Ask The Tech Guys Episode 1960 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for as the tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte coming up, Scott Wilkinson joins us with his picks for the best TVs for next week's Super Bowl.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:08):
And I'm Mikah Sargant Alex Lindsay shares a video that shows us how we can design our own images using Midjourney,

Leo Laporte (00:00:14):
And which router is the right router for your new fiber optic connection. All that and more coming up Next, I'm Ask the Tech Guys podcasts you love from people you

Mikah Sargent (00:00:26):
Trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:27):
This is TWiT. This is Ask the Tech guys with Mikah Sargant and Leo Laport. Episode 1960, recorded Sunday, February 5th, 2023. Quibbles and Bits Fast. Ask The Tech Guys is brought to you by Fastmail. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity, and make email yours with Fastmail. Try it free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. Ooh, Fastmail's also giving twit listeners a 15% discount on the first year when you sign up today. And buy EightSleep Good Sleep is the ultimate game changer and the pod cover, that's the ultimate sleep machine. Go to eightsleep.com/twit to check out the pod cover and save $150 a checkout EightSleep. Currently ships within the us, Canada, the uk, and select countries in the EU and Australia. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise@quick.tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? It's time once again for Ask the Tech guys the sequel to the Tech Guys show. Yes. In which I, Leo Laport

Mikah Sargent (00:01:53):
And I, Mikah Sargant,

Leo Laporte (00:01:55):
Answer your questions at calls dot twit tv or email questions and ask the tech guys at twit tv. We're doing it via Zoom now, not by phone anymore. So calls do twit.tv. Call call <laugh> one like the verb Your call. You call Call. It's a verb call. It's a, it's a, what do they call that when you order somebody to do that emphatic? Oh yeah. No. It'ss A

Mikah Sargent (00:02:21):
Latin, that's for sure. Latin. Oh, yes, there

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
Is. It's evocative for the, anyway,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:26):
Yeah. Something. So someone will tell us. Did you

Leo Laporte (00:02:28):
See the

Mikah Sargent (00:02:28):
Balloon? Ooh. I, yeah. It was purple and when I sucked in some of the air from it, it made my voice go

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
By. Saturday Night Live had a very funny Chinese balloon skit <laugh>, which a guy in a giant outfit is floating around. But seriously I was watching this with interest all week and kind of glad I didn't have any shows, <laugh>, because my initial reaction is, eh, it's a weather balloon. Come on. What are you getting all head up about? And then you know, our national Intelligence Agency said, no, this is a surveillance balloon from China. Thing is a balloon. While it has, they have in the past, been used for surveillance is a somewhat limited surveillance tool because you can't, can't steer it unless it's got propellers like a dirigible. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And this wasn't that. All you could do is go up and down and choose, I guess a, a wind current that's appropriate to the rough direction you want to go <laugh>. But if you're lodging it from China, you kind of, it's, it's a kind of a guessing game to get it to where you want it to be.

(00:03:34):
A little bit like Plinko. Yeah. Spy Plinko, the balloon was huge. 60,000 feet up, which is, you know, more than 10 miles, 12 miles up. You could still see it by the naked eye. Wow. Which is a means it was ginormous. They said that the, the thing hanging from it, the super structure or the sub-structure of hardware hanging from it was the length of three school buses. Whoa. And that presumably had whatever instruments was in there. Now the Chinese have more than 26 satellites floating above us at all times. <Laugh>. So we don't, they already have a pretty good picture <laugh> of what's going on. There's the balloon. We did blow it up over to North Carolina. It's in the water now. And Frogmen. Do they still call him frog men or frog people? Wait, we, and China was okay with that?

(00:04:25):
No, China was very upset. But you know what? They have nothing to say about it cuz it's in our territorial airspace. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> unlike a satellite or even, you know, I guess I, I guess the YouTube plane that Gary Powers is flying over Russia, the spy plane we used to fly, I think still do fly. Oh. I remember talking to a YouTube pilot. He was a listener to the show. That was Ontario Territorial Airspace. So I guess airspace continues beyond 60,000 feet. But anyway, it was in our airspace, and of course we can shoot it down. It's a, it's a a violation of our sovereignty as the President said. And he said, I, it was my idea to shoot it down <laugh>. I'm glad he just, I'm glad he was. I thought I thought of that. Yeah. I was gonna, you know, no one, no one thought of it.

(00:05:10):
 Everybody in the country was going, why don't they shoot it down? Why don't they shoot it down? Finally, the the Air Force said, well, we can't, because it might hit somebody in the head. There's video of, it's an amazing video of it being shut down. Yeah. The, the F 22 fi fighter Phantom flies up to it, launches a missile into the heart of the balloon and punctures it, which isn't probably that hard to do. And then it plummets to the earth. Third, as you see the missile. Wow. And boom, pop it, you just pop it like a balloon in the air and then the phantom flies off. So we were recovered, and I think it'll be interesting to see whether it was just a weather balloon <laugh> or if there had some surveillance in it. I, I think it's more, if anything, a provocation. Okay. It's a little China. Mm.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:57):
Uhuh. Look what can do. But

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
What I don't wanna see us get into a war with China over, over even a provocation. You know, it's like when the Russian migs, you know, fly around our, our flyboy up there and go, mm.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:13):
We were supposed to be meeting with them. And this happened right before that meeting.

Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
Unfortunately, the Secretary of State decided not to meet with them. I mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I think that's, I don't know. Is that proportion? I don't think that's proportion. Anyway, this is, it's not a political show. So we're not here to discuss the politics of it. But I think the technology of it is kind of interesting. I did see somebody on the on the news, one of the news channels say, you know, you shoot that thing, it's gonna hit the earth at 500 miles an hour. And I thought, wait a minute. This is by the way, a good exercise for everyone to do when they're watching or reading news. Wait

Mikah Sargent (00:06:45):
A minute. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
Wait a minute.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:47):
Really?

Leo Laporte (00:06:48):
Isn't there such a thing as terminal velocity when a human jumps out of an airplane, you reach because of wind resistance, you reach a top speed of, around I think 120, 130 miles an hour, then your parachute opens. You slow down. But, but because of wind resistance, you can't get much faster than that. Now, I guess the biggest, the bigger it is. You were, you came up with a formula, didn't you? I

Mikah Sargent (00:07:12):
Did have it, and then I removed it. That's

Leo Laporte (00:07:14):
All right. We don't need the formula. <Laugh>. There is a formula for this, but I just, 500 seems a little, I'd like actually our chat room.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:22):
Yeah. Cuz if we think about, so a lot of people think if I throw a coin off the side of the Empire State Building, it's going to kill someone on the ground. No.

Leo Laporte (00:07:29):
It hits terminal velocity.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:31):
Yes. And well actually, probably could. What ends up happening depends where

Leo Laporte (00:07:33):
It hits them, if any of 'em in the eye.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:35):
No, because a penny is so small Right. That the updrafts will actually reduce mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the amount of, of speed it has. Yeah. By the time it hits the ground. It's not,

Leo Laporte (00:07:45):
And I think if something has, is the size of three school buses, it's a lot of wind resistance. Yeah. I don't know. And the balloon, forget it, that's not going 500 miles an hour. That thing's like a giant sail. It could go off to back to China if it wanted to. Anyway. This is good. It's good to think, to use your brains, to use your noggin. Maybe it could be 500 miles an hour, but when you hear something like that,

Mikah Sargent (00:08:06):
Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
It's good to say, wait, wait a minute. Have you ever had Facebook on your phone? <Laugh>? That's a silly question.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:15):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:08:16):
<Affirmative>. So apparently a former Facebook engineer oh boy,

(00:08:22):
Has admitted that f because I al I took, I tell you what, when I took Facebook off my phone, my battery life went through, went much better, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I've always told people this, take Facebook off your phone. And I, I mean, the reasonable assumption is Facebook is always calling home and getting information and stuff. Well, it turns out, according to an engineer who is I think testifying in a lawsuit, as a former employee, Facebook secretly can drain your cell phone batteries and sometimes does. So on purpose, the practice, now you gotta consider the sources from the New York Post. Okay. So, oh, okay. But I mean, this is actual testimony from a lawsuit. So you can verify the testimony. The practice known as negative testing allows tech companies to surreptitiously run down your battery in the name of testing, testing

Mikah Sargent (00:09:18):
What

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
Features or issues such as how fast their app runs, when the battery's low, or how an image might load. This is according to a data scientist, George Hayward, who claims in Manhattan Federal Court in a lawsuit that he was fired last November for saying, I'm not gonna do that. I ain't gonna do that.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:41):
I've just turned off background app refresh on all

Leo Laporte (00:09:44):
This. I Well, maybe Does that help? Yeah, I guess that would help. Unless,

Mikah Sargent (00:09:48):
Unless they're, they're

Leo Laporte (00:09:49):
Negative. They're, they're doing some negative testing on you. No, not everybody, obviously. They probably do AB testing. That's what they call AB testing with. They do it to some people and see what happens. See if they hit the roof <laugh> killing someone's cell phone battery. If, of course is dangerous. Especially you know, if you're, if you're

Mikah Sargent (00:10:06):
Out and about,

Leo Laporte (00:10:07):
Out and about, you're waiting for the babysitter might call and say, you know, gotta come home. Your kids are, you know, climbing the furniture or something. <Laugh> the litigation filed against Meta says, I was unlawfully fired, says Hayward, because I refused to do this test. And it turns out, if you tell your boss, no, that's illegal, it doesn't go over very well. He'd been working at Facebook since October, 2019.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:34):
Is that not retaliate? I guess that's what the lawsuit's about,

Leo Laporte (00:10:36):
Right? Well, that's why he is gonna sue. And if it's true, and if he can prove this, I think he will win. He says he doesn't know how many people have been impacted by Facebook's negative testing, but believes the company engaged in the practice because he was given an internal training document titled <laugh> quote, how to run Thoughtful Negative Tests,

Mikah Sargent (00:10:55):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:10:57):
Which included examples of such experiments being carried out. I've never seen a more horrible document in my career. He said, Ugh. Oh, unfortunately, the lawsuit had to be withdrawn. We saw the the post saw, the documents, but because as many employers do, including us, by the way remember this, Mikah, they require you go to arbitration before you sue. Right? Right. The lawsuit was withdrawn, they're gonna go to arbitration. However, I'm glad the lawsuit was filed because we get to see mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:25):
<Affirmative> Yeah. That, that information is now available.

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
Geez,

Mikah Sargent (00:11:29):
That's not great.

Leo Laporte (00:11:30):
Geez.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:31):
I I, that makes me wonder, though, are they circumventing? Because many phones, including the iPhone, I can go into the battery section and look at what the, what apps

Leo Laporte (00:11:40):
You would know. So you and I have to say, but this is, you know, I don't know if they're still doing it. I do remember Facebook being one of the top apps for draining my battery. And I, when I removed Facebook, and this was years ago, probably four or five years ago, that my battery life definitely improved. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So just, you know, I thought, I thought keep it in mind. Keep it in mind. Earnings are in, we'll talk about it on twit later today, but Amazon better than expected revenue. But the stock went down because of fourth quarter guidance, you know what that means?

Mikah Sargent (00:12:18):
It means that they're preparing for headwinds, right?

Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
Yeah. Headwinds. Here come the headwinds. In fact, that's the term. Mr. Tim Cook used when he was talking about apples,

Mikah Sargent (00:12:26):
When they missed

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
Terrible temptations, quarter <laugh> he said, yeah, they got the headwinds right in the face. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:12:34):
Hate it when that happens. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
Boom. Elon Musk,

Mikah Sargent (00:12:40):
What is he doing now?

Leo Laporte (00:12:41):
Found not liable. Remember when he tweeted mm-hmm. <Affirmative> fi funding secured. I we're going to sell, we're gonna take Tesla private at I think four 20 ish years. And he had some stupid marijuana joking. Yeah. and he was being sued by shareholders who said, well, that, that cost us money. When you said funding secured in a price, we all, you know, I don't know what they did, stop shorting it or whatever. The jury trial said, no, come on, you didn't lose any money. Nine person jury on Friday. Two hours of deliberation, which is quick. It's like, takes you that long to fill out the form. Finding the investors who brought the class action suit failed to prove their claims against Elon or Tesla. He wasn't in the courtroom to hear the verdict, but he later tweeted the wisdom of the people has prevailed.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:37):
I swear to God. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:13:42):
Alright. Twitter has done a good thing for itself for the Super Bowl. They've got. So remember this is the Supers Bowl's next Sunday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, just a little programming note. Oh, right. <Laugh>. We will be on Saturday next week. Yes. As Will Twi. Because I didn't wanna make Mikah. I know. He's a huge football fan. Big, big,

Mikah Sargent (00:13:59):
Big. Yeah. I mean, I gotta see all the touchdowns, all the 10 yard passes, <laugh> and

Leo Laporte (00:14:09):
The I watch for the commercials, but we didn't wanna make an come in on Super Bowl Sunday. Eight. Also, it's hard to get twit together. You can't try to get a quorum. No

Mikah Sargent (00:14:15):
One's, no. Everybody else's doing things. I mean, even if you don't watch the Super Bowl, you usually get together with the folks care about. Yeah. Some of the folks care about, in a way,

Leo Laporte (00:14:24):
Speaking of which <laugh> did you just see? Is that, did I, am I imagining that Scott Wilkinson just peaked over my shoulder? I think I saw that. We'll see Scott in just a little bit. But let me finish the thought. So Apple is sponsoring the halftime next week. Yeah. Apple Music, Rihanna specifically, and man, are they making, you know, they put out a press release this week. They're gonna have Rihanna everywhere. There's gonna have every, all sorts of stuff. You could buy Rihanna's songs, Rihanna, Rihanna, karaoke Rihanna, everything. Because they spend probably, I don't know what it costs. I know a Super Bowl ad. One minute costs 7 million Uhhuh <affirmative>. What are you

Mikah Sargent (00:14:59):
Laughing at? You keep calling her Rihanna. And it's Rihanna. Are you

Leo Laporte (00:15:02):
Sure? I

Mikah Sargent (00:15:02):
Swear to God.

Leo Laporte (00:15:03):
Are you

Mikah Sargent (00:15:03):
Sure? Bad gal. Ri Rihanna.

Leo Laporte (00:15:06):
Are you sure?

Mikah Sargent (00:15:07):
Okay. Something's changed in my

Leo Laporte (00:15:09):
Life. I've read something that said, oh boy, people mispronounce her name. It's Rihanna.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:13):
Oh, really? Well, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:15:15):
We'll find

Mikah Sargent (00:15:15):
Out news to me. Well, you

Leo Laporte (00:15:16):
Look that up Mr. Aunt Pruit,

Mikah Sargent (00:15:18):
Please do.

Leo Laporte (00:15:19):
Our research staff is working on that. Please. Yes. Rihanna. Anyway, I won't say her name again, <laugh>, because that's not the point. So Pepsi used to sponsor this, right? Right. So instead they are buying a $3 million Twitter takeover that that's cheaper than the halftime. I bet

Mikah Sargent (00:15:37):
That's a good point though. How to, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:15:39):
Yeah. And, and the, the theory is that Twitter, at least in years past, was Super Bowls. Their Super Bowl <laugh>, if you will. It's a big, it's a big deal. Lots of people tweeting. You know, I can't believe that the referees are, and and so Anhauser Busch, the beer companies, 2.4 million on takeover ads. So you're gonna see Pepsi and Budweiser, traditionally big advertisers in the Super Bowl. They're going to Twitter and spending at least half what they would spend.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:12):
Leo, I have to officially apologize to you.

Leo Laporte (00:16:15):
Is it

Mikah Sargent (00:16:15):
Rihanna? It is Rihanna.

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
See, I thought I, I, you know, I've said Rihanna for years. Yeah. She's from the Caribbean. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's how you say it, man. Rihanna. But I, I, I recently read an article, said, you know, it's actually Rihanna.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:28):
Yeah. She says well, many have referred to the Star as Rihanna over the years. Her name is actually pronounced Rihanna. Rihanna. Excuse me. Rihanna actually confirmed this in recent videos for Vogue introducing herself to the camera. So thank you for the lesson today. I

Leo Laporte (00:16:42):
Appreciate it. And it's 50 cents. Okay. Okay. Say it clearly. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:47):
Oh, <laugh>. I thought you were saying I had to pay you 50 cents. No, no. Taught me his name. 50 cents.

Leo Laporte (00:16:52):
People say Fitty Cent <laugh>. No,

Mikah Sargent (00:16:54):
50 cents. And Little Jonathan and

Leo Laporte (00:16:57):
Little Jonathan <laugh>, master of Crunk.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:01):
Yeah. We mind blown. I'm sorry. The old man

Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
Got it right. The old

Mikah Sargent (00:17:07):
Guy. Got it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:08):
Rat. All right. We are gonna take some calls. Just little bit. Call twit.tv, but I <laugh> I saw him. I swear to God I'm not hallucinating. I think Scott Wilkinson is here and because the Super Bowl is coming up. Ooh. Did you see that?

Mikah Sargent (00:17:22):
I keep seeing, I keep seeing the

Leo Laporte (00:17:23):
Flash because the Super Bowl is coming up. I thought it'd be a good time to get Scott, our home theater guru host of the fabulous Scott Wilkinson show on YouTube, youtube.com/avs forum. I thought it'd be good to get Scott on the show today to tell us what TVs to buy for the Super Bowl. Hello, Scott. Hello, Leo. Hey Mikah. How are you

Mikah Sargent (00:17:44):
Guys doing? Hello. So good to see you.

Leo Laporte (00:17:46):
Great to see you. Hey, great to see you too. I just wanna say, yeah we were talking before the show about this H B O show called The Last Of Us, which is based on a video game, very, very popular PlayStation video game. Yeah. And there've been three episodes so far, and I've been telling people, if you're gonna watch this, watch it on the best screen you've got, if ideally an old led 4K HDR screen, cuz the cinematography is mind bogglingly. Good.

Scott Wilkinson (00:18:12):
I, I've, I've been intending to watch it. It's

Leo Laporte (00:18:15):
Gorgeous.

Scott Wilkinson (00:18:16):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:17):
So I just wanna say that, you know Stanley Kubrick is famous for making every frame of his movies a painting, Barry, Barry, Linden Linden for instance, everything is Yeah. Looks like a, a classic painting. Yeah. This show is kind of like that. The lighting is stunning. They really take advantage of the 4k. So that's, if you're not a Super

Scott Wilkinson (00:18:34):
Bowl fan at hdr,

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
I hope at hdr. Absolutely. There's a scene, I didn't notice it until the second episode. There's a scene where Joel goes to a ham radio operator to get some information and you know, it's coming off a video game, which is also gorgeous. Right. So they have to Yeah, there's a standard and I'm looking at this, I'm thinking this is lit like a Renaissance painting.

Scott Wilkinson (00:18:55):
Wow. This is

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
Stunning. And then I, then I kind of started paying attention and the whole thing is shut. It's gorgeous in any of that. Two reasons you might want to get a nice new tv. That's one. Indeed. And then the Super Bowl

Scott Wilkinson (00:19:09):
Is, and then the Super Bowl is the other one.

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
Is this a good time to buy a new tv?

Scott Wilkinson (00:19:13):
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You're, you're gonna get the best prices of the, of the yearly cycle of TVs coming and going. In many cases it's as good as Black Friday. In some cases it's even a little better. But you have to keep in mind that TV margins, you know, the profit that retailers make selling TVs are razor thin already. So, you know, are you gonna get much discount Yes. Because they're trying to get rid of them for the next year's models. I sent you actually a PDF with, with a list. I don't know if you've got that or not.

Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
Oh, I'll check. Good.

Scott Wilkinson (00:19:53):
But you can put it up in the show notes if you want.

Leo Laporte (00:19:55):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:19:56):
I listed a number of tv sales discounts that I found some of which are in the 20 to 30% range. Some in the thir 30 to 40% range, a few that are even over 40%.

Leo Laporte (00:20:12):
That's a big discount.

Scott Wilkinson (00:20:13):
It is, it really is.

Leo Laporte (00:20:15):
Exactly. Now, we've said this before, but it, one of the reasons is because this is LA last year's model, right. They're gonna have new

Scott Wilkinson (00:20:20):
Markets. These are all 2020 twos.

Leo Laporte (00:20:22):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:20:22):
And in some cases, is that a 20 ones? Oh no, not a bad thing at all. Not a bad thing at all. Generally speaking, TV evolution is just that evolution, not revolution. Unlike in 2022 at C E s I told you the about the QD ola, that was the first big improvement Yes. In to display technology in many years.

Leo Laporte (00:20:46):
Can we those now?

Scott Wilkinson (00:20:48):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, they, they're on sale.

Leo Laporte (00:20:51):
Should we? Okay. Yeah. They, as with any new thing, they're gonna be more expensive than the old thing, right?

Scott Wilkinson (00:20:57):
Correct. And next year there will be the second generation. Yeah. Or rather this year. Yeah. But for example, on Amazon, the Samsung 65 inch S 95 B, which is their qdi, their larger qdi is selling for 1798 down from 29 98.

Leo Laporte (00:21:16):
Wow.

Scott Wilkinson (00:21:17):
That's a 40% drop. So that's pretty significant. If you ask me.

Leo Laporte (00:21:23):
You, you do this every year. This is a, a spreadsheet. Let me pull it up so I can

Scott Wilkinson (00:21:28):
Show everything. Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:21:29):
<Laugh>, you really, you take this seriously. Here's the spreadsheet I do. And, and green means 40% or higher. Yep. So that is a, a Best Buy. And Amazon have those massive discounts. Yep. Now, some people would prefer to buy a Best Buy cuz they can pick it up. Right. Is it okay to ship a fancy TV like that?

Scott Wilkinson (00:21:47):
You know, I personally feel the same as those other folks that say, I'd rather pick up the TV and bring it home because yes, shipping, I'm sure shipping for the most part is fine. But this is a big flat piece of glass,

Leo Laporte (00:22:03):
<Laugh>,

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:05):
You know, 65 inches.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
Good way to put it. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:09):
And, and you know, it's there, there are bound to be some cases where it's gonna get broken.

Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
I don't know if, if they still offer this. I bought the last couple of TVs on Amazon mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and they offered something called white glove service. Mm. Where they would come, they would unbox it, they would set it up. And, and I always paid for that. Yeah. Well, yeah, you're looking at me bad, but because then if there's anything wrong with it, they're still there. Right. And I can say to them, take it back. Right. right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:38):
I mean, exactly. So

Leo Laporte (00:22:39):
I mean, I could obviously unbox it and all that. The other thing is, I don't want the box. So

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:44):
<Laugh> Well, you don't want the box

Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
The box back too. I

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:46):
Mean, I don't know about you, but I am no longer in an age when I can pull out a 65 inch TV out of a box by myself.

Leo Laporte (00:22:53):
Oh, I could. I'm massively strong. You're massive. I've, I've been doing ants pushups. That's why he lift.

Scott Wilkinson (00:22:58):
Okay, well there you go.

Leo Laporte (00:22:59):
He says, I don't need no guys in here to lift my tv. I can lift it with one finger. That's true. It's really nice to have those guys do it. And if they break it, they bought it. I don't have

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:10):
To break it. It's on them, man. It's on them. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:23:13):
Exactly right. But I've, I have had good experiences both times. The TV was fine, set up fine, but I agree with you. It's a little scary. Anyway, if not, nothing else. It is

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:22):
A little scary. I, I would, I, I like to pick it up myself.

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
What do you think the best deal? I'm seeing a 77 inch od mm-hmm. <Affirmative> from from lg, which is the one we like, right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:35):
For Oh, LG ods are great. But I think you're, I think you're probably looking at, it's not od, it's Q N E D.

Leo Laporte (00:23:42):
Q N.

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:44):
Oh no. There is an o there is a 77 old

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
500 bucks. Now if you're willing to go with the Q N, what does the N

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:50):
Stand for? Is that nano <laugh>? The N stands for nanotube. It's basically a technology that LG developed that uses nanoparticles to absorb certain frequent of light so that you get a pure red, green and blue.

Leo Laporte (00:24:09):
But it's still L C D. Correct. So this is the important thing to understand about any flat. Correct. There's really only two technologies now that plasma's gone. One is L C D. Correct. And one is O L E D O L E D. Correct. These direct few,

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:24):
Correct. L CD

Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Has a backlight with a shutter. Correct. And the back light is what they talk about with the Q net and the L E D and all that stuff. It's just different kinds of back lights, right?

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:33):
Correct. Correct. L C D TV is called a transmissive display because light is passing through little tiny shutters. O L E D or OED is called an emissive display because the little pixels are emitting light directly.

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:51):
So, so yes, the 77 inch O lead the 77 ct,

Leo Laporte (00:24:56):
That's the one I would get, I think. Yes.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:58):
I, I agree with you. 2,500 bucks down from 3,500 bucks. Yeah. Almost 30% off. It's

Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
Twice as much as a, as a Q N, but it's correct. But it's a better screen. I think it is. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:09):
Yeah. Oh yeah. That OLE is the best display technology in my opinion. The only thing it doesn't have that L C D has over it is brightness. Right. So if you need something really bright in a really bright room, then then an lc, one of the L C D technologies, Q led, qed, blah, blah, blah will serve you well. But the, when you, when you get off axis, and this is important for a Super Bowl application in particular, cuz you'll have a lot of people around Right. For presumably a party. And if they're off axis, the TV doesn't look as good. Mm. Yeah. Whereas with Ole, you can be anywhere and the t the picture looks just as good.

Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
Of course, if you have it a 77 inch tv, you can get a lot of people right in front of it. I mean, it's a That's true. It's a big enough tv. Yep. People that's a good point. Do pro is, is a projector a good idea around this time?

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:07):
Ah, very glad you asked that. Mikah

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
<Laugh>? No. it's like I had it planned, but I didn't

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:13):
<Laugh>. Now there's a new type of a, a projector, generally speaking, you want in a dark room, but there's a new type of projector, not so new, but it's gaining a lot of popularity called Ultra Short Throw or U s t. And that is meant to be a replacement for a flat panel tv. And so you put this projector on a, on a tabletop, a credenza or something very near the wall, and it shoots up at a steep angle. The light and fills a really big screen. Now on the last page of this spreadsheet that I, oh

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
Wait a minute to you. I was only looking at the first page.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:51):
Oh no. There

Leo Laporte (00:26:52):
<Laugh>. Oh, it goes on and on and

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:55):
On. I sent you a bunch of information. Scott,

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
You do this every year. I can't. This must take you days to compile.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:02):
Eh, you know, it's, it's, I know where to look.

Leo Laporte (00:27:05):
Oh, you do. So this is the last page.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:07):
The last page

Leo Laporte (00:27:08):
Is, is ultra short throw a bunch of ultra short throw projectors from Ben Q. That's right. Epson and High Sensee and four movie. Which, which brand do you like?

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:17):
Well I I,

Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
I have a high sense which I really like,

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:21):
Which is really good. Yeah. It's, it high sense is, is well regarded in the U S T projector market.

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
You've seen our high sense, haven't you, Mike? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's like a hundred inches. It's big.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:31):
Yeah, exactly. Now the, at the most recent U s T projector shootout done by Projector Central the Ben Q V 70 50 I one for best single laser. Now all of these U S D projectors use lasers as their light source. Hmm. And some of them use a single laser that then gets split into red, green, and blue. The, the laser is blue and then it goes through a color wheel or some other thing to get red and green out of it. So a single laser projector, which is less expensive. The Ben Q won the top prize for single laser, the four movie theater, which I had never heard of before. Me

Leo Laporte (00:28:18):
Neither. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:19):
Shootout. Yeah. That won the triple laser.

Leo Laporte (00:28:22):
Three one. Oh, is that red, green, and blue? The three lasers? Correct. Okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Exactly. So they don't eat the, the wheel. They just, they have Correct. My, weirdly enough high sense I think is two lasers.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:32):
Two lasers. Correct. Red and blue. And then they derive green out of that. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:28:37):
But three would be better.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:39):
Yes. Okay. Absolutely. Three distinct, discrete red, green, and blue lasers is the best and

Leo Laporte (00:28:46):
The most expensive.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:47):
And the most expensive. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:28:48):
But I say the prices have dropped dramatically. This high sense was $10,000 four or five years ago.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:53):
Exactly. And now look at it, we're looking at two to three or $4,000.

Leo Laporte (00:28:57):
You do need a, a screen. Does it include Correct. There's always Yes. It says screen included on these sometimes in some

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:03):
Of them, very few of em actually. Oh. a few of the high senses. That's

Leo Laporte (00:29:07):
How they get the, the price down you.

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:09):
Exactly. And with a few of the high senses, it includes a screen. You

Leo Laporte (00:29:13):
Need a special screen. You Correct. Do ultra short throw with a normal screen or against the wall.

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:18):
Or on the wall. Some people go

Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
Ultra screen with fennell lenses. That takes the thing coming in at an angle and bends it. So bounces

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:25):
At it, bounces it back out. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly Right. And Epson will sell you one. Yeah. A hundred, a hundred inch screen for $2,000.

Leo Laporte (00:29:33):
Oh, okay. So consider that. Yes.

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:35):
Or 120 inch screen for $3,000.

Leo Laporte (00:29:38):
I will add a caveat about these projectors because they're ultra short throw mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it's tricky to avoid. What do you, what do they call that when the, when the, the, the perspective gets, you get keystoning, it's tricky. You have to very carefully adjust both the screen. You can't move the projector or you're gonna have problems. So

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:03):
You That's true. It's very strange. Now they they are, it's a little finicky. They are designed with that in mine. They, the designers know that that's gonna happen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:30:13):
Mine isn't, I have to adjust it all the time. There's a, oh really? There's a, I guess it's an older one. There's a button you push and it says, cause I know when the regular projectors, you could say, you know, un keystone that and it'll fix it. Right. Right. But on the short throw, I mean, I had to ha you have, and the, and the, and the screen. We had had little cranks <laugh> that you would adjust to get the screen toque. That's a lot of work to get it set up. That's

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:37):
An older, that's an older

Leo Laporte (00:30:38):
System. Okay. They've gotten better,

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:39):
They've improved it since then. Okay. All right. But you're right, you're right. It is a consideration more.

Leo Laporte (00:30:45):
Does it seem to be more finicky than a normal projector? The short throats Yeah. Are a little tricky.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:50):
Yeah. Okay. It is. It, it, I agree. I agree. And it doesn't get as bright as a, as a flat path. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
But we're fine. We have it in our great room. It's, and we're gonna watch the Supers bowl on it. We're gonna have people over watch the Super Bowl on it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, that means there's daylight in there and stuff. But it's fine. I admit when I wanna watch a great show, like the last of us in HDR or the, I'll be tempted with the Super Bowl. Cause the Super Bowl is gonna be PR broadcast on on Fox. Not broadcast. I shouldn't say that. It will be streamed on Fox streamed Yes. In 4k. H d r. And so I have YouTube tv. I could watch the 4K HDR version. It's upscaled. Yep. But still, it looks very,

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:27):
I'm sure it looks great. And you don't see, you

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
Won't look at, see that on the projector. You just Correct. You just don't see that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:32):
Yeah. Correct. Now these projectors that I've listed here all do H D R to one degree or another. Projectors can't do it as well as flat panels because they don't get as bright. Yeah. and the four movie, the four movie theater as it's called, is the only one that I know of that's currently available that does Dolby Vision. H D R. So that to me is a, a kind of a big deal. There are a couple of others that have Dolby vision in beta, but they're not implemented yet.

Leo Laporte (00:32:02):
Okay. Well, I'm gonna put this four page spreadsheet, amazing document up on our show notes. We'll put a link to that. Right. John Ashley, we're gonna, yeah, we'll be able to get a link to that. So it's already, I'll quickly,

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:15):
I'll quickly, it's already there. I'll quickly tell you that the other pages, I, I just did a survey of lg, Samsung, and Sony on their own websites of what their, you know, what their TVs are selling for now versus the the list price s msrp p and including in the case of LG and Samsung, some of their U S T projectors, cuz LG and Samsung both do U S T projectors. The Samsungs are, they're only 14% off or 7% off. There's a couple of lgs that are reasonable good discounts. So

Leo Laporte (00:32:51):
If I were gonna be buying one of these for you, Scott.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:55):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:32:56):
And I'm writing the check

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:58):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
Which one would you pick?

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:01):
I would pick a, a, a Samsung, well, actually no, I wouldn't pick a Samsung Q LED Q O L E D because it doesn't do Dolby vision. Samsung does not do Dolby Vision. Period. That's

Leo Laporte (00:33:14):
One of the HDR technologies there are.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:15):
Correct, correct. Three or money. I would probably, if you were gonna buy me one of these, I'd probably go for the 77 C2 L OED from lg.

Leo Laporte (00:33:23):
Yep. Boy, I'm so happy. My o LG OED is several years old. You, you calibrated it back in the days I did. So it's five or six years old, maybe more. Yeah. and it's held up beautifully. And I, like I said, I, it looks great. I watched many of the playoff games in 4k, H d r. And even though it's upscaled to 10 80 p it really looks great. And RI mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:47):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:33:47):
Annana will be in 4K as well. So

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:50):
That whole sound, and of course I will be recording the Super Bowl and

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
Watching the Puppy Bowl. I know. W

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:55):
And watching the Puppy Bowl. And then when I watch the Super Bowl, I'm gonna fast forward to the game. I couldn't care about the game any less than I do.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:03):
I have to watch the game.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:04):
Why?

Mikah Sargent (00:34:05):
Why? Because my mom's team is playing

Leo Laporte (00:34:07):
KC Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:09):
KC we're from. Okay. Well there is family loyalty then. Yeah. But I'm just gonna watch the commercials and the halftime show. Nice. That's all I care about. Nice.

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
Otherwise,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:19):
It's Puppy Bowl for me. I think

Leo Laporte (00:34:21):
Commercials, I'll be interested. I think the commercials have gone downhill in the agree the last few years. Agree.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:25):
I agree. They might very well. And if Pepsi, and as you said before, Pepsi and who else were not Bud.

Leo Laporte (00:34:29):
Budweiser is

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:30):
Gone. Budweiser is not even gonna be on the commercials. I

Leo Laporte (00:34:32):
Used to love those. I maybe they'll, maybe they will buy those commercials. I don't know if the Twitter Pepsi's just not buying the halftime. I don't know if the Twitter takeover is exclusive of the Super Bowl. Right. But those Clyde's, remember the Clyde's Dale commercial?

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:43):
Oh yeah. Those were great. The

Leo Laporte (00:34:44):
Dog would run out.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:46):
Those are huge jerks.

Leo Laporte (00:34:48):
<Laugh>. I love those. I love those. So we'll see. We'll see. I mean, I think a lot of, a lot of oh, companies are not spending the ad money that they used to.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:58):
Sorry. A really good question in the chat that maybe you addressed, but yeah. Is there a way to watch the game at anything higher than 30 frames per second? Cuz Joe's saying, I've got cable and I've got an OTA antenna, but I can't get higher than 30 frames per second.

Leo Laporte (00:35:12):
Not ota You can't

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:13):
No, no. Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:35:14):
Not over the air. Yes. Thank you. If you want higher quality, you'd have to stream

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:19):
It streaming.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:20):
The question, Matt, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to. Does. Is Fox gonna be streaming it at 60?

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
I am looking at an article now from Consumer Reports. Yeah. How to watch the Super Bowl in 4k. Yeah. and I don't see the frame rate, which tells me it's probably

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:40):
30. It's probably 30. Yeah. 30

Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
Is a traditional TV framework. Frame rate. We've all gotten used to 60 frames Progressive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> because 30 is often interlaced. So now at least it's progressive. Right. 30 progressives better than 30 Interlays 60. Correct. Progressive would be even better. And many, even better. Many games are 120 frames per second. And that's a Well you

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:04):
Mean video

Leo Laporte (00:36:04):
Games? Yeah, video games, not baseball, football games.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:08):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:36:08):
So,

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:09):
And variable frame rate in, in video games too, which is really nice. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:13):
They don't say what I'm looking at the article and I don't see the That's interesting. Some of the cameras shoot at higher frame rates that does make a difference in how it looks

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:22):
And they don't. Absolutely. And, and it's important. High frame rate is a whole area of discussion we could go into, but for, it's really good for sports. Ah, mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because things are moving fast. Ah, you know, that ball is flying through the air and people are running around and with at 30 or 20 30 frames per second. You know, there's some motion blur.

Leo Laporte (00:36:41):
Consumer reports quotes. Michael Davies, who is a senior Vice president of field operations at Fox Sports. Yeah. He says because of bandwidth constraints, and I think they don't say this, but truck constraints. Yes. They don't also, they aren't gonna shoot it in in fork. They'll shoot in hd. What does truck constraint mean? You mean they have to have a, you know, at these stadiums in Glendale, for instance, they don't have a control room. So they bring out a big trailer

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:05):
Truck. A semi truck, a BA or true semi-truck. Yes. But more than one typically.

Leo Laporte (00:37:10):
Yeah. With the switchers in it, that's where the directors sit and, and all those people and the

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:14):
Audio mixers and everybody. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
And they're only a handful of 4K capable trucks. Most of these. So getting there, they, yeah. Okay. We're getting there. So also Davies says, because the show is so large with more than a hundred camera, 100 camera forces. Yeah. Some of them are shooting in higher frame rates, but what they do

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:35):
Force for Slowmo, for re

Leo Laporte (00:37:37):
For reflexly, so they use 10 80 p as the standard shooting in both 4K and a high frame rates require a lot of bandwidth Yep. For sports high frame rates, which can reduce blurring during fast moving action, as you said. And special effects Yeah. Are very important. But I don't understand what he means here when he says, so shooting in HD and then upscaling is a good compromise. I don't know if they're shooting in high frame rate. He says Fox will have some 4k, even a few AK cameras shooting, but they'll be used so that they can pan within the frame. Oh. To zoom in at high, those are high frame rate. He says, this allows us to digitally zoom. This is from consumer reports again. Yeah. But digitally zoom the picture for shots of whether a foot was in or out or whether a ball was caught. So when you see those instant replays and they can really zoom in, that's because they're shooting 'em at higher frame rates and higher resolution.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:29):
And higher resolution. And so you, it's a digital zoom, which you normally want to avoid. Yeah. But in this case, since they're only broadcast, whether taking a 10 80 p ultimately and then up converting that for broadcast, they can digitally zoom in and not lose anything.

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
There is the upper sky cam is 4k. Ah, I guess they have an upper and a lower sky camm now. Well, some of us, and they're, you know, the pylon cameras, they put a, at the end zone, there's these orange pylons on each end of the end zone. Yeah. So there's four of 'em total. Yeah. Those contain 180 degree field of view 4K cameras. Woo. Wow. And we've seen these pylon shots. Sometimes it's really important to determine whether something was a football was a touchdown or not. Can you imagine the file sizes? Well, and they're wireless. They have to stream it, which is why you never see the PY line camera live in my, in my they don't use it as part of the shot. Yeah. They, they, it's shooting and then they go Quick, quick, quick, quick. <Laugh>, look at that. Did you see how my frame rate in stop there? Quick, quick, quick, quick. Let's get, let's get that in and and then they can show it an instant replay. Right. right. So this is, they're shooting it in an HDR format called H L G.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:42):
Correct. Which is the standard for live broadcast.

Leo Laporte (00:39:46):
And then they'll turn it into HDR 10. Right. Because most TVs and streamers, not Don Dolby vision would be preferable, but a lot of don't support, including

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:55):
Don't support it. I

Leo Laporte (00:39:56):
Think this is Samsung that just refused to support

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:59):
It. Samsung refuses to support Goby vision.

Leo Laporte (00:40:01):
So HDR

Scott Wilkinson (00:40:02):
10. Yeah. They don't wanna pay the licensing fee. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:40:04):
Yeah. And if you have the Fox Sports app or the Fox Now app, it's also an HDR 10. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> over the year. Unlikely.

Scott Wilkinson (00:40:14):
Most. Yeah. Unlikely. Yeah. Although, you know, a TSC 3.0, the new over the air standard is gaining in market share. There's more markets now that have it, and it can do 4K and h d r of one sort or another. So we may very well see this over the air in the next year or two. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:36):
Mr. Scott Wilkinson is the greatest. He is our home theater geek. We're glad we could get you on today for the Super Bowl next week. You could watch his show at the on YouTube, the AVS Forum podcast at youtube.com/avs forum. Any are where, are you gonna put this spreadsheet up in an article somewhere? Or is it just for us? 

Scott Wilkinson (00:40:56):
It's at the moment. It's just for you. I'm, I'm thinking about putting it up on AVS Forum too, but I haven't actually made that arrangement yet. It was re it's really for you, man.

Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
Thank you. God bless you. Five pages. I, I undercounted five pages.

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:09):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:41:09):
It's a, it's a spreadsheet that goes on and on and

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:12):
On. No, I got carried away. What can I

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Tell you? No, I'm not complaining. I'm praising Yeah. I am here to praise you. Color coded for the best discounts. Green is the highest yellow than orange. Yep. and you could choose by manufacturer. And I've retailer and price got a tiny TV in my living room, so I'm gonna have to hit this list. You should have a nice tv. It's,

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:33):
You should have a nice tv, Mikah. Absolutely. When

Leo Laporte (00:41:36):
You say tiny, is it like this big? It's just a little bit bigger than this. This is 42, I think. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:41:41):
I didn't even include, by the way, I didn't even include 40 twos or 40 eights in this list, because the Super Bowl, you want a big tv. Also very important to note these TVs. You can, you can get a 55, 65, 75 inch TV for well under a thousand dollars, but it's not gonna be very good. I want you to buy, if you're gonna spend the money, spend a little more money, get a good tv, that's gonna last you a while and look really good on all kinds of content. And that's why I spec I I focused on not the super cheapest you could get.

Leo Laporte (00:42:14):
Yeah. Yeah. That's, I agree. And by the way, I think that's why shows like the last of us now are starting to look better and better because cinematographers and producers and directors realize, Hey, there's people out there with good TVs. We can make it look as good, if not better than in the movie theater.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:28):
That's right. That's right. Well, thank you for the recommendation for that show. I'm gonna start watching.

Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
It's a little violence, Scott.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:35):
Oh, just a, well, oh, just a word. Okay. There's zombies. Okay. Thank you, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:42:38):
Yeah, it's a good warning. It's not the

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:40):
Puppy. I'm not, I'm, I'm not in, it's not the Puppy Bowl. No. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:42:45):
Scott Walk gets in. Thank you Scott. Gotta get that laugh out of him at least once before we go <laugh>. All right, Scott.

Scott Wilkinson (00:42:51):
Thanks you guys. See you later.

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
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(00:47:14):
If you care about email, pay for it as little as $3 a month. I just signed up again for another three years. I do it three years at time cause I'm so committed to Fastmail. Reclaim your privacy. Boost productivity, make email yours with Fast mail. Try it free for 30 days@fastmail.com/twit. I've been recommending this for years, so glad to have 'em as a sponsor. Please help us by using that address so they know, oh yeah, we're getting people from watching. Ask the tech guys fastmail.comt/twit. You'll get a 15% discount on the first year when you sign up today. At least do yourself a favor. Try it. In fact, I did that toe in. I didn't get rid of my other accounts, right? I slowly moved over, but as soon as I gained confidence and I did that Fastmail was far superior to anything else.

(00:48:02):
I've moved everything over there, including most recently, my calendar and my contact. I don't use Google anymore for that Fastmail. You will love it. Fastmail.Com/Twi. Use that address so you get that 15% discount on the first year. Thank you. Fast mail for supporting. Ask the tech guys. Mike a sergeant. Do you think we should take some calls? We should take? There've been some very, very patient people out there. Let me see who's had their hand up. I love it cuz I could see your videos, some of you and some of you're making faces. <Laugh> saying Pick me, pick me. I wanna see the No, I'm gonna go to Tom. I won't make you do that. I'm gonna go to Tom. Let me move you into the on-air room. You're gonna see I think you're gonna see an invite and when you see it, unmute and say hello. Tom, your microphone is still muted. Your camera. Hello. There we go. Hey. Hey. Hi,

Caller 1 (00:48:58):
Mic. Hi. Hello,

Leo Laporte (00:48:59):
Tom. Hey Tom. Where are you calling from?

Caller 1 (00:49:01):
I'm a live in Chatham, Illinois. That's just south of Springfield.

Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
Nice. Home of the Simpsons? No. Ah, no,

Caller 1 (00:49:08):
It's not. I don't think that's the right,

Leo Laporte (00:49:10):
It's a different Springfield

Caller 1 (00:49:11):
<Laugh>. I think that's Missouri. I think Ifield, Missouri.

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
I I think it's none of the above. I think Matt Graining says like a

Caller 1 (00:49:17):
Mixture. Oh goodness.

Leo Laporte (00:49:18):
Yeah. Yeah. So what can we do for you, Tom?

Caller 1 (00:49:22):
Well, I, it it's my wife Leo <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
We all got one. We got her. Okay.

Caller 1 (00:49:29):
Her iPhone. S e I can't back it up. I I no, it won't back up. It says it's not enough, enough space in the i, in the iCloud. Ah, and there's nothing in nothing in the iCloud. It's an se it's a second generation E.

Leo Laporte (00:49:44):
Yeah. There may be other stuff in there. See? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:47):
So what it's sounding like, you said there's nothing on the phone, right? The you're saying why it won't it back out? There's,

Caller 1 (00:49:52):
I don't have anything. I, the only thing is I have a 10 hour here too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> A 10. I I you have had for years. Do you use the same, I've never had trouble

Leo Laporte (00:49:59):
Back. Do you usually say MyCloud account or different ones?

Caller 1 (00:50:01):
No. No,

Leo Laporte (00:50:02):
No, no. So iCloud gives you how much, what? Five gigs. Free storage and fault. Yeah. It's, and they do that because there's no way you can survive with five gigs. So you'll be paying for more no matter what. Right? Yes. If you wanna back up.

Caller 1 (00:50:13):
Well, this all, I all I back up is we don't back up photos. We have, I have another way to do that.

Leo Laporte (00:50:20):
You can look by the way on the phone and see what's in your iCloud. I think that might, why don't you wanna show them how to do that? Yeah,

Caller 1 (00:50:25):
That was gonna be, oh, I, yeah, I, I know how to do it.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:27):
Oh, okay. Okay.

Caller 1 (00:50:28):
So, and I've never had trouble. This only takes three gigs below.

Leo Laporte (00:50:31):
It should show you though, how much is used, what's using it and why it won't let you back up anymore. It also, you should know this, it doesn't just keep one copy of the three gigs.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:41):
That is where we were going. Yes.

Caller 1 (00:50:43):
There's there's nothing in there right now at all. <Laugh>. It's empty.

Leo Laporte (00:50:47):
Well, then they're live.

Caller 1 (00:50:48):
The, the thing is, I don't know why this, this should not take more, any more than three gigs to to load. Let, let me show all I can show you if you'd like. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:50:58):
I'd love to see that. Yeah. The screen so we can see

Caller 1 (00:51:00):
If we're looking at the same screen. I'm gonna look at here, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to iCloud iCloud Drive. No, no, I'm sorry. Icloud backup.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:10):
Uhhuh <affirmative>.

Caller 1 (00:51:12):
And let me, let me look at the here. First

Leo Laporte (00:51:15):
Of all, she has, she has her own account. It's not a family account. It's not a shared account. Somebody

Caller 1 (00:51:19):
Else. No. This is a separate, see how

Mikah Sargent (00:51:21):
Much zoom there? There's nothing there.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Only 345 K of five gigabytes. Well, you say it's three gigs. Apple's telling you. Okay. It's three gigs for the first backup. But if you're gonna back it up some more, it's gonna be more. I think they're basically, that's very annoying.

Caller 1 (00:51:37):
Here. I'm doing a backup now. You'll see what it says.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:39):
Starts, starts to

Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
Load. It's gonna say it's too much and then

Mikah Sargent (00:51:42):
It'll say, I can't back up. Can't go

Leo Laporte (00:51:44):
On. It's too,

Mikah Sargent (00:51:46):
What is it, what are we, what are we reading here at this iPhone can you'll have to read it to us cuz it's all off the screen there. Yeah, just

Caller 1 (00:51:52):
It says this iPhone cannot be backed up because there's not enough, enough storage and iCloud available. Okay. But it's all available.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:00):
Yeah. So here's what we're gonna do next together. We are going to tap on, we're gonna go back to the main setting screen. Yes. And then you're gonna tap on general. And then Yes. From there you're gonna tap on iPhone storage. Okay. And then you're gonna let that load for a second. It takes a second to load up. And when you do, we'll see right there at the top, it shows iPhone storage and it shows how much space is being taken up. Now you may have thought that, you know, there's not a whole lot on this phone or there isn't anything that we need to worry about here. But when that loads, that might give us a better impression that, oh maybe there was an app that you were using. Maybe a podcast app. Okay. So how much is that? 29.6

Caller 1 (00:52:43):
Gig 29. It says 29.6. But I have, I I've looked in the other spot where you can turn on or off what's gonna be backed up. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and everything's turned off except for calendar. Geez, I'd have to look again. I don't remember. There, there's something goofy going on here with this particular phone that I, I haven't, I've been, I, you know, we have a bunch of I iCloud phone devices in the, in the family and everything. Uhhuh <affirmative>. And I've always been able to get people's phones to back up, except this is the first time I've had trouble.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:17):
So here's what I'm gonna suggest to you. Yes. I am going to suggest that for one time you will, on this phone with this iCloud account, go ahead and pay the, just and bear with me here.

Leo Laporte (00:53:32):
99 cents. 99 cents.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:33):
99 cents

Leo Laporte (00:53:34):
To

Mikah Sargent (00:53:34):
A month up the, the storage temporarily. Do your backup. Uhhuh <affirmative>. And then, and then cancel it. Yeah. Because what I'm thinking is happening here is it's looking at what it thinks it should back up and it's going, that's too much. I can't back it up. But it's wrong. But it's wrong. And then when you get the backup, then you can do what you were just talking about where you say, okay, actually don't back up this, don't back up this, don't back up this. Just back up these three or four things. And then from that point on, you'll know that it's not taken up more than the five gigs. That's free. So yes, it stinks. You're gonna have to pay the 99 cents to temporarily add to it. But at that point, then you'll at least get to do that initial backup and say, actually, I don't need you backing up all this extra stuff. I just want these things. Cuz that's where we're having an issue is there's no way for you to say Yes, please. Back up this. No, don't back up that, because it won't even do the initial backup in the first place.

Caller 1 (00:54:24):
Yeah. Hey, and I, I'm not opposed to moving up the one tier, but I just, you know, it's funny because she has an I iPad too. We both have iPads. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the iPad takes about the same amount. Three gig and it will back up to her. I Oh, it will, no, it will back up to her iCloud account, but then I delete it. But then I'm afraid, I thought maybe you were gonna tell me, I had to reset this to fact. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:54:45):
No, no,

Caller 1 (00:54:46):
That's, and then I, I'd lose my for

Mikah Sargent (00:54:48):
Contacts and everything. Yeah. No, that is the thing that if you call the wrong people, they'll tell you to do. But we're the right people to call

Caller 1 (00:54:54):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Oh no, I wouldn't do that. <Laugh>. But obvious

Leo Laporte (00:54:57):
Obviously there's more on that phone than it says.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:59):
Yes. That's what it boils down to.

Caller 1 (00:55:01):
You know what I just noticed? There's Facebook Messenger was turned on. I'll bet maybe that's sucking up a lot of data. It

Mikah Sargent (00:55:08):
Could. Data, I mean, there's any number of things. If you give that phone a chance to load and you look in. So whenever we went to settings, we went to General, we went to iPhone storage. And you give it a chance to load, look through that list and it'll show, you know, photos has this much space music. There are some of those services that will be part of that iCloud backup. It could be that at some point someone sent your sent your wife a long video or photos and messages

Leo Laporte (00:55:34):
Out. Yeah. It doesn't know.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:34):
It doesn't know exactly. Yeah. And so it's just going, I wanna be able to back up the whole thing. No, and I can't with just a fine. What happened?

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
We used to use iTunes and backup to the computer. Yes. Do you have a Mac?

Caller 1 (00:55:47):
No longer. No longer. I went out, I had a 2012. I got rid of it. I've got a HP laptop and I've got Linux on it cuz it's old too. And I have a Chromebook.

Leo Laporte (00:55:55):
Okay. So there's, yeah, I don't think Linux or Chromebooks will allow you to

Mikah Sargent (00:55:59):
Back up. Yeah. Unfortunately Linux won

Caller 1 (00:56:00):
Windows, but a lot of things I can't do. Windows

Leo Laporte (00:56:02):
Would, but but not so cuz you get IAM amazing for windows or, or Mac and use it for a backup. That was the old way. We used to always back up and Apple, you know, look at Apple decided at some point that ar poo was the most important thing in their business. Average revenue per user. And how do you get more revenue per user? You start charging for like, iCloud

Mikah Sargent (00:56:23):
Every single month. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
And and so I think they decided that, oh, this they probably had a good rationalization. Like, oh, of course we, people never back up to their computer. And when they do, they always have trouble and so forth. But I remember for years that's how we would back up our devices. Start with the iPod, then the iPhone. So yeah. If you had a Mac, okay, you could still do that and probably have a good idea to do that. It'd certainly be more economical to do that. But given that you don't, I I

Caller 1 (00:56:51):
Don't have a, I no longer have a need for a pan like that. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:56:55):
Retired. I'm not knocking it. Yeah, that sounds great. I would just say you're gonna have to pay that 99 cents. Yep. There is another thing to know and I'm not gonna guarantee this, but it has been observed by many that even if you cut back the storage, apple might threaten to delete that backup, but they don't. Mm. So you probably could pay 99 cents back it up

Mikah Sargent (00:57:19):
And they stop

Leo Laporte (00:57:20):
Paying. Yeah. And it would still be there for a little while. I'm not gonna guarantee it. Right. I think it's worth the 99 cents I say,

Mikah Sargent (00:57:27):
Or this is annoying to get that prompt. So, but you know, I pay

Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
The 10, 10 bucks a a month Yep. For the Apple one subscription.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:33):
I've got family to get

Leo Laporte (00:57:34):
All that stuff. And you get a family get two, what is it, two terabytes or one, I can't remember. It's a lot of storage. Yeah. So, but that's, you know, to each his own,

Caller 1 (00:57:43):
Oh, one one final question. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, now her iPad does back up. Okay. There's not enough room for the phone and the iPad to back up. So we normally don't back up the iPad at all. Cuz she just uses it for general stuff. Uhhuh, <affirmative>. But her contact list is in there. And if I ever lo reset the phone, is there a way to get the contact list from the iPad? That's

Leo Laporte (00:58:03):
Also, it's also, it should be backing up and you turn that on to iCloud. Yep. So that's separate. Although it does count against, and this may be what's going on, right. It does count against your total cloud storage, but turn on the, the contacts back up. Absolutely. And the calendar back up to iCloud. That makes it, that's the easiest thing to do. And then if you lose both devices, you still have a copy of your calendar in your contact. So

Mikah Sargent (00:58:26):
Where

Caller 1 (00:58:26):
So I can get the go, I can get the, I can get the contacts back. I'm sorry. Yeah. From the iCloud iPad back up to the iPhone.

Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
It's as long as you're on the same account. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:37):
<Affirmative>. And we'll include a link in the show notes. There's a support guide that shows you how to export all of your contacts using icloud.com, the actual website. So you don't even have to be on the iPad or the iPhone. You can export it as this kind of backup that will be able to open on any contacts app. Cuz it's called VCard. It's a, it's a format that Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I That's good idea. We'll include that in the show notes. You can head there to that Apple support page and it'll show you how. And then, you know, you might wanna do that, you know, once every four or five months or so.

Caller 1 (00:59:04):
Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. Thank you. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:59:06):
<Affirmative>. Hey, thank you for the call, Tom. Yeah. Great questions.

Caller 1 (00:59:08):
Thank you

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
Very much. Absolutely. All the best to our friends in Illinois. I'm gonna move him <laugh> into the special post air room where you can hang out with other post air people. <Laugh> coming up in a little bit. Alex Lindsay has come through. Yay. He has made a video for us. He's gonna show us how to use one of these artificial intelligent image generators to create amazing images he likes. And I think a lot of people agree something called Midjourney. You've heard maybe of Stable Diffusion. There's others, there's apps for your iPhone like Lens. But he likes Midjourney. So he's gonna show us actually one of the most important skills, which is prompt creation.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:49):
Yes. That's where it always

Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
Is. How to tell the thing to do what you want that's coming up. Yeah. People

Mikah Sargent (00:59:54):
Sell those Now. Theys can sell you prompt

Leo Laporte (00:59:57):
Books. Yeah. You can study it in college. Are you kidding?

Mikah Sargent (01:00:00):
Has has that kicked off?

Leo Laporte (01:00:02):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's a, there's college courses to do that I

Mikah Sargent (01:00:07):
Should sign up to be a professor that teaches prompt

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
<Laugh>, prompt design. It's a very wonderful thing. Prompt design. All right. I want to go to Maine and our good friend Mikah, who is a, was a regular on the tech guy show for a long time. He is and, and yeah, aunt, you know him as well. I know he is a a airplane fanatic. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. He does an airplane podcast and we've seen him many times. Mikah, hello. Hey.

Caller 2 (01:00:37):
Hey. It's great to be able to be here with my other favorite Mikah to see you. You,

Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Well, we've never seen Mikah from Maine. We've only heard him, so now we got him. And I can see you welcome to the show. And he's out in Hi. He's outstanding in his field. <Laugh>

Caller 2 (01:00:52):
Actually. Well I am because it finally warmed up up here. You know, it was it was minus 18 degrees the other day. Yeah. But it's, it's up to 33 now. So that's, that's why I

Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
Want to heck you on. Oh my gosh. You're having a heat wave <laugh>, I wanna have you on cuz it was an arctics a snap cold snap in, in New England and it was the coldest it's ever been in the continental United States in New Hampshire next door. So I was wondering how you were doing up there. So

Caller 2 (01:01:16):
We were doing fine, but one of the things that's very interesting is, you know, there's a big push for everybody to move to high efficiency heat pumps. Yes. But, you know, heat pumps don't really heat very well when it gets below zero. Oh. And and they, they, they can work down to, you know, about minus five, minus 10 unless you get very, very expensive ones. And it was minus 18 the other day. I had friends texting me saying, we don't have any heat. Can we

Leo Laporte (01:01:40):
Come over <laugh>?

Caller 2 (01:01:43):
And then they turned on their propane heater, their backup propane heat. And at that temperature, the propane freezes so that you're not getting any vaporization. So it's pot kindly.

Leo Laporte (01:01:52):
Very difficult pot baby. Get them wood. Here we go. Split it. Put it in that pot belly stove. Get that roaring. I lived in a house for a long time and Petaluma here that didn't have central heat. It only had a, a wood burning stove. And we stayed warm. One stove downstairs. We sometimes would huddle around it. Of course it never gets to 18 below in Petaluma <laugh>. I'm glad you survived. Very rarely. I'm glad you survived. Hey, I wanna ask a couple of questions cuz I know you're, and tell us the name of your podcast again so we can

Caller 2 (01:02:20):
Oh, actually I can tell you about two of them. The main one is the Airplane Geeks Podcast. That's been going on for about 14 years. We have well over 750 episodes happening. And it we record every Monday night and it comes out every Wednesday. And always reasonably technical, but always geared to anyone that wants to listen. And very, very popular podcast. Probably the longest Running Aviation podcast out there. And then the new one that I've been doing for about a year with my good friend, Pasan O'Brien, a former associate producer of the Airplane Geeks, is called The Journey is the Reward Podcast. Ooh. And we actually wrote an article for Johnny about this. Brian has been working to get his lifetime one case status with United, that's 3 million miles in the seat. And he's 60,000 miles away right now. He's in Tel Aviv. He's been flying back and forth for about the past 18 months. And he ought to con, should have it completed sometime next month. He ought to be hitting that that status. And that's been a, a fun podcast. A lot more loose with a lot of travel tips and it's fun and just a good time.

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Now do you cover balloons on the airplane? Geek <laugh>

Caller 2 (01:03:24):
<Laugh>. It's, it's funny you should mention that <laugh>. Ooh, we do. And you know, you, the, it took a while to get this balloon down because you can't really just take it down with just, you know, some orangutan with a peace shooter. Yeah. It's really something that's very, very difficult.

Leo Laporte (01:03:40):
Fortunately we have pretty good air to air missiles.

Caller 2 (01:03:43):
Well we do, but missiles work on radar and a balloon doesn't have much of a radar signature. There's

Leo Laporte (01:03:49):
No profile.

Caller 2 (01:03:50):
Yeah. So you've gotta be able to really get the missile directly into the balloon, which is what we actually did. One, one

Leo Laporte (01:03:57):
Shot. It was a beautiful shot.

Caller 2 (01:03:58):
Oh yeah. Very well planned. Yeah. They also had to use the F 22 Raptor because a balloon was up at 70,000 feet. Very high. Yeah. And exactly. Yeah. And the F 22 can hit 65,000 feet. That's its top range in terms of what's published. But you couldn't just use a standard F 16 and you can't shoot it down. This is something that they tried to do in Canada a few years ago when a weather balloon kind of went awry. And an F 16 that cuz it wasn't quite that high shot a thousand rounds into it and it just kind of drifted around, you know, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
Well, what kinda missile did they use then? They must have used it.

Caller 2 (01:04:35):
Well, the missile just, you know, it, it was a, there was no warhead armed warhead on it. It went right in there and just popped and just basically popped it, but it was big enough so that it was a huge pop and brought it down over the ocean, so it wasn't going to Oh, that interesting. Hit

Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
Anybody. That's so there was no arm armaments on it. It just it was just a projectile basically.

Caller 2 (01:04:52):
Yeah. I mean, you can find videos of it and, and we watched them and you can see it's, there's no explosion. Right. Yeah. There's no explosion. It's just, you know. Yeah, yeah. Right

Leo Laporte (01:05:00):
Down. Now does the the Raptor pilot get to paint a outline of a balloon on his plane now? Yeah,

Caller 2 (01:05:07):
That's a good question. We, we were, a bunch of us were asking that and I suspect so. Although it wasn't necessary, you know, it wasn't combat. And I don't know, is it a true <laugh>? Yeah, I, I don't know if it's considered a kill. It's really, it's an interesting question. And well, I I can't wait to find out about it. I wish I could interview that Raptor pilot to be able to talk to him about what the experience was and what the planning that went into it. But I also suspect we won't really ever

Leo Laporte (01:05:30):
Find I, no, it's a little secret. In fact, I didn't, I did hear from, on Reddit, I read somebody said, you know, those raptors have a anti radar paint coating on them that is very Yes, they do sensitive. So they don't get to actually paint outlines of, of

Caller 2 (01:05:45):
Kids. And they are amazing aircraft. They are so maneuverable they can fly sideways. They they can, they can, they can go at angles that are just unbelievable. Just, you know, kind of along like that. And because of their, it's

Leo Laporte (01:05:58):
Such a funny, I've seen do it, juxtaposition of 1950s surveillance technology. <Laugh>. Yeah. I was a balloon with 21st century aviation technology, fighter technology.

Caller 2 (01:06:10):
Well, you know, it's not just surveillance necessarily. The Japanese, when we were doing World War ii, they had a program called fugo, and the Fugo was setting up balloons to drop incendiary devices Right. Over the US forests. Sure. And so th this is it's a pretty interesting concept now. I really think the reason that it took the Air Force so long to get this down is because really this was a Chinese pinata that was filled with egg rolls and they just needed to buy up a whole bunch of duck sauce and mustard. I think that's what it was. I wish

Leo Laporte (01:06:41):
It had been That sounds delicious. I'm ready for lunch. <Laugh>. yeah, I well, I'm very curious. I d it may be that we'll never know because it'll be classified what was what the payload was on that balloon. We may never know what it was, but it sure got the attention of America. It was the number one story on every news network. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> every newspaper. It's good. I guess it's something we could follow in balloon Boy, as long as it doesn't get us going to war with China, I'm okay with that. I

Caller 2 (01:07:08):
Just, and I, I hope that it doesn't, because if the Chinese wanna see something, they're looking through their satellites anyway, so I don't know what this was all

Leo Laporte (01:07:15):
About. Satellites look right up. I mean, it's higher. They're much higher up, but they got pretty good optics on those things. Yeah. I think they probably have as much information as they need.

Caller 2 (01:07:24):
The, the other great joke I heard about it is that somebody needs to write a bunch of Chinese school kids and say very, very sorry about shooting down your weather balloon. Next time you should study geopolitical situations before you launched them, you know? Well, it's

Leo Laporte (01:07:36):
Hard to control a balloon. And it could well be that they, they, you know, they launched it and then it got in the jet stream and, you know, a few

Caller 2 (01:07:42):
Days and, and there's one someplace down in, in, in Latin South America right now as well. There were, were two of them. So, we'll, we'll, we'll learn more Sure as it goes, as it goes

Leo Laporte (01:07:50):
Along. The other story I want to ask you about the last 7 4 7 rolled off the assembly line.

Caller 2 (01:07:56):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:07:57):
A line

Caller 2 (01:07:58):
What purchased by Atlas Air, a wonderful, huge cargo company. I have a friend that's probably going to be flying it sometime soon. Oh, how cool. And yeah, he, he used to fly 7 47 7. I

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
Loved flying in seven 40 sevens.

Caller 2 (01:08:11):
Very, very comfortable. Beautiful aircraft. Yep. But yeah, they're, you know, a four engine aircraft just isn't really that necessary any longer. So the 7 47 and the A three 80 will both eventually be going out of service, but as a cargo aircraft, nothing can beat the 7 47 and we'll be seeing them fly for a long, long time.

Leo Laporte (01:08:30):
It's, it's expensive to run four engines with fuel costs being what they are. Most jets now are two engines. Is that right?

Caller 2 (01:08:38):
Yeah. All, all passenger jets are, are two engines. With the exception. There were, you know, the 7 27, the DC 10, the L 10 11 were tried jets,

Leo Laporte (01:08:45):
I remember. Yeah. They had the tailed jet. Right,

Caller 2 (01:08:47):
Right, right. But now everything that's being made is, is, is twin engine. And and it works since they developed twin engines that could operate for such a long time with EOPS extended range over the, over the ocean. So that they didn't need those extra engines to keep it going so, well,

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
Mikah, did you have a question? I I, I'm taking advantage of our aviation expert, but I, but you could take advantage of us if you want.

Caller 2 (01:09:09):
Well, I wanted to actually tell you a very sad, but also a very funny story offering it kind of as a tip two listeners, because you know how difficult it is to cancel a cable subscription with Xfinity or Yes. You know, or, or whoever charter, whoever it happens to be. I had a horrible thing happen that my, my my aunt, the, the last of my mother's generation finally passed on Monday.

Leo Laporte (01:09:35):
I'm so

Caller 2 (01:09:36):
Sorry. Well, thank you. It, it's, it's very sad.

Leo Laporte (01:09:38):
But how old was she?

Caller 2 (01:09:40):
She was very young from my perspective. She was 85 and yeah, that's too young. That, that, that's young.

Leo Laporte (01:09:44):
The older I get, the younger 85 starts to look. Absolutely.

Caller 2 (01:09:48):
Yeah. Very true. And we used to also call her, she was, she was a young hot aunt, if you know what I mean. She was great. That's, that's what I referred to her up until her dying day. And and she loved it, but she would've loved this story too, because she passed and I needed to ca cancel her Comcast subscription. So I had all her information and I'm the executor and everything, but I know giving that information out, they, you know, they're gonna cause me a bunch of grief. So I just called up with that information saying that I was her, and I said, I need to cancel my account. Did you? And they, did

Leo Laporte (01:10:16):
You change your voice at all?

Caller 2 (01:10:18):
They, they don't question, you know, <laugh>, I'm, I'm not, I'm not gonna say the name, but the name could have been male or female, but that's ok. Ok. You know. Okay. But anyway, so I went through it. And even when, even when I don't change my voice, and I've done this in other situations too for my mother, and it's a different name. Nobody questions it anymore. There was a time when people did not

Leo Laporte (01:10:37):
Say, well, mine lady, you got a pretty deep voice there. No, they're not gonna say that. Yeah.

Caller 2 (01:10:42):
So anyway, so I, and they're going through the whole thing and I, and they said, well, can't we do anything to help you? And we can, we can move it with you. I said, I wish you could move it with me. I said, I'm in the hospice right now and I'm calling. And the doctor gave me two weeks to live. And it's a horrible thing to say, but at that point the guy said, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Let me take care of this right away. Yeah. It worked. And it worked. And I think whenever I need to do this again, that's all I'm gonna say. Uhhuh <affirmative> and I, and I, I, I feel terrible that I had to do it. That, but, and I feel bad for the guy, but if that's what they're gonna do, this

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
Is where they brought us. This is the, this is, seriously, no, they brought us <laugh>.

Caller 2 (01:11:22):
Wow. You know, I'm laughing about it, but it, it's, it's, and it's, it's a little, it's sad that it's come to that situation. You know, that's

Leo Laporte (01:11:29):
Have to, you have to say that. Just to get them to leave you alone.

Caller 2 (01:11:33):
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
We can't, we sure. We can't get you for your last two weeks. The all in one package you should be seeing. Right? Yeah. Hey, I wanted to show you something. I don't know if this is real, but I think it is. This is from our Discord. Our Club TWIT members, apparently that last 7 47 Yep. Flew a pattern as it flew away from Seattle, Washington. The Boeing plant where it was made, that was a 7 47 and then a crown.

Caller 2 (01:12:01):
And do you know why it's a crown? Why? Because a 7 47 is known as the queen of the skies.

Leo Laporte (01:12:08):
I, that's amazing. That is an Amma Now it's a pretty big area that they covered, but still over the state of Washington. That's amazing. They were able to do that. That's that's quite maneuverable.

Caller 2 (01:12:19):
This, this kind of thing goes on every time. Sometimes it's beautiful drawings like this. Sometimes it's drawings you would not put on ago.

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
<Laugh> pilots knock it off. So this is from Flight Radar 24. So I have to think that this is this is accurate.

Caller 2 (01:12:34):
It's, oh, it definitely happened. There's no doubt that it happened. And that's amazing. What's wonderful is that Atlas Airlines obviously chose to do this to celebrate their last delivery. And, you know, it's not a cheap thing to do flying four engines in a pattern like that on their way to Cincinnati.

Leo Laporte (01:12:48):
Yeah. Yeah. Mikah, always a great pleasure. I'm so glad that you found your way to the new tech guy show the Asthe Tech Guys show. And I hope you'll come back and visit us often.

Caller 2 (01:12:58):
Well, it's a great show and it's wonderful to hear you both and it's coming out just wonderful. Thank you. You're doing a great job. Thanks. And I really enjoy it. And it's so nice not to have all the breaks that

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
You used to have. Yeah. 19 minutes of commercials. Although it's a little weird for us, cuz <laugh>, because we gotta, we, we, we gotta keep going. There's no pacing at all. Oh,

Caller 2 (01:13:19):
<Laugh>. I, I get it. You know, I, I, I've, I've done radio, you know, I've I've had to put on the first side of all thing of rather the little knights

Leo Laporte (01:13:26):
And white sat

(01:13:29):
And then you go, it's, you know, you got a whole album side, you go out. And of course I did this very memorably in my mind anyway when I used to work at a radio station in San Francisco called K L O k I walked out the door and as many stations do, ours included the bathrooms on the other side of a one-way locking door so that people can't get into the studio. Oh. Just as we have a shared bathroom. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I went out the door and the door locked, and I'm listening, <laugh> tonight, sin White, satin coming to the end. Fortunately there was somebody in the station when I pounded on the door who let me in. But I can just imagine

Caller 2 (01:14:08):
There are great stories about that, including records skipping <laugh>. Yeah. And because remember back then records. Yeah. You have, there's nothing you can do. You're not there. And had

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
I, I got so bored as a DJ that I, I would wander the studio at this station all the time cuz I was so bored. And, and you know, inevitably the song coming to an End, I am racing <laugh> to get in the studio to start the next song.

Caller 2 (01:14:33):
And sometimes you forget to have the other record queued up. Oh. And so, you know, it's coming to the end and you're trying to queue up the other one and you're doing your back flip. And people don't even understand what that is. You know? Oh, we did both of us. Yep. Yep. And you probably also used to edit with a razor blade in your hand.

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
Sure did. And tape and your grease pencil. Yeah. Mike, and you still have radio dreams, bad dreams of of, of that kind.

Caller 2 (01:14:53):
Oh my God. I don't even want to go into it. <Laugh>. I still do.

Leo Laporte (01:14:57):
I I will. My headphones are all tangled up all around me. The song is running out. I can't cue up the next record. It's funny how that gets in your head. It's such a source of anxiety.

Caller 2 (01:15:06):
Right? You're the only one in the station. It's three o'clock in the morning, you know. Oh God. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:15:11):
Horrible. Mikah. Pleasure. Have a great

Caller 2 (01:15:12):
Day. Great talking with you. Thank you so much.

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
Take care. Let us give ourselves a little time out. What do you say? I like it. And hear from. Actually before we do that, I want to do the the ad and then we are gonna hear from Alex Lindsay who is gonna show us. He's put together a, a fabulous video on how to do your own artificial intelligence images. It's really cool. So cool. But first let's talk about our mattress. I love it. He's got it. I got it. Aunt, you have one. Now we're talking about the eight sleep, which is the most, I think, the most exciting innovation in sleep since the invention of the nightcap. I mean, this is incredible. Good sleep. Of course. Nature's Gentle Nurse, the ultimate game changer. The pod cover, it's the ultimate sleep machine. Now, I know a lot of us like to track our sleep, so this is a great sleep tracker.

(01:16:12):
It's in the mattress. You don't have to wear anything to bed, you don't have to do anything. It'll keep track of your sleep, but it's doing more than that. The EightSleep pod cover works all night long to improve your sleep, so you don't have to even think about it. It fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment. In fact, it'll even do it for you to give you the optimal temperature for the best night's sleep. The pod cover has dual zone temperature control. Lisa likes it much warmer than I do. So each of us sets this temperature for our bed. It can go as cool. And this is great in the summer, our Australian listeners will love this as cool as 55 degrees, which is refreshing. You know that when you, you know how that feeling when you flip over the pillow and it's cold, or you find a new corner of the bed and you stick your foot there and it's cool.

(01:17:03):
That's what this is. Like, the whole bed's like that. It's so nice. But if it's a cold winter's night, if it's Mikah and Maine and it's Arctic temperatures outside as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. And I'll tell you what, that is so cozy. The only negative is you may never get up. You may just say, I'm gonna stay in bed for a while. Now you mind it. It's based on your biometrics, your environment, the room temperature, your sleep stages. So it makes these adjustments. It turns out evolutionarily, Michael, you probably have confirmed this. You did a sleep podcast for years. Yes. I think this is my thought that, you know, we're in the cave. We got the fire, the cave man. Right? And and so it's warm, so we're gonna get in bed, but you know, the fire burns down. You bank the fire at night so it gets cooler. So it's warm when you get in bed. But then you go into a deeper, deeper sleep as it gets cooler. And then in the morning, the sun comes out and you get up and it's a, a brand new day. There's a natural cycle to the temperatures. And that cooler temperature brings you into a deeper sleep. Am I right? You

Mikah Sargent (01:18:05):
Are. So, because we've been humans, modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but only in the last 6,000

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Have we been sleeping inside. Have

Mikah Sargent (01:18:13):
We been sleeping inside? Yeah. So when you think about it like that, of course the sleep wake cycle is going to be completely dependent on the sun and the heat that comes from the sun versus the coolness at night. It all lines up

Leo Laporte (01:18:25):
And it, and, and with the, and there's a lot of studies to show this with, with the eight sleep, you'll actually get more deep sleep. And, and that makes all the difference. That's the sleep. That's cleaning your brain out. Restorative, consistent, good sleep can help reduce the risk of serious health issues. Heart disease, lower blood pressure. It can even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. It also gets you to sleep faster. Minute. When I get in that bed, I tell you what, <laugh>, it's bad. So cozy and, and it keeps you asleep longer and it saves you money because you don't have to worry about heating the house or cooling the house at night. It's much better to do it on in the bed itself. Right. I just love our eight sleep. So does Lisa. I guess you do too. Mikah, I'm not gonna put words in your mouth. You like your eight sleep. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:19:11):
So much <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:19:12):
So much. Aunt, are you happy with your eight sleep? Lord? Yes, Lord, yes. He says hallelujah. Praise the eight sleep. Go to eightsleep.com/twittch. Save $150 a checkout on the pod cover eight. Sleep currently ships Yes. To Australia where it's a hot summer or the US and Canada, where it's a little chilly right now, the UK it's cold. Some countries in the EU as well. Eight sleep. E i g h t s l e e p eightsleep.com/twitt. Get that Good night's sleep You deserve. It is a life changer. The only negative, and I gotta tell you this, when you travel and you're in a hotel and the bed doesn't get warmer and colder, <laugh>, you go, what is this? Am I an animal? This is <laugh>. So hotels start getting those eight sleeps, I gotta tell you, that's the only negative is you get, you're totally spoiled.

(01:20:06):
Eight sleep.com/twi. We thank him so much for supporting the show. All right. We got so many calls. I want to get to everybody, but let's let's see. All right. When we do one more call, okay, let's call before we, before we go to Alex, I really, there's so many great people with their hands up here. Let's say Jeff's been having, has had his hand up for the longest time. So Jeff, I'm gonna move you in. I don't think Jeff. Oh, he did. He has video. He just had it turned off and he's in a beautiful library. Wow. Right. Wow. Room. Gorgeous room. Jeff, welcome to ask the tech guys turn on your mute, unmute your microphone so we can hear you there.

Caller 3 (01:20:47):
He's the perennial mic muting problem.

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
<Laugh>, every zoom call begins with that, right?

Caller 3 (01:20:53):
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:20:54):
Where are you? So

Caller 3 (01:20:56):
I'm in Rio Rancho New Mexico, just outside of Albuquerque.

Leo Laporte (01:20:59):
You don't have to worry about cold weather, right?

Caller 3 (01:21:02):
Not usually. Although it's high desert here. It's, it's actually about 5,200 feet where I live. So it's sometimes gets pretty cold. Sometimes you get a lot of snow and ice. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:21:10):
All right.

Caller 3 (01:21:10):
Not today though. It's perfectly clear and looks beautiful. My solar panels outside are just sucking up the juice.

Leo Laporte (01:21:15):
Nice. Now I have to, you look like you're in a library, but I think this is your own your own library. Yes,

Caller 3 (01:21:22):
Yes, yes. That's my home office. Here's a

Leo Laporte (01:21:25):
Book lover right.

Caller 3 (01:21:26):
Portion of my collection back. There you go. I

Leo Laporte (01:21:28):
Gotta warn you, I always read people's books over their shoulder. Obviously a sci-fi fan.

Caller 3 (01:21:33):
Oh yeah. Got the Neil Stevenson up there and Ted Williams, the whole asterisks book collection.

Leo Laporte (01:21:40):
Oh, wow. Yeah. And what, and, and I see the, the Folgers Shakespeare complete Shakespeare, but what are the magazines?

Caller 3 (01:21:48):
What runway

Leo Laporte (01:21:49):
Next to that? What are those?

Caller 3 (01:21:52):
Oh, those white books. Those are the asterisk books. Oh, the

Leo Laporte (01:21:54):
Comics in French. Oh, yes. Not,

Caller 3 (01:21:57):
Not My wife is French and I'm trying to learn how to speak it. Oh, nice.

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
Yeah, I remember when I was a kid and we went to, went to French. I think they're Bel are they Belgian or they French?

Caller 3 (01:22:06):
I think one of the two original creators was Belgian. Belgian. but they're definitely written in French.

Leo Laporte (01:22:12):
Oh, yeah. And

Caller 3 (01:22:13):
Yeah, I love 'em. It's not it's not too easy for somebody who's trying to learn French at my somewhat advanced age, but it's it's a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte (01:22:20):
Oh, they're great comics. I love asterisks.

Caller 3 (01:22:22):
Oh, they're, they're hysterical.

Leo Laporte (01:22:23):
Yeah. Yeah. He's a he's a a Viking, right? Or he

Caller 3 (01:22:28):
Was a, he was a gall one

Leo Laporte (01:22:30):
Of the right

Caller 3 (01:22:33):
In facing off against Julia Caesar

Leo Laporte (01:22:37):
<Laugh>. Love it. What can we, what can we do for you, Jeff?

Caller 3 (01:22:41):
Well, first I wanted to thank you for many years of listening. Pleasure. And also to mention, I actually saw you in person at the 2002 Cs where you presented the company. I was working for the Best in Show Award. Oh. And I have my little award tech TV still.

Leo Laporte (01:22:58):
What was the company?

Caller 3 (01:22:59):
Yeah, tech tv. The company was Moxie, which you may remember. It was one of Steve Pearlman's companies. And I was I actually accompanied him on the demo videos and or demos to investors and so on to keep the machinery going Yeah. When we were in prototype phase.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:14):
Awesome. That is awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:23:15):
Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:23:16):
I've, I worked in the Valley for about 30 years and I've been living in Rio Rancho for the last three.

Leo Laporte (01:23:21):
So what did Moxie's I think on Yes.

Caller 3 (01:23:25):
Yes. It was bought by Digo, by Paul Allen's company. Ah. And by the way, I worked with father Robert's, sister Melanie at Dig, which Oh, nice. There are all kinds of interesting connections back to you guys. But the, the reason I'm calling you today is because you guys were talking about Daniel Suarez the other day, and as a, as a big reader, of course I've read his stuff, but I was, I was actually turned on to him by you listening to one of your podcasts back in the day when I was working at Ad Bright. And listening to him and his backstory and and and just being reminded of that today, I wanted to let you know that you, and he actually inspired me to write a science fiction novel, which really hope is my first.

Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Oh, congratulations. Oh

Mikah Sargent (01:24:07):
My goodness. I'm,

Caller 3 (01:24:09):
It's been published for a long time, but I, I really, you know, I don't know anything about marketing. So getting it out there and actually getting it in front of people has been difficult. Always the

Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Challenge reviewed for creatives is, is figuring, cuz creatives tend not to be good at promotion. Right. That

Caller 3 (01:24:26):
Is true. We're artists,

Leo Laporte (01:24:27):
<Laugh>, we're artists. So I married somebody who could make twit what it is today. Right.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:33):
I think, yeah, this whole, it's a new wave thing of a creative also being their own marketer.

Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
It's very hard to do. And, you know, Daniel will be the first to say that his wife Michelle, is his promoter. Right. And I think it really takes that, because you're focused on writing and you're not focused on how to get the word out and the publishing and all that stuff, it's nice to get somebody to help you out on that. What's

Mikah Sargent (01:24:58):
Your book called? It's

Caller 3 (01:24:58):
Very difficult. It's, it's called The Prometheus Option. And it's available on Kendall and on Amazon, and you can actually get it in the paperback. It's a big paperback 220,000 words, and it's a high-tech science fiction techno thriller. It's set in the Bay Area, and it's still pretty current, even though I published it in 2016. So I'd be, I'd be very happy if you guys would let me send you a box of free autograph books. Oh, that'd be great. And see if you guys would enjoy them. All

Leo Laporte (01:25:26):
Right. Sure. Don't send too many. Cool. But I think a few would be great. <Laugh> a riveting, relentless action-packed high-tech thriller in the tradition of Tom Clancy and Neil Stevenson. I'm, I can't wait to read it. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:40):
I've added it to my, well,

Caller 3 (01:25:41):
I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys did. It is also

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
Hopeful, apparently free on the Apple Bookstore. If you want to download it. Not

Caller 3 (01:25:46):
Free anymore. I need to update that website.

Leo Laporte (01:25:48):
Okay. Update that. That's exciting. I do wanna read it. And I love the idea that it's in the Bay Area. That's great. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Caller 3 (01:25:55):
So here's my problem. I'm a tech geek. I'm very deep in technical technology, but the thing that absolutely eludes me and kills me is serious suggestions on CarPlay <laugh>. So this is just the most maddening technology in the universe. So here's what I did thank you Mikah, for turning me on to HomeBridge, which I use to connect my vivnt security system to my to my apple Home Kit environment. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:22):
Context. And I

Caller 3 (01:26:22):
Use, don't

Mikah Sargent (01:26:23):
Know, home Bridge is a way for you to take your home kit, well, actually, devices that don't typically work with Home Kit, the Smart Home, and actually use those devices with the, with your home kit setup continue. Yeah,

Caller 3 (01:26:36):
It works well. I can see video, I can open and close the garage doors, and that's the real point. I'm trying to, I'm trying to automate the opening and closing of the garage doors when I get to my house. So, wow. We

Leo Laporte (01:26:46):
Have a, you just a garage. Can you say, Siri, open the pod, bay doors, Siri, and then the garage would open. That would be

Mikah Sargent (01:26:53):
Awesome. That Yeah, if you call them that, if

Caller 3 (01:26:56):
You call, yeah. Now I can do that. I can do that. But the problem is I'm very frequently talking or, or being talked to by somebody in the car with me at the time. Yeah. So pausing to do a voice prompt is,

Leo Laporte (01:27:07):
It didn't take long for my kids to figure out that if I were talking to one of the assistants, they could start jumping in and getting it to do all sorts of things. And it, especially if you're in the car, you don't make me pull this over. Yeah. If you're talking, it's hard. You Siri. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:27:23):
My workaround for that was to use the Apple Watch, and I just used my shortcuts on that. There you go. But it's, I don't wanna take my hands off the wheel, so. Right. I have this I have an older car. It's a 2015 Infiniti Q 70 hybrid, and it has a touchscreen. And I got an aftermarket UN navi CarPlay module, which is pretty cool. It works very well. The problem is when I get close to home and the, the Siri suggestion comes up, Siri has decided that the only garage door that I ever care about opening is my small garage door. Oh, no. Which is, that's where I have my workshop. And so <laugh>, it just always comes up with small garage door. So it's so

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
Annoying.

Caller 3 (01:28:00):
What I have to do, I have to, I have to stop and pull over and tell it verbally or open the phone and tell it I'm not driving, and then open the, the large garage door, and then sometimes it will stick. So the next time I get in the car, when I, when the little series suggestion pops up, it shows me close or open big garage door, which is great. And under iOS 15, it was totally unstable. It would sometimes show up, it would sometimes stop, it would show up when I leave, it wouldn't show up. When I came back iOS 16 I hoped had fixed this, and they did in some kind of weird hacky way. So when you when you get home, you, or when you turn the car on and the CarPlay module starts up, you can see this little card pop up in front of the closed small garage door series suggestion in the lower right hand corner, it's clear that it wants to do the small garage door, which says, well, I really want small garage doors. The door, it's, I love that door. So the, the, the, the open, the, the big garage door button pops up after a while. Sometimes it's immediately, sometimes it's after five or 10 seconds. Sometimes it's long enough for me to start cursing, you know, enough to ize the air inside the car. But eventually,

Leo Laporte (01:29:17):
Yeah. But I'm sure when it happens, it's not, that's frustrating.

Caller 3 (01:29:19):
It's crazy. So I, I just wondered, is there any way to flush the brain of Siri so that it just forgets about that small garage door?

Mikah Sargent (01:29:27):
You essentially want it to be suggesting the other one as opposed to it. So I, I'm curious, have you ever tried tapping and holding on that pop-up that suggestion that comes up to see if you get any context menu because

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
It might give you a choice

Mikah Sargent (01:29:43):
By like a training where you say, stop suggesting this one. No. Yeah. And then see I have that, so that's something to try. I can't, you know, I, I'm not for sure if that will work. But what you can do to, to flush the machine is you go into your Siri settings on your phone and in there you've got, and I'm, I'm reading along with this the show suggestion, show recents. And then you've got a bunch of different options to say, show here, show here, show here, show here. And for some folks it seems like toggling those off and then restarting the phone just and then toggling them on again, refreshes it wood, it's kinda like clearing out your, your spotlight index. Yeah. but

Caller 3 (01:30:26):
Right. I've done that. Okay. So it did not persist, unfortunately. It it, it immediately prompted me with the small garage door again. And then for a while it took it. And then I have, have noticed sometimes restarting the phone from power off situation sometimes helps that problem, but it doesn't always help.

Mikah Sargent (01:30:44):
There's another setting that I do wanna mention. So in on your main settings page, you can scroll down until you find the home app in that main settings page. And there you've got the option to actually have Siri suggest for the app. So let me find the exact wor Okay. So you've probably toggle that off as well.

Caller 3 (01:31:07):
I just, I've, I've gone under there and I, I turned it off and on and I actually turned it off. Repowered the phone, turned it back on, thinking maybe that would help flush it itself.

Leo Laporte (01:31:15):
I just want to point out, this is not an unusual problem. There's an entire Reddit thread, which Scooter X is found. Just wondering if anyone has iOS six beta with multiple home kit garage doors, has seen an improvement in how it's managed, or is there an option to set a preferred door to which the number one comment is, I pray they have addressed this. I think there is, it appears according to Cat two Dev Null, which is actually a useful Unix command it appears it will present the door that was most recently opened through Home Kit or Siri. If you're driving home and it presents the wrong door, you can ask Siri to open the correct one by voice. Pretty crude workaround. Somebody, the same person said, I tried to log this as a bug, but the ticket was closed. Cuz it's a feature, not a bug. Not,

Mikah Sargent (01:32:10):
Oh

Caller 3 (01:32:11):
Boy. It's

Leo Laporte (01:32:11):
A bug. It's a bug. It's a bug. Now, of course you can a bug lose that small door, but you probably don't want to do that.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:17):
Yeah. You still wanna be able to control that one. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
That's how I fix it.

Caller 3 (01:32:22):
You meant just remove it from a home kit and not just get rid of it all together. Just,

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
Yeah, no, don't take the door out, but just turn off that feature. How did you pair it to the door? You must have a, do you have a MyQ or you have a smart garage door?

Caller 3 (01:32:35):
VI security system has okay. It, it just automatically came in as part of the devices and that are controlled by that

Leo Laporte (01:32:41):
And Home Kits saw it. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Caller 3 (01:32:45):
Didn't identify involved

Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
Or anything like that. It just knew.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:48):
Yeah. And then it automatically suggests it. So yes, it's sounding like depending on which one you last open, that's what they're doing. It would be nice. I, I will also submit some feedback just, you know, people continue to submit feedback and say, Hey, we should be able to set a preferred garage door. It's I I, if it was alphabetical then you could just call it a garage

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
Door. Oh.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:08):
Store. But it's not, but

Leo Laporte (01:33:09):
It's not, it's just the last one you used

Mikah Sargent (01:33:10):
It. Yeah. That's what it is. That at least is what it, what they were claiming based on what they've looked up. Yeah. So I imagine that you are regularly using home kits to have the other garage door open.

Caller 3 (01:33:23):
No, I only ever opened the big garage door. Oh. Only ever the big garage door. Did

Leo Laporte (01:33:28):
This get worse with iOS 16? Because that's what this Reddit thread seems to imply that it was working and then it got broken with iOS

Caller 3 (01:33:35):
16. No, it seemed like it, oddly enough, it, in my case, it seemed like it was worse before it was worse. And then when I 16 came out, it came out. Now of course, 16.3 just came out. I installed that and then all of a sudden it's bogus again. So,

Mikah Sargent (01:33:46):
Well, if you're never using it to open the small garage store, just Yeah, I would just delete, remove that one from the home kit setup,

Leo Laporte (01:33:54):
Which

Caller 3 (01:33:55):
Probably

Leo Laporte (01:33:55):
Does. Just to confirm though there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Siri No, please always default to the big garage door. Yeah, yeah. It's just, that's good. Yeah. I mean, this thread, we'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you for finding this Scooter X in our irc.

Caller 3 (01:34:10):
Yeah, thanks Scooter. By the way, I'm geezer nerd in the oh, let's

Leo Laporte (01:34:14):
You Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent (01:34:15):
You's great. Geezer nerd. Great handle.

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
I'm gonna join this CarPlay subreddit because in fact, everybody who uses CarPlay probably should. These, this is, I have to say Reddit is really great for this kind of tech support, this user support because it is, yeah. We're all in this other people

Mikah Sargent (01:34:30):
Together. Exactly.

Caller 3 (01:34:32):
Yeah. But it's more fun to talk to you guys.

Leo Laporte (01:34:34):
Yeah. I'm really glad you called him. Sorry. We have a solution. But yes, it is possible that somebody listening mm-hmm. <Affirmative> has a solution. So and I, you

Mikah Sargent (01:34:42):
Know, I might know a few folks on the Home kit

Leo Laporte (01:34:43):
Team Oh, chat

Mikah Sargent (01:34:45):
Up and say nothing.

Caller 3 (01:34:45):
Great. Something maybe you could suggest to them, maybe you could suggest to them, can we get an app that just let you put your shortcuts in there as buttons? Right. Because I'd love to add that.

Leo Laporte (01:34:55):
Oh, would that be nice? No. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:34:57):
As I'm driving up to my huge estate, I gotta be able to open gate one and gate

Mikah Sargent (01:35:01):
Two, make the fountain start spraying.

Leo Laporte (01:35:03):
That's right. Turn chocolate fountain on. Yeah. Prepare the rotating bed <laugh>. Good. Yeah, I think this is, this is, to me a common complaint these days is that Apple seems to have almost abandoned home kit that they're not moving in. We, at the time when they announced it, we thought this is going to be revolutionary for home automation. It just hasn't moved along in the way it oughta. I think there's still a lot of, I I'm impressed though. You've got so much automated, Jeff, that's,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:32):
Yeah, I think now it's quibbles. Mostly though, I think it's it's a pretty robust plot.

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
It's quibbles and bits. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:39):
Quibbles and bits.

Leo Laporte (01:35:39):
Exactly.

Caller 3 (01:35:40):
Quibbles and bits. So am I. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
<Laugh>. Thank you Jeff. Thank you

Caller 3 (01:35:43):
<Laugh>. Thanks a lot guys.

Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
And we'll, I'm gonna definitely look for your book. Thank you. That's really awesome.

Caller 3 (01:35:48):
Well, I'd be happy to send you guys a box

Leo Laporte (01:35:50):
To send a box. You know, a couple, you know, aunt wants one. Michael, I would love to have one. Yes. That'll be cool. Absolutely. Hey, thank you John. John will want one too. John's a massive sci-fi geek. Before we run out of time, I think we bo we better thank Alex Lindsay for doing this video. He has, I've been, I've been begging him. He's been showing us at the end of every Mac break weekly amazing images that he generates with his artificial intelligence. He's become quite adept at it. And I said, it would be really great if you could give us a tutorial and ask the tech guys watch.

Alex Lindsay (01:36:25):
Hey everybody. This is a quick overview, how to get started in Midjourney. The first thing to do is go to mid journey.com and you'll see this option here. You can join beta sign in. The one you want is join beta. And if you click on that and you have Discord, you will, this will all happen very quickly. It'll say, I'm going to it, and you'll be in the Discord app, <laugh> right into the community. I might ask you to join there. The first time you do it. The community is the first place to start. And what you can do is you can sign up, you know you can, you can sign up with a and do a trial c c trial support. So it'll explain how to do that and, and what's actually going on. You want to start with you know, some of the rules, the faq, these are gonna explain how you get started.

(01:37:05):
One thing to remember is, is that you, and here's the getting started, and this is really good. You just start typing, imagine. And you're gonna get up to, I believe, 25 of these that you can start with. So you can do these for free. And what you're gonna do is go into the newbies area here and you can sign up and start to put in descriptions and you'll see outputs and you'll see other people's outputs at, well now I wouldn't just immediately start doing this. This is how you burn up your free versions of it. So don't start here. What you want to do is go down here and you'll see general down here as well as some of the themed image generation. And in here you're gonna start to see people doing stuff. And what you want to do is start looking at what they're doing here and searching and, and, and really paying attention to it.

(01:37:46):
So you, you look at, you know, generally it's the most important subject starts at the beginning and then a modifier. And then another lessen less important modifier is kind of, most of these go the thing you see here a lot is ar that's, that's dash, dash AR two to three, which means that they want the aspect ratio to be there. And by the way, this little things like spaces make a difference. Like, I'm not sure if this one actually, yeah, this one didn't work. See how these are square and they hit ar it's because they left the space right there. So you gotta really pay attention to the nomenclature of what people are doing here and what, what results they're getting, you know, out of this, this piece. But you can take a look at what they're typing in and take a look at what they got.

(01:38:24):
 And you, and there's hundreds or thousands of these. Some people put in an enormous amount of data in here. I don't know if all of it matters. <Laugh> I will tell you, like, I don't know if all of that matters. But they, they put a lot of it in and they get a result that they expected out of here, and they are producing, some folks are producing incredible results there. But study these things and figure out, and look at what they're putting in, look at what the options are in these, in these areas. And so the, the the aspect ratio is the one I use the most, that use three to 16 by nine, or three to two mostly so that I can, they look nice on a screen. So that's what I pay attention to. But you can go through and look at a lot of these and just to see what you like.

(01:39:03):
And a lot of this is almost a mood board of things that you think are cool. And then look at what they did to get those, and there's lots of them to look at. So spend a little time doing that, then go back up to newbie and try your own. And all you have to do is hit imagine. And then the, when you see prompt, you start to type in what you want there. Now, I'm not gonna bother to do that because I have my own bot. So once you want, decide you want to do this, you can sign up for your own bot. And once you, once you've done that, you get your own bot here. So if I go to my bot, that's the, that's the comu. So this is my bot here. So this is, these, these are obviously wood, chuck's, chucking wood.

(01:39:39):
 I don't really know. It looks more like they're cutting wood here, planning to chuck wood. I'm, I'm not really sure sure, exactly what's going on. But what you can see here is that I did a, you know, I just gave it a basic prompt. I have an aspect ratio. So let's, let's talk about how this actually works. So you go imagine, and then you can say, imagine Leo Laport flying red Dragon. And then you can do put in something like glam lighting, and we'll do ar that's aspect ratio 16 by nine. And we'll hit go.

(01:40:19):
Now what I have here is I have Leo flying a red dragon, and I can decide that I like those. I can, if I hit this button here, it's gonna just redo it all. If I hit one of these top buttons here, it's gonna upscale it. So if I want to see a larger version of Leo here riding this dragon, or I pick one of these ones that I want to, to have him ride I can hit this. And what that's gonna do is start to do what's called an upscale. And so that's gonna start upscale, I think a larger version of it. I could also say, I just want more versions of that and click that here.

(01:40:49):
Riding, riding Horse for some reason, holding what looks to be something here. He's having a great time. Leo doesn't have his glasses on. It looks a little like Leo. And of course you can keep on trying to do these. And, and again, if you start to reseed them, tell them to do another version of it. Do it. And here's four different, slightly different versions of all of those things. And so now it's not gonna be totally accurate. It's doing it from a description here. And so this might not have been the best example. You can also do something like, let's say imagine Leah imagine. Well, you can also do something like grab onto an image. So what I can do is I can actually take an image of I can take an image of myself and I can just put it here and load it in. So there's an image of myself, and I can right click on this and say, I want to copy the link. And then I can ha imagine, and I can paste that link in and say let's see. Writing, let's try this. Writing a Red Dragon glam lighting ar 16 by.

(01:42:04):
So here you can see it took my image, the image that I gave it here, and just started putting me in front of a dragon. Now, why I didn't have me ride it in, I probably needed to say on a dragon. So we'll try again. Imagine me as a Jedi, I knight realistic in the style of manga ar 16 by nine.

(01:42:48):
So here are a couple versions of this, and you can see kind of on the realistic side you know, a lot of different, different looks for me. But taking that in initial photo and building them into a certain look and, and a certain build. And again, if I wanted to see any of those on their own I can actually just simply go in and say, well, I like this. Number three, give me a high res one and maybe give me some more looking like that. So that's how that works. That's the basics of it. You can mix and match styles, mix and match looks. But the main thing is, is that you want to experiment. You want to, a lot of times it's not the first thing, like Dolly, mostly it's like the first thing you get is what you get with Midjourney.

(01:43:28):
You're constantly saying, I want a little bit more of this, or, let's try this, or let's go down. You following the paths, you're going down the paths that you see here of picking new seeds and then scaling up. Some of them, I scale up a lot of them just to see what they look like at full resolution. And so, but, but that's the kind of thing. And you'll notice that your, your seeds will go a lot faster than your up res currently. So that's how you get started. In way to get good at this is first to look at what everybody else is doing and then start doing your own. Now, I will admit that if you like it at all, get the basic one. You know, I think there's like $15 a month that you can get, get started, and then after that you can keep on going. I have, I do these a lot <laugh>. So, and you can come up with a lot of, you know, anything that you start to think of, you don't, you know, you can start to kind of throw in here and have a lot of fun. So hopefully that gets you started and gets you kind of a sense of how this all works. It's definitely worth checking out now while it's fresh and fun.

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
You can see that the real skill. Thank you, Alex Lindsay, by the way, his stuff is amazing. And we, I sometimes use it as our album, Martin on Mac Break Weekly. Yeah, it's one of the hosts of Mac Break Weekly. But you could see that it's really one of those things where you're almost like, you're whittling. You, you, you don't, you kind of, and you could tell he has a lot of patience. I think it's kind of, he does it during the show. So I think it's the kind of thing he has, like office sort of

Mikah Sargent (01:44:47):
Fidget

Leo Laporte (01:44:48):
And he fidgets with it and it gets better and da da it's really amazing experience. As he pointed out. Mid journey's not free. You, if after the first few images you have to pay for it. If you had a really high powered gaming machine, you could download stable diffusion, that's open source and free and then play with it and do almost I mean, pretty much the same kinds of things. There's a lot of settings. It takes a while to get used to that. I had

Mikah Sargent (01:45:12):
No idea you could use an image of yourself with it. I thought that that was a advanced feature that was not possible. He's just popping in an image of himself saying, change this one as you want it. I thought I had to do a bunch of stuff. Yeah, he's,

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
Yeah. So that's something I think Midjourney does better than others. Stable diffusion it. You know, you wanna have a 10 different images and different poses and stuff. It's pretty impressive that mid journey can do that. He also said if, if you're, he said you could just use Leo's name because there's enough pictures of me on the internet. <Laugh>, that's a risky thing. There's enough pictures of me on the internet that you could you could use that. Okay. Yeah, I probably wanna upload, upload those pictures. Hey, geezer nerd Jeff, when he was on, mentioned our good friend Daniel Suarez. I should mention that Daniel's already been on this weekend space. They scooped us. He he is such a fanatic about space travel and asteroid mine. He really wanted to promote and going to Mars. He really wanted to talk about that in a serious way, a non-fiction way on this week, weekends, space.

(01:46:16):
So, listen to this episode, this week's episode of Twists twit TV slash T s, if you wanna hear from Daniel. And then February 10th, which is, is that Friday an, is that Thursday? Is it Friday? It's Friday. Friday at 10:00 AM Pacific. No, 11:00 AM Pacific. 11. We're gonna do a triangulation with Daniel about the new book and about space. And just catching up with Daniel. He's one of our favorite sci-fi authors. He wrote Demonn and Freedom tm. And if you haven't read those books yet, start there. Those were his first two books. And then continue. He's got about half a dozen out now in the latest critical mass. Just came out January 31st. Daniel Suarez will be our guest. If you are in Club Twit, make sure you join us there for it, because you'll be able to ask questions directly of Daniel. Otherwise you can watch it on this show.

(01:47:05):
We're gonna have a little clip of it next week. Exciting. And Saturday, if we have time to get it together by Saturday. Otherwise, it'll be the, the week following. I don't know if the editors will be able to do that. And then and then we will have the full interview on our news, or I'm sorry, our event feed Twitter tv slash events or on triangulation. That's the interview show I've did for years, weekly. We decided not to do it weekly, but just whenever I have somebody interesting to talk to, and this is definitely somebody interesting to talk to. TWIT TV slash T R i for more information on that or to watch that. So that'll be fun on on Friday. Hey everybody, it's Leo LaPorte, the founder and host of many of the TWIT podcasts.

(01:47:47):
I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. Our mission statement at twit, we're dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. That's our audience. And you, I guess, since you're listening, by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. To do that, we also create partnerships with trusted brands and make important introductions between them and our audience. It's how we finance our podcasts, but it's also, and our audience tells us this all the time. A part of the service we offer, it's a valued bit of information for our audience members. They wanna know about great brands like yours. So can we help you by introducing you to our highly qualified audience? And boy, you get a lot with advertising on the TWIT podcasts. Partnering with TWIT means you're gonna get, if I may say so humbly the gold standard in podcast advertising.

(01:48:48):
And we throw in a lot of valuable services. You get a full service continuity team supporting everything from copywriting to graphic design. I don't think anybody else does this or does this as well as we do. You get ads that are embedded in our content that are unique every time I read them. Our hosts read them. We always over-deliver on impressions and frankly are here to talk about your product. So we really give our listeners a great introduction to what you offer. We've got onboarding services, ad tech with pod websites that's free for direct clients. We give you a lot of reporting so you know who saw your advertisement. You'll even know how many responded by going to your website. We'll also give you courtesy commercials that you can share across social media and landing pages. We think these are really valuable people like me and our other hosts talking about your product sincerely and informationally, those are incredibly valuable.

(01:49:46):
You also get other free goodies mentions in our weekly newsletter that's sent out to thousands of fans. We give bonus ads to people who buy a significant amount of advertising. You'll get social media promotion too. But let me tell you, we are looking for an advertising partner that's gonna be with us long term. Visit TWIT tv slash advertise. Check out our partner testimonials. Tim Broom, founder of it Pro tv. They started it pro TV in 2013, immediately started advertising with us and grew that company to a, a really amazing success. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years. And they say, and I'll quote Tim, we would not be where we are today without the twit network. That's just one example. Mark McCreary, who's the c e o of Authentic he was actually one of the first people to buy ads on our network.

(01:50:39):
He's been with us for 16 years. He said, and I'm quoting, the feedback from many advertisers over those 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm proud to say that the ads we do overdeliver, they work really well because they're honest. They have integrity. Our audience trusts us and we say, this is a great product. They believe it, they listen. Our listeners are highly intelligent. They're heavily engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's partly because we only work with high integrity partners that we have thoroughly and personally vetted. I approve every single advertiser on the network. If you're ready to elevate your brand and you've got a great product, I want you to reach out to us, advertise@twit.tv. So I want you to break out of the advertising norm, grow your brand with host Red authentic Ads on twit.tv.

(01:51:43):
Visit twit.tv/advertise for more details, or email us advertise at twit tv if you're ready to launch your campaign. Now a reminder again that we will not be on next Sunday, correct? We'll be on Saturday because of some, I don't know, some thing that's going on on Sunday. I don't know what are we allowed to say it these days? Is that still? Yeah, you can say Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Super Bowl. What you can't do three times it's gonna come right? Super Bowl Super. Ah, you can say it as many times you want. What you can't do is do ads around it or giveaways around it cuz it's trademarked. Oh, but we can say it <laugh>. Now if this gets taken down on YouTube, because I said Super Bowl, super Bowl, super Bowl, I take it all back. Let's get around a Super Bowl.

(01:52:24):
Now you can't do that, by the way, <laugh>, that you can't do, he's trademarked that Happy birthday, the Super Bowl <laugh>. You can do that now. Oh, that's right. Happy birthday's. Public Happy birthday is now public domain. Although Mickey Mouse in the early days of twit for many years you know, we were very nervous about that because we would, you have, they would call you and say, we want royalties. Oh boy, the Super Bowl is coming up. You can't do that, darn it. We got a, a video question in the email. Let's see that.

Caller 4 (01:52:51):
Hey, Leo and Mikah, my name is Alan and I'm from Vancouver, Washington. And I have a question for you. I'm a longtime listener and I'm still listening to your podcast now that you've changed from radio. But I've got a Mac question. So this is probably for Mikah. So Mikah I've got a circa 2014 Mac iMac that I'm needing to replace because it's getting to the point to where it's not gonna be updated anymore, although it's still running great. But I am leaning toward a new Mac Mini and particularly the pro because it has more outputs on it. But my question actually revolves around the sound. So with my iMac, I am used to the good sound that comes out of that mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with the Mac Mini, I know there's not gonna be good sound coming out of it. So my question really is what do you recommend in terms of perhaps a monitor that has great sound with it or another solution that might revolve around some other external device? So that's what I'm looking for is just little advice on if I, if I move to a Mac mini, what I can hope to do for good sound, because that's important to me.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:11):
Yeah, this is a great question. Because we all have different setups with different sound preferences, and depending on what device you get Yeah. You get the whole package, right. And this is not one of those cases in the

Leo Laporte (01:54:23):
Old days Yeah. For the imax,

Mikah Sargent (01:54:24):
You would get everything built in. Now, I'm gonna a so I will tell you how I do mine, and I'm going to tell you do not as I do, but as I say, which is listen to Leo in a moment because

Leo Laporte (01:54:35):
Yeah, I know what you're gonna say.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:36):
What I do is I have a studio display that is connected to the Mac Studio. And as much as I like the all-in-one idea, this studio display has given me so much trouble, particularly with the sound, when it wakes, it wakes great, but when it doesn't, which is too often, oh, then it is, it is troublesome and I end up having to restart it and do all this other stuff. So I would recommend going, and I also think it's just a good idea to not have it all built into the one package so that you can update different components and not spend as much if you choose to make those updates. So Leo, I would imagine you've probably got a good

Leo Laporte (01:55:16):
Size. Yeah, I have much better solutions than that <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:20):
But I understand, you know, somebody's used to the iMac, they love this idea that they had one thing plugged into the wall, plugged in the keyboard, or used the wireless keyboard and the mouse, and then it just worked. And you didn't have to do anything else. I don't think the IMAX sound was all that

Mikah Sargent (01:55:32):
Good. No, it wasn't great, to be

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
Honest. And I don't think the studio display sound is all that good. And it's definitely overpriced. Yes. I think almost So it looks like, and nobody's sure, but Apple really implied that this Mac Mini is the replacement for the iMac. That they're not gonna make an iMac Pro or a larger screen iMac. I mean, nobody knows what Apple's gonna do, but they, they, they really showed this new Mac Mini as if it's instead of an iMac. And actually I prefer it, as you said, I like the idea of having a separate screen, a separate computer, if the computer breaks, you know, if you can get that fixed you don't have to bring the whole thing in. If there's a better display comes out or a better computer comes out, you can upgrade one or the other. So I like separates, it's kind of like the old days of stereos where you would buy a receiver that would do everything, maybe even have a turntable in the lid built in, that's not as good as a component system where you have individual components.

(01:56:30):
And I think it's true for modern sound, you can get good powered speakers Absolutely. That you just plug in to the back of the Mac Mini, either through the headphone jack, or if you wanted, you could get a external device that powered the speakers. I, I would start looking at audio engine speakers. These are very good computer speakers. These are audio file speakers. Hmm. They're very good computer speakers. They have little ones that are relatively inexpensive. I have a somewhat larger size, kind of the audio engine five s with a subwoofer, and now you've got real stereo sound. You, that could be your stereo coming off of your Mac Mini. I think that's a great choice. Now I did order something that we're gonna review as soon as it comes, I think next week. You know the name Creative Labs? You remember Creative?

(01:57:18):
Yeah. They're still around. They're still around. They used to make the sound blaster cards you'd put in your pc. Well, they just released something, four computers called the Sound Blaster X five. Now it's 280 bucks. So this is a little bit more expensive solution, but it comes out of the optical out or the USB out of your computer. In fact, if you look at the back of it you'll see it has a U S B connector in the back as well as outputs optical in and out, u sb in. And it even has these old analog line in line out red and green ca you know, RCA cables. So that's the, that's the back of it. And then the, you can power decent speakers, very good speakers with it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But it's also a very good deck. In fact, what they did that's interesting is they have a dual channel deck digital to analog converter that takes the bits that come outta the usb or the optical outta your computer, converts them into the analog sound that speakers need.

(01:58:21):
So that's what a DAK is. And this one, each channel left and right has its own Dak. Wow. Is that better? I don't know. It's twice as good. I don't know <laugh>, but I think This's a good company. I think Soundblaster a good name. So look, I took the hits so you didn't have to. I've ordered this. I will, as soon as it comes, I'll be reviewing it for you. And I, my idea was to hook it up. Lisa's, she's got the Mac studio and she has been using headphones. Oh. So I got her some nice speakers. I'm gonna set it up with this and some nice speakers. So she'll have good sound coming out now that she does a podcast, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> host Red Ads podcast all about how we do what we do. I thought she should probably have, since she's editing it and all that, he self recording it.

(01:59:02):
I thought you need good speakers so you can hear what you're doing. So we'll have this probably next week they've shipped it. So I'm gonna guess I'll have it next week for a review that. Now this is a little bit of a higher priced solution. This is the sound blaster X five from creative.com. Let me show you though, that my personal favorite, and I know Scott Wilkinson likes these a lot. With that sound blaster, you could run any speakers you don't need powered speakers, audio engine or powered speakers. So the idea is you don't need an amplifier, you don't need anything else. You just hook them up to the back for your computer and they give you good computer sound audio engine.com. And you see they have these little A two s, which would be really kind of a good choice for computer speakers. It's really, you know, this is the A five, which is what I use.

(01:59:50):
It's really up to you. The larger and more expensive obviously is gonna sound better. But these are excellent powered speakers that, that work with computers nowadays. They also include Bluetooth, which means you could drive them from your phone or another device. I probably should have gotten these for Lisa since she likes Bright Red. Might have been a better choice <laugh> for her instead of having to get the D and all of that. But you see there a pair of speakers, 269 bucks, same price as the creative, but you don't need the creative. These hook up directly to the back of your computer and they're powered because they're small. There's, you know, they're not gonna have a huge amount of base. So you, you could, but you could also power audio engine also spells sells subwoofers. So you could pair a subwoofer with that. I think external sound is gonna be a much better choice, but it really does come down to you know, what your years need. Exactly. And if, if you thought that IMAX sounded great,

Mikah Sargent (02:00:46):
You're gonna see an upgrade in any Okay. External, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:50):
Purpose-Built speakers. Just remember that You need powered speakers if you're connecting directly to the computer. If you want to use traditional stereo speakers, I use LACS in my, in my in my office. That sound really good. Those need an amplifier. And for that, you're gonna need something like the creative, which is a, both a d and an amplifier to drive those. So there are a, a number of different choices. You have, do you want to do some some emails? Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:01:18):
You have some emails. Emails.

Leo Laporte (02:01:21):
Because I, I, I want to encourage people, you don't have to just call and sit on hold for two hours on our Zoom. You can also email, ask the tech guys twit.tv. We haven't done a lot of emails in the past, but I, I wanna make sure people know that they can and, and encourage you to use those. And if we have time after we do an email, we'll get to another phone call or two. Cuz Paige and Gary and John and Chris, they're all holding on. And Sal, I see you Sal, applauding <laugh>. Yeah, he's wearing his his what is that? What is that? A those the Indians. What is that? The and there's, and Jeffrey, he's, he's a Texas Rangers guy. Oh no, he's a Tesla. That's a, anyway, there's quite a few guys in there. Hello everybody. Hello. We'll get to you as best we can. But first an email.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:07):
Yes. You get your Amazon purchase screen loaded up so that you can look back at the answer.

Leo Laporte (02:02:13):
I like to look at my history.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:14):
Yes. And the question that is being asked, it comes from David Bernhardt. Okay. or David who writes, hi Leo and Mikah. Can you tell me about the laptop stands you have in front of you on the show? <Laugh>? I've been looking for something better than trying to balance a laptop on my lap or putting the laptop on a desk service on desk surface. Are your stands Free Strand standing and are they adjustable in height and Dicks your chair?

Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
Yes. We love

Mikah Sargent (02:02:38):
These. And do they wobble when you type?

Leo Laporte (02:02:40):
No. No. And you found 'em Mikah?

Mikah Sargent (02:02:42):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
So, but I bought 'em. Yes. So you're right. I, you

Mikah Sargent (02:02:45):
Know, you know where to to,

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
But let me, let's give you a demo. I mean, can you, can you show people how great these are? See, they roll. They roll, they go up and down. They've got

Mikah Sargent (02:02:55):
So many different, they tilt pranks so you can choose how you want it. 

Leo Laporte (02:02:59):
This one's a tool stand. So you can have a little thing on one side. Can you see that? Well, you can't really see that, but you have a little thing on one side and a separate thing. And let me, let me look these up cuz 

Mikah Sargent (02:03:10):
There are lots that are offered on Amazon, but actually find them is not easy. I, because they, you know, they get buried under all of the different records. I

Leo Laporte (02:03:20):
Don't know how you found these. These are kind of chinesey. So that means there may be many companies to sell.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:26):
Right. Exactly. You get them. This

Leo Laporte (02:03:27):
Is two Jung Bamboo, <laugh> medical tilt over bed, bedside table with castor wheels for elderly patients and home care

Mikah Sargent (02:03:37):
Like us.

Leo Laporte (02:03:38):
But, but I had told Mikah, and you see I bought it on my birthday. What I told Mikah is that's what we want. Something that would float over your, the like an arm. So you could have these in bed

Mikah Sargent (02:03:51):
And they lift up too. You know, we have 'em pretty low to the ground. There's kns, there's so many knobs to make adjustments exactly how you

Leo Laporte (02:03:58):
Wanted. But we wanted something that wouldn't, you know, be a table in front of us. Yeah. Take up a so you could see our socks <laugh> and, and something that was kind of like being armed cuz we have arms on these chairs that would reach over them. So you found 'em. And they're very nice. It's bamboo. They look good. They're very sturdy. Mm-Hmm

Mikah Sargent (02:04:15):
<Affirmative> 80

Leo Laporte (02:04:15):
Bucks not expensive. Yeah. So good question. This is, this is the one we got, but, and you know, I think we should do this show from Bed, to be honest. <Laugh>. I would if I could. And I love the fact that they have these dual swivel things. Now it's funny cuz this picture, they've got it upside down. The stops are at the top. You want the stops obviously at the bottom where the Yeah. I don't know

Mikah Sargent (02:04:39):
Why they've put

Leo Laporte (02:04:39):
Them at the top. Whoever took these pictures doesn't really understand what they do, but yeah, I I really like these, I think for 80 bucks and they seem pretty sturdy. Yeah. Burke put 'em together. So I don't think that, I mean, in fact he had to drill holes so that the stops would be at the bottom.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:55):
<Laugh>. That is per, well I mean mine only has holes on one side though, so.

Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
Oh yeah, mine. Oh, I know. Cause mine's a lefty.

Mikah Sargent (02:05:01):
That's what

Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
It was. You're a righty. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:05:03):
So. Well, I'm actually left-handed though. I just don't use it on, but

Leo Laporte (02:05:06):
You're sitting on the Yeah, exactly right side. So you want it to come in from the left mi or from the right mine comes in from the left. That's why. Anyway, that's a long answer to a very simple question. I'm glad you like him. I think, you know, you found 'em and I thought we were gonna have to go through a dozen of 'em. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:05:21):
I mean I did. That's what it, I had to look through a lot and then I came across these and said, oh these look right. We've got another email,

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Ju Jang.

Mikah Sargent (02:05:28):
This one comes from John. John says I'm traveling to the US I'm coming from Canada and I don't wanna have to pay a $12 roaming fee every day. I've got an old Samsung S eight. Is it possible for me to get a US SIM to use to make and receive calls?

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
Sure. You got our sponsor. Mint Mobile. They'll send you a sim no charge. You put it in. It won't work in Canada. It's US only. They use the T-mobile network in US only, but it will work when you come and they're cheap. There are a lot of other providers like that. There's even one that's Canadian. It's owned by two cows called Ting. Oh. And that, but it's for use in the us. I personally like Google Fi now. I think Google Fi is not as inexpensive as it used to be, but I think Mint Mobile is a better deal. But FY also uses T-Mobile and US Cellular. I use them internationally. I mean that's one of the nice things about fi it would work and cost the same in Canada as it would in the US and they'll also send you a sim that you could put it. That light goes out at this time every day. Yeah, I

Mikah Sargent (02:06:32):
Was wondering about that. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:06:33):
Is it on a timer? Oh, I know why. Cuz nobody's wandered in the hall. Oh, ah, oh, okay. Sorry. I got distracted. Li

Mikah Sargent (02:06:42):
Li why aren't shut there

Leo Laporte (02:06:43):
Running around? So mint ting GoogleFi, all of them and many others you will send you and I think they'll send it to Canada, I'm pretty sure. Google will certainly otherwise edit it. Send it to somebody in the US that you can just pick it up when you come. Paige is in our lovely waiting room. Paige, unmute your mic and say hello to the tech guys.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:07):
Hello? Hello, Paige.

Leo Laporte (02:07:08):
Hi Paige.

Caller 5 (02:07:09):
Hi Mikah. Hi Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:07:11):
Where are you calling from?

Caller 5 (02:07:14):
Culver City. Oh, California. Did you

Leo Laporte (02:07:16):
Used to listen to the radio show on K ffi?

Caller 5 (02:07:18):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:07:19):
Absolutely. Welcome. Well, I'm glad you found your way here. I was worried that we would leave some people in the dust when we moved to podcast only.

Caller 5 (02:07:27):
Yeah, it's taken some getting used to, but yeah, I'm here

Leo Laporte (02:07:32):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:32):
Yay.

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
Thank you. What can we do for you, Paige?

Caller 5 (02:07:35):
Okay, so I'm getting fiber internet put in.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:39):
Ooh, jealous.

Caller 5 (02:07:41):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Now I'm trying to figure out which mesh router system to get Uhhuh <affirmative> and I'm two that I've thought of as the Arrow six plus and the Aus Zen wifi. Okay,

Leo Laporte (02:08:00):
Now this is a good question for Mikah cuz he is an hero customer. I

Mikah Sargent (02:08:03):
I'm an hero customer, but I, I am curious, what are you using right now before you've gotten the fiber put in? Because that'll give me an idea of kind of what you're used to in terms of making adjustments and changes to the wifi.

Caller 5 (02:08:18):
I still have at and t Uverse

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
Cable. Oh, okay. So you're gonna lose that because at and t's gonna come, they're gonna gather it all up, throw it in a big box and say the heck with you Paige <laugh>. Bye. Yeah. Okay. So you need it. You need all new gear and, and who's providing the fiber?

Caller 5 (02:08:35):
Ting. Huh? T I N G. Huh? Ting

Leo Laporte (02:08:40):
Probably not related to Ting Mobile, but Okay. Ting, because

Caller 5 (02:08:42):
That's what I was wondering.

Leo Laporte (02:08:43):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. That's

Caller 5 (02:08:43):
Funny. I can't, they do have, they do have Ting mobile, so Oh, maybe it's,

Leo Laporte (02:08:47):
Huh?

Caller 5 (02:08:48):
Possibly.

Leo Laporte (02:08:49):
Okay. So they will provide you with an interface to the fiber fiber's Funny.

(02:08:56):
Yeah. Technically it's not a modem, but yeah, a mo we'll call, it's just like, it's just like your modem fiber's funny. Okay. There's a variety of ways. You can have fiber. You can have fiber to the curb, which means you have to have a box that takes fiber, turns it into ethernet or they may actually have ethernet coming into your house. You know, there's lots of different ways you can implement it, but, but they're gonna provide you with whatever that interface is. Like at and t they're gonna want to give you a router and that modem device because they can do a lot of things well to you that you don't want them to do <laugh> if they have the router. You do want your own router, I think. Yeah.

Caller 5 (02:09:39):
Yeah. So, well, that's,

Mikah Sargent (02:09:40):
Here's my other suggestion. I've, I've gone to Ting and I see that they actually as part of the system, you could get Euro routers for your

Leo Laporte (02:09:52):
Home. Oh, then I would include

Mikah Sargent (02:09:52):
That. So I would, I would totally do that. And you don't need to, you know, do it through Ting, but because they are kind of optimized for use with ero. Yeah. I think it's a good idea to go with the system that they're using. Oh, you're

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
Lucky. Using, so it's in Centennial, Colorado, Charlottesville, Virginia, Culver City where you are, Encinitas. It's in weird little parts of the world. Yeah. That's in Roar Fork, Colorado. Interesting.

Caller 5 (02:10:16):
Putting the fiber in the street was quite amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:10:19):
Oh, you saw them trenching? Yeah.

Caller 5 (02:10:21):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:10:22):
That's good. That means you got fiber to the curb. That's great.

Mikah Sargent (02:10:25):
Yeah, that's gonna be lick,

Leo Laporte (02:10:26):
That's what you want. And what are they costing for? What are you getting and what did they, what does it cost?

Caller 5 (02:10:31):
89 a month? 

Leo Laporte (02:10:34):
Is it gigabit?

Caller 5 (02:10:36):
Yeah, one gigabit.

Leo Laporte (02:10:37):
And is it gigabit? D symmetric we call symmetric where it's down and up? Or is it slower upstream? It's probably 30 megabits upstream. Something like that,

Caller 5 (02:10:47):
You know, that I'm not sure. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:10:51):
Good deal. Yeah, I think that's a good, I think, I think it's a good way to go. Boy. Symmetric would be fantastic. Yeah, that would be really cool then. It, it's worth 90 bucks is an absolutely great deal for that. The reason being, nowadays we upload as much as we download often, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's a lot more traffic coming out of the house than there used to be. So it's good to have more bandwidth coming out as well. I would say if they offer ERO to Euro. Yep. The asus is fine. It's very good. How big, how many square feet are you

Caller 5 (02:11:19):
Covering? It's probably overkill. It's 1500 square feet, but it's an old house with plaster walls.

Leo Laporte (02:11:26):
Uhoh. Uhoh. Yeah. Yeah. Does it have horse hair in the plaster?

Caller 5 (02:11:30):
<Laugh>? It's

Leo Laporte (02:11:31):
Not, not old. That would be pretty old. I asked that because somebody once called the radio show that did have laugh and plaster walls with horse hair in it. Wow. And it turned out those are, wow. Those are pretty hard to penetrate for wifi as it turns out. Wow. plaster's probably. Okay. Depends on what's in it. Metal is the case of death. That's what you don't want. Plaster though. It could go through. It's not, not any worse than drywall. 1500 square feet's a good size with Arrow. You wouldn't need more than a base station and, and a beacon.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:59):
And one beacon. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:01):
And I would put the, it'll help you place it. When you place it. You're gonna put the beacon in the tr you know, on the way to the trouble spot. So there will be some corner of your home that's harder to, you know, get that wifi than others.

Caller 5 (02:12:11):
The thing about Eero that I'm concerned about is that it's app only versus having a web Yeah. Interface.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:20):
Yeah, that's a, that's a fair concern. That has been kind of one of the things that you see a lot of people who use Igo can we at, can we address this? They're, it's a little bit aply in the behavior in the sense of we're trying to make it as simple as possible. We don't want people to get o you know, have it be overcomplicated. And I agree it is annoying to not have the, you know, internet access method to be able to make those changes. But what I've found, even as a power user I have never needed anything that an internet interface would provide that I can't do from the app. So that's, it is honestly not been an issue for me, but I totally get that hesitation. That's a hesitation that I had as well. It's, it's not come up and I mean, if you've got, you know, the, the chops to make all of those adjustments and you're really wanting to dig in and, and I mean you can do all of that still.

(02:13:11):
I, I've opened ports, I've, you know, made adjustments to the way that the I P V six and all that kind of stuff is available via the app. But I know that hesitation that folks have cuz they're going, well, that's just not the way that I'm used to doing things. So if that's so much of a hangup for you, then yes, I think one of the other systems might be great. I just can't provide, you know, that personal recommendation for those because I have had euro and give Euro to my family as well just because it's worked so well for

Caller 5 (02:13:40):
Me. Okay. Well that's great recommendation. Yeah. The other

Leo Laporte (02:13:43):
Question would be, do you have hardwired devices? Do you want ethernet in some places as well?

Caller 5 (02:13:49):
Yes, but I have a switch

Mikah Sargent (02:13:53):
Oh good. That I'm gonna use, see if I can Switches is my hero.

Leo Laporte (02:13:57):
Yeah. So the, so the switches will give you more ports and, but it'll have to be plugged into the base station. Right. Does the Beacon have ethernet?

Mikah Sargent (02:14:03):
So the new ones do. Oh, the

Leo Laporte (02:14:04):
New ones do. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:05):
Okay. Yeah. I, so if you've got an older system where the, the ones that plug directly into the wall, you won't have those extra port. But yes. The new systems, especially the six E version you're thinking about that will have, I believe it's one extra six. Six plus. Six plus. Okay. I, I, that will have one extra port on each of those

Leo Laporte (02:14:22):
Beacons. So you could put a switch on the beacon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> remember though that that switch is connected via wifi back to the home base. Right. But if all of the stuff you want wired is near where the base station's gonna be Yeah. Where the fiber optic device is, I

Caller 5 (02:14:36):
Think for the most part.

Leo Laporte (02:14:37):
Yeah, yeah. Then yeah, you could just run wires out of a switch. That'll be fine. I think the arrows is easily the best way to go. One other thing to keep in mind, and I don't know how Ting does it, but normally Mikah pays $99 a year for Euro plus. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that has a lot of nice features, but it's something to know about. It's a hundred bucks more a year.

Caller 5 (02:14:55):
That's the other thing that the ASUS has it included.

Leo Laporte (02:14:59):
Right.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:00):
So when you say it has it included, what do you get? As, as part of the, the, you get to do like ad blocking and advanced security features with just a's basic system.

Caller 5 (02:15:13):
Yes. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:14):
Well that's interesting thing is

Leo Laporte (02:15:15):
That I think Ting is paying for the Euro pros, right? They don't char they're gonna rent. No, in this case they're gonna rent them to you. No,

Caller 5 (02:15:22):
In this case I decided to buy them. Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (02:15:25):
Myself. So you have a choice. Rent or buy. Okay. I don't think the Aus stuff is as good. Ah, okay. That's very concern. Hero really does a good job. I mean you pay for it. But the ad blocking the adult, do you have kids in the house? You want to control their internet access or?

Caller 5 (02:15:42):
No. Don't need that. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:15:44):
<Laugh> it does a good job. It has a very good parental controls. And, and you know, I think the, you may not need the 99 buck a year. Yeah. Because it's gonna do most of what the important stuff, the quality of service adjustments. Some people are concerned about hero cuz of privacy. That's the other thing. Yeah. the reason they do this through an app is most of it's controlled at the home office and your traffic is, goes through the home office. They know what devices you have in your house. They know who's busy and who's not. That's how they do the quality of service adjustments. But if you're a, if you're a staunch privacy advocate, Euro's probably not a good choice because IRO does have a, a window not into the, I don't think they see all the traffic, but they do have somewhat of a window into what you've got going in your house. Some people don't like that idea. The Aus would not, unless you subscribe to that additional service and then Aus would <laugh> cuz that's a requisite of the service. Ah,

Caller 5 (02:16:40):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:16:41):
Aus is a Taiwanese company. I think they're very good. I think they make excellent routers. I'm a, I'm a big fan of them. They're really powerful compared to the arrows. Euro really knows that you're gonna have beacons so that the base station doesn't have to be quite so powerful. The ASUS is really designed to run without beacons, without secondary. You can get 'em, but you don't have to. It's very powerful. Probably the one you're looking at as looks like a spider, right? It has all those antennas, six antennas on?

Caller 5 (02:17:09):
No, I'm looking at the it has two units. It's a ax, 6,600 XT eight.

Leo Laporte (02:17:16):
Okay. Ax. The six, it's

Caller 5 (02:17:19):
In wifi

Leo Laporte (02:17:19):
Ax means it's 8 0 2 point 11 ax. So the euro would be the more up to date six E I believe

Caller 5 (02:17:27):
Plus, plus six

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
Plus. But does it have six E on

Caller 5 (02:17:31):
It? No, I don't need six

Leo Laporte (02:17:33):
E. Okay. Yeah. You'd have to have devices that supported it. No, this has gotten so complicated. It's too bad. Yeah, I per, if it were me, I'd get the Euro to be honest with you. It just depends on how geeky you are and how much you wanna mess with it. If you really like messing around with it. Yeah. If you wanna do V lands, you know, some more advanced stuff, the is a better choice. <Laugh> no.

Caller 5 (02:17:54):
Okay. And then the other thing though is apparently with the Euro, there's only, and I'm not a hundred percent sure on this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there's only one S S I d I think in the

Leo Laporte (02:18:06):
Yeah. That doesn't separate 5G and 2.4.

Mikah Sargent (02:18:09):
That is correct. So, but yeah, if, if you're worried about getting those devices connected that are 2.4 gigahertz if those devices have modern firmware, if you know you've bought them in the last three or four years, it's likely that they can figure that out for themselves. If you have any devices that can't figure that out for themselves, it's very easy. In, in the ERA app, there's, you go into the troubleshooting steps and it led to you temporarily disable that five gigahertz network. And that worked for me, just for me. Ah, there was only one device in my house where I had to plug in. I ended up plugging in an old Apple airport Extreme in order to get the connection. And that was because I had a printer from 2011 that needed wifi direct, which is hor, or not wifi direct, but what's the horrible system where you press the button and oh, opens everything up and it's awful and it's bad and no one should ever use it. Yeah. I can't think of what that's called <laugh>. But it, it, it's this feature that

Leo Laporte (02:19:07):
Is, I'll say W ps Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:09):
That, yeah. Wifi protected setup. It essentially like opens things up for a moment so you can make the connection. Anyway, my point is that was the only device that I ever had a problem with. Everything else I could use the troubleshooting stuff. Okay. So as long as you don't have wifi protected setup devices in your home, which I don't recommend having anyway the turning off the five gigahertz network temporarily has worked just fine.

Leo Laporte (02:19:31):
Let me just real quickly. The a the AX 6,600 you're looking at, is it the mesh one? The euro, the ASUS mesh? Yes. Okay. So it has, it does have multiple stations. It doesn't have all those spidery antennas effect. They look a lot like, they look

Mikah Sargent (02:19:45):
Like a little air conditioners or

Leo Laporte (02:19:47):
Something. Yeah, I'm not, I am, I'm honestly not familiar with these. I've used many Aus routers very happily. We've got one in the studio as a matter of fact. But I haven't tried their mesh solution. They've been, you know, IRO started this whole mesh revolution. And so everybody including a's had to keep up. I'm very happy with Aus. I, I don't know if I would say it's really comes down to how much control of it you want. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Arrow is designed for people who just wanna set it and forget it. If that's you, then hero's a great choice. Either way you're gonna pay a roughly the same amount of money. I think you're gonna have the same coverage. Asus might be minorly pat more powerful. I might got, yeah,

Caller 5 (02:20:29):
It's probably overkill

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
Though. It it, what? It depends on who you are. You know, I might, I might actually get what I end up doing is going with you Vic, you went

Mikah Sargent (02:20:37):
Oh wow.

Leo Laporte (02:20:37):
Which is crazy. Talk about expensive, but the idea was that, you know I want an absolute control. Yeah, I like it that there's no, I'm looking at the specs for the Asus. There's no subscription fee. I like that. It looks like it has some pretty nice features. I'm just not fam I haven't used it. I'm not familiar with it. I'm familiar with their older gear.

Mikah Sargent (02:20:58):
And I've had, I, I will now say this. I've had a friend and then I watched a video of somebody who was recounting their last year of devices and they name the things that gave them the most trouble. My friend started with Aus routers and then ended up switching to Iro cuz he had so much trouble. The person that was in this video that was talking about all the things that failed them <laugh> and it wasn't, it was not this Aus router, but it was an Aus router. They ended up switching to ubiquity in the end. So I only know of poor experiences that have taken place. So that's why I'm also hesitant to do that. It's not simply because I have Euro and like Euro. It's also because I have heard a couple of people have issues. But again, that's just it could just be that those two

Leo Laporte (02:21:42):
People, Paige. But now you know the way to the show. If you have any problems, yes. Call Mikah <laugh>. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:48):
Yes. I'd love to help you answer your s

Leo Laporte (02:21:50):
Question. I think for most people, hero is the right answer. Absolutely.

Caller 5 (02:21:53):
I, yeah, I think you've convinced me I'm gonna go that route at least initially and all I can

Leo Laporte (02:21:58):
Let us know change and ask Tang if, if I wanna try this for a month, if I don't like it, can I, can I get the Asus instead? Ask them if they have a return policy. And if they do, then that's great. Then I would try, I would, you know, cuz your every home is different. Wifi is such a black art and every home is a little bit different. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it may be the ACEs would work better in your home. If you have any trouble with the Euro, at least you know you have a backup.

Mikah Sargent (02:22:21):
And congratulations on the fiber.

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
That's exciting. I'm so jealous. Yes. Thanks Paige. Yeah, thank you guys very much. Wonderful to have you on the show. I'm glad you found your way here. Hope it wasn't too painful. <Laugh> <laugh> we are outta time. Yes we are dag nabb it. I want to take so many more calls. I apologize to those of you who've been sitting there in the Zoom for all this time. But we will get back next week and we'll answer as this next week maybe. We'll, well we have some fun stuff planned <laugh>. I don't know. We can try to get some, we're doing our best. We're doing our best to get everybody in. But we also want to give you a good variety of content. Remember next week Saturday, two to 5:00 PM Eastern, 11 to two Pacific, 1900 UTC for Ask The Tech Guys just for this one week because of the Super Bowl.

(02:23:10):
We'll be back on our Reg regular schedule in two weeks. Make sure you watch the special triangulation. It's gonna be a lot of fun with Daniel Suarez coming up this Friday. Mikah Sargant hosts a wonderful show for iOS fans along with Rosemary Orchard iOS today. Yes, that's every Tuesday at 9:00 AM Pacific. I don't even know what that time is, <laugh>. I've never been there. I don't, it's a mystery to me. Right before Mac Break Weekly he's also on Tech News Weekly every Thursday with Jason Howell. And I love having him here with me cuz as you heard, he's doing all the hard work. <Laugh>. I'm just sitting here playing. Please join us next week on a Saturday. Please. You can get the show after the fact on the website, twit TV slash atg. Ask the tech guys. There should be two T's but it's too much for us.

(02:24:02):
So we just did ag. Yeah. and you can also get us on YouTube. There's an as, actually I think it's still the tech guy. It's tech Guy Labs, tech guy Labs tech youtube.com/tech Guy Labs. But that's the thing to do, be subscribe. It's the same feed as the old tech guys show. So if you're already getting that, you're already getting as the tech guys, if not look in your podcast client for Tech Guy or Tech guys. It may still be same tech guy, but that's the feed. Subscribe to that. You can still go to tech guy labs.com for our show notes. We will put a couple of things there, Scott Wilkinson's great spreadsheet with all of the TV recommendations and prices. That'll be there as soon as we get the show up and running. You also get audio and video right there on the page if you want to go.

(02:24:42):
Tech guy labs.com and I bet you will take Alex's little piece and we'll turn that into something for our twit bits. Feed Twit which is youtube.com/twit. If you are a club member, we'll see you in the club on Friday. If you're not yet a member, please go to twit tv slash club twit. Seven bucks a month. But I think it's worth it. No ads on any of our shows. Additional shows that we don't put out in public like Mikah's. Fabulous. Hands on McIntosh show. Hands on Windows with expert Paul Throt, the Untitled Linn Show with Jonathan Bennett, the GIZ Fizz with Madman. Dick d Bartolo. There's Stacy's book club, there's a lot of special events. Do you already did the win to Dao on Friday, right, Anne? Or is that coming up this week? That's on Thursday. That's on Thursday.

(02:25:32):
So Wintu Dao the host of all about Android will be in a special Ask me anything with Aunt Pruitt. 9:00 AM Thursday morning. We'll do the triangulation interview at 11:00 AM This is specific time on Friday. All of that for seven bucks. I think it's a great deal. Twit.Tv/Club twit. Most importantly, it helps us produce more content. It helps us keep the lights on and keep everybody keep my dogs fed, happily employed here at twit. Thank you Mikah. Thank you Leo. Have a wonderful week. You know what I want you to do one of these days. What's that? Show me how to program this button on my watch. <Laugh>. That's, that'll be a great one because I think you could do shortcuts on there. Yes. You can make, think of some fun shortcuts we could do. That'd be great. Help. I fell down on the ski slope. I can make it make sounds too, really. You can do like w w oh, that'd be really good. Sad trombone

(02:26:26):
<laugh>.

(02:26:27):
Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time next week. I'd ask the tech guys. Bye-Bye.

Jason howell (02:26:32):
You wanna hear about the latest news happening in the tech world from the people who write the article sometimes from the people who are actually making the news? Well, we've got a show for you here@twi.tv. It's called Tech News Weekly. Me, Jason Howell, and my co-host Mikah Sargant. We talk with some amazing people each and every Thursday on Tech News Weekly, and we share a little bit of our own insights in each of us bringing a story of the week. That's a twit.tv/tnw subscribe right now.