Ask The Tech Guys 2026 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. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. Today. It's just Ask the Tech Guy, Mikah sergeant has the day off. We've got lots of questions, including how do I search through my ringtones to find out who I've assigned them to? How do I use my photo library to figure out what year a photo was taken? And we'll visit with the Gizwits with some more cool lights. He loves those LEDs. You can stick everywhere. Ask the Tech Guys coming up next Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

This is Tweet. Hey, how are you today? It's time for Ask the Tech Guy. Mike is not feeling too well today, so he's taking the day off, so it's just me. Sorry, that's all you got, just me.

888-724-2884 is the number I'd love to hear from you. If you want to call in and ask a question, make a comment, make a suggestion. If you want to use your smartphone and zoom in, it's call.twit.tv. We have emails and we have videos and audios and all sorts of stuff, so we're going to get to the calls in just a bit about 45 minutes from now. Okay, make it half an hour, coming up at when that clock says 12.00. So 32 minutes from right. Now.

Dick DeBartolo, Mad's Maddest Writer and the GizFiz, will give us a gizmo or a gadget. We'll also show you how you can win a copy, autographed like this Mad Roasts Comedy. Oh, that'll be fun. Yeah, well, there it is. Look at that. How did you do that? That's magic. Did you see the Tom Brady roast? You know who did see it His wife, ex-wife. Not happy, very not happy. Roast was apt. A lot of burning going on. Sad day we should commemorate today because you remember the Doge. How much Dogecoin did you have? You still have it? Oh nice. Now there was a peak on the Dogecoin. Was there not when you could have become a millionaire? It got up to 70 cents 78 cents right before.

0:02:47 - Caller
Before. Elon musk host is Saturday Night Live and then went right downhill.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
After that did he do something that made the dogecoin less valuable.

0:02:58 - Caller
He mentioned the dogecoin on a Saturday Night Live and that did it, huh yes, and then, when it jumps up, everything that goes up must come down.

0:03:04 - Leo Laporte
And that did it, huh, yes. And then when it jumps up, everything that goes up must come down. So you missed your opportunity. Is what happened? Is that what you're saying? Well, the doge passed this week.

Kabosu, the side-eyed Shiba Inu, who inspired the doge, mean he lived to a happy 18 years. There's the picture. You've all seen that picture. And then remember that what happened with the doge thing that they said? You know they? He started talking funny, like you know, he would say things like uh, much, sad, very in comic, rainbow colored comic sans Kabosu was a pack among a pack of 19.

Shiba Inus sent to a Japanese dog shelter after the shutdown of a puppy mill. He was adopted by a pet loving kindergartner Sorry, kindergarten teacher. This is a difference In 2008. And she began posting on her blog. By the way, her blog is still there and, of course, a tribute to the doge on the blog. So just a little pause, eda Milkbone in honor of Kobosu. But 18 is a good long time for Shiba Inu. So that's story number one. I'm sure I prepared that for Mikah because I'm sure he'd have shed a little tear. He's at home shedding a tear.

Here's one to pour out for the guy who tracks taylor swift's private jet. Congress just made that impossible. Well, it's not just tate, it's any uh any millionaire who wants to make their private or billionaire. I guess you have to be a billionaire right to have a private jet. You gotta have a lot of money. Uh, an amendment in the faAA reauthorization bill was passed last week that allows private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information. Signed into law May 16th. Passed in the Senate. There are a lot of Taylor Swift fans in the Senate 88 to 4. Nothing passes the Senate 88 to 4 these days. That's remarkable. The House 387 to 26. That's as close to unanimous as you can. Get the whole jet tracking thing, which Elon Musk called assassination coordinates, right. Taylor Swift wasn't that happy about it. I think it was kind of interesting because you could see how much these very wealthy people were flying around in their little personal jets.

Jack Sweeney was a college kid, university of Florida, who made a TWiTter account in 2010. I'm sorry, 2020. Elon Jet that was tracking Elon's jet. Musk famously threatened to sue him and then pulled the account down. He went on to Mastodon. By the way, he's back on X. You know that it's not TWiTter anymore. The transition is official now. I even saw a little notice at the bottom of the screen when I went there Occasionally. I check and just see how Elon's doing and it says, nope, not TWiTter, it's Xcom. Now I personally, I'm thinking I'm the only person in the world who's happy about this, because TWiT was founded I don't know three or four years before TWiTter.

We even had the founder of TWiTter on the show, ev Stone, and I asked him him why did you? You? Because ev, was it ev, not stone, ev williams? Ev had a uh. Before twitter he had a podcast app called audio. That was his big thing, audio. And then apple created its own podcast app, itunes, and it was like oh, forget it, oh, no, forget it. So he gave. That was very interesting. He gave all the investors money back for Odeo, shut it down and started TWiTter. So I know that Ev knew everything there was to know about TWiT because we were very big on his Odeo podcast app.

So when he came on our show shortly after founding TWiTter, I said Ev, why'd you call it TWiTter? You knew there was TWiT. That's confusing. He said I didn't think either of us were going anywhere. I didn't think either of us were going to ever make it, so it really wouldn't matter. Well, after years of explaining to people, we even had a little paragraph. We used to carry around TWiTter. TWiT is not TWiTter. We were founded before TWiTter. They took our name. We're a podcast network, they're a social media network. We had to explain it every time we called somebody. Hi, it's Leo calling from TWiT. TWiTter Still get that. In fact, my iPhone still, every time I type TWiT says no, you mean TWiTter. I said no, I mean twit anyway.

So I'm happy it's back, it's X and Taylor's happy because now here's, by the way, how much Tay-Tay flies around. She's got two private jets and she does a lot of flying. Well, of course she does. She's got concerts. She's got a boyfriend in kansas city. That's why she's stopping right there. And, uh, she makes a lot of trips to kansas city. There you go, kansas city, back and forth to kansas. Oh, wait a minute, gotta go to florida. Nope, now let's go, nope, back to kansas city. Nope, she, uh, she gets, gets. She has to, she needs to, because why she's only? There's only one of her. Anyway, this beautiful graphic will never happen again, because we will never know where her mysterious you know what she might not, she'd have to change your tail number, wouldn't she? We know the tail number.

And finally, speaking of jet flight, this is Memorial Day weekend, a day to remember those who gave their all in the service of our country. It also happens to be a really big weekend for air travel. Apparently, on Friday, the Transportation Safety Administration screened the largest number of airline passengers ever Ever 2.95 million people flew somewhere on Friday. That makes it the biggest travel day of all time. It looks like this summer is going to be a big travel summer. They've been breaking records, you know, ever since COVID ended. It ended right. I did see a study that said it's still a good idea to wear an airplane, wear a mask, especially on a longer flight. I'm just saying, I'm just saying All right, let us go to the phones in just a little bit. 888-724-2884. You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys, the Ask the Tech Guy singular. I'm not traveling because I don't want to join those 3 million people flying back and forth. I'm staying right here. I hope you'll stay right here and join us. 888-724-2884. Mr John Ashley, I am going to let you produce, since that is your title.

0:10:37 - Caller
Before we actually go to the phone calls, there's actually a voice bill I wanted to play for us. It was actually a follow-up question to one that you took a couple weeks ago. Let's hear it.

0:10:48 - Caller
Hey Leo, this is Manuel from Tampa. I'm calling you back because a couple weeks ago I left you a message about my Mac losing Safari after I installed the latest update of the software. So I got an update. My solution was to take it back to the Apple store and they completely wiped it up and basically left me with a brand new operating system, and that made Safari work again. But when I started bringing my files back from my backup bringing my files back from my backup I had the same problem again I lost Safari. So apparently there's something going on with the files that I have on my backup. One of them is creating a conflict. So I guess my next question I'm sorry is going to be how do I find a corrupt file or whatever it is that's causing Safari to basically not work? Thank you so much. I know it's a long-winded question. See you later.

0:11:54 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, hey, thank you for giving us an update. So, by the way, this is exactly what we told you to do. The thought was there was something that was loading with Safari that was causing it to crash. Of course, you wipe the drive, you start over, which you could have done yourself, but they did it for you. Wipe the drive, start over, no problems. Bring your files back problems. So there's a few possibilities. I think it's now we know it's not the cache or the cookies. We talked about clearing those. Well, often that could cause problems with the browser. If a browser's cache gets corrupted, it's a database of sites you visited previously. To save time, it saves off the images and text and so forth. But if that database gets corrupted, the browser loads it and goes. I can't, falls over. But in effect, I don't think a restore would bring back your cache, nor would it bring back your cookies. Another problem that could have been, you know, loading when the browser loaded. Hold down the shift key when you load Safari. That's one way to keep extensions from loading, and I think that it may be. In fact, it's likely that you have something, an extension, on your system that when you restored it, those would get backed up and restored. They're stored in an extensions folder that is crashing Safari. So you want to launch Safari without extensions. I'm pretty sure that you can do that by holding down the shift key. That used to be the process. But let me just search start safari safely or without extensions. You know we call it a safe, a safe start or safe mode. Maybe you have to do maybe you all right, maybe you have to do a special command to launch it in safe mode. This would keep uh extensions from loading extensions. You would see in the Safari menu. If it is a malicious extension, however, it might not show up in the preferences. Plugins are in the help menu under installed plugins. I'm pretty sure that that's the key. So, unless they've changed this, this is quite a few years old, but it used to be hold down the shift key and Safari will start up without any extensions or plugins, if it works at that point. Well, now you're very much narrowed it down to look for something in the plugins folder or the extensions folder, and I think that's probably what's going on Something corrupt there. It's actually, exactly, I think, what we told. What's going on, something corrupt there. It's actually, exactly, I think, what we told you in the first place, which is there's something loading with Safari. A clean install, of course, wipes out everything you restored. You put back both plugins and extensions, so they're loading again and Safari's crashing again. But I'm glad you called back. I'm glad you called with the update.

Do we want to take a little break? I know we have Dick DiBartolo coming up in 20 minutes. Let's do a little commercial break. We'll get ahead of the game. How do you like that? Have we ever been ahead of the game before? Maybe Our show today, brought to you by the Eufy Video Smart Lock E330 is so easy to install.

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0:17:41 - Caller
Yes, john, there is an email that is in the pile, but I think I want us to have you try to search for it, because I don't know if it's at the top of the pile.

0:17:51 - Leo Laporte
It's not at the top. You don't know. I don't know off the top of my head.

0:17:53 - Caller
You don't know. Off the top of your head, off the top of the pile. I know they're in the Zoom call right now and I've asked them if they would like to raise their hand. Tell me what the subject matter was it's Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7.? Oh, that's a good question, and it's from Jose Ah, and I know he's listening right now because he's in the Zoom call. Oh, if he were to raise his hand, I would pick up on it right now.

0:18:15 - Leo Laporte
It is not on the top. Yeah, it is not in the top four.

0:18:19 - Caller
Like I said, I'm not sure it is not in the top five.

0:18:23 - Leo Laporte
You know I'm reversing the order at this point. That's okay. It is not in the top six. Do you want me to? You know what? I bet you didn't even put it in the pile because I'm down to my last one. How much will you give me? How?

0:18:39 - Caller
about this.

0:18:40 - Leo Laporte
If he's not in the pile.

0:18:43 - Caller
I can't promise anything.

0:18:44 - Leo Laporte
No, he's not in the pile. I can't promise anything. No, he's not in the pile.

0:18:46 - Caller
You forgot to put it in there. I thought I had it in there.

0:18:48 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a call.

0:18:49 - Caller
Okay, all right.

0:18:50 - Leo Laporte
Who needs email when you've got calls?

0:18:55 - Caller
I know.

0:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Okay, let's pick up on Douglas. Hello, douglas, is this the call?

0:19:05 - Caller
This is a different call.

0:19:06 - Leo Laporte
It's a different. Well, what happened to the call? I could wait a minute, let's just go. Will you tell me what his question was?

0:19:12 - Caller
Okay, so his question was about he has a.

0:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7, right? Yes, you're going to pay a lot for wi-fi 7. Wi-fi 7? Of course they've changed. Remember it used to be 802.11 a, b, c, d, e, f. Wi-fi 7 is the latest one, and I mean really latest one. It's just out, which means you're going to pay a lot.

There's two downsides to getting the latest. You're going to pay a lot. Companies will charge you a lot not Not every company will offer it, but you'll also have to have Wi-Fi 7 enabled utilities or, you know, pieces, hardware, what do you call that Hardware phones, laptops, that kind of thing to take advantage of it. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for Wi-Fi 7. They are. It is now how many bands? I think it's tri-band, but I think they also have many, many channels. It's introducing a 320 megahertz ultra-wide bandwidth, 4096 QAM multi-RU, multi-link operation. So it's potentially this is a TP-Link, they're selling one of these potentially a lot faster. Look at that difference in speed 46 gigabits. You know what? You don't need 46 gigabits. You probably don't need nine gigabits. You really only need one gigabit if you've got a really fast connection. But hey, you got it right. I think the biggest advantage of Wi-Fi 7 that you're going to see is it's eliminated.

One of the biggest problems with Wi-Fi you may have heard when we have people on our shows, burke shakes them by the shoulders and says no Wi-Fi for you. We insist that they be connected via ethernet. And that's because wi-fi earlier wi-fis had a nasty habit. They were very polite, bad habit in when it comes to networking, as if they saw any other traffic on that channel, your wi-fi router would go oh, pardon me after you, alphonse, and wait a random amount of time and then try again. Still see some traffic. Oh, never mind, I'm sorry, it was like a party line and what that meant was you might have seen this in your own Zoom calls. We would see it regularly in the calls we would get with people using Wi-Fi. There'd be a pause, a dropout, packets would be lost and then people would either speed up verbal or just there'll be silence. It's not a good thing for continuous streaming like video or audio. So that's eliminated with Wi-Fi 7. They now have enough channels, they don't need to do that. So they say they'll no longer be that collision-based after you, alphonse. So that's a huge thing, I think.

Improved throughput fine If you have many, many devices. Fine. Lower latency, that's really good, considerably lower latency than 6E. And you have that network capacity. Because of all the extra multi-link channels, you have a lot more capacity.

So where would you want wi-fi 7? Well, first of all, if you're not price sensitive, if you're using I don't I don't know if anybody's put out a wi-fi 7 device yet maybe the next iphone will be apple's not notorious for for staying ahead of the curve. Samsung would probably do it Maybe a newer laptop this laptop, the HP laptop I got just now, is 6E. We just got 6E and everybody's already talking about Wi-Fi 7. Now, wi-fi 7 is yet to be ratified, but we're pretty sure it's in the final stages. So we're pretty sure we know.

By the way, if you're curious, if you're an old timer, you want to know what it's called. It's 802.11BE. So 6E was AX 6 and 6E were AX. Y55 was AC. That's probably the last time we used 802.11. It was 802.11AC. Then there was AX. Now we're up to be. No one knows why. I presume that there was an axayaz ba, bb, bc, bd, and now they're up to be.

What happened to all those others? I don't know. Why are you asking me? Ask the IEEE. They're the ones who make that up. Higher data rate, more bands. They have a 6 gigahertz band, but so does 6E. So that's, you know that's a push. Lots more channels with lots wider channel size. That's huge. So the multiple in multiple out on 6E is 8 by 8. It's 16 by 16, twice as many channels for MIMO on Wi-Fi 7.

You might want that. I'll be honest. I'm setting up a new Wi-Fi network. I'm absolutely looking at the Wi-Fi 7 Ubiquiti access points because I'm a little worried about the distance they have to go, things like that. I have yet to play with it. I don't know if anybody's played with it yet. It's certainly you're thinking you're future proofing, right? Let me see what tp link is charging. I know ubiquity is charging a considerably more.

Here's the, here's the. Uh, you a very good router. The archer be, the archer line from TP-Link is great. This is the BE. Let's see. Let's buy it. Let's just see. It looks cool. Wonder what Amazon wants for the Wi-Fi 7. $544. Okay, eight antennas Looks cool and, by the way, tp-link is the low-priced leader, so you can expect it to cost even more from others.

Should you get it If you have Wi-Fi problems and you're in an existing building and you're already using 6, skip 6E, go right to 7,. Yeah, that might be sensible. You're certainly getting the latest and greatest. It definitely has some advantages. I think for me, the biggest, biggest advantage is it's.

It's, we're told. It won't have that collision problem. You won't have to pause and wait for others to go through. So that's, that's the answer to that. Uh, and I guess he's in the. He's not. He didn't raise his hand, is that, jose? Yeah, yeah, he didn't raise his hand. I hope that helps you, jose. I think Jose is our caller from Mexico City. I think we've talked to him before. I might be wrong. Anyway, I hope that helps Jose.

Should you get it now? You know it depends on how price sensitive you are and so forth. I mean, this is going to be an improvement. It's brand new. It will require, you know, new equipment. It will require new equipment. Wired says it will be a good while and this was in January, but still, it will be a good while before most of us should consider switching. Okay, so there's a good article on Wired explaining the benefits and the details. It's faster, it supports more connections, it's got better low latency performance, better for cloud gaming, et cetera. There you go, that's your answer. Hope that helps, jose.

Some people like to have the latest and greatest and are willing to spend that premium to have the brand new thing. I guess one thing I should say you should be reassured, even though I don't think it's been ratified fully yet. They have a sort of IEEE has this or the Wi-Fi Alliance has this as a certification program, and if the hardware you're buying says Wi-fi 7 certified, you're pretty much guaranteed it will be compatible. Even if they update the standard it's, you know in the next few months it'll be, it'll probably be unchanged. Okay, now what do we want to do, john ashley?

0:27:18 - Caller
we're five minutes out from dick. Do you want to do one quick?

0:27:21 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I'll do an email. Have we done a call yet?

0:27:25 - Caller
not yet.

0:27:25 - Leo Laporte
No, it was five minutes before you don't have faith that I could do a call in five minutes, I'll do this one. This is uh from jacob. Hi, leo and micah. Hope things are going well.

I'm facing a tricky problem with summarizing my project meeting notes using ai. He's tried zoom sy, sybil, noda, otter. They're decent but they have limitations. There's cost, which is true. He says. They're pricey for my frequent extensive meetings. I'm sorry, jacob, recording issues. Client consent laws often prevent recording beyond my notes. He also says I have a large backlog of notes, some projects started years ago, archived in SharePoint. He uses an M1 MacBook Air as access to Windows machines.

This is the kind of at this point, in my opinion, the frontier, the new frontier for AI the idea that you take an existing large language model, whether it's OpenAI's ChatGPT or Mistral, the open source one, facebook's Llama, google's Gemini I keep calling it Gemini, it's because I go back to the astronaut days, gemini Use those large language models and then do something called RAG retrieval, augmented generation which in effect takes a kind of vanilla. It's like sprinkles on your ice cream cone. You got your vanilla large language model and then you want to sprinkle it with your documents and then ask questions of the large language model. That's why you need it, because that's the ability to answer questions. Ask questions of it, but, based on the sprinkles, I've done that with a couple of custom chat GPTs. Currently, I think, chat GPT is limited to 20 documents far fewer, I imagine, than what you want. Ideally, we all would like and I think we're getting close to give it everything. You know. That's what Microsoft announced this week with their new Surfaces and their CoPilot Plus PCs. They announced something they call Recall. They're getting a lot of hate for that, by the way. Recall on a Windows 11 CoPilot Plus PC takes snapshots of what's going on every few seconds on your computer and stores them. The idea being, by the way, it's not just an image, it's doing OCR on it, it's understanding it. The idea being then you can ask the co-pilot AI, which is OpenAI. You can say but OpenAI with RAG, right, with the retrieval, augmented generation, being everything you've done on your machine. You could say hey, I was looking at a website a couple of weeks ago about army tanks. What was that site? And the AI would, in theory, be able to go oh, I can tell you because I remember it, because it remembers everything.

Now Microsoft said look, we're encrypting it using BitLocker. It never leaves your device. It's secure. You know we're not going to get it. No third party is going to get it.

People like Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer said yeah well, that's all well and good. A if you trust Microsoft I think you could trust Microsoft here in this case. But B if no one has access to your computer and that might be the rub, because you've now put on your computer a record of everything you've ever done. And if somehow somebody gets your computer whether it's an evil maid or the evil NSA and they get your computer, they can now see, they can search, they can see everything you've done, because once they log in BitLocker, as you know, bitlocker unencrypts it and makes it available. So that's the only in my opinion, that's the only real threat is somebody else getting your computer. Keep a long, strong password on it. Don't let anybody get it while it's unlocked. I think you're probably all right. So that's kind of along the lines of what you're talking about, but this is in the future. I think all of this is in the future. Notebook LM, something from Google based on Gemini, does the same thing.

But I think in most cases what you're going to run up against is the token window, the maximum amount of data that the LLM can access. I call it a corpus, a body of data, right, and what I did with my custom GPTs 20 was enough. I gave it 20 books. These modern LLMs can really hold a lot of data. I think they're up to a couple of billion tokens now. So you know, you can have quite a few documents in there, and the reason is they need to load that all into their little LLM brains so that when you ask it a question it can go well, let me look, but anything it can't access. So there's a limit to how much you can access. You're asking it to do a lot. One meeting, no big deal, in fact. I would, absolutely. I would bet Otter AI and others would start using this capability, rag capability with a chat GPT, if others, it's not going to be cheap.

Now, ideally, down the road, you use something like Everything LLM. This is another LLM to look at that's local only. Everything lets you download an LLM from did I say everything Anything, sorry. Let's you download an LLM from Facebook with Lama or Mistral or any one of these open source LLMs Some of them are tuned and then add your own documents.

It's still not going to be able to hold probably as much as you want, but it has the advantage of being absolutely free, so I think that that's probably the place to start Anything. Llm the last chatbot you'll ever need, the ultimate AI business intelligence tool. This is something really. I think that everybody wants the notion that you could give an AI your information and say, oh no, don't make up anything, only take it from my information. This is the goal you don't get hallucinations, you don't get inaccuracies and you get, I think, very useful summaries.

So this is the one I've played with. I find it to be a little bit slow. If you have a heavy-duty machine with an NVIDIA GPU, it might be more responsive. I've been using it on a Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max, which is about as high-end an NPU as you can get, and it's still a lot slower than OpenAI's ChatGPT. So you can use GPT-4 if you want. If you have an OpenAI account, you can use the API key, but you can also use Lama and Mistral for free. It will import pretty much any kind of document PDFs, text files, markup files, odt and more so that's important. Of course, again, there are going to be limitations on the total number. But the nice thing about this is you can download it and try it for free, so this is the one I would try.

I don't think it's going to do everything you want. I haven't. Honestly, I think chat GPTs custom GPTs are the best I've ever used in terms of speed and performance. I think Gemini's close. But if you want to do it for free, locally, anything LLM and you know you can, it doesn't do transcription, but you can download Whisper and which is the chat I'm sorry, is that ChatGPT? Yeah, chatgpt's OpenAI's transcriber does a very good job. So get Whisper AI, use that to transcribe the audio and then feed it to anything LLM. Let me know how it works. You're right on the cutting edge. To me, this is the single most useful thing any AI model can do is let us query it about our own stuff. Hey, no questions asked. It's the best time of the day to talk to Mad Magazine's maddest writer and our gizmo wizard, dick DiBartolo. You cleaned up Disneyland.

0:35:38 - Dick DeBartolo
Oh my gosh, I sent you. You know what? The Norman Rockwell Museum up in Stockbridge Mass is doing a big tribute to the Norman Rockwell Museum up in Stockbridge Mass, wow, is doing a big tribute to MED. It's going to run from June 8th through October 27th and the curator of the museum said can we do some interviews at your Disneyland studio? Wow. So Dennis and I thought this would be a big deal, so we spent about four days. I'll send you a little two-minute video of what it was like.

0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. It took you four days to clean up Disneyland.

0:36:15 - Dick DeBartolo
It's one tiny room.

0:36:17 - Leo Laporte
Yes, take a peek. Wow, look at this. Oh, you really fixed it up. Welcome to the GizWiz Theater. Oh, I'm not seeing that. Oh, look, how beautiful that is. Look at the. Oh, you're not seeing it, dick. You're probably just seeing me looking at it and selling and swooning. Okay, it is very clean, very beautiful. Notice, yeah, all dust on the shelves of gizneyland is the original dust from Mad's offices on Madison Avenue. Do not touch or dust. Is there really dust left?

0:36:53 - Dick DeBartolo
Well, on some of the older boxes yes, Well, you know, Mad closed in December 2017. Yeah, and the New York office and the editor said I'm not taking a lot of stuff, so take what you want Including the dust, all the dust, is yours. I have a little gadget warehouse shelves.

0:37:16 - Leo Laporte
Because the warehouse itself is massive. So you, just have a select number. Are you going to rotate that collection periodically?

0:37:33 - Dick DeBartolo
Yes, yes, number. Are you going to rotate that collection periodically? Yeah, uh, yes, I actually I'm trying to have one of some, some of them. The show is calling me, not, not one of the people watching it. Uh, anyway, and so this is where the section of the show where I sit. Look at that. Do you ask the tech guy?

0:37:41 - Leo Laporte
that's where you are right now. Yeah, exactly, wow, one, two, three, four, five, six screens dick really well, you know what?

0:37:49 - Dick DeBartolo
I have one that's on the hudson river. Oh, I have one that is virtual, virtual railroad, so that I can see trains around the country. This is geek heaven yeah, this is awesome that looks. It's pretty neat, you really clean it up.

0:38:05 - Leo Laporte
You know what you did. Maybe you didn't know this. You did something they call Swedish death cleaning.

0:38:12 - Dick DeBartolo
I did not know that.

0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
You know why? I know this Because I've been doing it. My sister told me about it because our mom's getting on and you know we've got to clean out her house. Yeah, and the idea is before you pass, you clean up so your heirs don't have to. Oh, what's the fun of that? My wife's making me do it oh, okay we have.

I have filled up. I did what you did, basically garbage bag after garbage bag of old stuff that I don't need and then I'm gonna have. We'll do the traditional leo uh free auction where I pay you to take the stuff of some of the better choice or stuff Did you do that with your.

0:38:59 - Dick DeBartolo
What did you do with it? I have, I have the worst choice in the world. I take it to the warehouse and pay $450 a month, let's say. Isn't?

0:39:10 - Leo Laporte
he sweet, he rents an apartment for his old gadgets, just so they're happy. Exactly, exactly.

0:39:17 - Dick DeBartolo
Exactly, just so, when someone said remember the CompuServe disk that came in? Oh, I have that. I have that. I don't know where it is. It's in the warehouse somewhere, is that?

0:39:28 - Leo Laporte
what goes through your head when you're ready to. You know, you're looking at these old AOL disks and you're thinking should I save it? Is that what goes through your head? Well, someday, looking at this, these old aol discs, and you're thinking, should I save it? And what is? Is that what goes your head is? Well, someday I might need it, yeah yes, yeah, I am.

0:39:43 - Dick DeBartolo
Don't you have an? Don't you have a garage full of stuff?

0:39:45 - Leo Laporte
you'll never need not anymore. I've done swedish death cleaning. I mean I seriously the and you're right, I understand why it took four days, because you're right, I understand why it took four days Because you're sitting there and you go through this. You know I have boxes, I have e-waste. I have give to the. We have a charity. We like to donate old clothes and stuff too, and they'll take some stuff, not everything. So I've got the box for the veterans, I've got the box to save, and then I've got the box to throw in the giant dumpster in our driveway and and you have to everything. You pick up, you go and you throw it away. It's painful.

0:40:30 - Dick DeBartolo
I've been through that.

0:40:31 - Leo Laporte
I've been through that so what was the criterion did? Did you only save things that sparked joy?

0:40:39 - Dick DeBartolo
mostly oh yeah, anything uh bills I I just destroy right away, throw out the bills, that's for sure no joy. There's no joy in in paid bills, that's easy paid bills.

0:40:51 - Leo Laporte
You were saving everything, weren't you? I feel like you saved everything.

0:40:55 - Dick DeBartolo
Absolutely, absolutely. It's the stupidest retirement plan ever that I would save every copy of Mad Magazine because it would be worth a ton of money.

0:41:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's different. You should save every copy of Mad Magazine.

0:41:07 - Dick DeBartolo
Well, the warehouse is like $5,000 a year, so I ain't going to At some point?

0:41:13 - Leo Laporte
do you think you're going to go through the warehouse At some point?

0:41:16 - Dick DeBartolo
do you think you're going to go through the warehouse, I am planning on just leaving a note behind the door that said I've passed on. Please keep everything or throw everything out. That's my plan.

0:41:26 - Leo Laporte
Let me ask you a question, do you?

0:41:31 - Dick DeBartolo
have any heirs?

0:41:31 - Leo Laporte
No, you can't leave it to your dog.

0:41:34 - Dick DeBartolo
No, I can't leave it to Charlie.

0:41:41 - Leo Laporte
Dennis wants nothing to do with it. So okay, I mean that's kind of morbid.

0:41:44 - Dick DeBartolo
I may do with a few like Al Jaffe and Doug Gilford who runs the Mad Cover site yeah, give them some it's find a museum or a school.

0:41:55 - Leo Laporte
Is that what happened to Al Jaffe's stuff?

0:41:57 - Dick DeBartolo
Al Jaffe gave a lot of stuff to, I think, columbia, I'm not even sure what school, but. But you know, scripts are not like artwork, artwork. People want the artwork Right. Scripts are not really worth much.

0:42:11 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that interesting. You have a bunch of old match game scripts, things like that.

0:42:15 - Dick DeBartolo
Oh, I have a bunch of old match game scripts, things like that. Oh, I have a bunch of match game stuff. I have old mad scripts. I have, and I even bought two gadgets for today. Lee, I didn't want to totally take up your time with oh, but I love that.

0:42:25 - Leo Laporte
I think this is so cool and everybody is. Everybody has been through this. This is I don't think there are very many people in the world who who you know just have, rigidly, I'm going to get rid of it. If I don't need it, I'm getting rid of it. We all have a garage somewhere full of stuff we just can't let go of, even though it has no use at all. No, absolutely, absolutely. And you're the, you're the gadget guy. You've got you, probably more than anybody I have a lot.

0:42:53 - Dick DeBartolo
Did you ever visit? Regis's office um, back in the old regis didn't collect a lot of stuff, oh but I have a picture somewhere of me.

0:43:04 - Leo Laporte
I know because you were up there teaching him how to tweet right now x, yes, twitter and uh, he had a lot of notre dame memorabilia. He had a wall, a memorabilia wall. But you can't. You know you have a great career like that. You can't, um, you want to save it all. I understand that.

0:43:22 - Dick DeBartolo
Yeah absolutely Absolutely.

0:43:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to. I think I'm going to save one memory per year. It gives me 20 memories. All right, let's do your GizWiz gadget of the week If you go to gizwizbiz.

0:43:37 - Dick DeBartolo
Okay, so it's actually two, because I found two kind of fun things. Okay, these are little undercounter lights. Okay, oh, I need these. And what's interesting about this little puck light. This one is bizarre. This one comes with remote control. Should I call it this little pucker?

0:43:56 - Leo Laporte
Do what, never mind. Okay, I think I misunderstood this one you can.

0:44:02 - Dick DeBartolo
It has a 13 color option. If you want it, you can either turn it on and off remote or click the little motion switch on the back. The two of them. What I like about the two of them is they come with a little USB-C tray so you can charge three of them at a time. How long do they last in a charge? You know what it's really going to depend on how often you open cabin. So far it's been several weeks and I haven't recharged either one of them.

0:44:31 - Leo Laporte
So this doesn't turn on to. It's like a refrigerator light, but you can put it anywhere.

0:44:36 - Dick DeBartolo
Leo, guess what? What? The wiring and my refrigerator has burned out, and I have one of these on each shelf. Wow, and when I open my refrigerator it's better lit than when the original bulb was in there.

0:44:53 - Leo Laporte
We've come a long way. That's really neat. Leds are great, yes.

0:44:57 - Dick DeBartolo
Yeah, now this is another version and this is kind of different.

0:45:01 - Leo Laporte
By the way, if you ever want to go on a diet get your refrigerator lights to be green and you will look in your refrigerator and go I'm not going to eat that, oh no.

0:45:11 - Dick DeBartolo
I make sure I have it on orange, so everything looks wow. Make sure I have it on orange, so everything looks wow. Tasty, that looks so delicious, even though it seems to be mold on it.

The mold is very that's okay very attractive. It's attractive. It's an attractive kind of mold. I love that. I love that the longer guys. You click it to one side and it'll go on, wow, with a white daylight. Click it to the other side and it'll go on with a white daylight. Pick it to the other side and it'll light up with warm light. So the one strip can be either light, so in the closet, if you want it to be bright, do that Under the counter. You want it to be soft white? Hit the switch to the soft white side and it'll come on in that temperature. And it's the same deal. You can charge three of them at one time. And I put a link there. As of this morning, a 50% off coupon was still there. Now, I don't know, On Amazon those things disappear at any second. Yep, Is it showing? Oh it showing.

Yep, oh, it's still there. You get five of them and the charging station For 20 bucks, for 20 bucks.

0:46:24 - Leo Laporte
So there's a magnet backing that you put in your cabinet or whatever. That is correct. So this is easy to detach. You just pull it off the magnet. Exactly. Fortunately, my closet has a metal frame around it, so you just pull it off the magnet.

0:46:36 - Dick DeBartolo
Exactly. Fortunately, my closet has a metal frame around it, so I just snap it onto that. And I have one under my desk which has a metal leg. I just snap it onto that. But if you don't have a magnetic surface, it comes with five magnetic strips and the back of each bulb has its own magnetic magnetic strip already installed and everything is USB-C. Wow.

0:47:02 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, look, cause they have. This is all from a company, interestingly named company, and Miri, I know A N M E E R Y. Not all of them have the coupon. So that is correct, you've got to. You've got to look and see of them have the coupon. So that is correct, you've got to. You've got to look and see which ones have the coupon to get there.

0:47:20 - Dick DeBartolo
You want the 39,. You want this $40 one. $40, one's got the coupon, which is five, and that'll bring it. It should come out to 1999. Yeah.

0:47:29 - Leo Laporte
That's because they're dumping these. I'm building more closets Leo because I have no room for all these lights, so I have to. This is this is exactly how you get to that point. Is you go? Oh, in fact, I still have a lot of stuff that I bought because of you. I saved it. You're welcome in the death cleaning. I saved everything okay, all right I want to buy these, but then I just cleaned everything out. It's like but at least I'll be able to see it. Right Now I can see the empty spaces clearly. This is great.

0:48:05 - Dick DeBartolo
Put one on the garbage can cover and when you throw something out and you lift it, the light will go on.

0:48:10 - Leo Laporte
So tempted, I think at half price, get $100 worth. That's what is that? 25, 25 of them. You could put them everywhere. There you go. There you go go to gizwizbiz. Click the link that says the gizwiz visits, ask the tech guys and you can see all of these. You can also click another link right below what the heck is it for a chance to win an autographed copy of mad magazine?

you have till the end of june to identify what is obviously yeah, yeah I'm thinking it's either a, I don't know, I don't want to say, because I think I'm right, maybe I'm going to send it in because I'd like to get. You got six autographed copies of Mad Magazine for the right answer. You get more. You get more bang for your buck, though. If you come up with a cute silly answer, he's got 12 autographed and you're playing for this. The August. No, you're not. This is the June issue.

0:49:16 - Dick DeBartolo
So this is a new, not the one you'll be playing for the august issue, which, uh, I don't have copies yet.

0:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'll send them out to you guys when I get, okay, because I have the june issue. Yeah, I don't have to play, I get the autograph even even if I don't play. Dick autographs up right there like that giz fizz.

0:49:31 - Dick DeBartolo
Ah, there it is this is the back cover of the august issue that that month I know that is so cool, the norman rockwell museum, and can we visit that in new york?

0:49:43 - Leo Laporte
no, but they're actually stockbridge it's in scott bridge, but that's his old.

0:49:49 - Dick DeBartolo
That's where his studio was, okay at some point I'm going to be doing a zoom thing for the museum and I'll post a link for that. And they shot a lot of videos here and if they go public. I'll post links to them too, oh that is so cool.

0:50:06 - Leo Laporte
So scroll down a little bit, john Ashley, so we can see Norman Rockwell Museum. Nrmorg Be there through the end of October of this year. You know Stockbridge isn't so far from my mom. Maybe I'll uh go on over. I'd love to see that kids and teens are free museum tons of original artwork.

It's going to be quite something I will never forget visiting those old madison avenue offices and showing me the original art cover. Art art which is big. They paint it big and then they reduce it for the cover. Beautiful stuff, man. Is that ever for sale? Could you ever buy and frame one of those on your wall?

0:50:45 - Dick DeBartolo
I have on loan. I have the original cover from the Mad Poop-Sy Down Adventure. I had written the satire, you wrote it, yeah, yeah, and it was the largest. This is back when mad was in its heyday and it sold over two million copies. Wow, wow. So I have I have that cover.

0:51:07 - Leo Laporte
That must make you feel pretty darn good. Uh, if you like dick, you will love the GizFiz, wednesdays at 5.30 pm Pacific. Thursdays, giz Whiz at 4.30 Pacific, both streamed live on gizwhiztv. And to play the what the Heck Gizit Contest or to get links to the gadgets he just mentioned, go to gizwhizbiz. Actually, if you go to gizwhizbiz, it's all there, everything's there, dick. If you go to gizwizbiz, it's all there, everything's there, dick. You're the best. I'm so glad you did Swedish death cleaning before you passed.

0:51:43 - Dick DeBartolo
Yes, Anyway, thank you, it's great fun to be doing this. I'll see you next month.

0:51:51 - Leo Laporte
See you next month, Dick DeBartolo everybody. I'll have your new issue for you, all right, you next month, dick d bartolo, everybody, I'll have you a new issue for you. All right, have a great memorial day. You can't used to probably take the boat out on memorial day, right, yeah, I right now.

0:52:02 - Dick DeBartolo
There's usually a big service up at the soldiers and sailors monument and I go up to that.

0:52:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that sounds great, that sounds wonderful. Thank you, dicky d okay, buddy, take care take care.

Bye, love to charlie and dennis. Should I sign up to be his heir? I don't know if I'll, uh, if I'll survive him. He's in much better shape than I am. Uh, gizwiz.biz is the website? All right? Let us we're going to move on in just a moment Take another call, so get on the horn 888-724-ATTG, that's 888-724-2884, or call.twit.tv, our show today, brought to you by HP and Intel the EliteBook 1040G11.

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0:56:19 - Caller
I have Douglas on the line.

0:56:21 - Leo Laporte
Douglas. We got him. Hey Douglas, hello, come into the Stargate, my friend. Look at that, hello he is on the planet Jupiter.

0:56:37 - Caller
I don't know what planet it is, but what can I do for you? Douglas, I got a couple of things for you today. A couple weeks ago I called in. I was trying to use uh utm to run uh windows uh arm on my MacBook Pro and I was getting an error about uh no open gl driver uh. So I uh gave up on that and I last week I downloaded VMWare fusion now?

0:57:05 - Leo Laporte
yeah, they just announced that's for free.

0:57:06 - Caller
Yeah, and I loaded windows arm on that and my application works on that. Nice, not complaining about that. So I just thought I'd let you know.

0:57:15 - Leo Laporte
I solved that yeah, utm is another virtual machine. I've never used utm, I have used uh vmware fusion for years, but I really like parallels and they were the first to support excuse me, to support apple silicon. So that's how I run windows on my mac and it runs beautifully. Yeah, yeah, there was some.

0:57:34 - Caller
There's some discussion about the old um full boot um what's the one um apple used to support oh yeah, they don't do that anymore, they gave that up yeah, well, they're saying, now that microsoft has arm, they may it may come back what somebody was saying who was saying that?

0:57:52 - Leo Laporte
not Not Apple? Somebody online, yeah, no. I don't think so. Apple has decided, I think, to abandon the idea that you need to run Windows on a Mac. They're probably right. They're probably right If you want to run it. It runs surprisingly well in emulation. I haven't tried VMware Fusion yet. It runs well, right.

0:58:13 - Caller
Yeah, it's running fine and it runs the one application that I uh, that I um hello loki, um that I, um my cat, decided to show up I like loki.

0:58:27 - Leo Laporte
Now, what is she? What is loki wearing? Is that her? Is that her? It's her utility jacket, it's her harness. Oh, I see she's got a tile on her or a air tag. Yeah, nice, very cool, um she doesn't mind that.

0:58:43 - Caller
What's that she doesn't mind. She's had it on ever since we got her, so she's used to it I need to have a harness on her for when I take her to visit my wife at the nursing home. So, oh, nice, nice.

0:58:55 - Leo Laporte
Which we're going to do later. It's an interesting thought that Apple could bring Boot Camp back, but Microsoft has supported Windows on ARM for years and even before they went to Apple Silicon, that didn't get Apple to make any difference.

0:59:13 - Caller
I don't think Apple's going to bring back Boot Camp. I think emulation runs fine because Windows on ARM is working for the one application that I need.

0:59:18 - Leo Laporte
that wasn't available and note that's one of the issues, because Apple doesn't support OpenGL anymore, so an emulator has to give you an emulation layer to make anything that needs OpenGL to work.

0:59:31 - Caller
It works now, so I just haven't had a chance to license it yet. So two other things, uh one when I was on here a couple months ago, I showed you pictures from the vintage computer federation flea market. Yes, I remember. I just want to let you know that they have one coming up on june 22nd and it's where it's in wall.

0:59:56 - Leo Laporte
Jersey. I have to head to Wall, new Jersey, so let me, if you're in the East Coast. This is an amazing old computer festival.

1:00:10 - Caller
Well, yeah, so it's basically a flea market. So, so, it's basically a flea market. So there we go.

1:00:24 - Leo Laporte
There's the information, the vintage computer swap meet. Do you think if I brought some of my old computers down I could get any money for them?

1:00:33 - Caller
I don't know, there were people selling a lot of stuff there. I bet for not a lot, though, right, I know it didn't seem to be a lot, yeah, so um, this, in this swedish death cleaning, I'm looking at all this old stuff.

1:00:47 - Leo Laporte
I filled a giant box for e-waste because I just don't think anybody wants to buy well, these really old devices.

1:00:57 - Caller
There's a lot of people buying up old believe it or not 486 and pentium motherboards. Really what for? They're building gaming boxes okay, oh I get it.

1:01:10 - Leo Laporte
Vintage gaming boxes like emulation, I get it. Yeah, because an older processor is going to run pac-man, just fine, yeah yeah.

1:01:18 - Caller
So I mean, it was just, you know, to run older games too. That makes sense. So, um, the other thing I have a question about. I don't know if anybody's run into this before, but I've started doing tagging with my um, my photos, okay, um, now that both the Google Photos and Apple Photos support pets because I tag a lot of my pets and I ran into a little issue it's going to sound silly. I currently have a orange cat, a ginger cat and star butter, and we used to have a ginger cat pilcher, and the problem is that they look very much alike, so they're tagging Starbucks gets tagged as Pilcher and Pilcher gets tagged as Starbucks, you know.

1:02:06 - Leo Laporte
I think we got a little ways to go before AI can distinguish between orange cats.

1:02:11 - Caller
What I was hoping it could, if there was any way to tag photos based on date. Well, what I was hoping it could do if there was any way to tag photos based on date- Ah, you certainly can search for photos based on date.

1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
but you want to combine the tags. You want to say orange cat on this date kind of thing.

1:02:28 - Caller
It's filter and orange cat. After this date is started, this is where our sponsor.

1:02:32 - Leo Laporte
Miley-O is so good. Miley-o has an incredible system of filters and and will let you stack them uh.

I don't know if, uh, every time I search yeah, I wish it would come to think of it in both mac uh photos and google photos, you could search for one thing a day, or cats, but you can't combine them as far as I know. And, yeah, you, you know I often want to do that. Miley does it very well. Miley, filtering is incredible, and so you can uh search for hippopotamuses I don't think I have any hippopotamus pictures, but these are all automatic, which is amazing.

1:03:13 - Caller
And then, and then you can, and then you can stack them uh, multiple, multiple selections, so it really is quite powerful what I found, what I found really impressive with, um uh, with google photos you just go here real quick is I think I've taken a lot of pictures of airplanes from various places and like I can put in here, I want to see a picture of a PBY, which is a. It was a seaplane from World War II and amazingly, it actually finds them.

1:03:50 - Leo Laporte
That is pretty impressive. That's Google photos. That is really impressive. That's AI for you. Wow, this was. This particular photo is interesting. That's Google Photos. That is really impressive. That's AI for you, wow. Yeah, this was Wow.

1:03:58 - Caller
This particular photo is interesting. My wife's grandmother took it out her window and we're coming in to pick up water to go dump on forest fires. Oh, yeah, sure, yeah, oh. But I mean I've been pretty impressed because I searched for, you know, a given airplane and it picks up the airplane.

1:04:17 - Leo Laporte
That is see. You know a given airplane and it picks up the airplane. That is see that I don't know if milio is that sophisticated. I mean that what that really is is using google's large language models and uh, and years of collecting everybody's photos and learning from them.

1:04:28 - Caller
In fact, it's been able to. It's been able to do this for a couple years, though, so I'm not sure if it's ai or just they know what it looks like.

1:04:34 - Leo Laporte
It's just that it's's now available in a more general form. But Google see, remember this. You may not remember this, but maybe you do Remember Google used to have Google 411, where you would, instead of calling 411 information, you would use this online and you'd talk to it and we'd talk back to you, and then he discontinued it. When they discontinued it, they said yeah, we've learned everything we can. We did it. They admitted this. We did it to improve our artificial they didn't call it AI models, but that's what it was to improve our language models, and we got years of data from you, from Google 411. So we don't need to do it anymore. I think it's safe to say that's exactly what they're doing with Google photos. If you look at the privacy statement, they have the right to do that and they're learning from it. In fact, you're helping them. Every time you tag something, they're going oh, that's an orange cat.

1:05:35 - Caller
Well, none of those plane pictures were tagged.

1:05:37 - Leo Laporte
Somebody else did. It might not be you, but somebody else did.

1:05:41 - Caller
Yeah, Right. What I think was interesting was after last week's chat GPT 4.0 demo, I went in and tried to do some of the stuff they did with the camera and chat GPT told me I can't access your camera Right. So I said, well, they showed you accessing the camera in the demo and then they admit that this wasn't this was, you know, stage Right. It actually told me it was staged. Wow. Well, at least it's an honest AI.

1:06:08 - Leo Laporte
I think 4.0, the new chat GPT model is multimodal. That's called multimodal where you can right, but but you, you remember that they are under the microscope from regulators and and privacy advocates and they may, they may have decided yeah, we don't want to, they could do it. We don't want to ask permission to see your photos because people would freak out.

1:06:32 - Caller
You'd have to give it permission, remember yeah, yeah, I know that, I know that, so they can do it.

1:06:35 - Leo Laporte
Believe me, they can do it google vision's been able to give it permission, remember, yeah, yeah, I know that. I know that, so they can do it. Believe me, they can do it. Google vision's been able to do it for years. This is where google has a big advantage. Google has been collecting information like this forever. That's that's kind of their model, even back when they were just spidering the web so you could search for stuff, what do you think they were doing? They were indexing everything, excuse me. So then you know google has a head start, but it's. But there's a big issue with knowing it and giving people access to it, and I don't know if google is ready to do that yeah, I've been playing with chat gpt writing writing stories too.

1:07:13 - Caller
Um, I had it write a story about taking the saturn 5 out of the museum and flying it. Oh, how funny. So and who do I?

1:07:21 - Leo Laporte
know that's been using um ai to uh help their writing. Oh, frank woo, uh, brianna woo's husband is a sci-fi writer has she was really singing the praises of chat GPT Not that he has it right his short stories, but he it helps him craft them, and that makes a lot of sense. I think every time I see a use for AI it's in conjunction with actual human intelligence. On its own it's not that bright, but it can be used like our, our email from Jose. It can be used to look at your stuff and give you some insights, and I think you know that's a really nice partnership.

1:08:05 - Caller
Anyway, I tried to yeah, I tried to have. I had a. I had my son create a new logo for my website and then I tried to have mid journey create something similar and it was next to impossible, yeah.

1:08:15 - Leo Laporte
And that's a that's. That's also a, an art. It's turns out of prompt engineering. Hey, doug, thank you. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

1:08:23 - Caller
Yeah. So just one quick question, dan yeah, um, are you doing any public speaking? No, no, okay, too much work.

1:08:32 - Leo Laporte
Okay, and I realized I used to do a lot of it and I got paid pretty well to do it. But uh, I realized that people really want a comic and what they really want is they want to be laughing and entertained. And then two or three useful tips. I'm looking for something in my bag that's where this group wouldn't want that.

1:08:51 - Caller
But you know, I'll see if I guess they do everybody wants that.

1:08:55 - Leo Laporte
That's what they want. They don't. They may not admit it, but I realized that after a while, and I'm just not funny enough is my problem.

1:09:02 - Caller
I'm not a comic yeah, I like public speaking and unfortunately I don't do it in my job anymore like I used to.

1:09:08 - Leo Laporte
So but don't you find that really that you have to a spoonful of sugar, make some medicine, do it down. You have to entertain people, for them to pay attention.

1:09:18 - Caller
Sometimes, sometimes not. I mean, I had one talk I was doing one day. A guy decided to answer his phone right in the front row. There you go, which I thought was just plain rude Most difficult gig I ever had.

1:09:29 - Leo Laporte
I got paid a lot of money by HBO to go to their annual sales meeting. It was in beautiful Palm beach. Uh, florida was gorgeous. Um, but I made it. It wasn't my fault, but there was a tactical problem because I followed the comic. Lewis block sorry, black, not block. I followed, you know, maybe that was the problem is I didn't get his name right. Anyway, anyway, I followed the comic. Louis.

Black. They were howling, they were howling. And then I come up there doing a little gadget display. Did not go well, did not go well. That's when I realized I need to have some shtick Doug great to talk to you.

1:10:09 - Caller
Thanks for joining us. Sorry it takes so long, no problem.

1:10:12 - Leo Laporte
I did want to show this All right, take care.

I did want to show this because remember we had the call last week A guy wanted to attach his iPad to his TV. He was using an HDMI dongle, so the iPad had to be fairly close to the TV. He wanted to get back here on his couch and control the iPad. And Mike and I looked it up and we said, said yeah, we, we think you can get a bluetooth keyboard that will control an ipad. And we found this little doohickey. I said I'll buy it because I want to try it. 30, about 30 bucks.

Uh, this is such a cute little thing. That's the r I I i6. It is a bluetooth keyboard. It has a trackpad, has mouse buttons it. It even has remote control style dial on here and buttons and okay and so forth. And I paired it to the iPad and, yes, not only could I type you wouldn't want to, the keys are small but this trackpad worked as a mouse and so you could totally control the iPad. So, in fact, because it has this and it's a learning remote too, by the way, you see here it has infrared. So, because it has this little dial here, you can use it just like you would use your remote control and then, if you needed something more, you could use the keyboard and the trackpad. So in answer to that question from last week, yes, this.

I'm sure there are other devices, but this little inexpensive, a chinese keyboard the size of a remote control can totally be used as a ipad controller and keyboard. There it is the rii k06 26. Are you going to buy it? You can have this one. It almost made it to these e-waste swedish death cleaning e-waste but then I thought, no, no, I gotta show this on the show. Lewis black, never follow a comic if you're not funny. All right now. Where Now? Where should we go? John Ashley, let's pause.

1:12:19 - Caller
We need to refresh a little bit.

1:12:21 - Leo Laporte
I have because I was coughing a little bit. We had Doug came by, remember Doug came by when we had the open studio. He said chloroseptic. So I have a little lozenge and it seems to have quelled the coughing. I can't feel a thing in my throat but you know You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys. Mikah has the day off. Leo Laporte answering your questions. 888-724-2884. Give us a call. I have a box for e-waste, a garbage bag, and then we have a big dumpster in the front Because we're doing the whole house Swedish death cleaning. It's kind of not a great name.

1:13:02 - Caller
I think it's a good enough name. I think it's going to be the show title for sure. All right.

1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
What next?

1:13:09 - Caller
John Ashley, I want to pick up on George.

1:13:12 - Leo Laporte
All right, is George on the phone?

1:13:14 - Caller
No, he's actually on Zoom, on the Zoom. No, he's actually on.

1:13:15 - Leo Laporte
Zoom On the Zoom. Well then, we should invite him into our Stargate. Hello, George Reminder. If you're in the Zoom and you want to ask a question, press the button to raise your hand, because we're looking for those hands. Can you hear me, guys? I can. Where are you calling from, George? Just outside of Washington, Dhington dc. Nice the nation's capital. What can we do for?

1:13:40 - Caller
you. You could say that. All right, thanks, leo. Um, yeah, my question had to do with some more of that. Uh, photo organization software. I know you've talked about the, my leo, and gonna probably talk about it again.

1:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, they are advertising about it again. Well, they are an advertiser. They give us good hard dollars to talk about it, but I love it. I use it on everything. But anyway, what do you want to know?

1:14:04 - Caller
Well, yeah, specifically, I have a friend who's about to scan a whole bunch of old family photos. They're not in any particular order and we know voice recognition or face recognition can do a pretty good job of you know, putting together, you know a particular person. That is like order photos. You know this is one and sally was 20 this is what out sally was 40.

1:14:46 - Leo Laporte
This is what at sally was 60, that kind of thing. No, I've never seen anything like that. That would be really cool. I don't think we're far off from that, by the way in. In fact, I bet you current AI models could do it. Somebody's just got to write it, you know. And there's here's where we are right now with AI. That's really interesting. The capabilities are limitless, and so now people have to decide well, what do we want to do?

First, people have to. You know, it's not just you can say, okay, I tell me how old aunt Sally is. You have to kind of set it up to do that, and then you have to build it into some photo software. What a great idea. What a great idea I have. Unless somebody in the chat room knows, I've never seen anything like that. Um, it could pick up aunt Sally really well. In fact, you know, google Photos will do this, apple Photos will do this and Miley will do this amazingly well. I can give it a picture of my son, who's 28 right now, with a big old mustache, and it will recognize pictures of him as a kid and even, in many cases, as a baby. Right, which is remarkable, is a baby right, which is remarkable. So it's not that far from saying baby, young adult, adult, middle-aged, old age, that's. I have to think that that's even possible right now. It's just somebody has to incorporate it in the.

The company I would pay attention to mileo, because they are. It's really interesting to watch at their, I think, at their peril. They keep adding new features and it's so. It's oh, susan's dialing in. We'll get Susan on here. Yeah, I'm good glad you called Susan. So at, I think, that their peril, because one of the problems I have describing Milo is it can do so much. They've just made a with LDS, the Church of the Latter-day Saints, to give it access to the LDS database, and I think that's very interesting because now you can use it as a genealogy tool as well and you can share it with family members. I think that this company has decided we're just going to do everything we possibly can. So if anybody were going to do, you know, here's your daughter at age three, four, five, six, seven, it would be my Leo. It might be Google. I think it's just a question of prioritization. I honestly think they have the capability already. Yeah, Okay, Well thanks very much.

Stay tuned, I'll tell you what if somebody does that, I'll, I'll, I'll tell, I'll tell you, I'll announce it, cause that's a great idea. I think you've come up with a really great idea. Yeah, thank you. Wouldn't it be cool I mean not just people, but if it could look at a picture of a house or a picture of downtown and say, yeah, that was between 1936 and 1938. Somebody who's paying attention could do that by the model of cars. If you had a big database of pictures, somebody like I don't know, google Street View had a big database of how houses look in different eras. I don't think it's too far off. I think that that's something we're going to be able to do in the near future. You're watching, ask the Tech Guys.

Mikah has the day off, but we will continue. I will soldier on solo, as I did for so many years on the radio. It's funny. You don't do it for a while and you get used to having somebody else with you and I miss it. I miss having Mikah here Now. Susan is somebody who's called in before. She has a very interesting business effect. Susan, I am going to be sending my mom's photo albums to you soon. She helps people take their family photos and digitize them, but more than just a kind of a scan cafe where they just take it out, scan it, take it out and scan it. She really is an archivist, coming from your many years doing something very similar. Hi, susan, welcome back.

1:18:47 - Caller
Hi Leo, can you hear me, all right.

1:18:49 - Leo Laporte
Has anybody done that, where you could take a picture and say they're 6, 10, 20, 30?

1:19:01 - Caller
a picture and say they're 6, 10, 20, 30?. So it's all in your organization and you can always tag individuals. Once you figure out you know the date of the photo. So I use Lightroom to camera scan and tether my camera and so when images come in, then I have to physically organize those digital files by year, once I figure out the year. So I organize the physical photos first I think we discussed this earlier so that I flip them all upside down and I look at the dates, I look at the size. Some have scalloped edges, whatnot. So you're, you're organizing your physical photos first. Right, gather them all up, organize them first, then put them into batches, and I have a batch card system that lets me number the different batches, and this could be by an event, could be by year, could be an envelope that somebody wrote some information on that I need to keep track of. So you batch them and then you then you scan them. So, however, this person is going to get them scanned, then the the digital organizing step begins.

1:20:10 - Leo Laporte
But that's very human, intensive and you have a lot of skill. Know, for instance, oh, scalloped, that's 1952 through 1968. Right, you could, you know that kind of stuff. It's one of the reasons I want to send you and you've, we've talked about this before not my mom's pictures. I said I'll take them out of the albums. You said, no, send the whole album because there's there's clues all over the place in that album.

1:20:35 - Caller
Exactly right. So there are recently some up and coming software that the photo managers have been aware of, and I am beta testing some of them, where they're supposed to be able to help you date images.

1:20:56 - Leo Laporte
See, I told you somebody was going to do that. That's cool.

1:21:01 - Caller
So one of the companies is Image. Let me make sure I have this correct before I tell everybody. So it's I-M-A-I-G-E dot com.

1:21:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's image with an A-I in the middle.

1:21:21 - Caller
Yes.

1:21:22 - Leo Laporte
I get it.

1:21:24 - Caller
And so they are in the process of helping you use A-I with your photos to date images as well as figure out locations and whatnot.

1:21:38 - Leo Laporte
So this is really. This is exactly what we were talking about.

1:21:43 - Caller
Right, and so this is one tool. So I'm I'm happy to talk to the gentleman. I have a free 15 minute consult on my website, you know.

1:21:52 - Leo Laporte
Anybody can what's your website again?

1:21:59 - Caller
my website. You know anybody can. What's your website? Again, it's save a memory dot photo, all right, and so this might be something that he looks at once. He gets his whole collection digitized and the. You know I again use Lightroom and so, as I'm physically looking at my screen, of all my digital files, I am creating folders and I'm looking at those images and I'm putting them into decades If I can narrow it down to a year within that decade born, because what I do is I have, you know, sheets of information. Look at that. You know where people fill out. You know who the important key people are in their photo collection that they gave me, so I know when they were born, when they were married and if they passed away, when they died, and that gives you a huge goalpost or markers to know, oh, it's going to be between this and this, that's brilliant.

But that's a lot of human skill.

1:23:02 - Leo Laporte
I mean that is, and it's probably expensive because this is taking a lot of your time.

1:23:08 - Caller
Well, this is what people pay me for. I consider it a white glove service because I do all the work, um for you, uh, to get your catalog organized, and then I also keyword everything and then I backdate your digital files. So when they come back to you as high resolution jpegs, they're already keyworded and backdated and then they'll. They'll come in photo software the way you need. Now I will say and maybe you can help me on this one my life right now I'm all Apple, except for one older yoga laptop that I have, in case I do have to interact with. Plus I'm running Parallels for Windows. But anyway, when I hand off my thumb drive to a client and they're on Windows, they can't always see easily the data.

1:24:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the exit data Interesting.

1:24:04 - Caller
So on a Mac, if you plug in that USB thumb drive, you can go right to the search box and you could type in one of the keywords I've tagged and it will pull up all those images. I get it.

1:24:14 - Leo Laporte
I've tagged and it will pull up all those images.

1:24:15 - Caller
I get it, but you can't do that in windows explorer, Right? So you have to have some sort of library software program, you know a library cataloging program that will allow you to access that.

1:24:31 - Leo Laporte
That exit data. Yeah, that's a limitation of windows, isn't it Not right? Yeah, cause they just didn't build that into explorer right now.

1:24:42 - Caller
Somebody did share with me and they can't seem to figure out how they did it, but there was a workaround to allow windows to cough up that information interesting.

1:24:50 - Leo Laporte
I am not familiar with a way to. There might be a plug-in Explorer. I wouldn't be surprised a plugin to read EXIF data for Explorer. I think Explorer could be extensible that way. That's interesting. I'm going to. You may know about this tool. I mentioned it before on the show.

This is a really useful Mac PC tool. It's for modifying, reading, writing and editing meta information. It's by a guy named Phil Harvey. It's called EXIF E-X-I-F tool, and what's interesting is it will support the standard EXIF. Exif is extended information, that's a standard. But there's also IPTC, which is the journalistic standard. There's also XMP, sidecars. There's a bunch of other profiles. Photoshop has its own. There's even things like ID3, which is what MP3s use, and this will support all of them. So this might be a shortcut for some of your Windows users. You can run this on Windows and so it can be used to look at all of these various forms of metadata, move them back and forth. It's kind of a higher end tool. It's not a. It's not super easy or super graphical, but it is super powerful and I think that that's it might be more for you than anybody else. I don't know.

1:26:18 - Caller
Let me see if there's um so what I end up having to do is find them a final resting place that will, uh, be able to read and interact with the data that I've spent. They've spent money for me to do so. For example, if you were to import it into Google Photos, for example, you may lose some of the facial tagging and you know they're not. People aren't going to use Lightroom per se. Miley works great, but that is.

1:26:54 - Leo Laporte
All these are proprietary extensions. That's the problem, right.

1:26:58 - Caller
Well, no, it's how it's. Some programs just don't recognize EXIF data. Hmm. So yeah, this is interesting.

1:27:12 - Leo Laporte
In Windows 11, you can view and edit EXIF in File Explorer In the in the details tab. I'm going to put this link to this in the show notes. This is from like goldenrodyellowsuitepagesdev, but I found this. Robert Rodriguez has written a fairly long piece on how to see EXIF data in Explorer. Now, you're right, it may not show everything. Again, that would be a flaw on Microsoft's part. There's also something called Metadata++ which allows you to do this, and it will extend. It looks like we'll extend Explorer, and even Microsoft Edge will do this. So there are ways to make this visible in Windows. I think that it's better to use the standard. If you use Lightroom to do that kind of stuff, it's going to do it. Lightroom has its own sidecar and it's going to do it in. Anroom has its own sidecar and it's going to do it in a Adobe sidecar, and that's not necessarily going to be visible.

That's if you don't save your metadata to the file, so it'll let you, but it will store the file in a format that can be read by other programs.

1:28:27 - Caller
Well, so I, I work with the raw file up until the point that I'm ready to hand it off, and then I export and I make it a JPEG Right, and then they get a 600 PPI JPEG.

1:28:40 - Leo Laporte
It's very high quality JPEG yeah.

1:28:43 - Caller
Right, but yeah, so I'm struggling with realizing some of my clients with Windows. I'm struggling with realizing some of my clients with windows. They, you know, handing off that library unless they get into a, you know, a dam, a digital asset management software or no software. You know, sometimes they can't enjoy everything. Now I do also look at trying to get individuals to think of their future legacy. So you're talking about, you know, the Swedish death cleaning and all that, and that has to. You know, you have to look at your digital collection as well. So one of the softwares that I've been working with is a company called permanentorg and they, once you buy a certain amount of gigabytes for long-term storage, you can then assign a legacy contact.

And so this is great for those family photos, not your whole library collection out of Apple Photos, right, because that could be terabytes and not really affordable. But you know, if you're looking at 50 gigabytes of data, you can buy it one time and then it's. You basically are buying a long term storage location for your archives and then you can add the stories behind the photos as well, and that's what I am suggesting that clients look at.

1:30:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I think you're going to need maybe do some experiments to see what you can save in Lightroom that can still then be read in Explorer. And it's good you have that old yoga Make sure it's an up-to-date version of Windows. File Explorer does have a details tab that apparently will show a lot of the, if not all of, the EXIF data, so I think it's really great.

1:30:35 - Caller
You can see it, but here's the conundrum you cannot search and get a list of all things.

1:30:42 - Leo Laporte
Ah, you want to search it?

1:30:44 - Caller
Right, I want to see my Aunt Jane, or whatever or I want to see my grandfather and I want all the images where he appears, and you can't do that with windows explorer. You can with finder.

1:30:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So I'm looking on the explorer and I have the details sidebar open and then there's a properties button that can give you a lot more information, including all the you see all this EXIF information. So it is visible, but can you search on it? That's an interesting issue. I'm not sure, I'm really not sure, how you could do that. I mean, this is not the most user-friendly UI. This is the old Microsoft style control panel UI, but that's what it does. This is the latest version of windows and that's how you get that D, that data as the details sidebar and then properties. How could you do searching on that? That's a very interesting, interesting conundrum. This is why we like Miley. Oh right.

1:31:48 - Caller
Exactly yeah. Get all your clients to use Miley. The entry level to learn that software is rather steep. So, they've recently launched a new version of it. I'm not sure if you're aware, but they've allowed you to have different workspaces based on tasks.

1:32:06 - Leo Laporte
I have seen that. Yeah, yeah.

1:32:08 - Caller
Yeah, so that's really helpful. You can get to the basic tab and it gets rid of all the bells and whistles where people often will get lost.

1:32:14 - Leo Laporte
I just saw that in an update and it said do you want basic? I said no, I want all the bells and whistles. But this is exactly what I was talking about earlier. I really admire the folks at Miley because they just want to throw in every feature possible, but it gives you this problem, which is it does so many things. It's hard to understand you. You, uh, Miley O is a sponsor we should mention and I didn't know this last when we first talked but Susan is a uh kind of a official Miley O certified pro, so she actually has Miley O uh support services and uh we'll do that and my three hours of customized setup and support on my Leo, that's really cool.

1:32:53 - Caller
Good for you, Just to make sure that people get started with a good experience. And if you want to buy my Leo and get what they call concierge services, you can go to my Leocom and and you can sign up for their concierge plan and you will get one of several photo managers and I am one of those that get that, get handed off clients directly from MyLeo.

1:33:15 - Leo Laporte
Very nice Susan's site, saveamemoryphoto, but there is really no, I think, at this point replacement for the human touch. What you do is quite remarkable for your customers. I'm glad you called me, but have that caller.

1:33:33 - Caller
check on image I-M-A-I-G-E dot com.

1:33:36 - Leo Laporte
That's so interesting, yeah, yeah.

1:33:39 - Caller
Because that's that's the realm of where I believe photo management is is going to be moving, is more, more and more AI tools.

1:33:46 - Leo Laporte
Why not? Why not? And if you could do it locally, even better, because then we don't have to hand over Aunt Sally's picture to Google, right, yeah, very interesting. I mean, look, we know the capabilities there. It's just somebody's got to surface it and make it easy for you to use in some way. But we know that capabilities, you know Google's definitely.

When the face recognition first became a thing, google was very careful not to release a feature that would let you take an arbitrary picture and say who is this? Uh, because of the security and safety issues of of having a stranger say who's that hot chick and then, looking you up, google could do it, they know how to do it, they've got the tools to do it, but they will not surface that. And they're right, they're absolutely right. I can't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to date a photo, though I think that would be so cool if you could take a photo and say, oh, that's somewhere between 1956 and 1958. And Google has the information to do that. They've got the street view, they've got everybody's photos. But again, they may be reluctant to show their power, their real power, because that would be scary, susan always a pleasure.

Thank you for the work you do. Save a memory dot photo. Thank you, susan. Okay, thank you. Have a good one. You're watching. Ask the Tech Guys Leo Laporte, micah Sargent has the day off. We'll be back in a moment, or next or right now, but first the chloroceptic wore off. I am not sick, I just have a tickle. You know what it is. Next time I do Swedish death cleaning, wear a mask or a dust mask, because there's a lot of dust in all that stuff and I have had just a lot of dust in there. What do you want me to do next? John Ashley, it's time for John Ashley. Producer, amazing producer miraculous, miraculous.

1:35:52 - Caller
I want you to do another voicemail. Let's do it.

1:35:57 - Caller
Hi, my name is Gary and I'm from Gary, indiana. Wow, probably the third time I've ever called and I'm 68 and fighting all pain. But I'm about to try to build a PC with my grandson. I haven't built one in 15 years. I need a site for tutorials. Motherboards I've always used were Asus. Are they still the ones to use? Any other information about building this PC. Thank, you.

1:36:40 - Leo Laporte
What a great project, gary. From Gary, our old friends at PC Perspective, ryan Shrout and Alan Alventano, have moved on, but they still publish their hardware leaderboard. So this is PCPERcom and then, if you go to their hardware leaderboard, they have a variety of systems from the top of the line dream system no compromises all the way to the high end, the mid range and the low-end system, and for each of those systems they have the component recommendations. Now, this doesn't mean you have to do this. You can easily modify it, but what it will do is give you the information you need. So, for instance, let's say you're going to build the mid-range system, the $1,000 system. This is their motherboard.

They recommend the ASRock, but what's great is when you click it you're going to get information about it pluses and negatives, pros and cons and there's no reason you can't say well, maybe I'm going to go a step up from the ASRock to the Gigabyte and you can see that. So I think this is very valuable. They have a lot of reviews at PC Perspective as well, and in every one of these cases they've looked at the hardware and they've reviewed it so you can see what their opinion is on it. I mean there are lots of places you could go to get this kind of information, but this is somewhere I've pointed people to in the past. It's a very easy, simple way to just get a list of components to put together and it depends, gary, how ambitious you are, how much research you want to do, but certainly it's a great starting place. You could say, well, I can't afford that high end system, but I think a mid range system for a thousand bucks, that sounds not so bad.

1:38:39 - Caller
There's another service I could actually recommend. Yes, how many PCs have you built? I've only built two in my lifetime, but one that when I built my most recent one. There was a service I use called PC Park Picker. It's a little more advanced of a service, but what I like about it is it does have some guides as well of like builds that they recommend, but there's also people that built their own PC.

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I've used this before. Yes, I've seen this.

1:39:05 - Caller
Yes, when you put different parts in. It can actually tell you if there's a compatibility issue with that's the big one, isn't it?

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
because you can buy a motherboard that won't support the processor you want or you're getting the wrong dd ram, you can want to get the right ram and so forth.

Yeah, this is. I have used this site, this has been around for years. Great site, pc part picker. This is, you're right. This is for more advanced. I'm not sure gary's done it before, but you know I don't generally these days tell people, oh, build your own, you're not going to save money. Uh, and it's going to be harder to integrate it properly. Go to a good custom uh PC builder, uh, and you're going to. You know, get a uh like a Falcon Northwest or somebody, and they know everything they're going to put together right for you. But there is one exception to that, and this is your perfect reason to do this Gary your grandson. You want him to understand how this works, you want him to have the experience, and so I think this is a great way to do it. If you feel less confident PC Per, I would do both, right, pcpercom. And if you kind of know what you're doing or you just want a broader range of things. What's nice about this is it'll also price it out. So you can do the builder, pcpartpickercom, so you do the builder and you're actually.

I wish we'd had this when we did the Ultimate Gaming Machine. This would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. By the way, john Ashley, we are giving away, as part of our Swedish death cleaning, the last ultimate gaming machine we built, which I think was in the brick house, wasn't it, john? No, not that that's mine, that's my own. Build the beast. We have one at home. It has an HTC Vive VR controller. It was built for the Oculus, I think, way back back in the day. I don't know what the components are. Do you remember us doing that? It's been a while. It's a good looking computer. Anyway, if you want it, john, you can take a look at it. We'll talk.

It's fun. It's fun getting rid of all this stuff, did you I've? I realized I have five different kindles. No one needs more than one kindle, really no one than one Kindle, really no one. Actually, I'm really liking that new Kobo Libra 2 color that I bought. I really like quite a bit. So I'm kind of leaving the Kindle behind. I'm using a great open source program called Calibre to move all of that over and it does a great job. You can move back and forth. You can import your own stuff. It's open source, caliber e-book management. I don't know how I got onto that. Gary, what a great question. Have fun with your grandson and remember whatever you do, do not touch the computer while it's plugged in. Make sure it's unplugged. And I bet Gary Indiana you know I never, and I bet you didn't either John Ashley wore the bracelets to ground yourself, because we just don't. It's not a dry climate, but I wouldn't be surprised if, in Gary, you might want to make sure you do a grounding bracelet so that you don't accidentally damage these things.

Well, in my place as well there's actually a hardwood flooring as well. Yeah, you don't have to worry about it. Linus tech tips does have his how to build a pc guide. Uh, if you want a youtube video for that kind of thing, um, I think linus is pretty good. I always wonder a little bit about whether the components they're using are components they prefer or sponsored components, but I think you could trust these guys right. Certainly one to look at.

1:42:44 - Caller
The one thing I would recommend is to not have Gary, do not look at the Verge. Ultimate PC build video, is it?

1:42:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that one. They got in a lot of trouble for it, didn't they? They put things in upside down. Somebody made that video. Didn't really know what they were doing. Somewhere I have my Build your Own PC video from 30, 40 years ago. I don't think anything in there is useful anymore. I did cut myself at one point and the people were making the video said just just keep going, it's okay. Blood everywhere. No, no, uh. Next should we uh take another call, or go back to the email.

1:43:28 - Caller
You were giving me a little bit of a fun flack when I could have that one person's email, so maybe we could go through a couple of them maybe let's do a speed round.

1:43:39 - Leo Laporte
Hello, leah and micah. This is chris club twit member salute. Originally from london, but currently get this sailing across the atlantic from namibia to Brazil online with Starlink. Wow, he's probably there by now, because this is dated January 30th, so I think he's probably in Brazil. Congratulations, chris. That's cool. Sailing on what? On a cruise ship or on a sailboat?

I got 12 to 15 great custom ringtones which I use as personalized ringtones for my family and friends, for example, the theme from Veep for my wife. I do. My wife has a custom ringtone. I'm a flirt, that's a good one and my daughter does. It's good because then when they call know though, that got to answer that. However, I signed some of these a while ago. Can't remember all of them.

Is there any way to find out which custom ringtones are assigned to which context? In other words, a reverse search is kind of like uh, some of the questions we've had already today. He wants to look at the ringtone and see who it's assigned to. I don't know of any way to do that. You can go through those contacts one by one and see it depends on how he did it. He doesn't say if it's iOS or Android. I don't think. But yeah, he doesn't mention, but I'm going to guess it's iOS. You can go through your contacts and see where you've assigned the ringtone, but I don't think there's any way to go through the ringtones and see which contacts. How interesting is that? How could we do that? Maybe Mikah and Rosemary could come up with a shortcut on ios. Today I'll ask micah a shortcut that would go to each ringtone. That's what it would. You could do that actually wouldn't be that hard. You, you know the name of the ringtone. You need something that can search through every contact and find the ringtone and then give you. I think you could write a program to do that. Tell you what if shortcuts won't do it? Maybe I'll see what I can do, fire up something that's a good one for a programmer to do Reverse search on ringtones. Don't know of an off-the-shelf answer, though. Good luck on the sale. Jeremy's writing from Saskatchewan.

I'm using the Edge browser on my personal Windows 10 laptop, my iPhone 14 Pro Max and work laptop that has Windows 11. Wow, he loves Edge. I've set up two Edge profiles, one with my personal email, the other with my work email. I can't seem to get the syncing to work properly. This is an edge question. You saved an edge question for me of all people.

When I log into either edge profile on any of my devices, am I not supposed to see the same tabs open? I've tried the option in the edge settings to delete the local data and then resync with Microsoft servers. It doesn't seem to help. I'm guessing I wouldn't be at all surprised. The profile is designed to sync bookmarks, but it doesn't. That may be history, but it does not.

I bet you sync the open tabs, so, and that's what you want. You want open tabs to sync, right? So, and that's what you want. You want open tabs to sync, right? I'm going to ask Paul Thorat. But in all the cases where I've used browser sync, it's selective. The browsers don't necessarily sync everything.

Let's see if we can do a little query. I'm going to ask Scarlett Johansson for Edge tab browser sync. Scarlett, keep your favorites organized and more. Yeah, I'm thinking that sync Microsoft Edge tabs across devices. Aha, here's a YouTube video. You know why I hate YouTube videos? Because you have to watch a long video before you get to the thing that they could have told you in one sentence on a web page.

This is from Computer. Everywhere it says he can sync Edge tabs. So I'm going to have to. Apparently, I have to enable it First.

Okay, good, open the Edge web browser oh, this is one of those videos where he doesn't talk then click the three dots, then click settings, then click sync. Ah, it's. It has to be told to sync tabs and apparently open tabs is not selected by default. You can also enable history. So there you go. Did not know that. Look, this is good to know. I could do this a little bit faster by opening Microsoft Edge and showing you Come on Edge, here we go, here we go. Now, if I go to the three dots and I go to settings and I go to settings, there are sync settings and you know I am syncing OpenTabs and I'm sure I haven't messed with the defaults. So that's interesting. So maybe you accidentally turned yours off and that's all you have to do is turn it on. It is on by default, jeremy, I have all of them on. I want everything to sync wallet assets, apps, extensions, history, passwords. Um, yeah, it should. It's supposed to turn it on, if it's not.

Uh, john ashley writes leo, it's time for a break. No, all right, I will do a couple more emails, or maybe a call or two when we come back. You're watching, ask the tech guys with leo laporte and micah sergeant. All right, mr ashley, you're in control. Another email, all right. He wants us to get through this entire stack before the end of the day.

Todd writes with warm regards, I might add hello, leon Mikah, listening to show for a very long time. I've learned so much from you, thanks for your innovative, informative, funny and captivating content. He thinks he's running a lewis black probably my question. My friend and I have recorded nine episodes of a new podcast best motorcycle roads. Cool, todd youtubecom slash at best motorcycle roads. He calls it a podcast, but it's a YouTube. Is it a YouTube or is it a podcast? Are they the same now? I think they're the same now, before we get too far down the road, we are wondering what we can use to make a searchable page, database or whatever, so that we can easily find the topics, subjects and products we've talked about in previous episodes.

I know that your website offers the ability to search previous episodes, because I've been able to find answers to many of my questions over the years. Thanks in advance. So yeah, you need a website Now. One way to do this. Maybe there's a lot of ways to do this. There's an almost an infinite number of ways to do this. You want to make a searchable page database.

So many websites do support search. If you created a website that had a page for each show, if the website had search, then people would be able to do what they do with our website. So really, what you want to do is find a website builder that will support search. Squarespace, wordpress, google's Blogspot all three support search across pages. I think it's really down to you making show notes, and you could easily do that if you've got the YouTube video. In fact, the easiest thing to do is get the YouTube transcript right and put that transcript on the show notes. People are going to be able to search the text. That'll be very fast. I would still. If I were you, I would still put some links. What do you do, john? Do you put links in? Uh, you do on our in the show notes.

1:52:32 - Caller
Yeah, well, we put the. Put the links on to the show note page, not into the transcript directly.

1:52:38 - Leo Laporte
But we do put transcripts as well. So if you go to our website, ask the tech guys show, let's see the last show, you'll see at the bottom we have notes, bullet pointed notes. This is actually an artifact of our particular software, which I'm not crazy about. What I'd like it to do is have the bullet point that's clickable, but we don't have that ability. So then we have links separate down below, ideally, where it says Bitcoin Pizza Day is this week. That would be right here. That's just the way our kind of junky software works. I guess I never understood why we designed it that way.

I in the old days maybe, if you listen to the radio show way back when, I used a wiki to do this, and that might even be a good way for you to create a website If you had somewhere to host it somewhere like DigitalOcean to create a wiki website. There are quite a few programs that will make you do a wiki. Wikis are easy to edit. You can have collaborative editing so your other hosts can edit as well. Which one did I use? I'm trying to remember. There are quite a few. I mean it really depends on what you wanted. So this is interesting. I mean it really depends on what you want to. So this is interesting. This one wikijs. This uses GitHub. Github has a free feature called Pages, so you could create a free depending on how technical you are website with GitHub and then put this software on it. Wikijs Makes it easy to edit, easy to put in links For years. This is how the Tech Guy website ran, probably for the first five or 10 years of the Tech Guy show, because I was doing it all myself. So that's another idea.

All you really need is a place to make a webpage that has search. I would absolutely save your transcript from your YouTube videos. Have a link there. It wouldn't be enough to have a link to make it searchable. You'd actually have to paste the text into it, I think. So you could do that. You could have a series of you know today on what was the name of it. Today on the podcast, on what was the name of it. Today on the. On the podcast today on best motorcycle roads, we covered four roads x, y, z and m and so you have links to those, and we talked about a great place to stop for a beer on one of them and you can have a link to that and then the full transcript is below. Paste the transcript that way. When somebody searches your website, everything that you said is in the search, as well as those main links. Many, many, many ways to do this, but those are some of them that I would look at. We use a content management system called Drupal. It's a little hard to use, a little complicated. I'm not sure I'd recommend that.

I think, really, really, he was probably mostly interested in me saying youtubecom at bestmotorcycleroads, the name of the new podcast. That sounds cool. You know what? Let me go pull that up. You're welcome. You're welcome.

I like to support other podcasters. Why not? You're welcome. I like to support other podcasters, why not? Best motor, my friend is actually about to go on a motorcycle journey up the coast look at that planning your 2024 motorcycle riding season. They've got youtube shorts. Yeah, you need a webpage. So this is part of the problem of doing this on YouTube is they do so much for you that you go, oh, I got all this. All we do is record this, put it up there. We got drink, but you want a little bit more. You need a webpage.

I think every podcast should have its own home on the web, and there's another reason to do that. If, for some reason, youtube goes down or blocks you or somebody comes along and says, hey, that's my show, you always have the website. Go out and get bestmotorcycleroadscom. When people ask you about your podcast, instead of saying youtubecom, slash at bestmotorcycleroads, say, oh, it's bestmotorcycleroadscom, and then you can link from there to the YouTube videos. That's fine, but you want people going to your place first because you control it. You don't actually control your YouTube page in the long run.

Another one Running out of time Darren hi says Darren Hi, like many, I have ideas, but all my life I have not acted upon them. I'm so sorry, darren. Today I'm going to start acting on an idea and if it works, great. If not, I'll have some fun learning and doing it. He doesn't say what happens. If it works great. Let's see what the idea is, what's, what's the possibilities? I have an m1 mac and I'm looking for some video editing software where I can annotate onto the video circling items or adding arrows. I want to keep it simple. I have final cut pro on the ipad, but I'm not finding an easy ad. No, no, so this is something you do while you're recording the video, not after the fact in editing, could he? I guess he could add graphics after the fact.

1:58:16 - Caller
No, there are plenty of plugins for Final Cut nowadays where you can add in those types of graphics. You have to pay for them. That's the problem.

1:58:23 - Leo Laporte
Right, oh, I can afford Final Cut Pro if that's what you recommend, but I'd rather not shell out $300 right now.

1:58:30 - Caller
I mean, it's a single license, one-time payment only, though. Yeah, that's not bad.

1:58:35 - Leo Laporte
I would do it. Not on the iPad, it's not. It's a subscription on the iPad. Oh, it's a subscription, right, unfortunately. Thank you, apple. Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro used to be the best deal in the world. You paid once and you owned it forever. I still own it on the iPad. What about something like OBS and doing it live? Does that seem like too far-fetched? That's what our friend Alex Lindsay does. In fact, when Alex designs my studio, I'm going to have him put a Telestrator into it.

1:59:05 - Caller
You'd have to have three Macs running differently. This is how he has three Macs running. One different aspect of different things.

1:59:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's probably too complicated. That's more expensive. I'm just thinking that is he recording the video and then he's going to edit the video and add stuff.

1:59:22 - Caller
You can do it either way. That's the thing.

1:59:25 - Leo Laporte
Would it be better to do it as you're recording? Maybe not necessarily.

1:59:28 - Caller
What if you mess up?

1:59:30 - Leo Laporte
Does Resolve, which is is free. Davinci resolve. Does it have a way of annotating after the fact? I bet it does. This has to be table stakes for a video editor, right? So resolve is free. Uh, here we go. Use live drawing to draw on video and final cut pro. So it is actually built into final cut. Discord says let's look at that link. Thank you, scooterx. This is an Apple support link. Use live drawing to run video on Final Cut with iPad. Oh, nice, you could use your finger or a pencil what record a live drawing clip. So it sounds like final cut is definitely one way to do it. There are many video editors, though, for the ipad. If you don't want to buy final cut, but you, you certainly can do this. We'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you, scooter X. To this Final Cut Pro user guide for iPad page. Use live drawing to draw on video in Final Cut Pro. Nice, and that is on iPad, which is what he wanted to do. Obviously, you can't do that on a Mac because it's not a touchscreen.

2:00:48 - Caller
He still has to pay for the subscription.

2:00:49 - Leo Laporte
What's a free Touchscreen? He still has to pay for the subscription. What's a free? Is there anything free for the iPad, like ClipChamp or something like that? Clipchamp is Microsoft's video editor that you can actually use on a website, so you could use it on an iPad. Let's see if it has that capability. I don't know if it has drawing. I bet it does, though, doesn't that seem like something everything should do? How about Adobe's? What is the name of their video free video editor? I can't remember. Yeah, clipchamp's a web app, the guy at Logitech points out. But that's the advantage of that. Because it's a web app, you can use it on the iPad, right? Maybe not? How do you?

2:01:48 - Caller
it asks you to browse for a file. Hello the file's on the web page.

2:01:53 - Caller
How do you do that on the iPad? It's just with the Files app.

2:01:56 - Leo Laporte
You can't do that. I don't know. I have to try it. All right, here is Meredith Marsh's video. Thank you, discord. See, I'm never alone, I always have the Discord and ScooterX. This is a video from Meredith Marsh. Had it right on top of Vizios with iPad. Use my link for a 30-day trial. Well, that's the sound effects.

2:02:24 - Caller
How is she doing this? I've been doing that in my YouTube videos is adding my own handwriting over top.

2:02:30 - Leo Laporte
Look at that, isn't that cool. While I'm talking and I've been having a lot of fun with this and incorporating. Look at that, isn't that cool.

2:02:44 - Caller
What program do you use there, meredith? Okay, okay, okay, technique of using your own handwriting on your YouTube video is nobody can copy it.

2:02:55 - Leo Laporte
No one can take that, okay, okay, okay. Well, I'm going to leave this as an exercise for you. It looks like you need a green screen background. So she's using keying. She's using Final Cut Pro. That's what she's doing. She's using Final Cut Pro, darren. There she's doing. She's using Final Cut Pro Darren. There's some ideas. Anyway, there's some ideas. We're not going to get to the last. Come on, let me do one more. Hey I don't make the calls on that one Leo.

We already did this one so we don't have to do it again. Ah, this is from Scott. Hi guys, after nine years on my current Dell XPS 15, it's time to upgrade. I mostly do CAD on my current laptop that's not GPU intensive, but in the future I want to run AI models locally. I've been looking at framework laptops and wonder if one of these would be a good choice. Certainly, framework is great because they're modular, they're upgradable, but these days, if you want to do AI locally, you really want an AI-dedicated processor. As I mentioned, the HP using one of the intel ultra core ultra processors. Intel has just recently added machine language capability what microsoft calls an npu to its processor. The qualcomm snapdragon elite x looks like the top of the line npu at this point. You could look at a laptop, and it won't just be microsoft surface of course is out the surface pro 10 using the snapdragon elite. But I would also look to some of the other big manufacturers at a laptop, and it won't just be Microsoft Surface, of course is out the Surface Pro 10, using the Snapdragon Elite, but I would also look to some of the other big manufacturers, including Dell. They will be putting these out in the next few weeks. Literally, those would be good choices.

Having the NPU on your laptop really makes a big difference in terms of the speed and capabilities of the LLM, of the machine language, of the AI tool. Now it is the case, and our own AI guru here, anthony Nielsen, is always saying this. He says, leo, you could do a better job with an NVIDIA graphics card, a GPU, than you can with an NPU enabled computer. The problem is a laptop. You're not going to be able to put a very fast, powerful, energy hungry nvidia video card onto it. So if you want a laptop, I would say get one with a snapdragon elite. Uh, the new qualcomm chip that's got the npu built into it. They're claiming 40 tops and better, 40 trillion operations a second and better. That's quite good. Down the road they'll be even more. I don't think it's a bad idea. I think you want to run your AI models locally. That's the way to go, and I think we are now out of time. Meredith is still explaining how to draw on her videos, but if you watch that video, you can, you can find out. Uh, michael will be back next week. Uh, unless he's been doing Swedish death cleaning, in which case who knows, you never know. Uh, I will be back next week for sure, when we do ask the tech guys.

We do this show every Sunday, uh, from 11 AM Pacific Tech does. We do this show every Sunday from 11 am Pacific to 2 pm, that's a 2 to 5 pm Eastern time, that's 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live YouTube dot com. Slash twit, slash live. All our shows are live, from the moment they start to the moment they end.

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