The Tech Guy 1942 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 (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Radio Networks on Sunday, November 6th, 2022. This is episode 1942. Enjoy this episode of The Tech Guys brought to you by Addigy, the only Apple device management platform that combines MDM with live agent capabilities. To manage and secure your Apple ecosystem regardless of your macspertise. Visit addigy.com/twit for a free 14 day trial to see how Addigy helps you manage your Apple devices in real time because IT problems can't wait. And by, Melissa. Over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit.

(00:01:17):
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here, The Tech Guy. Time to talk computers. Yes. The internet. Yes. Home theater. Yes. Digital photography. Smart phones. Smart watches. Space. The final frontier, all that jazz. 8888-Ask Leo is the phone number. If you wanna talk about tech with me, you can call in. Look at that. It's very modern. We have telephones now thanks to that great man, Alexander Graham Bell. And you can I don't know if he would recognize today's telephone, but you can use whatever that thing is to call 88 88. Ask Leo. Now, Alexander Graham Bell when he first came up with the phone was a little puzzled as to how you would answer it. See, in those days, people didn't say hello to one another. No, no, they didn't have that yet. <laugh>. Good day sir. And a good day to you my friend.

(00:02:20):
They didn't have hello? In fact, Alexander Graham Bell proposed that being of a, I guess a nautical bent that you might say a hoy as you would on a ship when you're hailing another ship. But he thought a hoy is maybe not clear enough. So what if we did a Hoy Hoy, a hoy? It could have been ladies and gentlemen, instead of saying, Hey, hey, hey. How are you today? I could have been saying, Oh ho hoi ho hoi <laugh>. oh, Hoi hoi. Now Apple, confused, I guess, about what you should call or how you should call their voice assistant Siri.

(00:03:11):
See, one of the problems when you have a voice assistant, This happened to us last night. We were watching a show. My wife and I enjoying it. We hadn't gotten around to watching the new Jack Reacher yet. She was admiring Jack Reacher's <laugh> physique. I was trying to follow the mystery and for some reason, Amazon's Echo decided to chime in with a long winded explanation of something no one asked her for. And then when we shouted, we used the A word, we don't, you can call it Echo Alexa. Oh whoop, I said it. A L E X A is very flexible. In fact, I have one of mine at home is his name, Ziggy. You can use Ziggy hay. Ziggy you can use the A word. They don't do a hey, right? They just do the, And actually the choice of these words is fairly important because if you choose too common a word what happened to us last night will happen all the time.

(00:04:11):
Does it happen to you? I have see in my home as part of being the tech guy, this is kind of one of the disadvantages. I have to have them all. So every room in the house has both an Amazon Echo, a Apple Siri, and a Google Voice assistant. All three everywhere. In fact, the kitchen <laugh> has Sonos too. So <laugh>, you can wake up a variety of voice assistants. Sonos wants you to say, Hey Sonos. Google wants you to say, Hey, Goog, Amazon. Just the name of the word. And by the way, you can have it Melissa. If you use Melissa was it Melissa McCarthy's voice?

(00:05:01):
You can have it be Samuel L Jackson. You call, Hey Samuel. You can say echo computer, which is not a good choice, by the way, I tried that for a while. I keep going off here in the studio. It did again, but I haven't muted <laugh>. It's listening right now. You could say the A word Siri is just Siri. There's no other name for it, which is silly cuz I remember we had a phone, the Moto X, this is six or seven years ago that you could tell it what you wanted. The wake word. That's what these call these things. The wake word to be in. In my case, on this Moto X I made it long so it wouldn't trigger accidentally. I said, I don't want you to wake up and help me unless I say "help me Obiwan Kenobi" I figured how often is that gonna happen?

(00:05:54):
Actually, it turns out more often than one would think. But it was a good one. One, right? Many syllables unique. Doesn't sound like anything. Jack Reacher might be saying, I like that. Now that phone could do it. Why can't all these other devices seven or eight years later be smart? So Apple made it Hey Siri, hey Siri. Cause that's three. I hope I am not waking anything up. It makes me mad. They do it on the football games and it drives me crazy. They finally, they changed it. They used to say on sports, Hey, you know who? And I think they realized that was annoying fans. So now they say, just ask Siri. Well if Apple gets their way, this is according to Mark Gurman, there won't be anymore. Hey, it'll just be Siri. Which is a big mistake. Apple has been working. This is crazy. This is crazy. Apple has been working on this feature for the past several months working on it. What's the work? You just take off the hay <laugh>. How hard can that be? <laugh>? Wouldn't it be nice if you could change? I don't understand why you can't. Apparently if it takes 'em four months to take the hay off, there's something going on. I don't understand. It's expected to roll out, get this next year or in 2024.

(00:07:25):
Well, I guess I won't hold my breath. I hope they don't do this. I think it's a terrible idea. Apple has to put in a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work to get it to work better, to have longer, Can I just say Apple? Knock it off. It already wakes up way too often and now they wanna make it really frankly easier. Oh, that's because they wanna keep up with Amazon, which only makes you say the A word, but a word is three celebs. A L E X A <laugh>, huh? Anyway. And huh? syllables. And so I think it's good to have more syllables. And of course you with Google, well, it's also three Cel Abels, okay? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. It's a problem for me. Not only this show but all my shows. I do a bunch of podcasts during the week because we wanna talk about these things. We can't say the phrase cuz it'll trigger stuff.

(00:08:33):
I think everybody should be allowed to have their own. I really do. Well anyway, Apple, it's apparently a difficult computing problem cause Apple's been working on this for months and it's not gonna be ready until next year or maybe the year after. Oh, yay. Okay, fine. <laugh>. Okay, you can call me. Well see. Hey Leo. That would be okay. I just think it's better to have it be whatever you want. Cause people would have fun with it, right? Somebody said Jeeves, let it be called Jeeves. You know, like Jeeves. Hey Jeeves, That'd be good. Should be longer though. I really like help me Obiwan Kenobi. I know that feels like a lot of words. I just like it. Notice I haven't said one word. <laugh>. It's funny to watch on Twitter people who are avoid trying to avoid getting noticed by the dark one. Instead of saying Elon, they'll say L no, <laugh>.

(00:09:42):
Oh that's clever. He'll never <laugh> catch on to that. We're still waiting for the other shoe to drop my deepest sympathies to all the folks who work at Twitter who are outta work. Apparently half of them, you still, It's nice cuz Lno has given you two months to find another job. Well that's cuz of a state law that require the warrant act, which requires notice with a, you're gonna do lay off half the team and well, he can't really give him notice cuz he just bought the company last week. So he's gonna give him two months but don't come into work. In fact, he locked the doors on Friday locked. He said, Don't come in, don't. I don't wanna see you here. So my sympathies to all the folks who work at Twitter HQ and all around the world, I'm unfortunately this show used to be broadcast in San Francisco where Twitter HQ is. But they laid off the entire staff at the station <laugh> a couple weeks before. So I guess I'm just, it's all fallen on deaf ears. It's the way of the world, I guess. Nowadays. 88. 88 Ask Leo is the phone number? (888) 827-5536. Let's hear from you from anywhere in the world. You can also visit our webpage if you want more information. Tech guy labs.com. Your call's next.

(00:11:14):
The company's begun to reach out to some people at laid off asking them to come back. According to Casey Newton. What a train wreck. Huh? I mean look, I, it's probable that Twitter, in fact, even Jack Dorsey, the former CEO said Yeah, we grew too fast. Probably there's some people who possibly were redundant, but you can't know that in a week. Should we call him Lno from now on? I don't know how you would know that in a week. Not by looking at how many lines of code they produced is a great historic piece in the I think Andy Hertzfeld wrote it or it was Lno. Yes, I know. I think that's the joke. John <laugh>

Kim Schaffer (00:12:22):
20

Leo Laporte (00:12:24):
<laugh>. He says, Hey Leo, Lno rhymes with lno. Really? Hell no. Oh hell no. Al no. Has it been coming for months? Do you think the audit's been going on all that long? Do you think that when Elon came in as Perros going, he says, Here's a list of people we were gonna fire. No, I don't think so. I don't think so.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:03):
Oh my God. What <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (00:13:05):
Oh my God. What

Kim Schaffer (00:13:07):
The people we have on the phone? Yeah. We're only missing Chris as your staple guests. If you look at the list of the two top people.

Leo Laporte (00:13:18):
Oh wow, that's cute.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:19):
Too bad. The third one's not Chris

Leo Laporte (00:13:22):
<laugh>. That's cute. We have a Rod and a Sam <laugh>. We just don't have a Chris. Hey everybody, it's time to call <laugh> our candy girl. Did you see that Aaron Carter passed away?

Kim Schaffer (00:13:46):
Yeah, that popped up well while we were doing the show yesterday. Yeah. And he sang a candy song.

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
Candy. Ah la candy. Yeah. Bump, bump, bump, bump bump. 30 something, 34.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:58):
Very young. Drown in a bathtub.

Leo Laporte (00:14:00):
Is that what

Kim Schaffer (00:14:01):
Happened? That's what I heard. So

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
You who? Same Whitney Houston. Whitney Houston drown in the bathroom and

Kim Schaffer (00:14:07):
Her daughter

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
And her folks take showers. Take showers

Kim Schaffer (00:14:12):
And don't do drugs and drink and then get in the bathroom.

Leo Laporte (00:14:14):
<laugh>. Okay. That's probably good advice as well.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:17):
It's sad. Or a hot tub for that matter.

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
Or a hot tub. Yeah. So boy that really brought me down. I don't know. How about you <laugh>?

Kim Schaffer (00:14:27):
You brought it

Leo Laporte (00:14:27):
Up. I did bring it up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You know me, I have the attention span of a squirrel.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:33):
Oh, I was gonna say Nat, but

Leo Laporte (00:14:35):
<laugh> and Nat even less. Yeah. If all you have to do is float something by my eyes and I'll go, Hey, what about that

Kim Schaffer (00:14:42):
<laugh>?

Leo Laporte (00:14:43):
I think it advantages you in some respects, if you're a radio host and you have a short attention span,

Kim Schaffer (00:14:48):
But then you move off topic so quickly.

Leo Laporte (00:14:51):
Yeah. Well isn't that good? We want that. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I forgot to go to radio school. I'm sorry. I don't know. So I who So Kim, I should introduce. I do know that ladies and gentlemen, Kim, she is our phone Angel. She answers your calls when you call 88. 88. Ask Leo. And I like to say hi to her because she's in another room and I never really get to talk to her. So Hi.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:13):
Yeah. I don't get to flail in front of you like I used to. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:15:17):
Yeah. We used to have a setup where I could flail in front of the window, see you on the other side of the glass. Which is how most radio stations have it. Yeah. And so if you want my attention, you could wave now. I can't. It's fine. I can't see a thing

Kim Schaffer (00:15:28):
Better for you <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:15:30):
Well, remember I have a very easily distracted, I actually have to tell people don't come in the studio when I'm talking cuz I'll go, I'll fumble, I'll, I'll fool around <laugh>, right? Alright Kim, let's

Kim Schaffer (00:15:46):
Go to Rod in la. But not that Rod.

Leo Laporte (00:15:48):
Yeah, it's funny, Kim was noting we have a rod and a Sam on the line. All we need is a Chris. Chris. And we'd have the, but not that Chris, But not those people, other people. Rod's coming up our space guy Rod pile. third hour Chris Mark wrote our photo guy Samal seminar car guy. But right now it's the other Rod from Los Angeles. Hi Rod.

Speaker 3 (00:16:09):
Hey, how you doing Neil?

Leo Laporte (00:16:10):
I'm well. How are you?

Speaker 3 (00:16:11):
I'm doing okay. I'm actually calling to follow up on a conversation we had about a month ago. I had a Western digital, my passport hard drive that stopped working, stopped being recognized. And a couple of, I guess you and a couple other people in the chat room talked about this newer tech universal drive adapter. Yeah it's USB bear drive adapter. I found one on Amazon and purchased it. And when I got it, the problem is none of the connectors on that thing actually connect to this. My passport.

Leo Laporte (00:16:45):
We have to open it up. I did. Oh, okay. And since, so inside the My passport, What? The passport is a USB drive from Western Digital. Western Digital makes hard drives. So they're always looking for new ways to sell hard drives. This is one way to do it, put it in a USB enclosure and then it's an external drive. But inside there, this is just a regular bear hard drive you'd have for a computer. The problem is there are all sorts of kinds of hard drives. In fact there, the adapter, you got many people sell it. I use the one from newer tech will fit SATA drives and will fit the old a tapi slash IDE drives and will fit laptop drives. But maybe there's something else in that Western Digital. What does it look like?

Speaker 3 (00:17:29):
Well, and the only thing that looks like a separate connector is a little kind of it's like flat on the end. It's got six looks like copper connectors.

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
It sounds like a SAT connector.

Speaker 3 (00:17:43):
Yeah, but I mean newer tech said it was good for none of the connectors work with it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:49):
Huh? I wonder if they have some sort of weird proprie <laugh> proprietary thing in there.

Speaker 3 (00:17:59):
Yeah, it's possible.

Leo Laporte (00:18:02):
Somebody in our charm twisted Mr. Says, yeah, Western Digital does this to prevent doing what you just did. Which is not a great thing because you wouldn't do this unless you had a reason to get into the drive and you're trying to access a drive. Cuz it seems to be damaged trying to figure out what's gone wrong. Do me a favor, and this isn't gonna help the radio audience, but if you said you were in chat, you could post a picture there. We we'd like to see it and then maybe we could figure it out. The A SAT connector is a little square thing and I'm wondering if that is a sata. Sounds like it's a SATA connector, but that should work with the nortech and it doesn't fit, huh?

Speaker 3 (00:18:49):
Yeah, no, nothing. There was nothing in the newer tech that <laugh>. Yeah, I tried to just put 'em all together and nothing really kind of works. So.

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
Right. Let me see here. There's here's from the Western digital community. Oh, I see this connector. Oh that's interesting. So WD 2.4 portable USB drives do not have standard data. They use a USB interface so they don't Oh, that's interesting. So all the USB circuitry actually on the drive. And that's interesting. So I'm looking to picture, I don't know if it looks like yours. Are you seeing our video or no?

Speaker 3 (00:19:34):
I'm sorry. Where's the

Leo Laporte (00:19:37):
I'm putting outta my video at live dot twit tv, but I'm guessing that's what this is. So now what do you do? I wish I'd known. I'm sorry, I apologize, but you

Speaker 3 (00:19:47):
That's okay. I mean

Leo Laporte (00:19:49):
Newer tech is

Speaker 3 (00:19:50):
A useful Be surprised when I open it

Leo Laporte (00:19:51):
Up. Yeah, it's a useful thing to have. This is a terrible looking connector and it looks like it is in fact proprietary which means you won't be able to probably buy an interface to it. It's very weird looking. It also has additional pins, which makes me curious. You pull, is it a metal projection that's coming off? Can you pull it off?

Speaker 3 (00:20:17):
No, I mean it's pretty much part of the, It's

Leo Laporte (00:20:20):
Part board there. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:20:22):
I'm trying figure if there's anything else I could do to take this apart anymore than I already have. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
No, if you unscrew those screws, you'll be opening up the drive and then truly ruining it because air, it's, you don't want air to get in there. Well, you don't want dust to get in there. Actually air does get into there. I see these. Are there other pins? I see other pins in this picture I'm looking at, Are there other pins? Yes.

Speaker 3 (00:20:45):
Okay. I see it in and it looks kinda like, see where the six pins are there. Although with the one that I have, there's plastic flush to the end of those things.

Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
Oh, interesting. Yeah, it sounds like it is unfortunately. Thank you. Western Digital Proprietary. All you could do at this point is go around to the forums community.wd.com and other places and say, Is anybody got an adapter for this? I'd really like to get into it. I think it's USB three. You'd really like to get to the bear drive, not the usb. That's the key Sam bull samma car guy coming up. Boy, that's annoying. Increasingly companies do these kinds of things and it's just not friendly. <laugh> not a friendly, they're saying in the chairman it's a USB three. I'm looking at it. I'm trying to see. So there, yeah, no, the one I'm showing, the one I'm looking at is, it sounds like not the same as the one you have. It's not a micro USB connector or something like that, right? No. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:21:59):
I mean it's similar actually to what Apple. Like the apple, the kind of roundish sort of, and the newer Samsungs are.

Leo Laporte (00:22:08):
That's really interesting.

Speaker 3 (00:22:10):
That's the

Leo Laporte (00:22:11):
A type C. It's like a type C. Well it might be a type C. Yeah, that's it. If it is a type C and you might try just plugging it in <laugh>, see what happens. It could be just a type C connector I guess. I'm not sure why they do this. So that means the enclosure has no circuitry at all. It's just a box that you put it in to keep the electronics away. So you might plug a type C in and see what happens. It wouldn't hurt it. Chat rooms kind of has all sorts of thoughts about this, but not familiar with it. Sam, you said you have something like this

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:51):
Sam? Yeah, I've got one right here. Oh, where's my video not showing up here. There we go. Start video. Yeah, I've got one right here that I opened up recently that failed on me. And that is the USB three micro connector. So the smaller port in here is a standard USB micro and then there's the extension. Decide they sold these for a number of years. So you could plug in a USB micro, A

Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
Micro USB cable

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:19):
Cable to the one side and you would just have USB two speeds. Yeah. And then if you have the extended cable, it'll give you the faster USB three speeds.

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
So I don't think you care about the speeds so much. Rod you just want to get your data off it. The problem is USB hides a multitude of sins. So for instance, spin right? Can't really do everything it wants to do. You kind of wanna see the drive without the USB interface on top of it.

Speaker 3 (00:23:51):
Yeah. Cause that's exactly

Leo Laporte (00:23:52):
Why I opened up mine. That's why you open up and take it out. Is it this kind? It's not this kind of cable yeps. The one. Oh, okay. That's the USB three kind of cable. Okay. So you could plug that in and you'd get data off of it, but you wouldn't get around the USB interface. And that may or it's worth a try. But I suspect you're gonna have exactly the same result that you would have with the enclosure because it's the enclosure's not doing anything. Enclosure's just keeping dust out and keeping you from touching the circuitry and stuff. So yeah, you'd like to kind of get to SAT somehow. I wouldn't throw it out yet. Maybe we'll come up with an answer. But it sounds like you have a US USB interface to it. It's really those pins sticking out are probably a SAT interface. Yeah, That's why when you have pins connector. Yeah, if you could get the right, get a connector. The newer tech doesn't plug in pins. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:24:59):
Like I said, my pins don't actually stick out. They're actually encased in a black plastic.

Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
Yeah, they're really trying to keep you from doing what you really want to do. That is so annoying.

Speaker 3 (00:25:08):
And it is about three

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
Years old. How vital is this? Cause if it really is vital, you can't go to drive savers. They'll have have solved this already, but it'll be expensive.

Speaker 3 (00:25:18):
Yeah, well I mean it I've gotten some quotes from three to $400 in Well

Leo Laporte (00:25:23):
That's not too bad. That's not too bad knowing they're not gonna have to open it. They just have to access the data. Yeah. Thanks Rod. I don't have an answer for you, but thank you for calling and that's a very, I appreciate it. That's, I'm glad you've added to my database. I'm adding that to my database. I will no longer tell people open it up.

Speaker 3 (00:25:42):
Well, especially if it's one of these Western digital my

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
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Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:33):
Sam. Perfect combination.

Leo Laporte (00:30:34):
Perfect combination. Especially this time of year. I bet you got the Miata

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:38):
Actually. Actually not yet cuz it's like in the mid sixties today. So after we're done, I'm gonna go take the me for a drive. The sun is shining. Oh fun. I've taken care of most of the leaves. I just

Leo Laporte (00:30:52):
Saw your

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:52):
Picture here out of the gutters.

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
It's pretty, pretty, pretty, Yeah. Nice time of year in Michigan. If it's not freezing. So what do we wanna, It looks like you're in front of a lucid there.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:02):
So I have a lucid air in the driveway right now. Oh I'm so jealous. And I've only got it for the weekend. Excuse me. Lucid sounded over because they wanted me to check out the new UX two point. So when I last drove the lucid back in September when I was out in California I noticed some issues with the software. There was some lagginess and at one point it locked up on me. The whole infotainment system locked up. And a couple of weeks ago, about two, three weeks ago, they released an all new version of their software. They basically did a almost complete rewrite on it and they also added some new features and they call it UX 2.0 for user experience 2.0 And they wanted to give a chance to try it out. And so the car was delivered on Friday morning. And what I actually wanna talk about first is something that is not uniquely a lucid issue. It's actually a more general issue across the industry. One things you may have noticed over the last several years, the last decade really is cars having bigger and bigger wheels and less and less tire. I know, I hate

Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
That.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:12):
If you see the picture over my shoulder, you can see that's not much sidewall on those tires. A

Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
Thin strip of rubber is what? A 27 inch wheel? It's huge.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:22):
No, it's a 21. Okay. So I mean it's not the biggest wheel out there but it's pretty big. But it's a very low profile tire. And traditionally one of the components of the suspension, by

Leo Laporte (00:32:34):
The way, folks in your car, if you're watching the video, he's not talking about the van over his right shoulder. The lucid van. Yeah, he's talking about the sedan over his left shoulder. <laugh>. Yes. It's a very important distinction. I guess the van dropped off the car I guess.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:49):
No, actually it came to deliver a new tire and a wheel.

Leo Laporte (00:32:52):
Oh, now we are gonna hear the story.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:55):
Yes. So one of the things about when engineers are designing the suspension of a car, the wheel and tire is an important component of the suspension because obviously it's the interface to the road. But the tires as they're rubber and they're pneumatic, they have some compliance to them. So when you're doing all the calculations and figuring out, okay, what is the effect of spring rates, DAMing rates of all this stuff. So how is the car gonna feel going down the road? The tire is a crucial component of that. And tires, pneumatic tires that is a tire filled with air is designed to have some give to it. So when you go over a little frost eves and bumps in that it's

Leo Laporte (00:33:34):
Most

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:34):
Of them bend yes. But as you make those sidewalls shorter and shorter and make the wheels bigger and bigger, there's less and less compliance there. Do

Leo Laporte (00:33:43):
They do this for styling or is there some practical engineering reason for this?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:48):
It started off as an engineering thing. They started going to larger wheels in order to accommodate larger brakes because you know break cor rotors have to fit within the wheel. So back in the late eighties or late seventies, early eighties, they started going from 14 to 15 to 16 inch wheels and then 17. And the main purpose was to allow for bigger breaks. But then they just kept on going <laugh> and making them bigger. Bigger

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
Because people said, oh that looks cool

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:21):
Cause it looks really cool when a designer is sketching this up. But it's actually not that functional cuz the bigger wheels are heavier. They make for worse ride quality because you've got more unsprung mass. And it also makes them very susceptible to damage from the road surface if you know have a less than perfect road surface, which we've been known to have here in Michigan and in a lot of other places. I mean frankly you're part of the world there. The roads are not always ideal.

Leo Laporte (00:34:53):
Call pet pothole city. So I always have chosen smaller the smallest wheels I could find. Cuz I thought also tires would wear better than

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:05):
The smaller. That is generally true.

Leo Laporte (00:35:07):
And is the ride better?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:09):
The ride will be better because you've got more compliance from the tire itself. The tire's got more give to it. So

Leo Laporte (00:35:15):
I don't care how it looks. I want it to be functional.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:17):
Yeah, I mean it's a balance. If you go to too tall a side wall, then there's also more sideways compliance. So your handling's not gonna be as good. My wrap name only too tall.

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
Sidewall. I

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:28):
Just thought <laugh> go ahead and And also you're breaking performance and acceleration performance isn't gonna be as good cuz you've got more too much compliance. So it's a matter of finding the right balance. But I think designers have gone a little bit too far on a lot of vehicles. So this particular lucid has the optional 21 inch wheels. Nineteens are standard. Okay. So what happened was I went out to dinner with my wife on Friday night and we were coming back and I hit a pothole, which I've driven down that street countless times over the years. And then I start, a few seconds later I started hearing a hissing sound. I said Ah, that's not good. And so I stopped and the hissing sort of slowed down and I went again and the hissing picked up and so I stopped. I got out and I looked and I saw the left front tire was going down mean to the degree it could given those short sidewalks.

Leo Laporte (00:36:28):
<laugh>. Another thing, a flat you can hardly tell

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:31):
<laugh>. Yeah. And then the tire pressure monitor came on. So I got it home.

Leo Laporte (00:36:38):
Here's the question and this is irritates the heck outta me. Does it have a spare?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:43):
No it does

Leo Laporte (00:36:44):
Not. My car doesn't have spare

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:46):
EVs don't

Leo Laporte (00:36:46):
Drive me crazy. Why not?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:48):
Yeah, wait be weight. And also one of the things they've done with EVs, because the motors and everything are so small is they've pushed the axles out to the corners, which helps to give you more interior space. But it also means that there's less room to no room to package a spare. Usually in the back of the car they

Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Give me the mock comes with a kit to put goo in the top,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:11):
An inflater kit,

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
Which will ruin if it's a big hole, it's purposeless cause it won't patch a big hole. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:16):
It's fine. It's fine if you pick up a nail or something like that and

Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
It can ruin the wheel.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:21):
<affirmative>. So I reached out to Lucid let him know and the fleet management company that delivered the car said, Hey, if you got a spare wheel, if not, you're gonna need to send a flatbed when you come to pick it up on Monday. Cause flat. Oh Lucid called the mobile service unit that is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is about two and a half hours away from me. But they came out on Saturday morning and brought another wheel and tire and put it on. So that's good. But my main point in all this is if you're buying a car or a truck and there's an option for larger and larger wheels, don't go for the largest one. Go down a size or two because you'll find that your car or truck or SUV has a lot better ride quality. It'll probably handle better may not look quite as cool but the tires will be a lot more durable when you encounter the inevitable imperfections in the pavement. And it's just better overall to do that. I did that when we bought our Honda Civic. Instead of buying the civic sport with 18 inch wheels, we went for the seventeens on the trim level just because I didn't want what the roads are like around here. I didn't wanna risk too much tire damage.

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
So you didn't get to drive it that much

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:45):
You Well actually, I mean they replaced the tire yesterday, the tire and wheel yesterday. So I went out driving this morning for a couple of hours we should mention and I shot some video that I'm gonna send over to Anthony.

Leo Laporte (00:38:55):
Lucid is one of these new car companies that's making EVs only and it's a luxury vehicle. But

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:02):
That's a fabulous car,

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
Is it? Oh

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:04):
Yeah. Oh yeah. I love it. But it's very expensive.

Leo Laporte (00:39:07):
How much?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:08):
154,000 for the one That's my

Leo Laporte (00:39:10):
Driveway. Oh you get a BMW I seven for less than that. Wow. Yeah, that is pricey. Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:15):
But I seven's not as pretty.

Leo Laporte (00:39:17):
No, it's got the big eyes.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:19):
It doesn't have as much

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Range. The robot eyes, <laugh>, Sam Will, Salmon Principal Researcher Guide has Insight and our car guy. Thank you Sam

Speaker 5 (00:39:29):
<laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:34):
I drove the I seven this

Leo Laporte (00:39:35):
Week. Was it nice?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:37):
It's really nice, but it su like many modern cars, it suffers from creeping feature. I,

Leo Laporte (00:39:42):
Yeah, boy, sounds like it. But so as you know I have till February, 2024 to buy a new car cuz my lease runs out. Then I could just have the buyout option on my mock so I could just buy it. Which is probably gonna do anyway even if I resell it cuz I'll make money. I'm sure. But I'm wondering, given the demand free EVs wondering what I'm gonna buy next. I'm not gonna spend $160,000 on a car though. No, but I want Luxury vehicle. I miss, Miss my Audi, my

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:15):
A eight. Yeah, well there is a lower cost version of the air coming. They're gonna be announcing it I think later this week called the Pure Edition, which should be priced around $87,000 to start.

Leo Laporte (00:40:29):
That's a little better. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:31):
There's also the Cadillac lyric, which user 34 27 just mentioned in the chat. The lyric is really nice, a crossover. It's about similar size to the Maee. but definitely it's Cadillac. Much, much more luxury.

Leo Laporte (00:40:45):
That's my problem.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:48):
So the Lucid Air Pure is definitely a good one to look at. If you want a sedan, I would also definitely take a look at the BMW I four. Oh, okay. The I four is it's a little bit smaller. It's not as big as the A eight or the air but by the time, by early 24, I think sometime next year we will also have the BMW I five which is the new five series is coming pretty soon. And there will be an electric version of that as well. Might

Leo Laporte (00:41:21):
Be, I think by 2024 gonna be, almost every car will have an electric version

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:27):
Or most of them there will be a lot of more electrics. Yeah, well they're gonna have some too. They're finally starting to they finally figured out their problem that was causing the wheels to fall off the BC four and so they've got that sorted out. Oh good. Yeah. Varchar is asking Am I gonna buy an EV for my next car? The answer is yes, probably. Almost certainly we will The Miata is staying with me until I drop, but our Honda Civic is five years old. We usually keep our cars for five to 10 years and so probably in about four or five years we'll be ready to replace that. I mean it's only, it's got less than 30,000 miles on it. And so when we're ready to replace the Civic we'll almost certainly get an EV at that point. I like not having a car payment, so that's why I'm not rushing out to buy one right now. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
Lisa says

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:26):
Just a lot of there, just

Leo Laporte (00:42:28):
Buy a bolt or an EV and save that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:30):
Money.

Leo Laporte (00:42:31):
Those great we're pole.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:33):
Yeah. And next year next fall. Next year Chevy's bringing out the Equinox.

Leo Laporte (00:42:39):
I like the of the Equinox. That's nice.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:41):
Yeah. And that's gonna be priced starting at about $30,000. So that's also gonna be a really good option if you don't want something really huge. So there's a lot of new options, A lot of new choices coming out in EVs might be, will stick to his Honda Accord. Hey, if the Accord is working for you's, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Go forever. Great car. Yeah, they

Leo Laporte (00:43:05):
Go forever.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:06):
Yeah. And I mean that's why we'll probably keep our civic for at least another four or five years. There's no rush to replace it right now. It works great. We love that car. And so I

Leo Laporte (00:43:20):
Just, not going to stations, I really have to say I really

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:23):
Enjoy. Yeah, no,

Leo Laporte (00:43:24):
Enjoy that.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:26):
I hear you. And when I do have EVs or plug in hybrids to drive, it's nice to be able to just plug 'em in and not have to deal with that.

Leo Laporte (00:43:36):
Start the day with a full tank. Can you stick around for the top of the hour? Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:39):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:43:40):
We'll talk in a few. Does anybody really know what time it is though? I mean, that's the question. Is it 11? Is it 10? Is it <laugh>? Is it noon? Is it three? I don't know. Leo LaPorte, That's a good song to play on the day we return to standard time people. You might remember that the Senate passed a bill last year. I think it was last year. Maybe it was this year, sometime some distance of ago saying let's just be daylight saving time all year round. But the house didn't, so I don't know why. I don't know. So I think we're gonna be set in the clocks. Actually, you may remember from years past, every six months I'd go on a tirade about what it Yeah, Mike B's already saying, Here comes Leo's DST rant. Yes, but I've mellowed in my old age. Cuz I realize if you're in a northern most ips, Salanti or Oregon or Washington state or heaven for Fen can, Well Canada, I guess they're on their own time.

(00:44:56):
Alaska, There you go. That if you don't change the clocks, you're getting up in it's dark at 10 in the morning or 11. So I understand, I understand. I'm, I'm not unsympathetic to that. We can get you Look, we're very adaptable. I don't know, I think I'm gonna drop the rant. I don't care anymore. I guess that's it. <laugh> arranged my life so that I don't have to be to work till 11 o'clock in the morning. My time Ever. <laugh> that Once in a while some tech company will have an early morning event like Microsoft. I'm looking at you, Microsoft and I will have to get up earlier and be at work at seven or eight. Not happy about that. But most of the time I don't have to be here. 11. So the heck with it, you guys can worry about it on your own. <laugh>. Is that, that's selfish, isn't it? Yeah, it is. I don't have a, I guess what I'm saying is I don't have a clock in this hunt or something. 88. 88. Ask Leo now. Let's see. I think we did Rod. So let's do Sam in Alameda, California. Hi Sam.

Speaker 6 (00:46:10):
Good a Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:46:11):
Good a How are you mate?

Speaker 6 (00:46:15):
I'm, I'm doing okay.

Leo Laporte (00:46:16):
Good.

Speaker 6 (00:46:18):
Leo. The exact time. Pacific daylight time at this moment is 1149. Oh 6, 0 7, 0 8.

Leo Laporte (00:46:24):
That's what White clock says too, isn't it nice. We used to have to go around the house and change all the clocks. At least we don't have to do that anymore.

Speaker 6 (00:46:32):
Yeah, well there's a website you can go to, which is time.is.

Leo Laporte (00:46:37):
Yes. Or time.gov. There's quite a few of these. Yeah,

Speaker 6 (00:46:41):
Well time.is, I don't know anything that does it as well as that.

Leo Laporte (00:46:45):
I'll try it. Time is I get it.

Speaker 6 (00:46:48):
Well time.is.

Leo Laporte (00:46:50):
Yeah. Oh, look at that. Yeah. And it says my clock is ahead by 1.9 seconds.

Speaker 6 (00:46:56):
Well it's, mine says that my time is exact.

Leo Laporte (00:47:00):
Your computer's supposed to check and send. It does, but Windows apparently has decided to take the day off

Speaker 6 (00:47:08):
And Well it does sometimes. It's not always. You see it exact.

Leo Laporte (00:47:12):
Yeah. Yeah. Well this is good. I like it. I will use this time dot ias and it knows your time zone. So it does it right now. See my Mac. That's interesting cuz my Mac says the time is my time is right. But Windows is a little

Speaker 6 (00:47:31):
Off and of course you can try it on Android as well. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:35):
Sure. Should work on everything. But that's the nice thing is our devices now are very good about getting the time right, which I like.

Speaker 6 (00:47:42):
Yeah, yeah. And of course we're still on Pacific daylight time for another few hours.

Leo Laporte (00:47:50):
Wait a minute, you're in Alameda? No, you, What do you mean Pacific Daylight time? We're in standard time now, aren't we?

Speaker 6 (00:47:56):
No, not yet. Not till 2:00 AM tomorrow morning.

Leo Laporte (00:48:00):
Well then what time do you think it is right now?

Speaker 6 (00:48:03):
1150 and 49.

Leo Laporte (00:48:06):
You didn't set your clock back an hour last night?

Speaker 6 (00:48:09):
I didn't need to. Windows did it for me.

Leo Laporte (00:48:15):
Okay. What can I <laugh> now I'm very confused. But you're saying that we don't actually enter standard time until tomorrow.

Speaker 6 (00:48:22):
2:00 AM tomorrow. 2:00 AM on. It was on.

Leo Laporte (00:48:26):
Yes it was. It was Sunday this morning. 2:00 AM We entered it. We're in SA standard time.

Speaker 6 (00:48:33):
I don't think so. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:48:35):
Well

Speaker 6 (00:48:35):
Are we okay? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:48:37):
I think we are. That's why we set the clocks back. <laugh>.

Speaker 6 (00:48:39):
My paper calendar says you're right. November the sixth.

Leo Laporte (00:48:43):
Yeah. I think we already did it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame you for being confused in Australia summertime practically so.

Speaker 6 (00:48:52):
Well in the eastern states it's Australian Eastern Standard time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:58):
Are you from the east or the west?

Speaker 6 (00:49:00):
I'm from the Central

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
Airs rock area.

Speaker 6 (00:49:05):
That's right. The same time zone anyway. Yeah

Leo Laporte (00:49:08):
It's a big country.

Speaker 6 (00:49:11):
It is. Yeah. I'm just got an Adelaide clock here somewhere. I'm just, I've got too many icons on my desktop.

Leo Laporte (00:49:19):
<laugh>. You must have family down on there, so it's probably very confusing.

Speaker 6 (00:49:24):
It is true. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:49:25):
<laugh>.

Speaker 6 (00:49:26):
No, it's not normally confusing. It is now that I'm talking to you for some reason, but

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
I've confused you and I apologize. But I do that to people and I'm so sorry.

Speaker 6 (00:49:36):
I was wrongly. You got it

Leo Laporte (00:49:38):
Right. No, it's okay. I had already set the clock so it was too late for me. What can I do for you today? Well,

Speaker 6 (00:49:44):
I'm a Windows guy. Yes

Leo Laporte (00:49:46):
Sir.

Speaker 6 (00:49:47):
And I've got two Windows machines. One of them is a Lenovo laptop. Yeah. They're a low end one and the other is a Lenovo desktop. And the desktop is a great machine and it, it's very fast. It has a Intel processor in it. Let me, and I did have it up

Leo Laporte (00:50:13):
Here. Oh, I don't need to know the make. What's the issue?

Speaker 6 (00:50:16):
Well, there's no issue with that. Oh, what I want. I've been a longtime user of True Crypt and I know the story. I know the story.

Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
It's gone. Yeah, yeah. Sad to say. Yeah. It's kind of a mystery. We'll never know exactly why the guy who does Truecrypt decided to

Speaker 6 (00:50:34):
Stop. That's true. And I know Steve Gibson is very keen on

Leo Laporte (00:50:37):
It. Yeah. We've talked a little bit about, there's some conspiracy theory that he decided he didn't wanna be in the encryption game anymore and there's some conspiracy theory that maybe the feds had asked him to modify his code somehow or something like that. For whatever reason, true crypt ended, it was open source and Vera Crypt, V E R A C R Y P t took the true crypt, the last known good True Cryp code and updated it version.

Speaker 6 (00:51:05):
Version 0.7 0.1

Leo Laporte (00:51:07):
A. That's right. Nowadays, I recommend, if you want a true kryp like program, it'll do both files, folders, and your whole disc and V E R A C R Y PT dot

Speaker 6 (00:51:21):
Good. I know. I know of it. I've never got it. Good. Yeah, but I use True Cryp in the container file mode.

Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
As long as you use the version prior to their last <laugh>, the true Cryp guy announced, Don't use <laugh>. The last version

Speaker 6 (00:51:40):
Seven point, I thought 7.1 A was, Okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:45):
Well yes, I think you're right. Don't use 7.2 I think is,

Speaker 6 (00:51:48):
Well one of them is only good for D decrypting.

Leo Laporte (00:51:54):
Yeah. Which is good, right? It's good to offer that because people might have used

Speaker 6 (00:51:57):
It. Yeah. If you ever get stuck. But here's my real question is the follow Yeah. Following. Yeah. My previously mentioned laptop machine comes up with a message saying it's not suitable for Windows 11, not compatible with Windows 11. And my desktop says it is and I don't want it to automatically update. I seem to remember there used to be a program. It

Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
Will not. Okay. So first of all, if Microsoft says it's not compatible, that means you have a blocker. That's good. It won't force it down your throat. You can't, without taking great steps. Install Windows 11. Windows 10 is supported by Microsoft until 2025. So there's no issue about that,

Speaker 6 (00:52:43):
But I can't see how to stop it happening automatically.

Leo Laporte (00:52:45):
It's not gonna happen automatically.

Speaker 6 (00:52:47):
Well, okay, if you are sure of that, that's what I'm calling about.

Leo Laporte (00:52:53):
So

Speaker 6 (00:52:54):
To me it looks to me it's keep, when I look at

Leo Laporte (00:52:56):
The, Well, it might harass you. <laugh>. Yeah. Can using group policy, you can block it forever but if it's saying you're not getting it because there's something with your system, then I wouldn't worry about it. It's not gonna try to do that. I'll give you some choices though in the show notes. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy. Yeah. If it says it's not suitable, it not only can't you do it it yourself, it won't do it automatically. You don't have to worry about that. Thank goodness. Thank goodness someone did. Someone got an electric vehicle. That's what someone did. Now I bring you Samal, Sam and his Lucid Tire

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:42):
<laugh>. All right. So Eric Dunman earlier in the chat saying that he loves his hybrid and that's a great thing. Hybrids are a fantastic option for somebody who, for really EVs don't necessarily make sense for everyone just yet. Depending on what your life circumstances are, where you live may not be convenient to plug in an EV to drive an ev. And so a hybrid is a fantastic option to save you a lot of money on fuel. It's much more efficient and nothing wrong with continuing to drive a hybrid for the foreseeable future. Redacted talked about tubeless tires, in fact was referring to non pneumatic tires. So this is a concept that's been around for a while. I think Michelin first introduced it in the mid two thousands, probably somewhere around 2006 or seven. They introduced a concept called the Twel that basically instead of a traditional wheel and tire, you have a wheel that has flexible polymer spokes and they're usually angled, so it's got some compliance like a tire does, and then a rubber tread around the perimeter of the thing.

(00:55:04):
So it's all one, basically one piece and they've been working on continuing to develop it but or consumer vehicles, it's not quite ready yet. It's still a little more costly a little more the performance is not quite up to par yet, but these are being used fairly commonly now particularly for off-road vehicles because since they're non pneumatic, you don't have to worry about puncturing them when you drive over sharp rocks and things like that. So a lot of off-road vehicles, four by four, like these quads and quad cycles and side byside are available or offered with these non pneumatic tires now. And there's a few links in here in the chat. A couple people dropped in links I did to a Bridgestone page. And so those types of vehicles were primarily using those non pneumatic tires. Now then Lum Luka was asking about an EV with seven or more seats.

(00:56:14):
And this is an interesting category. Obviously there's a lot of larger SUVs, three row SUVs out there with six or seven seats in there, or eight in some cases but there's not a lot in terms of EVs in that vehicle form factory yet. There's the Tesla Model X is available with third row and the Model Y, but those are pretty cramped in that back row but there are a bunch of EVs coming in the next couple of years that fit into that category. Ford is gonna be introducing an Electric Explorer in 2024 as well as an electric Lincoln Aviator. Hyundai is gonna have the Ionic seven, which is their three row suv. There's also the Kia nine that is coming, both the Ionic seven and the EV nine concept versions that give it a hint of the design of those were shown last year at the LA Auto Show, and we may be seeing the production version of those that coming up next week at this year's LA Auto Show.

(00:57:28):
Then let's see, user 34, 27 mentioned some Mercedes EQs SUV that is also a three row, although the third row again in there is pretty tight. It's kind of minimalist for a third row. I think Lou's looking for something probably a little bit bigger than that. And so there will be if you're looking for a full size suv, like a Ford excursion or for Ford Expedition Chevy Tahoe size vehicle we will be seeing electric versions at least of the Suburban and Cadillac Escalade coming probably the 24 25 timeframe. Jeep is also gonna have an electric battery, electric version of the Wagoner coming and the Wagoner is quite large. So if you're looking for a three row SUV that really has room for using all three rows, especially if your kids are getting older then might hold off until 20 probably. I think the Wagoner I think is probably gonna be a 25 but 24, 25 timeframe, we should start to see some of those larger three row SUVs.

(00:58:49):
So those will be I think, particularly useful for what Lou is looking for or anybody else that's got a larger family. Let's see. Dr. Mom, Grandma says yep, the third row is only suitable for small grandchildren. Yep, pretty much. Let's see, Rachel says, What do you think of the Mazda MX 30 with rotary extender? Rotary sounds like the perfect application for this. Quiet, smooth, small, efficient, think I'm in love. Yeah, I mean I think that's gonna be a really interesting one. I've driven the MX 30 the current version, which is just battery electric and it only has a hundred miles of range. It drives really well. It drives like a Mazda and it's quite fun to drive, but it doesn't have much range. And Mazda is planning a version of it with a range extender using a small rotary engine like in the old RX seven. And that is an excellent application for a rotary engine because it is so compact and power dense. It's easy to package in a vehicle like that. The question is, we don't know if they're actually going to offer it here in North America.

(01:00:01):
Mazda's been a little cagey on whether they're going to bring that to the US market. It probably will be offered in Europe and in Japan, but North America maybe not so much. Let's see. Web oh 8 9 1 says I bought a Pole Star in May car's, beautiful, but has to spend more time in a pole star repair facility because of software issues than being driven by me. Oh, that's unfortunate to hear Web I have not heard of any major software issues with the Pole Star too. I've driven several of them now. I actually had one last week really like that car but not sure what's going on with the software issues. Actually, the one software issue that I have noticed with that is more so I know that there is an issue with software with charging with certain types of home chargers. I know that the Pole Star two will not charge with my home charger.

(01:01:04):
My charger, it's electron charger level two charger works with every E plugin vehicle I've tried except for the Pole Star two and the Volvo XC 40, which is the same, essentially the same car different body. But I know there, I've talked to Polestar, they know there's an issue there with that charger and a couple of others, but they haven't released an update for that yet. Redacted S what about the new VW OUTTA sync? I'm not sure what that one is. I know there's the ID buzz that's coming in later next year. It's already on sale now. A two row version of the ID buzz is on sale in Europe now. A three row version is coming to North America next year. That's a little bit bigger and we'll have more range than the European version but not sure if that's quite big enough for what Lou's looking for.

(01:01:59):
He says yeah, the Escalade is big enough. Wagoner as well, but these are all overpriced. Yeah, that is true. The Wagoner, there's two, there's the Base wa, there's a standard Wagoner and the Grand Wagoner. The Grand Wagoner definitely can run up well over a hundred thousand dollars. The base Wagoner starts, at least the gas version right now starts about 65. I don't know where the EV's gonna start. It's probably not gonna be less than 70 though. And let's see, Lemme check the time here. Yeah, we're 30 seconds left here. Yeah. Okay. So I will hand it back to you, Leo, and I'll talk to you next.

Leo Laporte (01:02:38):
Sunday. Thank you, my good friend. All right, Will see you soon. You too. Enjoy your El Lucid <laugh>. All right, bye. Thanks. Why? Hey, how are you today? Or should I say? Oh, ho, ho, ho. Leo LaPorte here, The tech guy. Time to talk about, well, tech computers, the internet, home theater, virtual reality smartphone. Smart watches. Smart vehicles. 88. 88. <inaudible>. The phone number. (888) 827-5536. From anywhere in the US or Canada, outside that area. You could still call, but you have to use Skype Out. 88 88. Ask Leah website will put lots of links up there. Everything I talk about on the show is tech guy labs.com, that's free, no signup. Sam was asking about a way to keep his Windows machines from upgrading to Windows 11. He has one machine that says you can't, and so you don't have to worry about that one. The good news is if you like Windows 10, you Windows 10 is fine and it will be in service.

(01:03:45):
It'll be getting updates through 2025. So you got three more years. Don't worry about it. But it is true. Microsoft will kind of pepper you with annoying announcements about how great Windows 11 is, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to keep it at Windows 10, there are some choices, and I've put those in the show notes or I will. Sam mentioned Steve Gibson who does our security show security now, and he's made something maybe a little broader than you need, but maybe something worth looking at called in control grc.com/in control. I'm not a fan only because it lets you prevent updates. Now, most of the time you want these updates. They're critical. There's security flaws. Being fixed in control gives you the chance to say no updates at all. And I don't think that's the right way to do it. But there is an in control.

(01:04:39):
You are able to My nervousness is that you might turn it on, forget it, and then now you're not getting security updates. And honestly, if you are using Windows, you desperately need security updates. You don't need feature updates. You don't need to go to Windows 11, but you definitely need security updates. You'll also need, even if you stay on 10, Microsoft has now this kind of annoying policy of making versions of 10 out of date and they do it pretty like in just a couple of years. And I find this incredibly annoying. I maybe you've gathered not a huge Windows fan, I think Microsoft has not been a good steward of this operating system. So now you've gotta not only pay attention to the major version, are you on 10 or 11, but you have to pay attention to these semi-annual updates and make sure that you have the most, the one that's recent enough. So you're getting, you're not stuck is if you are gonna keep using Windows 10, you kind of wanna get these 2021, H 1 21 H two. They used to be 2019. Oh, you could see I don't have much energy for explaining Microsoft's inexplicable system. So in control is one solution. But I will put a link to an article on Ease us for probably a better way to do it, which is a registry modification. Yeah, I know those can be dangerous, but this one, they walk you through it.

(01:06:18):
You can stop the Windows 11 update forever. You have to actually, maybe this is not so bad. If you have services dot msc, you can scroll down Windows update and you can disable Windows Update. That's why that seems so dangerous to me. Anyway. They have a variety of ways to do it, including some that I think are less dangerous. You want updates though, You just don't want 11. And this is, again, this is Microsoft muddying the waters. They're so anxious to get you on 11. I just said, okay, fine, I'm do do it <laugh> on Windows 11, fine. And I don't have a problem with that, but I understand cuz Sam had two machines. One was staying on Windows 10, he didn't, He wanted them both on the same version. So I guess, I don't know what the answer is. I guess for most of us, just use whatever's current. Let Microsoft let go and let Microsoft, cuz figuring it out is so complicated. But if you insist <laugh>, there are ways, and I've put them@techeyelabs.com. Si <laugh> heavy. Can you hear the heavy sigh? Richard on the line from West LA's next. Hi Richard. Leo Laport, Dtic guy.

Speaker 7 (01:07:43):
Hi Leo. Good to talk with you.

Leo Laporte (01:07:45):
Nice to hear from you. What's

Speaker 7 (01:07:46):
Up? I've got an email saying that there's some might be a problem with PayPal and I've been dealing with somebody supposedly from PayPal. I'd

Leo Laporte (01:07:55):
Be very nervous about that. I'd be very nervous about that. I'd be very nervous about that. Your best bet is to not respond to that email, but go directly to your PayPal account and see if there's any notice there with you logged

Speaker 7 (01:08:09):
In. I don't have the PayPal account.

Leo Laporte (01:08:10):
Well then there's no problem with your PayPal.

Speaker 7 (01:08:13):
Well that's why I'm you, I don't understand why I, they're

Leo Laporte (01:08:17):
Scamming you. That's

Speaker 7 (01:08:17):
Why saying call this number,

Leo Laporte (01:08:19):
That's they're scamming you. It's a scam. So that, that's proof positive. <laugh>, Hi, this is PayPal. We've noticed a problem with your account. Call this number. Usually it's not just a problem, it's something scary. We see foreign actors accessing your account and withdrawing money. Is that you? Is that okay? Please call us. And

Speaker 7 (01:08:39):
Then that's exactly what I got.

Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
Yeah, what a surprise. So they want you to go, Oh my God, freak out. But you don't have a PayPal account. <laugh>. So what they would inevitably do if you called them is say, Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, it's great to talk to you Richard. I want you to log into your PayPal here. Let me send you a page and log into your PayPal account. I'm gonna, I'm on the other end and we're gonna watch and make sure that this is all working properly. They're going to scam somebody, not you, cuz you don't have a PayPal account, but they're intended to scam somebody out of their PayPal login so they can drain your account. They are the foreign actors who wanna drain your account. So the good news is you don't have a PayPal account. It's just like me, I get emails from quote, and I'm putting this in air quote so you can't see it, but quote my bank, but I don't bank with the Bank of Nova Scotia.

(01:09:30):
My bank says, Oh no, people are withdrawing funds. You better contact us immediately. They just send that to a million people figuring, well, some of them will have bank in Nova Scotia accounts or PayPal accounts, and we'll get that. Got it. So ignore it, Richard. In fact, this is a boy, this is such a big issue these days. Close friend of mine got a text message, This is Amazon, there's been a problem with your account. She responded, Lost thousands of dollars to these scammers. It wasn't Amazon. So if this happens, if you get an email or a text and it scares you because it says somebody's withdrawing money from your account. First of all, understand, bad guys scare you. So you will act without thinking. So think and then instead of clicking that link or calling that number, go to the account. Go to the account, log in. If there really is truly a problem, you'll see it on the account.

Speaker 7 (01:10:25):
Which account are you talking about? Well,

Leo Laporte (01:10:27):
You don't have a PayPal account, so you can't go there. <laugh>. So Richard, you understand this is a scam, right?

Speaker 7 (01:10:35):
Well, there's

Leo Laporte (01:10:36):
Nothing you could do about it.

Speaker 7 (01:10:37):
Knew about it. It seems to me it was a scam. And I went through a few steps and some of my bank account was drained of money. And I, I've been in touch with somebody supposedly from PayPal, although I looked him up and he's at the And

Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
You lost lost money. Have you lost money now?

Speaker 7 (01:10:59):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
So you fell for it. You're not talking to PayPal, you're talking to some guy in Beru or India or Nigeria. You're talking to somebody who is scamming you. And I'm really sorry that you gave them bank account information. That's terrible. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 7 (01:11:20):
I called PayPal their basic number that's in Palo Alto. And the guy I was supposedly talking to supposedly works there.

Leo Laporte (01:11:29):
What don't you get about this? You were scammed.

Speaker 7 (01:11:33):
No, I was pretty sure I was, but I wanted to check it with you.

Leo Laporte (01:11:36):
Yes. And there's money missing from your bank account.

Speaker 7 (01:11:41):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:11:41):
Call your bank and don't call a number that's in your email or anything. Call your bank and freeze your accounts. And maybe if you've got a very nice bank, they might make you whole, but generally they won't You. If somebody walked up to you on the street and said, Hey Richard, I am the president of your bank. Let's walk over to the atm. I wanna make sure that everything's working properly. Let's withdraw some funds. So you go, Okay, and you go to the ATM U with address month now give those to me and I'll quickly deposit them back into your account. And he walks away <laugh>. Basically what happened to you? Except I guess because it happened via email and it happened via text or whatever, and it was on the phone. These guys are not, they're good. They will conv. It's called social engineering. They will convince you that they are who they say they are. They are not. And they scammed you. I'm so sorry. I would call your bank. I would freeze those accounts. And this is a Richard, I'm so sorry. This is a cautionary tale for everyone.

(01:12:52):
Oh boy, this is terrible. Don't do this. I don't know. I don't know. It should have been a huge red flag that you don't have a PayPal account and they're talking about your PayPal account as if you do. That's a huge red flag. I guess at that point they said, Well this is interesting cuz it seems to be tied to your bank account. Let me verify this. They're so clever. They're so clever. It is happening all the time. Now it's interesting when I've talked to the folks at Treasury and the Secret Service and stuff, they say, these aren't even new scams. These are the old scams dressed up on the internet or dressed up with new technology. But it's the same old scams. The pigeon drop, the old con game. The wonderful book, by the way, about the game, if you ever want to understand a little bit better and how it's been moved to the internet with amazing success, The Confidence Game by Maria Con Cova.

(01:14:09):
You can get it on Amazon. The subtitle is why we Fall for It Every time. Kna Covas a really interesting journalist who goes out and really, she talked to every con artist ever. I mean, if you're curious about this system, about how it works and how they play you, this is a great book to read. Honestly, here's the deal, Don't trust anything that comes via email, via text, by a phone. If it comes into you, you're gonna say, But wait a minute, what if there is a problem with my PayPal account? Well, if they do send you an email, say, Oh, interesting. Then ignore it. Don't click the links in it. Go to paypal.com, log in and verify that. And you gotta have the sniff test.

(01:15:04):
Something's funny. If they say something about your PayPal account and you don't have one, I couldn't log in. Well then clearly they're fishing, right? Use your nose, Trust your nose. If you don't have a PayPal account, then it's bogus. If you don't have a Bank of Nova Scotia account, then it's bogus. But even if you do, this is where it's really dangerous. You have an Amazon account, you get a text message from air quotes, Amazon go, Don't pay no attention to the text message, go to your go log into your Amazon account and see if there's anything there. There won't be. That's where they would notify you, right? On your Amazon account, on your PayPal account, your bank account. That's where they'd say something. Not via push message, text, email. So really you gotta be you. I in most of us, and this is, we're taught this is a good thing.

(01:15:56):
We're trusting, we're trusting, we trust people. But the internet has brought a whole breed of scammers right into our lives. Like right there on our phone in our email. You can't trust anybody. I don't want you to be a non-trusting person, but trust, but verify. I don't know, maybe we need to be a little bit more cynical. They're out to get you. They want your money. I'm so sorry you lost money, Richard. I'm so sorry. Contact your bank. Follow through on this because these guys might still have access to your account. They will drain your account if they can. 88. 88. Ask Leo, Chris Marwat photo guy coming up in just a little bit. I love people, I trust people. But verify more calls right after this. One of these days. We'll just open the lines and say, okay, if you've been scammed or you've, if you've been approached by a scammer, share the story. Cuz there's so many great stories from people and I think it would help opens people's eyes to how widespread this is. We are in the year 1942, also episode 1942. Thank you Professor Laura for memorializing that. If you go to tech eye labs.com, episode 1942, That's today. Slowly getting to modern times, inch by inch trips on the line from Tustin, California. Our next call, high trip.

Speaker 8 (01:17:32):
Hey Leo, how

Leo Laporte (01:17:33):
Are you? I'm great, how are you?

Speaker 8 (01:17:35):
Good, I'm awesome. Hey, we spoke during the summer of Covid. I'm the one who inherited those 300 CDs from my neighbor and I converted 'em into digital format. Wow, nice. And did that project. And you and I talked about it and I did it. So I followed your advice. I did it in Slack and it sounds great and

Leo Laporte (01:17:54):
Everything. Yeah. And that's future proofing it because you've basically copied the CD's quality. So there you go. Exactly.

Speaker 8 (01:18:00):
Yep. Yeah. So I did what you said. Now what I wanna do is I'm trying to figure out a way to move it to the iPhone, iPad era, but it's all in Slack. And what's the best way to sort of move in that direction so that I can put it on the phone or put it on an iPad or that type of thing. Is there an easier way to do that for conversion?

Leo Laporte (01:18:20):
Converting your Slack stuff?

Speaker 8 (01:18:23):
No, the well converting the Slack.

Leo Laporte (01:18:26):
Slack not over

Speaker 8 (01:18:28):
Anything. I can, I

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
Thought you said Slack and I thought, wait a minute, Flack. Oh yeah. So I'm trying to, A new format. Yeah. Apple has a format that's equivalent to Slack called Apple lossless and the iPhone will play that. I don't know if it'll play Flack. Flack, which is an open source. So let me explain what you, It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't play fla. So I should explain what all this is to people going, when it's flack, what are they talking about? So when you take a cd, it's digital recording. Most of the time when you copy it to computer, you convert it into a format you might be familiar with called mp3. The problem with MP3 is well the advantage of it is very small. It's about 11th the size. But the disadvantage of it is in order to get that compression, the squeeze it to that size where you get a whole CD on your computer in 50 megabytes you have to take bits out.

(01:19:24):
You're like plucking little bits of it. And in theory, the theory of MP3s, those little bits you're taking out are inau anyway. But if you know what to listen for, they're not inau and there's no going the other direction. It's a one way trip down low quality street. So when you called a year or so ago, you said you were gonna take these CDs and preserve them digitally. I suggested you do it with what's called a lossless compression technique. It's only gets about two to one instead of 11 to one. So it's only half the size, but nothing is plucked out. It's the full quality and it's a two-way compression cuz you could take a flack directory and turn it into that exact cd. It'll be identical in the bits. So that's really good. Apple has something similar called Apple Lossless, which it will I believe the iPhone will play.

(01:20:21):
Probably what you really wanna do, if you're gonna put it on an iPhone, is open the flack up in iTunes. Will it? Will iTunes read flack? I think it will. If it does, open it up in iTunes and convert it to aac, which is Apple's Law C. That is taking little pieces out of it. Compression. Cuz for your iPhone, that's probably fine. And certainly for the iPhone 60 CDs is not a huge amount. But there are ways that you can convert flack to alac Apple. Lots of programs that'll do it without losing any quality. That might be the easiest thing to do. The system. I'll give you, hold on a sec, I'll give you some links. Leo Laport, the tech guy. Chris Mark. Mark coming on. I'm sorry. I always run out of time,

Speaker 8 (01:21:08):
<laugh>. No, no worries. Actually it turned out to be 300 CDs Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:21:12):
Oh 300. Ah, that's

Speaker 8 (01:21:15):
A lot. 300 in it. And it's about, yeah, it's about a hundred gigs. And it was my neighbor's collection from the day that CDs started being produced back in. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:21:23):
It's well worth keeping.

Speaker 8 (01:21:25):
It's awesome collection. I love it. I just want to get it so I can, And I followed your directions explicitly because I didn't wanna lose any of the bits on it. But

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
Anyway, so let me see if you can get it the easiest way to, Are you on a Mac or a pc?

Speaker 8 (01:21:40):
Pc.

Leo Laporte (01:21:40):
Pc. But you wanna get to an iPhone? I don't wanna recommend

Speaker 8 (01:21:46):
IPads. I can thing, Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
I don't want actually recommend moving it using iTunes, even though there is iTunes for Windows. It's terror or a ball. So what you want is A as a, and you can easily find this a flack converter.

Speaker 8 (01:22:04):
I know. It just, I couldn't find one that does them in bulk.

Leo Laporte (01:22:08):
Ah, okay.

Speaker 8 (01:22:11):
That was the issue.

Leo Laporte (01:22:13):
You can do it on a Mac using something called system fla. C I S D E M. That's a, that does bulk conversion. Let me see. For Windows. Well

Speaker 8 (01:22:23):
I guess they could grab my son's MacBook. No,

Leo Laporte (01:22:25):
No, no, no, no. Let's not. Let's not. <laugh>. <laugh>. Let's see, here's

Speaker 8 (01:22:33):
Let me have it.

Leo Laporte (01:22:33):
Yeah, yeah. Here's an online one. That's not gonna be ideal. Yeah, you want something that'll run in the background Cause you won't lose any bits. It's really a simple conversion. For years I've used, Lemme see if

Speaker 8 (01:22:53):
This I quality's awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:22:54):
Yeah, let me see if, Yeah, fu yeah, this works. This is what I used for a long time. Fubar 2000

Speaker 8 (01:23:02):
<laugh>, right? I'll look that up. F O O I love

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
The name. Name. F O O B A r two thousand.org. It's free up to date. Works on Windows. It will convert from and to anything. What you probably, I would recommend, if you're gonna put it on some thing where storage, I think it's best to think of the flack version is your archival version. And then convert it to AAC or MP3 for use on a phone or an iPad where

Speaker 8 (01:23:29):
It's all backed up on Sonology and carbon. It's all. So

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
I think probably you don't want convert it to Apple lossless, just convert to aac, which will sound fine. But you have those masters, so you've got your digital masters basically on yours logic. And that's, that's in a way why you want that. Because then you can convert to a lossy format without damaging the masters. You go back.

Speaker 8 (01:23:53):
Yeah, I can experiment with whatever I want. I'll

Leo Laporte (01:23:56):
56 Kilobit. AAC is gonna be on an iPhones be fine.

Speaker 8 (01:24:03):
One other question if we have time real quick. Sure. I've got a laser jet in the garage. I'm using an XP machine just to be a print server and so I can connect it to my network and I tried to upgrade to Windows 10, put a new machine out there and I can't see the printer, It won't oh connect to anything. I've looked at all the services, I've checked the network configurations to make sure that it's visible. Do you know anything? I've studied the threads. Have you heard of any issues with print server and Windows 10 issues?

Leo Laporte (01:24:32):
What are using cups? Which print server?

Speaker 8 (01:24:36):
I just share the printer. I've been just sharing the printer on Windows 10 and it can't be seen by anything else. My X machine. The trick is problem. And you see it,

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
There's two ways to handle this. Go to the win, the manufacturer of the printer and see what they've got for Windows 11. Otherwise Cups, C U P S is your friend. Cups is an open source printing system that will almost certainly work with your printer. You gotta see Google, your printer's name and cups, then you can put the cups driver on that one. Even XP would support cups. But 11 will certainly support cups.

Speaker 8 (01:25:12):
Perfect. Thank you so much. And thank you. I was the pole star writer, my star, but it's in the shop all the time. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
Nice to talk to you. Yeah, poll star's definitely on my list. Definitely.

Speaker 8 (01:25:23):
I love the car, I love the car. I just wish I could drive it more than them.

Leo Laporte (01:25:26):
It's a shame that's in the shop. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. Have a great one. Thank you sir. Take care.

(01:25:34):
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There's also another side email deliverability. Email gets bounced a lot, right? Email providers often have additional authentication protocols they use designed as a response to increase spam and fraud within the email industry. But those protocols can get in your way. They can mean actually a higher chance of undeliverable emails because your email is misconfigured on the center side. We talk about that actually quite a bit. Melissa has a solution for that too. These guys are great. Melissa's global email can identify which authentication systems are in place for your server during validation. So you can make changes to your settings to help your email get through. Improve deliverability again, saving you money, making your money. Melissa's global email identifies potential business impeding authentication systems like S P F D C D A. If you follow best practices for these and utilize email validation, you're gonna maximize email deliverability, improve ROI on leads, reduce costly IP reputation damage, eliminate spammer designations.

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They are the address experts. I know you're gonna love Melissa. I want you to check it out. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. They do so much. I'm we're talking about some of the other features they have. They really are fantastic. I want you to just try 'em. Go to melissa.com/twi. You get your first thousand records clean for free so you can see how it works. I started with our holiday list, right? Our Christmas card list. That was a good thing. Good thinking, right? melissa.com/twi. Don't let bad data ruin your day. melissa.com/twit. We thank Melissa for supporting the tech guy showing Now back we go. Leo Laport, the tech guy. I'm loading my 35 frame, 35 mil, 36 frame, 35 millimeter Kodachrome into my Nikon FM 1000 camera because it's time to take some pictures with our guy Chris, or as my good friend, the National Geographic photographer always said, make some images cuz he would travel all around the world and sometimes taking a picture was a little insulting in some cultures. Hello, Chris Mark White taking

Chris Marquardt (01:30:15):
Is not enough. Making is

Leo Laporte (01:30:17):
Important. Make a picture. You

Chris Marquardt (01:30:18):
Make pictures

Leo Laporte (01:30:18):
Making a picture. He always said that. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:30:21):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:30:21):
Chris is my photo sensei. S e ns e i.photo. And he joins us every week to help us make better pictures.

Chris Marquardt (01:30:29):
What I'm trying to, So today we are not making pictures. Today we're looking at pictures and that is the mysterious assignment.

Leo Laporte (01:30:40):
Oh, it's

Chris Marquardt (01:30:42):
Time except for months. Yep. It is. Time to look at pictures. And I have gone through the, all very mys was a really tough choice today. This time it lots of great photos and yeah, I've chosen three and we wanna talk about those. Appreciate,

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
So we send you out for four weeks, taking pictures illustrating a word or a concept in this case mysterious. And then Chris picked a few from that photo pool to exactly to highlight.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:13):
So let's start this with the first one by Bypro bite. And

Leo Laporte (01:31:22):
It's, oh it, well, it's dark. That's a mysterious, It's definitely

Chris Marquardt (01:31:25):
Mysterious, dark and mysterious photo. There's so many things I like about this photo. What we're seeing here is a rainy street zebra crossing a person, but you don't see the person really. You see an umbrella which is wet. So you have these nice little specs of drops of light reflecting off of drops on the black umbrella. The whole picture's very dark, but that means that the lights on the opposite side of the street reflect really nicely in the wet pavement. So you have the red traffic light on the ground reflected on the ground and very sparse lit, very mysterious. Really happy about this. So very good job. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
That looks like a movie, right?

Chris Marquardt (01:32:12):
It does. It has that shallow depth of field, which you get from cameras with bigger lenses. Or if you use portrait mode on your smartphone it really focuses your view on where the focus is on that umbrella, which doesn't have much information cuz it's very dark, but it's clearly an umbrella and a person holding it. Again, some mystery. So well done. Nice job by for bite. Next one is by rockabilly hog. And we are down in some, this looks like a wine cellar of sorts. Lots of barrels. Wooden floor. And then mysteriously, I've got very mysterious light cuz we have this, the back lit point light source, which makes this really, really defined shadow of that barrel on the ground. And again, lots of black of dark, which means there's lots of blanks that we can fill in with our imagination, which is part of what makes mystery. And of course there's the mystery of why is that one barrel standing there and the rest are in there on the shelves. The mystery

Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
To me is what's in that barrel. I bet it's

Chris Marquardt (01:33:23):
Tasty. And of course you wanna know what's in that barrel. <laugh>. I bet it's good. So I like it. Yeah. The third one I chose is it comes from a different direction. It's not black and white. It's stark. It's not black and white, it's not dark. Scott McLean, Mystery Rose 22 is the title. And what we see is, okay, first of all it it's, it looks like a very sunny, nice picture, but of course it's a picture of some desert somewhere. And then in the middle of that desert there's a rose, which looks very fresh and very healthy. But it just lies there. So that immediately in my mind, in invokes a story, What happened here? Why is there rose in the desert? Why is it not dried up? Why what? Just something must have happened just a few seconds ago. And of course the real mysteries, of course the title of the picture, which is Mystery Rose 22, which means <laugh>, that mean there is 21 other mystery roses.

(01:34:26):
The title is even a mystery. <laugh>, the whole thing is a mystery. How'd it get there? So yeah, that was fun, fun, fun assignment. And I'm really happy with what we got. We got a few more. We have a few more minutes here. We have this one. I like mystery figure by Mitch xx. And it's just a silhouette and silhouettes also add some mystery cuz you end up with, yeah, not really seeing this, but there's this strangely hunch looking figure standing next to some fencing up on a crest. So again, mysterious and there's plenty more pictures. So really good job everyone. I'm very happy with what all

Leo Laporte (01:35:15):
Joe is took. Joe who took that umbrella photo is in our irc and he's very graphic. Oh there you go. That you picked it. And he and I both shoot with that beautiful Leica Q2 camera, which is a fixed lights lens camera. That's all you get. But it's Leica, it's nice and compact recently because I'm worried about getting it stolen like it's famous for their red dot. I recently put a little piece of tape over the red.so it just looks like,

Chris Marquardt (01:35:45):
Do you really think that someone who knows which camera, the steel gets fooled by you.

Leo Laporte (01:35:52):
No. If somebody is looking for an expensive camera and knows their cameras, they're gonna know. But I just don't wanna attract the amateur. It

Chris Marquardt (01:36:01):
Does attract a bit of attention. Yeah, <laugh>. The only thing that could be worse is if you had it blinking red and lit up at night or something.

Leo Laporte (01:36:08):
Whereas the umbrella is beautiful. Joe, where was that taken? Cuz it could almost be anywhere in the world. It looks very mysterious with that big black umbrella. Joe, did you pose it or were you just walking around and you said, Oh I gotta take that picture cuz it's beautifully, There's little raindrops on the umbrella. He says it's in Manhattan.

Chris Marquardt (01:36:31):
Manhattan, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:32):
Manhattan. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:36:33):
Okay. That's what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

Chris Marquardt (01:36:34):
Leo gets what I have here.

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
Oh, it's time for the fish bowl. Fish bowl cam. I'm fish bowl. So this is how we pick the topic for the next four weeks. Chris is gonna shake it up, pull out something there. Is it all adjectives in that fish bowl? Yes.

Chris Marquardt (01:36:55):
It's all adjectives. It's all adjectives. Yeah. Here we have it and it says,

Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
I can't see it. Blue glue. What?

Chris Marquardt (01:37:05):
Blue. Not glue.

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
Blue. Blue color. The color. B l u e. All right. But that's all we're gonna give you. No, no hints. This is really not even a contest. It's just about going out. Taking more images. Doesn't have to be with that expensive fancy, like a q2. It could be with a smartphone. Frankly, Joe you and I both know we probably could have taken the same picture with our Apple iPhone. We won't mention that. Although I have to say, I don't have to tape over any red dots on my iPhone. Nobody thinks I'm doing anything but just taking snapshots when I do it with a camera phone. Right.

Chris Marquardt (01:37:46):
There's one more mystery about that Mystery rose 22 picture. Yeah. The exit data doesn't show what camera.

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
Oh, I hate it. When they

Chris Marquardt (01:37:52):
Could be a smartphone. Could be.

Leo Laporte (01:37:54):
Could be. Yeah. The barrel was taken with a pixel six smartphone. Yep. And by the way, stunning sepia. Great contrast, great light. That's a smartphone. I think nowadays, there's no way we could look at any of these and say, Oh, that's a professional camera. That's just a camera phone. There's no difference anymore. If you know what you're, you're doing with it. So now go out, take an image illustrating the word, the concept, the idea blue doesn't have to be the color blue by the way. You said the color blue doesn't have to be the color. Blue could be. Am I blue? Could blue without you. Yeah. Could be anything. Go out high. The fourth young people take a picture. If you find one that you say, Yeah, Chris is gonna love this, then you upload it to flicker, tag it TG Blue. That way Renee will know that it is a submission to the tech guy group. Send it up to the tech guy group on Flicker and we will pick three more images four weeks from now. Thank you. Chris. Photo sensei, sensei, photo leola, Port Babi, Babu, blue daba di daba cab be any kind of blue. You got a blue background, you get your laptop.

Chris Marquardt (01:39:13):
There we go. You get a, Everything looked good. Everything looks, It's all

Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
Back. It's all back. Did you get a new M two? What'd you do?

Chris Marquardt (01:39:21):
It's the Air M two air fully spec.

Leo Laporte (01:39:24):
Yep. That's what I had. I had to, when I spilled coffee into my M one, I had to get an M two

Chris Marquardt (01:39:30):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:39:31):
Love it.

Chris Marquardt (01:39:32):
Did you spill that? Here's the

Leo Laporte (01:39:34):
Question. What color did you get?

Chris Marquardt (01:39:39):
The space Gray.

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):
Yeah. See I got

Chris Marquardt (01:39:42):
Midnight. I'm a space

Leo Laporte (01:39:42):
Gray cause I'm a blue guy.

Chris Marquardt (01:39:43):
No fingerprints.

Leo Laporte (01:39:45):
The big fingerprint magnet. But I put it inside a clear

Chris Marquardt (01:39:48):
Case. Yeah. But then no, I laptops don't get cases. I, for me, laptops don't get cases. Phone phone does. Cuz the breath important stuff is all on the phone. Yeah. So I keep

Leo Laporte (01:40:00):
My phone in my wallet case. That way I've got everything in this one thing. And I'm less likely to forget my wallet.

Chris Marquardt (01:40:05):
Yeah, no, I've seen the midnight blue and it's beautiful. And it's nice

Leo Laporte (01:40:09):
And it's a total

Chris Marquardt (01:40:10):
Fingerprint. And I saw the stories and I saw the stories of the display one polished every two minutes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:18):
And honestly it's hard to clean off the fingerprints. They really, So you were right. You were smart. You were smart.

Chris Marquardt (01:40:27):
No, I'm just boring space. Just boring

Leo Laporte (01:40:30):
<laugh>. I wanted something different. Different. That's really what, and I'm, I'm happy. But again, I had to put it in a case. So

Chris Marquardt (01:40:36):
I'll make mine special by putting stickers on it

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
And stuff. This is my old 14 inch MacBook Pro motherboard fried.

Chris Marquardt (01:40:45):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:40:47):
Yeah. You can actually you can't see it on camera, but if you could with a macro, you could see it. This is the chip that connects the, I mean the port that connects the track pad and it's melted.

Chris Marquardt (01:41:01):
Had that melted.

Leo Laporte (01:41:02):
Yeah. So it's just a random short circuit. Right. Cause you can't pull battery power. I turn it off immediately. Didn't matter. Oh,

Chris Marquardt (01:41:09):
That was from the coffee. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:41:10):
The coffee, Yeah. Yeah. It still smells a little bit like an espresso <laugh>. So everything else is kind of okay. I can't find any other melted chips. But things could be short circuit internally. But that melted chip, that's a pretty good sign that something bad happened in there.

Chris Marquardt (01:41:25):
Give it to Louis Rossman. He fixes these things.

Leo Laporte (01:41:28):
I don't think these are all, I don't think even Louis Rossman could fix this

Chris Marquardt (01:41:32):
If he takes chips off. And does

Leo Laporte (01:41:34):
He remove surface

Chris Marquardt (01:41:35):
Mask that Yes he does. Under microscope. This is

Leo Laporte (01:41:38):
The, That's crazy. Maybe I should have Apple quoted me 1300 bucks cuz they'd have to replace this. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:41:45):
Of course. Yeah, of course. How repairs work these days?

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
There's the M one Pro chip. Wow. Well I have a nice

Chris Marquardt (01:41:55):
Anyway, the M two air is fine. It's totally fine. Oh I love

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
It. Oh, I

Chris Marquardt (01:41:59):
Love it More than I need. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:42:00):
Absolutely.

Chris Marquardt (01:42:01):
And the consolidation from two systems to one is really making a big difference. Good. It's really interesting. Cause there's the sinking of photos and that kind of stuff just goes away. So

Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
Yeah, I got the two terabyte drive for exactly that reason so I wouldn't have to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yes. It's the song for our assignment. Oh, I remember that. Do you know what you're exactly the right age, Laura, That you were probably about seven or eight when that came out. Just the right age to love that. I don't know. It was used in one of those smart kids movies where poor Paul Jamati is a bad guy and he gets, falls into blue paint and he walks around the Blue Man group. He's all blue and they played that song. That's all I remember. But that's, I think the song predates that. But that's just why my kids, when they were in the single digits, they loved that. In fact, I used to have an argument with my son Henry, who would say no, he's saying if I were green I would die. I say, no, he's just saying Daba d Daba. He said, No, no, he's saying <laugh>. If I were green I would die. I don't think so. Eel 65. Am I right? 98? Yeah. Perfect. Abby was six, Henry was four. <laugh> on. We go with the calls. Brad on the line from Lopac, California. Hi Brad.

Speaker 7 (01:43:30):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:43:31):
Welcome.

Speaker 7 (01:43:32):
Great to speak with you.

Leo Laporte (01:43:33):
Well great to talk to you. What's up?

Speaker 7 (01:43:37):
Well my brother was in radio and he just passed away a few

Leo Laporte (01:43:43):
Months ago. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 7 (01:43:46):
Yeah. And when I was going through some of his stuff and I came across this piece of equipment, I thought maybe you might know what this is. Okay, let's see. It's made by a company called a rt or Applied Research Technology.

Leo Laporte (01:44:02):
Oh yeah, I remember them. Yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 7 (01:44:05):
Okay. This is called a P Pro V L A two Channel Tube Leveling Amplifier.

Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
Yeah. Yeah. So A R T was very popular. Applied research, very popular audio file stuff that what you have is called a compressor, which we use in radio to make our voice sound punchy. <laugh>. In fact, I think they still sell it. So I don't know if you ever listened. Was he a dj? What did he do in radio?

Speaker 7 (01:44:48):
Yeah. Ever since high school. Yeah. He was in radio for years.

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Nice. I love that. The greatest medium mankind has ever invented. I'm such a big love radio. So yeah, if you ever listen, do you ever listen to Let's see you, Do you ever listen to kj, The boss sounds of K HJ Radio, Los Angeles. They had this big

Speaker 7 (01:45:15):
Oh you, huh? Years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:45:18):
Yeah, years ago Boss, they called it Boss radio and sometimes they use echo. That was another box from applied research. But their voices would just punch through. They'd be so strong is because they used a compressor. What a compressor does is it squeezes. It doesn't compress like mp3 compressed music. It squeezes the dynamic range so that the loudest sounds and the quietest sounds are almost exactly the same. So if I whispered, it would still come through as loud as if I shouted. And the reason they did that in the old days of radio is because as you tune down the dial back when there were 70 stations and you go, they wanted to punch through and immediately grab you. And the compressor was used to do that. So if he was a dj maybe he did some work at home or maybe he got this at a radio station as he left. But every radio station had something like this. And you'll see on the front of it, you have knobs that probably two channels right, left and right.

Speaker 7 (01:46:34):
Yeah. It's a two channel two leveling amplifiers. Yeah. It says on,

Leo Laporte (01:46:39):
Oh it's tubes. Wow. This is an old school. This is nice. So you'll have on the front, you'll have a couple of knobs. One for gain, which is how loud it is. And if it's a boss jock on K hj, you turn that up loud, right as loud as you can. And then there'll be next to that. There'll be a dial that will say how much compression it might, I'm looking at one that has an impedance style and a low cut dial. I don't know if that's what yours has

Speaker 7 (01:47:13):
As well. And this is little input threshold.

Leo Laporte (01:47:18):
The threshold is how quiet the quietest sound could be. Anything below that gets dropped off. Wow. Yeah. Wow. This is

Speaker 7 (01:47:28):
Something that, Is this something people would use today?

Leo Laporte (01:47:32):
We use something similar. We use something nowadays what you've got is a classic because it's based, it's got tubes and old. And you'll remember in the old days the great amps had tubes. Nowadays it's all solid state, which is much more robust and reliable. But some say especially audio files that don't have the same, they don't have the same warmth, the same sound. Warmth is not what you're really going for with a compressor. So it might have some value to a collector because it's a tube amp. So you could put it, I would list it on eBay and start with a fairly high dollar value, $500 to see what happens or best offer. Maybe I'm wrong on the price search on eBay before you price it to see if there's anybody else selling anything like it.

Speaker 7 (01:48:22):
I did kind of glance over a couple things and they were like in $300 range. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:48:28):
That sounds about right. But you could start a little higher cuz you've got a tube. That's pretty classic. Do they still use 'em? Absolutely. We use something that is a little more sophisticated called an Omnia. Part of our audio chain comes from a company called tes and the Axia system, a lot of radio stations use this. It's all digital so there's no tubes. And the Omnia does, besides compression, it does some other processing, but it's an audio processor designed to make me sound better. So it does some

Speaker 7 (01:49:02):
Smaller actual,

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
Actually no, the Omni is pretty, John is the Omni is these are all rack mounted.

Speaker 7 (01:49:13):
Oh correct.

Leo Laporte (01:49:14):
Yeah. So we A, which do we have an Omni? We have a one and an eight. I'm on the one which is just our same size as what you've got. It's is what's called a one you rack. It's one level. There's one that's called the eight that has eight channels. We use that as well for our bigger shows. And that is four you. So it's for, it's four times taller than the one you've got. No. So it's pretty cool. And every station uses these. I've, as long as I've been in radio, we've had probably that one dates I would guess from the sixties or seventies was holy. Now where did he work?

Speaker 7 (01:49:50):
In the San Louis <inaudible>. He started out and then he worked down in la. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
Yeah. I'm guessing that he got that radio station was probably taken it outta commission. Or maybe he, Did he ever broadcast from home? Cause if I were gonna do home broadcasting, that might be the kind of thing I'd have.

Speaker 7 (01:50:08):
That's kinda what I was thinking. But it looks like it's always been in the box. I'm not even sure if it's even been used. Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:50:14):
Not. But I could tell you. Yeah, Robert W. Morgan on K hj definitely had that box.

Speaker 7 (01:50:23):
I've actually found tapes where he's got recordings of all these DJs from LA and around.

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
Yeah, sure.

Speaker 7 (01:50:29):
Kate.

Leo Laporte (01:50:30):
Yeah. Charlie Tuna. The real Don Steel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Great stuff. That's the stuff I cut my teeth on. I never was a boss Jock always wanted to be a boss jock. Cause those, that was the mid sixties and it was when rock and roll AM radio was at its peak, it's most powerful. It's most dominant. If you go back, you can find on the internet, you can find what they call air checks from these guys. And you might hear them and they'll have a little echo as well behind them. But they'll sound, their voice will sound big a And that's what that box does. It gives them a big sound. Wolf bend jack, they all used them. We all used them. There's also something called expansion, which brings out the background noise. <affirmative>. Nowadays we're a little more sophisticated in how we use our compression <laugh>. In the old days, if you had meters, you'd know somebody was compressed because the needle on the meter would just go, would hardly move. He'd go boo. Even if he whispered it, it'd be a big sound. Anyway, I'm sorry about your brother, but that's a great piece of history. Brad, nice to talk to you.

Speaker 7 (01:51:37):
All right, thank

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
You. Neil. Leo Laport, the tech guy. The boss tech guy.

(01:51:50):
Charlie Tuna's. Real name was Arthur W. Ferguson. Are you kidding me? Now I know why he was Charlie Tuna <laugh>. I think the real Don Steel was a great name. And Robert W. Morgan. What a great name. I'll play something for you in a second. I loved these guys. We had sort of a boss. Radio was invented on KJ in Los Angeles, but we had sort of a similar thing in San Francisco. Well hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laport, the tech guy type, The tech eye show where we talk about computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphones, smart watches, radio compression <laugh>, music compression and more. It's funny, in one hour we had a question about audio compression using MP3 and flack and we had a question about audio compression using an A R T compressor tube compressor. Anything with a chip in it or a tube in it. I guess I'll have to expand it now. 88. 88 LIOs the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Spaceman rod pile coming up to talk about the latest news from space. Meanwhile, back to the calls we go and Flora, who is on the line from Burbank? Hi Flora.

Speaker 10 (01:53:15):
Hello there Leo. I'm so glad I got you.

Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
Oh, I'm so glad to talk to you. Flora, what's up

Speaker 10 (01:53:22):
On my phone? Under known devices, under wifi. There's this network

Leo Laporte (01:53:29):
That you never saw before. Get rid of it. Can't get rid of it yet cuz why? It's your neighbor. <laugh>. But I can't have it. Forget it. It'll still pop up but it won't be a known device, a known network anymore. Is this on an iPhone? Right.

Speaker 10 (01:53:46):
I tried for get network and then I went away and then it came back and then I factory reset the phone.

Leo Laporte (01:53:57):
Well it's always gonna show up,

Speaker 10 (01:53:59):
Doors down and unfortunately I've gotten hacked.

Leo Laporte (01:54:03):
Okay. Okay. This is a separate to my phone. It's a separate issue. Issues not related to being hacked. When you go into wifi on any device, phone, laptop, tablet, you will see nearby wifi devices cuz the phone really know it doesn't really know which one's yours. Right now I have my networks on my iPhone and if I do press the I button I can forget it. Which means it will no longer show up in my networks. But it'll always show up in other networks. Networks that are within range of you that you can see will always show up. There's nothing else to do about that. And it's harmless.

Speaker 10 (01:54:46):
I understand it's there's the available networks that's different. It says known.

Leo Laporte (01:54:55):
What kind of phone are you on?

Speaker 10 (01:54:58):
I'm unfortunately on a flip phone. And the reason I'm on a flip phone is because I keep getting hacked.

Leo Laporte (01:55:04):
Oh okay. But what phone was it you were seeing? These network. This network on

Speaker 10 (01:55:09):
It's al Flip phone.

Leo Laporte (01:55:12):
You're seeing it on your flip phone?

Speaker 10 (01:55:16):
Yeah, it's a known dev known network. It's not available. And here's the thing, I always keep wifi off and I have a auto connect off and I have a look for nearby devices or public networks off. Everything's

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
Off. Yeah. Why do you think you've been hacked?

Speaker 10 (01:55:40):
Well it started with I was listening to the Richard Guy that got scammed and the way it started with me, it was fake Amazon email. Then these people are using my information to commit clients because they took over my email and they sent 65 emails.

Leo Laporte (01:56:01):
That's one of the reasons they like to take over emails cuz they can use a clean email yours to perpetrate their schemes.

Speaker 10 (01:56:10):
They were offering fake jobs. So I guess it could get all the info from these poor people they used accessibility. Have

Leo Laporte (01:56:22):
They been stealing from you though? Have you

Speaker 10 (01:56:25):
In the background? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:27):
So you think they're using your

Speaker 10 (01:56:28):
In a dark way for sale?

Leo Laporte (01:56:32):
That's meaningless. That's meaningless. Don't worry about that. You don't use that email anymore. I take it 20 million

Speaker 10 (01:56:39):
In examples.

Leo Laporte (01:56:41):
You don't use that email. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:56:43):
What I did is I factory reset the phone and it came back the known network and I don't have wifi. They had installed an infrared adapter in my computer. The one they hacked.

Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
How did they do that?

Speaker 10 (01:57:03):
I have no clue. It appeared and I couldn't get rid of it. I had,

Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
Did they actually have the registry? Did they have physical access to your computer?

Speaker 10 (01:57:14):
No, no, no. They did all this remotely. There was 50 gigabytes of information in my computer that didn't belong to me. About 1,600 files that if you try to erase them, they rename themselves and duplicate it. But the people are like two doors down.

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
Oh, it's your neighbors.

Speaker 10 (01:57:39):
It's my neighbors. It's not somebody in a foreign country. It's in front of my house. I've heard you talk while, unless you work for a three letter agency or somebody's parked in the curb. Well they were parked at the curb with their computer and this is a residential area so it's like the reason can't stop is because they kept hacking my Androids. They used the nearby for Google Play. They turned on the developer mode. So I said, what the heck is this? So I looked at it, I said, Oh, it shows you what running in your background. So I started using that.

Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Do you live alone or is do you have a spouse or a friend who lives with you or you live alone? Cause it sounds like all of this stuff, somebody would need physical access to your device for a lot of this stuff. You don't think the neighbors are sneaking in the house at night? Do you

Speaker 10 (01:58:37):
Have a scanner?

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
Yeah, but they can't magically get into your device.

Speaker 10 (01:58:46):
No, I know it's really weird. I even put the phone in a fairday bag and I work for a while and then it stopped working. So I keep doing stuff. But this is the newest thing, the known network and I factory reset the phone and it came back. So I remember that if you put the Mac address and your wifi network, it connects automatically. Yeah. So that's probably what they're doing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:15):
Does that phone have wifi?

Speaker 10 (01:59:19):
No it doesn't. Yeah, that's interesting. But you can get in using wifi. Yeah and like I said, I have it turned off and like I said, I factory reset it and there it is. The other thing is the setting <affirmative> that says auto download on mms. Yeah, the

Leo Laporte (01:59:42):
Text. Yeah. Yeah. And your texts that dad loves pictures and stuff

Speaker 10 (01:59:44):
Turned off and it keeps turning on

Leo Laporte (01:59:48):
<affirmative>.

Speaker 10 (01:59:51):
So I guess they use access, They're run people on my Androids, they have that accessibility applications where you can for people that don't see and stuff. And I kept changing things and whatever and they kept getting in cause it's not just one, it's several neighbors and they were doing something weird with the phone. So I looked at the developer mode under apps running in the background and accessibility was running all the time and accumulating a lot of data. So I turned everything off on accessibility cuz that bypasses a lot of stuff. So then they stopped and in other words they do something, I figure it out, I do something else and then they do something else. So like G board I guess they had put a keylogger and G board was accumulating massive amounts of data and it was translating cuz I put my phone in Spanish and I put it in French, then I put it in Italian, then I put it in Portuguese and just to try to throw them off. And they were using the Google translate.

Leo Laporte (02:01:09):
They speak all those languages.

Speaker 10 (02:01:12):
No they don't. But they Google translate does.

Leo Laporte (02:01:16):
So they don't need to. Do you speak those languages?

Speaker 10 (02:01:21):
I speak English, Spanish And then I can get by with.

Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
So you were able to put those line Portuguese on there, but you kinda understood

Speaker 10 (02:01:30):
But I can't

Leo Laporte (02:01:31):
Speak it. Yeah, boy, I don't know what to do. The people. Yeah, I need

Speaker 10 (02:01:40):
A good, I don't know if

Leo Laporte (02:01:42):
Your Did the people come over to the house? Ever stay away from 'em? Cuz they sound like they might be crazy. Boy, I wish I could help you. Leo Laport, the tech guy. <laugh>. Well more after this.

Speaker 11 (02:01:57):
I just need

Leo Laporte (02:01:58):
You the favor. If it's not one thing, it's another.

Speaker 11 (02:02:01):
I just need you the favor. I was like, let me just play this out.

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
I don't, I

(02:02:13):
Don't wanna be mean. Well obviously there's a mental health issue here, but I honestly don't know what to say. I don't wanna exacerbate it. I don't want to be mean. I was desperately trying to think of something I could say. But this is the problem I have <laugh> with mental illness is I, There's nothing you can, Is there anything you can really say? I don't know. I don't know what to say. I just don't know. I had no, I have no words. I just <laugh>. What would you have done Kim? What? Don't laugh now. You put her on <laugh>. I mean I just don't Don't wanna be mean.

Kim Schaffer (02:03:13):
You're a champ.

Leo Laporte (02:03:15):
<laugh>. I And obviously she believes that it wasn't a prank call. You think Kim did it on purpose? <laugh>. Oh Kim, I'm gonna look at her. Does she have that wicked like look, no, she didn't do it on purpose. I mean when you talked to her, she said a normal <laugh>, you did it.

Kim Schaffer (02:03:38):
It was questionable.

Leo Laporte (02:03:40):
Oh, I am gonna have to thank you. Oh you did. I mean I never know because you don't know. Cuz some it could be legit, right?

Kim Schaffer (02:03:49):
Most of the questions are well over my

Leo Laporte (02:03:51):
Head as it is. Yeah, No, no, I understand. But I understand how that could happen. And the thing that was weird is that she had

Kim Schaffer (02:04:00):
All the terminology

Leo Laporte (02:04:01):
A, she listens to the show clearly. She's listened very carefully to the show, which is the risk of the show is it's giving people ammunition, <laugh>. But the approximate thing that she called about was, I'm seeing this wifi signal as a known signal and that's a legitimate call. But then, right, I think that Al then I asked her, Does your friend have wifi? She says no. So well

Kim Schaffer (02:04:29):
Then no

Leo Laporte (02:04:31):
Sense. Maybe she had a printer question. I don't know. <laugh> almost would've preferred that. Almost would've would've liked that better. I don't look it. I don't wanna make fun of it. She clearly is worried about something. We're going to Mars on a rainbow bridge. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. We talk about tech in just a bit. We'll talk about space. Rod Pyle, the editor in chief of the Astra magazine for the National Space Society and host of our this week in space podcast will be stopping by meanwhile on with the calls from Lake Elsinor, California. Erica is on the line. Hi Eric.

Speaker 12 (02:05:19):
Hey Leo. Welcome. Okay, so I've been wanting to get into crypto and I saw this story come up a while back with Elon Musk giving away crypto. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
That was a scam.

Speaker 12 (02:05:31):
Your crypto.

Leo Laporte (02:05:32):
That was a scam. It was a scam. That was a scam. Cause

Speaker 12 (02:05:35):
It, it's, it's funny cause when you search for it on Google, you can't find any references to saying that it's a

Leo Laporte (02:05:41):
Scamming. It was a scammer. Got onto Twitter. Turned out we found out later, Twitter had terrible security. This was a couple of years ago. And the scammer was able to get access to administrative account that allowed him to tweet on anybody's behalf. Now, that's a massive security flaw. It wasn't just Elon. He tweeted as Tim Cook. He tweeted as Barack Obama. He tweet, he tweeted as a variety of people saying, Which is really silly, I want to give back. If you send me X amount of crypto of Bitcoin, I will send it back double. Now, most people hearing that or reading that might say, Well that sounds pretty shady. I'm not gonna send you my Bitcoin and have you double it. Why don't you just send me it to me the first place? But we can save the doubling part. But because it came from well known names on with blue check marks on Twitter, I think perhaps some people fell for it. At the time, it was pretty clear that not a lot of people, maybe a few hundred thousand dollars changed hands. Not a lot of people fell for it. Twitter, immediately within force,

Speaker 12 (02:06:59):
The site looks perfect. Yeah, it looks totally legit

Leo Laporte (02:07:02):
Because it's easy. Anybody can do that. It's, it's simple, it's trivial, it's easy to make a site look completely legitimate. That is not a skill. It's a widespread skill. It's not. And every bad guy has it. So you can't judge a site by how nicely it's designed. Twitter discovered it and then they went out and they actually hired a whole security team, including a guy named Mud, who's a well known security guy, worked for the feds and hacking groups and it was very, very accomplished. Peter. He worked there for about a year. Was fired early this year when Elon Musk put his offer to buy Twitter in Zao was fired. And then he's the guy who then later became a whistleblower. You may have read about that. So this was Twitter admitting, Yeah, we've got security problems. Zach co later as a whistleblower said, Oh, you don't even know the half it. I talked to one of the early engineers at Twitter last week, a guy with the named Rebel. He's a respectable upright guy, but he said, Yeah, our security was really bad in the old days. You

Speaker 12 (02:08:16):
Would think that Twitter would know about this and have a link right on their fraud page where you could clearly get the answer. But there's just no

Leo Laporte (02:08:27):
References either. Maybe they all, maybe they're embarrassed. But let's put your thinking cap on, Eric. Is any somebody gonna give you free money?

Speaker 12 (02:08:37):
The only thing I thought that they might be doing it is cause we wanted to track identities.

Leo Laporte (02:08:44):
Yeah, it'd have to be a to a lot of identities. If you go to Wikipedia and search for 2020, Twitter account hijacking, they have a whole page talking about the hack. 130 high profile accounts were hacked.

Speaker 12 (02:09:03):
Okay, so this is a brand new one. This one just started.

Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised actually. Right? If it worked before <laugh>, do it again. Probably not the same guy, but somebody inspired by the same guy. So what's the page that you're looking at now?

Speaker 12 (02:09:19):
It's Twitter hyphen go.com,

Leo Laporte (02:09:23):
Twitter hyphen go.com. By the way, because Elon has now bought Twitter and I might add fired, about half the staff expect a lot of these. Okay, this is just the beginning. I don't think Elon really wants to give you a hundred million in cryptocurrency, <laugh>. I really don't. In fact, I think Elon is a little desperate right now cuz he just spent 44 billion on a site that's got no revenue to speak of. So this, yeah, sure it looks real. I can make this page in five minutes. I could make this page. This is nothing. So yeah, boy, this show has been about scams today and I guess the lesson is, I don't know what the lesson is. What's your wallet? See, I come up with a lot of cliches. What has happened, and I mentioned this before, but I'll say it again. There've always been confidence games, The pigeon drop.

(02:10:30):
There have been many, many movies made about this. Remember George C. Scott and the Flimm flam man about artists. In fact, we always kind of love him. That's what the Sting was, is a con. And there've been many, many cons, but they're well known. They're cons almost in every single con. The key is you play on the greed of your victim. You play on watch the Grifters, another great movie play on the greed of your victim. And the difference is these days, these cons are not downtown on Main Street or you see a wallet on the ground, another guy sees it at the same time. You both run over to it. It's got some money in it. The guy says, Well what are we gonna do? We both saw it. And it comes up with a plan, which involves you going to your bank, taking money out of the bank to give to this guy because of your greed.

(02:11:31):
Remember, play upon your greed. So all of this has gone from Main Street downtown. That's called a Pigeon drop by the way, and is now online, which means it has, They have websites, they look very real. They got a picture of Elon. I mean it's gotta be real. Sure it's gotta be. By the way, there are some clues on this site. So a couple of things. First of all, don't be greedy. There's no such thing as free money. There are people, there are artists out there who are trying to you. So be suspicious. There are clues to look for.

(02:12:09):
Instance, biggest giveaway, crypto of 100 million. That's not exactly a sentence. And then here it says Instruction for participate. That's not English. What does that tell you? The person who did this is not a native speaker. That's very common. Instruction for participate is a dead giveaway, right? You see an un grammatical phrase, biggest giveaway, crypto of 100 million. That's not English. In honor of the purchase of Twitter, we are giving away cryptocurrency, <laugh>, the con artists are out there. Use your noggin, don't be greedy. Suspect everything. Leo Laport, the tech guy. There's gonna be a lot more of these. This is just the beginning by the way, you've been signed out John, I just wanna let you know instruction for participate. Yeah. To me that's a giveaway. When I see that it's very professional page. It says Instruction for participate.

(02:13:31):
Oh, it's registered with Reg Dot. That tells you something. The Russian, the registrar, four days old. But this, you know what? People will probably fall for this, but it's greed cuz somebody's gonna try. I want money. I would submit that. Buying a Powerball ticket, we've kind of put ourselves in this boat, right? Because now with government sanction, you can take your hard earned money and give it to who runs Powerball, some casino, probably some casino operation because wow, they're given away more than a billion dollars. Rod, what is the chance? The chances of Powerball, by the way, are they've increased the odds recently to one in 292 million. One in 292 million. What about somebody's gonna win. Yeah, but not you <laugh> almost as many people as in the United States.

(02:14:43):
You have twice the chance of getting hit by lightning twice. Twice as likely to get hit by lightning as to win the power ball. And I think when we sanction stuff like that we're in a way kind of teaching people some sort of weird numeracy. Yeah, it's in theory run by those state governments, but it's not the most, the money. There's the casino interests siphon off a lot of that money. Yeah, I voted no on both of those Big Don. I think that some of this comes from the fact that we are kind of sanctioning this kind of something for nothing. Greed. What do you think, Rod?

(02:15:37):
Oh, you're muted. That's the problem. Here we go. There you go. I think I'm about as likely to be hit by an asteroid as to win anything <laugh>, which will be our first story today. <laugh> good? Yeah. What about that asteroid? Hiding behind the sun. How dare it. Yeah, the nerve of those things, huh? We need to start looking a little more carefully. Your chance of getting hit by lightning is one in a million. Your chance of winning the power ball is one in 292.2 million. Oh is it million? I thought it was in the billions. No, I'm sorry. In the billions. Is the chance of my Doge coin ever being worth more than 3 cents? Share? Powerball is now up to 1.6 billion. So Lisa, I have to say Lisa and her sister bought a ticket and I did not mock. I did not laugh. <laugh> I have, but you better not.

(02:16:30):
I've literally never bought a lottery ticket. But I've seen her biceps. I wouldn't laugh. Well why you do it cuz you have that for that next day or two that you can fantasize. What if I won? Yeah. It's that little moment of one hope that will soon be extinguished from all of us. By the way, I did a little test. I said the power ball was worth 1.6 billion just to see. And everybody in the chat room said, No, no. It's 1.9 billion <laugh>. That's insane. I'm glad you're paying attention. I'll split it with you my friend. It's 1.9 billion Leo <laugh>. Get it right dude. I just, It's telling that everybody knows exactly <laugh> exactly what the power ball is worth.

(02:17:26):
We've created this monster of ignorance and we are gonna pay, It's happening. It's time for our rocket man himself, Rod pile, editor in chief of Ad Astra magazine. I'd go reach back and get your pile of pile books, but it's sitting under my bowl of chili, so I'm not gonna touch it right now. Okay, <laugh>. Well that's an important thing to have. Chilly is number one, take my word for it. He's written a lot, <laugh> written a lot of books. Editor in chief of ad astro. The most important thing Rod does every week is host this week in space with te malik of space.com because we love space. We started having you on, it's been about a year, right, Rod? Yeah well we're up to a little less. We're up to 36 episodes plus the betas. It's twists. Yeah. Two a year I guess. Yeah.

(02:18:20):
But on the radio show you you've been on. Oh yeah, yeah. I think a couple years things were happening. The pandemic, wasn't it? Yeah, maybe. Yeah. People were getting sick. Yeah. I have a blank spot in my memory. <laugh> from that particular time. So Oh, blame you. But that's because things were starting to happen in space now. Yeah. Now we learn that this sneaky little asteroid's been hiding behind the sun all this time. I was little devil. So this is a little worrisome. It's something, Wait a minute. Yeah. Cause I was it. Is this worrisome? Yeah, it is. So we try to track, we being primarily the Air Force and a few other entities try to track the most dangerous asteroids out there. So one of the most dangerous, well they're half a kilometer and bigger, let's say we think we know we're about 90, 95% of them are, and that's through various means.

(02:19:13):
Mostly ground based telescopes and radar. But every now and then you find another one. So just last week was announced, newly discovered 2022 AP seven. We'll have to give it a better name than that. A little less than a mile in diameter, maybe a little more. They don't have an exact measure yet, but this is a mass extinction event of this thing smacked into the earth. Oh, I don't like those words. Mass extinction event. And we think that there may be as many as 50 of these left that have not been spotted. And a lot of them are probably within the earth orbit and therefore they dance around the other side of the sun or near it. And they're really hard to spot. Now that's with earthbound telescopes, it's easier with orbital telescopes because you don't have as much issue with the atmosphere. None. And so there's this poor mission that used to be called neo cam, now it's called neo surveyor NIO for near earth object.

(02:20:09):
That's been trying to get flown for, I don't know, 12 years now. I remember writing about it back in like 2014, I think. And it's a good mission. It's a space telescope specifically to go up and find big rocks that might smack into the earth and wipe us out. And it's just one of those things that keeps having funding challenges. Finally, we think it's gone over the hurdle, but it's still a lot of work to be done. And of course, even once it's flown, you gotta get the data down. You gotta have people go through it and you gotta find these suckers know where they are. And we've just taken that first baby step with the dart mission as you recall, to figure out how to nudge 'em out of the way. But to do that, you gotta find really early. Cause if it's a mile across, you gotta nudge it real hard or nudge it real early.

(02:20:53):
And that's just geometry <laugh>. I thought that was sex education, but that's another matter. <laugh>. All right. We know. Wait, so I have so many questions, but since the year, it's almost, since we're gonna, it's the end of, since it's a mass extinction event, I guess I don't have to worry about it. When will it hit the earth? Well, there there's no risk of this one for at least a couple of centuries, but, But every now and then we get something usually in large, but we get something flying way close to the earth than we expected cuz we just didn't spot it in time or it was miscalculated. We spend send that thing, that dart thing up so we could nudge it and be prepared. But as I was saying, you've gotta find it really early, like many decades hopefully. Well we got centuries come at you.

(02:21:44):
We have what for this one? Yeah. Oh, but what about the other 49 that are hiding in the dark, potentially 49 that are hiding out in the glare of the sun or somewhere way out in the outer solar system. Those things worry us a lot more. So the concern is because haven't our monitoring system is inadequate basically. Yes, exactly. So the message that I'm trying to get across is we need to support and fly these monitoring systems and find these suckers and then we'll figure out how to deal with 'em. And if all else fails, we'll set off a nuke next to it and knock it off. When's the last time there was a mass extinction of it <laugh>? Well there was the dinosaurs. That was how was a mass extinction of Yeah, but there was also that big one that came in over Tonka back in, what was it, 1908 I think.

(02:22:31):
Which that was up in East Siberia, right? Yeah. And it didn't a mass extinction about by any means, but it certainly didn't make people around Toka very happy. This one that we saw behind the sun. This is bigger than that one though, isn't it? Yeah. This one, Well it's somewhere between little under a mile and maybe as much as a mile 0.8 or so. That's big. That's a really big run. That's huge. That's a county killer. And in terms of overreaching effects certainly global. Do we have minutes? A few minutes for one more story please. I beg of you changed the subject. Yes. Yeah, Mars quake. Well this is another death and doom story actually. But we had a Mars detected by the insight lander, which they were able to, this is on Mars obviously. They were able to correlate that Mars quake with an image of a new crater across the planet from where?

(02:23:29):
Inside Crater planet. Wow. That's cool. And they don't see these very often. And so this is a magnitude for Shaker. So it's correlated with a 500 foot crater. This is unprecedented. And it spewed up, crater spews up a lot of soil, but it also kicked up a bunch of water. Ice, which is something we wanna see because once again we would like to have water as a resource on Mars. So this is a really great thing. It also was a big enough quake that it gave them some more really good geologic data on the interior of Mars. Cuz it was something that big wax into the planet. It kind of rings like a bell. All the seismic waves bounce around and you can learn awful lot about the core. Unfortunately our only size mob on our Mars, which is an onsite, is gonna go dark in probably two to three weeks because there's been so many dusty events that the solar panels are coated and oh, it's on its way out now.

(02:24:22):
And people you will usually say, why don't they set up something that cleans the solar panels? And I asked and the answer is complexity and weight. But they're working on it really Like a little rover with a squeegy. Well angling them might help or put lower. There's gotta be ways you could have a cleaning thing built in. Exactly. There there's been proposals for compress carbon, compressing some carbon di out of the atmosphere. So there's ways, it's just not something they've done yet. And unfortunately, but this thing was only supposed to last a couple years. Well that's the thing. There's batteries run out. There's a lot of things that would run out. So it's not about 20%, it's gonna say bye bye pretty soon. But they wait until they get miss two check-ins and then they say, okay, mission over. And they still listen for a while just to make sure.

(02:25:08):
Yeah. So figures crossed, maybe it'll pop back, but I kind of doubt it. SpaceX had a nice Falcon heavy launch, didn't they? Yeah, we don't see very many of those. And I really want to get out there and see One Rock and launch is cool, but seeing two thirds of it come back to the launch point, <laugh>, two of the boosters, the site, the site engines after they were released then flew their way autonomously back and landed so they could be reused. Which is always an inspiring site. It's really amazing. And if you see the video, they come in really fast and they just break at the last second. So that's gotta be really exciting. And there's double Sonic booms on this. One was they landed on land, which they usually land on a barge right out in the ocean for so well, for the Falcon heavies, they come back, they're too big cause there's a little too much going on I think to go back onto the park.

(02:26:03):
And is this launch a preparation for a mission to the moon or what is this? Falcon Heavy? They launched some Space Force stuff, right? Yeah, I think so. At this point there's no certain payloads going up on Falcon Heavy for the Artemis program. Although it's certainly been proposed because yeah, people are tired of the expense. When's the next Artemis attempt? Soon? November 14th. This month? Yeah, couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah. So I gotta get a new bet going with Tark. I've already won his chair. Although he doesn't agree <laugh> cuz he is got this very cool Star Trek chair and I bet him we wouldn't be in that first month and yeah, we'll see. Ladies and gentlemen. Oh, the space force theme. I salute you Rod pile author, Space 2.0 as we fly off. Could stop. My ears are bleeding <laugh>. Thank you Leo. <laugh>. They, it was a request <laugh>. Yeah. So come to love it someday. It's growing on me to be honest. Really? Yeah. Like a fungus. Well it's a little silly, but it's good. I mean

(02:27:30):
It's no worse than when the cassons go marching along. No, but we've had over a hundred years to get it right. <laugh>? I actually heard there were a couple of alternatives that people had put up on YouTube and elsewhere that they just composed cuz they wanted to contribute and they were pretty good. But of course anything else that happens with government, especially federal government, I can only wonder what kind of input they got. Okay. It can't be too nationalistic. It can't be too patriot. It can't be sexist. It can't be Yeah. It's too marshall in nature. It can't be too warlike. It's hard. Cause they can't be that. So I wonder what kind of instructions they had. Maybe they said, just make sure you could tap your toes. Cuz when John Phillip Su was composing all those other DIDs back in the day, people just said, Yeah, but melt. We were in a istic nation. Yeah. Get those cassons out there from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Triple E. Well said. Yep.

(02:28:31):
I don't know rumors that SpaceX is buying Boeing. Yeah, I saw that. I hope not. We need a variety. Right? Well, for one thing, Elon doesn't need to buy any more companies for a while. I think he's fully distracted now and trying to bring a shareholder owned company into SpaceX. I mean, that would be a difficulty. Or your arms are wrapped around, I don't know what the feds would allow it, because that pretty much corners the launch market in this country. And there's a whole bunch of reasons not to Now, could they run it better? Maybe. I don't see his style working very well with the shareholder owned company. That would be, I'm impressed. I'm impressed that during this whole Twitter thing, he was able to launch those two Fal can have you land them so beautifully. I did he steer. I think he did.

(02:29:20):
Right. I don't think he does it by himself. He doesn't do it all by himself. He's got a couple of good people working for him over there. <laugh>. But I still have you come any closer to figuring out the big why. Is this just a matter of trying to control the public sphere? Well, it's certainly possible that it's about influence. I Elon plays the fool. Is he a fool? I don't know. He might be. Might be playing the fool and secretly have ambitions. Twitter's never made much money. Certainly not 44 billion worth. And the things he's floated as making money back aren't gonna make anywhere near the interest payments alone. So yeah, it's an interesting question. I really don't know what his long term strategy is. I thought for a while maybe he was gonna try to polish it up and do an ipo. But even then you're not, there aren't enough suckers out there to make that work.

(02:30:23):
So I don't know. Did you see the the BBC documentary that came out about him? No. No. Oh, it's very interesting. I was only able to catch the first hour, but it's Oh, look for it. Yeah, it's quite in depth. They interview his mom, they interview his friends, they interview former employees. And even the ones that really like him are very careful speaking <laugh>. So it's just pretty fascinating to watch. All right my friend. Have a wonderful week. Thanks sir. I'll see you next one next week. Take care. Bye. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy this week and every week thanks to Professor Laura, our musical director. Thanks to Kim Scher, our phone Angel. Thanks. Most of all, those of you who call in and listen in, couldn't do it without you. I'm very grateful. This is a privilege, absolute privilege to be here. But we got a time for a couple more calls before we get going here. Stanley is on the line from Sherman Oaks, California. Hi Stanley.

Speaker 7 (02:31:23):
Hello. Long time caller.

Leo Laporte (02:31:26):
Welcome. You've

Speaker 7 (02:31:28):
Had before, Hey, one thing on that mass extinction we haddon ma stuff in America. The Clovis people, they think they were wiped out by a mass extinction.

Leo Laporte (02:31:44):
Oh, interesting.

Speaker 7 (02:31:45):
Yeah. That they found. That's one element they find when meteors come in. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:53):
An element uncommon or not on earth. And interesting. And when was that? Would that have been unfortunately, your phone, your Sean's breaking up. Are you on a cordless? Yes. Get closer if you can to the base station.

Speaker 7 (02:32:15):
Okay. I'm sorry about that.

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
No, that's all right. I just wanna understand what you're saying.

Speaker 7 (02:32:19):
But anyway, what I'm calling about is my wireless is about seven, eight years old and it's just not cutting it anymore. And I went online to see what they cost and they cost anywhere from 50 to $400. And I'm 84. I'm on a limited income and I'm trying to find one that will work fine. My situation is my house is very small. It's only a thousand square feet. So I don't need a lot of range. And I only have a couple of Chromebooks and a tablet. And since my wife has passed away, I'm the only one here. And so I only one item on at a time. So it's not multiple, but I was trying to find out what would be a good one to fit that scenario.

Leo Laporte (02:33:08):
You certainly don't need to buy anything fancy. You don't need a mesh router cuz it's only a thousand square feet. It's just you. A very simple router will work quite now quite well. The one that wire cutter recommends as the best router for most people is the TP link Archer. Let me see what the price is. I think it's around 60 bucks, but let me just check.

Speaker 7 (02:33:34):
Yeah, I was looking at that one. Yeah, TP Archer and I think it's a AC 60 or something,

Leo Laporte (02:33:41):
Or they make a variety of ones for 53 bucks. And I think this would be adequate. The AC 1750, it's dual band. It isn't wifi six but I don't think that that's a big problem. Unless you have something that's gonna use wifi six for a little bit more. 79 bucks you could get there at 1800, which is a wifi six router. The AX 21. But I think these TP links are,

Speaker 7 (02:34:07):
Yeah, the AX 21 was one I was looking at.

Leo Laporte (02:34:10):
That's an well that if you're willing to spend that kind of money, 80 bucks, that is a hell of a router, excuse me, a heck of a router. And I think would do everything you'd want, would work great in a thousand square feet. I

Speaker 7 (02:34:22):
Like a place where you can get it cheaper. So good.

Leo Laporte (02:34:24):
Yeah. I'm just looking at the Amazon price. Yeah. The AX 21. Excellent. And if you wanna read the review, the wire cutter.com, which is a product review site owned now by the New York Times, they're pretty trustworthy. They've liked these TP links forever and they consistently recommend the archers.

Speaker 7 (02:34:42):
And that's wire cutter.com,

Leo Laporte (02:34:44):
The Yes. Wire cutter.com. That's right.

Speaker 7 (02:34:47):
Oh, that's wonderful.

Leo Laporte (02:34:48):
Yeah. I concur with their review of it. Yeah. Target has it for I see where you're finding it. Target has it for 60 bucks today, so that's a good deal.

Speaker 7 (02:35:00):
Maybe I'll go down to Target

Leo Laporte (02:35:02):
<laugh>.

Speaker 7 (02:35:04):
Yeah. Anyway, it was, I think it's Iridium that ends up in the meteors. And I think they found that one for what wiped out the dinosaurs. Yeah. Some of the geologists. It was on our local channel that the one that has no commercials, I can't think of it earlier.

Leo Laporte (02:35:29):
University. Yes. Public broadcasting. University of Southern car, South Carolina has discovered Clovis people lived about 12,800 years ago and disappeared suddenly.

Speaker 7 (02:35:43):
And all the mammoths and the large mammals, the very large mammals that were here, I think from camels on upward, there used to be camels here. And they all disappeared. They just went. Yep. And there's a layer of carbon with this iridium in it. It's

Leo Laporte (02:36:00):
Actually platinum and they That's right. Platinum. While it is obviously here on earth, it is also strongly associated with comets and asteroids. There's so much platinum, It's normally very rare right at this level. But there was so much platinum in these burial sites that they suspect that maybe was a cosmic event that ended the Clovis group. But I'm looking at the University of South Carolina paper on this. Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:36:34):
It was either a commod or a meteor. Yeah. Yeah. And it they went into real,

Leo Laporte (02:36:42):
Oh, you're right about iridium. The platinum anomaly is similar to the well documented finding of iridium that they found in the rock layers dated 65 million years ago from an impact that caused the dinosaur extinction. Right. So the iridium was with the dinosaurs and this platinum, they think might be what happened to the Clovis people 12,800 years

Speaker 7 (02:37:01):
Ago. And it wasn't as big Cause it didn't cover the whole earth. It just covered North America.

Leo Laporte (02:37:06):
Yeah. Well maybe I wouldn't be surprised to find that there have been more of these events than we think.

Speaker 7 (02:37:12):
Yeah, they were discovering, they can find, and this was the reason they really found it, was because of the nickel deposits up there in Canada. They couldn't figure out how they were there. And they finally figured out with about 10 or 12 years ago that it was due to a meteor.

Leo Laporte (02:37:31):
Fascinating.

Speaker 7 (02:37:32):
And that they've suddenly learned, tend to space to try to use a special spectrometry to look at the terrain, to figure out where there are impacts. Because then they wanna look there for mining <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:37:49):
I don't know if that's quite enough platinum to make it worth mining, but still no fascinating

Speaker 7 (02:37:53):
Nickel.

Leo Laporte (02:37:55):
We need those

Speaker 7 (02:37:57):
For What happens is the impact is so large, it melts down into the earth and brings stuff up out of the core.

Leo Laporte (02:38:06):
You remind me of my dad, who is a geologist. He loves that kind of stuff. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Stanley.

Speaker 7 (02:38:13):
I'm a retired process and quality engineer. There you go. And I'm 84 and I've been doing it since 61. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:38:22):
Well, it's a pleasure talking to you, Stanley, and enjoy that new router. I think it's gonna work great for you.

Speaker 7 (02:38:28):
Thank you so much. Alrighty. There was so much data I was overwhelmed. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:38:33):
You know what? In fact, when they founded the wire cutter way back when, that was, the premise was we're gonna say one product, the one thing that we recommend. Obviously you could say, Well this is good and this is good. Maybe that's good and not, Sometimes I do that, but I know what you mean. I think people just really want you to say, No, get this, You'll be happy. Yeah,

Speaker 7 (02:38:52):
I know. The advertising is so overwhelming,

Leo Laporte (02:38:55):
Confusing. I know. And they use a lot.

Speaker 7 (02:38:57):
Thank you. Thank you so much again. Your show is so great.

Leo Laporte (02:39:00):
Oh, Stanley, I'm so glad you listened. I appreciate

Speaker 7 (02:39:03):
It. Yes, I've been listening for years.

Leo Laporte (02:39:04):
Thank you. Keep listening. Now that you know the way, I hope you'll call some more. Okay, thank you, Stanley. Bye-bye. Have a great day. Well, we are out of time. I see my battery level as almost zero, so we better get outta here and recharge. I'll remind you that we put everything we talk about. In fact, I just put an article about this discovery of platinum that is fascinating from the University of South Carolina. Just put that in the show notes. Those show notes, all the links from the show. Go to tech guy labs.com. That actually is a redirect that we used to have a website there, but it got too expensive. So we now point you to the main site for the podcast network that I do every week called this Week in tech. So tech guy labs.com will take you to the TWI site and that's where you'll find all the episodes, including this one episode 1942.

(02:40:03):
We also put audio and video from the shows there and transcripts too. I'm Leo LaPorte, your tech guy. Thank you so much for joining me. We'll see you next time. Have a great geek week. Well, that's it for the Tech I Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twit, T W I T. It stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twi.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh on Mac Break, weekly iPads, iPhones, Apple watches, them iOS today, security and Security now, I mean, I can go on and on. And of course, the big show every Sunday afternoon this week in tech. You'll find it all@quit.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time