though. Last time Amazon had a lot of them that were not sufficient and people would hurt their eyesight, even could lose their eyesight. So don't mess around. Don't mess around Even if you're not in totality. We're not going to be in totality here, but we'll see There'll be some darkening.

1:04:53 - Scott Wilkinson
There'll be some darkening, there'll be something, but be sure, in that case, for sure, be sure to wear your glasses.

1:04:58 - Leo Laporte
Um, yeah, because you think oh, you know oh, it's covered, I can just look yeah yeah, totality is the biggest risk because it seems like it's dark and I guess I guess it's safe when it's when it's when totality is fully there.

1:05:13 - Scott Wilkinson
I'm, I believe it's safe. We're going with a group that's going to have an astronomer with us, so we'll be sure to oh how fun for you.

1:05:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, enjoy Durango. Thank you. Yeah, bill, bill, I want to say Bill Nye.

Bill Nye will not be there, but somebody will, and he'll be making sure that you are protected, and I like hearing that. Yep. Have a great time, scott. Yes, enjoy, thank you, take care, we'll see you next month. Scott Wilkinson, everybody, bye-bye. The eclipse is April 8th and I guess that's a Monday, right, it's a week from tomorrow. You know what tomorrow is. Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. April Fool's Day, remember, the tech companies used to do all those big, so many big pranks, and I'm so glad they stopped. They did Because, especially as a tech journalist, it was the worst day of the year.

1:06:04 - Mikah Sargent
You never knew what was real and what wasn't.

1:06:06 - Leo Laporte
You would go and look at these articles and go is that real or not? And it happened 20 years ago, april 1st 2004.

1:06:15 - Mikah Sargent
Google announced Gmail Wow, and we, april 1st 2004, google announced gmail, wow, and we all thought a very real thing, that we thought they're joking right, because they were famous for their uh, april fool's and putting a lot of resources into, oh yeah, their april the toilet internet things like that, uh, but no gmail.

1:06:32 - Leo Laporte
Uh launched on this day in. Uh. It's kind of a neat, neat story in 20 years ago, and the reason it was kind of mind boggling is because they offered at the, for the time, a huge amount of storage for your email. They said never delete your email. Are you curious? Do you remember you were eight?

Yeah, I actually don't remember the the launch of gmail I will say oh my god, I remember it because people were selling their invites on ebay. Oh wow, it was such a big deal. I got in there, uh, I think pretty quickly, um, and I had a gmail account. I still have a gmail account. For years we use gmail, uh, at work.

1:07:15 - Mikah Sargent
We have a workspace was there awareness at the time of how gmail was funding itself, or was it all just so?

1:07:21 - Leo Laporte
so much excitement that everything was free at the time. Here is the press release google news from google, april 1st 2004 google gets the message, launches, launches Gmail. User complaint about existing services leads Google to create search-based webmail. Heck yeah, say Google's founders. So search was the big thing and the idea was never throw out your email, because you're going to get a whopping one gigabyte of free storage and so you should be able to keep every message you get. I don't know if it would hold 20 years messages. Nobody in these days thought anything would last 20 years, right larry page says gmail solves all my communications needs. It's fast and easy, it has all the storage I need and I can use it from anywhere.

1:08:16 - Mikah Sargent
I love it remember before that so many people using their isps yeah or aol or aol, yeah, or hotmail was.

1:08:24 - Leo Laporte
Hotmail was around before gmail, I think. Um anyway, and it's still around 20 years later. It's one of the few things Google has not killed. Knock on wood.

1:08:36 - Mikah Sargent
Knock on wood, oh man.

1:08:39 - Leo Laporte
What else should we do now, Mr John?

1:08:43 - Caller
Mr John. Okay, mr John, do you want to do another caller? Yes, I'm going to. Let's pick up this caller right here.

1:08:54 - Mikah Sargent
This caller right here. This caller right here. Remember, star six to unmute yourself. What's your name and where are you calling from?

1:09:04 - Caller
Hi, this is Scott from San Francisco. Hi, scott, and I'm a proud club member since the beginning.

1:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you, yay, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. We really appreciate it.

1:09:19 - Caller
You, Leo, have provided invaluable information and entertainment for years and years and years. Thank you.

1:09:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, and you know, it's not just for me, it's really because I want people like Mikah Sargent and all of our staff to to keep doing it, and I think we really think what we're doing is important. So, thanks to you, and, and, and 11,000 other club members, I think I think the future is bright. So thank you, scott, I really appreciate it.

1:09:48 - Caller
If anybody has a question about signing up for the club that's listening now, please do it. I guarantee you won't regret it. Yeah, do you go on the Discord Scott.

1:10:02 - Caller
Yes, I do Okay.

1:10:03 - Caller
Occasionally. I got in the habit of watching the pre and post-show content through the YouTube stream when it was on and for some reason I find it fascinating and some of the most interesting and entertaining things have happened unplanned.

1:10:21 - Leo Laporte
I completely agree with you. I've always thought the stuff that happens before and after the shows is the best part of the shows, because we have such great people and we're just talking about stuff we're interested in. Yeah, yeah.

1:10:33 - Caller
Yeah, and the beautiful cat. I forget the cats around the dog, the, the yeah, lily, lily. Oh, there's just so many things. Let me get to my question, please. I have, I have, an app which I use every day for hours. Frequently, the problem is the company to save money, I'm positive, I'm sure, they did an update which totally changed the app. So many features were changed, erased. So what I did was, after listening to you, leo, I went to the APK and I got the last version of the app before the update and I installed it on one of my lesser phones, not one of my best phones, and it's been working fantastic.

1:11:30 - Leo Laporte
But what I'm wondering is you basically went back to an older version. Yes, only by a couple of months.

1:11:36 - Caller
You basically went back to an older version. Yes, and you know, only by a couple of months, by a couple of months.

1:11:40 - Leo Laporte
Do you want to tell us what the program? Was or would you prefer not to?

1:11:45 - Caller
The reason I don't want to do it is there's a lot of talk in Reddit about people are upset, they're dropping their subscriptions and this I do. Pay every month for this, this service, and I've been happy to do it. I'm hoping that they will listen to our our hubbub and do something the only reason I wouldn't want to mention it is good.

I'm afraid. I'm afraid they'll do something which will deprecate the old version from now and I won't be able to use it, which they could because so anyway, yeah, did you get it from?

1:12:16 - Leo Laporte
APK Mirror when did you get the old APK? That's the package APK.

1:12:22 - Caller
I think it was APK Mirror yeah.

1:12:24 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's a good place to go.

1:12:28 - Caller
Yeah, I was wondering about how safe that is. That's why I put it on one of my older phones.

1:12:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is always risky. You know I mean we were just talking about at the beginning of the show the risks and sometimes even a site like APK mirror that I know is good and genuine, could end up being a target of a supply chain attack. And so, yeah, you, just you just have to take it. You be very careful. I guess is the answer.

1:12:53 - Caller
This app is so important. This app is so important to my daily entertainment and usage that I just had to do it.

1:12:59 - Leo Laporte
You really got me now. Sorry, we won't push.

1:13:06 - Caller
It's related, you know. I'll just say what it is. It's SiriusXM oh okay.

They have so many great music programs and I've been into music for 40, 50 years and it's just great. And when you I don't use, I use the app, the Internet version, and the sound quality is not that bad, it really isn't. Is not that bad, it really isn't. But the thing I'm wondering is should I try to not update my this phone that it's on? Would it be helpful to keep using it, and how long will I anticipate being able to keep using the old version? Is there anything I can do to keep it the way it is?

1:13:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, the ideal thing to be for all of this would be to have a burner phone, a separate, inexpensive Android phone that you use just for Sirius XM, so that you could run the old APK without risk. And I can do that.

1:14:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it doesn't have bank details apps on it. Yeah, if it's just blank and just the Sirius XM phone, right.

1:14:15 - Leo Laporte
The out-of-date Sirius program is less likely to be a security issue than not updating Android. Not updating Android is a security issue almost always because it's a target right Okay, and they're always fixing bugs. Every month they put out a bug fix, security fix.

1:14:33 - Caller
So if I dedicate this one phone to just this, october 2023, october to 2023 version of sirius, I never updated how long?

1:14:44 - Leo Laporte
oh, I think it'll last until sirius says, uh, it's not gonna work. You don't even you know you can continue to run an android phone on an old version of android. Millions I dare I say billions of people are doing that worldwide and it's not going to break anything as long as you don't try to run new software on it. Where you get into trouble with any operating system that you don't update is, for instance, the browsers. Let's say, after a period of time, well, we're not going to update on old versions of Windows because it's too risky and it's too much expense for us to develop versions of old versions, so we're going to move along with the times. Chrome does that, firefox does that, all the browsers do that. So things like that won't work.

But as long as you're not using new software on the old operating system, there's no reason that it shouldn't continue to operate exactly as it did. And Mike is right Don't do banking on it, don't do anything that you really want to keep secure. But running radio shows on it seems fine to me. I don't think there's a risk, yeah.

1:15:45 - Caller
Can I do another quickie question real quick? This is more of a curiosity question. I have a TV with Roku built in and there is a program on KQED from San Francisco on their broadcast channel 9.2, friday nights Poirot, which I love to watch. The strangest thing is recently this started happening when I have my Roku hooked up to the internet internet because I have YouTube TV it drops. It will. Anytime I have it hooked up it will drop the 9.2 broadcast, only the 9.2. So I it's the strangest thing over the air broadcast all the other channels come in fine, only the 9.2. And I just I do watch some of the other programs occasionally. So I mean it's fixable, I just do a network connection reset when I want to watch it Is 9.2 using the new means of sending data, which is internet instead of broadcast.

1:16:54 - Mikah Sargent
And so when you're not Somewhere hybrid, yeah, when you're not connected to the internet, then it's forcing it to be sent to you.

1:17:00 - Leo Laporte
Maybe it's ATSC 3. Yeah, ATSC.

1:17:01 - Mikah Sargent
That's what I'm wondering if they've upgraded and for some reason, your television maybe the Roku TV doesn't have the ATSC.

1:17:10 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, what I do is I just use the PBS app and you tell it yeah, that's the best solution to it. Use the PBS app, you tell it you are a KQED subscriber. It'll automatically say oh yeah, that's your local PBS station, and then you'll be able to. But you have to be a donor. I'm sure you are. If you watch Perot every Sunday, you must give them five bucks or something and then, as a donor, you'll get to have the app and everything and it's all on demand and there's a lot of great old American experience. That's why I did it. I wanted to see the old American experience thing, it's just very curious to me?

1:17:45 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, I'm interested, it's only the 9.2.

1:17:47 - Caller
Yeah, I don't know, the other channels do not do that. Anyway, thank you guys so much.

1:17:51 - Leo Laporte
I think Mikah Sargent's theory is the best theory. I have no idea, I have no idea.

1:17:56 - Caller
Yeah, it's just weird. It's just a weird thing.

1:18:01 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you guys so much, thank you. Thank you for your membership.

1:18:05 - Caller
Let's get some more people on the club. Heck, yeah, I appreciate it.

1:18:09 - Mikah Sargent
As Google's founder said heck yeah, heck, yeah, thank you.

1:18:13 - Leo Laporte
I love it. That's really nice. That's really nice. That's really nice. If you're not a club member, you can become one very easily. It's seven bucks a month. I think the benefits outweigh the cost. It's not much. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to our club, to discord, which is a great community. Even when I was on vacation I hung out in the discord. I just love it. You also get a video of shows that we only put out audio for, like scott's home theater geeks and micah's hands on macintosh. You also get all that stuff that he liked the beginning and end stuff before and after the shows. It's always the best stuff. That's because when we're kind of unplugged, yeah exactly unplugged, right?

yeah, uh, so please, twit.tv/clubtwit. We'd love to have you as a member. Where's lily?

1:19:01 - Mikah Sargent
he wanted a visit from the dog there was a a photo of lily shared in the discord I believe she's doing dog things, okay, very important.

1:19:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes, uh, was that the picture? Oh, who took that? Did you take that? Oh, that's a cute picture of lily and her little doggy bed. She was in the middle of the freeway well, not the freeway, but the hall. I mean it's, I almost, I mean literally that's the middle of the hall. Yeah, you know what?

1:19:33 - Mikah Sargent
it's her said yeah, bur hall. Burke said she's the one who puts it out there.

1:19:37 - Leo Laporte
She moves it from what it is to in the middle of the hall.

1:19:41 - Mikah Sargent
It's so funny because I'm so used to little dogs being pretty submissive. She's not submissive, my dogs. If you were to walk toward them, they will move out of the way.

1:19:53 - Leo Laporte
She does not move out of the way whenever she's, except if she can tell that you want to be picked up you, uh, she will be here, I'm sure, on on uh, sunday, next sunday, when we have our open house, and on the 21st. By the way, that's another benefit for club members, things like that how did you get her?

1:20:08 - Mikah Sargent
he's just very commanding did he swoop in.

1:20:10 - Leo Laporte
He, yeah, he led the pack. She will not normally let me pick her up, but she is such a sweetie oh, she has a technique. It's like swatting a fly. You have to come up from behind producer man and a dog whisperer oh you're the sweetest aren't you, no, my dog, golly, my dogs are very small very, we keep, we kept trying to get him to bring henry and mitzi in, but he just says they're two scaredy cats they're scaredy cats and also I don't want them being fed things that I don't want them fed.

1:20:40 - Mikah Sargent
And Lily gets fed things all the time.

1:20:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. My wife is the worst. My wife is such a soft spot for animals. We have 300 turkeys in our backyard.

1:20:55 - Caller
What Turkeys? Yeah, you want some turkeys. Our back what turkeys? Yeah, you want some turkeys. She's like oh yeah, I'd love that turkey. I love turkey. Is it? Uh? Is it breast meat?

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that's been my experience too, galia, larger dogs being relatively docile yeah, usually that's the case because they don't need to prove dog in a small dog. She is. Yeah, she absolutely is all right, what's next?

1:21:17 - Caller
you know it'd be good time for another.

1:21:20 - Leo Laporte
No, another break I can do breaks. I know how to do breaks now. I've been trained. I've been trained to do breaks, but first I have to find the place where the brakes exist. Oh, windows, I love windows. Ten women wrestlers from the 1990s with the best physiques. See, that's the kind of news I'm looking for.

Microsoft is. So what's wrong with you, microsoft? What's wrong with you? Our show today oh, lily, lily, stay here. Can you stay here while I do the commercial brought to you by Ecamm. Lily actually is an ecam professional, aren't you? She knows how to do multi-camera shoots, green screen, lower thirds. She could do it all with ecam, can't you, lily? You know who can micah use ec, use Ecamm on iOS today, and so does Rosemary Orchard.

Ecamm is the leading live streaming and video production studio built for Mac. Honestly, if we were starting Twit today, I wouldn't have all this equipment, wouldn't have all this gear. I'd have Ecamm. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, ecamm is here to elevate your video production, from streaming and recording to podcasting and presenting. Ecamm Live is your all-in-one video tool. Perfect for simplifying workflow. Ecamm Live includes support for multiple cameras, screen sharing. The live camera switcher lets you direct your shows in real time. All the things we do here you could do with Ecamm, and the video quality is superb. You can add logos, you can add titles, lower thirds and graphics, share your screen, drop in video clips, bring on interview guests, use a green screen and so much more. Join the thousands of worldwide entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators, musicians all Mac users who rely on Ecamm Live daily Get one month free when you subscribe to any of Ecamm's plans.

Visit ecamm.com/twit. I subscribe, too at home. Use the promo code TWiT at checkout. I use Ecamm on my Zoom calls and you know that one time, when the studio went dark because the power went out and I ran home, fired up Ecamm and finished Twit. Thank you, Ecamm. ecamm.com/twit. E-c-a-m-m. There are two Ms in Ecamm. There's only one L in Lily. No, actually, there's two Now. Now let's do something. Oh, you want to go, I know, but I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna hand you off to the man who really wants to play with you oh, all right, we're gonna take our moment of.

1:24:05 - Leo & John
Uh well, we had our moment of lily. I guess we could take another moment. Hi lily, hi lily hi, lo, hi lo.

1:24:13 - Leo Laporte
do you think she smells Mitzi and Gamer? She might yeah.

1:24:18 - Leo & John
All right, what do we do now? You want to do another phone call? I got an email. I got to do an email.

1:24:23 - Leo Laporte
I can't oh stretch for the email they're building up. They're building up. Got to do an email. Oh, there goes, lily, she's done. She says I've had enough of this holding thing. Images back up on trip from Carl. He's a photographer, says so right here on the email. My fellow photographer is going on a photo trip to Egypt in a few months. Oh no, that's where you got to bring a camera. He'd like to be able to back up his images without taking a laptop. Any thoughts Without taking a laptop? Is he going to take anything? Is he going to take a iPad? Is he going to take a phone? What is he going to do.

1:25:01 - Mikah Sargent
What is he?

1:25:01 - Leo Laporte
going to take with him. First of all, he should take a smartphone with a good camera, and I'll tell you why. I've been to Egypt twice now and you go in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor and you go down into those tombs. It's amazing. They in Luxor and you go down into those tombs. It's amazing. They will not let you bring, in many cases, a good camera with you, but they can't stop you from carrying a camera phone, and some of my best pictures were on my iPhone. I think it was an iPhone 14. It was a couple of years ago, but honestly, that is a fantastic and, I think, much needed tool and it will solve this problem because you'll then have a way to back up. So now this is going to depend a little bit on what camera he's using. We don't really have a lot of information, but if he most cameras these days Canon, nikon, my Leicas will pair to your phone and copy photos over to your phone, wireless. Uh, sony does that. The sony imaging app. Leica has its photos app. Uh, I can't remember what canon calls their app. If your camera supports that, then it's probably. Here's what I do and I would do.

You're going to bring a lot of memory cards. For one thing, you never erase a memory card when it's full or almost full or you're just at the end of the day, depends how many you have put it aside. Put a new one in. That's smart. That's your originals. That's really important to protect that. If you don't have a computer, you can't really easily copy that to a hard drive. They used to make and I think they probably still do hard drives they call photo wallets that have an SD card reader that do copy it over to a hard drive. So then that's all you're carrying with you. But I think nowadays the smartphone is really the way to do it. So you connect the camera however, you connect it usually wirelessly to the smartphone, copy all the images and I would always get the raw and then use the camera's facility, whether it's Google Photos or Apple's iCloud, to back up those photos to the cloud.

Now you feel pretty safe because the originals are being stored somewhere. If you're an Amazon prime member, they will store the originals too. In fact, you might want to do multiple ones. Depends on your uh, you know internet access when you get to the hotel, almost certainly if you're to a fairly big hotel, and Egypt has plenty of those um you'll be able to back up, um up. I took some of my most fabulous pictures in Egypt, though, on my phone, so I think you really do want to bring a phone, you want to check to see if your camera will back up to your phone, and then you want to set up some sort of backup, and you're going to do it via Wi-Fi. Don't do it out in the field. Do do once you get back to the hotel, to either amazon's photos or google photos or apple photos. Um, I forgot what, uh, what phone I brought with me, uh, or what um camera I brought with me yeah because it's been a while.

Huh, yeah, this was iphone 11 in 2019, but this is the only thing that you could bring into these tombs, so it's really was important to have a camera phone. Let me see what else. I have quite a few. You know Google I don't care about most relevant, I want to find actually a lot of these. I think this is an iPhone, believe it or not. Let me just again look. Yep 11 Pro Max. That's pretty so I think that, while it's nice to have a great camera and I certainly would always bring a great camera for videos and for going Ah, here we go, here we go. So we could. Only this was an amazing tomb and again they said you cannot wow, you cannot bring, uh, a good camera with you and they're not well lit. Right, you're down underground, deep underground. They don't want you use flashes because it's harmful to the look.

How fresh that painting restored at all well, lisa insists they painted this over. There's no way this looks this good from 3 000 years ago. But they said no, no, there's no. And the reason was this tomb was only discovered, uh, maybe 50 years ago and was sealed, and they didn't have a lot of tomb robbers, so the painting is fairly fresh I want to believe that it has had no work I don't think that conservators would allow them to touch this stuff up.

You definitely want your camera phone for those times when you can't bring a good camera in this kind of stuff is the stuff that gives me goosebumps.

1:29:31 - Mikah Sargent
It's incredible. I've got to see this in person.

1:29:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you have to go, Boy. I can't remember the name of this tomb, but they had just recently reopened it. They kept it closed for a long time and it felt like this was just painted yesterday. Truly amazing. And Lisa said no, no, they've restored it. She said she didn't believe it. That's it, the tomb of Seti I, KV 17. This is another tip. By the way, I always take a picture of the guide poster because I can never remember where I was. Yeah, that's a good idea.

So, um, and the history of it is here and so forth. So, yeah, I'm glad I did that because I had forgotten, uh, where I saw it. But yeah, these are all iPhones here we are in the, in the tomb itself, and you can see, the lighting isn't particularly good.

1:30:20 - Mikah Sargent
Now they've put okay. So that's interesting. With that photo there did they come down in and they took things and moved them to put them in between this they just put up some, so you wouldn't, okay, so you wouldn't touch it.

1:30:35 - Leo Laporte
Touch it or kick it, so that's where they were yeah, yeah, this is untouched.

They put up some barriers and so forth that is, but it's fair I have to say, egypt's a poor country and so they, uh, but these tombs are so valuable to the international community, yeah, that, uh, I think they would be very hard pressed to modify these so you could see, these are conservators and archaeologists, in their, their table and their chairs. They're still working on this. Oh my, this tomb has an interesting history, but anyway, so, going to egypt, there's great street photography in cairo. It's amazing. Be careful, there's some dangerous places you can go, especially if you're a woman, uh, but if you keep your wits about you, there's amazing street photography in cairo. Uh, the, the, uh. The pyramids are incredible. I have some pictures of climbing the pyramids. Um, no, I didn't climb. You're not allowed to climb it. Did I say climb them? You did say visiting them. You don't climb them all right is.

1:31:31 - Mikah Sargent
Does that mean that leo actually climbed?

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
I did it secretly there was a there, you know the murder on the nile movie.

1:31:38 - Mikah Sargent
At some point they're climbing the pyramids and I thought if you give me an extra 200, in the old days they would let you do that. No, they don't?

1:31:44 - Leo Laporte
you don't get to do that anymore. You don't get to do that anymore. Let me see if I can anyway. Uh, that's the solution. Uh, let me just see if amazon still sells these photo wallet uh devices.

1:31:56 - Mikah Sargent
They were very big for a while I like the, the idea that you didn't have to have a computer telling the thing what to do. I could just pop that in and it would move it over automatically. Is that the idea? Yeah, see, that's a cool and it had.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
It would have a little screen on it. Um, and a lot of we, a lot of us used those. Yeah, here you go. Um, so they still make these this. Some of them are wireless, some of them connect. You see, it connects to the iphone. Um, it looks like these are designed to work with an iphone. That's very interesting. I think they figured why put any smarts in. Here here you go. No, that's a usb. So I think maybe this is a category that has kind of dwindled or disappeared because everybody's got a smartphone now.

But in the old days, photographers would bring these hard drives with a memory card reader on them and they would take them around with them. I had a few of them. I think nowadays, bring your smartphone is the number one tip. Pair your phone to your camera, copy your photos off and then use Apple Photos, google Cloud Photos. A lot of people forget that Amazon, if you have a Prime membership, allows you to upload originals. I'm uploading 74 megabit RAWs now, which is crazy. Caldigit makes one, but does that connect to a computer? The whole idea of these is they were completely standalone. Oh, caldigit makes one, but does that connect to a computer, or does that the whole idea of these is they were completely standalone. They didn't require a computer. He says he's not bringing a computer with him, which is probably not a bad thing. I always have a laptop with me. Now that's a dock.

1:33:40 - Mikah Sargent
See that connects to a computer. All right, oh wow, yeah, yeah, there used to be, it was very popular something called a rav power file hub that would do that. Yeah, that might be still around. Is it still around? I'm looking, I'm not seeing.

1:33:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, one more. I'm gonna do one more because I'm that kind of guy. Do we have somebody at one o'clock? Nope, that means many to be you and me. Landline and smart speakers together at last. This is from the fish.

1:34:06 - Mikah Sargent
Hello, the fish. Hi, which fish? This is the fish.

1:34:11 - Leo Laporte
Some of us have landlines for various reasons. How dare you? How dare you fishes? Some of us have landlines. Amazon has discontinued their Echo Connect. Oh yeah, is there a similar device that can connect a landline to an Echo Show 15 so that it continues to announce phone calls? What I didn't even know they had this. It allows calls to be initiated by voice. Besides one Amazon device, I also use mostly S-I-R-I devices HomePods, iphones, ipads, apple TVs are alternative. It allows my landline device. I also use mostly s-i-r-i devices home pods, iphones, ipads, apple tvs. Is there alternative that allows my landline to work with s-i-r-i?

1:34:45 - Mikah Sargent
you, unfortunately, are one of a very few people who chose to take advantage of this service. This is so funny this is.

1:34:53 - Leo Laporte
This is. This is ancient history, right? These old camera wallets and and now this.

1:34:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is just. Unfortunately, no, I have not heard of any new system. Amazon deprecated all of that technology and I don't believe Google offers anything like that with the Google Home stuff.

1:35:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here's Scooter X again on it. What Echo Connect discontinued two months ago after february 29th 2024, and amazon echo subreddit guy says I can't stand it when companies pull this crap. It's so darn annoying.

1:35:36 - Scott Wilkinson
I bought it, then you decide not to support it.

1:35:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah.

1:35:42 - Mikah Sargent
Welcome to the world, if you're, if you're, if there aren't that many people using it, unfortunately, and it costs even if there are people using it.

1:35:50 - Leo Laporte
if it costs is the key, yeah.

1:35:51 - Caller
And Amazon told us.

1:35:52 - Leo Laporte
They lost what was it? Ten billion dollars on an ALEXA. Yeah, just in general. In general, the thing is, you can make phone calls with your Echo.

1:36:03 - Mikah Sargent
It just doesn't use your landline, right, and I think that's the main reason most people just go well, I'll just use yeah, because you can also just Bluetooth connect your phone to it, Not your landline but, your cell phone to it and use it like a conference room.

1:36:16 - Leo Laporte
So you got a few, very few people have landlines there's the first thing and they have all these other ways to do it with either a cell phone or your internet connection. Yep, I can see why they. Maybe they killed it.

1:36:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I guess you could just buy a purpose built conference room telephone that you'd hook up to your landline instead, and then I'm sure there are plenty that offer voice functionality if you wanted to do that.

1:36:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but yeah, you and then I'm sure there are plenty that offer voice functionality if you wanted to do that. Yeah, but yeah, you're gonna have to basically build your own kind of a system. Yeah, and that, yeah, that's interesting. I remember, uh, back in the day at tech tv, remember the band they might be giants who doesn't great band, right, and they very early on had something they called dial, a song where you would you would call up a phone number and their answering machine would play one of their songs to you. Oh nice, they might still have it for all I know did we ever, uh, figure out if they were giants?

1:37:12 - Mikah Sargent
no, no, it turns out they weren't oh yeah, oh, I met them.

1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
They were about this tall so they wanted to go digital. This is 2000, probably. I built for them a Linux box, oh, really, with a modem interface to the landline that would. Then the Linux box would play the songs for you. So it was basically a fancy Linux-based answering machine, linux-based answering machine. And they, what they would do is they could put their cd you know their, their, their recorded cd in the computer, would pick a song at random and play it down the phone line using a modem in the old, you know these modems connected to the phone line so you could call their number, it would pick, the computer would pick up. So you did that. I wrote a little thing for them to play it right, I doubt they ever used it, but anyway. Uh, I gave it to them on the show. You could probably find somewhere. Somebody has probably put that show on youtube.

Let me see if they dial us on tube there's a lot of stuff that's that's in our lifetime, in your memory, even, yeah, disappeared, unfortunate.

1:38:21 - Caller
Now let's take a call, all right.

1:38:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to pick up on this caller right here and if you're tired of calling us, you could call Dial-A-Song. Oh, do they still have it? Maybe not? Dial-a-songcom? Welcome. The Dial-A-Song number number is 844. Let's call this number. Wait a minute. I really want to know if it's still. They do it. They, it's so funny. They do it on their website. Now I wonder if they're using that linux box I made for them 20 years ago caller on the line.

1:38:54 - Mikah Sargent
Please hold while we die.

1:38:56 - Leo Laporte
yeah, sorry we got to do this, sorry we got to do this.

1:38:59 - Caller
Sorry, Leo has to do this Four four, three.

1:39:04 - Leo Laporte
I won't say it out loud because I don't want everybody calling it at the same time. Let's put this on. Let's see Can they take us down for playing a song that they put on the. You know what's cool? It just plays the song. It doesn't say hi, you've called the Hypergians or anything.

1:39:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it just immediately goes to the song. That is wild. I love that it still works, that's great, they still have it 844.

1:39:36 - Caller
It sounds different to me. When you put up the microphone, I don't think it would take us down.

1:39:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I still have it. Eight four, four different to me when you put up the microphone.

1:39:42 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it would take us down. Yeah, I don't know if they'll be eight, four, four, three, eight, seven, six, nine, six, two, or go to the site or subscribe to their youtube channel. And then there's something called the dial, a song radio network terrestrial djs boy. This is great. Anyway, I, I love those guys. They're really uh, they're really great, they were, they were. I wish I could find the clip of me uh, giving them that. I spent a long time working on that. We gave them the whole computer and everything that's, that's really cool caller hit star six to unmute I think.

I think it did I think I I gave them the option to put a voice recording in front of the song, so play the voice recording in the song. That's cool, but I don't know if they ever used it, hello caller.

1:40:24 - Mikah Sargent
What's your name? Where are you calling from?

1:40:27 - Caller
Hey how you doing, Leo, I'm Mike.

1:40:32 - Scott Wilkinson
Assagia, we're great. How are you?

1:40:35 - Caller
All right, I'm calling from Massachusetts. Okay, I've been a big fan of yours for a long time. Brickhouse Peanut, you did a lot of stuff, I did a lot of stuff in my day.

1:40:48 - Leo Laporte
Most of it, I regret.

1:40:54 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, I wanted to call you. I was like man, I've been following you forever For the longest time. Well, thank you Before you. I've been following you forever for the longest time. Well, thank you Before you, micah. Sorry.

1:41:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, he's so young you probably couldn't follow him forever, so what can we do for you today, sir?

1:41:11 - Caller
Hey, I know I've been following you and then I've been following about the Synology and I know I never got Synology but I knew about it and I'm like, oh, that sounds real cool that you can back up your stuff and you don't have to worry and you don't have to have, like the Google Drive or Dropbox or stuff like that. I love it.

1:41:37 - Leo Laporte
I have two Synologies, because I have one here at the studio and one at home. I back up stuff at the one at home and then it backs itself up to the one at studio. So even if we had, you know, worst case scenario a fire at home and the Synology got destroyed there, I still have a backup here. You know, one of our sponsors, miley of Photos, has recently added a feature which I love, which I can it will automatically back itself up to the Synology. So now I have more than a terabyte of photos gets backed up to the Synology and then my Synology uses its own hyper backup to back up to the Synology here, so I don't ever have to worry about losing photos, which, by the way, would be an answer to that previous email.

Yeah, if you had a computer you could back it up. Previous email. Yeah, if you had a computer you could back it up. But, um, actually, I guess maybe a way, you know, you could put a synology app on your phone that would do that. They have, they used to have one called, uh, memories, I think. Anyway, what can we do for you today? Did you get a synology?

1:42:34 - Caller
no, no, I haven't got a synology yet. I was thinking about synology. Yeah, I was thinking about sonology. Here's the downside.

1:42:41 - Leo Laporte
It's expensive. So it's a computer, not a very smart one, it's got a fairly slow processor, but it's a computer that has a lot of hard drives, right 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. So the box without any hard drives might be $400 or $500. And then you have to put in hard drives. So you're talking, you know, at least a thousand bucks, uh, before. It's a usable thing. So it is.

It is not the cheapest way to do backup and nowadays, I think, with so many people using cloud storage solutions, I'm wondering. You know, I think a nas backup it's for people like that home theater guy with his vault of 20 terabytes or boys at petabytes it was a lot of movies, uh, that's who that's for. Somebody wants a huge amount of storage, uh. But I do really like this analogy. If you're looking at a nas I, I could not recommend it more highly. It's been very reliable. There are plenty of ways to do it yourself. By the way, with a pc free nas is one linux-based network attached uh system storage system. But a synology is turnkey, makes it easy.

Even steve martin could figure it out yeah, yeah he bought a synology because he's heard me recommending it so many times and I says, wow, steve, are you going to, can you? He said, oh, I got it. I figured it all out. Nice, that's awesome. He's very technical. Here are they? Might Be Giants on the screensavers, yeah yeah, bobby Orr. Many years ago. And then hockey. I think this. I don't know if this is when I gave them the thing- or not. You guys are so great From Brooklyn, though not from Worcester.

1:44:27 - Caller
We had them on a lot.

1:44:29 - Caller
Did you really? Oh, I didn't know that.

1:44:31 - Leo Laporte
That's cool, that's on Dial-A-Song, rhino Records did this compilation 52 songs. It's wonderful, by the way. I've had it for about a month and I just listen to it over and over again. Wow, trevick, what is the Wicked Little Critter from originally?

1:44:44 - Mikah Sargent
It's an album called Dialogue.

1:44:45 - Leo Laporte
It's so interesting hearing how your voice has changed. Has it changed? It has absolutely, Because I'm old now, right?

1:44:56 - Mikah Sargent
You have a richer voice these days.

1:44:57 - Leo Laporte
That's what you call a lavalier microphone in a studio like this.

1:45:01 - Mikah Sargent
I think your pitch has dropped just a little bit.

1:45:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's deeper because I'm older. And also all the cigars and whiskey That'll do it. Yeah, that'll do it every time. So anyway, is it just to say hi that you called in, or do you want to?

1:45:15 - Caller
Yeah, yeah Do you want?

1:45:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, do you want to.

1:45:18 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, do you want? Yeah, like if I did get a Synology like what are like the cheaper kind of hard drives that you could get for it?

1:45:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I use Western Digital Reds, which are designed for NAS. Sorry, john, what did you say? The Red Pros, yeah, yeah, they're not cheaper but they're. But they're see. So a Synology doesn't use SSDs. I mean you can get one if you really want to spend a lot of money. They don't use solid state, they use the old fashioned spinning drives and they're designed to do that. But you want a drive that can spin and all the time, and it's always on and has so has a very long time, a mean time between failure. So that's why we use the western digital red pros. Let me just see how expensive they are. The good news is hard drives have gotten cheaper and cheaper. So a 14 terabyte red pro is 300 bucks and that's huge.

It's a lot, that's huge, not too much money you would probably more likely go with with two or four, four terabytes. They're $150 each. So now you're talking, if you get a five-bay to Synology, you're now talking $650 for the hard drive, about $650 for the Synology. So that's you know. It adds up that's $4,300. But so it's not for everybody. Don't look for cheap hard drives, particularly only because you get what you pay for and you don't want hard drives in this thing to die. They are designed to have redundancy. That's why you get the five drive. Uh, Synology, Good God, what are you laughing?

1:46:55 - Mikah Sargent
at. That's just a lot of drives, that's all it's a ton of drives, you can get a two bay disc station for 296 dollars.

1:47:01 - Leo Laporte
That's somewhat redundant, um, but I would. You know I have the five bays. Let me see here, yeah, yeah, oh, this is a six bay, this I'm trying to remember which one I have. Um, here's one for eight bays for 1799, but remember, you didn't have to put eight hard drives in there. It was going to be 1200 bucks. So now you're talking almost three grand. So don't go crazy. Get. Get, here's what I would do.

Uh, for your first analogy, get one of the two bay drives drives, they have disk stations for this one's 151 bucks. For the DS223J, it's probably an older one. You only have to buy two drives in there. So that's another 300 bucks. So now you're talking 450 bucks. You're going to get eight terabytes of storage. Now, remember, some of that's dedicated. You're going to get eight terabytes of storage. Now, remember some of that's dedicated. Uh, redundancy, so I take off about a third. So you're going to get about six terabytes or five terabytes of storage. That's a lot, right, that's. That's probably enough to back up not only your computer but several others. Here's another good hard drive. These are actually these are pretty cheap. The, the seagate iron wolf four terabyte is 80 bucks. That's half the price. John, do you think those iron wolves are okay? I always get the red pros.

Yeah, yeah, I also do red pro yeah so you got to consider that it is not inexpensive. But I think having having um a lot of mass storage for backup is pretty handy, that's my take on it. I agree, yeah.

1:48:44 - Caller
Thank you for your question Synology S-Y-N-O-L-O-G-Y.

1:48:49 - Leo Laporte
And yeah, I can't remember which one I have. I think it's the 1915 plus. Is that the year you got it? Yeah, well, actually the Synology naming exactly the first two numbers of the year. Yeah, well, actually the Synology naming exactly the first two numbers of the year. And then the second one is the maximum number of drives it can use 15? Well, but that's not. That doesn't have 15 drives in it.

1:49:11 - Caller
Oh, it's pseudo drives.

1:49:12 - Leo Laporte
They have an eight drive extender. Yeah yeah, they have ways of so it's the maximum. So you would want something like a 23 or 24 something. If you could. Here's an 1823 for $1799.

1:49:28 - Mikah Sargent
So 2018.

1:49:30 - Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly, you're getting it, I get it, you're getting it. Aha, you're getting it and you want the newer ones. Generally they have faster processors. There's not. I mean, how much technology changes, it's generally you're going to get a newer processor. That's the biggest difference.

1:49:47 - Caller
Okay, next, next, what we're going to need to do is this will be a group activity for all of us, all of us together. Are we dancing? No, we're going to take a moment, we're going to stretch of us together. Are we dancing? Uh, no, we're gonna take a moment, we're gonna stretch, and that was our moment, I feel better. I feel energized don't, don't, don't crack it too much, leo I could do some tai chi for you oh, are you back in it?

1:50:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, good.

1:50:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I missed some because of vacation. I love my Tai Chi. You can't really do it sitting down. Yeah, it's all about the feet Grounded right. Yeah, you're watching the screensavers Mikah Sargent Sargent, leo Laporte, jammer B, john Slonina, man producer Ashley Is this a throwback?

1:50:43 - Mikah Sargent
Is that what you're?

1:50:43 - Leo Laporte
doing Burke McQuinn and his dog, his little dog Lily.

1:50:46 - Mikah Sargent
And his little dog too, but you called it the screen saver. Is this the new screen savers? Is this the new new screen saver. Oh, he's doing like a throwback.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
You know my old voice also goes with an old brain.

1:50:57 - Caller
All right, I was going to do. No, he stepped away. Okay, let's pick up on. You know, we haven't done actually at all a voicemail. Yeah, I'm going to do this one right here.

1:51:13 - Scott Wilkinson
Good afternoon Leo and Mikah Sargent. This is Charles from Virginia Beach, Virginia, Long-time listener and frequent caller to the old radio show and first-time caller to a new show format. I'm calling for a Linux distribution recommendation. I have an old Toshiba satellite laptop from about 2018 that I would like to repurpose since it's too old to migrate to Windows 11. Other than having an external keyboard, since some of the original keys don't work, it's still good. I'm pretty solid on the networking side of the house. I'm still learning programming Just learned R and learning SQL, Tableau, Python. Oh, that's great.

What recommendations can you make for a good Linux distribution for a novice like me? For the Toshiba laptop, linux Mint seems like a good option. And also, what data would I lose if I install Linux? Thank you for any recommendations, bye.

1:52:08 - Leo Laporte
So generally you can install Linux as a dual boot system and probably since this is your first Linux, linux is a free, open source operating system. It was invented in 1992 by a guy named Linus Torvalds and it has become the number one operating system in the world. If you include all the servers and the Android phones which run Linux and the Chromebooks which run Linux and then the handful of Linux desktops, it's a great operating system. It is unlike Windows and even Mac mac. It is non-commercial. Uh it you know you're not going to see ads in there. You're not going to see it pushing you to install the latest version of the linux browser, any of that stuff. But it's also a little less polished. I think it's gotten better. Uh, from point of view, it's a little easier to use, but it's a little less polished than Windows. But you just described if you're using, if you're learning R and SQL and server and all that you're obviously a technical guy. I think you'll have no trouble installing it and running it and keeping it running. You can dual boot First time you do it. I would say you know it's harder to install a Linux dual boot, but maybe you want to keep one foot in the Windows water and one foot in the Linux water. So you can definitely do that. They'll all do that. My personal recommendation is, if that Toshiba is not your only computer, make it a dedicated Linux machine, in which case it will wipe out everything. So you want to back up your data? You do want to do this anyway. You want to back up your data to something else, because you are going to start over on this drive. You're going to wipe it. All the new Linux distributions have installers that are very easy to use. You should let them partition the drive as they choose. As you get more expert, maybe down the road you'll partition it in your you know the way you like it. That's what I do.

There are two main kind of well, they're more than that but let's say two main roads of linux. There's also the susa fedora road, but let's talk about the two main roads of linux. One is based on debian, which is a it's actually the name of the guy and his wife, deb, and Ian's Linux, yeah, and that's community driven. There's no zero commercial, it's everybody, it's wonderful, it's well done and it's a little more stable. It is kind of more like Windows and Mac, where they have big releases, maybe once, twice, three times a year, and Ubuntu and the Linux Mint you mentioned. Those are all derivatives of Debian, as is PopOS, which is another very easy to use nice Linux from the System76 folks. Those are all. They start with Debian and they, you know, when you customize a Linux distribution you might change the installer, you might change the common bundled apps, maybe do a different desktop environment. All that stuff's customizable. But the base, root version of Linux that they're starting with is Debian.

There is a second branch of Linux which I prefer, actually called Arch, and Arch has led to a number of derivatives as well. I use an Arch derivative called Manjaro. The reason I like Arch is it's what we call a rolling distribution. Debian, as I said, only updates periodically. They'll do security patches from time to time, but it's very stable. It doesn't change much. But I am used to a computer that is always updating, that all the browsers are updating, everything's updating all the time. That's really more. What Arches is a rolling distribution where everything will constantly be updated and so you will every at least every week probably do a major update. The drawback to that is it sometimes can cause stability issues. I find that's less. That's not a problem, but potentially the advantage to it is you always have the latest version of everything. For instance, if you're using Arch this XE problem that we were talking about early, that was patched right away. Actually, ubuntu and Debian have patched it as well. So security patches they roll out, but they're slower to roll out. The idea is we want you to have a stable system. You don't update it as much, so that might be your bent.

Whichever you prefer, I like rolling, uh, and I think manjaro is very nice because it's very easy to install. It's very smart installer. It will almost certainly handle all of the proprietary stuff on that Toshiba. It'll partition your drive in an intelligent way. It uses modern file systems. It uses modern desktop environments. All of those later you'll be able to customize, but the first time you're going to want something that does it all for you, manjaro is a good one.

Frankly, on the Ubuntu side, I would look at Pop OS. I found that to be a very reliable installer as well. Handles all of the weirdness Because, you know, every PC is a little different. Popos does a great job. They have the System 7 and 6. Folks have written a new desktop environment in Rust called Cosmic. That, I think, is going to be very interesting. I don't know if that's shipping yet. With PopOS it's very close to. I think it's only in beta right now. That's another choice that you're going to have to make.

Really more important than anything else is the desktop environment, because that's the look and feel. Unlike Mac and Windows, you can have any look and feel you want, and that's one of the things I like about Linux. But it also is one of the things that confuses people. Most people, both on Ubuntu and the Arch side, will kind of go with something called GNOME, g-n-o-m-e from the GNU project. Mint is unique in that it is Ubuntu with its own desktop environment, which I'm not crazy about. It's called Cinnamon and frankly it's more Windows-like, which is why a lot of people use it. And frankly, it's kind of crazy to have your own distribution just because you want your desktop environment. So I'm not a fan of Mint, to be honest with you. I think it's a little quirky.

I would prefer you go with Pop OS Now that will have its own desktop environment as well. They were using GNOME I think they've changed, but I'm not sure to cosmic. Uh, manjaro, you have a choice. You can use kde a lot of people like that, a lot of bells and whistles. I think stick with gnome at first. It's simpler, it's cleaner, it's fast, it's kind of default. So to answer your question, probably for you, pop os, your first one, you were nodding, you like it.

1:58:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I like Pop OS because it is kind of an easy understanding, Easy clean.

1:58:44 - Leo Laporte
I can't remember if they're still using GNOME. They have a variety, I think, of choices with their desktop environment. That's one thing you're going to see when you go look at these Pop OS Workflow customization. That's one thing you're going to see when you go look at these Pop OS workflow customization desktops. I don't know, I don't know what they ship with these days. It's been a while.

I've been with Manjaro for a long time. What do I use on that? Lenovo? I think that's Manjaro over there. That's what I use on most of our showsig, mac break, weekly twit, uh, compatible with most software tools. They don't even say let's see. Maybe if I go to the download page, you know, they don't even say oh.

One other thing to consider is the video card. Most linux's work out of the box with amd video. If you have NVIDIA video cards, you'll definitely want to get an NVIDIA version of Pop OS or Manjaro so that it has the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This is an issue A lot of purists in the Linux world say no, no, everything has to be open source, don't want any proprietary stuff on my computer. That's probably not practical, yeah, not necessarily realistic and maybe even for that Toshiba, impossible. So you're going to want to make sure that it supports. One thing to do, probably before you install anything, is you're going to download it, put it on USB key. That'll be the installer, but it will also run a live version of it without installing it and you can see, make sure that everything works. The mouse, the trackpad, the keyboard. All that stuff comes with gnome by default.

Yeah, so they haven't moved to cosmic yet, but that will be coming and I think that'll be very interesting when it does it. Uh, that's a lot of work, though to write a new desktop environment, desktop environment. So, yeah, pop os 2204. You see that lts long term service. That means it's not going to get updated a whole lot. It's not a rolling version, it's a long-term. You know you don't have to do a lot of updating. It's gonna be very it's focused on stability, not currency, not the latest. You're gonna enjoy it. You're gonna enjoy it known by default, but it's easy to change. That's the thing, and I think at some point I will whenmic comes out. We'll definitely take a look at that.

2:01:02 - Caller
All right. All right, I have a caller lined up right here.

2:01:12 - Leo Laporte
Look at him, he appeared like magic. It's great Welcome, sir. What's your name and where are you calling from First name, aaron, hi, aaron.

2:01:19 - Caller
What's your name and where are you calling from? First name Aaron. Hi, aaron, I'm calling from.

2:01:23 - Leo Laporte
Ashfield, massachusetts. Very nice, is that western.

2:01:27 - Caller
Massachusetts.

2:01:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, up in the northwestern corner. Beautiful part of the country, I love it.

2:01:32 - Caller
About as far from Boston as you can get and still be in Massachusetts.

2:01:36 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I love your clock. I recognize that clock. What can we do for you?

2:01:43 - Caller
Aaron, well, I just wanted to say before I tell you my problem I'm watching you here and through my framework laptop. Oh, love the listening, listening and hearing you on my Aftershocks.

2:02:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, another sponsor. Nice, I really like it?

2:02:07 - Caller
Yeah, good man. Member of the club. And before that I used to leave a tip in your tip jar every month.

2:02:17 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you Aaron.

2:02:18 - Mikah Sargent
God bless you. I really appreciate that that's month. Thank you, aaron. God bless you. I really appreciate that. That's awesome.

2:02:21 - Caller
Thank you Very kind, I've been watching you right since, since the beginning, since they might be giants, anyway. So I have a problem which I'm not sure we're going to solve, but it's. I thought it might be interesting. I've got a YouTube. Interesting, I've got YouTube.

2:02:40 - Leo Laporte
TV yeah.

2:02:41 - Caller
And I have Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers set to record.

2:02:52 - Leo Laporte
Yes, because who has time to stay up till 11 o'clock at night to watch TV.

2:02:57 - Caller
So yes, dvr them and you know, if you skip the commercials, it's about 15 minutes. I, yes, dvr them, and if you skip the commercials, it's about 15 minutes. They're a lot shorter and I find them useful to put me to sleep. It keeps my mind from running away with me, and about two months ago the sound on the Jimmy Kimmel recordings got so low that on my in my bedroom I have an old Panasonic Viera plasma.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
Nice.

2:03:31 - Caller
And I have a Roku premier and the the. The sound scale on the Vr is zero to 100 yeah and a normal listening, for everything else that I listen to is around 25 to 30 oh wow, okay, I listen about 70 better, get better hearing aids and uh and actually um, most of the time I use the Roku app and a private listening through my with my um with the uh, connected to the to the phone, which works great because you can go. You're not.

it's not, it's wifi, it's not Bluetooth, so you can, I can go all around the house and not lose connection or anything, and I just you know I can understand people better and it just works really well. So I end up using it most of the time when I'm upstairs. The sound level on the Kimmel show is so low that if I turn the VR up to 100, you can hear it, but it's still not really loud enough to use?

2:04:49 - Leo Laporte
Is it the same on the headphones when you listen?

2:04:52 - Caller
Yeah, the headphones. It's worse because even if I turn that up all the way, you can tell there's some sound there, but that's about it. Well, that's terrible and the interesting thing is that that's the only thing that that that happens with that is the only one I tried recording. I said record just before and just after the local news and Springfield and Nightline, and they're fine, if you, if I Chromecast it from my phone, it's fine. If I Chromecast it from a computer, it's fine. You know, listen to it on a computer and they're whatever is. This is the recording you know. Well, it's of course it's same recording that everybody has, but and it Of course it's the same recording that everybody has, and it On the downstairs TV, no problem.

2:05:52 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to guess that this has something to do with encoding. Yeah, that's what it sounded like to me too, this is a weird one, that it would just be that show, but you know.

2:06:02 - Caller
Yeah. So the next thing I did was I took the Roku from the upstairs down and connected it to the downstairs TV. Yeah, and the sound was fine there. Okay, but then, just to see, I connected up the Roku app in my AfterShokz and it's low there, the Roku Plus upstairs on the.

2:06:37 - Leo Laporte
Panasonic is fine, works fine, so I'm wondering so there is a way to enable and disable surround on YouTube TV. It supports 5.1 surround.

2:06:49 - Caller
I've tried all of the settings for different sound settings. Okay, it doesn't make any difference.

2:06:55 - Mikah Sargent
And you said the real wrinkle for me now is that you said that when you took the other Roku and you connected it to the plasma, then you did not have the issue correct. That's right, yeah, See, up to that point I was thinking that that older plasma TV was somehow not processing the quoting correctly.

2:07:15 - Caller
It's a setting in the Roku, some kind of weird reaction, weird interaction between the Roku and the and the Panasonic and YouTube TV. I guess Wow. But but it's so weird that I mean I record a lot of different shows on YouTube TV and this is the only show.

2:07:36 - Mikah Sargent
This is the only one. Kimmel is the only show that it does that. Yeah, I mean, that does speak to me.

2:07:41 - Caller
Oh, here's another thing, that's interesting If I come up, say I go to turn it on, the show starts at, I think, 1130 probably, and say at midnight I decide I'm going to watch that and I turn it on and I start at the beginning. So I'm, you know, I'm still listening to a, to a recording, because the show is live and it's still on, but the sound is fine, then, really so it's only after the fact I wonder if there's some process it's only after only after it's staged overnight that it doesn't work when it's being saved

2:08:14 - Leo Laporte
that's interesting, that youtube tv is somehow recording. I think this is a bug. I don't think this is now. No, now I'm not thinking it's a codec issue. I really think it's a bug.

2:08:28 - Mikah Sargent
Probably your XLR just came unplugged on your mic at the end I was wondering why I got so quiet.

2:08:39 - Leo Laporte
I thought my headphones must have cut out. I think it is a uh a bug in the youtube tv dvr it's not recording it properly I thought possibly somebody listening.

2:08:51 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, might have been the same as well if it were a codec, you'll be more consistent, right?

2:08:56 - Leo Laporte
uh, for instance, live would be the same as recorded. The fact that only happens on the recording is, I think, telling uh, youtube tv is not bug free. Don't know what the bug would be given that you are paying for youtube tv.

2:09:13 - Caller
You should call the support should be, yeah, yeah I would reach a

2:09:17 - Leo Laporte
lot for it it's not cheap.

2:09:19 - Mikah Sargent
You want to everything that you just told us, exactly how you told us. Make sure you've got all of that information available um it is.

2:09:27 - Caller
You know what. You know what they're gonna say. They're gonna say well, we've never heard of that before.

2:09:31 - Mikah Sargent
Of course they. I mean they might. Yeah, um, I, this is again. This is really fascinating. Uh, that's something. No, it's not a, it's not anything that's critical to my life. I, this is again. This is really fascinating.

2:09:40 - Caller
Something I hadn't heard before. It's not anything that's critical to my life, but I just thought it was kind of interesting.

2:09:46 - Leo Laporte
You know, there is a YouTube TV subreddit which I am a member of and I follow and I am seeing on Reddit YouTube TV audio issues, terrible audio on recordings, on recordings, on recordings, see, see, I wonder I've, I've seen, I've done a lot of searching around and I've come across those things.

2:10:06 - Caller
But if you, if you, read them, they're not.

2:10:08 - Leo Laporte
It's not the same problems they're talking about yeah, but there's something going on wrong with the way it's. Yeah, oh yeah, and I think that's gotta be a bug. Now what? The one salient solution in this whole reddit thread is uninstall and reinstall, and I think you've probably tried that. But if you haven't, take the app off completely off the roku and start over it. The thing about to understand about all of these apps, uh, is they youtube and google. Everybody have to write different apps for each platform and some of them are better written than others. So, for instance, somebody watching YouTube TV on an Apple TV would not necessarily have the same bugs as someone watching it on a Roku. I think you found a bug in the Roku app personally.

2:10:57 - Caller
Yeah, but also it's related to the Panasonic, because it doesn't happen through the TV sound.

2:11:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah that could be a weird interaction.

2:11:10 - Caller
That's why I thought initially it was codecs.

2:11:13 - Scott Wilkinson
But if it were a?

2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
codec, then the live would also be bad, because in theory, the same thing's coming to you live. It's coming on the recording. That's why I say it's a bug. It's doing something different to the audio, from the live audio that you're getting. So the panasonic is able to decode the live audio stream. Something's happening in the recording that's baffling the panasonic. Is it mixing it down? Is it mixing it up? Is it changing the codec?

2:11:42 - Caller
uh, that's why what do you suppose they could be changing between? I mean, when you're watching the show on a recording. Yeah, while the show is staying, still being recorded.

2:11:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's say, for instance, after it's recorded no, that's right, you're watching a recording, it's different. So let's say, for instance uh, you're watching. If you're You're watching a recording, it's different.

2:11:59 - Caller
So let's say for instance, you're watching, if you're, if you're watching it, if you're watching it starting at the beginning of the show at you know, midnight. Oh, you're watching it delayed. You're watching a report.

2:12:13 - Leo Laporte
Then you are watching a recording and it doesn't happen, then but I think it doesn't happen.

2:12:16 - Mikah Sargent
There still might be a different, and it doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen, then.

2:12:19 - Caller
But I think that still might be a different technology and it doesn't happen if you. You know how they overlap a lot of times, like there'll be three minutes or five minutes of Nightline on. If you watch the recording of Kimmel to the end and the sound is bad, you know right to the end. But if you watch the recording of Nightline, which might have a minute or two of Kimmel at the beginning, the sound is fine.

2:12:46 - Leo Laporte
I really think that it has to do with mixing, and there are different audio codecs. Your TV has to decode what it's getting, whether it's PCM, dolby 5.1, stereo, two channel there are a variety and there are other ones. By the way, there's lots of weird kinds of codecs and it sounds like, for some reason, when YouTube TV is saving the recording, it's either messing it up or changing the coding to something else that the Panasonic doesn't understand properly. It may be for do you have a center channel? No, so it may be and this is a very common problem that it's taking a two channel recording, or when you're watching it live and then saying, oh, this should be five one, and changing it to five one and putting all of Jimmy's voice in the center channel, which you don't have. I mean, this is an example.

I don't really know what's going on, but I think it's something about the audio encoding that's different in the DVR recording than it is in the live, or even, apparently, in the delayed, which doesn't make much sense. But you know, you've got to finalize that DVR recording and maybe at that finalization stage they go oh, let's flip a switch and change to something that the Panasonic doesn't understand, and that's the only thing I can think of. It's a very strange thing, but you know it. Uh, it's a very strange thing, but you know. This is a problem these days, because there are multiple audio codecs and multiple ways that audio can be mixed.

2:14:27 - Mikah Sargent
And I wonder, yeah, what it is about the Kimmel show that they've decided, yeah.

2:14:30 - Leo Laporte
They may well say, oh yeah, we're going to do this in five one, and then the DVR sees five one. It could even be in the Kimmel metadata. Could be wrong, yeah Right. And so the DVR is working on the Kimmel metadata and it's trying to encode. Is something that doesn't encode that way. You would think other people would have this, but you haven't. It's the common. The Viera is older, by the way. I love those. We have a Viera at home that we still watch because that plasma.

2:15:00 - Caller
I think I got one of the last ones.

2:15:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, got it after they'd been discontinued, but that's a 10 year old technology now, so it could well be that that's part of the problem.

2:15:10 - Caller
It's kind of amazing really it is. It's not that any of this stuff works at all. Yeah, when you think about all the different interactions of all these different pieces of equipment and they actually work together pretty well.

2:15:24 - Leo Laporte
It is amazing and that's because of standards. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of standards it's become kind of a mess, and I think that that's you have. I think what's happened here's my best guess you have. I think what's happened here's my best guess.

2:15:48 - Caller
What's happening is YouTube TV is finalizing the DVR recording by changing the audio codec into something that the Panasonic does not understand, and that's just weird.

2:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Now you could possibly fix that with a sound bar. Why just on Kimmel, though? Because Kimmel is recording it in some, so every show is recorded differently. By the way, I used to, I watched Jeopardy and I DVR it on the TiVo and it used to sound great because I added a center channel. And now, all of a sudden, like two weeks ago, they changed their mix and now it doesn't sound great anymore. The audience is really loud and uh, and the host is really quiet, it, it. Every TV show gets to do it different, and they and even within a network they might use different codecs. So, and then my also my other theory is that there may be a bad metadata in what Jimmy Kimmel's network is sending to YouTube and the YouTube TV is acting on what Kimmel's saying you know what Kimmel's saying, you know what the show is saying, their codec is and getting a bad result. There's all sorts of possibilities like that.

They obviously change something, because one thing do you have any other use to do that? So you're feeding the sound into the Vieira. Do you have any other way of feeding the sound from the? Is the? Is it a standalone Roku? It is, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, so it has optical out and it has HDMI out. What are you using to feed the TV optical or HDMI?

2:17:09 - Caller
It's using the TV sound.

2:17:13 - Leo Laporte
Yep, so it's on an ARC port on the TV.

2:17:20 - Caller
So it's just a straight HDMI, it's just the HDMI in.

2:17:23 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's normally the best way, but one thing you could try is take the optical out. I think you have an Ultra, so the optical out of the Roku into something that can handle the optical a receiver or a sound bar and just see how that works. That may be what you have downstairs, wyatt, which is why it works. Well, I have a sound bar, and just see how that works. That may be what you have downstairs, which is why it works.

2:17:41 - Caller
Well, I have a sound bar. I have a Vizio sound bar downstairs, but I also disconnected that and checked and ran it through the TV sound, just to check on that. Yeah yeah.

2:17:52 - Leo Laporte
So what I would suggest is running the Roku sound output directly into the Vizio. Just bring it upstairs as a test. Directly into the Vizio. See if the Vizio, because that's a different decoder than the Viera's decoder. See if the Vizio.

2:18:07 - Caller
So send in the optical, but I'm much more interested in having it work through my aftershocks.

2:18:14 - Leo Laporte
But if you want to track down what's going on, you have to troubleshoot. So bring up the Vizio, see if you can get that roku audio plugged in. I think it has an optical output plugged into the vizio directly via optical see if the sound is fine, and if it is, that means the vizio is doing a different kind of decoding than the viera and it's doing it properly yep, so yeah, at least you'd have it, you know, sort of ironed out.

You know the problem is, yeah, the viera does not understand what it's getting from youtube. Dvr of the jimmy kimmel show.

2:18:43 - Mikah Sargent
For some reason I know a troubling uh question, but uh, certainly one worth bringing up okay, sir, we gotta let you go because we're out of time.

2:18:54 - Leo Laporte
We gotta get another show on the road here, but but.

2:18:57 - Mikah Sargent
I appreciate your support.

2:18:58 - Leo Laporte
It's great to see you and enjoy the beautiful countryside in Western Mass.

2:19:04 - Caller
I called you once before about tell you about our fiber optic, their little town. I'm the apple grower out in Western Mass, oh I remember you.

2:19:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes, he grows some apples, nice, nice, delicious.

2:19:19 - Mikah Sargent
I love it. I'm jealous.

2:19:20 - Leo Laporte
Next time I'm out there, I'm going to come by and say hi Apples, please Love apples.

2:19:26 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much. What kind of apples.

2:19:26 - Leo Laporte
Do you grow again?

2:19:29 - Caller
Oh well, our number one variety these days is Honeycrisp and Evercrisp, the ones I know you were interested in the Macintosh that we grow, I love.

2:19:37 - Leo Laporte
Macs, but they don't keep well. Grocers don't carry them anymore because they don't keep well.

2:19:45 - Caller
The Honey Crisps are plastic.

2:19:46 - Leo Laporte
They don't travel like a Honey Crisp. But see, I grew up in New England and we would go to the orchards, like yours, and we would pick them. Oh man, and do you do apple cider in the fall?

2:19:57 - Caller
We don't sell apple cider we don't.

2:20:00 - Leo Laporte
We don't sell apple cider, we make it for ourselves. I love it, nice, nothing like macintosh apple cider. A pleasure talking to you, sir. Thank you for calling you. Take care, now I want some apples I know fresh, love the tree I am very easily suggested, suggestible.

I was watching the west wing the other day, uh, because I I had some free time and I didn't want to watch anything that Lisa might want to watch and there's so many things we want to watch, right. So I thought, well, the West Wing safe, it's ancient, right. And president, what's his name? President comes down and he comes down to the White House kitchen and he's looking for peanut butter and apples and I saw that and ever since I've had a craving for peanut butter and apples. That's that's why Instagram works. I was going to say, that's why I have these stickers. Instagram works. Thank you for joining us.

We do the show every Sunday. Every Sunday, happy Easter. For those of you who celebrate between about 11, 11 am and 2 pm or 1.39 pm Pacific, it's roughly 2 to 5 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. If you want to watch it live, we do stream live on YouTube and we do that so you can call in live. We like having those live calls. Twittv I'm sorry, youtubecom slash twit is where the live stream is. If you want to watch after the fact, techilabscom, you could download shows or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Mikah Sargent Sargent will be back on Tuesday for iOS Today Yep Thursday for Tech News.

2:21:34 - Mikah Sargent
Weekly. That is correct, and of course you can watch other shows on Thursday, including Hands on Mac, and you'll also be able to listen if you're in the public. I had to call President Bartlett there. You go Head to calltwittv while we are doing the show to get in touch with us.

2:21:50 - Leo Laporte
I think you want twain of butter and pears with a name like Bartlett.

2:21:55 - Mikah Sargent
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2:22:08 - Leo Laporte
We love that. Do leave us a voicemail. It's always fun to hear those voicemails. Send us a video too. You can email the video ATG at twittv. What else Is there anything else to say? That covers join the club twit.tv/clubtwit. We're going to have a live studio audience next week. That'll be a lot of fun. There'll be people arriving as we're wrapping up the shuffling in shuffling in.

Wow, that's exciting. Anything else that takes care of it. Thanks to all of our wonderful staffers who make the screensavers bus. Oh God, here we go again. It's the tech guys. I was teasing. Ask the tech guys. We'll see you next time. Have a great Geek Week, everybody. Bye-bye.