The Tech Guy Episode 1888
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
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Podcasts you love
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From people you trust. This is tweet.
Leo Laporte (00:00:12):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. The show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, April 24th, 2022. This is episode 1,888. Enjoy. The tech I podcast is brought to you by Cachefly Cachefly is giving away a complimentary detailed analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. See if you're over paying 20% or more or more at twit.cachefly.com
Leo Laporte (00:00:44):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, it's Leo. Laporte the tech guy. Yes, it's that time of the day where we talk about tech for the next three hours, obsessively compulsively without exception technology, but that's a broad subject, right? That could be the internet could be computers could be smart phones, smart watches. Facebook. Twitter could be a lot of things. Tesla. In fact, our smart car guy, Sam bull, Sam's coming up in about 25 minutes. Chris Smartwater, our photo guy a later after that, and then our space guy, rod pot, we got, I got all kinds of guys, space guy, rod PI hour number three. So yes, all that's tech. Isn't it. These days tech is everywhere. 88, 88. Ask Leo, if you wanna talk about it with me 88, 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. That's toll free from anywhere in the us, Canada. Out side, that area you can still call, but you Skype out or something like that.
Leo Laporte (00:01:47):
And it should still be cost free 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. Of course, there is a website. We, we modified it somewhat moved. The tech guy lab site over to the podcast site, twit.tv as an economy measure. Well, it turned out the software. We use the, what they call a CMS content management system. We used for the tech eye labs and for TWI DRAL is its name D R U P a L Dru. We were on a pretty old version of drool and drool says we're not gonna support that after next year. So I went to the folks, I went to the Drupal shop and I said, how much would it cost to update our Drupal on the tech guy lab site? And they said oh, just a quarter of a million dollars. And I said, oh, yikes. So we're gonna update it on twit.tv, cuz still need to update it.
Leo Laporte (00:02:42):
But we're just gonna move everything over there. So we'll have everything secure and safe for you, which is important and all the information you need. So there'll be links from the show. Anything I mentioned, we'll put a link in, it's not as sweet of, you know, layout and all that, but all the same content is there. The links are there. In fact, there's new stuff. There's a transcript of every show with time codes, of course, audio and video from the show. So if you hear something, you should be able to find it. Even professor Laura's musical playlist all of that will get there. Not, not immediately though. So don't go there right now and say, where's her playlist. We're gonna wait a lead end of the show. And then she's gonna put it together and she's gonna set it off. And then somebody from my team will go, okay, fine.
Leo Laporte (00:03:24):
And type it in. And then finally, a day later, it'll get in there. Be patient just like Elon Musk be <laugh> he's not the most patient is he tweeted this morning. Something that everybody was in a tizzy over turns out something else. He is. Elon is so Elon who of course made, made his fortune off something called x.com, which then joined, merged with PayPal, made a lot more money, few hundred million off of PayPal. He's what they call part of the PayPal mafia. The handful of people who made so much money on PayPal, that they're now powerful Ola GARS in their own right. Eon took some big chances. He, he, he pushed all his chips in, put it all on red by buying a little electric car company called Tesla, put all his says he slept on the floor for, for he years or something.
Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
I don't know. It's, it's one of those stories that, that, that gets more elaborate with time. I slept on the floor for three years to make that work. The floor of the plant, not just on the floor of any old place, but in the, of the floor of the plant, he also doesn't have any houses. He says sold all his homes. So he is couch surfing. But if you're an oligarch couch, surfing is a little different for them than it might be. For me, he's probably staying in one of his billionaire friends. Extra houses would be my guess. Would that be my guess? He also of course started SpaceX, which is really kind of a remarkable story of commercial space success. He's announced plans to go to Mars. He wants to colonize Mars, even though that is going to be a challenge.
Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
Anyway the late then he tweets a lot. <Laugh> mostly nonsense. <Laugh> mostly in fact, in some cases, illegal nonsense, at least according to the securities and exchange commission, which is find him 20 million and said, you've gotta have a lawyer look at your tweets before you post 'em dude, dude, that was the tweet where he said he was gonna take Tesla, private funding security, even though it hadn't been and of course that made the Tesla stock go up up, up, and he reaped a fortune so much. So by the way, that he's now the richest man in the world with close to 270 billion, $270 billion of a fortune. So he spent a few billion about three to acquire a significant piece of Twitter. This is old news, but I'm recapping. So if you know, <laugh>, you're just now getting into the story. He bought about 15% of Twitter, which is enough to trigger actually, anything more than I think 5% was supposed to trigger an sec filing, which he did not do.
Leo Laporte (00:06:13):
He waited weeks. And the reason is, you know, he wanted to wait to, he says, well, it's just a mix up, but there was a benefit to him because if nobody knows, he's secretly buying up, all these shares, the price doesn't go up. He can continue to buy at that low, low price. Then of course it did go up quite a bit. About 30%. Once it was announced, he owned all of that. What did I say? 15%, no. 9.2% is what he owns. Then they asked him be on the board. Then he said, no, I don't want. I said yes. Then he said, no. Now the latest is he has he claims he has raised the money. He's got the bankers Morgan Stanley and a few unnamed banks, like a dozen to put up the money. Cuz even though he's the richest man in the world and it's important, if you ever become the richest person in the world, you should know this.
Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
Even though he's the richest person in the world, it's not liquid. He doesn't have it in his pocket. I'd have to be a big pocket to hold $300 billion. So he mostly it's in stock, it's tied up and he doesn't wanna just start dumping his Tesla stock cuz then the price would go down and he wouldn't be the richest man in the world anymore. So what people like him do, they don't, they don't need money. What do they need money for? So he just borrows against the stock and plenty of bankers are willing to give him that. So he now has Mr. Musk. He says he has a, and I guess the banks agree. He has enough money to buy Twitter. So we'll see. I don't, I still don't think he wants to. And actually what I was started, this all tiade on is this morning, about six hours ago, he tweeted cryptically, moving on.dot, and everybody thought, oh, he's moving on from the purchase of Twitter.
Leo Laporte (00:08:02):
Right wrong. You gotta remember <laugh> Elon is kinda like he's the trickster he's lowkey. He's he's you know, never, you know, always everything's go layers within layers. So then a couple of hours after he tweets that he tweets from making fun of bill gates, he's moving on from making fun of bill gates. He posted with a profane tweet, which I can't say on the radio, a picture of bill gates who has a little bit of a tummy Bill's 67, he's got a little bit of a tummy, but he said he looks awfully light like the pregnant emoji, <laugh> the pregnant guy, emoji, which it kind of does blue shirt. So he, he made fun of him. And he's kind of mad at bill gates because Bill's been shorting Tesla. He says I'm I'm, I'm moving on. And then.dot dot. And the rest of the sentence is three hours later from making fun of gates for shorting Tesla, by claiming to support climate change action.
Leo Laporte (00:09:02):
But it, you would be wrong. One would be wrong to read anything into Elon's tweets. They're they're designed to amuse and baffle. So I'm not going like to stock market did read quite a bit into Netflix's announcement. Netflix's the, the announcement of Netflix will solve that. The announcement of Netflix that there for the first time ever subscriber base had dropped by a couple of hundred thousand people. Stock market dropped by a couple of billion dollars, 35%. I think at the last count, I, I haven't, I don't have any Netflix stocks. I haven't checked, but wow. Wow. Could it be the end of the line? And then, and then CNN announced we're we're dumping CNN plus after a month launched last month, I, after a month because we only got 10,000 active viewers. And so, and of course they just merged with another company, Warner discovery who didn't want 'em to do it, but couldn't tell 'em not to do it cuz they hadn't merged yet. So CNN went hadn't do it. And then when they got the merger, they said, nevermind and cancel it. So anyway, $300 million in marketing down the tubes that we're gonna spend a billion. So I guess if you're a, a discovery, you say, well look, we saved 700 million, which they need to because Warner the parent company of CNN and HBO has 35 billion in debt.
Leo Laporte (00:10:34):
You see again, you and me, if you know, if we had $30,000 in debt, we'd feel we'd be probably, you know, like pretty bad, right? 35 billion in debt. No big deal. No big. It's not big oligarchs. They're not like you and me. 88, 88 ask Leo. So this streaming, the streaming world is changing. That's I guess the, the bottom line and Elon Musk is not <laugh> 88, 88. Ask Leo, we'll go to your phones, your calls right after this. Oh, they said the word telephone. That must mean it's time to say hi, introduce my cohort in crime. Kim Shaffer, the UN unbreakable there ho there. Phone angel. Hi there. Hey there. Hi there ho there I'm as happy as can be happy Sunday. Happy Sunday to you too. You have a good week. Yeah. I'm going to a giants game for the first time in like five years. Exciting Wednesday. So I've got a little something going on. This <laugh> citing this
Kim Schaffer (00:11:53):
Week.
Leo Laporte (00:11:54):
Very exciting
Kim Schaffer (00:11:55):
Butter and eggs. Oh my God. It was off the hook.
Leo Laporte (00:11:59):
<Laugh> butter and eggs that yesterday in beautiful downtown Petaluma was butter and eggs day.
Kim Schaffer (00:12:03):
There were so many people there.
Leo Laporte (00:12:05):
It was fun. Huh?
Kim Schaffer (00:12:06):
I, I only went, the parade was already over, but just went and listened
Leo Laporte (00:12:10):
To music. Yeah. I
Kim Schaffer (00:12:11):
Can't a white claw.
Leo Laporte (00:12:13):
What's a white. Oh no, never mind. I don't even wanna know. It's something you young people drink. Is it an adult beverage? Yeah.
Kim Schaffer (00:12:19):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
It was fun. Huh? Yeah. Once a year
Kim Schaffer (00:12:22):
It was nice to see people out doing things.
Leo Laporte (00:12:25):
Yeah.
Kim Schaffer (00:12:27):
Cause
Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
That's it was almost, it was almost like COVID didn't ever exist. No,
Kim Schaffer (00:12:31):
It didn't there. It did.
Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
It's really interesting. There
Kim Schaffer (00:12:34):
Were maybe three people wearing a mask.
Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
Yeah. One of them was Micah.
Kim Schaffer (00:12:38):
Oh, was it?
Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
Yeah. Bless. I said, oh, bless his heart. Bless his heart. Bless his heart. Who should I talk to here?
Kim Schaffer (00:12:44):
Let's talk to Alan Upland because he's asking about a jet pack and that's something completely different in my mind. I'm sure he's asking about
Leo Laporte (00:12:53):
A jet pack.
Kim Schaffer (00:12:54):
I need to be educated on as to aside from the Rocketeer what the jet <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:12:59):
He's probably. Well, I hope it's a real jet pack. Not being word rocket WordPress plugin, but we'll find out. Thank you, Kim. Hello, Alan. From Upland. Leo Laport. The tech guy. Oh, I have to push this button. Yeah, there you go. Thank you,
Caller 1 (00:13:14):
GTE engineer and, and just know enough about technology to be dangerous, but
Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
My kind of guy I'll tell you, <laugh>
Caller 1 (00:13:24):
I'm using a jet pack. I think that's what they call 'em from Verizon to support my internet.
Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
That's okay. So I had speculated that you weren't talking about the jet pack, which they exist. You could put it on your back and fly around. You were talking about jet pack, which is a WordPress plugin, but no, you're talking about the Verizon jet pack, Right. Which is a kind of a MyFi device that lets you use the cell phone network for your internet access.
Caller 1 (00:13:50):
Yes. And we're in a mobile home park and I can only get I can either get the dish type stuff which is not acceptable or I can get the DSL from from Verizon or well actually from frontier and that's you'll but
Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
You move around, right? You're not stuck in one spot.
Caller 1 (00:14:10):
Well, that is true. But, but even from my home the Verizon or excuse me, the frontier stuff is it's DSL and it's limited to about six.
Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
So Verizon has two solutions for you. The jet pack is for your RVing because just like your phone, it's a hotspot that goes around with you. And as long as you've got Verizon high speed, Verizon internet LTE or better, it's gonna be pretty good. It allows you to hook up fi 15 other things. So it uses wifi. It should be fast enough. It, the problem with cell phone data is it's not consistent. It depends on how many people are using that tower at any given time, your distance from the tower and things like that. So you can't unlike a landline DSL or a cable connection. You can't say, well, you're gonna get a hundred megabits. So they don't, but it is often 50 to a hundred megabits, which is certainly fast enough to watch TV. You exactly. They wanna discourage you from using at home.
Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
They really want it to be a mobile thing because then if you're at home, you're sitting on a mobile tower the whole time. But they do sell now something for your home, which is actually if you've got, especially if you've got Verizon's 5g in your neck of the woods is actually a very good choice. I think a good alternative better than DSL as fast as cable. So if where you live, you have good connectivity to Verizon. And I guess if, if you know, if you don't have a Verizon phone, get a friend with a Verizon phone,
Caller 1 (00:15:50):
I have the best I can get where I live is LTE.
Leo Laporte (00:15:54):
Okay. That's so, but they are rapidly rolling out this what they call mid bend. So, so 5g, when they first started hyping it, especially Verizon was especially guilty of this. They were hyping something called millimeter wave, which you have to be 800 feet from the tower. And there's very few tower. In fact, they talk about how it's available in NFL stadiums. Yeah. If you're at the right end of the stadium, it doesn't even go across the state. So, so that is kind of, I, you know, many, many phones will use that. I wouldn't worry about that unless, you know, you live in an, in an urban area, you know, like New York city or there, you know, three blocks area of, of Philadelphia where they have it. I wouldn't worry about that. There's the low band, which is no faster than LTE and, and Verizon at and T and T-Mobile all offer low band, but then there's this mid band, which is a Verizon, it's very confusing.
Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
Verizon calls it ultra wide band, but it's a actually the mid band, but you'll see UW on your phone. And that can be up to 500 megabits. That can be really fast. So this, these, these Verizon home internet systems support UW they start at 25 bucks a month. You're probably gonna pay 40 for what you want, which is not bad. <Affirmative> four up to 500 megabits per second. But up to is the important word, cuz it's gonna depend in, in your case, maybe not, cuz you can't get you don't get UW, but they are rolling that out very quickly. So the time will come probably where UW will be available.
Caller 1 (00:17:29):
Might be yeah. I'm getting to the jet pack that I have. I'm getting I, I say we have the best we get here is LTE. Yeah. but I'm oh usually somewhere between 2025. Yeah. that's
Leo Laporte (00:17:43):
Kind of okay. It's
Caller 1 (00:17:43):
Really, yeah, it's good for what I,
Leo Laporte (00:17:46):
It's not good for watching high Def you know, Netflix
Caller 1 (00:17:51):
Well we, we use it on the TV and I don't, we don't watch a lot of high Def necessarily. Okay. Only cause my eyes are not that great anyway.
Leo Laporte (00:18:00):
So if you don't care now they don't want you to use that at home. They don't want you to be in the same. Well, I guess you could. I don't know. The, the bandwidth limits I think are what makes that less desire. Yeah. But they do have a home internet version of that. So if you're getting a SU sufficient speed on the jet pack at home, you should probably look at their home internet solution.
Caller 1 (00:18:21):
Okay. I'll look at that. Now.
Leo Laporte (00:18:22):
Hold on just a sec guy, take a break. Sam bull Sam, our car guy coming up. Leo. Laporte the tech guy. Go ahead. Sorry.
Caller 1 (00:18:33):
Yeah, that's okay. The only the only issue I have with this thing is that it doesn't have a a, a port for for ethernet.
Leo Laporte (00:18:43):
No it won't. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a wifi access point. Yeah.
Caller 1 (00:18:47):
Right. I want to I wanna be able to put a network drive on this thing and I don't know if that's possible.
Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
No, not, not on the jet pack. Okay. What you could do though, is you could get a network attached storage device that has wifi built in. It's not ideal at 25 megabits per second, but, but you, but, but you know, runs in the background at night. Really what you wanna look at though, before you start doing stuff like that is what the limits are. The bandwidth caps on that jet pack, because you'll hit that pretty darn quick. If you're doing it for backup and stuff. I mean, really, they intend that for light internet usage, maybe, you know, looking at Google maps as you draw getting your email, that kind of thing. Even if you watched a lot of Netflix, you'd start to, you start to hit those caps pretty quickly.
Caller 1 (00:19:38):
Yeah. Supposed well, you know, it's, it's unlimited, but who knows what that means?
Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Well read the fine print. Cause unlimited usually actually they've got in trouble. So maybe it is unlimited now, but what it used to mean is unlimited, but it slows down a lot after 10 gigabytes or five gigabytes or whatever. So see where they say, see where they say after, you know, after you use 25 gigabytes, you're gonna slow down a 3g speed. See where they say that in the fine print. Yeah. They may not because they got in trouble for that.
Caller 1 (00:20:10):
Now the other device you were talking about, the one that that they're coming out with now, would that have the capability of putting a network drive on it?
Leo Laporte (00:20:19):
I'm looking to see if they have an ethernet on that. Cuz wouldn't that be cool? My guess is no, but this called their 5g home or 5g home plus, and I have not used, I've seen 'em but I never thought to look and see if there's an ethernet. <Laugh> let me see 5g home plus ethernet. Let me see if I can find a picture of it. Yeah, I don't, they don't mention ethernet. So I'm thinking there, oh wait a minute. Yes. Yes. I'm seeing@vzw.com three land ports. Oh, well wait a minute. This is the 5g home router. You user guy. This might be for their fiber, you know, call 'em call 'em. Okay. Cause this looks different. This says the home router. Yeah. It looks like they, but it looks different than the one I've seen. So but it looks like at least one of the devices they offer has a w port. This is just a router. I don't think this is their, this is their home. Oh, I get it. Maybe this is for connecting. This is a router to connect to the home internet. I don't know. They sell a router. It looks like it's just a router they sell. Okay. And that would have to have land ports. Here it is. There's a Verizon internet gateway router. Yeah. Now that's a router again. Gosh, darn it. Does anybody have Verizon home internet looks like it does have a land port, but you, before you buy it, call Verizon and then also get the deeds on limits and so forth.
Caller 1 (00:22:10):
Yeah. That gives me a, a path to go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great.
Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
Thanks for calling.
Caller 1 (00:22:16):
Well, thank you for all that you're doing and keeps, keeps us old guys up to date and everything.
Leo Laporte (00:22:20):
My pleasure Al, as a fellow old guy, <laugh> take care. It have ports. Okay. Okay. I wanna get one from my daughter cuz she's got an ultra wide band in her apartment and I thought instead of Comcast might be more affordable to get that tech I show brought to you today and always my Cachefly Cachefly brings you all of our, if you go to the website and download it, if you download it in a podcast application, you're downloading from our content delivery network. Cachefly, why do we use a CDN? Well <laugh> for lots of reasons. It's lots less expensive than just down, hosting it on our own website, downloading it there that can really add up by the way. It's also a lot more reliable and a lot faster. A CDN content delivery network like cash puts you closer to the content. So cash because it is a, the best CDN is gonna be as much as 10 times faster than downloading a it from a website.
Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
They have pots pops points of presence on six continents. So our listeners are getting it, not from the R server here in Petaluma. They're getting it from a server next door to them. So that's much faster plus because they have so many points of presence. They have extreme reliability. Even if a server, one of their servers goes down, they have failed over. The other servers are still going 30% faster than other CDNs, even cash lies pretty amazing. And how do I know it? We've been using it practically since the podcast network's more than 10 years now. Cash offers low latency, ultra low latency, video streaming with latency less than a second. And it can run more than a million viewers concurrently. What you'll go live in hours, not days with sub one second latency ditch your unre web RTC solution for cash flies, web socket, live video workflow.
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It scales to millions of users. This is an amazing thing. 50 plus locations around the globe means you'll reach your audiences no matter where they are. You'll be closer to your customers. You'll take a load off your origin servers. If you use cash, life storage optimization system, we've been using this for a long time. Now it's available to everyone. Essentially cash hosts the content. So you reduce your S three bills. You increase your cash, hit ratio to a hundred percent. It's actually brilliant. And man is the support. Great. I highly recommend signing up for that priority support. You will get amazing support 24 7 every day of the year from the nicest engineers who in many cases are already on it. <Laugh> if there's an issue they're already on it, they're just amazing cash wise, giving away a complimentary detailed analysis of your current CDN bill. Just bring your usage trends. Your, if you have it to twit.cachefly.com, see if you're overpaying by 20% or more, get the best for less cash. A hundred percent availability in the past 12 months, a hundred percent, not 4 9 5 9, 6, 9, 10, 9, 100%. We love cash. Never had a problem with them in all these years. They're the best twit.cachefly.com. Take my ward for we're very happy customers.
Leo Laporte (00:25:57):
Now back to the tech on Leo Laport, the tech guy tech I time and it's time to talk automotive tech with Sam bull Sam. He's a principal at guide house insights. He hosts the wheel bearings podcast joins us every week. Hello Sam.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:14):
Hello Leo. How are
Leo Laporte (00:26:16):
You? I'm well, do you think as a automotive journalist, you need to live in Michigan, is that part of the deal?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:23):
Not necessarily. There's lots of them that live in a lot of different places. Bunch of them in Los Angeles. I know several that live in Portland, Oregon strangely in Dallas. Interesting. interesting. My, one of my, one of my co-ho, excuse me, one of my co-hosts on the wheel bearings lives in New Hampshire, the other one lives in the, the bay area. So
Leo Laporte (00:26:44):
You can live anywhere we're everywhere, but I think you have a,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:46):
As long as you have a road,
Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
You have an inside track living in Slane. I mean you just down the road a piece, it,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:52):
It does make it easier for me to attend briefings yeah. With manufacturers and suppliers and so on. But you know, when it comes to a lot of the drive of events and, and various other events that we go to, a lot of those are in other locations anyway. And so we ended up getting flown there, like for example, this past week I flew out to LA for about oh 8, 18, 19 hours, I think to see the car that's behind me, if you're watching the, the video stream
Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
When these, that, that looks like a well, I see the Lincoln mark on the front of it.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:27):
This is the Lincoln star concept.
Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
Okay, well, wait a minute. As soon as I hear concept, I tune out because,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:35):
Well,
Leo Laporte (00:27:36):
It doesn't mean they're gonna ever shift
Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:37):
In the past, in the past, that has often been the case. You know, in this particular example, you know, the, the challenge as manufacturers go to electrification is, you know, you don't need that big grill with all the airflow for it to cool the engine because you don't have an engine to cool. You only need a, a relatively small opening to cool the batter,
Leo Laporte (00:27:58):
See Teslas have a, you know, metal front. They don't have any grill.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:02):
Well, actually plastic, but
Leo Laporte (00:28:03):
Plastic ish metal looking plastic. Okay.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:06):
Yeah. <Laugh> and you know, so the, the question is, you know, how do you, from a design perspective, how do you give a car, a distinct visual appearance? That's, you know, implies, you know, this is what the, you know, you, you rec you see it and you recognize the brand. Yeah. You know, for example, you see a w you see the twin kidney grill, you know, that's a BMW, right? You, it rolls Royce. You got that, Paron grill. You
Leo Laporte (00:28:31):
Can't miss that. You
Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:31):
Know, it's a rolls Royce. Yes. Yes. You know, Lincoln, you know, their current batch of vehicles have a, you know, they have a unique, uniquely shaped grill and, and headlights that you see across the board on all of their vehicles. And you see, you know, it's a modern Lincoln. But it's been a challenge for some brands to figure out how to evolve into the era of electrification BMW. So far has basically just kept actually, as they've grown their twin kidney grill from, you know, relatively modest size to something that is massive and overtake,
Leo Laporte (00:29:02):
I think it's unattractive, but I think luxury cars is they all have big grills. There must be a reason like,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:08):
Yeah. Unfortunately that's been a general trend in the industry over the last seven or eight years.
Leo Laporte (00:29:13):
Lexus does it too.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:14):
Let's make it bigger and bigger. Yeah. But is that what BMW's done? They just blank it off. It's
Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
Like a pedestrian catcher. So it just like, I
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:25):
Don't knows. That's, it's, it's, it's more aesthetics than anything else, you know, just trying to create that brand image.
Leo Laporte (00:29:31):
It's that's right. You know, when you see that BMW grill, you know, that's a BMW, there's just no question those kidneys coming at you, coming at your kidneys, that's a BMW grill. We know exactly.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:42):
Yeah. So what, what this vehicle is is this is a preview of the new design direction for Lincoln as they start to launch their, their electric vehicles in the next couple of years. And
Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
So it's got a grill, but it's it's pretty grill well
Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:57):
It's yeah. Well, it's not, it's not, you know, that face if you're looking at it and I'll drop a link to to my article about this in the chat mm-hmm <affirmative>. But if you're looking at it, you know, what would, what you would normally think of as the grill is not a, there's no actual grill opening there. That is it's a panel, but it's back lit. And the, the, the, the color on the backside is etched away. And it's back lit with LEDs and they can do animations and create different lighting patterns on there. And Lincoln is, or Cadillac is doing something similar with the new lyric as well. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. But then what really kind of sets this one apart is the, this light bar that stretches across the entire front front leading edge of the hood, and then stretches up back and over the wheel arches. And it's, it's quite a distinctive look and, and I think it's really attractive. So you're, we're not gonna see this exact vehicle, but the vehicles that we are going to see are going to have, you know, most of the characteristics, the visual characteristics of this vehicle. So this is the face of electric Lincolns to come.
Leo Laporte (00:31:06):
Yeah. It looks good, actually. Yeah. and I think a lot of electric vehicles have that light bar across the front that seemed like lucid does that too. Right. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:16):
Right. And, and then there's some other unique features about this, this concept that may or may not make it to production. Like a lot of EVs have a front trunk or a front what Lincoln has done with this one is they've gone a little bit different. So the, what you would normally think of as the hood, you know, that normally is hinged at the back and flips up to give you access to the front, that panel now actually just lifts straight up in the air. And then there is essentially a drawer for the front that, that opens, that extends out from the front of the car. You can easy access.
Leo Laporte (00:31:49):
Oh, that's kind of cool. Like a lift gate on a pickup
Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:53):
Kind of. Yeah. And so I don't expect this particular feature to show up on all of the Lincolns. You know, this, in this case of this particular vehicle, you know, it's not as tall as, as normal as most traditional SUVs. So it doesn't really need it cuz it's not that high, but on the electric version of the navigator, which is their big, full size SUV, this would be really beneficial to give you easier access, to get stuff out of there. Yeah. so, you know, it's, it's an interesting approach. The other thing that's cool, the, the hood panel such as it is, is actually a piece of electro electrochromic glass. So I don't know if you've ever been on a Boeing 7 87, but the windows in there, they don't have traditional mechanical shades. They're they're coded with an electro Chrome material that when you run an electric current through it, it gets O it goes opaque.
Leo Laporte (00:32:44):
It's so cool. And yet so strange, but I like
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:47):
It. And so if, if for some inexplicable reason you want it to show the world what you're storing in your front you can make it transparent so that everybody can see what's in there and then you can also make it opaque. Again, that's one, I don't think we'll make it to production, but you know, a lot of other aspects of this vehicle will. And then finally there's the interior where they have what they're calling a coast to coast display that stretches all the way from one, a pillar to the other all the way across the top of the dashboard. And this is a concept that we first saw several years ago at CES with a company called Biton an E a Chinese EV startup that may or may not ever make it into production. But this is, I think we, I think we may have talked about this once before.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:33):
I, I got a chance to ride in a Biton prototype a couple of years ago in San Jose. And basically you've got the panel, the display panel that stretches all the way across and it's up at the base of the windshield. So it's almost like a heads up display. It's closer to your line of sight when you're driving, you have a more expansive view of things like maps and so on. And this is something that will be coming to market. In fact Lincoln just in the last month or so launched a model in China for, for only for the Chinese market, a sedan called the Zephyr. And because we don't buy sedans in America anymore they, they launched it for the Chinese market and it has one of these displays that stretches all the way across. And this is something that we will be seeing on these upcoming Lincolns. So there's it that won't won't quite make it to the real world and some other other really interesting stuff that probably will
Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
A concept car with some pretty cool concepts. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that maybe <laugh> the release. What about that steering wheel? I'm I, that looks a little too much like a yolk to me
Leo Laporte (00:34:41):
It's they won't do,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:42):
That's kind of slightly squared off. That's actually pretty similar in shape to the steering wheel that's in the new Corvette. So that's, you know, that's not, not quite as bad as a yolk. Okay. but next, next week, I'll talk about a yolk that that will be available.
Leo Laporte (00:34:55):
It's no yolk, but it is a concept car. So yeah, you're mileage the Lincoln
Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:00):
Star concept.
Leo Laporte (00:35:01):
Thank you. Sam bull, Sam principal, researcher guide, house insights. His podcast is@wheelbrains.media, have a wonderful day. And we ill
Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:11):
See you next week. Will it's 80 degrees out, sun shining. So I'm gonna go drove the Miami Miata yesterday, gonna drive some more
Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
Spring in SEL landing. People are worried about the sun hitting that display. Actually. I kinda understand
Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:29):
That. Yeah. You know, it depends on, it depends on the display technology that's used. You know, even with the current smaller displays that we have in vehicles today you know, some of them do better than others. The ones that that Hyundai and Kia and Genesis use are excellent, you know, even with the sun shining directly on them, they're still very visible. Yeah. And you know, others like some of the ones that Nissan and Toyota have used in recent years are just on unusable, right. Bright sunlight. Right. So it depends on the specific display technology you use, but you, it can, you can do it so that it's still very visible. Cool.
Leo Laporte (00:36:06):
I am gonna give you your three and a half minutes.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:09):
All righty.
Leo Laporte (00:36:10):
And I shall return.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:12):
Okay. So let's see. Somebody here in the chat was asked about yokes. Yeah. So Lexus this week announced their R Z four 50, which is their first EV it's based on the same platform as the Toyota BZ four X and the Subaru Soter that we talked about last week. And one of options that they will be offering in there is a yolk style steering wheel. Now this is very different from what Tesla's doing with the, the model, the model S plaid and the model S plaid they've kept a traditional mechanical steering system. So between that yolk and the wheels, there is a steering call 'em that goes down to the, the steering rack. And, you know, there's a mechanical connection between your hands and turning the wheels. The same is not true for the RZ. If you get the optional yolk, the yolk only comes as part of what they're calling a steer by wire package.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:14):
So in the, in the model S if you have to do a, a tight turn or do you know, some countersteering if, you know, if you start sliding, things like that and you have to do your traditional handover hand steering, it's really difficult, almost impossible to do reliably with that yolk steering wheel. And you know, if you've ever watched a formula one race or, or a lot of other you'll, you'll notice that a lot of modern race cars do have a yolk style steering wheel, but they also have what's, you know, what we know is a really fast steering ratio. So that takes very little steering angle to actually turn the wheels. That's not practical in a road car because that would be way too sensitive for most driving condition, but in a race car, you can get away with that.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:03):
What they've done in the Lexus is they've taken the steering column out and you've got a steer by wire system. So BA essentially the yolk is like a video game controller. You turn it, and then that signal gets interpreted by the computer along with a whole bunch of other signals. Like, how fast are you driving? What are the conditions you're driving in? And then it decides how far to turn the wheels based on that. So in the case of the most vehicles, the, to go completely from one end to of the steering, to the other, it's usually somewhere around three, three and a half turns from lock to lock from one, one extreme to the other. So about three, about a thousand degrees, roughly of rotation in this Lexus, it's a maximum of 150 degrees of rotation. So you're never gonna go, you know, you're never, you're never even gonna go nine full 90 degree rotation in either direction or the other.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:00):
So you can use the yolk and keep your hands on the wheel on the yolk at all times, and never have to switch back and forth because of the way it's set up. So it remains to be seen how well that will actually work, what that's gonna feel like. But you know, at least they're going in the right direction. I still prefer to have a traditional round steering wheel and mechanical steering. You know, as, as an engineer, that's worked on this stuff, certain things I think should probably remain relatively analog, but that's just me.
Leo Laporte (00:39:34):
Is this our tribute to our, a caller from Winslow Arizona from last night. <Laugh> I think it is eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536, toll free from anywhere outside the us or Canada. If you wanna talk high tech, let's do it. Not just problem solving. We can talk about, you know, concepts, ideas, but mostly it's problem solving. Shane is on the line from Indianapolis. Hi Shane.
Caller 2 (00:40:01):
Hey Leo, how are
Leo Laporte (00:40:02):
You? I'm great. Welcome.
Caller 2 (00:40:05):
I'm back.
Leo Laporte (00:40:06):
You're back, baby.
Caller 2 (00:40:07):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:40:08):
Okay. Now what's now what's the problem.
Caller 2 (00:40:12):
It's this Twitch thing. It's, it's a Twitch. That's what it is.
Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
Twitch. You want a string to Twitch,
Caller 2 (00:40:20):
Right? But what I want do is I want, I have a PC set up for my do, and I wanna use the audio. I wanna go out
Leo Laporte (00:40:29):
D is not his dog or his parent. It is his digital audio workstation, just so we know. Okay. So you've got your computer with the do so that's where the audio is.
Caller 2 (00:40:40):
Yep. And I have another gaming system that I want to stream or make that music pipe through to that stream and use an audio
Leo Laporte (00:40:52):
There. When last we joined Shane, he was attempting <laugh> to, to stream. As I remember you were using oh, some strange, it was a very group Goldberg system. Right. And we wanted to simplify it. Have we simplified it now?
Caller 2 (00:41:11):
Yeah. Well, I figured out what the problem was. Oh, good. Oh, I have a, I have a really nice mixer. It's a Yamaha trying to think,
Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
Is it an analog or a digital mixer?
Caller 2 (00:41:21):
It is digital. It's got a, it's got a,
Leo Laporte (00:41:23):
So it's got USB out of it. And so your microphone goes into it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so does your computer with the doll right. Goes into the it, and it mixes that down and then outputs that via USB to the streaming machine.
Caller 2 (00:41:38):
Well, can't, that's the, that's the hard part. How do I get the do machine to stream, to, to connect to the other machine? Can I just use it USB? I have not.
Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
Oh, that's interesting. Well, it's gonna depend on your doll. <Laugh> I like saying that. Okay. I like saying that most <laugh> most, almost certainly it will do it because that's how pros wanna do it. They don't wanna output audio analog audio from a computer and record it, or do anything with it. Want bits coming out of the computer, which they can then pipe into something else, whether it's a digital to analog converter or, or another device like in as in your case. So, yeah, the do should have the, you may have to Mac PC, Mac, Mac, or PC
Caller 2 (00:42:31):
PC. I do have a Mac and I have,
Leo Laporte (00:42:34):
So I don't with a Mac, you can say there's and I think this is the same with a sound control panel on a PC. You say what the output is. So go to your sound's control panel. And you're if, if you have a device that Yamaha mixer that has USB in it's important, it has USB N if it is taking USB N then you will just select that in your sound control panel. You'll you should see it. It should say Yamaha do Yamaha, the mixer.
Caller 2 (00:43:05):
Okay. Well, and that goes, that,
Leo Laporte (00:43:08):
And that will go into the mixer. So the trick is your mixer has to have both USB in and out, out.
Caller 2 (00:43:16):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:43:16):
Does that make sense?
Caller 2 (00:43:18):
I haven't, I haven't seen one,
Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
If it does not, if it has only analog in which would be weird microphones are analog instruments are analog. Then you can take the, you can either take the analog audio out of the computer with the doll, or you can have a buy a separate standalone deck, which is what most pros would do, cuz the deck in, in most PCs isn't very good. So you want to get a good quality deck that can do 24 bit sound, you know, and take that out of the PC via the USB port. You'll select that deck from again, the sound control panel. And then that will output analog into your mixer. If your mixer I'm sure your mixer has some sort of digital,
Caller 2 (00:44:02):
I think it like I can set it up, like it's the same USB port and I can set it up so that the mixer has
Leo Laporte (00:44:08):
So it only has, it only has one USB port.
Caller 2 (00:44:11):
It only has one USB.
Leo Laporte (00:44:12):
Okay. Look and see if there's optical in, then that would even be better.
Caller 2 (00:44:17):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:44:18):
See, even as one of those weird optical connectors on the,
Caller 2 (00:44:21):
I may end up just getting some new hardware, then
Leo Laporte (00:44:23):
A fully digital look, a digital mixer should take digital in hand out. I mean, okay. That's, you know, that's just, so if your Yaha outputs, USB, unless it's, mm-hmm <affirmative> right. Kind of low end and it's designed just for somebody who says, well, I'm gonna play a guitar and sing. And so I want my microphone and my, and a micro and a pickup for my guitar to go into this mixer, mix that, and then send to my computer. You know, if it's inexpensive mixer, it might do that. So I, I just, it depends on what the Yamaha's capable of. Get that, get that, ya, get that manual out and look through it,
Caller 2 (00:44:56):
Look through it. Yeah. Okay. And I looked at it some time ago cuz what I was thinking is, well, all the research I found was just go out your audio port on your one PC and then, oh you can do that. Your mixer. Yeah. And then that would record it. But it's a real, I mean it's, it's not a good sound. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:45:13):
Yeah. So there's part of the problem is
Caller 1 (00:45:16):
Analog.
Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Yeah, exactly. Part of the problem is that you, if you put a digital to analog converter, something has to do that. The computer's thinking in bits, it doesn't know about analog mm-hmm <affirmative> so it's somewhere along the line. Those bits get to be turned into analog sound. But if you do it inside the computer with a that's, what sound cards used to do, you know, you remember your sound blast from creative labs,
Caller 2 (00:45:35):
Whole sound blast with the disc that went with it and all that good
Leo Laporte (00:45:39):
Stuff. So that was a D it went into, you know, you plugged it into the slot of your computer and it took the bits from your computer and it had jacks on the back, you could plug into speakers or whatever. But the problem is if you're doing it inside the computer, it's a noisy and environment. And generally speaking computers, which do have DS, otherwise they wouldn't have analog outputs, you know, for your speakers, they're not gonna spend a lot of money on that particular part cuz they figure if you care, you'll have your own deck.
Caller 2 (00:46:05):
Right.
Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
So you could, so there's a couple things you could do and DS can be under a hundred bucks. Doesn't have to be hugely expensive. So you could get a D that plugs into the computers, the do computers, USB port, select that as the output for your do. And then that will have an analog output. We could then put in the Yamaha if the Yamaha doesn't have digital.
Caller 2 (00:46:30):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
Okay. We're gonna put a link setting up your Twitch stream. If somebody found a good article <laugh> that covers some of these topics. What is it you wanna stream again? I forgot.
Caller 2 (00:46:43):
So what I've done is <laugh>, I've kind of taken some metal guitar riffs and I've put that over some techno music. Oh, that's right.
Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
Whatever. You're playing it along the music. Got it. Yeah. And are you playing an actual guitar?
Caller 2 (00:46:58):
Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:46:59):
Yeah. So the Yamaha is there for, to take your guitar. If you have a mic, your mic to take, if you're take, you know, the original music. Oh. This original music being played off the do, is that why you have the do?
Caller 2 (00:47:09):
Yeah. That's why I have the do got it.
Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
So you could, if you wanted to,
Caller 2 (00:47:13):
I trying to save my gaming PC for just the gaming stuff. Right.
Leo Laporte (00:47:19):
Call me nuts. But you could also just get a, you know, a music player and plug that into the Yaha.
Caller 2 (00:47:26):
I do <laugh> that as well. That's working. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
Yeah. That would be easier. Yeah.
Caller 2 (00:47:31):
When I, when I use like Ableton or I use reer yeah. That, you know, you can compose it there. Sure. But I don't wanna put all that software and all those, all those files on my gaming system, I wanna keep 'em coming.
Leo Laporte (00:47:43):
Well, I have to say it's much less of a rub Goldberg situation than it was. So you're getting there. We're getting there.
Caller 2 (00:47:49):
Well, that was that was, I was trying to use something to
Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
You were using the zoom audio. You were using the zoom to pick up the yeah. And that was that. Yeah. So, so we, so we, we flattened that stuff out a little bit.
Caller 2 (00:48:01):
That was a, a driver issue. Actually. I had to go to Yamaha and get the driver from Steinberg.
Leo Laporte (00:48:07):
Yeah. Steinberg. Yeah. They make Cubase. Is that your, do which do, are you using, you said Ableton.
Caller 2 (00:48:15):
I'm using Ableton and using Reaper.
Leo Laporte (00:48:17):
Okay. Anyway
Caller 2 (00:48:19):
Kind of open source.
Leo Laporte (00:48:20):
Yeah. I like Reaper. Reaper's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I bet you, there is an, some sort of digital input into that look for a toss link connector, an optical connector. That would be great. Of course your computer may not have an optical output. So <laugh>
Caller 2 (00:48:38):
That a deck, right?
Leo Laporte (00:48:39):
Then you need a D oh my God. No, you don't need a D cuz the Optical's digital. You need a, you just need a, something. I don't know what you need. Okay. It's complicated
Caller 2 (00:48:50):
On the right path,
Leo Laporte (00:48:51):
Shane. I can't wait to hear this YouTube channel. Leo Laporte the tech guy. <Laugh> Crazy. Sounds like fun. All right, Sam, you're gonna have a mind boggling nine minute and something. 15 seconds. All right, mark. Enjoy. All right. Thanks. If you need me just holler, I'll be sitting here drinking my coffee.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:22):
Let's see. Willie stroker asked whether BMW has lost their way with the bold new designs. Are they trying to be too ultramodern with the new kidney grill? Losing sales to Tesla may be the cause. You know, it's, it's hard to say. I, I was talking with some folks from BMW last week at a brief preview briefing of the new seven series. They unveiled
Leo Laporte (00:49:44):
Was that the car that you were saying you couldn't talk about last week?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:48):
Yes. Oh good.
Leo Laporte (00:49:50):
Yeah. I saw
Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:50):
That. So I was the new seven series sedan, which includes the I seven and electric version. Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:49:55):
That looks really sweet.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:57):
Yeah. I'm not crazy about the design, you know, I think compared to what or what Mercedes did with the EQs, you know, it's, aside from the front end, it, it's pretty conventional looking, you know, it's a pretty, or, you know, traditional three box sedan. Yeah. Yeah. And my, my, my big issue with BMW is that, you know, they have decided that they're not yet ready to go all in on EV. And so at the, up to this point, they haven't done except for the I three, they haven't done a fully you know, battery electric purpose built platform. That's coming in 2025 with what they call the Noya class, the new class car. But right now the I four, the IX, the the I seven, these are all based on they've done flexible versions of their platforms. So they can use the same architecture for either internal combustion hybrid or battery electric versions.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:01):
And that is an inherently compromised process. You look at any of those vehicles in pro file, you notice they have, you know, the traditional BMW profile, the long hood, you know, which looks more premium, more, more sporting, you know, and the cabin is kind of set back a little bit and you look at that and you think, oh, there should be lots of space in there for some front storage. And then you realize, no, they haven't bothered with any of that. There is no storage. I mean, you look at your, your, your Mockey, you know, and it's got a nice, decent size storage compartment in the front. You know, BMW claims. They need all that space for all the climate control stuff and, and everything else will like on their internal combustion versions of the same car, they still have the same climate control equipment.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:47):
And yet, you know, they also managed to fit in an engine in there. So if you take out the engine, there should be some space left. And so, you know, it's kind of a, a weird argument to be making. And especially the, the seven series, you know, it's a big car. Yeah. And there's, there's no front storage. Yeah. That's and then another, another example of where they copper, because it's got the same floor pan for all the variants, there's still a center transmission tunnel. So in the backseat, if you happen to be sitting in the middle, there's a, there's a tunnel there just like there is in the gas engine version of the seven series, except there's no nothing in it. There's no transmission or drive shaft or anything else. So it, it is kind of compromised in that way. And I, I think until BMW, you know, does a more mainstream purpose built EV which is come, as I said, is coming in 2025, you know, I have a harder time recommending it. And, you know, the, the seven, the I seven compared to the Mercedes EQs, the EQs has an EPA rated range of almost 370 miles. I
Leo Laporte (00:52:53):
Think I really want miles five 80, I think is I'm just so beautiful. Yeah. It's so nice inside.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:01):
And, you know, they haven't, they don't have, I don't think they have a front trunk in the, the EQs, but it also has a much shorter hood front end slopes down, you know, it's a sleeker look. And you know, so it's, I think Mercedes, you know, I mean, they, they're still not quite where Tesla is, you know, in terms of their energy efficiency or lucid, but you know, they've definitely gone in the right direction with this generation of EVs. And I think BMW needs to, to step up and granted BMW doesn't think that, you know, the EV sales are going to be, you know, are not, they're not gonna hit the same kind of market share that some of their competitors think are gonna be there. If they're right, then maybe they made the right decision now and not necessarily investing so much in dedicated platforms, but if they're wrong, then they could be left in the dust.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:53):
So it's, it's, it's a tough thing, you know, I mean, when you're, when you're investing, you know, hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in a vehicle program, it's always tough to make those decisions. And we'll see how it plays out over the next several years. One of the other questions that somebody had earlier on in the chat while we were talking was about whether it's worthwhile to buy a plug-in hybrid. And it depends a lot on what your use case is. So just to clarify, you know, a hybrid has an internal combustion engine, an electric motor, and a small battery, and it uses the motor to provide some propulsion assist and also to do regenerative braking to recover energy when the vehicle's slowing down, put that back into battery, which it then turns around and uses when you accelerate.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:44):
So the engine doesn't have to work as hard. You get better fuel efficiency, plug-in hybrid, same basic concept, except you take a much significantly larger battery. And you know, this week, my review first drive review of the Jeep grand Cherokee four by E came out, which is an example of a plug-in hybrid. So you now have enough to battery to do some significant amount of electric driving like an EV and you still have when the battery runs out, then you still have a, a standard hybrid power train. So you still have a more efficient partially internal combustion power train. So when you wanna take a road trip, you don't have to worry about planning where you're gonna stop to charge and leaving time for charging and all of that. You drive just drive it like a true additional vehicle.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:28):
And then finally battery electric, you know, which eliminates the internal combustion entirely. But now you have to plan on, you know, where you're gonna find chargers and, and leave time for charging. So most people like 80% of all driving in the us is less than less than 40 miles a day. So for most people you don't need an EV that gets 3, 4, 500 miles of range. And most the vast majority of people do not take, you know, cross country road trips on any kind of regular basis. But for those that, do you know, the EV is great. You know, certainly great for, you know, everybody's daily commuting. Longer range EVs can be very useful for road trips. But as I said, it does take a little more planning. Hybrids are very fuel efficient, and are also great for, for longer trips.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:28):
And then the plugin hybrid kind of tries to give you the best of both worlds. So most modern plugin hybrids get anywhere from 25 to 30 in some cases, as much as 40 miles on a charge, which is an enough to do all of your daily commuting on electricity alone, you plug it in at night. And if you live somewhere where you have access to charging, if you have off Streett parking in a garage and you can charge it overnight, then you can do all your daily driving. And then and when the battery runs out, you just keep on driving. You don't have to stop and find a charger every time your battery's depleted. And so for the long road trip, you know a I think a great example of a great plug-in hybrid is the Chrysler Pacifica.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:15):
Plug-In hybrid 33 miles of electric range. You can do, you can drop the kids off at school, go to work, do all your, your normal without using any gas at all. And then when it comes to time for a road trip to Disney, or to go visit the grandparents or wherever you're gonna go, you just keep on driving. You don't have to do any plan. You don't have to do the kind of planning you do with a battery EV so it's, it depends a lot on your use case. You know, if, if you, if you don't take long road trips and your, your daily driving can fit within the range of what's available in an EV that's in the kind of vehicle that you want, go with an EV if if you don't have access to charging at all, go with a hybrid, and then
Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
I'm gonna go with a lucid air, cuz it's got 500 miles <laugh>
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:04):
There you go.
Leo Laporte (00:58:05):
Hey if I were going, wanted to get El lucid air mm-hmm <affirmative> in February, 2024, I, I don't need to order it now or reserve it now. Right. Or do you know
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:20):
I'll have to check.
Leo Laporte (00:58:21):
Would you find out if I wanted to get one in Valentine's name
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:25):
Much, see how much back, how much of a backlog they have? Cause
Leo Laporte (00:58:27):
I think that's gonna be the one comparing that to the Mercedes. I think that's gonna be the one.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:32):
Yeah, we're we're my wife and I are planning a vacation probably driving up the west coast this summer and I'm actually gonna try and see if I can get El loose here. Good drive from, from San Francisco to Portland's what
Leo Laporte (00:58:42):
I, I want to hear your as your action. Thank you, Sam. Ever. Great
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:48):
Talk to you next week.
Leo Laporte (00:58:51):
Why? Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The EE tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leah owes the phone number (888) 827-5536, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada outside that area. You could still reach me, but you're gonna have to use Skype out or something like that. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number website tech guy labs.com. You can go there and get the latest from the show, all the links, video and audio of the show. After the fact even a transcript of everything I said. And you said tech guy labs.com and that's free back to the phones. We go, let's go to Hatfield, PA J on the line. Hi Jerry.
Caller 3 (00:59:42):
Hello Leo. This is Jerry from Hatfield, Montgomery county, PA the less, the fluid neighbor to the bucks county. One, which you looked to yesterday
Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
Now was that rude of me to start talking like that. Cause I have the impression bucks. County's kind of the upscale neighborhood. Do you know what I'm saying?
Caller 3 (01:00:00):
It is. Taxes are crazy.
Leo Laporte (01:00:02):
<Laugh> okay. So I wasn't, I, I didn't wanna be mean I understand I have family from bucks county. I, I know, I know the truth. That's I know the truth. Montgomery county. It's just a little more down to earth.
Caller 3 (01:00:14):
That's right? Yes. Little deal. My community yesterday had earth day and I took some electronic stuff in the, for recycling. Oh nice. Which really was I hated because I got rid of a, a large all, all in one laser printer. Oh, because they don't make the toner anymore. Unless I wanna spend $80 of cartridge from Indonesia. Oh. And two HP printers, which don't work with windows 10. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:00:46):
Don't you hate this. At least you did the right thing and you, and you brought it to the electronics recycling. Right? So one hopes it's not gonna get put in a pile and burned.
Caller 3 (01:00:56):
Yeah. So Leo, I'm thinking if I move to Lennox, what guarantee or what it, how, how do I know if I go to Linux, I can get a printer. That's gonna work right on Linux and I don't have to change the operating system. Well,
Leo Laporte (01:01:11):
Interestingly, you could have checked to see if any of those, well, the toner cartridge is another matter, but those HPS, right. You could have checked to see if they'd work with Linux. So in general, the way Linux works, Linux, I should say is a open source, which means you can look at how it's done free operating system created by a community of volunteers for the most part who put in their time to make an operating system to compete with windows and Mac. And as you know, I love Lennox. I'm a big fan. And I use it as my day to day operating system. Almost in every respect, this is starting to change. It used to be for a long time that the companies that made the hardware barely knew Linux existed. And the last thing they were gonna do for a tiny, tiny market share is write custom drivers.
Leo Laporte (01:02:02):
So they would make drivers for windows, for sure, cuz that's not, you know, in those days, 90% of the market, maybe not always, maybe they'd make drivers for Mac, cuz that was at the time three or 4% of the market, but there was no way they were gonna make drivers for Lennox, which is, you know, one 10th of 1% of the market. It just was too much time and money for such a small market. So what happened? I, over the decades that Lennox has been around, it's been around since 92, over the last 30 years is the volunteers who write Lennox would write their own. And they would direct drivers for the hardware that they had, which tended for the most part to be older hardware. So, and this is still somewhat true. Even today that the older hardware, like your old printers is very likely to be supported with open source, third party drivers, not from HP, but from some volunteer, who's got an HP printer and said, well, I'm gonna make this work. Now that's changing. Companies are recognizing Linux. Linux is much more than one 10th and 1% of the market now it's really growing it's I think two or 3% of the market and growing and companies also realize it's very good PR to have drivers for Lin. So more and more you're seeing that. But generally the advantage of this is, you know, HP discontinued their drivers for windows 10, right? For those printers.
Caller 3 (01:03:31):
That's correct. Now is that cause it's not in the printer.
Leo Laporte (01:03:35):
No, they could write it. They, no, they want you to buy a new printer.
Caller 3 (01:03:40):
Why tossed out?
Leo Laporte (01:03:41):
They could. So there's no technol, as far as I know, there's no technological reason and I'm pretty, darnt sure of this, that they couldn't make a driver to work with that printer. The only reason is economic. They don't, they want you to get a new printer. What you've had that printer for 10 years, what, what do you expect us to do? Live on sandwiches? You need to buy a new printer.
Caller 3 (01:04:03):
Don't forget the ink.
Leo Laporte (01:04:05):
Oh, and don't forget the ink. So it is very likely. So the, the, the Linux printing system is called cups. C U P S not the song by, by pitch. Perfect. The drivers for print. And there is a long list of cups, supported printers cups, C ups.org. Okay. Ironically cups was originally designed by Mac by apple, but it is an open source standard. And what, what you'll have is if there is a guy out there who has your printer, who says, darn it, I wanted to continue working and I'm not gonna rely on HP. We can't even rely on 'em to give us windows 10 driver. So I'm gonna write my own driver and put it up for cups. Oh, But good news. These cups drivers work fine. HP uses and I'm not sure about the vintage of your printer, but they used to use, and I think they still do a printer language called P C. So the other thing you might look on cups, if it doesn't have that model is for a generic PCL driver.
Caller 3 (01:05:09):
Is there any version of lines you would recommend? I've never used before. I do have a copy of
Leo Laporte (01:05:16):
Tutu is what most people start with. But, but you wanna download the latest they're free Um-huh this is a larger discussion. I am a fan of a distribution called Manjaro M a N J a R O. These are all free. And you know what? You can try 'em if you've got an old PC line around, just download these and you, you, what you do is you install 'em on a USB thumb drive, and then you put the thumb drive in. You tell the computer boot to the thumb, drive, not to your internal drive and the whole Linux will run and you can try it. And you can make, in fact, I recommended to do this, make sure that your, everything you want, you know, works the sound buttons on your keyboard, the track pad, the mouse, that kind of thing. And if everything works, then there's an install button and you can install it right under the hard drive. Do this with an old computer that you've got line around.
Caller 3 (01:06:06):
They're in no trash too. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
Well, yeah, yeah, but that's what see, but Lennox FIS, a lot of them wanna make sure those older things continue to work. They don't have the same, a incentive that HP, Microsoft, Dell have to get you, you know, obsolescence. They wanna keep this stuff. Yeah. They wanna keep this stuff running. So Abuntu current version is 2204, which just came out. So you will April 20, 22, right. So probably will want to download the newest one. Another good one based on Abuntu that's good for beginners is pop OS that's from a company that makes Linux hardware system 76. They make a very nice kind of cleaned up version of Abuntu. They're two kind of families of Linux. There's the slow and stable family. And there's the, what they call the rolling release family, which is the most. We wanna keep it most up to date, but we're willing to take a little bit of a chance by doing that. I'm in that second group, I use a rolling release based on arch. It's called Manjaro Debbie and is the slow, but steady, slow and stable version. Debian is the precursor. AUB. Buntu is based on Debbie and Papa. OS is based on a Buntu. You'll see this all the time, but AB Buntu is fully community. It's a really I think a very good choice, nothing wrong with ATO.
Caller 3 (01:07:33):
Before you let me go, Leo, give me a wave of goodbye.
Leo Laporte (01:07:36):
Are you watching?
Caller 3 (01:07:38):
Well course I watching.
Leo Laporte (01:07:40):
Yeah. Okay. So about 20 seconds from now, you'll see me sing so long. Jerry <laugh>
Caller 3 (01:07:46):
Eight seconds
Leo Laporte (01:07:46):
<Laugh> oh, good. Eight seconds. That's not much latency. That's great. There you Jerry. And you see if you are watching. I have, thanks to Mike. A Sergeant who made this for me, crocheted it for me. A little Linux mascot, tux, the penguin. And he's got a cute little hat says I love Lenox. Cuz Micah knows. That's where my heart is. Pleasure talking to you. Jerry. Give my regards to all the nice people in Montgomery county.
Caller 3 (01:08:10):
Okay? Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:08:11):
Let's stay away from those bucks county folks. They're just too snooty for words. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask me on the phone number. (888) 827-5536. No, no, no. I have family in bucks, county. We're good people too. There's good people everywhere. You know, that's the truth of it. Leo Laporte the tech guy more calls to come.
Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
Yes. NLE. N E R D L E. All right. I'm gonna play it the daily. Oh, it's a numbers. Wordle. Guess the N and six tries all of these are kind of based on master mind, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So each guest is, oh, it's a formula. It's a calculation with plus minus times divided or though they should have, you know, bit shifting. They should have more stuff. Yeah. Well we need, always need more parentis. See? Okay. I think I could probably solve this. Let's see. So what do you enter first? Just a bunch of numbers.
Leo Laporte (01:09:37):
So, so, okay. John has already solved this. Let me show it here. Guess the N one six tries after each guest, the color of the tiles, blah, blah, blah. Each guest is a calculation. You have to have at least one equals sign. It can only have a number to the right of the equals, not another calculation standard. And of course I presume the calculations always have to be correct. Yes. Does not compute. Okay. Well, so you ideally you'd want to get all of the numbers in there, right? Right. But you wanna get yeah. One, let's see one. It's not taken all. You have to do it from the keyboard. 1, 2, 3 times four, five. No it's not gonna fit. No. So one, two times three, four equals. Is that still too big? Yeah. It's gonna be three digits. Oh yeah. There might be a plus in there. Huh? One, two plus three, four. Oh, oh yeah. That's right. Okay. Equals 56. Yeah. Well let's not get it wrong. Thank you, John. For your math. 46. Okay. Okay. And then enter. So what is the, what is the move mean? Is that wrong? Wrong position. So the equals sign. They're not even there. So now we gotta do 3, 5, 6.
Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
Oh yeah. I did six. Oh, hold on. <Laugh> I got a darn radio show to do
Leo Laporte (01:11:42):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:11:51):
Leo Laport, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. If you want to call in with a question, a comment, a suggestion. Glen's on the line from Tampa. Hi Glen.
Caller 4 (01:12:04):
Hi Leo. Thanks for taking my call.
Leo Laporte (01:12:06):
Thank you so much for calling what's up.
Caller 4 (01:12:09):
I've got a surface pro three that problem just came up, had it. And everything's been fine on it. Yeah. But I think it did an update on windows 10 and the mouse keeps bouncing to the right and off of whatever I'm clicking on and a screen pops up when I'm not doing anything and I've done a bunch of troubleshooting up till this point. So I'll
Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
That's well, the first thing of course, and you've done this I'm sure is try another mouse.
Caller 4 (01:12:39):
Yes I did.
Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
Okay. So you have some other mouse, you plug it into the USB port. Is it the track pad? That's doing this. Do you have the keyboard or is it just the mouse?
Caller 4 (01:12:48):
Both of 'em do it. I disable the pad.
Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
So that's one thing I would do is disconnect the keyboard so that you don't have that extra stuff. And then just connect, connect the mouse via the USB port and it's still happening.
Caller 4 (01:13:02):
Correct.
Leo Laporte (01:13:02):
Okay. So it's software obviously, right? Or it could be no, it couldn't be, it could, I was gonna say a bad mouse port, but it happens with just the attached keyboard so that unlikely, although they may both be on the same us B ship, I'm not sure how the connector works on the surface pro for people who don't know surface pros are tablets, but they have a detachable kind of fabric keyboard. And you can use that and it has a track pad. So you can use that as a mouse as well. All right. So it sounds more and like it's a mouse issue and this happened after a recent update,
Caller 4 (01:13:39):
I believe that's when it started happening.
Leo Laporte (01:13:41):
Yeah. So the problem is there isn't a distinct mouse driver. The mouse is something called a human interfaced device. So the driver is an H I D driver. And probably so generic, it's unlikely to have problems, but you know, anytime you have a hardware failure or, or misbehaving hardware with windows, the first thing to do is to remove the driver and reinstall it. And I mean really remove it. So I guess you could go into your device manager, you know how to do that?
Caller 4 (01:14:13):
Yes. I've gone in there and I've found the mouse and I've deleted. There was three of them in there. I deleted all of them and
Leo Laporte (01:14:19):
There, oh, that's interesting. There were three different mice drivers, huh?
Caller 4 (01:14:23):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:14:24):
All under USB.
Caller 4 (01:14:26):
Yes. All IDs.
Leo Laporte (01:14:28):
Oh, interesting. I D M I D K E Y M O U S E. I would think that's mouse interface driver. So maybe that's something Microsoft does. All right. So you deleted them all now sometimes by the way deleting a driver requires more than just finding it in the device manager and, you know, deleting it. You wanna delete all the files. You actually have to go to the driver and find the files. There'll be DLLs and weird named files and delete those specifically. So maybe that's it. But you did all that it plug and played new drivers and it's still happening.
Caller 4 (01:15:09):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:15:13):
And so it happens with the track pad, which is the Microsoft version and it happens with a Microsoft mouse and other mice or
Caller 4 (01:15:21):
Yes, I tried two different,
Leo Laporte (01:15:24):
All
Caller 4 (01:15:24):
Right, mic I've out wireless. So I tried two of those and I've got a
Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Straight good. I mean, you've done all the right troubleshooting. You've eliminated. I think the issue of it being a mouse problem or even maybe a USB problem, which is good, cuz you don't want it to be a hardware problem. You want it to be a software problem. I'm trying to think. So it jumps around on its own even when you're not touching it.
Caller 4 (01:15:49):
Right. And if I go in a box or fail and type something, I get it like one letter and it's off the box,
Leo Laporte (01:15:55):
<Laugh> it has a life of its own. But even with your hands away, you're seeing mouse movement.
Caller 4 (01:16:03):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:16:04):
I have no idea. I mean there's always the nuclear option, which I hate to recommend, but I tell you what if you call Microsoft, they're gonna say to do this first, every tech support company does this, which is to reinstall windows. And the reason they do that is we don't know. They don't know what you've installed. Maybe you have some weird device driver or little widget installed. That's a mouse jiggler for instance, that's very popular now, by the way, when people are working from home and the boss is checking to see if they're actually working, they'll run software or hardware that jiggles the mouse moves the mouse around from time to time to make it look like they're doing something. There is so Jojo dancer has a download for a universal driver at support.microsoft.com and Jojo in our chat room is saying maybe if you download that it will, it will take over. It's certainly worth trying. See the, the thing that they're gonna tell you to do that I, you know, I I'm trying not to tell you to do is back up all your personal data onto an external drive and then re do the reset, the windows reset, which re really basically re restores it. You did that.
Caller 4 (01:17:23):
Yeah, I did that already. You
Leo Laporte (01:17:24):
Did it.
Caller 4 (01:17:26):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:17:26):
Oh, that's really interesting. <Affirmative> so that means, so even with a kind of, basically, as it came from the factory version of the software, you did the complete reset. You didn't save data or anything. It's just a complete reset. You you're still getting that. Yep. Now it does sound like it might in fact, I'm sorry to say be a USB problem. <Affirmative> like a bad USB chip and that's expensive to fix. I'm trying to think of what we could do. Short of getting, bringing it, bringing it in.
Caller 4 (01:18:02):
Wow. If I'm, if I'm using a docking station, a different USB port, does that make a difference on the chip?
Leo Laporte (01:18:08):
Try that? Does it still do it? Yeah.
Caller 4 (01:18:11):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
Oh my goodness. No, because the docking station is plugged into that USB port. Right. You only have one us, one port on that thing. Am I right?
Caller 4 (01:18:23):
Yeah. But when you dock it, it, it,
Leo Laporte (01:18:25):
Oh, the doc that's right. It goes to the Microsoft connector. That's right. The surface connector that's right, right. Okay. So you're connecting the surface connector and it's still failing. I still think it could be most computers have one or two USB chips on the computer. Two, if they're fancy, probably on that computer one, it's a fancy computer, but they only has one port. So it doesn't probably doesn't need more than one. If that chip goes bad, this would match the symptoms. I mean, that could happen. I guess, one other thing you can try, we're gonna put a link in the show notes to the the, the generic driver you could download and try one other thing you could try. It's kind of another nuclear option, but download a copy of Linux. Linux doesn't work well with a surface pros. But what we want to do is at least boot to an external operating system.
Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
So what, what would be good is to download copy Linux, put it on a thumb drive, put it in that USB port, tell the surface boot to that in order to do so you might have to turn off secure boot. But the only reason to do that is to see if the mouse behaves the same does with completely different operating system. It's definitely a hardware problem. Most likely the USB chip. So that's one way to, one way to test it is, is not use windows at all. Other than that, you got me Leo Laporte the tech guy. So PC guys, how to geek says you should install the optional driver updates. I don't know. I don't know. It might be worth a try. So, you know, when you go to windows update, it does the critical updates, but then there is optional updates. There's a button or a dropdown that says optional updates and you can see other updates which are usually driver updates. Have you tried that yet?
Caller 4 (01:20:23):
No.
Leo Laporte (01:20:24):
Yeah, you could. You're not gonna, you're not gonna go wrong. So go to windows update and then view optional updates and see if there is a I D or a mouse driver update you know, optional update there. I actually, I always install the optional updates. You know, advice varies this how to geek article think says not to only install 'em if you have a good reason, I always install all optional updates, including driver updates their Intel updates often there might be a real tech update. I think your mouse drivers are real tech.
Caller 4 (01:21:06):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:21:08):
Is it a real tech? Do you know? Or is it a Synaptics? It might be Synaptics.
Caller 4 (01:21:14):
Yeah. I don't know. I think it's I'm also using the logic tech.
Leo Laporte (01:21:18):
Okay. And that's the other thing, if you're using a Logitech, get the Logitech driver off of there. Hmm. At least again, this is all diagnostic. Yeah. But if you uninstall the Logitech driver, make sure that's not conflicting with the windows driver.
Caller 4 (01:21:34):
Okay. Got it. I'll try those. There's
Leo Laporte (01:21:39):
A whole, yeah. A few more troubleshooting things and then it's and then unfortunately you know, it's a trip to Microsoft. They're gonna, they're gonna make you, do, you already did. So you did the hard thing already, which is reinstall windows.
Caller 4 (01:21:53):
Great.
Leo Laporte (01:21:54):
Thank you. I'm sorry. I don't have much better help than that.
Caller 4 (01:21:57):
Thanks. All
Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
Right, Glen. All right. Take care. Bye. It's either a one digit answer or a three digit answer, right? Yeah. So I'm gonna say three, five. Let's see, we've done six, seven minus. Cuz we haven't, we don't have an operator yet. Well, I'm gonna, I'm trying to get a one digit answer. <Laugh> so it's gonna have to be like 3, 5, 5. Oh no. Yeah. I'm gonna run out. Yeah. So I am out of spaces. Dang. This is a little ch more challenging. Isn't it? Three, five. I did ti did I do times? No, I didn't. Okay. Three, five times seven equals 210 plus 35, 2 45, right. Oh, but we know we don't have a two and we don't have a four, so yeah. But, but I could do something. Well, all right. Let's do it. And let's just see. Okay. Enter. That's a lot of clue. So the five is in the correct position and equals wrong. So equals probably here. Yeah. So equals probably there. And we know that we have three, five and seven and times. Oh, that's interesting. Can you have times and divide? Can you have two operators or just one? No, but I could have multiple operators in the solution.
Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
This is fun. I'm gonna play more of this one. This is good. No, you supposed to do standard op operating you <affirmative> order of operations. It is a happy day. Happy days too. You Leo. Laporte the tech guy. 88 88. Ask Leo. By the way, you don't have to just call with questions. If you thought maybe you had an idea for our for our mouse guy. <Laugh> for instance, that would be a good reason call too. We're all in this together. We're all helping each other out together. 88, 88. Ask Leo Don's on the line from Carson, California. Hi, Don.
Caller 5 (01:24:36):
Hello there. Hello.
Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
Hey, how are ya?
Caller 5 (01:24:40):
I'm a long time listener. I've been listening to you since the windows 98.
Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
<Laugh> you know, I will was just thinking the other day, cuz I was talking with with Paul and we did windows weekly. We started doing it just before windows Vista came out. So that was windows XP. We started with windows 98. Why you must go back to tech TV days.
Caller 5 (01:25:05):
Oh. Even before that I I,
Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
Oh yeah. I was doing the radio in San Francisco. Before that. Were you in San Francisco?
Caller 5 (01:25:12):
No, just down here in LA
Leo Laporte (01:25:13):
LA. When did I start? I didn't start in LA till 2004, but but oh no. But then John C Devor and I did have a syndicated show. You might have heard in the early nineties. <Laugh> anyway, I'll take your word for it. When does 98? Wow. John and I started doing that show when it was windows 3.0
Caller 5 (01:25:32):
<Laugh> oh yeah. Go
Leo Laporte (01:25:33):
Do remember Doss do six, man. That was the best dos ever. So <laugh>
Caller 5 (01:25:38):
I was like, I still got that computer here.
Leo Laporte (01:25:40):
You do. Wow. Yeah. You're not putting it on the internet or anything. I hope.
Caller 5 (01:25:45):
No, I'm usually it. The program radios. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:25:48):
Very cool. Are you ham?
Caller 5 (01:25:50):
Yes I am.
Leo Laporte (01:25:51):
Oh nice. So you're using software defined radios.
Caller 5 (01:25:55):
Of course I've been using I've been a ham radio since what? Since high school
Leo Laporte (01:25:59):
Fun it's changed. Hasn't it? It used to be a lot of analog devices now. It's all digital software defined radio. So really I, you know, I have my very NiceCom trend trans receiver and I, I wanted to add capabilities. They said, okay fine. And they installed software <laugh> it's all software. Just a, it's just a computer that looks like a radio.
Caller 5 (01:26:22):
Yeah. It was internet came out. It took a lot of the attendance as far as hand radio people ever went
Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
Away. Yeah. But at least you don't have to know Morse code. I bet you do though. Don't you?
Caller 5 (01:26:31):
Yes, I do.
Leo Laporte (01:26:31):
Oh impressive. That's impressive.
Caller 5 (01:26:34):
I love it. <Laugh> I love Morris code.
Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
So what can I do to help you?
Caller 5 (01:26:39):
Okay. Currently I, I, excuse me. I have a Macintosh. I have a windows windows seven. I have a windows XP and I have another windows do it says Ms. Three.
Leo Laporte (01:26:51):
Holy cow three. You have 3.2. Wow. Not yet. Not yet. Oh yeah. Yeah. Don't upgrade too soon. Kinda wait. Make sure they get all the bugs out.
Caller 5 (01:27:02):
<Laugh> <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:27:05):
You never know. Right? I would guess dos three probably now has probably got, you know, most of the bugs are patched. I would guess pretty reliable.
Caller 5 (01:27:15):
I would say so. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:27:17):
<Laugh>
Caller 5 (01:27:18):
Let me talk to you about my current problem. Which X?
Leo Laporte (01:27:22):
All right. Another, another blast for in the past.
Caller 5 (01:27:25):
Yes, indeed. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:27:27):
But you know, if you're using its program radios, that's fine. Right? In fact, probably a lot of the software used hasn't been updated since then. You know, I'd be nervous about putting an old unsupported version of windows on the internet because of Beasties, you know, malware. But other than that, it's perfectly fine to do, do programming radios, for instance.
Caller 5 (01:27:48):
Yeah. I use windows. I speak for, believe it or not for the internet,
Leo Laporte (01:27:53):
That I'd be a little nervous about cuz you're not getting the latest security patches.
Caller 5 (01:27:58):
I know. Yeah. Unfortunately, while I'm using the by software, which has helped me a lot.
Leo Laporte (01:28:03):
Okay. But again you, you know, for instance, the browsers no longer update for XP which, which means you could have vulnerabilities in the browsers. Antivirus is, are slowly falling off one by one, but at least they see there's a market with XP users, but an antivirus alone is not enough to protect you from some of the malware that's out there that is at tell me about it. That is active. Yeah. You've already been bit.
Caller 5 (01:28:30):
Yep. Yeah. It could be. Yeah. Because every time we go to ex execute what you call internet browser, which is no matter which one I have on here, you know, automatically chose the, it says your clock is ahead. I can't figure out why <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:28:43):
Your clock is not ahead. I take it. It is April 24th on your clock. Yes. Okay. And it is 12:37 PM. Pacific daylight time. Yes. Yes. Okay. So your clock's not ahead. So the browser's broken, but you have to know that no, none of the major browser manufacturers support XP. So you have to be using an out of date. Browser are using internet Explorer.
Caller 5 (01:29:11):
I tried that so same problem,
Leo Laporte (01:29:14):
Huh? And you're sure that you ha your clock is accurate cuz that's one thing that happens with older, the battery that's backing up that time dies. So sometimes those have to be replaced
Caller 5 (01:29:28):
Uhhuh.
Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
So it is possible. Make sure you're not back in 19. What was it? 19. Oh four. I think those XP computers go back to 1904 when the clock dies.
Caller 5 (01:29:38):
Yeah. Cause I went to, even to the, at, I went to the bio was set up and the time is correct.
Leo Laporte (01:29:44):
Oh it is all right. Okay. I then you, that's not, that's not the problem. Let me see. Somebody in the discord says they've got <laugh> they've got, you know, they've got an answer. I'm looking, I'm looking. No, no, they don't have an answer. All right. Nevermind. <laugh> you know, when you call me, you're not just calling me all by myself. We've got two different chat rooms, running team tech guys in there trying to answer the question there's Googling and stuff. We've also of course got the, you know, hundreds of thousands of people listening to the radio show so often the answer will be, we'll be provided by the the team. Right now they're not they're not, they're not being very helpful. Let me think. Why is the browser doing that? Which browser are you using?
Caller 5 (01:30:34):
I'm U I've used let's see internet Explorer. I use a Chrome.
Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
You're using I E seven, right? I E seven.
Caller 5 (01:30:44):
I'm not sure. Let look.
Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
I think that was the last version.
Speaker 10 (01:30:47):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:30:51):
I, I don't, you know, I mean, look, this is probably part and parcel of, of the entire thing being out of date and broken browsers. No browser to my know, I just works with XP is up to date with XP. So
Caller 5 (01:31:07):
This, this browser is <inaudible> 4, 6, 6. Oh yep.
Leo Laporte (01:31:13):
Oh man. <Laugh>
Caller 5 (01:31:16):
They won't want me to go up there and download the oh
Leo Laporte (01:31:19):
Man. You're really you're living on the edge. My friend,
Caller 5 (01:31:23):
You
Leo Laporte (01:31:24):
Are living on the edge. So that browser has known flaws. Tell me you don't just browse the internet random and Willie nilly. You're going to just one spot. You're going to get the latest download for your software to find radio or something, right?
Caller 5 (01:31:40):
Yes. Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:31:40):
Always, but you're not going anywhere else.
Caller 5 (01:31:44):
Nope.
Leo Laporte (01:31:45):
Okay. And then you gotta hope that this site you're going to does not itself get hacked because what happens bad guys get into websites. You know, there's lots of ways to do that, cuz it's already in the public. Right? And then they put what they call exploit kits on the website. It'll be thing. And you can buy these online 50 bucks, a hundred bucks. You download these exploit kits. And it has in this little blob, which you then put on the server for that site. Hundreds of little scripts looking for flaws in anybody who visits. So the first thing they're gonna do is say, Hey, is this in an Explorer six? Then you're gonna say, yes it is. And they're gonna say, oh, I've got something for you and they're gonna take over your computer. Now they, the good news is, and we were talking about this on our security now podcast this week with Steve Gibson, there is a point where something is so old, nobody's trying to exploit it. It's like anybody's using this has no money anyway. So we're not gonna bother trying to steal anything from you. There's no, I don't. As far as I know, for instance, you probably don't have to worry about ransomware on windows XP because they figure why bother. Right?
Caller 5 (01:32:56):
Really?
Leo Laporte (01:32:57):
So you're probably all right. I don't know why browsers complaining. Let me see if I can find a browser, any browser that still works with windows XP, you really shouldn't be using I E six. That was horrifically. In fact, many sites you go to won't work very well. See, best thing to do. See if that place where you download the files for your SDF, SDR offers FTP or something like that. Something a little safer. Leo Laport, the tech guy. Let me, let me just best or only browser for windows X P. Let's see if anybody still makes anything for windows X, P I know firefi Chrome. What browser will run an XP pale moon. <Laugh>
Caller 5 (01:33:48):
Well, either or not, I even have couple other browsers on here, which like lunar Lu escape. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:33:56):
That one. Yeah. These are all people trying to do. Browser. It'll still work. So opera, apparently opera is, which is a pretty good browser. Still works and you don't need much. You're you're you're you're, you're literally only going to this site where you get the software for the radio,
Caller 5 (01:34:14):
Right?
Leo Laporte (01:34:14):
Nothing else
Caller 5 (01:34:16):
Opportunity. So I got the same
Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
Message. Same message.
Caller 5 (01:34:19):
Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
I wonder if your certifi gets her out of date, what does the message say exactly that the time is wrong?
Caller 5 (01:34:26):
It says private connection. Oh, can't establish between the computer and time is incorrect. Yes. It has a, a message. Both that says N T
Leo Laporte (01:34:41):
Date. Yeah. This is a cert problem. All right. Now I understand it. So,
Caller 5 (01:34:45):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:34:46):
This is because your browsers are so out of date, they don't have up to date, certificate information for the, for the certificate authorities. So As long as you are sure. When you see the time on your task bar, you see that time and date is correct, right?
Caller 5 (01:35:04):
Correct.
Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Yeah. What it's telling you is, is that I can't establish a certificate with a site you're trying to visit because the certificates on your system are out of date, giving you a kind of, I think an incorrect message. It's not that your clock is wrong. That can happen by the way. That's why I asked you if your clock was wrong. If your clock says you're in 1904, you'll get the same message. Because the certificate is authorized for certain, you know, a certain one year period, which does not include 1904. So that you'll get a kind of generic error message saying, well, your, your clock is wrong, but, but really it isn't that your clock is wrong. It's that you don't have up to date certificates. They come with the browser go to opera.com and download the latest version of opera.
Caller 5 (01:35:53):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
That will have a brand new set of certificates. So how, when's the last time you updated a browser or downloaded a browser
Caller 5 (01:36:03):
For this machine? Maybe about a couple of months. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:36:07):
Well you should have gotten the new certs when, when you did that. Well,
Caller 5 (01:36:14):
I have uploaded here now and it still says the same thing too.
Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
Yeah. The latest opera, same thing. Yeah. I think they're just trying to tell you something <laugh> that is bizarre.
Caller 5 (01:36:30):
Isn't
Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
It? It's bizarre. Well, it isn't because honestly What you're using is at the, this point, it's a horse and buggy. And so now are you sure that the, is it, does this only happen when you launch the browser or does it only happen when you go to the site?
Caller 5 (01:36:53):
Only when I launch the browsers.
Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
Okay. So as soon as you launch the browser, It gives you that message that the time is wrong.
Caller 5 (01:37:06):
Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Okay. So this is maybe the root certificates in the operating system are so old. How, how could we update your root certificates?
Caller 5 (01:37:17):
Really?
Leo Laporte (01:37:18):
Yeah. Let me just see update root certificates. XP. <laugh>.
Caller 5 (01:37:31):
Another thing too is got to mention is if I put, if I put an actual,
Leo Laporte (01:37:36):
I have to run we're at of time. I'm sorry, but we're gonna keep working on this. Leo, Laporte playing a little blues for poor old Don and Carson who wants to use ancient browsers, ancient operating systems. He still likes do 3.0. And for some reason, those browsers just don't like the modern internet. They say your clock is wrong. I think what they're trying to say, Don is <laugh> you're living in the past. I think you need to update probably the best thing to do at this point, Don, for your safety and to solve this problem, we've, by the way, I spent another three or four minutes with him off the air, trying to solve it is to just put Linux on that old machine. You'll get an UpToDate operating system with up to date certificates and an up to date browser. You won't have the security flaws.
Leo Laporte (01:38:25):
And the real trick is to make sure that you can download and install those software defined radios, which is apparently the only thing you're doing with this old machine. And I am sure there is a ham out there who will help you do that. So really we gotta get you on a more modern operating system. And this ties into the question we had earlier with somebody with old HP printers, he had just recycled because windows 11 and windows 10 didn't have drivers anymore. HP wasn't make drivers. And it, it is to some degree, it is, it is kind of art, official obsolescence. It's these companies saying, look, I mean, Microsoft, can't be expected to support every version of every operating system it's put out over the last 40 years. You just, that would be a, an unreasonable expense. Wait, it's not something we've really had much experience with.
Leo Laporte (01:39:14):
Right? <laugh> in the old days you got a horse, the horse worked until it didn't <laugh> then you got a new horse, but there was no question of I'm sorry, your horse is too old for the bridals we sell today. The saddles we make in 1883, don't fit the horse that you bought in 1862, but we don't have that problem. We didn't anyway, but we do in digital technologies, unfortunately. And it's because all of this software, if you're gonna continue you, you don't have to sell it anymore. But if you're gonna continue to support it, that means you have to dedicate full-time engineers to fixing bugs, solving bugs, doing security assays, to make sure there's no problems and companies just aren't willing to do that. So unfortunately, I mean the computer you're using, there's nothing really wrong with it. As far as I can tell you know, it still works. The problem really isn't the computer, it's the software you're running on. It is antiquated is out of date. That horse doesn't fit that saddle.
Leo Laporte (01:40:24):
So you have two choices, one get a new computer, get a new horse or the other, go back and get some saddles. They're a little weird, they're odd, but they still fit the old horses and we call it Linux and, and, and just put Linux on there and you can get an up to date cuz Lenox will continue to support that just as Lenox would continue to support those old HP printers. There is a Linux that will run on that XP computer. Doesn't have a lot of Ram probably it's gonna have to be a, a version of Linux design for old machines, but, but there's somebody out there making that. And you, you put that on there. It'll run and it'll have an up to date browser. It'll have up to date certificates. You won't get this error and you'll be secure, which is my most significant concern. You don't wanna ride an old horse with a new saddle. That's saying 88 88. Ask Leo, Steve on the line from Corona, California. Hi Steve.
Caller 6 (01:41:19):
Hi Leo. I had a question for you and I know sort of know your feelings about anti viruses, but I have 90 year old grandparents are sort of on training wheels when it comes to computers.
Leo Laporte (01:41:28):
Yeah. So some so while you don't need an antivirus and I don't need an antivirus, there are definitely people who need anti viruses.
Caller 6 (01:41:35):
Okay. That's what I sort wanted to know. I've always had to E sat on their computer before at
Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
That's good. It's very lightweight. The thing I would say though, is this is part of my concern about antivirus is they are now not now. Oh, you're safe. The antivirus is not a hundred percent protection. It's not even 50% protection and mean it's better than nothing. Windows comes with an antivirus that is just as good as he said. So if they're using windows, they have an antivirus. But if you want a little extra protection, it's not a bad idea to put ECI on there.
Caller 6 (01:42:06):
Now do those two run congruent with each other or in
Leo Laporte (01:42:09):
The past they work fine. Yeah. Yeah. Usually you don't want to have two anti viruses on there, but because windows now has this built in defender all the antivirus is intended for windows will coexist. They may, they may. I'm not sure what he said does it may disable defender, but I'll give you an example. We have editors down the hall doing the video editing for my podcast network. They were running on windows a one until recent. We've just bought 'em new computers. <Laugh> but they were using a one. And because they were using an old version of windows, they were running Eun. Okay. So I am not against that at all. Especially for people, teenagers, seniors people were just, don't naive about computing. The, the last guy we just talked to <laugh> he should be running away any virus you know, people want to run insecure versions of the operating system. It's not the end of the,
Caller 6 (01:43:03):
I know my, I know my grandparents, if, if like they get an email from one of my family members and they say their email got hacked, they're gonna click any link that came from a email looks familiar. Exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:43:13):
And they're in their nineties, you cannot blow blame them.
Caller 6 (01:43:16):
No,
Leo Laporte (01:43:17):
I don't blame 'em at all. My mom's 88. You know, honestly, I would, let's see, you can't do this either. I would not let my mom use windows at this point. But you know, they're familiar with it. I, if you, you know, they're a better bet would be for them to be using a Chromebook, which I probably do everything they want and would not be, you know, subject to malware.
Caller 6 (01:43:40):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
In fact, if you're on a Chromebook, you can click that link in the email and nothing will happen because it is expecting windows.
Caller 6 (01:43:49):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
But you know, but they're, you know, as you get older, I know you get stuck in your ways.
Caller 6 (01:43:56):
Change is scary.
Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
Change is scary. It's it's worth a try cuz it's not gonna look so different. It's Chrome, you know? So it's a browser basically. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and probably they're living in the browser as it is, is I doubt very much. They're doing anything outside the browser.
Caller 6 (01:44:14):
No, it's mostly in the browser. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:44:15):
Another good one. My mom loves her iPad. The only downside on iPad for older users is eyesight. It's a small screen. Yeah. Even the biggest, iPad's only 12.9 inches. So, but you can get a Chrome box with a big screen or you get a, you know, Chrome lab up top with a big screen that it'll be easier for them to read. They can put, you can make the text big on that. But if they're, you know, if they're stuck in the windows world, which is a shame, I mean, honestly, this is, this is where the computing industry went very wrong. Normal people should not be using a general purpose operating system like windows. It's just a requires too much caution and skill. But if they're insisting on using windows, put E it on there, that's fine.
Caller 6 (01:45:00):
Okay. Thank you Leo. I really appreciate
Leo Laporte (01:45:02):
It. Yeah, sure. I, you know, I, I know, look, we have to live in the world, right? Best, best solution. They, and they make 'em, there are computers they make for seniors. Basically. They're like Chromebooks. I think that's the easiest way not to get a special, expensive computer, but the computers designed for seniors are same thing. Very limited keeps 'em outta trouble. They can't do much with it. Windows. You can do anything. That's the problem. And of course that's why we love it because you know, if you want, want to do anything that your little heart desires with your computer, you want a general purpose operating system. It's what I want. But then if, if you say that you're taking on your, and this is the problem, people, there's a disconnect between the, the desire for this general purpose earning system and the disabilities it entails, which includes becoming a security expert, becoming your own it department.
Leo Laporte (01:46:02):
So unless you're willing to be your, you know, a, an expert in internet security, which is a full-time job for most people, unless you're willing to be your own it department, it's probably a bad idea. It to get windows, unless, you know, I need to do, you know, this weird thing that I can only do in windows. Okay, fine. But now you've gotta be a security expert. You, you know, cuz it's, cuz it's risky, it's risky. We can't, you can't have both. You, you know, you can't have a general purpose, powerful operating system and not learn how to use it. That's why, you know, ChromeOS is very popular, popular with schools. They don't have to worry about malware popular with people who just don't want to be computer geeks, iPads, same thing. The only problem with iPads and my mom loves her iPad and she's able to use it is it's a little harder to read that small screen, 88, 88. ASEO we're gonna take a little break news at the top of the hour. Come back with more of your calls. So gimme a ring. Let's talk tech Leola, port, the tech guy
Leo Laporte (01:47:24):
Back to the NLE. All right, John, let's see here. Let's check the board, make this a little bigger. Okay. So here is our neural. We know we've got a three, five, a seven. The five is here. We got an equal sign. Of course. And we've got a times Do, does that mean we, we have two fives if we see of red and green. Oh, okay. That, that red isn't meaning that five. Okay. So we, and we we're pretty sure unless it's an equal over way over here, which it could be,
Leo Laporte (01:48:05):
Could be. Let's not rule that out. Yeah. We have to cuz we have too many numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. So we know the equals here. The five is here. We've gotta come up with something that equals five, some multiplication number that has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 digits. So three and two digits and some of the digits are three, five and seven. And the answer, I should be able to sell all of it here. I think honestly, right. We don't have a 1, 2, 4, 6. We could have an eight or a nine. We don't know about eight and 9, 3, 5, 7, 8, And nine are possibles. Zero. One of them. Yeah, zero's in there too. Okay. So it's so sometimes something that's gonna equal five, three digits, times four digs. How can that be? That's that's not possible, John. That equals five. Must be a division in there. No, I understand. But no multiplication with three digits and two digits is gonna give you the answer. Five. There's gotta be a division in there. Well, can we do something like three times, Five Divided by
Speaker 12 (01:49:36):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:49:37):
You already know the answer. You sh oh, you already know the answer. Okay. So you can gimme a hint. There are not two. There are not two operators in there. There have to be. Yes. Could be a subtraction as well. So let's see. So I'm gonna do, John says my clue is my multiplies in the correct place. What I know, I know. I know. I know. I can't leave it though. Eight times 9 72 Minus. Nope. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work Divided by. That's not gonna work. Yeah. I know. I need to. I need to use five, three and seven. So Nine times 53 is 477 divided by. No, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work, but I'm in the, I'm in the right ballpark here. So, oh, I know what I'm gonna do. I can do times five. No, it's gotta be a Divi. It's gotta be de visible by five. I think. Unless the multipliers could be subtraction, which opens it up a little bit. John's given me all the good clues I give up. He's making my head hurt. John. My hand hurts. My my hand hurts
Leo Laporte (01:51:39):
Five times 73 divided by
Speaker 12 (01:51:48):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
Five times seven divided by Snow minus five times. Snow is 35 35 minus. Huh? How do you get five outta 35? You divide by seven. Mine is 30 minus three, zero equals five. Is that what you're telling me? Let's try it. Let's try it. I won Woohoo that with a lot of help. No, a lot of help. Help. Why the help? That's pretty funny. So tomorrow we won't, we won't spoil it for you. Lisa's very good with numbers. She should be she should be superb English. Wasn't your goodest subject either. Was it chicken hand? Chicken heads. The king. Won't mash potatoes. Pretty good too. It makes sense though. If you have a creative chat handle, that you'd be good at show titles. That makes sense. What is that?
Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phone phones, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. If you wanna talk high tech, let's do it. What, what do you say? You and me part of the high tech army, 88, 88. Ask Leo. There are really I think there are two kinds of people in the world. People who love tech and people who can't abide by it can't understand it. Hate it. Don't know why it works. Don't wanna have anything to do with it. So this is more a show for the former, but if you hate tech, but you still need to use it. This might be a value to you as well. 88, 88. Ask Leah when I used to do a show for tech TV.
Leo Laporte (01:54:06):
When I first started in 1998 on tech TV I was already doing this show, the radio show, so they knew I could do <laugh>. I could talk for at least three hours on any subject having to do with tech. So we, we proposed a show called the screensavers. That was a call in TV show, just like this, but on TV. But they had a problem. They had 24 hours to fill and they didn't have any budgets. So they said, Leo, we know you can do three hours on the radio. Could you do two shows? <Laugh> and I said, yeah, I'll do another show. It'll be called call for help. But Leo that's the same show. They said people calling in and asking questions. And I said, no, but no, it isn't because they'll have two different audiences. Call for help will be a show for people who came to technology, cuz they had to cuz they were using it at work for instance.
Leo Laporte (01:54:59):
And they had to understand how Microsoft word or Microsoft Excel work used was worked and, and they didn't care for it particularly, but they had to use it. That's who call for help was the, the kind of utilitarian here's how you use technology. The screensavers was for people who fell in love with technology to a young age. And I'm, I'm one of those people. The often it's through video games or early programming with basic, something like that and who just love it? Who are enthusiasts? So that's what we did. We did two different shows, one for enthusiasts and one for people who maybe don't have any passion for technology, but still have to understand it. I only get one show. I only get one show here. So this is for both of you, 88, 88, ask Leo all the information we talk about will go up on the website. After the show tech guy labs.com, including audio and video from the show and a transcript. But meanwhile, let's get back to the phones. David is on the line from Venice beach, California. Hi David.
Caller 7 (01:56:02):
Hello, Leo. The for picking my call.
Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
Welcome. The last time we had somebody calling from Venice beach. He I got into a fight <laugh> with
Caller 7 (01:56:11):
Somebody. Wait, no, wait. You were okay. That was not me, but when I called you last, I think it was three weeks ago. Yeah. Or two weeks ago you told me the same thing.
Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
Oh, okay. So it wasn't the last time you were the last time. So I just wanted to warn you, keep your eyes peeled <laugh> You never know what's gonna happen on Venice beach. Okay, David, what can I do for you? Right.
Caller 7 (01:56:33):
<Laugh> I'm more likely the one doing the fighting. Cause I'm the big guy here. I'm I'm really big.
Leo Laporte (01:56:36):
Oh, you're safe then. Good.
Caller 7 (01:56:38):
<Laugh> I am, but but I'm not safe with my computer so much. Oh yeah. My buddy fixed a computer for me. I mean, he put a computer together for me. Nice. And I wanna connect my Canon Excel. Two camera to it. Yep. Using a display port that's on my computer display. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:56:54):
You want video from your can?
Caller 7 (01:56:57):
Yes, sir.
Leo Laporte (01:56:57):
Ah, so you're gonna stream or something.
Caller 7 (01:57:01):
Yeah. I wanna record my old mini DV cassette put him on digital,
Leo Laporte (01:57:05):
Right? Yo. Oh yeah. That makes sense. It's funny cuz that's now that you say it that's the camera we used when we first started streaming our TWI network was Canon XL twos. We had three or four of 'em right John and pointed at me. So those are a little out of date now they're maybe closer to 20 years old, but you have a lot of mini DV cassettes that you shot with. It
Caller 7 (01:57:28):
Certainly do.
Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
Yeah. Now I'm trying to remember. I think it has, does it have fire wire out?
Caller 7 (01:57:35):
Yes
Leo Laporte (01:57:35):
It does.
Caller 7 (01:57:36):
Exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
Yeah. So you need to get fire wire into your computer, which of course no longer has fire wire and
Caller 7 (01:57:45):
Bingo. I tried that. So I tried a second option is to go through the RCA and have a converter.
Leo Laporte (01:57:50):
Oh, don't do that cuz you wanna keep it digital if you can. Cause then if you do that, so the camera, the D the mini D visa that's recording are digital mini mini digital video. So if you do that, then you're having the camera converted to analog, converting it back into digital for the computer. You're adding a, a, a step that degrades the video. What you wanna do is fire wired a Thunderbolt.
Caller 7 (01:58:18):
Okay. Wow. I heard about that and I neglected it.
Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Do you now, what computer are you using?
Leo Laporte (01:58:26):
Many, many modern computers will have Thunderbolt, but sometimes older computers. Your guy, your guy built you one, it's a windows PC. I'm gonna presume,
Caller 7 (01:58:34):
Correct?
Leo Laporte (01:58:35):
Yeah. It depends on what he, what he, what motherboard he used and stuff, but you certainly will have USB Thunderbolt looks like it's a type C adapter. So it doesn't look like it's the square USB type a adapter. It looks like. How do I describe that? It looks like a little rounded slot. It's rounded on both ends. Okay. If you had have that then you just have to get the right cable. The, the reason you wanna do that is it stays digital going right from the DV cassette right into the, the computer. You don't, you don't have that degradation of converting it twice.
Caller 7 (01:59:16):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:59:17):
But you've got it. But the trick is gonna get, get the right adapter. So what you're gonna need to do, maybe find it out for your buddy who built you this, or did he give you the manuals when you got it?
Caller 7 (01:59:28):
Yes, I have done on this side.
Leo Laporte (01:59:29):
Okay. So the manuals will tell you what ports that computer has. It's probably gonna be in the motherboard manual. So look, it's a, it's a, it's a tower case.
Caller 7 (01:59:41):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:59:41):
Okay. So he may have put some additional cards in there for other connectivity, maybe video they'll have their own manuals, but chances are any thunder boat will be on the motherboard. If it only has USB, there is I, let me see if there's to USB three would probably work. So you need to get a, in other words, you need to get the cable that matches what you, what you've got. So I'm sorry. Fire wire to USB three. Yeah. There are fire wire to USB three cables, $29 on Amazon.
Caller 7 (02:00:20):
Well, that's not bad. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
So actually even less depends on what you've got. So you're gonna find out what's on that motherboard, worst case you can go out and you could buy a fire wire adapter for your PC, put it in one of the slots or more useful to you going forward. A Thunderbolt adapter, cuz thunderbolts really fast. 10 gigabits per second, up to 40 gigabits a second. So that's nice cuz the faster it is the, you know, you can connect to hard drives other video devices and so forth. So you probably, I mean, you're gonna do this project once and then sell the cameras. They're not, unless you continue to right. Or you're gonna keep using 'em yeah,
Caller 7 (02:01:03):
No, I don't be.
Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
You don't need 'em they're out date. Yeah. So you could, you could install and I don't think a fire wire card is very expensive. You'd get a fire wire PCI card. But the first thing to do is see what capabilities you already have.
Caller 7 (02:01:16):
I see,
Leo Laporte (02:01:17):
Let me see what a and let me see what a fire wire to PCI card would cost. Cuz it's probably pretty now
Caller 7 (02:01:25):
I have fire wire, the old fashioned way looks like a rectangle, but rounded on top with three or four pin. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:01:31):
That's that's that's the standard fire wire. I can't remember on those cameras. If it's fire wire 400 or 800, that doesn't really matter because yeah. So a four port PCI fire wire adapter card is 40 bucks. So it's not expensive if you, and if you have a slot open still on your motherboard, that that might be a pretty easy way to do it. So first thing, check the motherboard manual. See if you've got Thunderbolt or fire wire, something that you can and convert fire wire into. If you don't, you can add fire wire ports to your computer with a fire card. It goes right in the slot and those are cheap.
Caller 7 (02:02:07):
Oh, well I have the old one from my old computer. When, when I used to use the cannon Excel to my old, did
Leo Laporte (02:02:12):
It have a, did it have a, a card removable card?
Caller 7 (02:02:15):
Yes, but it doesn't fit inside my computer. I don't know much what I'm talking about, but I
Leo Laporte (02:02:19):
Is your buddy still around that? Built it for you. <Laugh>
Caller 7 (02:02:23):
Yeah. New Europe
Leo Laporte (02:02:24):
Probably. Oh, okay. No, don't worry about it. When you open up the computer, you sh if there's free slots, you'll see these square things that you could put something in, probably the standard from your old computer, your new one is different. So maybe that's the problem that those new slots are called PC slots,
Caller 7 (02:02:41):
PCI slots,
Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
You know, but again, the first thing to do is see if you already have some, something that you can convert it to, although 40 bucks might be cheaper than a fire wire to, to USB cable. So it might be, it might be just as easy to do that. So you put a card in in fact, the chat room's given me a link to a Amazon page with exactly the right kind of cards and it'll work with both kinds of Thunderbolt, 1394, a the Sony kind the Canon kind and then the apple kind. So, and this is 20 bucks. Okay. Now, now you gotta do it.
Caller 7 (02:03:23):
<Laugh> thank you. Chat.
Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
Thank you. Thank you. Chat room. Have fun. What's on those videos.
Caller 7 (02:03:31):
A document 15 or 16 years of documenting muscle beach.
Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
Oh man. You got, you got a, you got a movie there.
Caller 7 (02:03:38):
Yeah. I'm producing a documentary. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:03:41):
You got Arnold in there.
Caller 7 (02:03:44):
I cannot confirm no deny.
Leo Laporte (02:03:48):
<Laugh> all right. Now you got something and I, and the beauty of this is you can make that documentary, but you don't have to get a company to buy it and show it at Sundance. You can put it on YouTube.
Caller 7 (02:03:59):
I, I have my ego. I wanna put at sun and I'm
Leo Laporte (02:04:03):
Put it in the studio. It'll be good. It'll be good. You can call it pumping iron three, the Venice beach story. It'll be great. I'm looking forward to it.
Caller 7 (02:04:10):
Actually. It's called the original muscle beach, the
Leo Laporte (02:04:13):
Original muscle. You know what I would buy that. I'd love to see that. It's
Caller 7 (02:04:17):
Your wife. Wasn't there for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. We
Leo Laporte (02:04:19):
Went, we've gone down there. She likes to do the the monkey swings. You know, those rings that you swing along. But they, last time I was down there, they really upgraded muscle beach. They've got some, a nice gym equipment there now. It's pretty indeed pretty nice. So people still, still lift there and
Caller 7 (02:04:36):
More than ever. And they don't lift. We, you, we lift each other. We do acrobatics. Like we lift people.
Leo Laporte (02:04:41):
I've seen that slack line and all sorts of interesting acrobatics out there. It's fun. I love Venice beach. Yeah. Fun. Oh, I'm glad you have that documentary. I'm glad you have the tapes. Yeah, let's get those converted now. Absolutely. David get to work on it. Thank you. Any help? I can. Any help? I can give you, you call back.
Caller 7 (02:05:00):
Oh, thanks.
Leo Laporte (02:05:00):
Okay. But look behind you. So when you say you're big, are you a weightlifter?
Caller 7 (02:05:06):
Yeah. Well, yeah. I lift people up and myself.
Leo Laporte (02:05:10):
<Laugh> how, what's the, what's the biggest person you could lift?
Caller 7 (02:05:16):
I can list like four people, at least. That's the thing. What it's
Leo Laporte (02:05:21):
It's like you could bench press 600 pounds, man.
Caller 7 (02:05:24):
No, no, no, no. I cannot bench press, but I can put on my knees and my shoulders.
Leo Laporte (02:05:27):
Oh yeah. You hold them. Yeah. You hold them like that. Yeah. Like an acrobatic trick. Oh, that's cool. Shane. I'm gonna come down. I'm gonna come down. I know muscle beach reopening. I'm gonna come down. I'm gonna visit.
Caller 7 (02:05:41):
Please do and look for soup. That's my nickname. S O O P super Superman. Cause I body double Superman in the movies
Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
You did. Which Superman?
Caller 7 (02:05:50):
The first man of steel.
Leo Laporte (02:05:52):
Oh man. You're ripped, dude.
Caller 7 (02:05:54):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:05:55):
No wonder you don't worry. If somebody's coming up from behind. Nobody's coming up on soup. Soup is all alone. It's nice to meet you. Soup. Have a great day.
Caller 7 (02:06:06):
Oh, Leo's pleasure.
Leo Laporte (02:06:07):
Take care. Leo. Laporte the tech guy. 80. You see what you mean? All kinds here. I love it. 88, 88. Ask Leo. Speaking of all kinds, spaceman rod pile coming up in 15. You right here. He does this, right? You kinda, you bend your knees. You got two people on your knees.
Leo Laporte (02:06:32):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:06:35):
It sounds like fun. I'm making friends everywhere. I go, rod. I want him to put us on his shoulders. Then you know, he ain't gonna do that. And two other people. That's why I asked, can you, how much can you hold soup? The shoulder I'm on will be the one that's kind of sloping down. Right? You'll you'll be barely counterbalancing the other side. Hey, I'm so glad you guys talked about fire wire cuz I have probably geez, seven years when I was working in DV between the end of beta cam and the beginning of Q HD. Oh, so you have a lot of those tapes, maybe a thousand. You wanna see, you wanna see decay, you know, by the way Kim has found soup's website. That's the a man we were talking to whoa. He body doubled Superman looks like he is Spota. Wow.
Leo Laporte (02:07:29):
I like the the ho head the best. That's how, that's what I want my look to be down at. I raw the charismatic masculine presence. Look at that. And oh, look at that extended leg up in the, in the left there. You scared of this guy. Woo. That's definitely somebody who wanna be friendly. I'm gonna go down to Venice beach and I'm gonna say soup. You you're gonna have your, your private body down there. Look at this guy, which you sometimes need at Venice depending on the day. You know, I tell you what, I'm not introducing to my wife. <Laugh> that's it. I'll she be gone? She does that. Oh, there he is. Look at, see he is doing the, the, the six people thing. Oh, that that's the physics problem right there. That's what he said. He says just physics. Yeah. That's like the handwriting Collider in, in neat.
Leo Laporte (02:08:16):
So Lisa does the the swinging rings. She does the rings. Yeah. She's really good. Yeah. Oh man. She can go all the way there and back. She's really good. She's super fit. That's why I'm saying I'm not introducing him to Lisa. <Laugh> be it on my marriage all over. Yeah. I used to be married. Then soup came along. <Laugh> it's all over that. Isn't gonna happen. No soup for you. NAIA. <Laugh> so what do you wanna talk about today? Mr. Pilot? I wanna talk about a cry for help to the aliens. Oh good. Yeah. Oh good. I can't it's really weird. Weird, but cool story. Oh, okay. All right. We will talk soon. I'll be here. S double O P short for Superman. Cuz he embodied doubled for man of steel. I'm telling you, we got celebrities listening. Kim. You want to go down and do an interview. We can do a documentary. You can do it. Me go see some soon. I think you'd like to like go down and cover that story. I
Kim Schaffer (02:09:26):
Just, can I just touch the abs?
Leo Laporte (02:09:28):
<Laugh> I know it's amazing. <Laugh> holy cow. Quite, but you know what? He was sounded like. It's funny if I would never put that, that caller to this picture. No, no. I mean he sounded like his sweetheart.
Kim Schaffer (02:09:41):
Yeah. I, well, I, I was
Leo Laporte (02:09:43):
I'm sure he is, you know, that's one thing about big guys. They don't have to be scary. <Laugh> right. Look at aunt Pruitt. Sweetest guy you'd ever meet. Yeah, exactly. He doesn't have to prove anything. Listeners of this program get an ad free version. If they're members of club TWI $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club, TWI discord, a great clubhouse for TWI listeners. And finally the TWI plus feed with shows like Stacy's book club, the untitled Lennox show the GIZ fizz and more go to twit.tv/club TWI. And thanks for your support. Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88 88. No, not me. Them. 88, 88. Ask Leo, get ready. You got your cup of coffee in hand. It's time for super Chris from Miami, our coffee achiever. Hello Chris,
Caller 8 (02:10:37):
How are you? My friend. I'm working the microphone. So I'm not gonna scream. Cause I know I can see you. I'm
Speaker 14 (02:10:45):
Back just a little bit.
Caller 8 (02:10:47):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:10:50):
How many cups of coffee have you had today?
Caller 8 (02:10:53):
Well, I'm gonna be honest. I'm in about four and a half. Kim's in about one and a half.
Leo Laporte (02:10:59):
I mean now do we count? What do we count? A little cappuccino as you know, about a half a Demi to a half cup. How I is that a half?
Caller 8 (02:11:08):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
Yeah. So I'm on one and a half in
Caller 8 (02:11:11):
You are? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:11:13):
One mug and one Demi tasian. So what can I do for my friend from Miami?
Caller 8 (02:11:19):
Well, let's ask the first question and that is well first, thank you so much. Very much. Always for taking the call.
Leo Laporte (02:11:25):
Always a pleasure. Thank you, Chris.
Caller 8 (02:11:28):
And Amy Webb, have you read the book I got as far as chapter five.
Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
I I, because I interviewed Amy, her new book is called the Genesis machine.
Caller 8 (02:11:40):
It's upset. Yes.
Leo Laporte (02:11:41):
Our quest to rewrite life in the age of synthetic biology. And it's a, there it is. Yeah. Oh, I have it. It's a great book. I know. Yeah. I gave my first copy to John. John, did you read it yet? Our studio manager, his a sci-fi fan. It kind of is sci-fi some of it, but it, it really is about the next big revolution which I've been saying is coming for about 20 years. You know, we, we are in the midst of the information revolution, the digital revolution obviously the, the, the thing, you know, the computers and the internet change so many things, but her position is we are getting very close to being able to gene, edit to gene splice, to create new genes and to modify our children before they are born to be disease free to have superpowers. What are we gonna do with this ability? And to answer your question, I haven't read the whole thing covered to cover, but I've skimed most of it, neither. Yeah. Yeah. But you enjoyed it, right?
Caller 8 (02:12:44):
Well, here's the problem. I made it till about, I did all of the first chap and then all of a sudden I got into the well part two. So
Leo Laporte (02:12:52):
You've probably been drinking too much coffee to read this book. Nope. You need to, you need to cut it into small pieces and digest it. <Laugh> you know what I would recommend if you, if you haven't finished it there are a couple of, couple of sections I would read the nine risks are good and especially, well, the chapter eight, the story of golden rice is I think a very interesting story. And then there's a whole chapter of predictions of what the world might look like. Actually it's a series of chapters and that's more like sci Fri sci-fi. So there's scenarios and those scenarios I think start in chapter 10. So go skip, you stopped at five, skip six, seven, and eight go right to nine. And I think you'll get the you'll get the momentum back.
Caller 8 (02:13:41):
It's not that I stopped at five on purpose, but one of my business partners came over and he's like, I gotta read that book. And I, oh, he stole
Leo Laporte (02:13:48):
It from you. <Laugh>
Caller 8 (02:13:50):
Yeah. So I ordered another one. Good. In the meantime, I've been reading the science of getting rich of course by wall, Steve wa and then I'm rereading Steve jobs. So
Leo Laporte (02:14:01):
How's that working for you, by the way, the science is getting rich. Is it working?
Caller 8 (02:14:05):
It, it does work if you apply, like, you know, the thing is a lot of times and they, and, and a lot of people will say, you know, Leo Laport and, and you know how you've done in your life and your career starting, you know what, and, and I remember one,
Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
I never did this to make money. There has been incidentally, I've made some money. I'm not rich, but I'm well off and that, but that's completely incidental. I did this cuz I loved it. In fact, sure. Everybody told me don't get into radio. <Laugh> it's not a, that is not a path to, to wealth and fame and fortune. That's a path to driving a 10 year old Subaru and working in Idaho. But I've been very lucky. Thanks. You are. Thanks to the premier radio network, our syndicator and my wonderful mentor at KFI radio, Robin Bucci I have been very successful. Thank you. Have Ben, hold on Chris. Taking a break. Leo Laporte the tech guy.
Leo Laporte (02:15:02):
I did not get rich writing 13 books. <Laugh> that was a sure path to PA. But I am glad Amy Webb wrote this cuz it is really I think it's well, it's more than good, although it is good reading. It's important. Cause I think this, this is something we are gonna have to deal with and I think it's very interesting. Yeah, it is. Sorry, Eric. I wasn't talking about you. I would've, I honestly driving a 10 year old Subaru living in Idaho is not bad. It's not a bad life. It's not sometimes I, I wish I had chosen that pass. Let's put it that way.
Caller 8 (02:15:45):
Wow.
Leo Laporte (02:15:46):
<Laugh>
Caller 8 (02:15:48):
Wow. Wow. That resets everything.
Leo Laporte (02:15:51):
I know like a no, you know what? You know what? Wow. All I, I wanted enough money to do a few things, send my kids to college. So they didn't have a crippling debt. When they got outta college. I feel really good that I was able to do that. Not that they're using these college educations in any way important, but at least they had the chance. So that was one. And then I wanted to have enough money so that when it, it came time to retire, I wouldn't have to live on Alto and I have, and I have achieved that now. So that's all I really wanted. Da Dana carve said it. He said getting rich and famous just means you have a bigger bedroom to watch TV in. Mm. And I think that that's kind of true. Oh yeah. Okay. You're right. I can, I can go on cruises. I can, I get to travel, but I didn't, it would've been okay if I hadn't had enough money to do that, but I do have enough money to do that. So that's fine. I don't know if I'll be buying El lucid air. It's $130,000, but I can a boy can dream.
Caller 8 (02:16:50):
Yes. Yes.
Leo Laporte (02:16:50):
Chris, did you have a question cuz I have to go for Mr. Rod pile. Oh, you're having a Mac crisis. It says here.
Caller 8 (02:16:58):
Yeah. I don't know which one to get, but you know what? I can always, you know, rod is, I talk to rod sometimes he's calling in from Mars because he's got that great view and I'm trying to get you into space and we don't know how to do it, but Rod's amazing. But I can always, I can always write you an email if that's okay and get,
Leo Laporte (02:17:14):
You know, the email. Yeah. I'll look for it.
Caller 8 (02:17:16):
I do know it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:17:17):
I'll look for it. All right Chris. Yeah. I'll talk to you there. My pleasure. Always a pleasure talking to you.
Caller 8 (02:17:23):
Thanks Leo. Take care.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:17:25):
Mr. Pile, are you, are you, are you, are you the lunch bed? So you you've gone and told me that writing books won't make you rich. You've completely destroyed my point. Do you know that? Isn't but well wait a minute. You know, better. How many books have you written? Well if you count everything, I just finished 20 and you're absolutely right. Geez. Well, I'm just saying what's your, if you took the money you made on those 20 books and divided it by the number of hours that you spent writing those books, what would your hourly wage be? You know, every now and then I do that and it, it usually is above minimum wage, which, which is good. Okay. It's more than 7 25 an hour. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. So we're pretty happy, but it's even above California. Minimum wage. No, if you're making that's really good.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:18:10):
You, I would say it'd be worthwhile if you were making like 50 to a hundred bucks an hour. Yeah. Probably gets cuz there's other benefits. You get notoriety, you get to be on radio shows and stuff like that. Well, and that's the thing, you know? And, and so if people, you know, sometimes people come asking for book advice or coaching or something and the trick is, you know, you're, it's like you said about radio. You do it because you love it. And cuz you have to, and cuz you couldn't find another way to make a living that thrilled you as much. Yes. But the speaking circuit is where it's at. Oh there's big money in that. Cause a couple hours of that is like an entire book advance, you know? No there's you do it right. I, oh man. It's good. Good money. It's kind of stunning.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:18:46):
Yeah. The last two years have not been kind, but you know yeah. Not a lot of speaking going on. No. A little bit of virtual stuff. I did do one thing. I did a, a keynote at the IBM Watson IOT conference. Oh fun. Just 2020 was starting with that's came out and they did like pay us to do it virtually, which shocked me. Cause I thought that, oh that's the end of that. But not a lot after that. Yeah. Hey space, man. Here we go. Here we go. Okay. Let me get my stack. Let me set my timer. Oh, he's got a timer. I'm big time now man. Fancy. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
Four of the 30 books. Yeah. You don't have to show up all <laugh> it's time for our space, man. He's the editor in chief of the national space society magazine at Astra. You could get a copy of that@spacedots.org. He writes about space li you just told me 30 books. Wow. 20, 20, 20. Okay. Still more than me open for 30 by the end of the, by the end of the line, you know? Yeah, no, I, I wrote, I wrote 13. I decided to stop at the lucky number of 13 because I realized I was making less than minimum wage. Yeah. So it was those royalty checks that were under a dollar that did it. Right. <laugh> amazing stories of the space, age and planetary robots blueprint for a battle star. First on the moon, some great books among the 20. He, he joins us every week to talk about the latest in space.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:20:32):
You know, we really timed this. Well, it's been an exciting time for space exploration. Hasn't it? I mean, things are just happening. It, it hasn't continues to be, but today we're, we're taking a little bit of a sideway step about, we're gonna to talk about aliens cuz we haven't talked about aliens for a while. So well they live in space. That's fair. Well, that's true. And, and I call this one to cry for help to et so they live, I should correct myself. They live in space and on Venice beach <laugh> and in your closet and I have okay. Yeah. Do we know? Well, first of all, when you say aliens, you're not talking about at UFOs, that's something else. Not at all. You're talking about the idea that life may exist on other planets, other planets, other star systems and an alien could be intelligent life, but it also could be a permium.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:21:23):
I mean, right. That would be an alien. Right? Right. So, so in our solar system, you know, whether you're talking about or in Salus or Europa, you're probably talking about microbes and, and maybe, maybe some, some multi-cellular creatures, but, but nothing substantial. But this particular story is about a project coming up for world space week in October, this year, a group called Medi, which is an offshoot CEI SOCE is a atrial intelligence. Medi is messaging extraterrestrial intelligence Medi, which is active set, which worries some people cuz they're afraid of telling the aliens are here, is gonna send out a message to the Trappist one star system in October. And it's gonna say a number of things, but among them is, Hey, we've kind of messed up our planet. Right? Little bit of trouble. What he drink? You got an extra planet <laugh> yeah. Well or do you have advice for us?
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:22:16):
So you're saying that this new message to space is a cry for help. Well kind of, I mean it's really more of an doesn. Seems like idea. It's an information. So how far away, how far away is this is this planetary system. You, you could also call it ringing the dinner bell it's 39 light years from earth. So minimum it's a 79 to 80 year round trip. So, so we won't hear back from them for 39 years, times two at if right. If it even gets it. So I, but I think what would be interesting by the way, because of 39 light years, the chance of them coming to us is low, unless they've somehow invented faster than light travel. Right. If they could do a, a wormhole shortcut, they may step right into your studio. That's sci-fi but yeah, maybe more reasonable and say, well at least we could have a very slow, but a very, maybe profitable conversation.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:23:10):
Right. So we're starting the message with a signal to let them know it's artificial. So it's not just some repeating pulsar or something. Yeah. then there's a digitized periodic table. Oh, established some ground rules, like, okay, we got the same physics here. You have, you know, where you are and then there's a little bit more stuff of mathematics and then there's cultural stuff we think would be universal everywhere in the galaxy. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like what we did with the Voyager records. Right. Right. And then there's, so this is a group of anthropologists, sociologists and artists and scientists. Oh, so we got artists in there, so there's gonna be thank goodness. That's the best of us. Yes. So they're gonna send music and I, as I gather a lot of the information about, Hey, we're, we're kind of burning the candles both end here on earth is in this music, which interestingly, the there's a number of compositions, but it includes some stuff from a news Becky group.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:24:10):
So it really is truly a universal kind of representing the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. When we sent the Voyager record out, was there any music on that? Oh yeah, there was a lot. I think there was there was natural sounds, surf, wind, thunder and animals. There were spoken greetings and 55 ancient, modern languages. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and Carl Sagan's six year old son, Nick of course. And then there was there was, I think there was some little Richard and a bunch of other there in there. Little blind, Willie Johnson. Mozart BEOV yeah. Yeah. Ky, right? Yep. Blind William Novinski Chuck Barry. See, for anybody who's at the classical music. I would've worried about sending aliens Vinky because that might just cause them to attack. It depends on which piece they did. There's the Rite of spring. Beautiful. They're on their way now. Oh, you're kidding. No, come, come on man. Well, I mean caused a riot at the Paris pump back whales.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:25:08):
Well, they're probably not per Parisians out there. <Laugh> think you're safe that so, so this is gotta go out from my radio telescope in Australia at a place called, called, I think I pronounced this go hilly. Yeah. And part of the idea of behind sending to Trappist one, which was the first system that the that, that particular telescope identified the Trappist instrument is that that star system is 7.6 billion years old. Our solar system is about four and a half billion years old. So they'd be ahead of us thought is they might be more they're older than us. So they're either way smarter. They want themselves all already in which case, or, but they may send a message back saying, yeah, we had the same problem. The secret is in eat less sugar. Yeah. <Laugh> that's right. Something, no butter is good for you.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:25:53):
Or as they said on Saturday at live, I would, that'd be great. Send more Chuck Berry <laugh> that'd be okay with me. So there are some, some it's weighing in on this though saying, you know, so SETI is listening. Medi is sending, right? Yeah. So, you know, I get kind of excited about the idea of trying to communicate, but, but besides the, you know, I say tongue and cheek about ringing the dinner, bell, come eat us for lunch. There are some people saying, you know, this is kinda like unauthorized Intertel or diplomacy. Yeah. Cause who are these guys? I mean, this, they don't represent the earth. This was the plot of a science fiction trilogy called the three build body problem. Right. And it was a, it's a fascinating conundrum. Should we announce our presence? It wasn't weird. Yeah. Should we announce our presence to the universe?
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:26:40):
Isn't that a risky thing to do? Well, these guys are just doing it, doing it right. Well these and these guys are just doing it. They right. It's not like they asked us. I mean, it's like, are you gonna walk next door to your neighbor in petal and say, Hey, call that guy in North Korea and tell him to stop messing with those missiles. You know, you want somebody who does that for a living probably to do that. I understand their point of view is, well we're scientists. This is what S if it exploration is, this is what you do is, you know it could all end in tears, I guess that's the <laugh> or a blood bath, but we'll hope not. So, and one of the things that makes Trapps interesting. So they're doing this twice. They're doing once the traps to another, to a, another star system a few weeks later called K two 18, but tra was kind of a big deal when they spotted it a few years ago.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:27:31):
I think it was 2017 because it's got seven. What we think are Rocky planets. And a lot of this is by inference. You know, we won't be able to get better, better knowledge of it until we've got the web look in that direction. It's the first target for the web, by the way. But it's got seven Rocky planets and we think three or four of 'em are in that habitable zone. So maybe they got water. Maybe they got liquid water. Maybe they got critters. So we'll see. Yeah. What's your position on all this? Should we just stay mum? Or should we reach out reach to it's too late? Right? I mean, how long have you been on the air?
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:28:05):
<Laugh> 39 years there. You you've reached Trapp one, right? No, that's true. My first, my first outreach to the aliens was in 1976. Right? So you, you make an excellent point. We got the Titanic SOS signals going out in 1912, you know, but, but don't those, I mean, over 39 light years, probably those signals have attenuated to nothing. Right? Well, but these are smart aliens. They've been around twice long. Do you think, I mean, is there just a little tiny, tiny photon still going or whatever it is? Yeah. Yeah. Cuz we pick up stuff from all over the unit. So I, I think there's a very good chance if they they're watching. I love Lucy right now. I love Lucy. And they're looking at that conveyor belt with the chocolates right now thinking that these people are right for send more Vita Vita <laugh> Leo Laport, these tickets.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:29:00):
Wow. You're right. That wasn't Vegemite. That was Vida Vida, Vida Vida. Although there is a Marmite crisis looming. Yeah. Yeah. Big Marmite shortage. Oh no. Yes. <laugh> I know. You know, these are the things I watched CNN and they're talking about the war in Ukraine, but they're missing the big stories. What about Amber Hert and Johnny Depp? What about the big Marmite shortage? These are things inquiring minds wanna know, but did you subscribe to see an in streaming service to try? No, I did not. No. I don't think you did. I did not either because there was no news on it. This is where they went it wrong. Everybody assumed, oh, it's gonna be streaming CNN, but it's not. It's crappy shows that nobody wants to watch. So what kind of stuff was on there? Cause I was listening to you guys talking about that this week on it was all, it was all you know, this week in tech, I think CNN has a lot of movies, you know, document or movie. So it was a lot of that. And then they had shows Chris Wallace, they hired him away from Fox. And so right. But it, but it was, it was all gonna be kind of chat shows, not news shows.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:30:15):
Oh yeah. That's soft programming. They did, it was soft programming. And the reason it's soft is that they, they didn't want cable companies to be mad at 'em cause they still make the bulk of the money. This is the innovator's dilemma. They still make the bulk of their money from, from cable. So when, and, and you know, I mean, cable broke their deal with me when they said, Hey, if you pay us, we won't show commercials. Oops. That didn't turn out to be true. Did it right? I mean, that was really Netflix. What's happenings. Again. Netflix is gonna bring in commercials. I heard you guys talk about not gonna watch it. If it's got commercials, the whole purpose of Netflix is to avoid commercials and it was bad enough when commercials drove broadcast TV, but at least those shows were made to host commercials with the Prota agonist, looking off camera with that long stares, they faded out of act two.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:31:08):
Now they just drop 'em in like somebody dropped the knife on the thing. Right. <laugh> and the commercials comes bang in they're in the middle of an emotional scene. They go, whoa, boom. We just had the kiss moment. And now we're watching a, my favorite. That was weird. My favorite moment when I'm watching shows on Netflix or I pay for at commercial free Hulu or peacock, is that part where they have the dramatic and they fade to black and they fade right back up to see <laugh>. I love that. I love that. It's just to me, it's the commercials. I didn't see. Meanwhile, it is weird seeing let's go to commercials breaks. Isn't it? Yeah. <laugh> you gotta go. No, no, no. I don't have to go. Well I do, but I don't have to right away. But isn't it weird having the five a structure go away?
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:31:56):
Yeah. I I'm still not quite used to it. I, I don't miss it at all. I think they still, I think they still do it. They just don't have a commercial to, to signal. You know, if you haven't watched slow horses on apple TV, plus I haven't, if you have apple TV plus highly recommend it. This is my kind of TV and, and I bet you do, cuz you probably watched for all mankind. I do you so slow horses is a, is a British spy show. Really wonderful. And the final episode is Friday. So you can binge the whole damn thing if you wait till Thursday.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:32:34):
So I see somebody's mentioning on the Chad Avi lobe, he's the astronomer at Harvard that got much attention when O MOU. Oh yeah. Slung through the solar system few years ago. And he finally wrote a book about it, which is pretty interesting. If you get a chance, oh, I'll have to read it. And he, his logic is good. You know, there's still people that are kind of scratching their head over how somebody running the Harvard astronomy department would step out and talk about that. But that's what makes good science right. This take can change how open mind and I'll open mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's no aliens, but good. I'm good. Good on him. Hey, thank you rod. Thank you, sir. See ya. Take care. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy this week and every week. Thanks to professor Laura, our musical director. She spins the discs for us and makes us smile with her musical selections. Thanks to Kim Shaffer. She's the one who answers the phone gets you on the air. Most of all, though, thanks to you. Both who listen and call cuz won't be silly for me to sit here, talking to myself the whole time. Thank you. I really appreciate this opportunity. 88 88. Ask Leo time for a couple more call before we wrap it up. Richard, on the line from Paducah, Kentucky. Hello Richard.
Caller 9 (02:33:47):
Hey, this Richard obviously. Hello Richard. <Laugh>. I have a Sonology for bay NA with the two SSDs.
Leo Laporte (02:33:57):
Very nice. And
Caller 9 (02:33:58):
I find if it's ology, I find information on the four days, but not really on SSD, any recommendation on size for
Leo Laporte (02:34:07):
Those it doesn't need to be big those SSDs. So the Sonology is a network attached storage. And when you buy it all you're really getting is an enclosure. In your case, an enclosure that can hold four drives, spinning drives typically, but you could put SSDs in there. I don't, I think it's probably not necessary. Theologies are great. I recommend 'em. I have two of them. I, I love them. And that what happens is you put software on there that it's essentially a form of Linux. That's customized for that. And you can do a variety of things. Most people at least use them for backup, but there's other things you can do. It could be a server in your house, all sorts of stuff. A lot of people use Plex on a Sonology to make a media server. The bottom of the Sonology has slots for one or two in many cases, not all of them, but of slots for one or two little SSDs.
Leo Laporte (02:34:57):
And the whole purpose of those is to speed up primarily rights, but to some degree reads of small files. So they're, they're basically cash in all of computer science, you'll see cash everywhere. The idea being when you access some data, the chances are good. You're gonna wanna access it again real soon now. So when you access data, whether it's a website you're visiting or in this case a file you're taking off the hard drive, chances are good. You're gonna want it again. So we're gonna save that data somewhere faster than the internet or the spinning drives in case you ask for it again, and a good, a caching algorithm really speeds up your computing because it's gonna predict, yeah, he's gonna want this again. So let's keep it right here. So that's what those do. You don't have to have them on a Sonology the idea is primarily it's gonna speed up reads and writes because if you're reading a file or writing a file, chances are, you know, you're gonna do it again. It's just it's it's and that I, you know what, I don't even know how much it speeds it up by. I always buy them <laugh> I always buy them. You don't eat a big 1 64 gigs is more than enough. You can get 32 gigs. If you can find a, you certainly don't need 128 gigs because it's not gonna ever use that much. It's a small cash kind of while you're reading and writing. So I'm sure Sonology has a recommendation somewhere for what to get, but the nice thing they
Caller 9 (02:36:26):
Have all the charts and I'm sure they do. I'm visually impaired butt, anything for the small ones a little bit.
Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
Well, let me see if I can find this for you. Cash SS D recomme recommended size. Let's see what they say. This is on the knowledge base analogy, knowledge base. And the question is what's the minimum recommended size for my SSD cash. They say the table below shows. So if your volume size is less than 24 terabytes <laugh> which I'm sure it is
Caller 9 (02:36:59):
E yes, it will be.
Leo Laporte (02:37:01):
They say the minimum size of the SSD cash is 400 gigabytes. Wow, wow. Oh, wow. Oh,
Caller 9 (02:37:09):
Terabyte or even a Tebo.
Leo Laporte (02:37:10):
Wow. That's surprising. Yeah, not even a terabyte 400 gigabytes.
Caller 9 (02:37:14):
So a terabyte would probably be better. Cause
Leo Laporte (02:37:16):
Well, it's more than I thought it was the larger. Yeah. Yeah. They have something called the SST cash advisor. So that's,
Caller 9 (02:37:25):
I didn't get
Leo Laporte (02:37:26):
To that. That's part of their,
Caller 9 (02:37:28):
I wasn't searching the right thing.
Leo Laporte (02:37:30):
It's not online. It's on your Sonology so it's a oh, okay. Yeah. So the, you can enable it and what it does, is it? Yeah. I didn't even know this existed. So before you buy the cash cards before you lay down your cash run this thing, keep it running and what it does, it watches what you do and then based on your behavior, it will then tell you. Oh, cool. Cool. Yeah. So that's probably gonna be the most accurate, I'm actually surprised they recommend such a large amount of cash. I would've said much smaller probably. Yeah.
Caller 9 (02:38:05):
Oh, that's surprising too.
Leo Laporte (02:38:06):
So they, they to do the SSD cash analysis, they need at least seven days of data. And then it will generate a result. So I would say don't yet. And run the advisor. I don't, I can't believe they say 400 gigabytes. That seems like way more than you would probably need, but yeah. Hey, we're trust in Sonology they don't, they don't make money on that directly. Cuz you can use third party cashes. So,
Caller 9 (02:38:33):
So also I have one, I'm not a doctor, but I'm a patient and your dry hack. You mentioned your medicines, you take yesterday and you said lisinopril. Yeah. For blood pressure. Yes, sir. I was allergic to that and it caused dry hack for
Leo Laporte (02:38:47):
Me. Goodness. Well that's good to know. No, I think mine's allergies because I have been taking lisinopril for about five or six years now.
Caller 9 (02:38:53):
So, and you've been hacking for about that. Haven't you maybe
Leo Laporte (02:38:57):
It's either that or the Marlboros one or the other I'm gonna I'll quit real soon now. No, I yeah. See
Caller 9 (02:39:03):
Your doctor about
Leo Laporte (02:39:04):
That. I will ask him about that. Thank you for that suggestion. I appreciate that. You're welcome. But see we're helping each other. Thank you, Richard. Yeah, yeah. Have a great day. You're welcome. Leo Shannon, Fort Collins, Colorado. Hello Shannon.
Caller 10 (02:39:17):
Hi there. How are you?
Leo Laporte (02:39:18):
I am well
Caller 10 (02:39:20):
Good. Question. I have a really old MacroPro and I've had it resuscitated once and I feel like since it came back to me while it is at least turning on, it got a little bit slow.
Leo Laporte (02:39:36):
How old, when you very old, how old?
Caller 10 (02:39:40):
I wanna say 15 years old.
Leo Laporte (02:39:41):
Oh my gosh. It's ancient.
Caller 10 (02:39:44):
So yeah, but let me tell you, it has, it has all of my Adobe suite on it so I can use it.
Leo Laporte (02:39:51):
Yeah. Nowadays, Adobe avoids that problem by not selling it to you outright, you have to subscribe <laugh> and you don't wanna do that.
Caller 10 (02:39:58):
Exactly. I'm gonna try to get them, get them put onto my other MacBook pro that's newer.
Leo Laporte (02:40:05):
So there's a couple of things you can do. There's a couple of things you can do. First thing is you can get a program like carbon copy cl that's one or super duper. That's another, that will take your internal drive and copy it bit for bit to an external drive, which means all your Adobe products will go with it and it will, and they'll continue to work. I would definitely start that with there. A slow drive usually means it's the beginning of the end for that drive and slow drives the number one cause of computer slow down 15 year old hard drive. It's probably on its last legs. So the first thing to do is yeah, well just go out to the big box store. You can get a giant drive more than you'd ever need for under a hundred bucks.
Leo Laporte (02:40:53):
Plug it in, download super duper or carbon copy cl you're gonna have to get one. That'll work with your old version of Mac OS. I'm pretty sure both will have a version you can use. And what they do is they make an exact copy of your internal drive. Now, now you have an option. One way you could speed up that computer and I'm not sure about the old MacBook pros, how easy to get into they are, but you could put an SSD probably in there, which would immensely speed things up, even just replacing the hard drive would probably help.
Caller 10 (02:41:24):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (02:41:25):
Okay. But the first step is to absolutely. Now, before you go much farther, get a backup with carbon copy Clary, super duper. So that if anything happens to that internal drive, you at least have that. And by the way, then you could restore it to your new machine as well.
Caller 10 (02:41:41):
Yes. So one of my first, one of my main questions is though I did put a booster in the same room as no, that doesn't help. I feel like it almost floated up. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:41:53):
Well it's yeah. It's it depends why it's slow if it's slow cuz of the internet maybe, but yeah. Yeah. But I think it's slow cause of the hard drive.
Caller 10 (02:42:00):
Yeah. It's a hard drive. Okay. Thank you Leo.
Leo Laporte (02:42:02):
Hey, a pleasure. Thank you, Shannon. And thanks to all of you for calling and for listening. I think it's time to wrap things up for this week, but I'll be back next week and we can talk about all of your problems with your technology next week or thank you something more uplifting. I don't know, space aliens. <Laugh> Chuck Barry. Thank you for joining me. The website tech eye labs.com has all the answers to all the questions. We'll have audio and video from the show up there in a couple of days, as well as a complete transcript. So you can search for the part of the show you want to hear again? Meantime, I'll see. See you next time. Leo Laport, the tech guy have a great key weekend. Well that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. TWI T 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 watch, choose 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.
