Ask The Tech Guys 1995 Transcript

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today? It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte coming up. Why do people keep putting notes on my EV when I'm charging it at public charging stations? Samuble Sam would explain.

0:00:11 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Mikah Sargent and I, plus Leo, walk you through Safari Profiles, a new feature in MacOS and O, I didn't even know it existed.

0:00:19 - Leo Laporte
And then we're going to talk to a businessman. He prints candles and wrapping paper and he wants to show you how. We'll show him how to show you how. Next on, ask the Tech Guys.

0:00:32 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Tweet.

0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 1995, recorded Sunday, october 8th 2023, acknowledging the sneeze. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Miro, the online workspace for innovation, where your team can dream, design and build the future together from any location. Tap into a way to map processes, visualize content, run retrospectives and keep all your documents and data in one place. Get your first three boards for free at miro.com/podcast Listeners of this program get an ad-free version if they're members of Club Twit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows, plus membership in the Club Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for Twit listeners. And finally the Twit Plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux show, the GizFiz and more. Go to twit.tv/clubtwit and thanks for your support.

0:02:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, leave a voicemail. During the week We'll be able to answer your question. You can also get in touch with us a couple of other ways. call.twit.tv is the url that you can go to, so this is for a phone call.

0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
Yes, what is for a Zoom call, zorro? That's a Zoom call call.twit.tv, or maybe Zoom.

0:02:35 - Mikah Sargent
Zoom. I don't know if people want to do that. Actually, this should be something. Yeah, it probably is.

0:02:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it is. If it seems to be a Zoom call, oh, I know it is, it's from the prisoner. Be seeing you. I'll be seeing you, and then you can email atg at twittv. Yep, okay.

0:02:56 - Mikah Sargent
Who got through those. Oh, what's email? Atgtwittv attgtwittv AztecGuystwittv. Yeah they all work.

0:03:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I figure, if I give them one, it won't be so confusing Atgtwittv. Or if you mistype it, then it won't probably still work. That's the best way.

0:03:15 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe that's fair.

0:03:16 - Leo Laporte
You know Zoom actually is in the news. Tuesday they're going to have their big event, which they call Zoomtopia, Zoomtopia, zoomtopia, and they are going to announce an AI Google Docs competitor, an AI powered workspace that listens to your call and then uses AI to edit, draft, summarize, include meeting notes. Plus, it will eventually have all the Google Docs word processing and stuff like that.

0:03:53 - Mikah Sargent
And they've already added mail to this. They've added AI summarizations of meetings. They've added you can do your calendar in Zoom. So they're really it's giving Microsoft teams at this point. Oh that is.

0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
It's a team vibe. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, teams that my Microsoft just updated to be half as big as twice as fast, twice as big and half as fast. I can never, I'll never be sure. A little word of warning from the Federal Trade Commission. You've heard of them. I've heard, yeah, ftc. They say Americans have lost billions and billions of dollars in social media scams. A golden goose for scammers.

0:04:37 - Mikah Sargent
Look, there's a hooded oh, I saw that scammer. There's a hacker hoodie. Yeah, that's a hooded hacker.

0:04:43 - Leo Laporte
That's a new report because it says social media just opens it right, opens you right up. I've, in fact, I read a story, a related story about this is actually a terrible story elderly woman who was a big fan of the Bee Gees and she was on a Facebook Bee Gees group and there was a button that said message Barry Gibb, one of the brothers. And so she did and she got in this conversation. He said I can't send you a picture, but I am Barry Gibb. She said what? And I love you, I'm deeply in love with you. She said well, what about your wife of 50 years? I'm going to leave her for you, but I want you to buy us a love hideaway in Oregon so I can come move up there with you. No, and here's the name of a good realtor in the area. Yeah, now I think there's a number of red flags there, including my bad Australian accent. Oh, that's go ahead.

0:05:44 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry, but I thought it was Cockney.

0:05:46 - Leo Laporte
Now he's from. Actually, I think they were born in England and then moved to Australia.

0:05:51 - Mikah Sargent
So you're not wrong. And you're not wrong that's, that had a mix, that's pretty good accent.

0:05:56 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, it wasn't, needless to say, barry Gibb, nor was it a realtor. She sent $11,000. She said my life savings to this guy and it's gone, of course. So that's an example of a social media scam. She was catfished. I saw it on the catfish channel on YouTube. So the FTC says social media gives scammers an edge in several ways, and I'm saying this too because you, our audience, knows this. They would have told your loved ones Exactly Because it's really is older people who are lonely and maybe not so technically aware and perhaps not so wary as we might be of strangers. The FTC says scammers can easily manufacture a fake persona, barry Gibb, or hack into your profile, pretend to be you and con your friends. Now that's happened to us, yes.

0:06:50 - Mikah Sargent
All of us Want to talk about that. Yeah, I and Jason Howell and also several people that, like Jason Snell, had this happen to him as well. They are creating fake profiles and here's the clever thing that they do they start by blocking you. So if I'm the fake Mikah Sargent, I go to Mikah Sargent and I block Mikah Sargent, because what happens is that I am not able to see this account. I don't know that it exists. So they took my name and they just did my first name and they put a period between it and my last name, and it's really easy to do this because all your pictures and everything could just be sent to that.

They're all right there, exactly. You can suck them out. Then you can also set it up to where it follows the same people, and then they just buy followers. It's way too easy to do this on Instagram, exactly, and so the only way that I knew about it was because a friend of mine texted me and said I don't think this is you that's saying this message to me, is it? And the same thing with Jason? Jason had it happen two or three times, howell, and it happened two or three times, and you have to have everybody that you know go in and say this is a person that is attempting to be another person. They're lying about the fact that they're this person and it can take a long time for those to go down. I think one of the fake accounts for Jason Howell was up for a while he had.

0:08:05 - Leo Laporte
It's gone now I was going to my messages because he messaged me saying let's be friends. And I was going to show it, but it's gone now. So, yeah, it was taken down.

0:08:14 - Mikah Sargent
And it ended up being because Jason had one of his friends kind of follow through a little bit just to see where it was going to go. Guess what they wanted, guess what they wanted Cryptocurrency scale Got a great investment for you.

0:08:26 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to be rich.

0:08:28 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, I'm really getting into this crypto thing lately. Have you heard about?

0:08:31 - Leo Laporte
it Well, and that goes along with and this is another venue, I think, or another vector for attack text messages we're all getting those text messages.

0:08:39 - Mikah Sargent
I get them from Lisa all the time. They're not actually from Lisa. Oh my, you're still getting them. Yeah, but what's funny and what's foolish is that they're using her former last name and almost all of them it's always signed Lisa K. Wow, yeah, that's weird, yeah.

0:08:55 - Leo Laporte
And so then I immediately know they're not super smart.

0:08:57 - Mikah Sargent
No, they're not. They're pulling from online databases or data buy.

0:09:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact, that's one of the reasons that Lisa uses one of her sponsors to lead me, because this all stuff is all online, right? If you ever search for yourself, it's all online. And so what they do is they'll look for executives and companies and they're able to get because it's all kind of on data broker sites and other places kind of get the hierarchy, Yep, and they use LinkedIn for it as well. Yeah, LinkedIn, Lisa's on LinkedIn and so I'm not on LinkedIn. By the way, it might be why I don't get ever somehow get involved in this.

0:09:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I never get any messages from you Don't start.

0:09:38 - Leo Laporte
This is not an invitation to demonstrate your prowess. Yeah, so they get the tree of responsibilities and they say, oh okay, lisa's the boss, here's her support.

0:09:50 - Mikah Sargent
And they message those people and it's things like I, yes, I need you to please go to the store and buy 15 Apple store cards, and then I need you to send me the codes for those, because we know seriously foolish to fall for that it's me, it's Lisa and I need these Apple store. I need it. I'm in a meeting right now. I can't get to the phone. This reminds me of there's a video of sometimes they'll have like YouTubers or TikTokers or whomever who know what's going on and they like scam the scammers.

0:10:18 - Leo Laporte
Don't do this, by the way.

0:10:19 - Mikah Sargent
No no, no, yeah, you should not. What was fantastic about this one, though, is that the guy was pretending to be an elderly woman who had gotten the codes, and, when it came time to give over the codes, she went on to the website and started redeeming them herself, the codes that she just bought, and so she's like oh yeah, I'm on the side, I'm redeeming the codes. The scammer was getting so mad, so mad, a little peeved, no, don't redeem the codes, lady.

0:10:49 - Leo Laporte
I give them to me and wait a minute. No, I'm Lisa.

0:10:52 - Mikah Sargent
No, don't redeem the codes lady, it was almost exactly like what Leo was just doing. It was really funny, so you don't have to do it. You've seen it now.

0:11:03 - Leo Laporte
Hey, speaking of scams, this is not a scam, but it's a scam. In a way it's a scam. Elon Musk, that genius, that business genius, has decided he doesn't like the aesthetics. How?

Twitter looks with all these links. So from now on, when you post a news story on Twitter, it will have the picture from the story. You could put whatever headline you want, but it doesn't show the headline of the story from the site, nor does it show the link. It just shows the picture and your headline and then people have to click the picture to get to the story. As a result, a number of jokers on Twitter have posted headlines like Elon Musk announced his endorsement of Joe Biden for election, or Elon Musk. So this is what it looks like on Twitter. Now, right, you see the site, fortunecom.

0:11:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, because you can't see the headlines. You don't know what that actually is. Yeah, the actual article.

0:11:59 - Leo Laporte
here is the story Fortune had about Elon removing the links. There's another one here Elon Musk formally I'm sorry, elon Musk, formerly Elon comes out as transgender Axioscom, even a kind of funny looking picture Interest. No, that's not. That's not what this is.

0:12:17 - Mikah Sargent
These are all people.

0:12:18 - Leo Laporte
by the way, they're all getting banned for doing this because Elon doesn't like to be called out.

0:12:22 - Mikah Sargent
Here's one Elon Musk, found dead at Twitter HQ of a proud suicide points to the same Fortunecom article saying so these, I think these people, it's showing are saying look, this is the problem, which is exactly what they did with the checkmark accounts in the beginning to showed how easy it was to make it look as if it was someone else saying something.

0:12:43 - Leo Laporte
So let me just be clear Elon is not transgender, it's not coming out as transgender, is not endorsing by Biden and is not killed. He's not dead. So those are all hoaxes, but very difficult with the new Twitter to spot them. You know what's?

0:12:58 - Mikah Sargent
stupid about this is if the whole point is to get people to stay on your site, why would you make it so that the headline goes away? Because we all know I know many of you you just read the headline and you move on. Now you have to believe it. Now you have to click on the article to actually go and read it, so you're leaving the app.

0:13:17 - Leo Laporte
That's why sites like a Reddit, which allow you to do this, post these news articles but you can say what the subject of the message is will almost always have a little thing modified headline. The moderators will say the headline is not the same as the headline in the article, just to let you know that this is not the actual article's headline. But Twitter has no such facility. So just beware. I don't know anybody who's still using Twitter, but please stop. If you are, you're not doing yourself any favors. I think a lot of people think oh, we're going to save it. Yeah, you know, we're going to save it. We're going to keep it good, because if all the good people leave, then only the bad people will be left. Got bad news for you Only the bad people are left. I think they've left, so you're not saving anything. 888-724-2884 is the number.

I think John well, I didn't mention Samuble Sam had coming up in half an hour, is that right? Yep, yep, our car guy. He's also going to be joining us on Twitter this afternoon, so let's get some good car questions ready for Mr Sam. What should we do, john Ashley? What do you want me to do? You want to take a call. Well, yeah, I'm letting you choose. Oh, I see some hands raised in the I see.

Todd. I see Todd, let's raise. Todd's got his hand up. Hi, todd, hello Todd, hello Todd, welcome to Ask the Tech Guys.

0:14:46 - Caller
Oh, it's an honor, oh my gosh, can you hear me okay? Yes, we are honored.

0:14:50 - Leo Laporte
Right back at you. Where are you calling from, Todd?

0:14:53 - Caller
Alabama, birmingham, birmingham. I'm wearing the sweatshirt. Yes, oh, and Leo, oh, yes.

0:14:59 - Leo Laporte
And Leo, my nephew, wait a minute. Roll tide, is that right? Am I saying that right?

0:15:03 - Caller
You're saying that very well, very well. Yes, my nephew's actually been on Jeopardy twice. I heard you talking about it.

0:15:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I was thinking maybe I should try, because I I play at home as many of us do. We watch the show in the evening and I do quite. I think I do quite well. Lisa keeps saying you should try out. So well, how does your nephew's experience?

0:15:24 - Caller
First off, he was a genius at two years old, so he did very well. But he said everyone on there is a genius, it's just all how you do the buzzer. It's the buzzer. That's really. That's what somebody else said to Rick.

0:15:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know. Glenn Fleischman is going to be on Twitter this afternoon and has also been on twice. He won his first game, lost a second. I think he might have been the one who told me everybody knows the answers to almost all the questions. It's just getting in Right, it's the buzzer.

0:15:48 - Caller
That's what he.

0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
That's what he says. There is a guy who makes a practice buzzer, no idea that you could buy. You could buy a practice buzzer, so I might. Ok, yeah.

0:15:58 - Caller
All right. So I have two questions, kind of pretending the same thing. Yeah, One is I can't figure out is I'm starting a new business and I want to show people I see people do this on YouTube all the time a video of how to do it. And I see them doing the YouTube video and they also have a camera on themselves, their selves and they're in the lower right hand corner. So what software are they doing to be able to record something that they're doing on their computer screen and an image of themselves?

0:16:26 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you the most popular one, but there are many ways to do it. In fact, you do this on on iOS today and hands on Mac and hands on Mac, and you use something called E cam. But most people who are doing this use OBS Studio. It stands for Open Broadcaster Software, as you can see, windows, linux and Mac. I've used it on my Linux box to play Valheim on Twitch and it allows you to have a camera input plus the screen input. You can mix the sound. It has a lot of nice features and it's free, and it's it's open source. It's free. In fact. Twitch took the open source version and made their own version, which, if you're doing it on Twitch, it's probably a little bit easier to use. It is integration, but it's Twitch, okay.

0:17:09 - Mikah Sargent
Are you planning on saving it for later? Are these going to be live streams?

0:17:14 - Caller
It's going to go. It's going to go on YouTube and somebody clicks how do I do this? It will just stream it to them. They can see how you're recording it for a YouTube video?

0:17:23 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, so you can use OBS Studio to record as well. It's really designed, though, for live streaming.

0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
It is live stream first. It doesn't sound like you really want to do live streaming that you would like to record. Okay, are you on a Mac or Windows?

0:17:37 - Caller
Oh Leo, I'm on the Windows with six monitors. Oh nice, holy moly.

0:17:41 - Leo Laporte
So I thought this I thought this factory floor you on was just a green screen. Is this your basement?

0:17:47 - Caller
No, no no, no, this is my. Can I flip it? How do I flip this? No, I can see it. This is my main. This is my main business right now. Oh nice, so just this is just the stuff I do like this machine over here. It's printing wrapping paper.

0:17:59 - Leo Laporte
What? Oh man, you buy your wrap.

0:18:02 - Caller
Look at it. Look at it, yeah, you're printing wrapping paper. How did you get so?

0:18:06 - Leo Laporte
entrepreneurial.

0:18:08 - Caller
I claim because I'm Jewish.

0:18:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, that's not true, they're playing.

0:18:12 - Caller
I know. They're playing for Jewish people.

0:18:15 - Leo Laporte
So though you, somehow, though you said I'm was this from an early age, that you said I'm going to be a business guy and start businesses.

0:18:24 - Caller
Well, I started business was always when I was young, and then, when I graduated college, I became a stockbroker and I really oh yeah, you need to run your own place yeah. Yes, so I do. So what's the name of your?

0:18:37 - Leo Laporte
what's the name of the wrapping paper business? I need some, I know.

0:18:40 - Caller
Well, leo, I only I only sell this on Etsy. Oh that I have other businesses. I've actually called you before, when my other business is, years ago, but this just sells on Etsy, and during Christmas, you know, I'll sell a few thousand rolls. Wow, no problem Kind of custom.

0:18:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean, what is it that makes you unique?

0:19:02 - Caller
Yeah, good question. No, they're, they're. They're good designs, they're good You're saying nothing.

0:19:08 - Leo Laporte
I'm exactly yeah.

0:19:10 - Caller
No, well, I used to. I used to do custom stuff like we use. I started out doing the custom socks. In fact, my ex-wife did a selfie on socks and I, my friend, will say we need to put this on Etsy. And I sold 999 pairs of socks in one night.

0:19:26 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, all right. What's your wrapping paper business on Etsy called so I can look you up.

0:19:31 - Caller
Oh, that is called. Hold on, let me put the name Am Am, amers, am ERS. Phenomenon F, p, h, e, n, o, m, e, n, o N.

0:19:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my Amers phenomenon. So you don't really care about the name. You figure people are going to search for wrapping paper and Etsy and find you basically the name doesn't, it doesn't matter, no, no. I just searched for wrapping paper on Etsy and I found bacon scented gift wrapping paper. What yeah?

0:20:00 - Mikah Sargent
I need to get that for somebody, yeah.

0:20:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to know how he makes it, though. I'm thinking it's a similar set up to yours, but right out of the printer he's got a George Forman grill and he's cooking bacon. I don't know. I don't want to know. He probably does. Yeah, you know, but that's what's cool about Etsy. Well, this is. This is neat. Yeah, so I'm sorry you're on a PC windows. There are a lot of different ways to do. If you're not doing it live, you don't really need OBS. That's kind of overkill, because what you really need is just some software that will mix your output of the camera and the output of your screen and then you control it. I know a lot of programs. In fact I use one on the Mac I really like, but I don't know anything on windows. You could use the camera Again. That's live focused?

0:20:48 - Mikah Sargent
Well, nobody, so I don't think you can. I don't know about its windows. I don't know that it works on windows. Okay, it is just as much recording focused as it is live focused. So, yeah, it's built for Mac ground up, so that, unfortunately, won't work. I would love to know what the folks at Lindacom, which is now oh, they do great stuff because they and I can't think of what they're called now LinkedIn learning they do this regularly on windows machines.

0:21:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to think they use cam studio or something like cam studio.

0:21:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, does the chat have any suggestions for what, what you, what you folks like to know? They?

0:21:27 - Caller
do so. Can I ask my next question?

0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
Why are you waiting?

0:21:30 - Caller
Sure, Okay. So the new company is going to send links to people every day, not spamming. They're going to sign up for them. We'll get a link. I would like to do the links by text. How does a like when I go to my bank and I log in it, it sells sent me a number to type in? How are they sending me those links by text?

0:21:49 - Mikah Sargent
I have a previous sponsor that could be very helpful. Podiumcom.

0:21:53 - Leo Laporte
So, there are a lot of ways to do this too. You're thinking podium, and podium is a service that allows small businesses to text their customers, but there are other ways to do this as well. In fact, years ago, I bought a Kickstarter project from one of our good friends it's actually a friend of Steve Gibson's that had a built in text messaging component to it and he was using Twilio. So this is kind of the more low end way to do it, which is Twilio. It's probably cheaper as well, but it isn't going to. It depends on how you're. You seem like a kind of a do it yourself kind of guy. So what Twilio is is an interface to the phone system from a computer. That's what they sell and what the way it works is. You'll buy a phone number from them and you pay by its pennies a minute. There's all sorts of the pricing is interesting. It's really based on. I've used it before.

0:22:51 - Mikah Sargent
It's pretty simple in terms of guy. I wanted to create a custom way to like text myself something, and I was able to get that set up with Twilio and not spend a bunch of money.

0:23:01 - Leo Laporte
No, it's fairly cheap. But if you're doing it it's all depend on because that was one person Right. So, it all depends on traffic.

Yep, yeah, I don't think Twilio is too hard to use. Okay, even something like podium is probably using Twilio underneath it. This is. There are a lot of businesses built on top of Twilio, like your business is built on top of Etsy, using Twilio as the interface to the phone system. So, so for recording cam studio, which is free and open source uh, this studio, cam studio. I've used this on windows. Uh, it will let you record the. Basically, it's does do exactly what you want. In fact. Here's bullet point number one use it to create demonstration videos. There you go, all right. So I've used this and it works very well. Uh, it's, it's, it's a really nice, simple system and it's absolutely free. Uh, and then, and then Twilio, which is, uh, you know, if you go to twiliocom, it's not immediately apparent that you could use this for yourself.

10 X, your customer relationships with Twilio, ai, guaranteed protection from SMS pumping, fraud and all that stuff. It's not. What you really want to do is go to their solutions and you're going to look at their, uh, their phone system solutions. They have customer. You know, it's interesting. They have decided why are we letting other people make money based on our hardware solution, our interface solution. So they're making their own high end stuff. But you, if you, if you spend a little time messing around with it, it's fairly inexpensive and it's what everybody uses to get to the text messaging part.

If that's too complicated podiumcom is also fairly inexpensive and we'll do that all for you. It's podium is really for, like, the dentist office that wants to text messages to customers saying, hey, don't forget to rate us, things like that. But you could use it for what you want to use.

0:24:48 - Caller
Perfect, awesome, all right. Well, those are my two questions.

0:24:52 - Leo Laporte
Hey, let me. So I want to give you more plugs.

0:24:56 - Mikah Sargent
Uh, what else? Thank you. There's a Betty white candle you can buy from the shop.

0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
Betty white candle. You do a Betty white candle.

0:25:05 - Caller
I do an everybody candle until I get it a season to assist.

0:25:11 - Leo Laporte
So you also make candles? Wait a minute, I want to see your. I want to see this. I know.

0:25:15 - Caller
I don't, I don't make candles really what I do. I used to make candles, but then I could go to the Dollar Tree and buy a candle for $1.25.

0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
You buy the wrapper around it. Yeah, no I print the wrapper, I mean yeah. Yeah, so these are like prayer candles, you make prayer candles.

0:25:28 - Caller
Yeah. So over here, just all the candles all set in a file with some night orders. One I print off six, You're brilliant. And so there's Kurt Russell.

0:25:38 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, oh, that's a cool candle, kurt Russell.

0:25:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, can I get a snake...

0:25:43 - Leo Laporte
Can I get a snake bliskin candle? That's Kurt Russell with it. That's Kurt Russell with a black eye patch from escape from New York.

0:25:51 - Caller
I bet I have that. Yeah, I bet I have that.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
I bet you have it. Look, he's looking for his snake bliskin.

0:25:55 - Caller
I have one question Do you have a photo of Leo in there? Maybe we could do Leo rapping.

0:26:00 - Leo Laporte
I will not sue you if you do a Leo prayer candle. I promise you.

0:26:04 - Caller
Well, since I'm the one who sent you all the socks, I already have the Leo. Oh, oh, that's that's who sent us those socks. I sent you the yeah, I sent you the song. Oh, we love those socks, thank you, oh, you're my pleasure, my pleasure. Mikah, you want to know why there weren't Mikah socks, but there are not enough pictures of you out there.

0:26:20 - Mikah Sargent
Fair enough, I'll have to get some more out there.

0:26:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I do have a question for you. I'm not sure Can I wash those socks you can wash.

0:26:32 - Caller
No, it's all something called sublimation. You'll never fade Like. I do that sock, the exact same way I do this mug, oh my God, a Wonder Woman mug. Yeah, it's the exact same process you do. You can do anything synthetic.

0:26:45 - Mikah Sargent
There's Grinch wrapping paper. That is delightful, so do you make a lot of money.

0:26:53 - Leo Laporte
Should I do this for my retirement?

0:26:56 - Caller
Like like two. Two years ago I made like over $100,000 a year Nice, but Etsy's gotten so saturated now. That's why I'm, that's why I need a branch out. Starting a new business. Well, I have other websites, but that's why I'm diversified.

0:27:13 - Leo Laporte
That's the key, isn't it Is to always be doing the new thing right.

0:27:16 - Caller
The next thing I have 20 websites, yeah, yeah.

0:27:20 - Mikah Sargent
Do you sleep at all? Yeah, yeah, when do?

0:27:22 - Caller
you sleep? I sleep at all. I have plenty of labor force.

0:27:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you also have plenty of incentive.

0:27:29 - Caller
I see.

0:27:29 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, I have a big labor force. No, I know.

0:27:33 - Leo Laporte
You keep starting businesses. I'm so thrilled to meet you.

0:27:38 - Caller
Again, I guess we talked before.

0:27:40 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for the socks.

0:27:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, thank you.

0:27:43 - Leo Laporte
And uh wow, I just call in once in a while.

0:27:45 - Caller
Let us know how it's going Exactly, follow up. Oh, you might remember my first call I called you about was I had a wall of stickers and I couldn't read the stickers on there. Yes, and I'll show you. That's the wall. Oh my.

0:27:57 - Leo Laporte
God.

0:27:58 - Caller
Wow, yeah, and look at the stickers.

0:28:01 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, you've got the ladder. Is this your basement or do you have?

0:28:05 - Leo Laporte
a rent a warehouse.

0:28:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, is this a warehouse.

0:28:07 - Caller
No, no, no, I have a 3000 square foot. I used to have a 47,000 square foot warehouse, but now I have a 3000 square foot warehouse on my property.

0:28:17 - Leo Laporte
I think you have a lot of energy, my friend, yeah, and you just Thank you. You have you just always. Your mind is in constant uh ferment.

0:28:27 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, thank you very much. I'm definitely buying the prison, mike mug prison.

0:28:32 - Leo Laporte
Mike mug. It's prison. Mike on Etsy. I love prison.

0:28:36 - Caller
Mike. Hey, I have a prison Trump in the exact same outfit too. Might as well. Right, I have Trump. I have Trump in the exact same bandana. I've sold only one of them.

0:28:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm not a hundred. You never know, do you?

0:28:49 - Mikah Sargent
I'm not a prison was the dementors. They were flying around.

0:28:55 - Leo Laporte
I had no idea. Yeah, so how do you get the ideas for this? Do you watch a lot of TV to your kids? Say, dad, we need to do a prison. Mike mug, by the way, you're not alone.

0:29:05 - Caller
Yeah, they'll do stuff. Yeah, no, yeah.

0:29:08 - Caller
There's the saturation you were talking about.

0:29:10 - Caller
You can put something on Etsy and have it knocked off.

0:29:15 - Mikah Sargent
Oh I have like bots yeah.

0:29:18 - Caller
I made this awesome shirt for Michigan they're coach Jim Harbar. I made a shirt and it said have a blue Christmas because their colors were blue and they go blue. Yeah, and I thought it was my million dollar idea. I had there were 50 other sites with it, like the next day.

0:29:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and there's nothing you can do about it so that's why I'm getting into something else. Since we started talking a prison Mike prayer candle. Oh wow, so it's just you cannot win. You cannot win.

0:29:45 - Caller
You can't win, but whatever you do is going to be out there.

0:29:48 - Mikah Sargent
You are winning because you have Chiwawa wrapping paper. What so?

0:29:54 - Leo Laporte0
I do.

0:29:55 - Leo Laporte
Did you do that, knowing that Michael?

0:29:57 - Caller
would fall for you.

0:29:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, did you know.

0:29:59 - Caller
No, I think I saw, I think I sold one role that in the history of having it up there.

0:30:02 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I'm, you're about to sell another.

0:30:04 - Leo Laporte
So you print on demand? I would guess you don't print these all at a time.

0:30:08 - Caller
No, it's only on demand.

0:30:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, people in the chat room who want to apparently want to compete with you? What is the name of the printer you use?

0:30:17 - Caller
Well, I have two printers. I would not get this. This over here is called a Maki. This is a. This is a Maki and it's what it's an it it's got a UV light and every time the light hits something that drives it. But this one over here, this one you could buy this one for like three grand. It's an HP design jet and it's like 10 times faster and you could buy a used one for nothing now and it prints a little bit better. But I'm waiting for a new head to come in. So the thing is, you have to have two printers of everything when you do this, because something's always down.

0:30:51 - Leo Laporte
Hey, it is such a pleasure to talk to you.

0:30:52 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much Thank you for showing us my pleasure.

0:30:55 - Leo Laporte
All right, I'm glad, and we now know a secret to his productivity Whenever he runs out of ideas, he orders a new head, and then it comes in and you got more ideas. Good idea, yes, thank you. I need a new head myself.

0:31:12 - Caller
Great to talk to you Wow 8887242884.

0:31:18 - Leo Laporte
That, john Ashley, was an excellent selection. Yes, good work.

0:31:21 - Mikah Sargent
So don't another one. Yeah, don't let us go down from here. I do have another one idea, but I need help with something else first, is it an ad break? I was trying to get to that, but yeah, sorry, I didn't let you. Just I didn't let you segue into that, my bad.

0:31:41 - Leo Laporte
You know, subtlety is not necessary. Honestly, good thinking. Maybe this would be a good time to tell you a little bit about our fine sponsor, the Oxford English Dictionary. I shouldn't have clicked twice on on Miro as I got you know. Have you noticed that on the Mac that it often accidentally maybe it's just the way I type opens the dictionary? It's like I know what the word the means. I don't need help, thank you. Our show today, brought to you by Miro and you know this is we were talking about this on Wednesday on Google. Google has discontinued the Jamboard. They're $5,000 physical screen that you would brainstorm on and stuff like that and it's and people who bought it. I feel so sorry for you because end of the line and then early next year they're just going to like disconnect it.

But you know what Google's telling people go to Miro and you know what they should have gone to Miro on the first place, because you're set of $5,000 for this thing. Your first three boards are free. What is Miro? Oh, it is the ultimate tool, the online workspace for innovators. What does that mean exactly? Well, it's a great place for you and your team to bring your innovative work together and nowadays, with teams located all over the world in different time zones some of them are in the office, some are you need a single source of truth, one place where all the ideas go. That's Miro. It's packed with the right things to be. For instance, if you're doing product design, product development, your dream products home base Our last caller could use Miro to brainstorm his next brilliant idea. We're talking for product specifically product development. Six whole capability bundles, from product development workflows to content visualization. And here's the nice part and this is new all powered by Miro AI. That means you're generating new ideas or summarizing complex information pretty much instantly. Let the AI do it. Miro can work for any team, but product development teams really get the full experience. It offers teams the richest feature set of any visual workspace, with specific tools to help with strategy or process mapping, facilitation tools to run effective design or agile sprints. You can have your swim lane or your can band. You get the picture. Miro connects super seamlessly to all the things, all the tools you're already using. We use it with Zapier and Google docs. If you're in product development, you might use Jira or Confluence, google of course a sauna, of course so you could centralize work in a way that makes sense for your team. And here's why this works. They don't have to leave Miro to update projects or statuses in any of these tools. It all is inside Miro. When you stay in one tool, get all the benefits of the other tools. You don't have context switching, you don't leave ideas on the table, you don't forget about stuff. It's all in there. It ends up being a massive time saver. In fact, miro users report they save I love this up to 80 hours a year per user. That's like an extra two weeks of vacation every year by streamlining conversations, cutting down on meetings, seeing all the most up to date information in one place. That's your Miro board. Miro just released a board this. You know what he could use this a board video recording feature called TalkTrack to save even more time. We're talking about pre-recording your thoughts and just leaving it on the board. Now you don't have to schedule another meeting. You just say, hey, here's my ideas, and then people can leave comments, they can leave suggestions, they can leave their own talk tracks. It's super powerful. And here's the best part your first three boards are free because Miro knows, once you start using it, you're going to get. It takes a little, you know you have to spend some time with it to get all the things you can do, and then you're you're going to. It's your. The light bulb is going to keep going off. Oh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. It's incredible.

Take a look at the Miro verse two. It's on the website for other people's ideas, ways they use Miro. It really can fit any workflow, any style of working that your team wants to use, even for an individual. I find it great for brainstorming. M I R O. miro.com/podcast. Your first three boards free. Start working better together at Miro dot com slash podcast. It's, it's, it's mind boggling, it's. This is exactly what computers and software were designed for and the internet was designed for me. It's a perfect expression of it. Thank you, miro, for supporting the tech guys. Now I think we have time for one more thing what do you have a voicemail there? Yeah, I think a voice mail. Okay, j A go for it.

0:36:37 - Caller
This is Lori calling from Tampa Florida. Hi, lori. My question is when copilot is integrated into windows 11, will it have direct access to data on the computer's hard drive, such as documents, downloads, et cetera? If yes, can that access be disabled?

0:36:59 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, oh, he's thinking privacy. So yes, and yes is the answer. So one of the great copilot, which is Microsoft's version of open AI's chat, gpt we they're using the word copilot in a variety of settings. There's copilot for GitHub, which does computer programming for you, it's a programming partner, but, as you probably know, microsoft announced this a couple of weeks ago at that big event. They are going to start building this into it. They're already got Bing chat in their edge browser and they're going to start building Bing chat, aka copilot, into windows, and that's, I mean, that's part of, I think, 2024 H two, I think, or 23 H two. I think it's coming soon.

If you don't already have it, part of the value of it is you could say, yes, summarize everything in this folder, so it does have access to that, but you don't have to give it access to that, and you don't? I think. What I hear you saying, laura, is that you're worried about Microsoft having access to your documents, your private information, and Microsoft's pretty clear that they're not going to do that. It's completely permission based. It is true, though, and a number of companies have said we don't want our employees using these tools. It is true that in many cases that information is then set up to the server for the work, and in I, for instance, I know with a, I use chat GPT. You have a choice of turning that off. You could say no, no, protect my privacy. Now you have to. I guess you have to trust them. You know that they're going to do what they say, but all of them are very sensitive to this now. So here I am on chat GPT, for I subscribe to this and you can go into the settings and you can.

There is the whole thing for data controls and you can say you know where, where this stuff is going to end up. You know is. Is the data going to be saved on your server? Do you have control of it? You can turn off history so that no history is saved. There's a remember. This is a website, this is not running locally. You'll have the same controls and I think even better when they put it on Windows, because nobody would use it Right If it started training on your personal data. That would be a big deal.

I will point you to this article. This is Microsoft support article co-pilot in Windows your data and privacy. So, as they point out, it's in preview right now, but it will soon come to all Windows and they will explain to you what they're say saving and what your choices are. So you can you can absolutely say do not, do not share this data, and they have lots of information about how do you control that. So this is a Microsoft support article. I know it doesn't have a number. If you just search co-pilot in Windows, your data and privacy, you'll find this article on some related articles as well. Yeah, co-pilot is Microsoft's flavor of chat, gpt basically, or Bing chat They've called it by a variety of names. It's. I think it's probably a good idea, but this is something that you're not alone and worrying about.

0:40:24 - Mikah Sargent
So I have to tell you, leo, I remember a couple of weeks ago where you said something about how you felt, like what we were going to see was people starting to say, I don't want this here, I don't want this here. And I was a little skeptical at the time, because I have seen the helpfulness and I felt like, if we could get these large language models into a part of our operating system, that it was more down into it that we might be able to see the value of speeding up certain processes that we do. However, as time has gone on and we've started to see it pop up in more places. I use a delivery service for my groceries because I'm a bougie fool called Instacart, and it has now AI built into it so that you can say I want to make this food and then it will give you recommendations for what groceries you should purchase based on that.

However, they're also tying in where they are getting these deals and discounts. It's more than just here's some suggestions for things to buy. It's also here's some suggestions for things to buy, but also these are our best partners who also pay to have their stuff sponsored. So there's a lot that goes into it. That's kind of behind the scenes. That makes me feel kind of about it and I don't know that I, like you were saying, I'm starting to feel that a little bit. Do I want you putting your peanut butter AI into my chocolate? I don't think I do. I want to leave my chocolate alone.

0:41:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's going to be a backlash, for sure, right, we're already seeing a backlash with Amazon's Echo and Google's Assistant, where people just don't want those things in their house listening even though I almost said we know they're not listening to you and sending everything back to the home office, but I guess we're pretty sure would be a better way of characterizing that there's. No, there'd be a lot of traffic if they were taking everything you're saying and sending it back to Amazon. So I don't think that the privacy invasions a lot of people think they are, but nevertheless, this is all starting to add up and I think people are really reasonably concerned about you know how much information we're giving to big companies and furthermore, it's very obvious big companies want that information and are monetizing that information. So they're strongly incented. So that's why there's this to me, this a little bit of a lack of trust. Now they say no, but how would you know? Right, how would you know? And so I think there is going to be a backlash.

You've seen the author backlash people like Salier Silverman and George RR Martin saying I don't want my books to be used in training AI. That's actually an interesting position and probably we'll see these are court cases that are ongoing probably can't be supported. Right, because I can read your books and ingest them and use them in my thinking. Why can't a machine do that? You know, that's you publish those books. Ian Bogost, who is an author but also writes for the Atlantic, had a good article. My books were used to trains Metas, generative AI. He writes good. It can have my next one too, he says, and I think this is a. This is the other point of view. These things will only get smarter if we all contribute into them.

0:43:42 - Mikah Sargent
I think we saw that also from Jeff Jarvis. Jeff Jarvis was saying I would feel I want it to be trained on my stuff.

0:43:49 - Leo Laporte
So there's. These are both completely reasonable. I guess I've given up on privacy. It's a shame that privacy is so important and I really want privacy, but as a somebody in the public eye, anyway, I don't think I had much right. I've ever had much, I just don't know. I don't. I think you should have the choice and good news, Microsoft says you will have the choice in answer to your question, as long as you trust them, Cause there's no way really. This is the problem. How do we, how do we verify no, you're, we won't use your data. This is so great question, Thank you. This is the time of the show where we would like to talk to a man named Sam Sam Abel Sam. Editors here. He is our car guy, principal researcher at Guidehouse Insights. He's also the host of the wheel bearings podcast at wheel bearingsmedia. Sam Abel Sam, join us in the Stargate. Hello, Sam, Welcome.

0:44:55 - Mikah Sargent
You're going to be on Twitter later this afternoon.

0:44:57 - Leo Laporte
So I know there's probably a lot of stuff to talk about in the car world. I'll let you pick something for today's show.

0:45:08 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh, right now you pick something what. Let me try this in a less oblique fashion.

0:45:16 - Leo Laporte
Hey Sam, what would you like to talk about today?

0:45:20 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, there was an interesting story on Jalopnik earlier this week. About the headline was bizarre passive, aggressive notes for drivers of EVs without fast charging or appearing on chargers at the Dallas airport. So what this was all about Something that people that are getting into EVs for the first time should be aware of is that just because you go to a charger that is rated at a higher speed, it doesn't necessarily mean that your EV will be able to charge at that same speed. You know, every vehicle has a maximum charge rate that it can support and every charger has a maximum charge rate that it can support, and when you plug in an EV into any particular charger, it's going to choose the lesser of those two. So, for example, if you have a Chevy Bolt, a Bolt can DC fast charge at a maximum of 50 kilowatts. If you go and plug that into a 350 kilowatt charger from EVGo or Electrify America, it's still going to charge at 50 kilowatts. It's not going to charge at 350. There are vehicles that will charge at or near 350 kilowatts, including stuff like the new Chevy Silverado EV, the Hummer EV, the Lucid Air will do, I think, about 280 or 290, and Hyundai and Kia EVs will charge it about 240 to 245 kilowatts and that's significantly faster than a Bolt.

So what happened here at DFW is there's a charging station there's an EVGo charging station where they have one 350 kilowatt charger and a pair of 150 kilowatt chargers and somebody got frustrated. And I understand the frustration because I've been in the same situation where apparently they found somebody using the 350 kilowatt charger with a vehicle that could not support anywhere near that charging power. I had a similar situation about a year ago when I was testing the Genesis GV60, which will charge about 240 kilowatts, and I went to my local EA station and at the time this is before they replaced most of the chargers with all 350 kilowatt chargers. There was two 350 kilowatt chargers and four 150s and, as is often the case in Electrify America location, one of the 350s was completely out of order, the other was being used by a Bolt and there were other 150 kilowatt chargers available at the same time. So I didn't say anything, I just went home because I live not far from that charger. I just went home and plugged in at home.

But if you have a vehicle that's capable of charging faster and let's say you're on a road trip you probably want to get charged up as quickly as you can and be on your way. So the note that was left on the charger was essentially this applies to owners of Bolt, hyundai, kona Electric, nissan, leaf and a few others that are slower charging. This charger provides 350 kilowatts, but if your car is not capable of using it to full capacity, therefore you're impeding faster charging cars from using it. Faster charging cars can get in and out quicker, to the benefit of everyone. Please show courtesy and use one of the other chargers to the left, and, though for cars with under 100 kilowatt of charge rate, you will not experience slower charging on these, as they will still charge faster than your car can handle. Please educate yourself on how EV chargers work. So that's what I want to do is provide a little bit of that education. That's fair.

0:49:26 - Caller
That's fair, but okay, however.

0:49:30 - Leo Laporte
That's fair, I understand. But first of all, a lot of EV owners don't know what the charging rate of their car is. That's not like printed on a sticker on the window and they may not know when they pull up to EA which of the fast chargers which are not. It's not immediately obvious. That's problem number one. So a little education, that's good, and I would expect people to drive Chevy bolts will now consider this and be courteous, you know, and use a slower charger if they could figure out which is which.

But honestly, the real flaw is with these people and I really blame EA. They have just done a terrible job of this who've designed these stations so poorly that sometimes for instance, sometimes you've got one. You know, most chargers have two outlets and if somebody's fast charging on one, you can only slow charge on the other. There's all sorts of issues with this. Couldn't they design a gas station that pumps at the same rate or adapts appropriately to the rate the car is available, so that there isn't this issue of oh you should use that pump over there because you can't take advantage of this pump over here? Shouldn't the burden be on, in other words, electrify America, not on the consumer?

0:50:47 - Sam Abuelsamid
Absolutely so. I'm just getting fed up with EA.

0:50:51 - Leo Laporte
These guys have built a ton of stations. They don't maintain them. They're actually giving EVs a bad name and it's because of them that we now all have to use next chargers, the Tesla charging specification, because people say, well, the CCS charging is terrible. It's not CCS is terrible, it's electrify America Audi.

0:51:13 - Sam Abuelsamid
And well, I mean to be fair. Evgo and ChargePoint have a lot of issues with charger reliability as well, but EA is far and away the worst. And EA, for those not familiar, is the company that was formed by Volkswagen Group of America a few years back after they were discovered to be cheating on diesel and exhaust emissions and as part of their multi-billion-dollar settlement they agreed to spend $2 billion to build out EV charging infrastructure, and what they did was they created a new business unit called Electrify America that built out. I think they're currently about 800 locations now across the US with DC chargers and they've done a reasonably good job of putting the chargers out there. What they haven't done is maintain those chargers and they've done a really poor job of that, and there's a lot of reasons behind that.

They don't have time to go into all of that today, but the reality is, if you go to an EA station and, to a slightly lesser degree, an EVGo or ChargePoint location, there's a pretty good chance that one or more of the chargers will not be functioning. But to your point about having all of the chargers just be able to charge at max rate, the EA actually is moving in that direction. My local EA station that is about half a mile from me here has six chargers and when they originally installed it back in 2019, I want to say 2019 or 2020, four of those were 150 kilowatt chargers, the other two were 350s, and last fall they ripped all those out and now they just have all 350 kilowatt chargers across the board. So they are moving in that direction of what you said of just make them all the same and whichever one you plug into, they will adapt and, to be fair, chargers have always adapted to whatever the speed is that the vehicle can handle.

0:53:18 - Leo Laporte
They step down. But if you had four high-speed chargers then it wouldn't matter which one the bolt used.

0:53:25 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yes, exactly, and that is now the case at a lot of the stations. They can do that. I don't understand they can. They can do that. How does that cost?

0:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, so does maintaining your charging stations at its cost.

0:53:38 - Sam Abuelsamid
A 350 kilowatt charger is significantly more expensive than a 150 kilowatt or a 50 kilowatt charger. That the electronics and everything they have to go in there adds a lot of cost to it. And considering that none of these companies are remotely close to being in a situation where they are making profits, then even when they charge, that's just part of why that a buck, a kilowatt hour they're still not making money on it. I don't think anybody's charging quite that much.

0:54:06 - Leo Laporte
No, but there's some very expensive ones. Yes.

0:54:09 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, and part of it is a lot of the charging stations remain underutilized. It's the classic chicken and egg problem People don't want to buy EVs if there's no charging stations out there. On the other hand, if you put charging stations out there before people are buying EVs, they're not going to get used and then you're not going to generate revenues to be able to fund the operations and upkeep of those chargers.

0:54:35 - Leo Laporte
Let's just say though just in defensive EVs, because I have three and that's all we use now is that most of the time, for most people, you're charging at home, you don't really have to worry about these stations. They're for long road trips and there are some people who have long commutes who need these or don't have stations at home and need these. So for those people, this is an issue.

0:54:54 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, let me address that though. The reality right now the people that are buying EVs, and we're still very much in the early adopter phase of EV adoption. We're at about 7.5% 7.5% market share for EVs in the US right now, so it's still very much early adopter, and you have to remember that most people do not buy new cars. We sell about three times as many used cars in the US every year as we sell new cars Well, I'm a dummy who buys a new car every three years.

Most people also can't afford new cars and used cars are a good value because cars depreciate so rapidly.

The minute you drive off the car you'd be nuts to buy a new car, but when you look at who buys new cars versus those that buy used cars, new car buyers tend to be somewhat more affluent. They are much more likely to have dedicated off street parking available, so they can plug in and charge at home. When you look at the people that buy used cars, close to half of used car buyers do not have access to dedicated off street parking. They live in apartments, townhouses, condos or even in older urban neighborhoods where they have to park curbside, and so charging at home overnight is not an option for a lot of people, and this is one of the things that we have to address with the expansion of charging infrastructure and that's exactly.

0:56:21 - Leo Laporte
the problem is that these crappy charging stations are discouraging people from buying EVs, so it ends up being a small percentage of people who can, because they can charge at home, I agree. My son, who's eventually going to move into an apartment. How's he going to charge unless more apartment complexes put in EV charging, which would also be nice?

0:56:45 - Mikah Sargent
I think this is just growing pains or workplace charging.

0:56:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is going to happen eventually yeah it's going to take a while, though, I really wish EA was doing a better job, it's easy to blame them, don't we all? And I am going to Well, and this you know.

0:56:59 - Sam Abuelsamid
This is why most of the automakers in the last four or five months have done deals with Tesla and they've said okay, we're going to drop CCS switch to the NACS charge charge connector, the Tesla design charging connector, which also as we talked about, I think, last month is it's a better connector, it's easier to use, it's easier to insert and get out, the cables are thinner so it's easier to handle and they're also going to be able to have access to the Tesla superchargers.

0:57:33 - Leo Laporte
Superchargers are so well maintained and they work well. And, by the way, you don't have this issue of on the supercharger network of oh, you should be using that charger, not that charger, right?

0:57:46 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, they're, they're all the same. Well, at any given location, they're all the same. Not all superchargers are the same. There's, there's, a couple of different versions of superchargers that are out there. Some are faster than others. Um, you know, and it's the older ones, you know, as they've installed new, as they've put it, rolled out new ones they're, they're they've been installing for the last two, three years, the version three, which will go up to 250 kilowatts. Um, they've, and they've deployed a few New version fours in Europe.

0:58:14 - Leo Laporte
now, One of the reasons there are cars like bolt that only charge at 50 kilowatts is that's bad for your battery in general to do that high speed charging right.

0:58:23 - Sam Abuelsamid
It. It is If you do it all the way up till the battery is full. So the the the problem is um thermal management is also a thermal manager.

0:58:33 - Leo Laporte
Heats the battery when you're charging.

0:58:34 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, so you don't want it, you. You have to have good thermal management of your battery and then, as you get close to full, you have to ramp down so you don't overcharge the battery. That's what damages the battery. It's a heat and overcharging. And you, and, in the case of the, the bolt, you know the bolt is an older design. You know it came out in 2017.

Uh, and GM was trying to create a more affordable EV, so the onboard charging system is is, uh, less expensive than you know. Again, putting a higher power charging system on there adds more cost. Uh, and they were trying to create a lower cost EV at the time that that car came out, six years ago. So, uh, there you know the next generation. You know the, the costs of those components are coming down and you're going, you're starting to see faster charging capabilities, even in those more entry level EVs. But you know to to what you said earlier, you know, about education. You know that's. Another component of this is that you know, you, you know there isn't usually a label on, you know, on the window somewhere saying this is the charging speed.

You have to look it up and support your handbook. You know, at the, at the retail level, when these cars are sold, you know. I think it's incumbent upon salespeople to both be trained and educated on this stuff and then to educate their customers. When somebody buys, you know, drives out of the, the dealership with a bolt or a leaf, you know they need they, they need to be educated. You know on what the capabilities are. Tell them.

You know this thing can charge at 50 kilowatts. If there is a choice of chargers at a location, you've gone to use the slower ones. You know, as a courtesy, because your charge, your car's not going to charge any slower, it's going to charge the same speed. But those who have cars that can charge faster, let them use the faster ones so they can get in and out and more people can charge. And then you know, or you know, or during the sales process, you know, explain. You know this car can charge at 50 kilowatts. This one can charge at 150 kilowatts. Here's the difference. Here's why it might matter to you. Yeah.

1:00:43 - Leo Laporte
I don't I'm ashamed to say, I don't even know what my Maki charges at.

1:00:47 - Sam Abuelsamid
Um 150. So it's in the middle there.

1:00:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, pretty fast.

1:00:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
It's pretty fast. I have to say I have to do up to 80% in about 40 minutes.

1:00:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have Tesla power walls. Power went out as, as you know, John, power went out, uh, in our neighborhood for three or four hours the other night and we just kind of bliss we, I turned off the hot tub, but we kind of blissfully went along with everything working just fine on the power walls and I was very grateful to have that. We have solar panels charging them up and, uh, they kept our house online for a good three or four hours. It's very happy. So I I like this whole process, but I understand it's really at this point for the F1.

1:01:29 - Sam Abuelsamid
It's. It's complicated, it'll it'll get easier as we go, go along and more people become aware of you know about the, the limitations of, of certain EVs, you know and and get a better understanding of how charging works. And it's just a general in general, as charging gets faster and more available.

1:01:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Sam, sam Sam. I'm going to let you prepare, get your makeup on and everything for this afternoon, this week.

1:01:55 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, we'll see in a couple of hours. Yeah.

1:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Can't wait. I'm looking forward to it. A lot more car information. Sam is a principal analyst at guide house insights. Uh, you'll see his writing in a variety of magazines. He is more and more, I noticed, called upon to talk about uh automotive technology as automotive, as automobiles get more technological, uh and uh. His podcast is great with Nicole Wakeland and uh Robbie and love Robbie. Uh the wheel bearings podcast at wheel bearingsmedia.

1:02:30 - Sam Abuelsamid
I just published this week's episode, about half an hour ago. Uh, what was the topic?

1:02:33 - Leo Laporte
of the week's episode.

1:02:35 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh, there's a whole bunch of stuff. Uh, we, uh Robbie, drove the Lucid air purer. Uh, the base model, yeah.

1:02:41 - Leo Laporte
Only $50,000. Woo no, it's 80.

1:02:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
I'm sorry, Only only uh, I had the, the Lexus RZ 450, and Nicole had the Subaru Crosstrek, and we talked about a whole bunch of other stuff too.

1:02:55 - Leo Laporte
Sam, sam, ed Roberto Baldwin, nicole Wakeland a very, very fine podcast at wheel bearings dot media. Of course, sam will join us every month on this show to talk about cars. Thanks, sam, thank you so much. Thank you, I'll come to you guys later.

All right, I'm going to pause before we get to our next call because I'd like to talk a little bit about something near and dear to my heart. Did you see ants interview with John Scalzi? Wow, that was cool. Uh, sci-fi author John Scalzi joined us in the club, in the club, in the club with bottle of Bob, the club I'm we're talking about. I'm impressed, go show it, go show it.

Our club is club Twit. Yes, and there is no champagne room, sadly, in club, but every room is a champagne room in club. Twin bubbly Uh, we uh started club to about two years ago. Lisa did uh because she recognized a problem that has now become widespread, that for some reason, uh, it was becoming more and more difficult to do ad supported programming. Uh, and we thought, well, we've always wanted to really be listener supported. So we've kind of hedged our bets. We still want to do shows like this in public with ad support, but we also want to do more shows than we can do otherwise through the club Plus. The club helps us keep all these shows afloat as, sad to say, advertisers seem to be departing the podcast world.

So how can you keep twit going and flowing? Join club twit Now. It's not expensive seven bucks a month, $84 a year, in fact. There are no higher tiers. There are lower tiers for families and corporate sponsorships. What does that get? You Add free versions of this show and every show we do. You get access to the club twit discord, where there's always something good going on. I'll tell you about some more events coming up in a bit, plus shows that we don't put out otherwise, like Mikah's hands on Macintosh and hands on windows with Paul Thorotts, scott Wilkins, this home theater geeks, the entire Linux show, and I can go on and on. There's a lot of great stuff in there coming up on the 12th home theater geeks recordings. You'll get to watch those in the discord. Are you going to join us for the escape room? Oh, yeah, so, micah, you did the escape room last time and the people who we did the escape room with I wasn't there are going to bring it to us.

1:05:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they have a portable escape room, and so they'll be bringing it to us and it's, I think, wizard and sort of magic themed.

1:05:33 - Leo Laporte
Why don't you just become complete morons in person as we speed through, try to solve this, and you're going to be sitting there. I know you are in the club going. I know the answer.

1:05:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly what's wrong with them. How did they not think of that? It's so easy.

1:05:47 - Leo Laporte
Eudophysis. Stacey's book club is a John Scalzi book. The Kaiju Preservation Society it's coming up in November. Renee Richie joins us. He's the creator liaison at YouTube, the expert on how to be a successful creator on YouTube, also a former host of MacBreak Weekly. He'll be joining Ant in a fireside chat November 16th, as will I, jeff Jarvis and Doc Searles. The old farts chat that's coming up in December. And our AI guru here in house, anthony Nielsen, will be doing one early next year. That's just some of the stuff scheduled. There'll be more because Ant, our community manager, is a hard work and fellow and he's always coming up with some fun stuff.

We want to make it worthwhile, you know, and so the best way to do that is give you a lot of value for seven bucks a month. But I got to tell you that seven bucks a month could very well mean the difference between keeping shows on the air and not and keeping the lights on and not. And we really want to keep going with what we do here, because I think Twitter's a fun place to be and I enjoy it and I'd like to keep doing it. If you'd be interested, go to Twittertv slash club Twitter. Now I would like to do another phone call.

1:07:01 - Mikah Sargent
How about a? How about a?

1:07:03 - Leo Laporte
Lewis, lewis, rose, rose, rose, hello Rose.

1:07:12 - Mikah Sargent
Star six, rose Star six, mr President.

1:07:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know you, sir. I haven't talked to you in ages. How are you?

1:07:20 - Caller
I want to thank you for getting a phone number. There's no reason anyone should be subjected to my face Full screen on that. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

1:07:30 - Leo Laporte
First name and city, sir.

1:07:32 - Caller
After that first guy with 20 websites and 50.

1:07:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and I know who's an overachiever, wasn't he?

1:07:38 - Caller
I feel like the vaudeville singer has been told he's following a comedy act with dancing dogs and children.

1:07:44 - Leo Laporte
Never, never do it. No, Lewis, you're always welcome. Where are you? Just tell us where you're calling from.

1:07:49 - Caller
Hollywood California.

1:07:51 - Leo Laporte
Beautiful Hollywood.

1:07:52 - Caller
All right Family of San Francisco Go Niners.

1:07:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, thank you. Yes, well, everybody's a Niners fan when it comes to the Dallas Cal Girls, yeah, oh, I'm sorry.

1:08:04 - Caller
I'm looking for a hardware recommendation. Usbc is the preferred wired connectivity standard for now.

Got the USBC. Yes, right On the M1 Mac mini, apple offers just two USBC ports, so I don't need one of those hubs that has a port for everything C and A and flashcards and SD cards and all that. I'm just looking for a hub that has maybe four USBC ports that provides data transfer and charging. There are dozens of Macs and models on Amazon and other sites Most I've never heard the brand name their models that offer data transfer, that don't offer charging and vice versa. Most of them are apparently not M5.

1:08:56 - Mikah Sargent
So I've got your answer. It is not an inexpensive purchase, but it is a solid purchase that you will be very happy with. It is the and you want more than charging. You want data and charging correct. That's right. Yes, Then?

1:09:13 - Caller
the, because this is going to get plugged into my mini, and so I have a couple items that just need charging, like a headset, wireless headset, and then I've got my iPhone and my iPad, that sort of thing you want.

1:09:26 - Mikah Sargent
The element hub from CalDigit, the element hub from CalDigit, so they make incredible docks as well.

And Leo and I both use their docks, but CalDigit has an element hub and on one and I know you said you don't need a whole bunch of ports, but this is, it's just two On one side they have four USB-A style ports and on the other side are four USBC style ports. They're also Thunderbolt for USB-4, those USB-A ports, and the other side is USB-A. That's 10 gigabits per second worth of connectivity. It has then on the side of it, the one USB port that plugs in from the element hub into your Mac itself. It's a powerhouse, but it's got its own power source so that you can do that charging and it's the. Again, it's a solid piece of tech. How much? How many of you have some other suggestions? How much? That's a good question, because their stuff is.

1:10:29 - Leo Laporte
CalDigit's stuff is fairly expensive. It is yeah, it is pricing. Where you really pay money for and you don't need to do this, lewis is the Thunderbolt ports. If you're just USB, that saves you a lot of money, because Thunderbolt, the licensing costs, I think, are expensive. So Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 hubs oh, we should explain, by the way, what the difference is between a hub and a dock and an. And then there's extenders and there's, and they're really, I mean the lines. The borders are small. But the hub, the dock, usually is a standalone device, the idea being that you'd leave it on your desk and then, when you get home with your laptop, you plug it in, so you're docking it yet and it's already connected to all your peripherals. There's also portable little USB hubs that you might carry with you. What was the price? It's $200. Yeah, a little pricey, but it's got less expensive.

Choices One this is a company that I trust I might trust for Mac stuff Other world computing at macsalescom, and I have used their USB-C travel dock. So this kind of is a mixture between a hub and a dock. It's only $49. It has 100 watts pass-through power. That's fine for your Type-C, but also it has two USB Type-A ports. An HDMI port I know you don't want that an SD card port I know you don't want that. And USB-C, if you just want USB-C. Plugable is another good name. We like Plugable stuff, and they make a 11-in-1 hub with all of those USB-C things. This is only $79. You may say, oh, I don't need a card reader or ethernet port, but it's nice to have, especially the ethernet, just in case. And so these are also have additional ports for monitors If you wanted to add a second monitor to your Mac mini setup, things like that, and at $79, why not? So this is one, two, three, four, five USB-C ports, which is really nice for a variety of data devices and so forth.

Belkin makes them. Belkin, I don't know. I mean, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad Because they white label third-party stuff. Satechi S-A-T-E-C-H-I also makes a variety of these. I would say CalDigit is like the top of the line, right? Yes, also the most expensive. Yes, other world computing one step down from them, plugable is at the same level as other world computing?

1:13:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they're not. I would say they're not as sleek in designs. If that matters to you, then that's something to consider Plugable specifically. But the others they really do.

1:13:13 - Leo Laporte
I like these because? But I use them with a laptop, so when I and this is, by the way I'll show you. This is another one I'm using right now. I just want to plug it in One other question to follow up on that. Yeah.

1:13:27 - Caller
The cables on all of these are pretty short, so they'd be sitting right on top of the mini.

1:13:33 - Leo Laporte
This actually is a little longer if you're the plug Extension cables yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn't do extension cables. I would say get one that has the cable that you length, that you need the plugables. Got some good distance on it. This is this is designed, as you can see, for a Apple laptop. Yeah, Because it's got two USB-Cs and then you would put the laptop on top here. This is from and then all the ports are here. I like this. This is from Hyperdrive, and I got to know Hyperdrive because they would do a lot of kick starters and I had some very good experiences with the Hyperdrive extenders. So this is an unusual one that Hyperdrive makes. It's just specifically for laptops. I'm not recommending it, but this is a good example and I only show it because we're using it right now and by doing that I've disconnected everything, so I'm going to.

1:14:21 - Mikah Sargent
When you said extensions, you're talking about extenders for USB-C.

1:14:27 - Caller
I'm talking about, for instance, a cable that would go from, so that not everything's piling on top of the mini I was looking for, like a USB-C female to male that would plug into the Mac from the port, the extra port device.

1:14:44 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I see no, so I wouldn't extend the dock.

1:14:47 - Leo Laporte
You can have extenders coming out of the dock.

1:14:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and most of them that I think. Well, I don't know about the ones that I recommended. The one that I recommended, its port itself is just a port.

1:14:58 - Leo Laporte
It's just a port and then it comes with a cable.

1:14:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so you can get it up to. You know, I think three feet is the thunderbolt. You know, as long as they go, are willing to go. That's right, yeah.

1:15:08 - Leo Laporte
The CalVigia doesn't come. It comes with one. It's just one.

1:15:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's not hardwired in and it's one foot long, the cable that they give you, so there's plenty of space between it and the device. But yeah, the, as Leo is saying, if you do end up going with one that has the cord built in, it's better to not do an extension on that because you just want to have it as close to the metal as you can get it in terms of the connectivity. Otherwise, you might run into some issues where some pin is not transferring some bit of information and it just ends up being a hassle.

1:15:42 - Leo Laporte
It also raises this specter of that type C, which is really just a description of what the port is, Doesn't tell you anything about the cable and you can get. There's so many types of cables and many of them won't do what you expect them to do and so forth. It's always better to trust the cable that came with the dock or the, because it's going to be the right kind of cable. That's very. I mean, everybody has run into this. Where you have the, you know all have the wrong cable, but it's no way of knowing by looking at it. I like this plugable but it is normal in the, so you'd have to go with the length of it. Those are all good things. You can go to plugable or hyper drives website or OWC's website, max salescom or Caldages website and you'll see a variety of these devices. Those are four good brand names you can trust. Yep, Agreed, Excellent.

1:16:38 - Caller
Thank you, we all. I'm going to be sending an email about a really sad AI story. I won't bring it up now and hopefully you'll comment about it on the show.

1:16:47 - Leo Laporte
I will read it, lewis. Thank you, yeah, I appreciate it.

1:16:50 - Caller
I'm going to have a good great to hear from you again.

1:16:52 - Leo Laporte
Have a wonderful day. Thank you, yep. Thank you, bye, bye. Yeah, I, I buy an inordinate number of these. I have, I have. In fact, I, at this point, I don't even I have to like kind of look and say, is this, is this? Thunderbolt.

1:17:08 - Caller
Which one is this one.

1:17:10 - Leo Laporte
They all look kind of similar. All the Caldages kind of look the same I got, I have one in the office. I have another one in the office that's a stand, a monitor stand. That actually might be good for a Mac mini. Yeah, who makes that one, john? Do you remember? Say again Anchor, that's anchor, okay. So let me show you this.

1:17:27 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah.

1:17:27 - Leo Laporte
Anchor does have a pretty good dock, now that I think about it, and I think this might be good for a Mac mini, because what happens with this is it's a docking station, that is, a monitor stand. Now, it's expensive it's 250 bucks but I use this in my other office. So you, you put the Mac mini underneath that's where mine is and then it actually might even be high enough for a studio, and then you plug it into the Mac mini and then you have all these plugs on the side and the back that you can use it. Just, it's a, it's something like a Mac mini. It's actually a great little organizer. So that's what I have in my office. You could use it with a laptop too. I guess you could put the laptop on the stand.

1:18:08 - Caller
That's pretty cool.

1:18:09 - Leo Laporte
And you can see underneath they have the wire management system so you don't have wires dangling or that stuff Kind of spicy 250 bucks. It's only $75 off right now. Is it $75 off?

1:18:24 - Mikah Sargent
So it's 250 because of the discount, or you get an extra.

1:18:28 - Leo Laporte
I think you get extra off, so that's a good thing. That would make it what? Uh, 175. That's not bad. That's the anchor 675 USB-C docking station. This might actually be the one if price were no object that I would recommend.

1:18:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, especially with the idea of keeping the cables on the way which you're talking about yeah.

1:18:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could see how the mini goes In this case. He's using it with a laptop. I wouldn't, but you could put the mini as I have underneath it and the monitor on top of it and it makes it kind of like an iMac. Yeah, kind of.

1:19:04 - Mikah Sargent
And it's got some raising. So then the ergonomics are there.

1:19:08 - Leo Laporte
Now, who is? Who is this guy with the? Is that David? So I got to pick up David, cause I I really love this uh comic comic book behind here or something like that, and he's plus he's been, he's had his hand up. He's a poor guy. He's got his hand up for hours, hi, david.

1:19:23 - Leo Laporte0
Hey Leo.

1:19:25 - Leo Laporte
Where are you calling?

1:19:26 - Leo Laporte0
from. I am in Ithaca, Ithaca. I am your friend David, who has that Cornell, who studies disgust.

1:19:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh my my, he's an expert in disgust, in disgust, Disgusting. You know like what Like disgust yeah Um I what I don't know more about that, david, you got to yeah, we're going to talk about this thing. You got a podcast set up. Do you do a disgusting podcast?

1:19:50 - Leo Laporte0
Yeah, actually yeah. In fact, one of our earlier reviews was one star repugnant.

1:19:58 - Caller
What's the name of your podcast?

1:20:00 - Leo Laporte0
It's called very bad wizards. Uh, and we've been doing it for 11 years, Leo 11 years, 11 years.

1:20:07 - Leo Laporte
I'm so proud of you. That's wonderful.

1:20:09 - Leo Laporte0
Thank you, you're an early inspiration, of course.

1:20:12 - Leo Laporte
So David introduced me to a professor named Jonathan Haight he doesn't like the word hate who wrote a really good book about why the left and the right are having a hard time talking to one another. Um and uh, so this research that you did at Cornell, are you still at?

1:20:29 - Leo Laporte0
Cornell, I still am Yep Right here in Ithaca.

1:20:32 - Leo Laporte
You were a graduate student when you, when we met, I think you know I was.

1:20:36 - Leo Laporte0
I think I was an early prof already. I came out to the Tweet Brick house cause. I was at at Saifu over at Google and uh, are you ever going to have people back?

1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
Someday set this a separate. After, after I get your question. I'll explain why we don't have people in the studio. Yeah, it's a longer, longer topic. Sure, but I don't push that on the stack Cause we got a lot of big stack. Let's talk about disgust. So, uh, your research you are, is it sociology or psychology? Psychology, psychology, yeah, your research was very, I thought, very interesting and jibed kind of with my own anecdotal experience, yeah, but you, I don't want to paraphrase it, yeah, no, yeah, it's super simple.

1:21:28 - Leo Laporte0
So disgust, an emotion that most uh researchers agree exists because it protected us. Strong motivation to avoid things that might poison us or might get us sick, you know, but vultures and jackals don't have it because they rotten meat, but we need it because they can digest rotten meat.

1:21:48 - Mikah Sargent
That's what makes us feel like something bitter that we put in our mouth might not be something we should eat. It's why dogs grow up so easily.

1:21:55 - Leo Laporte
Because they don't have the disgust gene that keeps them from eating it. But they do have the ability to get rid of it really quickly. So, it's an evolutionary trait to protect us from eating bad stuff.

1:22:07 - Leo Laporte0
Exactly, and you have that characteristic face, sometimes tongue protrusion. You see it in little babies. If you put you know, peas sometime.

Yeah, exactly, even from the moment they're born, if you put a couple of drops of quinine in their mouth. I didn't do this, people have done this, they'll go like this. So it exists. It seems to physically protect us from getting sick right, we're smart of evolution to do that. But it does also seem to influence our motivation in other ways and our judgments, and what we've found seems to have a play, a slight role in even the kind of political orientation that you have. So there are certain people who have a strong avoidance motivation. It's kind of related to an aversion toward novelty.

1:22:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh my God, I'm already obsessed with this, oh it's great.

1:22:59 - Leo Laporte0
Yeah, the world is a risky place and some people are a bit more sensitive to that.

1:23:06 - Leo Laporte
I have some videos actually of people who are very sensitive to horrible things. Do not feed your baby lemons, that's right.

1:23:18 - Leo Laporte0
Yeah, those are great Is that the disgust reaction?

1:23:20 - Leo Laporte
or is that just like what the hell?

1:23:23 - Leo Laporte0
It's thought to be so. Distaste is supposed. It's thought to be related to disgust. Of course babies, only only once you put it in their mouth do they do that.

1:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so disgust would keep you from tasting it Exactly.

1:23:36 - Leo Laporte0
Imagine like a bubble that's protecting you from getting anything too close to your mouth.

1:23:40 - Leo Laporte
But the thing that to me is the most interesting, and thing Jonathan Haidt has written about as well is this notion that maybe people who you know there's different sensitivities, maybe people are normal, you know, really sensitive to disgust, also tend to be more conservative because it's really novel yeah.

1:24:00 - Leo Laporte0
It's interesting, yeah, that's right, and then exactly right, and it rears its head in ugly ways, right? So people who like to try to convince others that certain sexual acts are wrong or certain people who are different from them are wrong, you know, they can use disgust as a way to get anybody to sort of like be strongly motivated.

1:24:21 - Leo Laporte
So it can be used as a role as well, yeah exactly, exactly. To me it explains what people are so upset about drag queens and transgender people. Because yeah, and it's in its. In a way, it gives you, it explains it without being judgmental. It's like oh.

1:24:38 - Mikah Sargent
I get it. I just think that's super important to understand where it comes from, because then I think that gives you the context that's needed and perhaps the tool set that's needed to, at the very least, understand them, but even maybe to get to a place where there can be some change. Yeah, that's right.

1:24:55 - Leo Laporte0
And I always tell people you know it's. Look, there's so much that discusses us. You have to ask yourself should my disgust play any role in whether I think it's wrong? So, like I, sex between two people who are not me Most of the time is disgusting when I think about it. So, but I don't think anything about that, right, picking your nose is disgusting, it's not wrong. So I think just paying attention to how these emotions might be influencing you and being a little bit more reflective about it is is, you know, hopefully one of the things that comes out of this research.

1:25:28 - Mikah Sargent
And so this is what the podcast talks about.

1:25:30 - Leo Laporte0
Well, you know, we started off I do it with a philosopher and we started off talking about that psychology and philosophy of ethics, and then you know, as you guys, well, no, you have to find things to do for 11 years. Yeah, so now we talk about movies, we talk about short stories, books anything but and you have a patron for very bad wizards Are there?

1:25:56 - Mikah Sargent
any. Yeah, last I'll ask this, I'll stop going out a little bit here. What just can I?

1:26:02 - Leo Laporte0
say I'm so happy to meet you, mike. I've been listening to you for a while. Of course, I've met Leo in person, but I'm so glad to meet you. Well, that's very kind.

1:26:08 - Mikah Sargent
It's nice to meet you as well. Are there any talks anywhere about this? Or like a book or something, because I just want to read about it.

1:26:14 - Leo Laporte0
Yeah, I haven't written a book. I have, you know I have. It's not a Ted Ted talk, it was a Ted X talk that got promoted to the Tedcom. So if you go to Tedcom and look me up, you'll see a younger version of me talking about politics and disgust.

1:26:30 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful, that's exactly what I was hoping for, so cool. Thank you so much, mike. Or listening to that.

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
And there, yeah, it's the strange politics of disgust. There he is. Yeah, there's also the book. I refer to Jonathan Hite's book, the Righteous Mind. Yeah, which is kind of tangential to your research, but related, I know you.

1:26:48 - Leo Laporte0
Related yeah, and we've collaborated about this stuff with him, yeah, so I think he was an early inspiration for me and always sort of helped out my young career when he was already a well-known dude.

1:27:01 - Leo Laporte
Nice, yeah, we, thanks to you, we did a triangulation with Professor Hite some time ago, but I think very interesting stuff, very interesting. Anyway, Well, thank you Leo. It's nice to have you on, David. What can we do for you?

1:27:16 - Leo Laporte0
Thank you. This reminds me of back on. Was it Call for Help when you had an actual webcam? Calls at like yeah.

1:27:24 - Leo Laporte
Postage, postage stamp. The camera was so bad and the internet speeds at the time, in the early 2000s, late 90s, were so bad that we would make people do be on the phone. So they'd be holding a phone, they would talk and then every second they would move Right Four frames for the whole time. It's a little bit better. It's a little bit better. It's a lot better.

1:27:44 - Leo Laporte0
So one very dumb quick question when I click on spam in Gmail and it says Report and Unsubscribe, is that alerting them that this is an active email, in the same way that it would for some of these more nefarious emails?

1:28:06 - Leo Laporte
I've just been curious about this for a while. That's a really good question. So Gmail, among others, require legitimate newsletters to have an unsubscribe link. There's no laws as far as I know saying that, but it is kind of the internet ethics that if you are doing a newsletter that it should have a link, usually at the bottom of the page. It gives you an easy way to unsubscribe. Gmail when it's seeing that link and sees repeatedly that you're getting emails from this people and notices that you don't read them.

By the way, that's another signal you're giving to Gmail will then give you that pop-up saying hey, I see you don't read this. You want me to unsubscribe, but you could do it manually in any email. In fact, on Fastmail I don't use Gmail anymore, but on Fastmail I actually filter all my email for that unsubscribe link Because that tells me it's probably a newsletter and I put it into a newsletter package. Are you sending them a signal? Well, if you click the link, you are calling home, you're phoning the home office. So if it's a legitimate newsletter, the only signal is David doesn't want to get this and they should unsubscribe you. Sometimes they give you an extra step if they're very reluctant.

It's a dark pattern, but it is a game, but absolutely there's no guarantee that that is not a legitimate newsletter, but that's spam. And then all he's trying to do is find out. Is this do I have a live one here? And what you're doing and it's very smart and I hadn't really thought about it is you're combining the advice that we've given many, many times, which is never respond to spam, because when you respond to spam, they don't know whether there's somebody at that address. By the way, spam. They send out millions of emails in each campaign in a minute or two, and half of those addresses may be phony. They don't know they're real or not. If you respond to it in any way, including saying stop sending me spam, you're telling the spammer oh, there's somebody at the other end and now they know they have a good email address. They're putting that in a separate basket for good stuff. So, yes, your unsubscribe is absolutely telling them that I don't know any way around it.

1:30:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so when the Gmail unsubscribe button is, it's trying to be clever, and so what a newsletter person can do to make the system better is in the header of the email they're meant to include something called the list unsubscribe header tag. This is an actual machine readable.

1:30:41 - Leo Laporte
URL, so it's looking at a hidden header.

1:30:45 - Mikah Sargent
That's one way that it does it. If it has that, then when you click the unsubscribe button, what it does is it sends a message to the server. It doesn't have to be from your account, it just sends a message to the server saying unsubscribe this email. That's the automated way to do it. That's how it should be working.

1:30:59 - Leo Laporte
But it does have to have your email address in it or it wouldn't know who to unsubscribe?

1:31:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it lists that. The other method that it does is it finds. If it can't find that in the header, the way that it should be doing it is that it goes through and finds in the email, wherever the email has that unsubscribe button Leo was talking about, and you may have noticed that at times it will bounce you to a page where you then have to go and unsubscribe. That is a non-ideal solution as well, because you're clicking and that click is, of course, registering. I used to use I stopped using Airmail, but what I loved about Airmail the application is that they had a clever, clever solution.

For emails that I didn't want to receive, they would send a because I had the privacy stuff turned on, so there was no register on the server. When an image loaded in the email, they would send a bounce email to the server like a mail or daemon. It was a faux mail or daemon or daemon, excuse me. That was essentially suggesting that the email was bounced and that it wasn't delivered to me because my email was not real, and I wish that's what Gmail would do. So yeah, unfortunately in these cases it's relying on the newsletter service or whatever it happens to be properly setting this up. But if this is also spam and you're reporting it, it's likely they're not doing that stuff that makes it easy to unsubscribe, so that unsubscribe button at the bottom is still sending that information over.

1:32:27 - Leo Laporte
So this is timely, david, because Google announced a couple of weeks ago they're gonna have new rules for email senders. Now, this is not people sending email from Gmail. This is people sending email to Gmail customers, and if you are gonna send 5,000 or more messages per day starting February 1st, you have to do certain things that will legitimize you. So if you're a spammer, you're not gonna do this, and Google will then see that as a signal that you are a spammer and just unilaterally block them. This is, by the way, it's a mixed bag, because Gmail is very aggressive to blocking spam, but that means a lot of legitimate mail also gets blocked because Google's aggressive and sometimes there's some false positives. So what they're gonna ask people to do is set up email authentication, spf or DKIM for the domain. Now, spammer's never gonna do that in a million years. So right there, spammers are out. You also have to make sure you have a valid forward and reverse DNS records. You'll have to keep the spam rates below 0.3%. You'll have to format messages according to an internet RFC message standard. You can't impersonate Gmail. There's a bunch of stuff, including for the subscribed messages, enable one click unsubscribe and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. So the fact that Google is gonna enforce this is actually, I think, very good.

I agree, because it will allow legitimate senders we're all subscribed out in newsletters that may send out more than 5,000 emails to Gmail customers a day. You know a successful newsletter will. This will allow real newsletters to be legitimate, to demonstrate their legitimacy, and Google will then pass it along. But it's also gonna absolutely stymie. Authentication is a great way to stymie spammers, because they don't want you to know who they are. So they are not gonna do that. So good, good to hear this is really good news, because Gmail is the number one email provider in the world. As Gmail goes, so goes the nation. It's gonna make a big difference in terms of spam and spammers. Whether it'll stop spam, I doubt, but if a spammer knows they can't get through to Gmail, that's gonna eliminate a lot of the viability of spam campaigns, right right, Well, thank you yeah it's a great question.

1:35:06 - Leo Laporte0
I had another question, but I don't know if you're, if you're at a time, oh give me another question, let's hear it.

So I'm in the fortunate position of being able to build a small little standalone like guest room, slash office, slash studio for myself, thank you. And so it's getting built right now. I need real wired internet, right. So it's gonna be like 50 yards. You guys field questions like this all the time, but here's my specific situation. I really need the wired. It's maybe 50 yards from where I'm sitting here and I thought of two options. One they have conduits running from somewhere out there, but my modem is like on the other side of the house. The coaxial is on the other side of the house. I asked the cable guy who was last year whether it makes sense to get a separate modem and separate subscription and just install that there in the little new studio and he said that could work. But one problem is if it's under the same address. The way that we distribute IPs is based on the physical address of your bill and you might start getting interference with two different cable modems.

1:36:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he would want you to buy a and I would agree a second account. Don't do that. Ethernet can go. A cat six ethernet cable can go 100 meters, 300 feet. So you have plenty of space. There's plenty of distance.

All you need to do so your cable modem, or the one place you could plug in an ethernet cable, is here. Your office is 100 feet down the hall. You have to string a cable Now. Obviously you don't wanna run a blue cable down your hall, so go up into the ceiling or through the attic or through the basement or through a crawl space and you can wire it. That's what we did. I have a wiring closet with a ubiquity router and a bunch of PoE switch in a hall closet and we ran ethernet cable all over the house and it comes down into the wall and there's an ethernet jack and it works beautifully. The places it need to be wired can be wired, because if you use a good ethernet cable Cat6 are better cable you can go a long distance and then Cat6 will give you 100 gigabits. I'm sorry, one gigabit for 100 meters.

1:37:43 - Leo Laporte0
Okay, Well, if only my cable company did that. Yeah, gigabits, plenty right exactly Gigabits, plenty.

1:37:49 - Leo Laporte
So that's why you just put in good cable. If you've got conduit, that makes it a lot easier. But we didn't have conduit, but we just had somebody get up in the attic, okay, and you have a guy down there, can you see? It. Can you see it? Yeah, he's dropping it down through the wall, that's all.

1:38:03 - Leo Laporte0
Yeah, so it might make sense for me to put my actual modem and router somewhere closer to where the coaxial comes in the house and run ethernet everywhere rather than my suggestion is you put a central, but you often don't have that choice right.

1:38:18 - Leo Laporte
That's what I ended up doing. The cable comes in where it comes in.

1:38:20 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, luckily so the town I live in. Luckily it had been run for cable television, and so I just went in where they had the little splitter and changed it so that the internet was coming in and I could just, you know, route it from the coaxial that was in the wall in a more centralized location, and then router next to it, and then from there ran the ethernet as I needed to.

1:38:47 - Leo Laporte
John, our wire closet is down the hall. John, what's the longest ethernet throw we have here, Do you know? 525 times. So it would come from the hall all the way down to your office. So that's a good distance. That's a 80 feet, something like that. That's a good distance and we have no problem. It works fine. Ethernet's pretty good in that regard. Just use a good cable. Yep, great Well thank you, David.

1:39:15 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

1:39:17 - Leo Laporte
I really appreciate it. Now, let me you go away, but you keep listening, cause I'm gonna explain why we don't have you can also add a switch. Yes, thank you. John's reminding us you could put an amplifying switch in between if you had to, and they're cheap. So the reason we don't have people in the studio, of course, first it was COVID. It's kind of still COVID, sort of COVID. You don't let me come here unless I test first. So seriously, mike texted me last week.

1:39:44 - Mikah Sargent
I did, you know could you test before you come in here? He was being breathed on by all of you fans.

1:39:50 - Leo Laporte
We had a nice meetup met with 50 or 60 people in Green Bay. Didn't wear masks, got real close.

1:39:56 - Mikah Sargent
No mouth kissing, but you know some hugs, so Dr Mom would agree with me that it was reasonable.

1:40:02 - Leo Laporte
I test all the time. In fact, we go through probably a box or two tests a week because we always want to be safe coming in here. So that's still kind of an issue. The other issue is when we used to have open studio was when we were fat and happy. I'm still fat, but I'm not happy.

And the problem is, in order to do that, we have a need a full-time employee. In this case it was a full-time armed employee, moses. We actually we contracted with the security agency because he had to be licensed to carry and so forth, and he was the person who would greet you when you come in the door. Then we had an intern or one of the staffers come and bring you down. They'd set up chairs and all that stuff. Unfortunately, we don't. We're a little bit skinnier than we used to be not me again, but you for sure and we just can't afford a full-time staffer just for people visiting. And obviously the staff that is here is working and if they have to get up every five minutes to let somebody in, they can't. People still come to the door.

We actually have at the desk a little setup of you know goodies, swag, swag that's what it's called Stuff we all get If I'm here. I will often come and give you a tour. So, david, if you came to the door and it was a time when I am here and not on the air, obviously I couldn't do it. Now I might give you a little tour, much to the despair of Lisa and the staff. Mikah goes no, I'm fine. No, no, one or two, it's fine. Yeah, I think.

1:41:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, there's it's just a play by ear.

1:41:44 - Leo Laporte
But we just can't afford to have an open studio and have people come in and sit. I wish we could, because you know, I like an audience, I love an audience and I would love no, I would love to have people come and watch Twitter and so forth.

1:41:56 - Mikah Sargent
We used to get sometimes 30 or 40 people. It's wonderful, yeah. When in Iowa today we'd have people in the audience, wasn't it great it was, it was nice. But we just can't afford it anymore. Maybe if Club Twit continues to grow.

1:42:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm not saying no, and if you are a Club Twit member, that's certainly. Where are the secret sash that we sent you.

1:42:14 - Mikah Sargent
You know the one and the secret password and we'll let you in.

1:42:19 - Leo Laporte
I can't promise if you come here and it's a good time and somebody's here and somebody can help you, they're not busy, you know we'll listen.

1:42:27 - Mikah Sargent
Don't plan a whole trip around it, I guess, is what we're saying. It would break our hearts and since nobody comes to Petaluma.

1:42:33 - Leo Laporte
Pretty much everyone is planning a whole trip around it. Yeah, all right, more of your calls coming up in just a bit. You're watching or listening to Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah and Leo.

1:42:44 - Mikah Sargent
All right, we are back from the break and we have a great question that comes to us from the club Are you ready? Yeah, all right, so it's a little wordy, but I promise it's good. So we had a listener who says I have a 13 inch MacBook Pro M1 with 16 gigabytes of RAM and, because of Leo, I have the coding bug. I have almost completed a certificate in data science from Harvard. Yay, via EDX, and I am on EDX is great. Yes, and I'm on data camp every day.

I'm using RStudio, vs Code and a new SQL editor slash course that I have not looked at in a while, so I don't actually remember. I'm using Safari Tab groups, so I don't have everything open at once. In addition to the course. I usually have many tabs for things. I Googled to find out how to do so, working in Python, r and SQL Nice. Anyway, I promised myself a new laptop when I finished the certificate. I'm handling larger data sets lately and more Safari tabs, and I keep getting warnings that I've used up all of my memory. These are annoying, but I wonder if I need more RAM than what I have. So when I get my new laptop, I cannot sit at a desk, so it will need to be a laptop.

What are the benefits of getting a MacBook Pro over an Air? I don't use a lot of ports. Would increasing the RAM be important? I'm also thinking a larger laptop would be better for increasing my typing speed, as I do miss keys sometimes on the 13-inch, by the way. I am thinking that I would then have two laptops, and one would be for work. If I could get a job someday and this is the part that's important. I'm a retired physician with some physical disabilities, but a little remote data analysts or, excuse me, analysis, would be awesome. Isn't that a good story? A very good story.

1:44:24 - Leo Laporte
So you were a physician. Obviously you got a lot of brains, a lot of talent, a lot of skills. You want to get into data analysis, which is you couldn't pick a better subject to get to Right, and he or she was. It Did not do it, we don't know. Dr Sorylian the good doctor has used Python, and they mentioned R, which is a commonly used statistics program, and SQL, sql. So in many cases you'd be connecting to a server and maybe you're doing the processing locally, maybe you're not. A Mac is a perfect choice because it's essentially a Unix box, so I drop out into the terminal almost always on the Macintosh and when I'm in the terminal, r, python, mysql, sql all work perfectly well, either locally or remotely using SSH. I've used Julia also. Vs Code is a great choice for Python or Julia or R. I use Emacs, which also can be used for those languages. I'm very happy with Emacs and Lisp, so I think a Macbook is a great choice.

1:45:34 - Mikah Sargent
So they currently have a 13-inch Macbook with M1 and 16 gigs of RAM.

1:45:40 - Leo Laporte
And I'm surprised they're getting this out of memory. I think that's a bug I so I don't think that's legitimately out of memory. I agree with you too. However, the new MacBook Air which I'm using right now goes up to 24 gigs, and a MacBook Pro goes up to 64 gigs, I think. Do you think that?

1:45:59 - Mikah Sargent
actually needs more RAM, I would get a.

1:46:00 - Leo Laporte
MacBook Pro, to be honest, to get the 14-inch, and I might wait because I'm still not unconvinced. There'll be new MacBook Pros this month, so if you can hang out for the month of October. They won't announce it after October. So if you get through the next couple of weeks and they haven't announced it, go ahead and get the M2 MacBook Pro 14. I think that's a very good choice, not much more expensive. Do get more RAM. But again, we don't think that 16 should be enough.

1:46:27 - Mikah Sargent
I think 16 should be enough. I so the good doctor, is using a third-party program that is sort of notifying about the RAM. If you're really concerned about the RAM, just use Activity Monitor itself and click on the memory tab. You can see, because a third-party program might be being a little bit over it's. If you're using the first-party program you're going to get a better idea and understanding of what's going on Eat the oligarchs and IISC says our studio loads everything into RAM.

1:46:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, but again, your code isn't that big. Right, your code's a few K. I don't know how big our studio is. Maybe those data sets have to all live in RAM. I guess if you had giant data sets it's possible that you could run out of RAM, so then, maybe more RAM would be a good idea. It's yes by the way Keith's reminded me, the MacBook Pro goes to 96 gigs. If I would say 32 is probably fine, 64 would be overkill.

1:47:27 - Mikah Sargent
The good doctor was wondering, because you and I have recommended a lot to the heirs of the M2 variety, if that would be a good idea as the next machine. That's why I'm saying get a pro and get a little more RAM, because you need more.

1:47:38 - Leo Laporte
RAM. But you know, Doc, how big your data sets are. So that's the question. I doubt they're that big. You know we're able to use stable diffusion on a MacBook Air with 1.6 gigabyte models easily. There are bugs that can cause this out of memory error. I think that's more likely. What's going on is that something is not normal there Now.

1:48:05 - Mikah Sargent
It's one of the reasons I use Emacs it's much more lightweight, Doesn't take up a lot of RAM, but yeah, I guess if you want to reward yourself for completing the certification, then yeah, bump up that RAM on a MacBook Pro and you'll be right on your way. Now, do you recommend? So? The doctor had mentioned some physical disabilities and maybe wanting a larger laptop because of that.

1:48:28 - Sam Abuelsamid
So get the 16 if you want.

1:48:30 - Leo Laporte
Do you like the 16? Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna buy the 14. 14. And I actually made a note to myself Leo, whatever happens, do not buy a new MacBook Pro until the OLED screens or the mini LED screens, at the very least, come out on an M3 processor. So I'm holding out and I'm hoping that's gonna be this month. I think it might be. It'd be nice, I think if it's not. The only issue is yields. Tsmc's yields on the three nanometer process might not be as good as they were hoping, which means there's a shortage of those chips. That's the only reason.

I know Apple has it ready and Apple wants to release it. Let's put it that way. Yeah, I understand a generative AM model is not a dataset. So Doc may be actually generating models through larger datasets. Yeah, out of sync. But first of all, most of the time people aren't creating those models locally, are they? They're using the cloud to do it. I just I feel like 16 gigs is an awful lot of memory. Is anybody in either of our IRCs or Discord? Is anybody using doing data science with a Mac and has a case for a larger RAM size? I don't know. I don't know. I think you want a big screen. Actually, to be honest, you may be better off waiting and getting an M3 Mac Studio with a large screen.

1:50:09 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, can't set it at desk.

1:50:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. Yeah, needs to have a laptop. See it, gotta listen better All right, Thank you, Dr Sourlean.

1:50:19 - Mikah Sargent
In the Discord that is the username. That's a great question. Yeah, I thought. Thank you and thanks for being in the club, doctor. Yes, thank you.

1:50:25 - Leo Laporte
And I'm really thrilled that you did the EDX classes, by the way, my favorite. So I did a couple of EDX classes on functional programming using Racket that I really love. There were the how to design programs HTTP by a legend. Interestingly, in functional programming, gregor Kazales, incredible Lisp legend, actually taught the course, so that was great. But if you are looking for a free course that will give you a really nice basics in computer science, harvard puts its CS50 course, a basic course that all Harvard freshmen take. I think it's free, it's very well done and it's available on EDX. Highly recommended If you just think you might be interested in computer science CS50. All right, my colleague had to get. Sarah, who's in Norway, has says my colleague had to get the most amount of RAM possible to be able to run his models, an AI model. All right, okay, yeah, guess it, yeah, yeah well, you can go up to 96 gigs.

Yeah, If you need more than that, you're going PC baby. Sorry to say so. The TD has his hand raised. You're not allowed to raise your hand, TD. What, oh in the?

1:51:47 - Mikah Sargent
chat, I mean in the Zoom.

1:51:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Should I go to. Do you wanna do a quick email or do you wanna pick a box? Oh, email, we haven't done it yet. Yay, email, time to stretch my rotator cuff. Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da.

1:52:02 - Mikah Sargent
Ooh, that crisp sound of paper.

1:52:06 - Leo Laporte
How many trees died for this segment? Explain, says Michael from Mobile, Alabama. Explain to me, Mikah. All right, fingers cracked. I've been trying to find a good explanation of how the new Safari profiles work. Mm-hmm, All of the iOS 17 and Sonoma reviews the loss over explanation of this feature. Fair enough, I currently use Safari for my personal stuff and Chrome for my work stuff. He's using Google Workspace. That's why I would like to just use a Safari work profile and stop using Chrome completely. Does the new Safari profiles feature support completely separate bookmarks and passwords, or is it just the browser cache, history and extensions that are separate? I would also love to see a hands on Mac deep dive episode on this subject and to profiles, you know what.

1:52:57 - Mikah Sargent
It's on the list now. All right. So with the introduction of iOS 17, as well as Mac OS, sonoma and all of the other 17s, apple did introduce a new feature in Safari. That's a lot like Chrome's own profile feature, where I'm going to sneeze. Is that part of the profile, or is it? Do you have to sneeze? I guess I'm not going to sneeze. Okay, it went away because I acknowledged it. You never acknowledged your sneeze, you're right.

1:53:27 - Leo Laporte
Just let it sneak up on you, pretend I don't know you're coming. So profiles I'm in Safari here. How do I first of all? How do I get into it? Create profile there you go. It's under the file menu. You've read it.

1:53:40 - Mikah Sargent
So with profiles, you are able to essentially kind of relegate your information, your accounts, your extensions, to different types of accounts, and most people do use this in Chrome as a way to have their work account tied to one and their personal account tied to another. So if you're curious about what actually is separated in profiles, you have history, cookies and other data like your other kind of cookie information. Bookmarks are separated, tab groups are separated, your start page settings are separated, your Safari extensions are separated. Oh, that's good, that's kind of the big one.

1:54:20 - Leo Laporte
So it sets up the profile from the current settings in your Safari. That is correct. So get your Safari the way you want it to be. You want it for your personal.

1:54:30 - Mikah Sargent
Then create the first profile and name it. You can give it a special icon that is specific to you and what would kind of be easy to recognize. I believe you can change the tint color as well, and then those settings.

You'll know immediately whether you're using which profile yes, exactly which profile and then you are able to kind of get everything. It's a new profile. Yes, and you'll notice in the. So if you swipe your mouse up to the top so that the screen kind of oh well, you've only got one profile right now, so you would have to have two, so let's do a new profile. Yeah, okay.

1:55:08 - Leo Laporte
Manage profiles. I'm going to make a new profile and this is going to be called twit, for work only, and I'm going to use the hammer icon, boom, and I'm going to make this be green. Okay, so it's distinct from the other one. Oh, it's very green, yes, and now I'm in twit. You can see it says twit.

1:55:29 - Caller
Or I can choose to go back to the other profile.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah. Switch to personal window, switch to new profile. That's nice. So I? I foolishly named one my new profile. Don't do that.

1:55:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, give it a good name.

1:55:41 - Leo Laporte
I have three personal window, my new profile and I'm on twit and it's easy to switch right here at the switcher.

1:55:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yep and basically your extensions will change between them. So maybe your work uses a bit warden. A sponsor of the network and you personally use one password. You can have an extension set up for just that, and what's great about it is the syncing that happens between your Mac and your phone and your iPad. So all of those are extensions.

1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
So these profiles are now on my phone.

1:56:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, those profiles will sync to your phone as well and you can set them up exactly independently how you want to. When you clear your history, you can clear all of your history across all of your browsing, or just the history of a selected profile. When you begin using a new profile, websites don't have the cookies or website data needed to remember you, so it starts at fresh if it's a new profile.

1:56:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look, now here I am on my phone and I've got personal my new profile. Where is it? And twit, I just created those and already it's here on my phone.

1:56:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yep, look at that and what's great is, if you do use those tab groups, then those are able to be separated.

1:56:51 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so my old tabs are gone, yep, oh nice, now I'm in the twit, you can go into work mode.

1:56:57 - Mikah Sargent
essentially, there's no tabs. There's no tabs.

1:56:59 - Leo Laporte
So all of those you know gambling and liquor tabs are gone. Right your horse bets.

1:57:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah Horse betsorg. That's good, yeah, and you could have a different start page maybe for what you do for work. So my start page for my twit profile could be twittv and I could have you know special bookmarks that are just the meeting that we do on Tuesdays and that kind of thing.

1:57:26 - Leo Laporte
That's really handy, Very handy. There's only one downside you have to use Safari. Oh, I love Safari, I'm a Firefox guy, True truth. But I have to say there is an advantage to using the native browser, both on the iPhone and on Mac, because you know of things like this. It's built in.

1:57:48 - Mikah Sargent
And this is pretty neat too. You can set it up in your website's settings so that specific links only open in certain profiles. Wait a minute. So when you click the Google Docs from Ask the Tech guys, this could make sure that I'm in my work profile only. So that's actually pretty cool. I did not know that feature. I'm learning about that today.

1:58:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah that's a really handy feature.

1:58:12 - Mikah Sargent
So, yes, I will be doing a deep dive on Hands on Mac about this. Oh good, because, yeah, that's, that is a very handy.

1:58:18 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even you know. This is funny because they come out with these new operating systems and you don't know all right, there are so many new features, yeah, and then I'm getting rolled out.

1:58:25 - Mikah Sargent
You never know. Thank you for that question. That was a great question and a great inspiration for another episode of HOM. Hands on Mac.

1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
Yes, let's see here, I don't think. Oh, I think we did, didn't we take a break? We're going to be back with more of your calls right now, more of your calls.

1:58:45 - Mikah Sargent
So there, I think we'll have time to do maybe just at least one more phone caller.

1:58:49 - Leo Laporte
Scott, I pushed the wrong button. I pushed.

1:58:52 - Caller
Richard.

1:58:55 - Leo Laporte
I pushed Richard's buttons. Hi, Richard. Hello Richard, this is Richard.

1:58:59 - Caller
Where are you calling from? Hello, I'm calling from the back of the car. I'm calling all the way from Santa Rosa. Oh, it's old chef guy.

1:59:08 - Leo Laporte
It's our good friend, old chef guy. Hi, old chef guy.

1:59:13 - Caller
Hi there. So I have a I will dive right into Gmail spam question. When I put somebody like a client, am I gone? Did I go away?

1:59:24 - Mikah Sargent
No, no, no, no. My open is on reference to we have more questions about Gmail. This is good.

1:59:32 - Caller
Okay, so I go into Gmail. I set somebody as a contact. Is that white list them?

1:59:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's really interesting.

1:59:45 - Mikah Sargent
It's. That's the way. That's. That was once the way that one made sure that you would get emails.

1:59:51 - Caller
However, however, I have had a nice qualifier. That was good. That was a great qualifier.

1:59:56 - Mikah Sargent
They used to say that they used to say they get this newsletter at us to your contacts, if a domain or a specific email account has been marked as spam or phishing or one of those other things that's read in in Gmail enough, then it falls under a certain score and may still end up in your spam account. So I will give you an example of this. I used to work at a company and we had we didn't have a standard username password login. It was username was your email. They would send you the email that has the quote unquote magic link, as they call it these days, and you click on the link to log in. Right, For some reason, some fool at some point marked that as spam, and because it was not an email that was being used in a lot of places one Marcus spam was enough to drop it below that score.

And so, even though that email that was sending the magic link was in the contacts for my work, it would still end up in the spam folder because Gmail had looked, you know, looked at the ranking of the domain or whatever it happened to be, and said, no, this is still spam. So we would have to go into the spam folder to find it, to get the magic link. Finally, I don't know if maybe after a while they, you know, look through it again, or if there was some way to say you know, this isn't spam, I swear. But whatever happened, it did start showing up again. So I would say, with Gmail specifically, I cannot confirm that adding someone as a contact is going to whitelist the email. I would say that it's a good idea to use the rules settings that Gmail has, as you know. Go ahead and add them as a contact, but also set up a rule that says if an email comes from at blah blah blah, then put it in my inbox for sure. Yeah.

2:01:50 - Leo Laporte
In fact, that's what I do.

2:01:52 - Mikah Sargent
ScooterX has a quote in Gmail.

2:01:54 - Leo Laporte
Whitelisting the email actually involves creating a filter, as we just were talking about. So it does create a filter automatically.

2:01:59 - Mikah Sargent
No, no, no. I think that what it's saying is you have to create a filter. If you want to whitelist an email, just setting them as a contact is not enough. You need to create a filter for it. You have to explicitly yeah, that's the way to whitelist, do it?

2:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

2:02:15 - Caller
That's how I do it on Fastmail. Is I add something about that? I have a client. I have a client that we email each other when we're producing online events for her and there could be, you know, five to 12 emails for setting up that event and every one of them insert bad words and bleeps out, ends up in the spam folder. So in the middle of trying to get ready to produce, it's like not coming in and she's saying I sent it to you 10 minutes ago and then I have to go find it. So I have to create a rule to say when this email comes in from that person she has a lot of bad words in her emails.

2:02:48 - Leo Laporte
I know who that person is. No, I have a lot of bad words. Oh, you do.

2:02:50 - Caller
Yeah, she's my old college, my old college roommate yes.

2:02:58 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, essentially you just need to go in and create a filter. Having them in your contacts is not enough. In Gmail, you have to create a new filter.

2:03:07 - Leo Laporte
And in the filter there's a box that you check that says never send to spam. That's probably a better way anyway.

2:03:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, no matter what, then you know it works Okay, and you can choose either a specific email address or you can choose a whole domain, so it gives you that. What's that wild card option? And then, yeah, that will let you create the filter. That's a good question, because people have that issue a lot.

2:03:29 - Caller
I think, it's really annoying when you're trying to Thanks Richard, absolutely yeah, when it's alive.

2:03:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, thank you, yeah, thank you.

2:03:37 - Leo Laporte
Richard. Great to talk to you. I'll see you at the uh at the Trader Joe's next week Exactly.

2:03:43 - Caller
We keep running into each other, okay, when I'm buying my bourbon pecans.

2:03:48 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I, we have time for more. You thought we wouldn't, but we do. Um, how about a voicemail? We haven't done a voicemail in five whole minutes. Well, I'd like to do more than one, but yeah.

2:04:01 - Mikah Sargent
I'm looking at my countdown I keep here. It has been six minutes and two seconds, Uh ladies and gentlemen, guys

2:04:03 - Caller
This is Frank from Los Angeles. I Frank Frank had a question regarding getting data which is uh text and voice messages off an iPhone of a deceased relative. Oh, yes, uh, I do have access uh to her account and uh, she's actually on a shared account with myself, but for posterity reasons, I would love to get all her text messages and any voicemail uh and save those for the family for uh mementos.

2:04:40 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you so much. All right, that's a great question. We get that question a lot. Apple's position is very clear, and this is true of Facebook. I just saw Mark Zuckerberg talking about this. Uh, it's very true of Google. They aren't going to assume that your deceased relative wanted you to have access to their messages. Maybe those are private, right? Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily assume that they want you exactly or their photos or anything else.

So, even if you have a death certificate and can improve that they were my relatives and so forth, they're not going to give you access to those. Which is why it's a really good idea with and most services allow you to do that Apple definitely does to establish a successor account, yep, a legacy contact. I did that with uh, with my uh, with Lisa, with my wife and with my kids, because I don't have any, any secrets and I want them to be able to access it. It's nice because obviously he also has done that right, he does have access. So that's the good news.

But we should say right up front you, you, you can, you, know, rattle all the paperwork you want. You're not going to get these companies to give that stuff up because, quite rightly, they don't assume that your loved ones wanted you to have access to that stuff, right? So, very important as a person who and all of us are in this boat who will be deceased at some point I'm sorry, mikey, you probably didn't realize that, but it's true what it would be very, very important for you to plan for this, because you could get hit by a bus. I mean, it does we, you know, yeah, so it's, everybody should do this.

2:06:19 - Caller
Have a legacy. Have a legacy contacts.

2:06:21 - Leo Laporte
Um, you can also uh. In your many password managers have a uh, uh, a chosen uh, I don't know what they call it depends successor, so that the people who will be responsible for your estate or who just want to keep your memories and your pictures alive I have 200,000 pictures in my, my Leo. I want them to have access to those, so make sure you designate those successors Now. Since you have that access, it's easy.

2:06:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and in fact, I just received an email, uh, I think a couple of days ago, from a listener who said this. I just wanted to let you know I used the app I'm amazing A while ago and wanted to applaud you recommending it. I wanted to get my friend's mom's messages off her iPhone after she passed away. I used the app to archive the complete history of the messages into a pages document for preservation. It exported nine years of text messages and saved a history of her life. I wanted to let you know and thanks.

Um, I get chills, um, so I amazing, I amazing is my suggestion. And look, the fact is you can do something similar, but it's much more difficult to do with just your Mac and your iPhone. If you plug well, or even a Windows machine, if you plug it in and you do, uh, the, the backup, and you go into the backup files and you look through them and you find and you put it all together. The much simpler way of doing this is just using I amazing. I amazing has a free trial.

Uh, and when you use I amazing, it will let you do exactly this, because that is part of what the application does it lets you pull voicemails. It lets you pull messages, it lets you export them in files that are easy to use and share and view, and so that is why I recommend the program. Uh, through and through. It is uh, now they have a uh special version of the application that is for, um, the folks who do forensics investigations. Um, that is how robust and sort of powerful this application is at getting these things off of a phone, uh, as needed.

2:08:28 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, um, that that's my recommendation, um, and I should say there are many of us. I don't know if I would want my text messages to be available. You know some text messages Lisa should get, but some text messages my kids should get, but not necessarily all text messages for everyone, all text messages.

2:08:48 - Caller
And so I don't think that's an unreasonable thing for companies to assume Same thing with pictures.

2:08:53 - Leo Laporte
They're protecting your privacy and I think that that's reasonable, yeah.

2:08:58 - Mikah Sargent
You don't know the relationship that people had with the person who's past Right, yeah Um very good question.

2:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Very good question. Very good question. Very good question. Uh, and I do want to thank Dr mom, who has given us the title for the show Death is inherited as an autosomal dominant trait with 100% penetration.

2:09:19 - Mikah Sargent
So, while taking me back to my genetics classes, lord, god, uh yes, so if you know what.

2:09:25 - Leo Laporte
I think it's easy to pretend that you're not going to die, but we're all doing it, yeah, we're all in the process of doing it, and so if you do want to preserve some stuff, make arrangements now, just because you may not have a chance later. I know it's kind of morbid, no, but I mean it may be for some it's interesting because also just truth.

When big tech started, we were all young, in the blush of our years. We were all young and we didn't think about this stuff. But uh, I saw Zuckerberg say, yeah, every day, thousands of Facebook users die and uh, so it's, you know, and they have ways on Facebook to memorialize an account and so forth. I think, by the way, that's a very nice way. I agree. I really like what that is Clever and good. Yeah, cause he can't, doesn't go away, but becomes now a uh kind of a, a guest book, a thank you uh to the past.

2:10:17 - Mikah Sargent
It's a little um sort of well I don't know, maybe this sounds morbid too, but I don't think so Like an online grave site almost. Why do we go to grave sites?

2:10:24 - Leo Laporte
It is to remember the person Much better really to go to their Facebook page, yeah Uh than to go to some piece of rock in in a nice garden. Sometimes I'm getting a little morbid, aren't I?

2:10:35 - Mikah Sargent
I apologize.

2:10:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, what about your Netflix subscription? By the way, I just logged in the Hulu. They said you know it's going to be $18, starting soon, netflix, wall Street Journal saying you know, as soon as the sag strikes over, they're going to. It's pretty soon. It's going to cost so much money to watch TV that I, you, should just watch this show. Yep, watch Twitter. It's free, or $7, but, but $7 is still cheaper. But you know what? You can still do it for free, if you, you know, you just have to sit through the ads.

That's all, everybody. We are out of time, I'm sad to say. The clock on the wall says you're out of time, we're out of time. So, um, I thank you so much for being here. I'm glad we could do this show. It's a lot of fun. Tip of the hat to our club members. Yes, indeed, make it all possible. And thanks to our producer, john Ackman, and thanks to our producer, john Ashley, to our studio manager, jammer beat John Slenina, we got two Johns in here, which is good, no waiting. And then thanks to Burke McQuinn, who makes sure everything is broken and then fixes it. It's a. He's got a. It's a two part job. He's a.

2:11:42 - Mikah Sargent
He burks it and then he, he burks it and he unburks it. It's job security.

2:11:47 - Leo Laporte
No, burke, we love you, burke is uh, burke is Burke. We love Burke and Kim. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, Kim, oh my goodness.

The old radio show hung out with us in the IRC. You can come by, kim, anytime you want, come and say hi, get some coffee, yeah, get some coffee. Uh, if you want to call us during the week. So we do this show on Sundays between about 11, 11 am Pacific and one 30 pm Pacific. Sorry, chris. Hi, mr Coffee Coffee guy, we ran out of time, didn't have enough time. Sorry, but we love you, chris. Uh, so if you're watching during that time you know, roughly two to five Eastern time, uh, 1850 or 1800 UTC If you're watching that time, then you call the phone number. You can be on the air with us live and that's nice, we love that, we do 8887242884. But if you're not watching in that timeframe, you'll just be able to leave a message and the voice message is as you hear, we love them, so uh.

2:12:48 - Mikah Sargent
I do. Yeah, I love all of these ways that you're able to get in touch with us. And yeah, it's, it's it's a warm feeling that you all want our help. I love that. I like feeling needed.

2:13:00 - Leo Laporte
If we keep sitting here, I'm going to have a warm feeling, so we better wrap this up call.twit.tv. I'm terrible, I apologize.

2:13:09 - Mikah Sargent
That's the URL. 8887242884, again the phone number, and ATG at twittv is the email. Thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode of Ask the Tech guys. That's Leo LaPorte.

2:13:19 - Leo Laporte
That's Mikah Sargent. Have a great geek week.

2:13:22 - Leo Laporte
Bye-bye.

2:13:24 - Jonathan Bennett
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, such as game consoles, cell phones and maybe even the machine on your desk. You already knew all that. What you may not know is that twit now is a show dedicated to it, the untitled Linux show. Whether you're a Linux pro, a burgeoning sysad man or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the club twit discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills, and then make sure you subscribe to the club twit exclusive untitled Linux show. Wait, you're not a club twit member yet. We'll go to twit.tv/clubtwit and sign up. Hope to see you there.