The Tech Guy Episode 1850 Transcript

(00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:06):
This is TWiT. Hi, this is Leo Laporte. Yeah. And this is your tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on premiere networks all over the country. Sunday, December 5th, 2021, the eighth night of Hanukah. This is episode 1,850. Enjoy the tech guy podcast is brought to you by Udacity. Udacity offers online education that's geared toward people looking to take their technology to the next level. Get the in demand tech skills you need to advance your career. Visit udacity.com/twit to learn more. And by simply safe, take advantage of simply Safe's holiday deals and get 40% off your new home security system. By visiting simplysafe.com/twit and by userway.org/twit. Your website is accessible, ADA compliant, and helps your business avoid accessibility-related lawsuits. The perfect way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's not only the right thing to do.

Leo Laporte (00:01:15):
It's also the law. Go to user way.org/twi for 30% off user ways. AI-powered accessibility solution. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo LePort here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphones, smartwatches, you know, all that jazz, all that jazz. 88-88-Ask-Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536. Toll-free from anywhere in the US or Canada. You call me we'll talk tech website, techguylabs.com. That's where you'll find answers to the questions links if I mention them. So you don't have to write anything down. There's also audio and video. You have video from the show. Boy, there's the, and more exciting, nothing more exciting than watching a radio show on TV. <Laugh> it's almost as bad as this morning at 4:00 AM me watching the world chess championship match. <Laugh> <laugh> it just it's it's not, it's not gripping television.

Leo Laporte (00:02:20):
It's not at least with a chess championship. You know, there's two people <laugh> and there's moves slow as they might be me. It's just one guy in a microphone. Anyway, we make videos for you. And it's all@techguylabs.com. Speaking of video, we get a call all the time. In fact, Scott Wilkinson's bemoan this I've talked to other people. My friend Steve Gibson was watching foundation and he said, yeah, what is it about modern TV and movies? I can't, the dialogue is hard to understand. Scott says doing it was okay, but I, I couldn't understand what they were saying there. And and I hear this a lot and in my initial reaction is you're old. <Laugh> right. You're just old. And you know, when my dad got older and he had hearing problems he said, would say to me, you're mumbling. And I would say, no, dad, I'm not mumbling, you're old.

Leo Laporte (00:03:20):
But in fact there might actually be an issue. Just read an article at slash film by Ben Pearson. One of my favorite kind of fan blogs. Here's why movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand and three ways to fix it. So acknowledging, and these are younger people writing this. Yeah, it's hard to understand. I remember when Robert Altman was in his heyday and he made movies like mash and McCabe and Mrs. Miller and you know, Nashville. And he intentionally, this was his thing, overlapped dialogue. So people, because he said, this is how it is in life in life, everybody doesn't declaim, clearly that's movies in the thirties. Everybody speaks with perfect D one at a time, and there's no overlapping and nobody talking under their breath. And then along comes Marlon Brando and the method acting, and people start talking on of their, with marbles in their mouth.

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
And then it comes Robert Altman, the director who says, you know, you don't have to hear every word of dialogue. Sometimes they can be talking over each other and he's famous for that. He's famous for that. And you watch MCCA and Mrs. Miller, you can't understand half of what they're saying, and that was in the seventies or sixties, maybe even, but it is difficult. And in modern times it's gotten even worse. And so there's a number of reasons. Pearson explains in his article, why this is one, it's a purposeful choice. It's a director. People like Christopher Nolan now who has taken the, the man of most unintelligible dialogue from a director tenant. Did you see tenant? There's a lot of times in that movie where you can't understand what they're saying, and he, he says, I'm doing it on purpose. He says it's, that's how it is in life.

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
And sometimes you don't hear what were saying the, the dark night movies, you know, same thing and sound designers. Apparently, according to this article, aren't thrilled with it. Ben Pearson interviews, a bunch of sound designers, some of them anonymous because <laugh> some of 'em wouldn't even talk to him saying I don't wanna ruin my reputation. I don't, I'm not gonna talk about this. <Laugh> sometimes cuz where characters wear a mask like in the dark night rises bane, everyone is talking for a mask. And so you can't understand some of what he's saying. I, I mean understand that. So that's a creative choice. Some of it's, the acting started with Marlon Brando and method acting where they wouldn't, you know, actors in the old days didn't even talk like normal people. They not only enunciated, they used a phony British accent. You watch these old movies and it's like, what the heck? Where are they from?

Leo Laporte (00:06:18):
Well, you know, Bakersfield, but they sound like they're from the United Kingdom. So that's another thing. And today of course the method is completely taken over. I just saw Kristen Stewart's new movie, Spencer. She plays Diana Spencer and she's whispering throughout the whole movie. She's talking like this. I thought that's an interesting choice. But you know, it's hard to understand what you're saying. How many people, how many of you even young people now we watch with the subtitles on, in fact, one reason the movies makers should hate this because that means you're not gonna go see it in the movies cuz you can't understand it in the theater. You're gonna stay home and watch it on TV where you could turn on the subtitles. That's bad for movie business, Christopher Nolan, I'm looking at you, but some of it's just the actors. They, they quote a sound designer for who's worked on gladiator and and Skyfall and, and other movie movies like that.

Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
And she says mumbling, breathy. I call it a self-conscious type of acting. It's so frustrating. See, she's gotta record this and then make it audible. I would say a lot of younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls into directors to say, I can't understand a word you're saying I'm listening to the dailies and I can't understand it. She says no amount of volumes gonna fix that. You turn it up all you want, you can clean up all you want and you can't understand it. So it's frustrating. I think for the sound recorders and the Mo motion picture set of the TV show set, cuz they know it's coming across bad. They don't wanna stop shooting cuz they can't hear it, but they should. That's another reason Pearson says, you know, sound, sound, sound, people have to have to speak up.

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
And then there's also just a pure technology problem. And I think some of this and I've attributed it in the past to five, one and seven one and atmo surround sound mixes where they don't give enough to the center channel, cuz there's so much else going on in a movie theater. Maybe the center channel is appropriately amplified. So you can hear it clearly, but at home, maybe not in fact if you're not listening on a well tuned seven one system. Yeah. So what I do often is I turn out the center channel. If you have a, have one of those systems where you have a channel, just for dialogue, that center channel, turning that up sometimes helps sometimes helps anyway. There's a lot of reasons, you know, and also they're mixing sometimes for the movie theater, not for the home. So there's that, there's a lot of reasons.

Leo Laporte (00:08:53):
This is a problem. He goes on there's you know, so how do we fix this? He says, well maybe movie makers need to pay attention. Maybe you know, cuz there's nothing we can do as, as, as viewers except you know, just technologically turn up the sound or up the center channel or turn on the subtitles closed captioning works. Maybe that's the, you know, I, I find myself, my wife and I both turning on the the subtitles, cuz I I'll say I sometimes it's just an accent, you know, in in Spencer, the movie about princess of Wales, like a lot of strong accents. So, you know, turn it on the close captioning. Maybe you can understand those British accents a little better, but don't feel like it's you, I guess that's the point. That's always the Mo my motto. It's not your fault.

Leo Laporte (00:09:48):
When this technology stuff doesn't work. It ain't your fault. It ain't our fault. We're not misusing it most of the time. Well, sometimes we are most of the time, it's the fault of the people who make this stuff. It's up to them. It's the onus, the burden is on them so that we normal people can use it. <Laugh> so come on film industry. You want us to come to theaters, right? Maybe that's why they're doing it. Maybe they're just saying yeah. What makes it, so it sounds terrible. It 'em. So they have to come to the theater. I hope they're not doing that. 88-88-Ask-Leo that's the phone number? 88-88-275-536. I've mentioned this before. My favorite feature of Apple TV might be the only reason to get an Apple TV. You press the Siri button and you say, what did she just say? And it's, it's so great. I use it all the time. Skips back 30 seconds turns on the subtitles just for the next 30 seconds. Replays it. In other words with subtitles on and then goes back to normal. Now that is a nice feature. What did he just say? I hope you can understand what I'm saying. I shall speak like a theft spin from now on communication is such a, a nice what?

Kim Shaffer (00:10:58):
I don't know, but it's a good thing. If you have <laugh> Kim Shaffer

Leo Laporte (00:11:01):
Is our operator. Communication is such a nice it's key

Kim Shaffer (00:11:05):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:11:06):
Thing. Hi Kim.

Kim Shaffer (00:11:08):
Hi. Oh, Leo actually.

Leo Laporte (00:11:10):
Oh, oh, Ola Ola. You were speaking Spanish for was I was listening the baby ad and blaming myself cuz I have babble. And I was before we went to my is supposed to study my Spanish and I just kept putting it off. And by the time I got to Mexico, I, I had to say AGL <laugh>

Kim Shaffer (00:11:28):
He just needed a couple keywords. Don't ask to bono. Yeah. I knew that. BU MAA P four. Yeah, the most important there's there's not very many things that youd actually have to say.

Leo Laporte (00:11:37):
He phrases your very good.

Kim Shaffer (00:11:39):
I am very good

Leo Laporte (00:11:39):
At the key phrase. We'll call it Kimble. Forget Baba. We got Kimble <laugh> so who should I start the show with? Well,

Kim Shaffer (00:11:46):
Let's go to Jamie in Hollywood. He wants a camera and so do I,

Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
So he wants a camera. And so do I, that's gonna be the name of the show. <Laugh> thank you, Kim. Hi. Hi, Jamie. Welcome. Welcome to the tech guy. Good to, Hey, how are you? I'm great. How are you? Pleasure.

Caller Jamie (00:12:03):
Pleasure to speak to you. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:12:04):
You. Doing great. So you want a camera? Huh?

Caller Jamie (00:12:08):
Well, you know, a particular camera this day and age with crime and all sorts of weird this going on. I was thinking, you know

Leo Laporte (00:12:15):
Oh, you want a security? A security camera?

Caller Jamie (00:12:19):
Yeah. In my car and

Leo Laporte (00:12:21):
Oh, in your car or narrowing it down here.

Caller Jamie (00:12:24):
Yeah. One that, that, well, they have tri cameras now. You know, some of them are by Sony and I wanted a name brand if possible. I'm seeing like van true and a bunch of other names, but I'm seeing these ones that have like a rear camera. Yeah. one that sees the cabin and one that sees the front, like a tri camera and it also has like protection. Why your car is parked as well.

Leo Laporte (00:12:44):
So more and more. You're gonna see this built into cars, cars like Tesla have these cameras all around. And in fact it is the law. I think I'll have to ask Sam are car guys coming up that you have to have a backup camera now in modern vehicles. So cameras, I have one. Yeah. They're cheap. They're easy to add. So do you wanna put this camera on your dash? Is that the, the main thing?

Caller Jamie (00:13:07):
Yeah. One that maybe is by the rear of your mirror that can see in the cabin out front and one in

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
The back one for front and back. Yeah. Yeah. The, the easiest of course with a dash cam is to have upfront and then driver that third camera, then you'd have to add another lens maybe on your light rear license plate or something like that. Yeah. I, so I used to have one and they went outta business and then somebody bought them. They kind of went back called the hourly, but it's really nice to have a camera like this. I it was about

Caller Jamie (00:13:43):
To buy the owl camera. I was actually in the process of buying it and I read an article that they went out of business and they showed an office that was empty and it was,

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
Yeah. But that was last year. And then they got bought and the company that bought 'em brought it back. So the owl cam is right. And, and I just don't know, I haven't, I don't know how it is under the new owner, but I liked it. It was really, it had a lot of nice features. Very cool.

Caller Jamie (00:14:04):
Yeah. Great concept.

Leo Laporte (00:14:05):
Yeah. Yeah. So it looks like they've decided to kind of keep it, keep it going. The owl cam has a lot of nice features. For instance, if somebody breaks in your car, it'll hear the glass break, record it and transmit it immediately. So even if they stole the camera, you'd have a video of them stealing the camera. Right. Yeah. Smart enough. You, you say it's, it's a little funny, you can have it record it's so here's the thing. You don't want something. Well, you could, some cameras record all the time. I'm in a loop, so maybe they have a few hours or a few days of recording and then they loop over it. The owl cam had this additional feature, which I thought was kind of nice. It had, it had the LTE built in, so it could upload over the cell network.

Leo Laporte (00:14:51):
And so you could no cell service. Yeah. You could say, okay, Presto, which was the magic word for it. And it would send the last 30 seconds up to the cloud. It also, if it detected a crash or glass break or whatever it would do that it has also built in the ability to record two weeks built in. So it's got a lot of, so yeah, I like the owl. It was a little expensive. It does look like now the company that purchased it is, has decided to go all in. The other thing I liked about the owl is, was it it doesn't look like there's, I don't know if they're still doing this at the time was powered by the OB D two port, which is a port on all modern vehicles, which is normally used for diagnostics, but does have power on it, which made it very easy to power.

Leo Laporte (00:15:39):
You just run a wire from it to the cars. O B D two port, which is right into the steering wheel and you've got it powered. Right? So that solved a lot of problems. Next past a lot of people are recommending the Garmin Garman, which is a company that made, remember, you may remember GPS systems, which now are completely obsolete. Thanks to the smartphone. Quickly had to find other areas to go into. They started making smart watches for runners and that they also make dash cams. And every reviewer I've ever seen loves the Carmen dash can. So that's another, and, and the, the main is fairly inexpensive. I think it's around a hundred bucks. Let me ask, Sam's already here for his segment. Let me ask Sam. Thanks. If he has a recommendation, great dash cam Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:22):
Unfortunately I don't have a recommendation. I haven't really used any but couple things to note, looking at the chat you know, most of these are powered, you know off the 12 volt line, somewhere in the car. And so one thing you wanna make sure, if you want to use it as a security cam, you need to make sure you find an outlet that is not switched by admission. Right. so that, you know, otherwise when you turn the car off, it

Leo Laporte (00:16:46):
Loses power. One. That was one nice thing about the owl is that it uses the OB D two port. So it was power. Well, except

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:51):
That the OB D two port is usually switched off with the ignition. So when you switch off the car, it's not, I, I don't think,

Leo Laporte (00:16:58):
No, I don't know how they did it, but they were drawing it with a car off.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:02):
You'd have to tap into a 12 volt line. Did

Leo Laporte (00:17:05):
The OB D I'm just gonna say how it worked for me, Sam. I did not. And it would record, so, okay. They may have some trick they're using, I don't know what it is, but that's the whole point is that even when you'd parked the car, it would continue to record if somebody tried to break in, so maybe it had its own it's possible. It has its own battery built into it. And maybe it charges up or something

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:23):
Like, like, yeah. I don't remember. I'll have to look that up. Yeah. But it

Leo Laporte (00:17:26):
Definitely here somewhere. Yeah. I still have mine. I haven't hooked it up again. Now that they're back online, that's the negative, of course you're gonna pay a subscription because that's, somebody's gotta pay for the the bandwidth be worth it. I'm, I'm a fan. I, you know, I can't say I, I can't say anything against it. I thought it was great. I was very sad when they went out of business, partly was cuz it was so expensive. Right. You know, compared to the, you know, the garment's 120 bucks or something and the owl is three times that, or no, it's 200 bucks for the classic four. And then they have something called the classic five, which is 2 69. I'm not sure what you get. They also sell multiple camera packs. So, and then, but then the thing to keep 'em mind is this 20 bucks a month to connect. So that's, that's an additional invest. It's a sales.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:18:12):
Another thing to keep in mind as well is if it's powered off the car it is gonna put some drain on your battery.

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
Yeah. And the Al says, we're smart and we don't do that. So this is again, something to investigate how, how they're doing that. Sam's coming up. We'll have more, in fact, we're gonna talk what? Oh, you're welcome. <Laugh> great to talk to you. Appreciate you. Take care. You too. Jamie byebye. Leo Laport. Theca yeah. 10 16 on the OB two port is power. So I guess, I guess there's a way

Sam Abuelsamid (00:18:52):
To draw. Well, it's, it's P it's a power that's, it's a power line, but in most on most vehicles I've used when you switch off the ignition, the powers to the OB D two port is shut off. So it's only powered when the car is on.

Leo Laporte (00:19:08):
Did you check your original audio by the way?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:11):
Yeah. It's it's on original

Leo Laporte (00:19:13):
Audio. Oh, you're crunchy still. I don't know why. 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:17):
Let's see. Is that any better?

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Yeah, maybe you're just, maybe you're just peeking. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know how the other thing the Al did that was grace. You can, this actually drive Lisa crazy. You can talk to somebody in the car through it. <Laugh> yeah. It says OB do two power connection on guard even when the vehicle is turned off. So I think there is a scooter, X is saying that line 16 is always on. So it may maybe that it could be, it says it's connected to the 12 volts. So there, there's some way they're doing that. I really like the owl. You know, what, what I'm gonna do is pull it back outta, outta the closet and maybe reinstall it. Cause I really liked it. I never ran into anybody or saw anything or had any occasion to use it, but it was nice to have. Yeah. Yeah. I thought the owl always stayed on you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:15):
Previously they charged for streaming that's right now it's unlimited, but you're paying 20 bucks a month. That's why you have the monthly connect plan. So what's the difference between the classic four and the classic five. That's the question? Our show today brought to you by Udacity. Oh yeah. I love Udacity. Udacity is the place to get an online education geared toward you or anyone looking to take your technology to the next level, especially if you're looking for a job in, in big tech, because this Udacity was effectively started by big tech guy named Sebastian throne one, 10 years ago, worked at Google and realized that just, just the, the people they were getting as applicants didn't have the skills they needed, even if they came from a four year degree <affirmative>. So he started the Nanodegree program at Udacity and it's grown. The Udacity has specialized in a, in exciting content that can help either take you further in the career.

Leo Laporte (00:21:18):
You want get you that first job and they offer the latest cutting edge Nanodegree programs. And you just can't find these anywhere else. They're really all about encouraging your career growth. Udacity will give you the information you need about the career you want. It'll give you the skills for that career. It'll help you get the job. Even there's some great references from U happy Udacity learners on the website, I'll give you one from a Udacity graduate. He, he was working at a Nigerian airline, like a lot of airlines. They had to lay off a lot of people during COVID 19. He said, you know, maybe I should get some skills to get a better job. So he applied for a machine learning scholarship program for Microsoft Azure, got the scholarship within six months, transitioned to a career. He is got a great job as a data analyst.

Leo Laporte (00:22:08):
And you know, he doesn't have to worry about COVID 19 check out one of Udacity, top five Nanodegree programs, data engineering. That's one of a product manager. That's a good job too. You know, that's a great job. If you don't don't wanna be coding, but you want to kind of help the coding team. Get the job done. Product manager data analysts like our from Nigeria or data scientist. That's hot right now, programming for data science with Python. In fact, I, the Python courses are great. There I've taken their Python courses. If you're looking to get the most cutting edge technology careers, they've got Nanodegree programs in artificial intelligence, flying cars and autonomous flight engineer. That's. That would be really cool. Wouldn't it? Machine learning engineer a whole lot more because these courses at Udacity are created with partners and industry leaders like Microsoft and Google and IBM and Amazon.

Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
You're getting your teachers. Your instructors are team leaders from these top companies learning the skills. These top C is need to get a great job there. You're gonna get the right knowledge from experts who are working in the field every day. All of Udacity courses are project based. I think this is really important for two reasons. One, you don't really know something until you have to do it yourself with a project. That's really how you lock in that learning. But two, those projects now go on your resume in effect you put 'em up on, let's say on GitHub and it's on link on your LinkedIn. Now this is the kind of thing employers look at. Well, what have you done? And so it's great to have those under your belt, that it's also active learning. And I think that's the best kind, your homework, your projects will all be reviewed by professionals.

Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
Just, just like code reviews you would get. If you were working at Google or Microsoft or IBM, you'll get real human feedback. You also get access to mentors 24 7. And that's a big deal because it's inevitable. I've done it. Everybody's done it. You hit a wall at some point, you go, I don't, I just don't know what's wrong, but those mentors are great. They can help you over that hump and on to the next big thing. And of course schedule's completely flexible because a lot of Udacity learners have day jobs. You can, you know, work whenever is right for you and you don't have to put in a huge amount of time, five to 10 hours a week. You can graduate in three months. So I think it's really worthwhile. I'll give you another example. These scholarships are great. You can find them on udacity.com at the bottom select scholarships under resources.

Leo Laporte (00:24:35):
One 10. Here's one of 'em, one 10 blacks and technology and Udacity have teamed up to offer part-time online tech scholarships for black Americans who do not have a four year <affirmative>. So your high school graduate, or you're in, you know, your two of college. You don't have a degree yet, but you really got the motivation. You wanna get that job. They're offering 2000 full scholarships, full scholarships for qualifying applicants. You can find out more@audacity.com and if you're a business, you can upskill your entire workforce with Udacity. Check out the enterprise section of Udacity website today to learn more bottom line, get the in demand tech skills you need to advance your career. Visit Udacity UDA, C I T Y udacity.com/twi. To learn more, please do use that udacity.com/twi. That way they know you saw it on the tech guy show. And I get a little pat on the head, udacity.com/and now back to the program already in progress, Le Laport, the tech guy time for Sam, apple, Sam, our car guy, principle researcher guide, house insights. He does the wheel bearings car podcast at will. Bear media joins us every week to talk cars. Hello, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:52):
Hello, Leo. How

Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
Are you this weekend? I'm good. The chat room iTech and the chat room says he loves his black view. B L a C K V e.com dash cam. So there's another brand to put in there. So today I see you're sitting in, in front of what is that? Android auto. What is that in front of you? It's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:10):
Android automotive, which is different, you know, it's, it's it's a great example of Google's brilliance in branding. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:26:18):
You're being sarcastic. Aren't you?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:20):
Just a little, yes. So Google has Android auto and they have Android automotive, which is something mostly different. And so let me give you a, a quick prim on what Android auto and apple CarPlay are to begin with. So both of those systems function pretty much the same way and what you can, the way you can think of them is essentially as a driver layer, that's running on your infotainment system that translates commands from whatever control interface you have, whether it's a touch screen or a center controller or voice, whatever, whatever it might be, they take whatever that vehicle is set up for translated into a common set of commands that, that the phone can understand, you know, that either an iPhone or an Android phone can understand. And then the phone streams back video back to the screen. So the, your apps that are running, you know, whether it's Google maps or apple maps or PocketCasts, or overcast, you know, whatever you're listening to or watching it, that video gets streamed from your phone back to the screen.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:26):
And your phone has to be there for these systems to work. So you're, you're, everything is running on the phone. Now, Android automotive is something entirely different that Google launched a few years ago. They announced it in 2017 and it started coming to market last year, the first vehicles to get it were from Volvo and pole star the Volvo XC 40 and the pole star to were the first ones to have it. You can, or Lantis Chrysler, Jeep, et cetera, have it on their Uconnect five system as well. And what this is, is actually a version of Android that is wise to run on the vehicle. So it actually runs in your infotainment computer. And it's a, it's a full blown version of Android that like with phones, you know, it's, it's open source. So you can run just the base OS, which is what Stant does.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:22):
And then you can put your own apps on it, you know, kind of like what or what Amazon does with their fire tablets. They run Android and put you know, their own voice assistant, their, you know, they put Alexa voice services on there and their own app store and things like that. Or you can get Google automotive services, which is analogous to Google mobile services for the phone, which is all of Google proprietary apps like Gmail and Google assistant and Google maps and run that directly on on the infotainment system. So last week I got a 20, 22 Chevrolet Tahoe that had this system in there. They, they just switched over from a previous system that was based on Linux. And when you start up the car for the first time, you can tap on on the Android auto Android automotive, or actually on the play store. There's a, there's a play store icon in the car. You tap on that, it says, log in, you can log in to your Google account, the same way you would on an Android phone, you for setting it up for the first time. And now you have access to all of your apps that you have bought on your Android phone. Assuming you're using Android phone, or if you're an iPhone user, you can still get access to the Google play store. You can use Google assistant, you can use Google maps for navigation.

Leo Laporte (00:29:44):
Here's a problem I have with all this. I, you know, Android auto does all of that as well, but it's attached to your phone. So when you get a new phone, you automatically get an upgrade. This is built your car. So it's really gonna be hampered five years from now. Their car is not gonna be nearly as powerful as, as a current smartphone.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:06):
Not, not necessarily because you know, they're, they're gonna, you know, Google is updating Android automotive, you know, just as they an update Android for the phones and all these cars, all these vehicles have over the air software updates. So they, but are they

Leo Laporte (00:30:20):
Building a good, hard, where are they building in pro? I mean, look, this, this is, this is a Google 10 sword chip in this pixel six. That's not anything like what that car system has.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:30):
Well, it's not like what car systems used to have car systems used to be, be powered used very underpowered processors, right? That's no longer the case. The, the new GM stuff for example, is using latest Qualcomm snap, dragon chips eight series snap, dragon chips. Oh, interesting. That power, the, the infotainment system. Okay. And

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
What happens if I wanna use CarPlay on an Android auto?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:54):
So on motive, I'm sorry. On the GM, on the GM vehicles. Yeah. They still support CarPlay <affirmative>. So you can plug in a phone over late on top of plug in an iPhone. Okay. And it, you know, it just opens up the CarPlay interface just as it would on any others.

Leo Laporte (00:31:10):
Modern cars have always have an operating system in, you know, Ford used to use Microsoft. Now. I think they probably use blackberries QNX a lot. They use QX to, yeah. A lot of systems use this operating system from Blackberry. This is competitive with this, right. The Android automotive is the replacement for Microsoft car or Android automotive or Q exactly. Yeah. Okay. So it really is. It's not so much about the user interfaces about from the automaker's point of view, what this operating system can do or no.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:42):
Yeah. so, you know, every automaker's putting their own skin on it, much as most Android manufac phone manufacturers put their own skin on, you know, the Amazon's got there or rather Samsung's got their, their launcher who, here's the real question from pixel <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:31:58):
Who who's privacy agreement, are you agreeing to your car manufacturers are Googles because Google collects a ton of information. So really you're sending all of the automotive information, things like your speed you know your fuel mix, everything is getting sent to Google as well as to your manufacturer.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:19):
Well, if you're using either an iPhone or an Android phone with carp play or Android auto, you're already doing that anyway. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (00:32:27):
The question because I remember they're collecting it through your phone. Yeah. I remember an interview with a, a guy worked at Porsche talking about the difference. He says Android auto collects a ton more than CarPlay does. Apple only collects one little bit of information. I can't remember what it was, your speed maybe, but Google collects everything. It can. Now this was, this is the problem is these, these agreements, you know, are probably buried somewhere in the fine print deep, but I'm a little, I think it's reasonable, be a little concerned about the privacy aspect of Android automotive compared to say CarPlay.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:06):
Well I said, you know, CarPlay, even, even with CarPlay, they're not Apple's not collecting vehicle information, but they still have information that they can get from your phone. So, you know, your, your phone knows is how fast you're moving. Even if it's not reading the vehicle speed from the car itself, you know, the GPS information, the accelerometers in your phone know how fast that phone is moving through space, right? So they still know your location. Your certainly your carrier knows your location. They know your speed when your, when you're moving, how fast you're moving. So they're still able to get most of the same data, whether it's running in the infotainment system or on your phone,

Leo Laporte (00:33:46):
I'm gonna give an assignment. Okay. I want you to go find out. And it is probably hard to find out how much data apple collects, whether it's CarPlay on your phone, apple, whatever, tell you yeah. And how much data. Well, I think apple does tell you in fact, and how much data of Google collects cuz it's my understanding that it's a significant difference and that apple in fact is careful about intentionally because that's their selling point about what they collect from from a CarPlay. So I mean maybe people, I don't know if people care, if Google knows everything about your location and driving history and all that, but if you've got Google in your car, you're not gonna have a way to opt out that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:24):
Probably not. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:34:25):
Yeah. Just something to be aware of.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:27):
On the other hand, you do have Google assistant for your voice control, which is way better than any professional voice assistant.

Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
I agree. And I sometimes use Android auto for that entirely. Certainly. it's a lot better than even than Siri Sam principal researcher at GHouse insights. He's also a podcast host@wheelbearings.media and he joins us every week. Thanks Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:50):
You're welcome Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:34:55):
Yeah. I'm trying to find this article. So as a Porsche engineer.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:58):
Yeah, no, I, I, I, I know, I know what Porsche has said at, in the past and you know, one of the reasons why that they were initially reluctant to implement Android auto in their vehicles. Yeah. And I'm sure that there, there Google probably is collecting more information than than apple is. But you know, that doesn't mean there isn't information still being shared from your phone through CarPlay or, or, you know, when you're using CarPlay,

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
Google collects vehicle speed, oil and cooling temperature throttle position, engine revs, essentially a full O B D two port dump over Android auto. And I presume Android automotive will be doing the same thing. And you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:42):
Frankly, I'm the I'm I have no problem with them getting that information. No, I agree. If, look, I don't care either information to, to train a diagnostic system right. That can help to say, okay, you know you know, give, give me predictive agnostic of when I might need service. I'm fine with that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't care either. I think are collecting that information as well.

Leo Laporte (00:36:04):
Yeah, I understand. And I know, and I agree cuz I use Android auto sometimes and I know that they're collecting that information, but some people may care and if it's built into the car as, as Android automotive, you're not gonna have a choice.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:17):
That's true. Well, except that the, the automakers already collecting that data anyway and you don't have

Leo Laporte (00:36:24):
A choice. Yeah, that's true. I know. I mean, Tesla was shocked. Well, I mean you do, you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:28):
Do have, you do have a choice in that you can opt out of the connectivity entirely. Right. You know, so if you, if you turn off connectivity entirely, then the automaker doesn't you, you know, nobody has access to that data. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:41):
And, and the reason Google wants it and apple would probably want it is for self-driving vehicles because this is all research from their point of view. And so in a way you're helping that self-driving vehicle project I'm trying to find what CarPlay collects. As I remember, it was a very small amount of information. I think it was only one, one item. So that's, I think that's that's for some of our listeners that's a big deal.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:13):
Yeah. No. And, and you know, that's, that's certainly a legitimate concern and you know, if that concern for you, then you should probably avoid buying anything from GM or Volvo or Ford or rental

Leo Laporte (00:37:29):
Ticket now. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:30):
Yeah. Yeah. And, and don't, don't connect your phone to your car, right? No matter what kind of phone you use you know, turn off, turn off your connectivity. Yeah. I mean, you know, actually better yet. Don't leave your house and put up, put up aluminum foil across all your walls in your house. <Laugh> be like Michael MCCA was in in the first couple seasons of better call

Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Solve. Just worried about electricity. Yep. Yeah. I just, it's something you you and I don't care about, but I know our audience cares an awful lot about, so it's just something to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:05):
Be. Yeah. I mean, to me, to me, I would rather have a, a useful voice recognition system that when I tell it, you know, navigate to some location, it gets it right. The first time knows where I want to go. If I tell it, you know you know, reduce the, a temperature by three degrees, it'll reduce the temperature by three degrees. And, and that's what this system does. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:38:26):
Yeah. I'm sure any always on always connected vehicle, like my mock is sending everything back.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:33):
Yep. And certainly,

Leo Laporte (00:38:35):
You know, Tesla's Tesla's, you don't even really have the option to opt out very much. Yeah. Oh man. They, they know everything depend on that stuff. Yeah. They know everything, but again, I think it's cuz they're building a self-driving vehicle, right. Or, well, they're trying, they say they are <laugh> Sam. Thank you. All right. You have stick around great day and I will talk to you next week. Do you want, do you want me to stick around for the top? Oh yeah. I forgot you do that. You're very generous. Yes. If you want please. Sure. Thank you. Yep. Well now I gotta give you credit professor Laura, there are many Hanukkah songs you could play, but she never wants to go for the obvious. And that is, that is not obvious. Who is that? Singing that Woody Guthrie happy Hanukah. <Laugh> wow. Good job.

Leo Laporte (00:39:24):
Professor Laura extra points for the research. She really, she, you know, and that's not easy. She has to go back in the music librarians dusty back there. I think there's skeletons of music directors from you years gone by and all sorts of stuff. The spiderwebs she's and then she, and she has to pick the record out and go blow all the dust off. Bring it in, put it on the turntable just for you. So thank you professor. Laura, you get a lot of credit for that. Larry's on the line from San Francisco, California. Hi Larry.

Caller Larry (00:39:56):
Hello Leo. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm frustrated and confused. Trying to configure windows.

Leo Laporte (00:40:04):
Well, welcome to the club. <Laugh>

Caller Larry (00:40:07):
Well what's happened is that, you know, we're eventually gonna be forced to go to windows 11. I'm sure we don't have to anytime soon. So I, I and I, you have

Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
I'll just to, just to say, I think we know the date is 2025. That's the end of life for windows 10. So you got a few years,

Caller Larry (00:40:25):
Four years. That's a theoretical date. Sure. Yeah. But anyway, so I decided to be in a position to update whenever I feel like it right now, I have a perfectly running windows, 10 system, but it can, can't update to windows 11 because from what I understand, you have to have secure boot and you can't run secure boot on a MBR partition. So you have to have a G GT partition. So I decided this was a chance to start over from fresh anyway. So I bought a brand new hard drive brand new SST E partitioned it into G P T partitions that I went to install, went and got a fresh edition of windows like downloaded the the media maker from windows itself. Microsoft itself went to install it and I get the message. Windows cannot install to this parti because it's in G P T mode.

Caller Larry (00:41:20):
I'm like what? So I went online to ask advice and I was told you need to make your install media, your, the USB drive G P T as well. So use Rufus. So I use Rufus re reformatted my install USB, put windows back on it, tried to install, and then I get the, the message that windows cannot make or see a partition I've gone in and changed my boot sequence. I I'm sorry, my boot configuration to U E I only you know, set the, did everything I could, I could, that seemed to do. And windows just won't install it either. Can't see a GT partition or it can't install to a GPT partition. So

Leo Laporte (00:42:11):
One of the things Microsoft did with windows 11 as they set the bar higher than they actually even technically needed to, to install windows 11, they said you have to have a TPM 2.0 module, for instance, I presume you have that. Is that right? Yes. Okay. Yes. They said you know, there's a number of things. You have to have a processor that's Intel eighth generation or later and none is technically required. This is important. It is not required by the operating system. It's merely a standard. Microsoft is set probably for good reason. They want to, they want to kind of encourage people to get modern and theoretically more secure computers. Security's a big issue in the windows world. It's a massive issue. Just look at all the ransomware problem problems. So Microsoft's doing what it can. It sounds like they're also requiring U E F I which means, yeah, you can, you have to do a secure boot. There also, it sounds like require, and I, I'm not up on this requiring as a result G P T, which is a there's two ways you can format a hard drive master boot record, or G P T the old way was master boot record. That's the old right? How old is your computer?

Caller Larry (00:43:21):
Well this computer, gosh, it's maybe a year old. I build it myself. So it,

Leo Laporte (00:43:27):
Okay. So that's been a fairly modern motherboard is that's the right? Yeah. That's the most important thing. Okay. So a year old motherboard, it should support everything on windows 11. There shouldn't be a problem. You, you backed up the data on the thing, right? Yes.

Caller Larry (00:43:41):
Good old.

Leo Laporte (00:43:41):
I drive so good. Thank you. I drive our sponsor. So once again I think the best thing to do is to kind of back up all the way. So go into your bios and reset it. There's a command to reset it to factory defaults and do that. That'll turn on secure boot. It'll make sure everything is set up as the motherboard intended, when it first shipped to you. And then when you boot up into the now correctly, set up Rufus USB key, use that installer to form partition. So de partition and repetition, the dry, the internal drive and format. It just let it do it kind of automatically. There's a, it's in the options where you can use the partition manager. So that way windows 11 is setting up the drive. It's using the default bios. Have you done this? And it's failed.

Caller Larry (00:44:31):
Well, I'm not trying to install windows 11. I'm trying to reinstall windows 10. Oh, on a G PT partition. So that when I have, cause that's the only thing that's standing in the way of my being oh,

Leo Laporte (00:44:44):
Update. Oh, okay. So you don't need the automatic update. I understand you wanna do that. I would stick with, well now you've screwed up your machine so you no, no, no. Right now you're desperate. No, you haven't. Okay.

Caller Larry (00:44:58):
No, no. This is a separate, hard

Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
Drive I got. So if you can keep using windows 10, I would do that. When you wanna go to windows 11, do what? I just suggested. Download a windows 11 ISO. I see. Okay. And reset your machine. Okay. That way it's always a better way to upgrade. Anyway. It's what, you know, clean install a nuke from space install where you're, you're not installing on top of an existing operating system. That's where you get in a weird compatibility issues. Why did you install with master boot record? Just outta curious. Cause windows 10 even wants GPT. Well, this

Caller Larry (00:45:31):
Is a, an old, like what

Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
I've done. Oh. Was an old hard drive. Yeah.

Caller Larry (00:45:35):
Well it's an old hard drive. It's an old, I, I just, I just clone the drive. Yeah. From a regular spinning drive onto an so again,

Leo Laporte (00:45:42):
This is the reason why a clean is better.

Caller Larry (00:45:45):
Well, that's what I was trying to do. I gotta,

Leo Laporte (00:45:47):
It's always hard when you're going from legacy, some old system to a,

Caller Larry (00:45:53):
Well that, that's what I'm trying to do. I got a brand new hard drive and install.

Leo Laporte (00:45:57):
So boot. So get download, use route. Did you download windows 11 on the, on the USB key? No windows 10. So here's what you wanna do. You, you can get it right now. Us windows 11 ISO. Right. And just do that on a windows 11 ISO. And I think, especially if you're partitioning with windows 11 it'll and you've reset your bios to defaults, it should just work.

Caller Larry (00:46:17):
Okay. All right. When I'm ready to go 11, I'll do that then. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
Historically, always problematic. This is where people always get in trouble when they kind of, I wanna take the old thing, but I wanna upgrade it to the new thing. And that's when things go get a little odd <affirmative> and I think that's what happened. That's all.

Caller Larry (00:46:34):
Yeah. There's no hurry for this anyway. Yeah. Like I

Leo Laporte (00:46:37):
Said, Microsoft has guaranteed 20, 25. The windows 10 will run fine until 2025. And there's nothing you, I mean, they could, you're absolutely right. Who trusts them. But if so, they could, at some point say, oh, we changed our mind. We want everybody. We use win is 11, but I don't think they'll do that. Historically that's not the kind of thing Microsoft does. So you're guaranteed 2020 till 2025, probably January 20, 25. You'll be able to use windows 10. You'll get updates. It'll be just like windows 11. Didn't exist. And you know what? Maybe in four years, windows 11 will be ready for prime time. Yeah, exactly. Maybe it maybe it'll actually work by then. Hopefully I'm, I'm getting so fed up with Microsoft. I really am. They released this prematurely. It wasn't a major upgrade. All it did was a cosmetic upgrade. They did it purely for market reasons. So people would buy new computers. Cause by the way, what you just described is why people don't upgrade windows. They buy a new computer. That's historically how people get in windows, the next version of windows, they don't upgrade it. They buy a new one. Only we enthusiasts go through this nightmare. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:47:44):
I was trying to keep from having to reinstall

Leo Laporte (00:47:46):
Everything too. Yeah, yeah. I, no, I believe me. I, Dan, I'd do the same thing. I understand completely. But but you know this, you know, and of course the other thing is really grind in my gears is Microsoft is messing with edge. They're making it very hard not to use their own browser. If you wanna install Firefox or Chrome, it's you gotta jump through massive hoops. And then they're our own browser is getting bloated beyond recognition. They just built in a feature to do by now pay later built into the browser. I'm pretty much done. <Laugh> I have to say I'm done Microsoft. Now, now it's time for the Samal salmon show. <Laugh>. Now let me put you in a window here and give you a to of clock. There you go. Don't need the GIW in the background. How about that? That's a excellent, I'm a trains professional. I'm gonna go make a cup of coffee. You get to talk cars. Thank you, Sam. All right.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:48:53):
So to continue on a little bit with the Android auto discussion or the Android automotive discussion I really hate that that Google didn't come up with different branding, more distinct branding for the two. So one of the one of the advantages with automotive that I don't think I emphasized enough is that, you know, in addition to it running in the car, it's not running on your phone. It's also because you have access to the, or at least on some applications. If, if the manufacturer decides to use Google automotive services you have access to the Google play store can download apps directly into the car. So things like PocketCasts hoopla and Libby for your your public libraries to download audio books NPR, all these apps, these Android apps that you would can use with Android auto, you can also download the directly into the head unit of your car.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:53):
So they're running on your car. So your phone doesn't even have to be with you, or if the phone's dead, whatever it might be, it's running directly on there. And you know, that, that is very convenient. Cuz you don't have to, you don't have to worry about, you know, if like a couple couple weeks ago Jeff Jarvis wrote into all about Android. He was complaining about using Android auto in his Mazda and he was having problems that kept disconnecting. He'll never have that problem when it's running right on the head unit. That said, you know, the, the issue of data collection and you know, what data do they have access to is you know, it's a, it's a legit issue and there are some people who you know, who are very concerned about that. And, and that's, you know, it's fine.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:38):
You know, if you're, if you are concerned about it, don't blame you. You know, there's certainly a lot of information being collected about us every day. Somebody did do drop into, I think the scooter X dropped into the chat earlier a page from the apple human interface guidelines on car data with CarPlay and essentially CarPlay apps, CarPlay compatible apps do have access to climate control information, radio information, and GPS location that they can utilize for the apps that are being projected back to your screen. So there, there's a fair bit of information that they're getting as well. You know, how much of that is also going back to apple or in Google's case to, to Google is, is unknown. You know, I don't, you know, I'm pretty sure that Google is not grabbing all of this data continuously and streaming it back to their servers because first of all the, the cost of that, the bandwidth cost of that would just be enormous.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:41):
Nobody is constantly collecting information and streaming it back to home base. Not even Tesla is data continuously back to their servers because the, the bandwidth costs would just get out of hand really quickly. But you know, they're, they're looking for specific events and, you know, occasionally sending back some information event, you know, doing some event based triggering to send back information, one interesting detail with CarPlay and Android auto, you know, when you're using the smartphone projection, both of them are using the GPS data from the car rather than the GPS data from your phone for navigation purposes. And that's because your car first of all you know, the GPS antenna is usually mounted somewhere on the roof and has line of sight to the sky. Then your phone does when it's sitting, you know, in the console or in your pocket or wherever it might be.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:37):
And it's, it's a better antenna, usually that's on the car. So you usually have a better signal. So all, all the smartphone projection systems will utilize the GPS signal provided by the car for navigation instead of their, the internal phones GPS, unless, unless that signal's not available from the car. The the other thing you know, I mentioned Stant, you know, Chrysler and Jeep and, and the, the various brands under the Stant umbrella, the Uconnect five system that debuted last year also runs Android automotive, but a, they are not using Google automotive services. So instead of using Google maps Stant is using Tom, Tom for navigation. They're using Amazon's Alexa voice services for the digital assistant and using, using various other services to replace what would be provided by Google. And I think, you know, part of the reason is, you know, they wanted they wanted something distinct.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:34):
And also as with phones Google does charge a licensing fee for use of, you know, just as they do this for Google mobile services for phone, for phone manufacturers, and they do it for makers for Google automotive services. So there, the operating system itself, Android whether it's Android for phones or Android automotive is free to use from the from the apple over the Android open source project. But it's the services that they're, they're generating revenue on. Some other stuff that was in the chat but what happens when LTE is deprecated and you know, this is also a very good question. Manufacturers have been automaker, have been using connectivity going back 25 years now to when the original GM OnStar system debuted. And they, you know, a couple of times now as we've gone from analog to to two G to, and then to 3g ver vehicles that have connectivity in them have have lost that ability to be connected when the previous generation system were shut off.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:47):
And that's starting to happen now with some cars that have 3g connectivity in there as, as networks start to shut down 3g they're being shut off. And at some point LTE is probably gonna be shut off, although it's probably quite a few years away yet before they turn off LTE networks. But what manufacturers are doing now is they are actually starting to design the vehicles. They know that this is something that is gonna happen and they're designing with upgradeability in mind. So a number of manufacturers, including Nissan on some of their models offer an option for customers to get the 3g radio replaced with an LTE radio. And eventually it'll be with the 5g radio. So that's you know, that by the time we see LTE going away, the vehicles that have LTE currently will will likely be able to be upgraded to 5g or, or six G or something at that point down the road.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:44):
Predictive maintenance, which I mentioned earlier is not something that's current advertised for Android automotive, but it is something that I can see Google potentially wanting to offer as a feature at some point in the future. You know, and that be maybe one of the reasons why they wanna see some of this data so they can build maintenance models and diagnostic models for the vehicle to augment what the manufacturers are doing. There was also a question earlier about catalytic converter guards you know, theft of catalytic converters is a very common problem in a number in many locations. I know just the other day I saw somebody posted online here in this area, their catalytic converter was stolen from their car in their driveway. Wow. Is that,

Leo Laporte (00:56:27):
Don't just the, the materials in it are so valuable or is it the converter itself?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:32):
Yeah, they have, they have, you know, they have a bunch of platinum in there and, you know, they, they could extract the platinum, but it's more so you know, stealing them from cars and then putting them in as replace parts, cars need to be serviced. And, you know, you can get a, a used one for quite a bit less than a brand new one.

Leo Laporte (00:56:51):
Hey Sam, thank you so much. I always appreciate it. No problem. You give me a chance to get, get a cup of coffee. You have a great gig week, too. I'll talk to you next Sunday. I'll see you next week. Woohoo. Woohoo. It's I'm trying out new new greetings, you know, Hey, Hey. Hey. That's okay. But you know, maybe a ho Hoy it's <laugh> it's me, Leo. Leport the tech guy, time to talk tech eighty eight, eighty eight as the phone number eighty eight, eight eight two seven five five three six do free from anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. Well, we could still talk, but you're gonna have to use Skype or something like that to call it shouldn't cost you anything. 88 88 LIO website tech guy labs.com. Believe it or not. I, you know, hello the word. Hello? Hello has been around for some time, but was not common used for greetings until the phone came out.

Leo Laporte (00:57:51):
You know, there was always you know, people were saying, hello hall, who? Hello? Whoa. There, Hey, Hey, Hey. In addition, I'm reading from Wikipedia to hello, Lou hall, hollow, hollow, and Hilo exist as variance. The problem was when the telephone came out, there was no agreement on what you say when you pick it up in Italy, you say Pronto, right? Every country has a different thing. They say it wasn't obvious immediately what we should say. Thomas Edison was the guy who said it should be hello, Alexander Graham bell, the guy who invented the phone originally wanted to use a Hoy. <Laugh> a ho ho by the way if you watch the Simpsons and you're wondering why SI Montgomery burns answers the phone that way, cuz he's old enough to remember the invention of the telephone, I think. And he maybe is a Alexander Graham bell supporter.

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
And that's what bell wanted to be a ho in 18 Thomas Edison wrote to the president of the central district and printing Telegraph company of Pittsburgh friend, David. This is a quote. I do not think we shall need a call bell as hello can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think Edison <laugh> could have been hello, but for some reason they decided hello holler in other languages. They have different words. Hello, not universal. And we didn't even know frankly what we were gonna answer, how we were gonna answer the phone until somehow it was agreed that Edison was right and Alexander Graham bell was wrong. So maybe I should start the show with, oh, Hey honey. What do they, how do they answer the phone in your, in your country? Bueno bueno is in, in Mexico you say bueno. Bueno. Yeah. Bueno Italy. I know it's Pronto. Bueno means good. Right? So you answer the phone. You say good sort of that makes no sense. <Laugh> that? That makes no sense at all. Good. Why know, how do they answer the phone in Russia? Either Russia, one answer is you. I don't know. I don't know. I think it's, it's intriguing in France. Do they say <inaudible>? I don't know, but hello? Hello Leo. Leport here the tech guy, but let's go back to the phones. Say hello to Ray in Beaumont, California. Hello, Ray.

Caller Ray (01:00:59):
Hey, how you doing? I'm well, how are you? Pretty good. And I kinda get a chuckle on when you were first talking about the, the sound in movies, because I, I actually work for Warner brothers and post production sound and I can relate with how the audio is pretty bad today. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:01:14):
So that's okay, good. Now we got an expert <laugh> so this is, I mean, I get this call all the time. Why can't I hear dialogue on my TV set it and I often say will just turn up the center's channel, but is it something else?

Caller Ray (01:01:28):
Well, you know, when we use to mix mix on the stages, you know, obviously when we're mix on the stage, we mix on the big speakers, you know, so that's how the mix is liked. And then when we do playback for television, we would play back on, they call the smalls, small speakers,

Leo Laporte (01:01:42):
Like a little AONE mix speaker and yeah.

Caller Ray (01:01:44):
Yeah. So we can see how it sounds coming out of the, you know for the viewers at home on their TV set and time and time again, I'd come home and I'd watch the show. One particular series I was working on one tree hill ran for about nine seasons on WV and I'd come home and watch it and I'd go, wait a minute. That's not her mix. Oh, wow. So we started doing some research. And when you sent into the networks, they would, they would do something on their end to change what we mix to the way they broadcasted it. So it was, it was kind of frustrating in a way because and you know, again, a lot of it has to do with, you know, the actors too. You get a lot of actors who kind of whisper, you know, when they're doing their, their dialogue and stuff and your, your production sound mixers out there trying to get their, get the sound as best as they can. But if you, yeah, the

Leo Laporte (01:02:31):
Record is, is supposed to say, and I imagine it's hard if you're in a set and they're rushing and they gotta shoot to say, can we do that again? I could, I could in here.

Caller Ray (01:02:40):
Yeah. And you know what, they, they rush so fast on the set, you know? Cause I used to call the production sound and say, Hey man, what's going on? And they're like, you know what? Cause I would ask for room tone, you know, we have to do ADR and have to redo lines, bring the actors in. They go, we can't, we don't have time to

Leo Laporte (01:02:55):
Do room tone. No, no they're moving, that's it so reset. We're towing. Yeah. There's no time. Yeah. You know, isn't that interesting. Yeah.

Caller Ray (01:03:05):
Yeah. But anyways, I just wanted to kind of throw it out there because you know, we, we do our best to get the show mix, but sometimes it's when it's broadcast, each network has a different way of, you know, sending that signal out. So sure.

Leo Laporte (01:03:16):
The engineers at the, in the studio mess with it too. That's right. Yeah. Room, room tone. For those who don't know, it's just the sound of the room without any, any speaking or any other noises. Right. And cause every room has a little bit of a different sound. You get that, then you can add footsteps later cuz you've got the room tone.

Caller Ray (01:03:33):
Yeah. A lot of people don't know that every shot, whether it's the master, the two shot the over shoulder or whatever is all shot at different times of the day a so the sound changes. So when we're sitting there cutting together, in fact dialogue editors are probably, you know, they're the unsung heroes because nobody walks out of a movie goes, wow, that was this great. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:03:54):
Nowadays they may walk out saying I could hear every word <laugh> yeah. They, they might do that. Oh, I'm so glad you called to get an expert opinion on all this. And we won't, we won't say who you work for the, well now you've given yourself away with the one tree hill reference. We all know who he is. Yeah, that's fine. That's okay. Yeah. No, I think it's a, I think I'm really glad to have read that article and now to hear from you because we get that call the time and it is a little bit puzzling. I, and I don't wanna say my callers are deaf. It isn't that right.

Caller Ray (01:04:25):
Right, right, right. No, it's, it's, it's strange how with this technology, I mean, you know, but talking about sound, you know, I mean I started back in 95, you know, and Roger corn movies and you know, some of that sound was pretty terrible back then, but you know, over the years it's gotten, you know, a lot better with the digital little, you know, platforms like, you know, pro tools and stuff like that before when you were, you know, doing sound on mag and you know, and, and doing that transition into the new technology is getting better and better and better, but oh sure. As it gets, as it gets better, it seems like, you know, okay, well then what, what are the networks doing? So, right. Right. So yeah, it just depends on the network, you know? I know. So you

Leo Laporte (01:05:04):
Started with Roger Corman. Oh boy. Yes. Sometime I want to hear those stories. That's great. Wow. What fun? That must have been.

Caller Ray (01:05:13):
Yeah. Yeah. That was a good, it was a, a good learning experience. I bet.

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
Yeah. Hey, I'll tell you what, I gotta take a break. Hang on Ray. I wanna get your question in. Sure. And it's my fault, cuz I used up all your time asking about the movies. Okay. <Laugh> but it's great. But just hang on a second. We're gonna take a little break. And when we come back, I know you wanna talk about online security and that's an important topic. I don't wanna let that go. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's good. Talk to you. See, I wasn't crazy. <Laugh> you're not, that's the main reason I brought it up at the beginning of the show. You're not crazy. It is hard to understand. What's the dialogue. Thank goodness for closed captions. Actually my secret Ray is I just wanted to talk to you off the air. <Laugh> hang on Ray. Don't go anywhere. Wow. Fascinating. So you, so you started as a recordist and then you moved into the post.

Caller Ray (01:06:01):
I actually started as a assistant dialogue editor in sound. Oh neat. Yeah. Right down the street from Todd se and they used to be, be around. Of course Todd is on gone now. Yep. But yeah, I started as a assistant sound editor and worked my way up into dialogue editor. And then from there eventually became a supervising sound editor. Sopranos was a good show

Leo Laporte (01:06:24):
That I was, you worked on Sopranos.

Caller Ray (01:06:27):
Wow. Yes

Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
<Laugh> but you know, some of those actors were kind of mumblers, you know? I mean oh yeah,

Caller Ray (01:06:33):
Yeah. You know, you know, I mean obviously, you know, a lot of the actors don't like to have to do ADR and redo their lines cuz you know, it's performance, you know, they don't wanna run into performance, but I tell you what I mean, I, I have improved a lot of actors performances, you know, when they've had to redo it. And so, you know, as long as it's done right. You know, it can turn out good. But

Leo Laporte (01:06:55):
So for those who don't know, ADR is a recourse to uping, basically rerecording of the sound in a studio after the fact, how much of the dialogue is, is rerecorded. All of it is half of it

Caller Ray (01:07:08):
Or, well it depends, you know, every show is different. You know, when you, when each show is locked, you know, after they got the picture locked and I come in there and, and run it, run the show down with the producers and we just kind of, I go through it and I'll note out, you know, this line. So you

Leo Laporte (01:07:22):
Decide, you say, I can't, I, we need to record that cause I, I couldn't get it. Yeah, yeah,

Caller Ray (01:07:26):
Yeah. We either do it because either bad audio or maybe they want to add a line, you know, that's on the back, you know, you know, there's a lot of different ways

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
You see that every once in a while you see, you see a line in the actor's mouth, isn't moving. It's like, I think they're adding that after the fact <laugh>

Caller Ray (01:07:42):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:43):
True. You know, you try not to do that, but <laugh> oh, fascinating. And it was mag tape originally you were recording unreal to reel and then now it's digital. You use sound devices, things like that or

Caller Ray (01:07:55):
Yeah. Yeah. They used to use the old Nara. Nagra was com

Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
Beautiful little Niagara portables. I, yeah. I still kind of want inau just cuz they're so beautiful. They're so elegant.

Caller Ray (01:08:05):
Yeah. Now it's all digital. It comes, comes to us all digital. So it just one, you know, take a file transfer from one hard drive to your, you know, your CIS editors, they load 'em up and we start editing, you know, and, and it's actually getting a little bit more difficult because you know, now they got so many tracks, you know, they got numerous tracks of audio that you gotta put together. But

Leo Laporte (01:08:26):
Yeah, I remember we went down to watch them shoot Dexter and the guys using a sound device, probably 16 track digital sounded devices, recorder. So everybody's micd, they've got mics everywhere. Now you've got all those tracks. You basically it's like mixing a record when, by the time you get into the studio, I imagine. Right? Yeah.

Caller Ray (01:08:47):
And then when you go into the studio now you got like your sound effects editor, you got 24 tracks. I on a standard show, maybe 24. Wow. Wow. Your dialogue, you got your maybe 14 tracks, you know, your dialogue and then your

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
ADR. Amazing. Hey, hang on for a second. Here we go. Sure. Leo LePort <laugh> the tech guy. We're going get down with Ray. Hello Ray. Thanks for hanging on. I appreciate it. <Laugh> you had a que I, I completely derailed our conversation. So let me get to your question now.

Caller Ray (01:09:24):
Yeah, well, I, I consider myself a semi tech kind of person, you know, but this past week, okay. You know, I've been having my online banking, I've been getting these messages saying, you know, Hey, you changed your password. And, and I didn't, oh, go online and have to call the bank. And you know, then they send me all these different, you know, text messages who verifies me. And then, so I changed it. And then again, just last night I got up and there was another attempt to yikes. Log into my bank. So that's the second time in four days. Well, it was

Leo Laporte (01:09:55):
More than an attempt to change the password or are you getting a message that merely says like the password reset message where it says, oh, you wanna change your password? What would you like it to be click this link? That kind of message.

Caller Ray (01:10:11):
Yeah, no, no. I got a message. Your access was locked because a number and incorrect login account.

Leo Laporte (01:10:16):
Oh, trying. They're trying to guess it.

Caller Ray (01:10:18):
They're trying to guess it and get in it. And, and they did get it the first time, the first time they were successful. So

Leo Laporte (01:10:24):
Did you just, and I was able to no shame here, but did your, was your password like monkey 1, 2, 3, or was it a no,

Caller Ray (01:10:30):
No, no, no, my, no, it was, well, I wasn't, I, I have last password, you know that.

Leo Laporte (01:10:34):
Okay. So you had a good strong password. Yeah. You know?

Caller Ray (01:10:37):
But on that, but I I have to say, I didn't <laugh>, I didn't have a password that was generated by last pass. I had my own, but you know, somehow, but I was able

Leo Laporte (01:10:46):
To this, I'll tell you why this is important because if your PA, if they got in, by guessing your password, if your password was guessable, that's one thing. If your password was not, you know, as a good ran them long password and they got in, that means something entirely different because you can't really brute force a bank site. You know what I'm saying? The, they, they put delays between the login and, and it's obvious with your bank, after a certain number of incorrect logins, they're gonna error out and say, no, no, no stop. So somebody was able to enter your password without a lot of guesses. That's somewhat concerning. Again, if your password was monkey one, two, three something, or your birthday and your middle name something obvious, then it's not so concerning, still concerning. Cuz some, a cuz somebody's trying to get in was so what's your sense of that password that they guessed? Was it easily? Was it guessable?

Caller Ray (01:11:38):
Well, I don't think so. You know, I thought it was

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
Pretty, was it guessable by somebody who knows you? Well, let's try that. No.

Caller Ray (01:11:44):
No. Okay. I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (01:11:46):
Okay. Yeah. That's

Caller Ray (01:11:47):
Concerning. Yeah, it is concerning. So that's why I was wondering, you know you know, I was looking your website, you know the VPN express VPN. That's not,

Leo Laporte (01:11:57):
I don't know if that's gonna help you. So what we really gotta think about, and this is gonna be kind of a kind of a game of logic is how the heck did that happen? You're using last pass. So, so the first thing is you're, you're smart. You're you're using last pass S which is a good password manager. But in this one case you didn't have last pass, make up a unique password. Right? My suspicion is, and my hope is that that password that they tried on your bank, you had used somewhere else. Is that possible? Yeah. Yep. Okay, good. So there you go. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, that's a relief. Believe it or not because it means it wasn't somebody who's spying on you. It wasn't somebody who's in your house, a camera looking over your shoulder. Somebody who knows you so well, they could guess the password. It was somebody who, you know, our data's breached all the time. It was somebody who found your password for another site and then said, wow, let's try this on a number of sites.

Caller Ray (01:12:57):
And that's the problem too. You know, we're all creatures that have where, you know, we don't want to do a different password. No, of course. You know, so you got, you have a tendency to use the same password on, you know, 20

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
Different points. That's why PA that's why last pass from now on, you know, use last pass. They'll even go through your passwords and say, these are duplicated and make sure only use any given password once have last pass created. Now here's the first thing I would do is go to there's a site I'm gonna give you here. That's a little weirdly spelled. It's called, have I been pawned? Have I been as normal, but POed is spelled P w N E D. Have I been pawned.com? This is a place where it's completely safe to use. Troy H who does it is, is really great. They collect password, breaches, data, breaches, all the data breaches. And they collect all the passwords revealed by these data breaches. So you can go in there and enter your email. But what I want you to do is at the top, there's a link to passwords.

Leo Laporte (01:13:53):
I want you to try that bank password in here. And what it'll tell you is where that password has been seen. And what you will find out is not only, you know, somebody obviously got it from a breach, you'll find out what breach it was. And now you can say, oh, that password is known. Oh, okay. That password is out in the, you know, in the world because somebody, maybe you got, maybe you had a target account that used that password or a Yahoo account that used there's so many breaches. Right? So it'll tell you where the breach came from and now you'll know, okay, I can't use that password and you should go own your last pass and change it in every case. Yeah. Yeah. A VPN is not the solution here because a VPN would protect you again. Somebody who's snooping on your traffic as it flew through the air.

Leo Laporte (01:14:42):
Oh, okay. But that's not the problem here. I don't think the problem is password reuse. That's a much more common problem. The reason is when you connect to your bank and no, every bank does this, you're connected securely. It's just as encrypted as if you used a VPN. Nobody, if you use, you can go to your bank, log into your bank at a coffee shop with wide open access. People can watch the traffic. They won't be able to do anything with it. So VPN is not gonna help you in that case, what is gonna help you is not using the same password over and over. But what

Caller Ray (01:15:14):
I, what I did this time is I went ahead and turned on that. What is it called? Two factor. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> authentic that. So now every time I sign in, I, they send me a text. So right. Ray,

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
<Laugh> everywhere. You can especially banking, turn on two factor. It's a little, it's an extra step of annoyance. But then even if somebody has your password, they can't open that. They can't change it on that account. Right. Right. But right. Well, but don't reuse passwords. <Laugh> I know. Well, no,

Caller Ray (01:15:43):
This is a good, I go through and update a

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
Lot of them. Yeah. This is a, well, the good thing is you're using a password manager. Most of them do this, but last pass does, I know that will do a security check on your passwords and will flag all the reuse passwords. And they'll even, they even have a thing that sort of automates the password changes for those accounts. It makes it a lot easier. Yeah. Highly recommend you do that. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller Ray (01:16:07):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:16:08):
Right. It was a real pleasure talking to you and learning about the movie audio and getting the confirmation that, yeah. It's not my ears.

Caller Ray (01:16:16):
Yeah. Well, I, I use subtitles too sometimes on some, so I'm right there with you.

Leo Laporte (01:16:21):
<Laugh> real pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Ray. All right. You too. All right. Take care. I did the sound for the Sopranos. Wow. And one tree hill. Wow. So again, I want to really emphasize, says, now somebody's saying, well, why I'm not gonna give my password to this site. You can, in this case, make sure you're at, have I been pwned? We'll put a link in the show notes. Have I been pwned.com. But what, the way Troy does, this is very safe. And he even explains it be beneath why it's safe to do it this way. He doesn't have actually get your password. He gets a hash of your password, which he compares with hashes from other database breaches. So it is safe to do this, but it's a great idea to enter your, you know, if you're, I have friends and family who do this, everybody does. If you're using a variation on your initials and your birthdate, for instance, fix it, fix it. Hello? Hello, Chris. Mark. What? How are you? My friend

Chris Marquardt (01:17:32):
Lee. Hello? Good to see.

Leo Laporte (01:17:33):
Hello? Hello. Oh, ho, ho.

Chris Marquardt (01:17:36):
<Laugh> we say hello? You say

Leo Laporte (01:17:39):
Hello? French. They say hello, but it's

Chris Marquardt (01:17:42):
Italian say pro. My, we are so Americanized. We are so Americanized.

Leo Laporte (01:17:46):
Yeah. Hi. You know, say when, when howdy, how howdy. I like howdy boy, Audi. I don't really know.

Chris Marquardt (01:17:54):
Howdy. Howdy. ALO,

Leo Laporte (01:17:56):
ALO hall. Yeah. I think probably influenced by America, right? Oh, it gets oh yeah, totally. Same with France. ALO. Yeah. Why do the Italians answer Pronto? <Laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:18:10):
What is that? Please Pronto. Pronto. Isn't that please? Like, I don't know. You would, you would also, you would also do answer the phone in German with the German words for please bit bit. So that's another way. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:26):
Bitta. That might make more sense. Yeah. Bitta. I, yeah. Pronto means ready. <Laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:18:34):
I'm ready. I'm ready. Ready to

Leo Laporte (01:18:36):
Talk. Ready to talk. Pronto. That's because Italians would be caught dead using the same word Americans use. That's probably

Chris Marquardt (01:18:43):
By the way you have an email. We are going to do the fishbowl today, fishbowl.

Leo Laporte (01:18:50):
So do you want you run it or do you wanna run it?

Chris Marquardt (01:18:53):
I'll drive.

Leo Laporte (01:18:54):
Okay. I'll have it open in case you need it. And I'll put a link in the chat rooms in the show notes. So everybody has the the appropriate link. Oh, the tech guy podcast brought to you today by simply safe. Here it is right here. Boom, boom, boom. This is the greatest thing ever invented. If you've ever wanted to make your home feel safer. This is the time. No better time than right now. This week simply safe is giving TWI listeners early access to their annual holiday deals. And when they say simply saves amazing 40% off the best home security you can get award winning. Yes. simply safe has everything you need to make your homes safe. This is the base unit, but you can get indoor and outdoor cameras, sensors for everything. Water. I put it under the water heater, glass break, put that in various rooms, windows, opening, doors, opening, sensors, motion sensors.

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Chris Marquardt (01:22:07):
Yeah. Didn't you didn't last too long. I, no,

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
It was fun, but you know, digital is so much easier.

Chris Marquardt (01:22:14):
You know, you know, the thing about film is it has, it has a, it has a, a development, a kind of look built, built in baked in. So that's one of the reasons that Koda Chrome was so popular. It's not a lot, not around anymore, but Koda Chrome had a look, a certain pick. The picture has looked a certain way. Yeah. And that is, that is difficult to reproduce it in the digital realm.

Leo Laporte (01:22:36):
That's true. And there is a certain pleasure to, especially with black and white to developing it yourself and printing it and all of that. But,

Chris Marquardt (01:22:44):
Anyway, it takes time. I know, I know

Leo Laporte (01:22:46):
It takes time in a special room with no lights. So, you know, it's not, not trivial. Mr. Mark here, Mr. Mark Ward. Let's do some digital. In fact, let's review our photo assignment.

Chris Marquardt (01:22:59):
Yes. The clear assignment we have we have received pictures. Let me actually put them on the screen cuz there's, unless it was a difficult choice this time, so much great stuff here. Thanks everyone for participating in our little assignment. And yeah, I made a choice of four three, three of these pictures and they all are around the word clear. And the first one I chose is Ram LAN and is one of those shots that it it's, it's a, it's a simple shot. It's a shot of raindrops on a window, but there is some interesting stuff to that. So in this case, what you see is the, the raindrops are in focus and the rest behind it is out of focus. It's a very, it's a shot. You see every now and then, but now what happens is what becomes interesting is what's behind the window.

Chris Marquardt (01:23:51):
What is out of focus? Because if you look closely in those raindrops, whatever is behind them is in focus. So we have lots of little kind of lenses in those raindrops that make everything that's been behind. It's very cool. It duplicates it. So I like these kind of photos, especially when they're very colorful. So like a window of a car at night with a colorful lights behind it. That makes it interesting. But this kind of a monochro version is also interesting. So I like this good job. Good job. And it's clear. Raindrops are clear. So that is that the second one is by Mitch XX titled clear ice. And I looked at the camera, Mitch took his new brand new icon, Z seven two R out, which just hasn't been out for too long. And it's a tele photo shot.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:51):
It's a long lens. It's it's a shot of ice and not just ice, but ice on a frozen lake. So what we're looking at is slightly ripple surface of the frozen ice. So the water wasn't very calm when it froze and then chunks of ice on it. And despite the <laugh>, I would be clear the, the pieces of ice aren't that clear. I mean, you see, you see, they are, they are not transparent. They're translucent. So you see in being white that's because there's air in the eyes. And what I like about this is that well, it's a very crisp shot, but it's also the color makes it feel cool because it's bluish. So it, it is on that cold side of the visual spectrum. And that makes it very, very, yeah. I feel cold looking it very authentic. Very authentic. Right. Chili. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just imagine that in warm and you can, you can easily do this. If you, I would think it was pieces easily spidered to keep warm. This is cold,

Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
Very cold. I like it.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:03):
Well, and, and that, and that pie that just came to your mind of course comes from the shape of that one piece of eyes. It looks like a slice of pie. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:26:10):
So looks, and if it were, if it were a yellower, then rather than blue, it might look like pumpkin pie. And so you could see where it also means that

Chris Marquardt (01:26:20):
It also means that just lunchtime for you. So yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:26:21):
Exactly. You can see where my mind's at <laugh> oh, pie.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:26):
All right. Yeah. Yeah. Third out of the three that I chose and this one, it took me, it took me a few seconds to warm up to this. And then, then it became one of my favorites of the entire set and what we're look what we're looking here. Okay. So we're looking at a silhouette of a tree or a bunch of trees in front of a sunset. But that's not all that is then mirrored in a window. And that window is kind of transparent, but right behind it, there's blinds. So we're looking at a house and then in the roof, there's the sunset. And that adds a whole bunch of layers, which makes this very interesting for me. So you see the warm sunset let's talk about colors for a second. You see the warm sunset, you see the coolish kind of side of the house and the windows.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:18):
So those contrast each other nicely from a color point of view, and then you had these layers, you have the sun, like the sky you have, the second layer is the trees, the silhouettes of the trees. And the third layer is the window. And then the fourth layer is the blinds behind the window. And these layers also become, I would say, layers in the story that you can see in that photo, whichever that might be, everyone can make up their own story about it, but someone's not at home. And but it's nice outside. Maybe that person is outside right now, taking that picture, maybe whatever there's, there's like layers of possibilities in that shot. And that's because of the visual layers. And that's, I'm, I'm really happy

Leo Laporte (01:27:59):
About this raises an interesting point, because if you wanna a pretty picture, you might eliminate the blinds. You just have the sunset and the trees. That would be a pretty picture. This is not aesthetically pretty, but it's evocative. It's more interesting. It kind of makes you think about what's going on. That

Chris Marquardt (01:28:19):
Makes it interesting. Right? That's something that comes from, from down here from from the fields I that's where this is located. Yeah. And we need a new assignment now.

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
Well, that means it's time to break out the fish bowl.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:36):
The fish book, we don't, we don't still don't have a jingle for the fish. You need a fish from

Leo Laporte (01:28:40):
The fish bowl. So what Chris does, he's got a lot of what are they? They all adjectives, adjectives, all adjectives in a, in a fishbowl randomly selected by his hand. And you can hear them rustling around <laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:28:54):
And I'm pulling one out. And that one says, hold on. Oh, <laugh> lazy, lazy.

Leo Laporte (01:29:03):
There we go. That's good. I like it. So that is going to be, what do we do with lazy? This is the thing don't be lazy. The whole point of this is not to be lazy, but to take pictures now it's not a competition. There's no prize. But the idea is for the next four weeks, think lazy. When you out with your camera or your camera phone, doesn't have to be a fancy camera by any means. And look for images that say lazy to you. And then if you find one you like, and you get a great image upload it to flicker. That's, that's where we do our photo sharing. It's a great photo sharing site, flicker.com. They don't pay us. Actually. We pay them, right, Chris, <laugh> we, you should talk to them. Well, they don't pay us, but we do encourage the use of it, cuz it's a great way to share your photos and get critiques and comments on it. But there's also a tech guy group. There you'll know you're in the right place, cuz there's more than 10,000 members, a very busy group. And the way you enter this, what is it? It's not a competition. This challenge is

Chris Marquardt (01:30:03):
To what's an opportunity.

Leo Laporte (01:30:04):
Opportunity is to upload your images. Tag it though. So we know it's for this month TG for tech guy, lazy. Not sure. I like that. TG TG, when I am lazy, TG lazy. When you upload it, submit it to the, the tech guy flick group, Renee Silverman, our moderator will say thank you. And you can do up to one photo a week. So no more than four over the next four weeks. And in about a month, Chris will sit down with all of the images. There were a lot this time, pick three, he wants to talk about the three. You just heard for this week's, this month's assignment. And maybe yours will be in that group. That's really the only reward Chris as always. Thank you. Sensei.Photo se N EI dot P H OT O and don't forget his great podcast tips from the top floor@tfttf.com. We'll see you next week, Chris. Thank you. Now I'm gonna go take some lazy pictures Already. A submission in the in the chat, in the discord chat. This

Chris Marquardt (01:31:16):
Is, this is a whole bunch of them. This is lazy.

Leo Laporte (01:31:18):
<Laugh> you know, that's a good point. It doesn't have to be like a guy in a hammock on the beach.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:27):
No, no. Could be results. Can, can, can be very, very inventive. I think lazy is a good one. I think I do. I like it has a lot of potential. Yeah. I'm glad you

Leo Laporte (01:31:35):
Picked it out. That's great. Here's another one. That's

Chris Marquardt (01:31:38):
Well, I picked it out of a hundred different ones. So

Leo Laporte (01:31:42):
This is actually working out well. I like this bucket idea.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:46):
<Laugh> yeah. Adds, adds a bit of drama to the whole thing.

Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
Yeah, it's fun.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:52):
Yeah. There's a lot of lazy. That's wrong with that? Nothing easy cats

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
And stuff here. It's good. All right. Have a great week. You got your booster, right?

Chris Marquardt (01:32:01):
I am boosters. We are hanging in there. There is a chance of me having to skip

Leo Laporte (01:32:10):
Next week. That's fine. Do you wanna wait until, you know? Yeah. Just email me. That's all. Yes. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:32:16):
I will. I will send you and John an

Leo Laporte (01:32:17):
Email. Yes. To John too. Cause I, I often miss emails. Yes. Thank you. Will do.

Chris Marquardt (01:32:22):
Thank you, Chris. All right. Thank you very much. All right. See you in a

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
Way. Take care. Bye. Leo Laport, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. We're talking off the air. We're talking about how people answer the phone. Cuz at the beginning of the hour, I was talking about ho, which is what Alexander Graham bell wanted to use. Ho hello, Thomas Edison's answer in Italy. They say Pronto, which means ready? Chris Marco was telling me in Germany, they say a same in France. In Spain. They say Dego, which is speak in Mexico. Go. They say BU, which is good. But then I realize, I don't actually always say hello. Kim says, she says, this is Kim John. Our studio manager says, this is John. And I realize sometimes I'll say that if, if work calls, you know, if you call me professor Laura and you know, the caller ID would say, premier, I would say, this is Leo knowing that, you know, you wanna, I don't know. I don't know who it is, but I think caller IDs kind of changed how we answer the phone. Do you, I'm curious. Do you answer the phone? If you see, let's say it's your mom calling and you see your name. You go, hi mom. Right? When my, when my daughter calls, I'll say hi, hi daughter. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:33:42):
So that makes sense, right? If you already know who it is, if the caller ID says you might answer charm says, do you say hello? Scam likely. Hello? Car warranty. No. <laugh> hello. Rob. Call robo collar. Eighty eight eighty eight S Cleo. Cedras on the line from Laguna beach, California. Hi Sidra.

Caller Cedra (01:34:06):
Hey, how are you? I'm great.

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
How are you today?

Caller Cedra (01:34:09):
Good. Thank you. So was at the airport putting my computer, my left in the bin. Oh, no bin moved and my computer hit the ground.

Leo Laporte (01:34:22):
See, this is why we shouldn't travel anymore. Okay. We should stay home. Just stay home. Everybody stay home. Oh, your computer hit the ground. It, yeah. Big like boom.

Caller Cedra (01:34:34):
Yes. Ugh. Yeah. Yeah. So it was running slower than molasses. Oh, you know, nothing in outside broke, but it was just like, it was like, there was a rat in there running it. So I did like,

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
Wait a minute. When you say a rat, like on a little, little spin wheel going?

Caller Cedra (01:34:55):
No, not that. Not as fast as a mouth, like a big

Leo Laporte (01:34:59):
Rat walking slowly. Okay. Got it. All right.

Caller Cedra (01:35:03):
Okay. So I went on the internet, did a little looked around. Did this command? C H K D S K F R. Check this. Yes. Now that actually made it work a little better. Little better. Oh yeah. Not amazing, but not horrible. So,

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
So I'm, I'm gonna guess it's a, it's an older computer.

Caller Cedra (01:35:27):
Just a couple it's just a couple

Leo Laporte (01:35:29):
Years, but it has a spinning disc in it. Not an SSD.

Caller Cedra (01:35:32):
Yeah, it does. It doesn't have an SSD. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:34):
Ssds generally don't get damaged by impact. It's not unusual for spinning discs to get damaged. And so if you will visualize not a rat, but a a number of platers that spin very fast, you know, between 5,607 and 10,000 re revolutions a minute. So very, very fast. And each of the platers has a a little head like a recording head, like on your cassette player, a little head that is, but it doesn't touch the disc. It floats just a hair above the disc, close enough, got it. That can read the magnets magnetic impulses on the disc, but not actually touch it. That's actually very important because it, if it should hit the disc <laugh> it could literally gouge it cuz the disc is spinning. Right. If it hits it even briefly, it could put a gouge along the disc. If, if it gets itself damaged, it might be just bent just enough.

Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
So that it's like instead of a micron above the disc, it's five microns above the disc. So it can kind of read it, but not really. So you could see that there's physical damage can happen to that drive. That could make it irreparable. It wouldn't get better. There's also soft damage. So the disc maybe the drive was at the moment doing something sometimes that happens the computer when you're not using it still is indexing the driver weather. So the disc was spinning and the head was reading normally on a disc, by the way on these spinning discs when it's shut down, when it's not in use it just to avoid this, it retracts the head you know, it stops the spinning. It, it actually goes into a kind of a bunker modes that it can't be cause any damage. But unfortunately I think timing wise, your disc was doing something.

Leo Laporte (01:37:23):
Okay. So that head and then, so this is another thing that can happen. The head could be writing ones or zeros, you know, it's writing data and then it gets knocked just as if you were writing out a letter and somebody knocked your elbow right across the page. So that's the other possibility is the have got ones and zero spread across the disc. Those it, those damages can be fixed, but both of them would result in the symptoms you're seeing, which is the computer is trying to read that area. Maybe it's the area it needs to, you know, on the operating system to boot the operating system. But it's trying to read that area. And every time it gets there, it's hard to read for, for some reason. And it has to try extra hard. So what check disc is fixing, it's not very powerful.

Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
It's kind of a semi useful tool is it's going and it's making sure that the directories and everything all matched, that it, that the, the directory of what's on the drive is correct. And you actually have a backup directory. You can check that. So it's, it's doing some rudimentary fixing, but not some not really hardcore fixing. The best thing to do that would fix either of these per problems is to get a new hard drive in there. Oh, okay. That will solve the problem. Now you've got the problem of your data. So before you do that, you wanna take, you know, it might be slow, but get all the data off that you can't copy to an external drive of some kind.

Caller Cedra (01:38:52):
Now I have eye drive. Is that, oh, you are. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:38:55):
I, I love hearing that. Not just cuz they're a sponsor, but because I know you're good. So that's great. So whatever data was damaged in this is fine. Is safe up in the cloud. That's good. I tell me the name of the computer. What kind of computer is it?

Caller Cedra (01:39:12):
Oh shoot. It's an HP HP,

Leo Laporte (01:39:14):
Most laptops you can replace the drive. And in this case I think replacing the drive with an SSD would be good. It'll speed up everything to the point where you'll go, wow. It's like, I got a new computer. Okay. So, and by doing that and then restoring, you know, reinstalling windows and restoring your data, everything will be fixed. It's a hardware issue on the drive. It's not repairable. If it's a software issue, it is repairable, but the cost to repair, it might be more than the cost of a new dis. See,

Caller Cedra (01:39:46):
That's what I was thinking. Like I went to the, when I would check it, going to a place to have him check it, it was $200 to check it. And I'm like, the laptop probably cost me five. No,

Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
You could get ans S D that's twice. The size of the one you have for $150 or maybe less. Okay. So you get a two terabyte SSD for nothing. So that probably the right thing to do, I would go out and you can go online. If, if you brought it somewhere, they could do it. They'll charge you labor fee. It's easy to go online, look up your ex exact model on YouTube and, and disc replacement and see if you're comfortable. It may just be a few screws in the back, lift it out, put in a new drive. It may be more complicated. So sometimes they put these under the battery and stuff.

Caller Cedra (01:40:30):
Oh, I apologize. Thank you. And I, I'm pretty, I'm kind of mechanical. Do you have a brand of drive that you like? Yes. Get

Leo Laporte (01:40:37):
A Samsung Evo. Seven 50 or eight 50 if you, if you want the best, get the a 50. Okay. well actually, no, they have an eight 70. Now. Those are very good. <Laugh> but you have to get one. That's gonna match. What's what you've got in the computer. So you do have to kind of look up that computer and see what kind of, is it a data connection? Is it MDO? Two? That kind of thing. Oh, it's a it's I dunno why I know that. Yeah. Good. Cuz you're smart. You're mechanical. You said that the Evo eight 70 Evo sat is SSD. That looks just like the spinning drive. It's two and a half inch drive in your computer, but it's it's not it's solid state. If you got a one terabyte drive, that'd be 109 bucks. Oh my gosh. I'm so doing that. You're so doing that is speed up everything. There's one other thing, my friend, Steve Gibson does make soft where that's check disc on steroids called spin, right? That's at grc.com, but it's 90 bucks. So I'm, I think it's always cheaper just to buy a new, new drive, but I do wanna get the plug spin, right? You know, 50 50 would fix it. If it's hardware, it's not gonna fix it.

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
The reason spin right. Is a good choice. If you knew it was a software problem, like a soft damage. But if the disc got gouged, well, even if the disc got gouged, as long as it's still running spin, right? What spin right. Goes through the whole hard drive looks for damage. Sectors could be physical damage or soft damage. And if it can't read that sector, it moves, reads. It keeps reading until it can, then it moves it off and sometimes it can recover a drive. The thing is if the drive's been dropped and is now acting funny, that's a pretty strong indication that you shouldn't keep using it. <Laugh> I guess that's that's to me what? That, what? That indicates time to time to get a different drive and now, you know, upgrading to an SST. What a big improvement that's gonna be. Well, Hey, Hey, yo, Adiga Bronto.

Leo Laporte (01:42:55):
It's me. Leo. LePort the tech guy. Time to talk computers, the internet. I'm starting to like that. Maybe, maybe I could just do like a ho ho Pronto OGA, BU eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number? Eighty eight, eight eight two seven five five three six. Toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You can still call. You can you can call from anywhere. Just you use Skype out or something. It'll let you call a phone number. It should be free cuz it's a toll free number, 88 88. Ask Leo the website tech guy labs.com has all the information you need. If you don't have to write anything down, if you hear something, I put links up there and, and all of that tech guy labs dot the come back to the phone. Cheryl from Riverside, California. Hi Cheryl. Hey

Speaker 9 (01:43:41):
Leo. How you doing? I'm well, how are you? I'm good. Hey, three years ago you recommended the pixel three

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
To me. Wow. That was a long, was it three years? Wow. Yeah, time

Speaker 9 (01:43:52):
Flies. Yeah. I really enjoyed the phone. But I was reading actually last weekend that the pixel three will get one more security update probably first quarter next year. Yeah. And I was curious, what's your thoughts on how safe is it to continue using a phone and just no longer getting security updates?

Leo Laporte (01:44:12):
This is unfortunately a big problem in the Android world. You know, all computers need security updates and if they don't get 'em, there's always a risk that you could be hacked. And it's, it's probably even more the case with phones only because everything's on there and you know, and so you don't want to get, you don't want to get hacked with Android. It's an issue because there are many, many Android phones out there that are under $50 that will never get updates. Those are, those phones are really, you know, running scared. The pixels are great because they Google's pretty good about updating them. Unfortunately, you know, three years is a long time in the phone world. So they have said with their newest pixels, the pixel six, that they are gonna offer five years of updates, which is pretty remarkable, all that.

Leo Laporte (01:45:11):
Yeah. There's two things to be considered though. There's two kinds of updates, there's security updates, and then there's feature updates. And this is true for windows as well. And, and Macintosh security updates are generally an ongoing process. Android is kind of settled on a monthly update. So when with a, with a Google phone, you're gonna have the best update cadence. You, you know, here we are in December, you probably will already have the DEC, well, maybe not it's December 5th, but the next week you'll have the December update. Okay. Samsung phones, you might still be stuck on October. Other phones you might be stuck on may. And then there's phones. You're stuck in, you know, 1992. So, so it really varies. Pixel's always gonna have the best updates, always Samsung, Motorola have both agreed to kind of keep their phones up to date for longer.

Leo Laporte (01:46:05):
That's really a big improvement. Google has also changed how they do updates because some of the updates now are in the Google play store and will be updated kind of automatically forever. You don't need to worry about feature updates, getting to Android 12. For instance, the latest version of Android is less important than getting those security updates. Okay. So when they say we're not gonna give you security updates past a certain time time to get a new phone. In my opinion, it really is. It's just not safe. Now there are options. If the phone's working great you can root it. Maybe even less secure. I don't know you can root it and install other firmware that is kept updated on it. The Android is an interesting ecosystem cuz it's open source. So there are lots of, of versions of the Android operating system available.

Leo Laporte (01:46:56):
And so a phone that is older can be made secure and up to date by we call it, rooting it which means merely giving you root access so that you can change the firmware details on that are very specific to individual phones and the best place to go for that information is a forum called XDA developers.com. And you search for your phone model, exact model cuz there's different models in Europe and the middle east and stuff. And you can see what the status is on rooting it Google's phones can always to be rooted. Google doesn't mind that. And then what ROS they call 'em ROS, alternate firmware is out there. So if you really said, I love this pixel three or I can't afford spending hundreds of dollars in a new phone, cuz I have a perfectly good device. You could, that's always an option.

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
Not, you know, there are potential risks as we, well, cause you're now running firmware notch from Google, right. But XDA is pretty good on, on picking the right firmware and so forth. I would say now would be a good time to look at a, a, a five a if you wanna save money actually was looking at that one. Yeah, they're really nice. If you're, if you wanna spend a little money, get a pixel six probably around June, Google will announce a six, a that's kind of how do they do these things? When they ship the new phone in the fall, they don't ship the low cost version, but then they, then they, six months later they release the low cost version. Right. So if you could wait you, and you certainly have time to wait, you could wait until say June or July a pixel six a would probably give you a lot of the benefits of the six without all the price.

Leo Laporte (01:48:36):
So sounds good. Yeah. they're supposedly with a six, a it's gonna be equivalent of the pixel six in almost every respect. So it'll be a good mid range choice. So it's, it really depends on the money. Five a is fine. That was the same thing for last year's phone, basically. Right. Okay. All right. Well thank you so much. Sure. Cheryl, the bottom line though, the answer to your question is don't use a phone. That's not getting updated. Gotcha. It's just too risky. If you're not getting security updates in any computer device of any kind, it's very risky because what happens when they release the update the first thing, it happens, bad guys go. And they say, well, let's look at what they updated. And that isn't in, in a way an announcement that there's a problem. Oh, they updated the you know, the messaging tool. Oh, well, let's take a look and see if we can find what they fixed and, and in effect, that's an announcement. Here's where to hack. So you know, this is, unfortunately when updates come out, it's kind of a, a red flag for everybody who does an update. It's really important that you do the updates now. Are you gonna get hacked?

Leo Laporte (01:49:45):
Probably. You know, it's generally you get hacked on computers, laptops, desktops, by an email attachment that you try to run. For instance, that kind of thing. It's a phone. You're not probably trying to open attachments on the other hand, the phone walking around in the real world with a, with wifi on and, and Bluetooth on. And so just, I guess it depends on where the flaw is that they're fixing, if it's a Bluetooth flaw and there've been many yeah, you could have a drive by heck. And, and if I'm a bad guy, I'm going to try to go after phones because every, everything you know is on there. And if I can get into a phone, man, I could, you know, have you got a GPS, a camera, a microphone. And <laugh>, it's always on the internet. This is like heaven for a bad guy. So I generally speaking, and this has been the problem, I think, in the Android world, one of the things apple does very well is they keep their phones up to date. You're still getting security updates for the iPhone six S we're up to the 13. Now that's seven or eight years. Not the same in the Android world. So yeah, risky, risky to use a phone that doesn't, doesn't get updates. Eighty eight, eighty eight as Leo's the phone number. Bill is on the line from Huntington beach, California. Our next caller. Hi bill.

Caller Elton (01:51:16):
Hey Leo. Thanks for taking my call. Thanks for calling. Yeah, I got a quick question for you. I had to replace my, my laptop, apple computer during COVID. It was getting old, but it had I photo on there and I found that I photo really worked well for me. It managed my photos and the simple editing on it was adequate and,

Leo Laporte (01:51:41):
And along comes Mojave. And now it's photos.

Caller Elton (01:51:47):
Yeah. And so I'm stuck. So yeah, you

Leo Laporte (01:51:51):
Have to move to photos. It's, it's very similar. Have you, have you tried it

Caller Elton (01:51:59):
Well, I'm trying to do that. 

Leo Laporte (01:52:02):
It's just, it's really, they mostly, it's a rename. They, they there's some stuff under the hood that's that different, you know, so some people with particular needs might say, well, I miss, you know, X, Y, Z, and I photos, but, but now it's been a few years by the way. And so photos has gotten better and better. I'm actually, I use it pretty much as my photo library, so you can move, you can absolutely do the upgrade. You'll do when you got the new Mac, I hope you saved the old stuff on the old Mac. Right? I,

Caller Elton (01:52:38):
I, I do. I, it didn't completely die on me, but it's you know, just shown its age. So I, yeah, so unplug it,

Leo Laporte (01:52:45):
There, there is an I photos library on there, get that off. That's got all the stuff you've had put in there for years, move that to the new Mac. And when you open it, just double click it when you open it, photos will say, whoa, I haven't seen one of these since 2015 and convert it and you'll be fine.

Caller Elton (01:53:05):
Okay. so you, you think I'd be happy with the, with the new photos?

Leo Laporte (01:53:10):
Yeah. I mean, there's new features that I think are great. Okay. Yeah. So let me see. There is, it looks like apple does offer an I photo library, upgrader. I think it do it automatically. This, this goes, no, this go, this is from 2013. This is this is this no you know, periodically apple will change the catalog format and stuff, and so they'll have to do it, but they do it automatically built into photos. It takes a while. Make sure you have a copy if don't do it on your only copy. So have a backup copy of the photos I photos library, and then, you know, work on on that. But yeah, I I'm, we all moved back back back in 2015 <laugh> and and

Caller Elton (01:54:00):
I'm starting to move,

Leo Laporte (01:54:01):
You're starting to move, man. And it's, I think it's good. There's new features that I think are wonderful. It does, it does a lot of automated stuff, kind of, they, they realize that there's getting a lot of competition from Google photos in terms of face recognition and and creating albums and movies and stuff. So they do a lot of that in the four U tab. They have a memories tab and it's all done on the phone safely. So it's not sharing any of that back to apple, which I really like unlike Google. And I think they do a great job. You know, I'm looking at my memories now. I have one called back in the day. I have one called golden hour. I mean, it's, they're using a lot of artificial intelligence to create interesting things. So I think it's pretty good. There may be a couple of features, some in the corner of I photos that you miss. I can't even think of what they might be. I think you'll be fine.

Caller Elton (01:54:52):
Okay. So it'll manage my photos, like exactly the same, my,

Leo Laporte (01:54:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly the same. Okay.

Caller Elton (01:55:00):
The, if I don't like it is, is there an alternative,

Leo Laporte (01:55:03):
That's what I was about to say. You're on a great platform for photographers, most professionals you use max. So there are a lot of choices. My personal favorites that I have on every Mac. I'll give you three. They're not expensive. One is pixel made pro and that's did you get, when you got the new Mac did you get one of the new M one based Mac or is it still on the Intel? Do you know

Caller Elton (01:55:31):
That? I couldn't tell you off top of my

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
Head. When, when did you buy it?

Caller Elton (01:55:37):
Approximately 16 months

Leo Laporte (01:55:40):
Ago. Okay. so it's an Intel base. That's fine. But pixel made pro is a very good choice. I think it's like $15 apps are maybe it's 40. No, it's 20 somewhere in between. So it's a, not an expensive apps are cheap on the, on the Mac app store. I also recommend dark room, another great app. And then the number one that people really love, I think it's a little hard to use, but if you want like a Photoshop quality app affinity photo affinity photo from Sarah. Okay. So those between those three, there's nothing you can't do. I actually have all three use all three and, and, and I also use some other programs from a company called sky and so forth, but I use all of those, but I keep all my photos in Apple's photos because they have a little feature you can edit in some other programs. So if you're working on a photo and the basic editing tools built into photos, which are quite good, aren't sufficient. You can say open that up in affinity photo, and now let's really work on it and you can do anything. Yeah. It's very, very powerful affinity photos, 38 bucks. I mean, it's really, it's on sale right now. It's really inexpensive.

Caller Bill (01:56:51):
And that's a one time

Leo Laporte (01:56:52):
Purchase. Yep. None of this Photoshop you're gonna pay for the rest of your life stuff.

Caller Bill (01:56:58):
You're right. All right, Leo, you've been very helpful.

Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
My pleasure. Yeah. Fear not, I think you're are gonna be fine bill, but again, as always, when you do this kind of thing, save the originals. So you don't, you know, you don't get into trouble and something doesn't disappear and so forth. I have to say Adobe's in trouble because there's so many good photo tools. Now on the Mac that the high price tools from companies like capture one and Adobe just, I thought, don't think they can compete. Maybe if you're a super pro somebody like Chris mark, our photo guy, he says, you know, I've invested years in Adobe Lightroom. I'm not gonna switch. Cuz it's all in that catalog. It would be a massive effort to switch. And that I understand. But if, if you are not tied into something I think photos just to manage the photos does a great job. Make sure you back it up. Of course. And then there are so many great programs out there you're you really have a huge choice on we go with the show. I'm not sure who this is because all it says is you have an older HP computer. What's your name, sir? It's Elton. Hi, Elton. Where are you calling from?

Caller Elton (01:58:09):
Washington state. Nice to

Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
Meet you. What can I do for you?

Caller Elton (01:58:13):
Well, I have, it is an older HP. I'm just kind of, I'm retired. I, I just not computer savvy. I've kind of picked it forever. I started out with an, a omega 500 <laugh> so anyway anyway, I got this HP computer. I got it at a Hawk shop, pawn shop. Oh wow. When I was out working it was a window seven. Okay. And I upgraded it when they went to 10 and I didn't like it and I went back and then, you know, they discontinued, you know, updates and everything for windows. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:58:50):
Probably you'd wanna move to 10, I think. Yeah,

Caller Elton (01:58:53):
Yeah. Yeah. So I did, but when I did well, the computer had a sticker on it. It said it was a, Blueray a dis player. Ah, and, and since I switched I can't play anything <laugh> so, and that's just one of the problems I have. I have an iPhone too, that I have a heck of a time trying to download pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:59:14):
Well, let's do let's. Let's do the Blueray first. I wanna run it at time. You need software on your Mac to run, to play or on your PC to play back Blueray and probably what happened when you moved to 10 or back again, the software that HP had provided is gone. So one thing you could do is go to hp.com and see if you've got updated software for that model of computer. Otherwise there are great Blueray programs. You can, Cyberlinks probably the most popular, but there are many other choices. I'll put a link in the show notes. Leo LePort the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
Yeah. I think that's one where they pro you probably blew out whatever the HP software was that they built in. There are free programs, you know, free open source programs, VLC from video land.com is good. But if you want kind of all the features of the HP product, they probably had a minimal version of Cyberlinks power DVD on there. That was very common in those days. Yeah. I just, the reason it's an issue is cuz DVD Blueray rather and DVDs, commercial DVDs are copy prints. So you can't just, you know, Willy nilly playing back, you need to have the right kind of software on there. Cyber. And that's why I recommend cyber link. It's about 70 bucks on Amazon. And it would solve all those problems.

Caller Elton (02:00:36):
All right. Sounds good. I appreciate it. My

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
Pleasure. What about your iPhone too? Well, wait a minute. Not iPhone two.

Caller Elton (02:00:45):
<Laugh> it's a seven.

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
Oh, good. Okay.

Caller Elton (02:00:48):
I got it. When I retired. It was my retirement watch. Oh, nice. And 

Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
Chris, the nice thing about a watch is, is it never goes out date an iPhone seven. Yeah. It's kinda outta date.

Caller Elton (02:01:01):
Yeah, but I, I made it last forever. And then finally, I mean, I've probably had it probably six years now. I I guess. And I dropped it the other day, But is taken off the top of the car on the freeway. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:18):
They're good.

Caller Elton (02:01:19):
Yeah. I had to, I had to go where's my phone to find it.

Leo Laporte (02:01:23):
So the problem though, if it's broken, is it, is it like won't turn on broken?

Caller Elton (02:01:28):
Oh no, no, it works fine. It's fine. Haven't get any SLIs from the glass. Oh, okay. So, and no, I just, when I download into this HP computer trying to download my pictures, I wanna delete 'em all outta my phone. Cause I have no memory left in my phone. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:45):
My suggestion is best way to do this is put Google photos on there. One last app and tell it back up. And it will back up everything to the Google photos cloud, the, and then there's a setting in Google photos that says delete, backed up photos. And it'll wipe off all those photos, but they'll be safe in the Google cloud.

Caller Elton (02:02:08):
Okay. But they'll delete 'em off my phone

Leo Laporte (02:02:10):
And then it deletes 'em off the phone once they're backed up. So it's kind of risk free. It won't delete 'em until they're backed up.

Caller Elton (02:02:16):
Oh, okay. So Google,

Leo Laporte (02:02:18):
Google phone photos. If you have an Amazon prime account, it's free. I do. Oh, Amazon offers, Amazon photos does the same thing and it does higher quality. It does the originals. So, so did your

Caller Elton (02:02:31):
Videos too? 

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
Yeah. Amazon photos from Amazon prime. I

Caller Elton (02:02:37):
Think I've got pretty much everything backed up. I afraid we went to Scotland dryer a couple.

Leo Laporte (02:02:42):
Oh yeah. You don't wanna lose those. Yeah.

Caller Elton (02:02:45):
But no, I've got 'em on thumb drive. Yeah. That's another

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
Thing I got. I drive on your, you put, I drive on that old computer. It should back 'em up. But maybe cuz it's a really old computer I drive might not, not I drive. I sorry. I, I tunes. Oh, okay. Confusing iTunes with our sponsor. Itunes should back it up. But if you have an older computer that iTunes won't run on, then Amazon's photos will work. Amazon will back up unlimited full resolution photos and five up to five gigabytes of video for free. Yeah. Cuz you're a prime member. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller Elton (02:03:20):
I some amazing Amazon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:22):
I know you get a lot for prime. I know they keep charging a little more, but boy, you get a lot. Right? So Google photos or Amazon prime either way, once it's backed up, then you know, then you don't have to worry about it

Caller Elton (02:03:35):
Anymore. HP. What? Just

Leo Laporte (02:03:38):
HP. See what hp.com has. They may have an update for all that software for windows 10, but if not Powerlink

Caller Elton (02:03:46):
Yeah. This is a pavilion G seven. I don't know how to

Leo Laporte (02:03:51):
Model number. That's pretty old. Yeah.

Caller Elton (02:03:53):
I just haven't talked to wife into spring and for my new, can't

Leo Laporte (02:03:57):
Heard a, you need the spousal acceptance factor. That's the thing that pleasure. Pleasure to talk to you. I got him run. Take care. Elton. Thank you, Leo. We got Elton going on in the background. Actually tech I podcast brought to you this week. And pretty much every week, these days, certainly our website's brought to you every day by user way, user way.org/twi. What is user way? User is the greatest thing for your website. Everybody who has a website is running a public entity. Okay. So us Supreme court said that that means it is bound by law to be accessible. That's the ADA, the Americans with disabilities act. You have to make it accessible. Now when I found that out, I thought, oh no, what is this gonna mean? I'm gonna have to hire developers. It's gonna be a lot of work. I'm gonna have to monitor for compliance.

Leo Laporte (02:04:47):
No, no, no. All, no, no. All you gotta do is go to user way.org/twi. What is user way? It's an incredible AI powered solution that tirelessly works on your behalf to enforce the hundreds of w C a G woo CAG. They call it with one line of JavaScript. You put that in there user way could do more than a entire team of developers. And if you're saying well, who are these guys? You've seen them as there are more than a million websites, including some of the biggest sites in the world, Disney Coca-Cola FedEx and now, but you don't have to spend like those guys they're making their best in class enterprise grade accessibility solutions available to everyone at a very affordable price. I, and I mean it less than less than we pay for just the fonts on our website user way. And when you scale, you're gonna love it because user way can scale with you.

Leo Laporte (02:05:45):
They can handle big sites like Disney. They can handle yours. An accessible compliant website is not just the right thing to do. It's also good business sense. You're leaving behind more than 60 million Americans with disabilities who can't use your site, registration forms, nav menus, shopping carts that just are inaccesible to them. That means lost business. That means lost business. So three really good reasons. It's the right thing to do. It's the legal thing to do. You don't want to get sued and most importantly, it's good for your business. It's good for you. It user way has been on the cutting edge, creating innovative accessibility technologies for years, they push the envelope of what's possible with AI machine learning and computer vision. They'll automatically fix violations and they do it in the code. They actually add to the accessibility layer of the browser and every browser has an accessibility layer.

Leo Laporte (02:06:36):
Every user with disabilities wants to do that so they can use your site. I mean, some of the things it does, it auto generates image, alts, those alt tags that you know, you're supposed to put in, without those a blind user, the photos are just empty spaces on your website. It actually writes the descriptions for you. You can add to that if you want. It's got a simple way to do that. You'll fix those complex menus, make sure that poplars are accessible. It, it fixes vague link violations, any broken links, little things too. Like for instance, I know you have a color, your brand uses, perhaps it doesn't without changing the Panton color. It adds to the accessibility layer, a modification modifying you luminance and saturate saturation so that it's web accessible. If it's not, and that's important, it's gotta be accessible colors and you'll get a report of all the violations. Look, just go to the website. They have a free scanning tool. It'll tell you if your site's ADA compliant. It's a simple addition, no matter what you're using WordPress Shopify wicks it's cost effective, easy to add. Same goes for AEM site course SharePoint. It integrates seamlessly with every kind of site, including my site, which is, you know, handwritten basically just one line of JavaScript. Just ask the voice of Siri. What she thinks a user way, user

New Speaker (02:07:53):
Way is trusted by more 1 million websites and 60 million users with disabilities visit user way.org to learn how one line of code can make your website accessible

Leo Laporte (02:08:06):
User way can make any website fully accessible. ADA compliant with user way. Everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs. It's also so a great way to showcase your commitment to millions of people with disabilities. Just the right thing to do, go to user way.org/twi 30% off their AI powered accessibility solution user way. What did I just say? 30% off. I did. You caught it. Didn't you user way.org/twi. Sometimes I say those things so Fest, you know, goes by. So you wanna emphasize that that's a good deal user way.org/twi user way, making the internet accessible for everyone. Thank your user way for supporting the tech guy. Thank you for supporting the tech guy by using that address user way.org/twi. Now back to the show, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to, for our personal rocket man rod pile. He's the author of so many great books about space and clearing.

Leo Laporte (02:09:03):
First on the moon, all about the moon landing space, 2.0 editor in chief of the great AOSTRA magazine from the space society, national space society, ns.org. Hello rod. Hey, I gotta get you a newer issue. <Laugh> well, this is fun cuz this is the living in space issue. Yeah. That very special. I like to plan for my new home. So you know, it's it's good. I like it. What is I like on the back cover? Yeah. What is up in what is, am I ready? Yes, I'm ready to go to space. What's I did just see that the latest guy to go up on the on the Amazon prime rocket.

Leo Laporte (02:09:44):
Did you see that? The guy that you talking about the guy that died or no, no, no. There's a, a famous person. <Laugh> this was escaping. Oh, I was hoping you would remember. Yeah, no, I, I had a, in my <laugh> they're going up on Jeff Bezos's blue origin, rocket two, two people paying 28 million each and then they, I guess, because it's probably good publicity, right? The next, oh, he's thinking so hard. He's not moving. He's not moving at all. Michael strand. Yeah. The football star is going up on on the new Shepherd's 19th mission, but we've lost rod because you know, know what? You never should give somebody with a big brain, like rod, a puzzler, because, and now he's he is, his computer is locked up. So we're gonna try to get rod, rod. We're gonna try to get rod back on the horn. Oh, he's calling. I hear him now. Let me, let me pick him up on the phone. Hi rod. You froze. Looks like you froze on me.

Rod Pyle (02:10:59):
Yeah. Looks like my, my internet can actually completely cooked itself. So 

Leo Laporte (02:11:04):
You froze though in a very fetching FA you know how, when sometimes when the computer screen freezes you, you looked like you were thinking about who was going in his space and then blue on the, yeah, that's trying to remember on the on the new shepherd. It is Michael Strahan, the football player he's gonna that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And he's gonna fly. We're

Rod Pyle (02:11:23):
Gonna see personality going up, you know, with every couple of flights, cuz it is good PR PR

Leo Laporte (02:11:28):
And then the other person going with him, which I really like is Laura Shepherd. Who's Allen she's daughter.

Rod Pyle (02:11:36):
Yes. That was the one that I had in my mind before it flew away.

Leo Laporte (02:11:41):
Han is the host of good morning America. So who cares, right? Yeah,

Rod Pyle (02:11:43):
Yeah. Yeah. I thought Yon. So in fact we don't have internet connection Boes. The one of the cool stories is gonna have, so I'll I'll

Leo Laporte (02:11:51):
Were you gonna play me some more music from Mars?

Rod Pyle (02:11:55):
No, I was gonna show you the, the Chinese YouTube Rover spotted about 300 feet away from where, where it is right now on the far side of the moon, a cube. What? It's very soft. Wait a minute. See what it is. But on thess

Leo Laporte (02:12:11):
Cubes there's are made by humans.

Rod Pyle (02:12:14):
Well, yeah, although, you know, the backside of the moon is really beat up because it was facing all the incoming CRUT, you know, cause the, the moon is tight locked to the earth. So the, the far side is always the far side. So back in the early solar system days got battered pretty hard. So it's probably just a big square rock, but it just,

Leo Laporte (02:12:31):
But, but square, you know, when you say square, you, you usually think, you know, somebody made that, right, right. You know who, this is gonna, you know, who's gonna love this, the conspiracy theorists guy, that guy used to be an MTV VJ Adam Curry is convinced that we have a military base on the dark side of the moon. So he's gonna love he eat this up. He's gonna say that cube. Hopefully

Rod Pyle (02:12:57):
I thought it was the Nazis, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:12:59):
Somebody does. Somebody does well, you know, with conspiracies, we're never sure. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:13:05):
So they're gonna, they're gonna drive over there, take a look at it, but I'll, I'll hit that next week, but

Leo Laporte (02:13:10):
Would they tell us, would the Chinese tell us if they'd found out what it was?

Rod Pyle (02:13:15):
Can you imagine? Well, first of all, it, it would be a crowning moment for them cuz the first discovery of ex extraterrestrial intelligence is one of those things that goes down to history books. Yes, you're right. Yeah. That's an empire builder. And then NASA's gonna say, oh, oh, let's fund a mission right now. And that

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
Speeds up. But as with UFOs and a lot of other things, human eyes or even cameras are often mistaken so well,

Rod Pyle (02:13:41):
And we always look for the familiar, right? So there's that thing we've talked about before Lia, which, which makes you wanna see faces and things like the face on Mars, but we also wanna see familiar shape. So if we see anything that resembles, you know, a corner or a, a convergence of, of angles that looks familiar to us, we go, oh, oh, oh, I know what that is.

Leo Laporte (02:14:00):
I love it. The Chinese have given it the name mystery hut.

Rod Pyle (02:14:05):
<Laugh> mystery. Yeah. You call these up quick. Which I thought was great. I mean, it's temporary, it's a rain name, but it's very descriptive and it

Leo Laporte (02:14:13):
It's kind of cool. So how long is it gonna take for them to get over there?

Rod Pyle (02:14:18):
Yeah, they say two to three months. Cause they're only driven about a quarter mile so far, so it's going very slowly, but you know, it's on the, on the backside of the movie, there's

Leo Laporte (02:14:25):
A, there's a movie in this, there's a movie in this, you know, they start now, they got two or three months where what if we launch our own Rover and try to beat 'em to it.

Rod Pyle (02:14:36):
<Laugh> from, from your mouth to Congress's year, it

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
Would be a race to get to the mystery hunt. Of course we'd get there. And it's just a funny rock, but you know,

Rod Pyle (02:14:46):
Well it turns out to be a fossilized fast food outlet. That would be really cool. <Laugh> 

Leo Laporte (02:14:50):
It's a, Wendy's

Rod Pyle (02:14:51):
Another very cool going up. Yes. Yes. On December 7th, we've got a, a mission with the very UN lyrical name of laser communications relay demonstration or L C R D, which was which was started because of what NASA calls data hunger. So they're getting so much data back from the Mars rovers, and there's gonna be so much coming down from the Artemis missions, but they said, you know, we need something better than radio. So they wanna do laser point to point laser communications, which is very 21st century. So that's what this is. It's a demo for point to point laser beam communications, which they estimate will be 10 to a hundred times faster if a data transfer than what they're using and have much bigger bandwidth. And because we're sending up in the next few years, some private space stations, more earth, observation, satellites, Artemis missions, of course, and the ever increasing bandwidth coming down from this fleet of Mar spacecraft we have and anything going into the deep solar system laser would be great for as far as it work.

Rod Pyle (02:15:49):
So they're gonna send this satellite up to geosynchronous orbit, which is about 22,500 miles. So that's the orbit where it orbits the same rate, the earth turns. So it, it stays in one point in disguise. So it's very easy to track. So it'll beam to a sub satellite and then back and forth to earth for the next two years. And you know, once we learn our lessons from that, then we can apply them to Artemis and some of the Mars missions and really start getting back all that, that high death video that we've been wanting to see all these years,

Leo Laporte (02:16:20):
They don't call it. They don't call it El CRI, do they?

Rod Pyle (02:16:24):
No not, not so far. I think it's just LCR D we've gotta use the initials for that one. Okay. And you know, the other benefit of, of interest to, to people in radio is that bypasses this increasingly crowded radio spectrum, you know, because it, it's just increasingly hard to do that. I mean, you talk about what they're doing with the television HC channels and so forth and that spectrum it just wax. So this gives, 'em a chance to say, okay, well this use lasers and completely slice through this. So I think that's really cool. I'm looking forward to that one, but

Leo Laporte (02:16:52):
Meanwhile, back to the mystery hut <laugh>

Rod Pyle (02:16:56):
Yeah, I knew

Leo Laporte (02:16:57):
You're gonna like this. You're burying the best story of the year. Really. I mean, I don't care about lasers in space, but when I'm about this mystery hut, so could it be a Starbucks? Maybe it's a Starbucks. I don't know. So they're asking in the chat room quite reasonably don't we have orbiters that could go around and take a look.

Rod Pyle (02:17:18):
They can, but it's really small, you know, so they can image it. But from above, it's just gonna look like a, a, you know, a slightly off angle square address. And if

Leo Laporte (02:17:26):
It's a secret military base, maybe they don't want to, did you, you ever think of that?

Rod Pyle (02:17:32):
Oh, could be maybe they, what it would be really cool is if you got over there with a Rover and it had, you knows on it and you could start poking around with a robotic arm and button and have it open up and then that box would, the spring would come out and whack right in the face of the

Leo Laporte (02:17:47):
It's Bruce Willis. <Laugh> thank you so much. Rod pile, the mystery hu is the gift that will at least for the next three months, keep on giving rod PI space, dos.org, editor, inchi of a Astra magazine and the mystery hut. Leo Laport, the tech guy. That's hysterical, man. I, I miss this story, the mystery, you know something

Rod Pyle (02:18:18):
Why? Sorry about the the zoom drop. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
No, I don't care. I don't care phone. You know, everybody else on the phone. Why should you be special? Yeah,

Rod Pyle (02:18:25):
I don't like it. I know fun scene special. I don't like it when my web goes down. That's been, but it's completely

Leo Laporte (02:18:32):
Dead. It really looks square. I mean, it really does. Yeah. What are the chances that you'd have a square rock from? Mediaite collisions? I mean,

Rod Pyle (02:18:43):
Well, for not, not nowadays, but back during the, the late, late bombardment period, they call it back about down the, what was at 3.5, 9 billion years ago, something like that. You know, you got some very big impacts, some weird stuff happens. And as we see on Mars, you know, we keep seeing these weird rocks that look very much like one looked like an artillery piece, this odd formation, you got the Dragon's teeth on the ground that are left behind when the soft stuffy road. So you can get us some really weird editing, great for conspiracy theories. But also really instinct for the geologists. Cuz they gotta sit there and figure out intuitively you know, okay, how the heck does this form? And then of course on the moon, you've got the lower gravity so that, that can change things up too. So there's a lot of, lot of ways that could have happened, but you know, let's get closer and see, and boy, what a feather are the cap, the Chinese, if they spotted something, huh?

Leo Laporte (02:19:35):
Well, I mean, what, I mean the likelihood that this is an alien artifact seems low, but maybe pretty low. I don't

Rod Pyle (02:19:43):
Know, like zero, zero. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
Mean, wow.

Rod Pyle (02:19:50):
Yeah. I mean

Leo Laporte (02:19:50):
That, do they, what would, what can they from the distance? They must know the dimensions of it. How big is it?

Rod Pyle (02:19:56):
You know, it was interesting. They didn't

Leo Laporte (02:19:58):
Say and they, yeah, yeah. I know why, cuz it's a military installation. They don't want anybody to know

Rod Pyle (02:20:05):
If it's theirs. Maybe they really wouldn't say for,

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
They wouldn't have mentioned it in the first place.

Rod Pyle (02:20:10):
I think they're gonna get there and see that it's an Amazon prime box. Yeah. Just hasn't been telling us about

Leo Laporte (02:20:18):
Wow. I think this is cool. Yeah. Cause you mean traditionally, you know, in all of the science fiction anything that's kind of got straight edges is a human artifact or an artifact of some kind. Yeah. You just don't. Yeah. So you just don't see it in nature. And this, I mean, it's hard to tell it's such a low res res photo, but it does look pretty dang square.

Rod Pyle (02:20:44):
It does. It does. And I'm I actually was kind of surprised the photo was that low Rez. I thought they'd have a better view of it, but I guess not from where they are, so they gotta drive over there and take a closer look. But that, I mean, it'll be late for Christmas, but boy, what a gift that would be if that happens.

Leo Laporte (02:21:01):
I mean, crystals objects often have straight edges, so it could just be a right, right. A crystal object of some kind. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:21:09):
But that's a big crystal, if that's a

Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
Case. <Laugh> well, that's what I'm curious. What are the dimensions of that? I'm really curious.

Rod Pyle (02:21:15):
Yeah. Well it's about 260 feet distance. So if I could drag out my old high school mathematics, I could probably figure it out, but I didn't do that before beforehand. I'm afraid. Wow. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:29):
All right, sir. Have a great week.

Rod Pyle (02:21:32):
All right. I will talk, play the next file scene for us will. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:21:35):
Yeah. Then we then we'd feel like we were on coast to coast.

Rod Pyle (02:21:40):
<Laugh> see.

Leo Laporte (02:21:42):
Our bell would never have let you start talking about lasers after the mystery hut.

Rod Pyle (02:21:47):
No, that's true. That's true.

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
Wait a minute for get the lasers. Tell me more about the mystery hut. That's they say? It's a, they say the link shows a region in question of the mystery hut, about half a meter per pixel. So how many pixels is it? That's might be pretty big half a meter per pixel.

Rod Pyle (02:22:08):
That'd be

Leo Laporte (02:22:09):
One, one, maybe 20 or 30 meters high. Wait, the what? The, wait, the who now I'm really intrigued.

Rod Pyle (02:22:18):
Turn

Leo Laporte (02:22:19):
Feet. Yeah. Maybe mystery hut. All right. Thanks rod. See ya. Take care. Bye bye. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy. Leo LePort the tech guy. Thanks to professor Laura, our musical director. Nice job professor played some great obscure music this week. Thanks to our phone angel chef for answering the phone. Most of all, thanks to you for listening and calling and I appreciate it. Wouldn't wouldn't be the same without you. So thank you for giving me the chance to be your tech guy back to the phones. We go time for a couple more calls. Louis on the line from San Diego, California Louis or Louis. What do you like?

Caller Louis (02:23:05):
Louis. Hi Louis. Hey, how's it going? It's great. What's up? So yes, I was calling cause so I'm pretty invested in the Samsung ecosystem. Okay. And I recently, I recently ordered the galaxy book pro 360 mm-hmm <affirmative>. So I can get some digital editing done and also some digital art. And I kind of just want to hear your opinion on it. One thing I was kind of concerned about was the Palm rejection on the, on the galaxy

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Book, have people complained about it?

Caller Louis (02:23:40):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:23:42):
So normally, you know, the companies that it's kind of an interesting layout companies with track pads will have software that says, you know, if you're typing, forget whatever's happening on your Palm, but this thing <laugh>, it's not exactly a track pad. The reason they call it the 360 is because it has this I don't don't know what, what is it? Oh, no, I guess it is a track pad. Nevermind. This isn't the one with two screens. This is a regular track pad. I I think have, so you've read online that they're having trouble with Palm rejection,

Caller Louis (02:24:19):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:24:20):
Yeah. So generally what happens, I'm sure Samsung sourced this from Synaptics everybody does. And it, would it be just a driver that would say, Hey, if you're typing or you're using the pen, ignore what happens on the track pad. You might even be able to find third party software that does, I have to say, I, I really like Samsung's laptops. I think they make really great stuff. This is gonna be interesting because you got a very good screen. It's an EDD touch screen, which of course Samsung makes the best screens out there. AMED is a battery hog. So I don't know how battery life will be. Are you gonna use the 5g as well?

Caller Louis (02:25:01):
Yes. I'll be using a 5g. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
So that'll be one of the question marks I would have. I'm not gonna worry about Palm rejection. I think that that's something that can be solved if they haven't solved it. Now, all they have to do is, is update the drivers. This looks like a really nice system. What, what processor did you put in it?

Caller Louis (02:25:21):
I believe it's the, it's the wind terabyte of storage. 

Leo Laporte (02:25:25):
And, and you got an I seven in there. Let me see what they're yeah, the Evo Evo. Okay. Yeah. Evo is just a marketing term from Intel <laugh> okay. I, I usually ignore those marketing terms. It's an I seven. I just wanna see which I seven is in there. It's it is very nice. Don't worry about it, I guess is what I would say. I know when you've ordered something for a thousand bucks and then you go online, you go to Reddit and you start reading people and say, Hey, you, you get all nervous. Don't get nervous. This is gonna be fine. Okay. This is gonna be fine. Okay. Yeah. I think you got a nice machine and I, I think Samsung does a very good job with their okay, cool. What are you gonna do with

Caller Louis (02:26:05):
It? A little bit of digital digital video editing and also digital art.

Leo Laporte (02:26:11):
Perfect. Cause it's got a pen. Yeah. That OED screen is great for that kind of thing. Cause it really looks good. I think you're gonna have fun. I think you got a nice, let me reassure you. You'll be fine. And if there problems with the track pad rejecting Palm movements, while you're using the keyboard, they'll be able to update that. Just, you know, call 'em and say, Hey, Hey man, okay, this is not cool. I think that, where did you see that? Reddit? Reddit, right? Yeah. <laugh> so just, you know, you should know, Redditors never met a piece of hardware. They couldn't complain about always take that stuff with a grain of salt. Got it. I felt bad for a long time. I bought a alien wear desktop and the, and the people on Reddit said, oh, why would anybody buy that? You could get a, you should build it yourself. What a crazy design, blah, blah, blah. And I love the thing. It's great. Got no problems with it. Peop that's what Reddit is made for <laugh> and you know, if you know enough to kind of say, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still, you know, useful. I read, read it religiously, but you know, you just gotta understand what you're getting. <Laugh> Redditors what are you gonna do? Right last call the day, Tom, on the line from Medina. Hi Tom.

Caller Louis (02:27:31):
Hi. oh, I I'm so lucky to get through today cuz I had a quick question. You made it. Yeah, I did. I'm I'm I'm gonna celebrate afterwards. Woo

Leo Laporte (02:27:41):
<Laugh>. What can I do for you?

Caller Louis (02:27:44):
I told you all screener I one, a couple of second quick question. Well, the first question is I have a special needs daughter that I I'm the sole caretaker of she's she's not totally blind, but she's legally blind. Okay. And, and she listens to a lot. She has a, she listens to a lot of music on a music player. Sure. And the problem is she's she's not very, I don't know which I, I, her nickname is Helen wheels. I often

Leo Laporte (02:28:12):
<Laugh>, she's not very careful with her stuff. Is that what you're saying? Right. That's

Caller Louis (02:28:17):
What I'm saying. Well, I wanna get to a new, I don't know a durable, but not real expensive player to player music. Yes. Got any

Leo Laporte (02:28:27):
Suggestions. Sure. Now, does she listen on headphones?

Caller Louis (02:28:31):
Yes she does.

Leo Laporte (02:28:32):
And, and where does she is? Does she get it streaming or does she have the music? Cause that's a big difference.

Caller Louis (02:28:39):
No, it's not stream. I put, I put music onto her, the, the device. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:28:45):
Get her a SanDisk clip SanDisk, which is best known for making storage. And I think probably they created this line because they had a lot of leftover SD cards or something. They make a player come, all the Sandis clip $39 inexpensive. You can get it at best buy you, get it at target. If she breaks it. No big. Right. You get another one. Yeah. But they're pretty, she's gonna have a hard time breaking it. Got nice big buttons. Easy to use you. You can. What's nice. Is it comes with storage, but it also has a SD card slot and that micro T so you can plug it into your computer. Copy all our music, put 256 gigs on there. If you want copy all our music over, pop it in easy peasy. And if she breaks it, just pop it out and put it in the next one. I think it, they're probably the least expensive music player out there.

Caller Louis (02:29:39):
Wow. I mean, okay. Just quick on, on that. I'm gonna get one of those, but how do you select songs to play on that? How does that work? It's got

Leo Laporte (02:29:46):
A screen. If you look on Amazon. Yeah. Look on Amazon. They have a variety of different ones. They're all under $50. They come in colors. What's their favorite color?

Caller Louis (02:29:57):
Should I say that she's color blind. So oh,

Leo Laporte (02:29:59):
Nuts. <Laugh> well, get it in pink anyway way. <Laugh> okay. <Laugh> then you won't lose it. You know, you have to charge it. You have to remember recharge it, but that would be true of any and it has a nice screen on it. Makes it very easy to figure out what's going on.

Caller Louis (02:30:14):
Wow. Sounds great.

Leo Laporte (02:30:15):
Yeah. 18 hour battery life.

Caller Louis (02:30:18):
Wow. Can I ask you one quick question about sure, Tom, I haven't got I drive yet. I confess you recommended that, but there was a guy's name you recommended that said you gotta have, this is a guy, a tech, like a Steve Gibson guy that talks about backing up things he's got. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
He's my friend photographer. Peter CRO. K R O G H. But what you wanna go to is his website, which is DP as in digital photography, best flow as in workflow dot I think it's dot org. Yeah. Dot org. It's from the library of Congress and okay. If you go there under best practices you'll see a thing on backup and that's his three famous 3, 2, 1 backup everyth thing you need to know about backup

Caller Louis (02:31:06):
The three, one backup. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:31:07):
He's the guy who invented it. I'll put a link in the show notes for you.

Caller Louis (02:31:12):
<Inaudible> can be one of the back. The three things. Yeah. Sure. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:31:17):
And you're a great dad. You're a, what's your daughter's name? Heather. Heather. Hi Heather. You're gonna get a nice present from Santa.

Caller Louis (02:31:26):
Well she's she's she's taking her nap while dad does all the work. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:31:31):
Tom have a great holiday. Leo LePort the tech guy byebye just saying bye to the listeners. You don't have to say goodbye. <Laugh> we got right up to the edge. I'm glad you asked. Yeah. Those sand desk players are cheap. They're not, I mean, look, you know, they're not, you know, iPods, they're not iPhones, but they're inexpensive and they work and they sound great and then do the job. So I think she'll be very happy.

Caller Louis (02:32:02):
Are you still talking to me? Yeah. Oh, I'm talking to you. Well, I'm listening. I, I heard the music. I thought you were going well, the,

Leo Laporte (02:32:11):
The radio audience is gone, but you're still there.

Caller Louis (02:32:15):
All right.

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
I got just you me now, man.

Caller Louis (02:32:18):
<Laugh> well, can I, you one more quick question. Sure. Take it in. Yeah, but I can't, if you ask me, I plug, I have an iPhone 12 pro or something. I plug it in through the USB port to my windows, 10 PC. And, but I don't know what I don't what, what windows program, iTunes,

Leo Laporte (02:32:38):
Itunes is what you want. What happens is, and windows is weird this way. I, if it's photos, it'll pop up, whatever photos app you tell it to use. It'll by default use windows, photo app. But if you want music and stuff like that, you could use windows, media player, whatever default is on your windows machine, you can change that by the way. But generally you want to use iTunes could because that's the, the program apple wants you to use.

Caller Louis (02:33:04):
Well, the problem I have is whatever pops up without me asking, it's you think I maybe with those pictures,

Leo Laporte (02:33:13):
Probably you can change that. So when, when you connect the device, you'll see, you can choose what law launches. When you connect a blue to a USB device storage device to your computer, windows will say, well, what, okay for photos, what do you want me to launch for? You know, music? What do you want me to launch? And so you can choose that

Caller Louis (02:33:35):
Because what it does, which really frustrates me, it backs up four or 500 photos and I got a million on my iPhone and then it just quits.

Leo Laporte (02:33:43):
Thank you. Thank you so much, Microsoft, another fine product from the labs in Redmond. Yeah, there's better apps. It can it'll do whatever app you say is your default photo app. So you can, you can buy a decent app if you want.

Caller Louis (02:33:58):
What's the tell me recommend a decent app to get, well, the best

Leo Laporte (02:34:02):
Out there would be Photoshop elements. It's under a hundred bucks. But there are lots of photo album apps. Depends kind of depends on what you wanna do if you wanna do editing Photoshop elements. But and when, by the way, when you install that, I think by default, it will change that behavior. It'll say, okay, I'm the captain now. So you know that you won't have to worry about figuring out. Let me just see what else people use?

Caller Louis (02:34:32):
What if I confess that I, I have Photoshop elements I pur just said, but never used

Leo Laporte (02:34:37):
It. Okay, good confession. That's gonna save you 80 bucks now. Just install it. <Laugh>

Caller Louis (02:34:44):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:34:45):
And it should in the installation, it should change the default behavior when you attach your iPhone.

Caller Louis (02:34:52):
But see, I'm just wanna make sure all those phones, the biggest thing I want them all copy to my somewhere. Yeah. So, so

Leo Laporte (02:34:59):
That's remember the last couple of calls ago. I said another thing to do is put Google photos or Amazon photos on your phone and they'll back up automatically. And then you have 'em in the cloud. Google photos is a great choice for that. What

Caller Louis (02:35:14):
Is

Leo Laporte (02:35:15):
Google photos, photos dot, google.com. You do. It's an app. You put it on your iPhone. You have to go in the setting and say, yeah, back up all my photos. And then there's a button that says delete photos that have been backed up and you can delete 'em all. Yeah. That's nervewracking. Isn't it? How about Amazon prime? Are you an Amazon prime member? Yeah. Yeah. Amazon prime guy. Amazon then use Amazon photos. So an app it'll back up and it saves the original quality on Amazon servers.

Caller Louis (02:35:45):
All right. I guess that's I, to me that's safer than <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:49):
Well it's full quality too. Unlike Google photos. So definitely the way to go. All right. All

Caller Louis (02:35:53):
Right. You're just making my life so happy today.

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
<Laugh> well, Tom, you're a great dad. I want to give you some support.

Caller Louis (02:36:01):
Well, well, I need more

Leo Laporte (02:36:03):
Support. I know. I bet you do

Caller Louis (02:36:06):
On Tuesday. I just got, well, I just got her an insulin pump. She's an insulin diabetic too. Oh.

Leo Laporte (02:36:12):
Oh my, how old is she?

Caller Louis (02:36:14):
Like, I don't wanna she's 39. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:36:17):
But you, you taking care of you love her.

Caller Louis (02:36:20):
Yeah, I do.

Leo Laporte (02:36:21):
You're such a great father. Oh, that's awesome.

Caller Louis (02:36:24):
Thanks. Well, you're a great father too. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:36:27):
Yeah. My daughter's only 29, but she needs help too. Believe me. But

Caller Louis (02:36:31):
You got his son that I talked to. I mentioned his, his, his movie. He,

Leo Laporte (02:36:36):
His TikTok, his TikTok man. He's like the, he he's a TikTok star now. I can't even get him on the phone anymore. He says, call my agent.

Caller Louis (02:36:46):
Isn't he a gamer? Two. He's

Leo Laporte (02:36:48):
All sorts of things. But yeah, he's certainly a gamer and he became a drone guy for a while, but now he's got 1.6 million followers on TikTok.

Caller Louis (02:36:59):
Oh my God. I know

Leo Laporte (02:37:01):
His name is salt. Look for salt. Underscore Hank salt. Underscore Hank. He's a cook. <Laugh> he's a cook. His last video got 2.1 million views. 2.1, 4 million, 3 million to his, his, his world famous California burrito. Get ready? Stand back. Hit got 27 million views. 27. Yeah, he's a superstar. I can't even get him on the phone anymore.

Caller Louis (02:37:31):
I hope he makes money off of that.

Leo Laporte (02:37:32):
Yes he does. He's gonna sell salt.

Caller Louis (02:37:37):
Oh, salt under

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
Cat salt, underscore hang. All right. Hey Tom, I gotta run. Pleasure to meet you. Keep up the good work. Take care of your little girl. You know what? She's always your little girl.

Caller Louis (02:37:50):
Maybe the next time I'll call. I'll have her and she'll say hello.

Leo Laporte (02:37:53):
I would love to talk to her. She never stopped being your little girl. Did she?

Caller Louis (02:37:59):
No. And she's, you know, she's just kind of difficult sometimes,

Leo Laporte (02:38:03):
But I know it's hard. I know. Believe me. I understand. I know what you're going through and I sympathize, but you're also hanging in there. God bless you.

Caller Louis (02:38:13):
I'm in the process of trying to figure out what's happen cuz I'm I'll be 70 this month. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:38:18):
That's the next question? Yep. I'm trying to, is it just you?

Caller Louis (02:38:22):
Yeah. My wife died in 2009.

Leo Laporte (02:38:25):
Oh man. I am sorry. Yep, Tom. You're you're an inspiration to us all. Thank you. Well,

Caller Louis (02:38:32):
No that's you, know's your it's your kid gotta take care of him. That's right. You know, I don't want, I don't want her going anywhere else.

Leo Laporte (02:38:40):
I know. God bless you.

Caller Louis (02:38:43):
Well, thanks Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:38:44):
Yeah. Thank you Tom. It's really a pleasure. Thanks to talk to me. All right, have a good one. Bye. Take care. You too. Bye bye. Well, that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. TWI T w I T it stands for this week@techandyoufinditattwit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh on Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS, today's security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.