The Tech Guy Episode 1889 Transcript

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

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Podcasts. You

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Love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier radio networks on Saturday, April, 2022. This is episode 1889. Enjoy. The Tech Guy podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/tech guy.

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo? Laporte here. The tech guy, my Sergeant has the day off, but it's it's okay. It's you and me? We're talking Hightech at eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo that's the phone number? Eighty eight eight eight two seven five five three six to free from anywhere in the U lesser Canada. Outside that area, you could still call just you Skype, Skype out, something like that. All you have to do is go 88 88. Ask Leo on your Skype out device and we'll be talking high tech, you and me computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart. Watch all that kind of stuff. 88 88. Ask Leo. You can now ask Google to remove your phone number, email and address from search results. You kind of have to be being harassed. <Laugh> that's that's the bad news. Good news is you can ask 'em to get rid of it, but they're not gonna remove personally identifiable information PII from Google search, unless you can say, well, look see, they're bugging me log in

Leo Laporte (00:01:56):
Through the Google home app.

Leo Laporte (00:01:57):
I'm not talking to you, but okay. My Google device, every time I say the word, she wakes some go away they will evaluate each request as the G word based on the criteria listed below and evaluate the content for public interest. So this is kind of like Twitter. Remember Twitter put out a policy that said we're gonna get rid of harassing tweets unless there's a public interest in it.

Leo Laporte (00:02:27):
Okay. For us to consider the content for removal, it must have government ID stuff like social security bank, account numbers, credit card numbers, images of signatures, images of ID, highly personal restricted official records like medical records, personal contact info. That's the one you care about. I think the reason this came up for me is there are lots of sites spoke. EO is one which take public information. They go around to county seats and stuff and they, they, they copy down the stuff that for years it's always been public information. For instance, when somebody buys a house, you can go to the county seat, say who owns that house? And they've got it on record there, but it was never available, you know, to the world. You had to make your trip down to the, to Dubuque and to, you know, to get the thing. And but what happened is kind companies went around with, they sent people around and copied all that information down and put it on the internet. So you can go to a site like SPIA. I probably shouldn't give 'em any credit, but you can go to a site like that and enter your name and low and behold, there's your phone number, your previous addresses, maybe your current address and that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
<Affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
So the question is, will they take that stuff down cuz that's not necessarily harassing? Is it, I don't know if you're being docs, that's what the Kittys call it, where somebody's publishing your personal information to encourage people to harass you, like go to your house and stuff. It would be very dangerous. Right? Well, that's a good thing. Google should probably take that down. Doesn't remove the offending content, just the search results. But Google is, so this is where people are a little nervous. Google is so powerful that if it doesn't show up on Google search, it doesn't show up, you know, it's like a dim or existed. How would you find it? It right. <Laugh> how, how would you know, it's there be hard to find. So that's kind of interesting. Anyway, I think that that's a, that that's a good, a good thing.

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
You can also ask Google to delete your photos from search results. If you're under 18 and your parents can do that. So all of that, you know, I think that's good, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. So a tiny teen, we need to step toward making the internet a better place. I still would remind everybody that, you know, be careful about what you put online, especially young people because it lives forever. And even if it's theoretically private, it's not necessarily guaranteed to be private forever. So, you know, be careful about what you post on Instagram and Facebook and all that stuff. Even if you have a private account, put it on the internet, eh, you're kind of publishing it. Never. I always told my kids never put anything on the on the online that you would be embarrassed for your grandma toey or a future employer.

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> Spotify's but qu this was the week of quarterly results. I'll give you the short, the thumbnail version. Of course the one Netflix that was at the beginning of the week, they said we've lost a couple hundred thousand subscribers, stock tanked a couple hundred thousand out of, you know, what is it? 38 million or something, some huge number. And you know, of course my wife was saying this morning, she said, well, of course they had huge growth during quarantine. Now it's kind of ending. People are going out and about maybe they're watching less TV. They say, ah, we can get rid of that FA they didn't have folks account. So of course, just a couple hundred thousand big deal. Well, it's a big deal to wall street, isn't it? And this is kind of the problem with wall street. They don't it's what have you done for me lately? <Laugh> that's what they care about. So that was bad. Microsoft had very good earnings. Google had low, they made less money from digital advertising than they anticipated. Still made money still grew, but not as fast and again, punished by the stock market because well, you gotta keep growing. You gotta double you can't double forever, right? <Affirmative> let's see Facebook, same kind of problem. Facebook's just been struggling with their stock. Spotify, Spotify had an interesting result.

Leo Laporte (00:06:52):
They as you may know, they canceled Russia. So that was one and a half million premium subscribe gone. They had trouble with Joe Rogan you know, people I'm leaving Spotify, the Obamas very famously. We're gonna do a podcast for Spotify and they went somewhere else. Did it hurt him? No. <laugh> Spotify went from 180 to 182 million paying subscribers in the last quarter. 2 million grew, even though they lost one and a half million. So that's good. Yeah, that means they're increasingly the powerhouse. And then there's Elon. I don't, we don't have to talk too much about Elon. Now. We know that he sold about $8 billion in Tesla stock. After making that offer for Twitter, he's gotta come up with 21 million. He's borrowing the rest of the 44 billion, but a lot of bees in there <laugh> what does it mean? Well, it means he probably is gonna do it.

Leo Laporte (00:07:56):
I mean, isn't, wasn't guaranteed that he would wasn't because you know, he still would have to raise the money. He's got the loans and all that stuff, but of course it would cost him a billion dollars according to the deal he made with Twitter, if he pulls out and if they pull out, it's also a billion dollars. So nobody's gonna wanna pull out of that. Or maybe, maybe Elon will say at the end. Yeah. It's worth a billion dollars not to be saddled with this Turkey, cuz honestly <laugh> I think that kind of is he's gonna that's I don't see how you make money with Twitter. Nobody's figured out how to do that yet at 15 years and lots of attention in the media, hasn't been able to turn much of a profit ever. So why would anyone spend 44 billion? Well, no one would, that's the point Twitter's been for sale for a long time and Elon's the first sucker. I mean billionaire to want it. And I think he wants it for ego reasons more than profit, but still it's a lot of money to lose.

Leo Laporte (00:09:01):
<Laugh> looks like that's gonna move ahead. It'll take a few months. It's not, it's not instant around six months because first Twitter has to write it all up, propose it to its shareholders. They have to vote to approve it, which they will probably because they're making money. It's more than the current stock price of Twitter he's offering. And so if they approve it then it also has to get regulatory approval from the federal government. So there's a few hurdles before it's all over about six months, then we'll see if Elon has some mass idea to make Twitter a better place so far, he hasn't demonstrated <laugh> much, much expertise. He is one of its biggest tweeters that's that's I guess a start, unlike the board, he actually uses Twitter. So that's good. Eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. We can talk how I tech doesn't have to be about that. It could be about your computer, your printer. I'll tell you about a couple of purchases I made this week trying to keep up with the Jones's 88, 88 as website tech guide labs.com. She's just sitting there in her telephone booth in the highway. <Laugh> ready to take your call. That would be cute. If we got you a little phone booth, you could.

Kim Schaffer (00:10:32):
Yes, it would.

Leo Laporte (00:10:32):
Kim Shaffer our phone agent. She,

Kim Schaffer (00:10:34):
It would be very cute.

Leo Laporte (00:10:35):
Be cute. Little booth, you know, we'd have it put a seat in there for you. Yeah. Phone would ring with a bell.

Kim Schaffer (00:10:41):
Would I have a big thick telephone book? Maybe I could just sit on that. Yeah. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
I always love it in the movies and it makes him really look dated. It's it's so easy to nowadays to put something in the movie that makes it look dated, where they run to the phone booth to look up like in the Terminator mm-hmm <affirmative> he runs to the booth to look up the address <laugh> and tears the page out of the phone book. Sarah Connor. So no one can ever find Sarah Connor again and better hoped. It's not a Terminator too. I always love that scene.

Kim Schaffer (00:11:09):
Good movie. I might have to go back to that. It's been a long time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
Yeah. It was much better than the, than the subsequent terminators. So thank you. <Laugh> let us terminate some of this problem. You got a problem I'm gonna fix it.

Kim Schaffer (00:11:24):
I no, no. I think Carine in Florida wants to chat about this week's big event,

Leo Laporte (00:11:29):
Elon and Twitter,

Kim Schaffer (00:11:30):
Elon and Twitter,

Leo Laporte (00:11:31):
Elon and Twitter. Okay. Thank you, Kim. Hello? Carine Leo Laport. The tech guy.

Caller 1 (00:11:38):
Oh, how you doing? I

Leo Laporte (00:11:39):
Am well, how are you?

Caller 1 (00:11:41):
Oh, pretty good. Nice hot weather down here. So I wanna talk to you about Elon Luskin Twitter. Now first,

Leo Laporte (00:11:48):
Just all anybody's talking about in the tech world, in the journalism world, but I have to ask a question question before we go too much farther. Do you use Twitter?

Caller 1 (00:11:56):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:11:57):
And do people, you know, use Twitter? Yes. Okay. Cause I always feel like it's, it has three 50 million users, so that's a good number. I mean, it's a 10th of what Facebook has, but it's a good number. But I always feel like it's maybe gets size attention cuz of the media, you know, constantly talking about what's happening. I

Caller 1 (00:12:17):
Feel that way too. I feel that way too, but I do use it and I know a lot of people, other people that do use

Leo Laporte (00:12:21):
It. Yeah. Okay,

Caller 1 (00:12:22):
Good. So I, I like to start out by acknowledging, I know that Twitter's a private company. They have every right to moderate their content and if every, any way they, they choose to do so. But however, I, as an American also have the right to criticize that moderation.

Leo Laporte (00:12:35):
That's true. So that is true. So

Caller 1 (00:12:37):
There's two different things that I have a problem with. Number one is quote unquote offensive speech. That's extremely OB subjective. We have people in this country that are offended by David Chappelle documentaries, which is absolutely childish and ridiculous. And we have other people that are not offended by anything. So the part of my prom is this information. Now there's several things that were labeled this inform over the past at least couple years that were not least plausible of wordy debates. The biggest example, being in the the COVID K 19 came from Chinese or Wuhan lab. And so the way I see this inform is, let me give you an example. Let me say, let's say somebody put on social media that you don't wanna live in Petaluma because it's under constant risk with hurricanes. <Laugh>, there'll be a hundred other, there'll be a hundred other people that retweet that or respond to that tweet saying that is complete nonsense and you know, it's

Leo Laporte (00:13:30):
Earthquakes, get it straight. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:13:33):
There's earthquakes are not hurricanes. Right? So, so that's how free speech works. I'd rather have a free exchange of ideas than having some other, some certain people decide what's misinformation and what's not, and what's offensive and what's not that's fair. So how do you,

Leo Laporte (00:13:46):
Yeah, that's fair. I don't, I think it's widely misunderstood what Twitter's trying to do. You've probably been on and it certainly, as long as the Internet's been around, they have a existed other forums that have gone downhill rapidly. It started with Usenet way back in the early days, the flame wars and Usenet got so bad that people just left. You can think of probably a few forums like that, where, and of course there's always four Chan and eight Chan four Chans, a good example. This is a form, which I don't recommend anybody go to. Maybe you're familiar with it. I don't know. Carmine, are you, do you know for Chan? I I do not. Okay. It is a, it is a form where anything goes, nothing is censored and what happens is, and by the way, I shouldn't use the word censored.

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
I don't, we need a better nothing's moderated. That's probably a better word for it. What happens? It is, it gets, it's like a garden where you don't tend the weeds. It goes pretty quick because the extremes push out the normal people. So I agree if it were, if there were civil discussion about stuff that is factually debatable and everybody were civil about it probably that, that does not need to be moderated. In fact, there are many people, including some Twitter people who say no, no moderation is not about what you say. It's how you say it. So Twitter is a business. Their business is to make a place where people want to be not to shape the conversation. I don't think they intend to shape the conversation, but to make a place where people want to be in order to do that. We know now from experience, you have to moderate it.

Leo Laporte (00:15:21):
Somehow you have to weed it so that you'd get rid of the most extreme, hateful, exaggerated stuff, because that pushes out the normal people. And so Twitter is a 15 year journey in trying to figure out how the heck to do that. And I'll be the first to say they don't always do it, right. They they'll say that they don't always do it right, but they're trying. And the problem Elon has, in my opinion, is he has this kind of dogmatic idea that free speech will fix it all. If everybody's just allowed to speak freely, it'll fix it all. But what he forgets is that spam is protected by free speech. That's free speech pornography is free speech. So he says, as long as it's legal, I'm gonna allow it. Well, that's how you get it to four Chan, a completely out of control place where no one normal wants to be.

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
And and that's the problem with making a product. You know, it's a business making a product that people want to use. Four Chan and eight Chan exists. In fact, eight Chan exists because four Chan was too careful. <Laugh> too moderated. So they wanted and even crazier place. And these are se pools. I mean, if you just wanna see what Twitter might be like with a very light touch or no moderation, but I, no nobody should do this unless they have a very strong stomach, go, go look at four Chan. So what Twitter's trying to do, not always perfectly is create an environment for exactly what you just described, reasonable discussion between people who are, you know, I mean, if it's a factual, if it's stuff that's made up and not true, you know, like the earth is flat. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't even ban that because you know, most people will just go. Yeah. Right. So if it's how it's said, not so much, even what it's said, does that make sense?

Caller 1 (00:17:14):
It, it, it does a little, but I, I just have a problem with who decides that. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:17:17):
Well, somebody has to, right. So who would you have do it?

Caller 1 (00:17:21):
Well, see, I'd rather have a free exchange of ideas than having one person or a few people decide it because well,

Leo Laporte (00:17:26):
But you, but you agree with me that you have to have moderation.

Caller 1 (00:17:29):
Well, I have, I agree with you that we have to have moderation things that are against the law. For example, I can't no, but,

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):
But spa's not spams, not against the law. So,

Caller 1 (00:17:39):
Well, Elon Musk said he wants to get rid of the bots

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
That's because he doesn't understand what free speech means. He says free speech is anything that's not against the law. Spam is not against the law. Pornography is not against law. Bots are not against the law. So he's got contradictory statements there and you're gonna have to in your own mind resolve that. Do we want spam?

Caller 1 (00:17:58):
I mean, I, I personally if it's there, it's there. I mean, it wouldn't bother me that much. I'd rather have a free exchange of ideas. Then

Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
I agree if we could have a free, a reasonable exchange of ideas. I agree.

Caller 1 (00:18:09):
Well, what's reasonable though. How do you, who decides what? Well,

Leo Laporte (00:18:12):
Somebody, this is the question. Do you have to moderate it or not? And I think you do, then somebody has to be a moderator.

Caller 1 (00:18:20):
Well, we can moderate based on what the law already states, if you cause

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
Spam bots. Nope. Cause then you have pornography bots and spam.

Caller 1 (00:18:27):
Well that, that's fine. Perfectly

Leo Laporte (00:18:29):
Legal.

Caller 1 (00:18:29):
What's wrong with that. What

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
Problem with that? Because like I said, it's weeds and it will quickly, all you have to do is go to four Chan. There's nothing illegal on four Chan, nothing illegal on four Chan. It's just not moderated. I think if you look at that and by the way, there are plenty other examples. That's the most easy one. You'll see what I mean. Leo Laport, the tech guy, Scott Wilkinson coming up. Did you hit my Did you hit my button there? Yeah. There are places that are free speech, no Gabs, not free speech nor is nor is truth. Social. They're very actively moderated. I don't know if we had dropout or not. Parlor is very actively moderated. You have to be otherwise. It's just becomes ads for condos in Florida. The whole thing, the easiest way to prove this is just go to four Chan, swear to God you have better have a strong stomach, but that is an, that is essentially unmoderated. They only remove illegal material. Not very good at that either by the way, but they, they try. No, no one should monitor. It should emulate four Chan <laugh> I mean, I'm glad four Chan exists, I guess,

Leo Laporte (00:20:25):
I guess. I don't know if you're speech absolutist fortune has to exist. I guess

Leo Laporte (00:20:34):
Our show today, I'm happy to say brought to you by wealth front, really like promoting these guys. And I have, I've done this for some years where they've been an advertiser with us. It is very tempting and there's a lot out there now tempting you to get into cryptocurrencies or NFTs or, you know, buying stocks, diamond, hands, holding, you know, and rockets in the moon and all that stuff. And I understand that's fun. It's attractive. But I tell my kids, that's not the way to build wealth over time. You may think day trading is the secret to investing success. Wealthfront actually has a ton of data that proves that time in market. Almost always beats timing. The market they're globally diversified portfolios, automatically optimized to hit the goals you set. So you get to say, you know, here's my timeframe. Here's my risk.

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Scott Wilkinson (00:23:21):
Hey Leo, how you

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
Doing? I am great. A B the national association of broadcasters show was this week. Now I, as a broadcaster, of course, I'm interested. It's really an engineering show for, and nowadays, not just for people with towers and, you know, transmitters, but for anybody streaming video and audio,

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:41):
But yeah. Podcasters. Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:23:42):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:23:43):
You and I used to go to that show and, and, you know, do show, do live coverage from there and stuff. It was great. Yeah. Now people ask me often, you know, why you even covering national association of broadcasters? That's the professionals, you know, we're consumers. Well, what the professionals do affects what you, the consumer, we, the consumer C and here. So it's important. I think, to keep up with what they're doing, because that will eventually end up affecting how we consume content.

Leo Laporte (00:24:17):
It's also a growing contingent of people. <Laugh> pretty soon will be everybody who are doing their own content.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:24):
That's right. Yeah. That's right now. Not everybody can afford to go to NA, but still what, what is shown there? What is introduced there? It's kind of like the CES for professionals.

Leo Laporte (00:24:37):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:39):
So I didn't go this year, but my

Leo Laporte (00:24:42):
Friend, that's the real reason people go, cuz it's kind of cool stuff. Right? It's

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:45):
Got cool stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:24:46):
That's we don't have to, we don't have to make all sorts of rationales. It's cool. That's

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:51):
Right. It's cool. It is

Leo Laporte (00:24:52):
Cool. It's fun. It is it's gadgets. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:54):
Now I didn't go. But our friend Mike, he did, and he gave me a lot of good notes on some interesting stuff that was happening there. First of all, he said the attendance was a bit over $55,000 50 that's good. 5,000 people.

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
That's good. Is that normal?

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:11):
No, it's it's about half of normal. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:25:13):
Wow. Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:13):
But it's still good.

Leo Laporte (00:25:14):
It's still a good number. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:15):
It's still a pretty good number. He said on the other hand, I learned there was upward upwards of a hundred thousand people in Vegas for the NFL draft. <Laugh> at the same time.

Leo Laporte (00:25:25):
Yeah. Well a that doesn't surprise me. I think the NFL's probably more popular,

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:30):
More popular than any big. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:32):
It's not surprise.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:33):
Yeah. So there was a lot of ATSC 3.0 news. And as we know, ATSC 3.0 is the next generation of over the air broadcasting, television, broadcasting, and more and more TVs have the tuners in them. We're gonna see a lot more coming up. What

Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
Tvs have, see, we dropped the tuners <laugh> right. 30 years ago they stopped putting tuners in TVs.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:59):
No, no, no, no, no. They, no. In fact by definition it's not a

Leo Laporte (00:26:04):
TV unless yeah,

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:06):
Yeah. It's right. If it doesn't have a, a tuner in it, it's really more of a monitor.

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
So, so that's funny because I guess I have lots of TVs, but I've never connected them.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:16):
Never connected to

Leo Laporte (00:26:17):
Anything that needs a tuner

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:18):
To an antenna. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:26:19):
Exactly. But tuner. So you can go to channel 2, 3, 4, 5. I get all those channels, but over the internet, not through the TV.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:24):
Right, exactly. Yeah. Well, the, one of the interesting things is that ATS 3.0 actually delivers digital audio and video content as IP internet protocol.

Leo Laporte (00:26:38):
Ah, yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:39):
So you

Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
Need an internet connection.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:41):
No, you don't. You don't actually it's coming over the air. Oh, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:26:45):
Oh, IP over the air.

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:46):
Oh, so it's data over the air. So it's data now, you know, the transition from analog to digital was just that analog to digital, but it was Digi digital video and audio information. It was not packetized IP takes, takes all that information and puts it in little packets and sends those little packets and that's what's happening here. And it allows a lot of things. It allows something called one to many. So and, and, and limited distribution. So you can, for example, say I, I'm interested in, in my district supervisor race and, and the, the, the broadcaster will put all the different races, political races into the stream and you can then tune which one you wanna see. So it's much more personalizable you, you can, you can get exactly what you want or football scores.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:49):
You know, I, I'm interested in my high school football and I don't care about that other high school football. And so you can tune in that particular thing. It also allows for more targeted ads, as we have seen on the internet now for quite some time, they've where you go. Right. And so, and they send you ads, you know, oh, you're just shopping for a purse. Well, here's a bunch of ads for purses and they're gonna, that is gonna come in. ATSC 3.0 as well to some degree cuz they're gonna watch what you watch and they're gonna say, okay, let's send ads to about that. Now you mentioned tuners in TVs and certainly virtually all TVs have tuners and more and more of them are gonna have ATSC 3.0 tuners. But you could also get set top boxes, separate boxes, like remember in the analog to digital transition, you could get a set top box of converted the analog to digital and, and sometimes set top or separate digital tuners.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:52):
Now you can get ATSC 3.0 tuners. Zapper box was one there at the show. Mike Mike identified $200, two tuner box with eventually the potential for DVR being able to record shows that come over the air. And what was another one? He said that the zapper box looked very good and Tableau is another one that you might have heard of that is gonna have an H DM I 2.1 connection to the TV. And this is an interesting thing too. The, the box will need an H DM I 2.1 connection to the TV, unlike earlier, Tableau devices, which brought in the signal from the antenna and then distributed it over your home, over wifi or your home network, which you could still do theoretically. But the issue of DRM, the ugly issue of DRM raises its head

Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
And copy protection,

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:56):
Copy protection, digital rights management. Exactly. And so now these new boxes that are gonna be coming out will require you to have a hard wire H DMI connection from the box to your TV. No more whole home distribution.

Leo Laporte (00:30:12):
See everything you've said so far makes me not want this

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:15):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
Am I wrong?

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:19):
This

Leo Laporte (00:30:19):
Is clearly designed for the benefit of broadcasters. Not for fewers mm-hmm <affirmative> in my opinion, I would, we get every,

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:26):
I would've to say

Leo Laporte (00:30:27):
We don't need it.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:29):
Well, yes, except that it's free,

Leo Laporte (00:30:34):
Free, but you gotta get a new TV and you gotta get a new tuner. It's not exactly free. Well,

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:39):
No, if you get a new TV, you're gonna get free

Leo Laporte (00:30:41):
With a new TV. The other thing that I should point out is it's, it's not U ubiquitous yet. It's slowly rolling out across the country, correct.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:51):
It's in 60, 70 markets. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
Have you seen any ATSC three programming and have you noticed any difference?

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:57):
No, no. I have not seen it. I oh, okay. Not that I haven't noticed any difference. I have not seen it. So I don't really know. There was one announcement that technol talked about HDR over, over the air and they've got a new well, they've had it for some years called advanced HDR by technical. It's all plain

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
Catch. That's what I don't get.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:20):
Well, yes, that is true. Yeah. That is true. But as you and I have mentioned many times, the picture quality of over the air is generally better than cable and

Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
Even HTR and atmo in, in high Def

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:36):
All that stuff. 4K,

Leo Laporte (00:31:38):
Although so far, as far as I know, none of the ATSC three stations have broadcast in 4k. Maybe occasionally, no, I using that extra bandwidth to do multiple channels. You can't do both true.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:50):
However, there was another interesting announcement at, at nav that addresses that issue. Oh. Which is called MIMO. I M O multi input, multi output, basically what it's <laugh> what have to it does we'll have to do it next time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
The way Mike Mann is saying in our discord that KTLA does do 4k, which I'll have to see. That sounds great. Yeah. Thank you. Scott. Wilkinson, Leo lat tech guy, more calls coming up. So do they, Mike, do they do it all the time or do they only do it some of the time?

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:31):
Oh, Hey Mike man. Good to see you, man.

Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
Yeah. I think a lot of people want to use the extra channels. Right. Cause there's more revenue

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:41):
Opportunity. Correct? Correct. Right. But, but this MIMO thing, I'm sorry, I didn't get to, to talk about that on the air. It it's really interesting and it's very technical they're they can take the, the broadcast signal and they can and code one channel on the horizontally polarized em wave and another channel on the vertically polarized em wave. Okay. Or, or they can take, they can take those two polarizations and transmit more data. NHK was showing I think it was NHK been Korea. I think it was Korea was showing eight K broadcasting over the air over ATSC 3.0. Using this bandwidth doubling technique.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
Okay, then that's cool.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
I am gonna let you talk.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:41):
Well, thank you. Yes. Mike B says picture quality may be better than cable, but fiber is pretty close to OTA. That may be true. I, I have never really seen I've never had fiber in my house. I don't now unfortunately, cuz it doesn't, they don't service. They don't doesn't come to this air area, but that may very well be true. That may very well be true.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:08):
So I guess Mike Mann is in the chat room. Nice to see you, Mike. I hope all is well with you. Beat master shouldn't shouldn't eight K use four times the 4k bandwidth. Yes. However, another thing I didn't get to talk about time is so short is that the Kodak efficiency is increasing exponentially and Mike Case saw some examples of, of 10 80 P at nine megabits per second, next to 4k at nine megabits per second with a more efficient Kodak. And the quality of the 4k apparently was better. Mike, if, if you're in the chat room please verify that for me. But I saw a photo that he took of, of a side by side comparison and it was, you know, it was looked really good, so it's not necessarily. So that 4k really requires four times the bandwidth of 10, a P and eight K requires four times the bandwidth of 4k. Because if you use a more efficient code deck, then you can actually squeeze that much information down the same size pipe. We can only hope 

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:39):
Let's see. Mac bookie is saying following on my question of last week regarding short throw versus long throw, why do most home theaters use long throw if short throw have many benefits? Well that's a very good question. Like I think I said last week, short throw has to overcome a problem that long throw doesn't, which is key stoning. And by that, I mean, if you're a short throw projector and you're right up against the wall and you're aiming your light way up, the image is going to be very, the, the outline of the image is gonna be very distorted and you need to correct that and you can do that optically or you can do that electronically. And the projectors that do it, optically are better than the ones that do it electronically, but that requires special lenses and lenses are never cheap.

Leo Laporte (00:36:37):
Leo Laport, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number Joey on the line from San Diego. Hi Joey.

Caller 2 (00:36:46):
Hey Leo. Thanks for taking my call and I thank you for everything that you do for us.

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
Well, I thank you for calling. What can I do for you?

Caller 2 (00:36:53):
A couple of things, Leo, I don't really have a tech question. I just wanted to <laugh> I'd like to call you and I like to call you and share my thoughts about different stuff. So what, well, first off I wanna thank you. Cause last time I called you about 10 months ago, Leo, we were talking about audio and you brought Scott in and you, you, you put my call on, on your site afterwards and I was so touched. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
You're flattered. That's good. Yeah. You were must have been the call of the week. You that's good. <Laugh> exactly you

Caller 2 (00:37:20):
Gave, you gave me two. You gave me two minutes of fame, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
<Laugh> my fleshy. Joey, you watching.

Caller 2 (00:37:26):
I was, I was watching a documentary on Netflix last night and it just bought a bought to me about 10 failure. I was, I wanna talk about like 10 different business failures. If we can get to a couple. Was,

Leo Laporte (00:37:40):
Was that the documentary about business failures?

Caller 2 (00:37:43):
It was a documentary about blockbuster.

Leo Laporte (00:37:46):
Oh yeah. They went out with a bang Netflix, but there's a good example. Blockbuster was a video cassette rental company. That's not a good business to be in <laugh> nowadays. And,

Caller 2 (00:37:58):
And Leo net full lakes walked into their offices and begged them to buy 'em from million.

Leo Laporte (00:38:04):
Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:38:05):
They told 'em Nope, go away. We don't. They kicked them out.

Leo Laporte (00:38:08):
There's a famous book by Christensen called the innovators dilemma. And this is what is going on, which is if you are making money in an, in ongoing business, you're what we call an incumbent. It's very hard for you to embrace something that is going to come in the future. For sure. I'm sure blockbuster knew that the video cassette rental business, wasn't a lifetime annuity, but it's still very hard to cannibalize your existing business in order to jump into, into a

Caller 2 (00:38:41):
New one, you gotta think, and you gotta think too the internet wasn't that good then? Right? You know,

Leo Laporte (00:38:46):
They might have had some reasons for saying, well, Netflix will never make it. But honestly, the real thing is we're doing just fine right now. And we don't wanna do anything to jeopardize

Caller 2 (00:38:55):
It stores or something like that. They had, they, they were, here's a,

Leo Laporte (00:38:57):
The world. Here's a modern example. It's very good CNN, which makes almost all of its money from fees from cable operators. Now they know that the future is streaming and they would very much like to do to jump from cable to streaming and charge people or five bucks a month they'd make more money, but they can't do that without getting the cable operators mad at them and risking their current income. So they did launch something called CNN plus a streaming solution. They only got 10,000 daily viewers because they had no live news on it. Why didn't they have live news innovators, dilemma. They didn't want to cannibalize their existing business. And if they put live news on the risk was they would lose all those cable operators. There's another famous example, which is Kodak. Kodak made all of its money in selling film and photo processing, right?

Leo Laporte (00:39:54):
They knew digital was cut coming. In fact, they even were one of the first companies to make a digital camera. They knew it was coming. They had full knowledge. Our lunch is about to be eaten. And so very famously, they started to push digital. And in fact, Kodak, you know, had a digital business. They bought something called O photo, which was a online photo sharing. And printing site was kind of number one at the time they really had a digital strategy, but here, here was their problem. There wasn't as much revenue in digital as there was in photo processing and selling film. And they couldn't survive as a business when they made the move to digital.

Caller 2 (00:40:32):
I think, and newspapers are another, another one

Leo Laporte (00:40:34):
Look at that. Right? I mean,

Caller 2 (00:40:38):
They, they, they saw, they saw the internet coming, but like you just said, they couldn't make money in advertising.

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Yeah. What are they gonna do? So there's a few counter examples in New York times and the Washington post have both done well in the digital environment, but, but that's a handful compared to the million, hundreds of newspapers that went out business all across the country.

Caller 2 (00:40:56):
But Leo, you got to think blockbuster would still be around maybe in, you know, even their physical stores in, in a, in, in big cities, you know, like New York or Los Angeles where they have enough people, but they could sell Blueray disc or not. You know?

Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
Well, there's red box, right? Most towns have a red box out in front of the drug store where you can get a DVD. But I, I have to think that's not a good business going forward. That's why, you know, when Scott was talking about this new ATSC three, it's very interesting cuz here's, you know, broadcast television channels trying to survive in a digital world. So is this the right strategy for them to design kind of a catch up technology using transmitters and towers? Is this gonna

Caller 2 (00:41:41):
Save? That's what, that's what I, but that's what I love about you. Cause you're all over it. You, you you're, you you're saying this, you scan what's his name? This is, this is a waste of time. They're trying to catch up. It's too late. Now.

Leo Laporte (00:41:53):
I feel like it is because they're, they're trying to catch up with, with something you already have on the internet. Exactly. And, and you know, Scott said, well, it's free. That's a good point. It's free. And you know, by the way, free broadcast is still the best quality as he pointed out broad, you know, quality of video. But I don't think most people care, honestly. It's, it's gonna be very interesting. We're in, we live in ti a very interesting time because what's happening is a very rapid, no, you don't normally get to see this. When the industrial revolution happened and, and machines came in and took away jobs from humans, it took a hundred, 200 years when the printing press came in, it took 400 years, but we're seeing this all happen in a lifetime. And, and so we're living in very interesting times. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. So that's what we're watching.

Caller 2 (00:42:42):
Hey <laugh> Hey Leo, I've got a couple other failures I want to hit you with. Yes. Okay. IBM failed to allow bill gates to license the software. Yeah. Remember that one? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:54):
So that was an interesting story. Cause they were building their first PC, which turned out to be very, very successful. But bill gates was a smart businessman. He said, look,

Caller 2 (00:43:01):
And he had to war two software too, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:43:03):
They had OS two. He said, IBM, I'm not gonna sell you Doss. I'm gonna let you license it. You pay me just a small fee for every copy sold. And it made Microsoft a very, very big pot of money. Sure

Caller 2 (00:43:15):
Did.

Leo Laporte (00:43:16):
Don't count. IBM out. Did every time I, I mentioned that my friend John C Devor says, yeah, but IBM still has a lot of patents, so they're not dead yet. They're an interesting company that's trying to struggle. You know, who's really done an interesting job Microsoft, because they realize windows and office people aren't gonna be buying those forever.

Caller 2 (00:43:36):
Leo. Their failure was they, they wouldn't go to the cell phones. They wouldn't

Leo Laporte (00:43:39):
Oh yeah. They lost in the, yeah. They, they lost a mobile. Oh,

Caller 2 (00:43:42):
What his name? They

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
Fumbled that. Yeah. They fumbled that that's Steve bomber lost that one. They had

Caller 2 (00:43:47):
Done that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:43:49):
So Satya Adela comes in six years ago, their new CEO and he's from the cloud side, he ran Azure and he said, the future's in the cloud, this, the quarterly results that just came out from Microsoft fully half of their revenue now is from the cloud. This is a company that has done the, the thing that is, I think very rare, which is make that transition. There's so many companies like radio shack that didn't

Caller 2 (00:44:14):
And another thing they did too, Leo was when they bailed out apple, I mean they

Leo Laporte (00:44:18):
Saved apple you're right. They did. Let's not forget that

Caller 2 (00:44:21):
That got 'em a lot of money. I mean, you know why they did that

Leo Laporte (00:44:24):
Antitrust regulations, they could not afford to not have competition. So they, so very famously Steve jobs came back to apple, realized they only had about three months left of money. They were gonna go bankrupt back in what is this? 95. And and they, 98 98

Caller 2 (00:44:40):
Say was 97 90.

Leo Laporte (00:44:41):
Yeah. Yeah. When he came back and his first time given a keynote bill gates comes on the stage, looming over him. Not on stage, he's on a screen, Lou, over him saying, I'm going, I'm going to give you 150 million. And it really wasn't outta the goodness of his heart. Bill gates was no fool. It was about,

Caller 2 (00:44:59):
Oh, it never

Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
Is keeping regulation off his bat. S

Caller 2 (00:45:02):
Yeah. Cut.

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
Business is hard though. You see how hard it is. Don't you, you see how hard it is.

Caller 2 (00:45:07):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:08):
And when you build a business with a, with a way of business in mind, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you sometimes very hard to make that pivot.

Caller 2 (00:45:17):
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:45:19):
What's the name of the documentary. I wanna watch that. Do you remember?

Caller 2 (00:45:24):
It's on net. Yeah. It's on Netflix. Yeah. Blockbuster on Netflix. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:45:27):
It's about blockbuster. Yeah. I'm gonna watch that. That's fascinating.

Caller 2 (00:45:30):
It's good. Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a business expert, you know, but I do find it kind of fascinating from a distance. Well,

Caller 2 (00:45:40):
You, you, you're a sports. You're a sports fan though, right? Yeah. Is there, did you know that the winner, did you know that the winner peg jets, the hockey NHL team? Yeah. You know, they passed on Wayne Gress. Did you know that? <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:45:52):
That's an example of, you always got a steer to where the puck is going. Right. Joey, not where it is now, where it's going. Joey. Always a pleasure. Thank you for calling Leo. Laporte the tech guy more calls right after this. <Laugh> it's called the last blockbuster in America, which is still running, I think, up in isn't it up in Oregon. Where is it? Joey

Caller 2 (00:46:14):
Yeps, Oregon, Oregon,

Leo Laporte (00:46:15):
Oregon. It's in Bens. The city. Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:46:17):
Yeah. Ben, Oregon. Ben, Oregon. Yep. Wow. Yep. Leo, can you imagine where they'd be if they had bought?

Leo Laporte (00:46:24):
Yeah. But how did you know that Netflix was gonna be the one, there were plenty of what if you had bought quibi <laugh> There were plenty of examples. You know, you don't know it's easy now for us to say, oh, if they'd only bought Netflix, but who knew right. Who knew, Hey, I gotta run. It's it's Scott Wilkinson time in the sun. Joey. Always a pleasure. Thank you. My call. Thank you, sir. Byebye. All right. Now it's your, got he,

Scott Wilkinson (00:46:49):
Hey, thanks so much. That guy's interesting. He's

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
I love Joey. He always has things to say.

Scott Wilkinson (00:46:54):
He's great. Yeah. Let's see. Hey everybody. Nice to see you. All IEC says, I don't know if you mentioned this and I missed it, but what about broadcast TV stations encrypting their signals starting in the summer. I had not heard that

Leo Laporte (00:47:12):
The surprise, huh?

Scott Wilkinson (00:47:14):
Mike. Hi. You probably know more about this than I do. So if you're still in the chat room, chime in here that would be bad. You know, they're, they're trying to deal with copy protection and everyone knows how Leo feels about copy protection and I'm more or less in that same camp. Hey, loquacious V two. Good to see you. Yeah, redacted. Yeah. I changed my shelf a little bit. Each time. I'm still working on the set at, so just to keep you on your toes, you know, see if you can spot the differences. And Mike, I says OTA is by law and regulation free to air. The DRM is to protect the content between the transmitter and the receiver, the <affirmative>. So there you go. That I thought that was probably the case. And he asked about that at NA as a matter of fact. Well, there you go. Let's see, Gary's asking, do you see any growth in Roku in the future? You know, <laugh>, I don't my crystal, ball's kind of cloudy on that. Who is certainly one of the big streaming platforms. My favorite actually,

Scott Wilkinson (00:48:38):
So hard to say You know, can all these streaming platforms, Roku, apple, TV, fire, TV Invidia Google TV, can they all survive? It's a very good question. And if they can't, which ones are gonna go under, I think it would be difficult to predict that Roku would go under, but one never knows. Doug M lunch is never free. Well, unless you're a journalist, sometimes it is <laugh> to you anyway.

Scott Wilkinson (00:49:23):
K woods. Good to see you happy weekend to you as well. K woods, what happened to Chromecast? Well, it's still around but I don't hear much about it these days. That's a, a good point. They that's that, that could be an example of one that didn't quite make it. Joe says Roku's growth will come from R Roku ad framework. Well, now ads, there you go. Netflix, and a lot of these companies, we talked about this on my podcast last Tuesday Barb Gonzalez was on and she's a streaming expert. And, you know, she was talking about how all these, a lot of these streaming providers, as opposed to platforms are, are adding or offering less expensive ad supported tier to their offerings. And so we're gonna see more of that. And maybe Roku itself as a platform will be doing ads too.

Scott Wilkinson (00:50:27):
I, I need to look into that, that, that is a very interesting question. Whether the platform will be offering ads, forcing ads upon you as it were. So let's see, web 2290 says I have an ad blocker, fire, Roku ads are being blocked. Well, there you go. So it's this constant battle between consumers who don't want ads and providers who must send you ads one way or another in order to survive. It's it's a real balancing act because the money needs to come from somewhere. So either you pay a lot in a subscription or you watch ads, for example, here's an example from my own experience. My wife and I have been watching the rebooted version of the show Kung Fu which started out really good season. One was excellent. Season two has gone downhill quite a bit.

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:35):
But the point I'm trying to make here is that the only way to get it on, on Xfinity cable is on a standard definition channel that has the incorrect aspect ratio, man, that's frustrating. I can get it in HD at the correct aspect ratio, but only streaming and the streaming option has fast forward disabled. So I can't zip past the commercials. So do I wanna watch it in death in a funky aspect ratio, which is looks super soft and really bad, essentially unwatchable in my opinion, or do I wanna watch it in a nice, in, in the proper aspect ratio and high definition and have to sit through the ads? That's a devil's bargain if you ask me oh, the Soo the writer, I'm sorry. Maybe you'll feel differently about season two, season one was excellent. Really excellent. And season two, well, I don't wanna give you too many spoilers since the Soo the rider just started season two. So let me know what you think. Let me know what you think. If you, you disagree with me, I'm all about it. Scooter X can't you watch it on KTLA well, no, since I'm not in LA anymore, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:53:00):
If you wanna change or change your lower third to reflect the we should probably do that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:05):
We should probably do that. Let's what do you want

Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
It to say?

Leo Laporte (00:53:11):
Youtube dot slash AVS

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:12):
Forum. AVS forum. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:53:14):
Mm-Hmm

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:14):
<Affirmative> exact de Mundo. Totally

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
Do that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:17):
That'd be awesome. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Yeah. I was thinking that during the

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:21):
Show. Yeah. I, I mean, I, I, I've taken a bit of a hiatus from tech hive, but doesn't mean I'm not gonna be back there, but

Leo Laporte (00:53:27):
Oh. But it's good to promote the new thing.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:29):
Yeah. so yeah, absolutely. If you could say just like that. Yeah, sure. That's awesome. Thanks man. Sure.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:48):
Let's see. The, so the writer I'm very sensitive to broadcast quality. That's true. I will let you know when I catch up on Kung Fu. Yes, please do. <Laugh> oh, let's see. Phoenix warp one star Trek, strange worlds debuts later this week. Any interest? Yes, absolutely. Where is it? I, I need to go find it. I don't, I'm not sure exactly. I, it must be on paramount, right? That must be where it is. Scooter X. Yes. On the CW app. That's exactly right. That's, that's where I watch. Well, not the CW app. I watch it on Xfinity on demand, but it is, that's essentially the CW app. Although, you know what, maybe there's a difference. I, I might have to go look on the CW app and see if I can zip past commercials. I would doubt it. I would be very strange.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:41):
That would be unusual if that were possible. Mike B I have called Comcast and complained. And I even called the station the call letters of which I don't remember now, but it's in Monterey and they actually responded and said they would look into it. And then they wrote me back and said, have we fixed it? And I went and looked, no, haven't fixed it. Okay. Have we fixed it now? No, haven't fixed it yet. I haven't gotten, I haven't heard back from Comcast, which is not that surprising, but a smaller TV station. I actually heard back from them. And that was cool. The Sue, the writer. Yeah. Paramount plus has all the star Trek shows.

Leo Laporte (00:55:25):
Okay, sir, gonna

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:26):
Let you back. Thank you so much. See you next

Leo Laporte (00:55:28):
Week.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:29):
See you next week. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:55:29):
You, sir. Save and better call Saul to the all day episodes. I want to binge it. We finished slow horses. That was really good on apple TV plus, that was very, very good. First, first thing I've seen on apple TV plus where I said, okay, they finally figured it out.

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
Well, Hey, Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches. You know, the usual litany of technology surrounding us imbuing a life a with excitement and frustration simultaneously in equal parts, eighty eight, eighty eight. Lios the phone number? (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You could still call, just use Skype out. Shouldn't cost you anything. We put links to things we talk about on the website@techguylabs.com, tech guy labs.com. Robert on the line from Ventura. He's next? Hi, Robert.

Caller 3 (00:56:40):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:56:41):
I'm sorry to keep you on hold for are so darn long, but thank you for your patience.

Caller 3 (00:56:45):
That's all right. Let me take it off speaker.

Leo Laporte (00:56:48):
Sure. This is as bad as calling the Dell tech support. I apologize. <Laugh>

Caller 3 (00:56:55):
Well it wasn't Dell. What, here's my problem. It's not nowhere near what Elon Musk is dealing with. Fortunately, or maybe not. Fortunately, I

Leo Laporte (00:57:06):
Don't know. I could, I could live with 270 billion, you know? Yeah,

Caller 3 (00:57:09):
Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't even answer a phone if I had that <laugh> anyway, I I'm trying to get into my email account. We have a kind of a legacy account, a product G net, which dates me a little bit, but

Leo Laporte (00:57:28):
Wow. And it still works.

Caller 3 (00:57:31):
Yeah. It, it goes

Leo Laporte (00:57:33):
<Laugh>. Wow. So somebody obviously prodigy is a kind of legendary, almost a, like a, a unicorner a mermaid internet service that goes dates back to the seventies and eighties. It was maybe the eighties, not, let's not go too far. But it was kind of at the same time as comper and genie. When, when, when instead of the public internet you had kind of your own little service AOL was the, be the biggest of them. And prodigy was cool, cuz it, it was very graphical. I think it was based on the French Minitel so it had this kind of very graphical look. Well that's cool. So you you've had, you've had this address since you had prodigy.

Caller 3 (00:58:16):
I have. And I've had the same cell phone provider, which is at, can I mention the name? Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:58:22):
ATN.

Caller 3 (00:58:26):
Okay.

Caller 3 (00:58:27):
And what happened was, you know, I think what they do originally,

Leo Laporte (00:58:32):
So at, and T must have bought the prodigy customers. So right. So, or, or, yeah,

Caller 3 (00:58:41):
Let me just say it goes to Yahoo.

Leo Laporte (00:58:43):
Oh, wait a minute. Now, now it looks like, is it so yeah, cuz at and T also by ya <laugh>

Caller 3 (00:58:50):
And now I'm looking at it, it says currently.com. So it says at&t and then Yahoo and currently have no clue. Yeah. Running this thing.

Leo Laporte (00:59:05):
Oh my God. And so can you log in with your old credentials or did they send you new credentials or how does that work?

Caller 3 (00:59:12):
Well, so we, my wife and I both have, this is why I haven't got rid of it is she has this account and she wants to keep her email address.

Leo Laporte (00:59:21):
Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah. So she doesn't wanna lose that prodigy, you know, dot net address currently is what at T calls their email. That's all at T Yahoo. So it's looking at it's currently do att.yahoo.com. <Laugh>

Caller 2 (00:59:41):
Okay. So yesterday my email mine went down, my wife, oh no, has hers.

Leo Laporte (00:59:47):
It says at and T mail users. If you are having login issues, please try again shortly. We've identified an issue and expect a resolution soon.

Caller 3 (00:59:58):
Well, that was, that resolution was for an hour away. Then it was three to five hours. Oh, wow. Then the call was try the next morning. Wow. Which was today. Now it's 24 to 48 hours.

Leo Laporte (01:00:13):
Well, which

Caller 3 (01:00:14):
Yikes. Insane.

Leo Laporte (01:00:15):
Yeah. So this is the problem. And by the way, you're not, not just the prodigy folks, but people with Yahoo mail at and T mail. This is becoming over the last month or two, the most common question I'm getting. And it's all because these companies got sold and sold again and they moved on and anytime you're moving a system from one company to another, you're gonna have problems like this. Once they get it onto <laugh> their servers, it should continue to operate just fine. There's no reason she doesn't care about the user interface. Does she use an email program or does she go through on the web?

Caller 3 (01:00:56):
We go through well, I go through Firefox to Yahoo, to the email. I'm not sure what

Leo Laporte (01:01:05):
So you're seeing, so that's the web. So you're seeing a website that has your email in it. That should, all of that should work just fine. You might get some user interface changes. Prodigy.Net is still down. I see. According to, is it down right now? It's been going up and down, which is interesting. So they're clearly in a migration to a new system, which you would expect at some point they want to get it off of whatever servers, maybe the Yahoo servers and onto the currently servers. And with any luck, this will happen. You to be a disruption now for a little while, and then once it gets back up, it'll be fine. It's almost as if the road you take to work is being moved <laugh> to another, another location. <Laugh> and so there's gonna be this interruption when the road is broken, but once it's reopened you should be all right. I mean, there's nothing I could do to fix it.

Caller 3 (01:02:09):
Yeah. I just thought, well, maybe someone else was dealing with this same problem.

Leo Laporte (01:02:16):
Yeah. Everybody is everybody with a prodigy.net address is currently down.

Caller 3 (01:02:21):
Well, see, this is the problem. My wife who has pro.net is not down and, and I can log in with a apple device and get to the, my email address page where it has all your inbox and it's shows my last email that came in yesterday morning. Here's

Leo Laporte (01:02:42):
The good news. 9:00 AM. Yeah. So it's, yours is not down that you can't log in, but you're not getting any new mail. So it's as might as well be down all that mail, you will get, nothing will be lost.

Caller 3 (01:02:54):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:02:54):
That's the good news. The servers that are sending that mail are holding it. I'll be trying every five minutes. Can, can I get it there? No, they, at some point they may, at some point say to the sender, Hey, I couldn't deliver this, but it won't happen right away. It might take a day. They'll try a certain number of times, but you won't, you probably won't lose anything. If, if prodigy or Yahoo at and T get their act together, they're moving. It is what they're doing. I think and it takes time for this to propagate through the system. That's why yours is sort of working. Your wife's is not working at all. It just, it has to propagate through the system. Honestly, I know your wife loves this email address. One proactive thing you could do is have that email address forward to another service that isn't gonna go down like Google's Gmail or that's free or pay for.

Leo Laporte (01:03:52):
I think people should, if you really care about email, you should pay for it. So they're paid services and it's easy to get to, to set prodigy, say, Hey, when you get mail, just send it over here. That way, if prodigy goes down, you won't get the mail sent to prodigy, but you can at least tell people, Hey, you know, send it to my Gmail address for the time being the prodigy services down for right now. That's about the only thing aside aside from moving away from prodigy that you could do. I see. Yeah. You just have to wait, <laugh> forward

Caller 2 (01:04:24):
It. You can send your existing address to like a Gmail.

Leo Laporte (01:04:29):
Yeah. There'll be a setting in the I'm presuming I haven't used pro of Gmail in probably 30 years, but I'm presuming there's gonna be a setting in there that will say yeah. Forward my mail to Gmail. You also can set up Gmail, get your mail from prodigy. Gmail has a, it has in the forwarding and IM map settings in Gmail, you can say, yeah, here's my prodigy login. Just get my email from there. And then that way you only have to check prod Gmail. You can continue to send outbound mail as long as Gmail doesn't go down. Now, Gmail might go down. But I, I think Gmail's probably a safe, but compared to prodigy, for sure in 30 years, call me in 30 years. We'll talk about a replacement, but for now I

Caller 3 (01:05:08):
Hope I can <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
I hope you can too. My friend <laugh> okay. Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. I, I, there are people out there with aol.com, email prodigy.net. That's the first time I've heard about that. Compuserve.Com. These old addresses, cuz they don't have to go away. The servers can go away. The companies can go away. But the way the system works, the phone book that looks up, the email works. It's easy to just change it and say, well, yeah, don't send it to comper settings server anymore. Don't send it to prodigy server anymore. Send it over here. That's an easy thing to fix. So the companies do that and that way they don't lose these subscribers. Who've been there for decades. Eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo that's the phone number, more calls still to come half past the hour. Johnny jet travel guru joins us. Leo Laport de No, no, no, no. Sunshine, come back, come back. Don't listen to him. Let's let's get some more sunshine. Leo Laport, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number Chris on the line from Rancho Cucamonga. Hi Chris.

Caller 4 (01:06:33):
Hey Leo. Thanks for taking my call. I have a problem. And so does my wife and it has to do with Bing I've spent years avoiding Bing and for some reason now on both of our computers she has a all in one and I've got a Lenovo think pad that I use for work. When I do a a Google search, it comes back with Bing, what

Leo Laporte (01:07:01):
<Laugh> I know that's this is Microsoft's brilliant business strategy. Wow.

Caller 4 (01:07:08):
Yeah. So if I do for instance, I was, I was trying to look something up the other day Russia, which is made you know, 66 billion in selling, you know patrol products.

Leo Laporte (01:07:21):
Yeah. Thank you, Europe in Germany. Yeah. Ugh. Yeah,

Caller 4 (01:07:26):
Look it up. And what comes back is bing.com news

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
<Laugh>. So this is, which is, you know, not the best news source in the world. It is from Microsoft. Bing is their search engine, which is essentially kind of Yahoo search re wrapped by Microsoft. So a couple of things could have done that when you downloaded edge it, Microsoft browser can change it. Windows 11 uses Bing by default, probably you did a windows update and Microsoft sneakily changed it, which is rude, but it's easy.

Caller 4 (01:08:00):
Well, but okay, well let's fix it because my web browser, it says is Google Chrome. But when I go into internet properties it says to create homepage tabs type each address on its own line and it has msn.com. Yeah. But it doesn't say anything about Bing, but when I go to duck dot go, Bing does not come up. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:08:23):
Right. Duck do go is a very nice search engine designed to be kind of privacy forward. So you, there are, as you know, now many, many choices which browser are you using?

Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
I'll tell you what, I'm gonna put an article in our show notes that tells you how to change it for all browsers. One by one, you have to go into the browsers and change 'em one by one. It's very annoying to me. In fact, for Microsoft's really gotten more aggressive to pushing their edge browser on people and their being search engine. And I find it very annoying if you're using edge it's in the settings and more menu, and there's a section on privacy search and services, and then you can choose what search engine is used in the address bar in Chrome. It's pretty similar. It's under setting search engine. There's a managed search engines tab and then Firefox pretty much the same settings search, check it out. Yeah. So it's all per browser. It's per browser. So go to the browser and change it.

Caller 4 (01:09:27):
Okay. Yeah. It was Chrome. We had it. I had it on Chrome.

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
Yeah. Well, but the, the question is which browser program you're using and my guess is Microsoft's pushing very hard for everybody to use their browser edge, which is based on Google's chromium, but is, you know, ified, including some Microsoft features that make them money. And of course they make money if you Bing search. So they want you to use Bing.

Caller 4 (01:09:53):
And then I'll tell you though, also when I'm using M Bing it doesn't come up with as many results as I looking for. Like when I use,

Leo Laporte (01:10:02):
Yeah, this is, unfortunately, this is the problem. And I say, unfortunately, cuz Google's so dominant. It's very hard to compete because they have now almost two decades worth of search indexing under their belt. They've searched, they've indexed the entire internet. And so they're completely dominant and they're, they are the best results. So it's hard for somebody to come along and say, well, we're gonna be better. Duck. Doco is trying and they're getting better and better. Bing has tried. And I think Bing is a little hobbled by Microsoft's desire to make money off of it. Right. So yeah, I would, you know, Bing's fine. What you'll also know notice in those sections is you can prefix any search with, with a letter or two that will say use Bing this time or use Chrome this time or use duck, duck go this time.

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
All of the search engines will allow you to do that. So you can, you know, if you don't say it'll automatically default to whatever your default is, I guess you want Google's search engine, but you can all also without changing the default, say for this search, just do duck, duck go. So I, yeah, I think everybody has the right to use the search engine. They want Microsoft has increasingly with windows and it's, I frankly I'm unhappy about it has increasingly in pushed you in the direction of tools that make them money. And just as we were talking last hour, I, I think it's unfortunate. I guess it's inevitable in it's, you know, it's capitalism, right? That companies are gonna do something that favor is their financial success over the user's interests. But it's my job <laugh> to represent in this battle. <Laugh> the user, you know, we're users.

Leo Laporte (01:11:46):
And we want our computers to behave the way we want not to make them a most money for the company that built the software or the hardware, but what we want. And so that's really the, the it's I guess in the capitalist society, that's a natural tension, but Microsoft, so it's a balance, right? And you don't, as any company, you don't wanna look like your anti-consumer, but plenty of companies make consumer hostile moves. Apple took the headphone Jack off of its phones. So you'd have to buy their Bluetooth headphones. That is not for our benefit. <Laugh> it's for their benefit. In fact Nelia Patel, my colleague at diverge famously call it a usual user hostile move. Well, it happens all the time in technology <affirmative> unfortunately. And there's, and there's really nothing. Nothing we can do about it, except that it's my job.

Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
And, and I will continue to represent the user in this battle. You know, I look, the companies need to make money. I'm not trying to put 'em outta business. I don't wanna put Microsoft outta business, but it is one of the reasons I prefer the Linux operating system, cuz there is no company trying to make money off of it. Everything that's done on Linux operating system because it's free and open source and created by enthusiasts for users is done, is designed around what the user wants. That's the whole design precept for there's at no point anything done to make money for the company. Cuz there is no company. Now as a result, Lennox can be kind of hard and tricky and tech techy because it's tech, he's doing it. So a lot of people still prefer Mac and windows. But if you, I honestly, I kinda like working in an environment where it's the consumers deciding their fate and you would, that's nothing you would ever see for instance on Linux is an operating system or a browser just willynilly saying no, you should use our search engine. You should use Bing, just use Bing. Bing's better. Microsoft's made a lot of most to force you to use edge their browser, try to use Chrome on windows 11 and it's gonna complain. No, they all report the tech. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
He is not the us postal service. He is Johnny jet and we had this song first. I just wanna say he's our traveling guru, Johnny jet.com joins us every week to help us travel better with technology. And we are getting back on the road. America is traveling again. Hallelujah. We are

Johnny Jet (01:14:29):
Hello

Leo Laporte (01:14:29):
John. Yes.

Johnny Jet (01:14:30):
Was 2.2 went through TSA yesterday, but 20 19 3 years ago was 2.5. So we still there's days where we're right there. And there's days where we're just a little bit behind.

Leo Laporte (01:14:42):
I, I think this summer's gonna be huge. We're still watching. There's a little COVID B a two spike, especially in the back east and the Northeast. So we're watching that. But man, barring anything unusual? I think, I think we're gonna be heading out in a couple of months.

Johnny Jet (01:14:59):
Well, I was supposed to be on a plane right now to where were to Newark and then Connecticut. Yes in

Leo Laporte (01:15:03):
Boston right now. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:15:05):
And so this morning I canceled my ticket be because I was looking at the numbers, I was like, you know what? They're spiking there. And I was gonna was C, C family. They've all been at parties. I'm like, you know what? I'm not bringing COVID back to my kids.

Leo Laporte (01:15:16):
Good. Yeah. My mom said, don't come visit in Rhode Island because of the spike. And I said,

Johnny Jet (01:15:21):
We're, we're supposed to go to Rhode Island in a few weeks. So yeah. Yeah. But I did learn some stuff by the way, from this ticket, I had a credit on jet Pelu that I needed to use by the end of the month. Yeah. <affirmative> so I booked mint using this credit cause that, oh, I love originally had it for three of my kids. I love mint or two of my kids in my wife,

Leo Laporte (01:15:40):
Jet blues live flat to Boston.

Johnny Jet (01:15:42):
It is, or to New York or to Florida, wherever they fly, fly a, they fly the plane a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:15:48):
I love mint.

Johnny Jet (01:15:49):
I do too. But jet blues actually fallen down from the top. They used to be always a fan favorite. They've had some serious problems

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):
When they first launched stabbing. It was so cool. They were the first, they had a screen in every seat. They did a lot of things, you know, leather seats. They did a lot of things. Right. But now they,

Johnny Jet (01:16:06):
They still do things, right? Yeah. They have the most leg room out of anyone in coach. Nice. But the problem is they've just been over, over understaffing and over scheduling.

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
Well, that's the, that's how every airline is these days. Yes

Johnny Jet (01:16:19):
They are. They they've now cut back 10%. But my thing is, you know, I was trying to buy this ticket two days ago and there was nothing available for cheap to New York or, or Newark I'm talking it's three to five times the price it was months ago in any class of service, coach is $500. Each way business goes between, you know, 1100 to 4,400, which, or actually 4,701 way. Wow. Not just min that's American airlines, first class, but

Leo Laporte (01:16:52):
Crazy min is basically Jim blues first class, right? It is.

Johnny Jet (01:16:56):
Yeah. They have life flat seats. They're, you know, on this route they do 2 1, 2, 1 2. So if you're flying by yourself, you ever want to get that single seat because you have your own little, basically your own little pot.

Leo Laporte (01:17:07):
It's quite a luxury though, because these are only cross country flights. So they're only five to seven hours. So it's kind of a luxury. I think if you're flying overnight to, you know, far, far away agreed, it's really nice to be able to live flat. They're very expensive,

Johnny Jet (01:17:21):
But I was able to get four, three men's seats for, for $1,400. Right's a good,

Leo Laporte (01:17:28):
That's a good deal. That's

Johnny Jet (01:17:29):
A great deal. I mean, that's, that's, that's cheaper than kids. That's

Leo Laporte (01:17:31):
Coach. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:17:32):
And when you, when you factor in check bags and food and seat assignments, you're saving money. So always look at first class, but if you're booking last minute, these days, you're not gonna get a deal. You really needed book in advance. So do that. Although I was flying back from Austin and Boston was a lot cheaper. I was able to get a coach ticket on American for three 20. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:17:53):
I think it kind of depends where you're going. Right? Correct. Cause I got, I got very inexpensive flights to Seattle, but I was flying out of our small regional airport up here in Santa Rosa. And that was only 250 bucks. So it really just depends. It really does

Johnny Jet (01:18:08):
Look around at different airports. Alternate airports are the key. But anyway, that American airlines, when I booked that flight right before I booked it, they said, would you like to upgrade to first class for $791? I was like hard. No,

Leo Laporte (01:18:18):
That's

Johnny Jet (01:18:18):
A lot. So I pressed purchase. I went into my into my itinerary and it said, would you like to upgrade to first class or to business class for two, for two 90?

Leo Laporte (01:18:27):
Oh this

Johnny Jet (01:18:28):
Is a minute after this one minute later. Wow. So if you wanna save $500, you know, do not take the first offer and then take the second. But I didn't take it either. Cuz I have executive platinum status and I saw that the flight was wide open in business and 43 minutes later, I got an email saying you're confirmed in business class. Nice

Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
For free. Nice for free. So

Johnny Jet (01:18:49):
You say

Leo Laporte (01:18:49):
7 99 bucks.

Johnny Jet (01:18:51):
Yeah. I wasn't gonna pay it anyway, but that's but that's a little trick that I learned this morning.

Leo Laporte (01:18:56):
Yes. Hold out. That's hold out. That's a good trick. Hold

Johnny Jet (01:19:00):
Out. And there's and because there's not so many business travelers flying and especially over the summer, there's not going to be always price out first class and then ask when you get to the gate, see if they're offering any cheap upgrades and factor it in or do it in advance. So you don't have to pay for the baggage.

Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
Nice.

Johnny Jet (01:19:17):
When you're at the counter.

Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Nice.

Johnny Jet (01:19:19):
Do you wanna talk about this clock or we'll just

Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
Yeah, no, this is cute. I have it up here. This is kind of a clever kind of a clock it's been around for some time. Tell us about it. Yes.

Johnny Jet (01:19:28):
Well, if you it's a long URL, so you have to look at the show notes or on Twitter or the chat room, but has five Google earth images and it just zooms in on it. And it picks a

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
Image that looks like, like a member. So two colon three eight, and each of them is really just an earth, you know, a building or a, an island or so it's an attribute of the earth that looks like those things. That's really a, it's kind of making me woozy cuz it's zooming in and out the earth.

Johnny Jet (01:20:00):
It does. And it's slow, but you, you can make it a screensaver. It's just a fun little geography thing. Right. It's

Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
Really kind cool. Yeah. So we'll put a link in the show notes or on your website Uhhuh. See how I get you over to Johnny set site. I like that. Clever CLE Johnny jet jot.com. This

Johnny Jet (01:20:19):
Is cool. Yeah. I also have some more tips. If we have some time we,

Leo Laporte (01:20:22):
You got all the time in the world, just check the, the earth clock. You're good. <Laugh> you're good.

Johnny Jet (01:20:29):
So I got a, a reader email this week saying that they're actually, one of my friends called me up and said, one of their friends just arrived in Bora and their luggage didn't and they they're panicking because they put their medication in their check bags. Ooh. And I was like, whoa, first of all, you never, ever,

Leo Laporte (01:20:44):
Ever put medication in a check by I know. Or any

Johnny Jet (01:20:48):
Or of anything about you?

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
Anything you need

Johnny Jet (01:20:50):
Electronics money. Yeah. Jewelry don't check it. Never. No. Did

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
You see the very funny tweet from the guy went, went on a honeymoon had an air tag, apple air tag in his bag on air Lingus.

Johnny Jet (01:21:05):
I did not. They

Leo Laporte (01:21:06):
Lost the bags and the guy's tracking it with the air tag and posting on Twitter. I see where my bag is. Air Lingus has no idea <laugh>

Johnny Jet (01:21:15):
And where was it?

Leo Laporte (01:21:16):
Well, it's going all over the place. It ended up in Frankfurt and they finally, you know, two, there were three bags. They got two of them back. One of 'em apparently stolen and he's telling air Lingus. I could see where it is. Why don't you just go get it?

Johnny Jet (01:21:29):
And that's one of my tips, actually, I, I wrote a post on six, put an air

Leo Laporte (01:21:33):
Tag in your bag,

Johnny Jet (01:21:34):
Put an air tag in

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
It. I have an air tag in my bag. You bag? Yeah. Isn't that also

Johnny Jet (01:21:37):
Also download the airlines app because the app will show you if it was loaded onto the plane, you can even go to the gate when the when you're boarding and just show 'em the baggage tag and say, Hey, can you just check and see if this bag was loaded onto the plane? Yeah. If it's really that important, but always bring a change of clothes on the plane. That's

Leo Laporte (01:21:54):
Right. You hand carry the stuff you're gonna need for sure.

Johnny Jet (01:21:57):
At least for a day. So this woman, she arrived the Bo Bo with no bathing suit, she had to go to the boutique in the, in the hotel, she spent $150 for a bathing suit.

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):
Shocking

Johnny Jet (01:22:08):
<Laugh> there's no target or Costco in Bora <laugh> so when you wanna remote places, you really need to start packing a week in advance, make a checklist and always click carry at least of days worth of clothes and, and essentials.

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
It's hard for me cuz I don't wanna pack my camera gear. Don't wanna pack my laptop. Don't wanna pack my phone. I have so much stuff. I don't want to pack. I, the suitcase is getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier. But yeah, I think that's good advice you don't want to, you can

Johnny Jet (01:22:35):
Also use a Scotty vest by the way, as a third carryon, you put, put some of the electronics in there.

Leo Laporte (01:22:40):
I do, it has 21 pockets and they are loaded. And then when I arrive at the TSA, Checkpoint's very easy. You just take off the vest, put that on the belt. Golden.

Johnny Jet (01:22:51):
Yeah, I did that one time I was in Germany or Australia. They both weigh your bags, your carryon. And I was like a pound over and they wouldn't let my carryon on. So I was like, okay second. Yeah. I went around the corner and just stuck, stuck

Leo Laporte (01:23:02):
My own. Let me throw this away. Wink. Wink

Johnny Jet (01:23:04):
Had put my laptop in my bag, in my, in my coat pocket. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:23:08):
There, there are Scotty vests that have a, a big pouch in the back for a laptop. Now you're gonna look like a fool wearing it. You are, but it works. Hey

Johnny Jet (01:23:17):
Johnny jet money,

Leo Laporte (01:23:19):
Go to Johnny jet.com. Thank you Johnny Leo Fort the tech guy. You look like a fool with a big old butt

Johnny Jet (01:23:31):
Without a doubt,

Leo Laporte (01:23:32):
But <laugh> you got your laptop. That's a good point. I'm a, I'm gonna take my, my my Jo my, my Scotty vest for whenever. Whenever I get an airplane, I'm wearing a Scotty vest.

Johnny Jet (01:23:43):
Actually I'm gonna write a tip about it this week. People cuz my wife sent me a news story. I think it, I think it was a Lingus where a passenger was gonna be charged for over overweight baggage and she put five outfits on, which is not the smartest thing. I think one person might even die to another time doing that from heat exhaustion. So you know, either pay the money or get a Scotty vest. I do have a question for you if I have time. Yes. so I bought a new laptop two weeks ago.

Leo Laporte (01:24:17):
Oh how, how what'd you get?

Johnny Jet (01:24:18):
I basically got the same thing. HP spectra.

Leo Laporte (01:24:21):
Very nice. 360 convertible. Really nice,

Johnny Jet (01:24:24):
But I don't love it.

Leo Laporte (01:24:25):
You love it. Love

Johnny Jet (01:24:26):
It. No, tell you one reason why is, cause it only has one USB port and only, and only one USBC, which is for the plug.

Leo Laporte (01:24:35):
You gotta get a dongle. I have one welcome to the dongle life,

Johnny Jet (01:24:40):
But I, I just think that's ridiculous also. What I don't like about it is a whole new operating system and you know, and another thing is actually this is with GoDaddy cuz I used my I had my email from them and they made me switch over to Microsoft 365

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
Who did so Goad

Johnny Jet (01:25:00):
Did. Yeah. They said they were getting rid of their web mail. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:25:05):
Yeah. They don't want to. Yeah that's actually is probably better. Yeah. Okay.

Johnny Jet (01:25:08):
But which is fine, but the problem is all my sub folders. I literally have a thousand subfolders on my outlook to keep me organized.

Leo Laporte (01:25:16):
Oh, so you

Johnny Jet (01:25:17):
All have different destinations? No. Well I still have it on my old computer. Right. But they're not showing up on the web version or the micro Microsoft 365. That's the

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
Beauty. Yeah. Cuz you made those locally. That's the beauty going forward of using IMAP is that it, any change you make to the folder structure is on the server. And so it shows up everywhere. But I guess with Godad mail, those folders were created locally. Can you export a folder STR from outlook? That would be the thing I would look for.

Johnny Jet (01:25:52):
That's what I'm curious

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
About.

Johnny Jet (01:25:54):
And then the guy tried to sell me the Microsoft package for like, I think it was $200 for five computers and I was like, yeah, sounds great. Cause I'm paying 600

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
A month for Microsoft. Yeah. So it's not no for two years, for two years. Two years. So that's not a bad deal. Yeah, it's not. But then I was like, I only have one computer that I really use. Oh. So it was not a good deal. No, it's only good for a family, but they have a one, they have a one computer deal as well. It's still SA seven bucks a month probably is, is the best you're gonna get. Right next P folder structure from outlook. Let's see if we can do that. Yes. All messages and current fo include sub folders. It looks like if you export them, the question now is then how do you import them? I think you can export your folder structure from your old outlook and 10 or can't can and then import it into the new outlook. And let's hope that it then gets sends a signal to office 365. This is the folder structure I want. There's gotta be a way to do that. Probably with a PST file. Yeah. Export the folders as a PST, then import it, but then might be will that then tell office 360, the outlook.com com server. These are my folders. This is what I want. Cuz that's what you want. Export the PST and import it into the new outlook.

Leo Laporte (01:27:14):
Johnny. I will do get rid of that. HP. You can return it. Right? I mean, I mean I already started downloading stuff, so I'm sorry. Yeah. That's how it's 1400 bucks in light is that they don't have a lot of ports. That's the new thing. Thanks. Thank apple for that one. Yeah. All right, John. All right. Take care. Bye 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 Stacy's book club, the untitled Lenox show, the GIZ fizz and more go to twi.tv/club TWiT. And thanks for your support. Laporte the tech guy. That's my motto. You can go your own way. Don't let Microsoft tell you what to do. Go your own way. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number? Oh, my friend soup from muscle beach is on the line soup. We looked up your pictures.

Caller 5 (01:28:22):
<Laugh> you did.

Leo Laporte (01:28:23):
You are you are quite the the, the Paragon of muscular be attitudes.

Caller 5 (01:28:32):
Oh boy. <Laugh> Have to be.

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):
You look good, man. Yeah. Nice soup. Has, has played has body doubled some of the most ripped people in the world <laugh> and is making a humidity about muscle beach. You've got a bunch of old footage of a muscle beach down there in Venice.

Caller 5 (01:28:52):
Oh, you wanna see? Oh, it's actually in Santa Monica. The original

Leo Laporte (01:28:55):
Santa Monica.

Caller 5 (01:28:56):
Santa Monica. Santa

Leo Laporte (01:28:57):
Monica. Yeah. That's where Lisa does the rings. Yeah. Santa Monica. Exactly.

Caller 5 (01:29:01):
Yeah. Yeah. You see beautiful footage. As you say@theoriginalmusclebeach.com, you can see all the all black and white footage and pictures of us doing tricks. That's a beautiful website. Very nice. Original. Yeah. Very nice. But today, see, I'm calling to say thank you first of all for last week, because you did help me last week with this Thunderbolt card to put in a PCR slot. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
Did you get one?

Caller 5 (01:29:21):
It worked. Yay.

Leo Laporte (01:29:23):
I know $19. You can hook up that old camera, the BA play back the videos,

Caller 5 (01:29:30):
Honestly, Marvel. The chat was awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:29:31):
Marvelous. I'm so glad to hear that.

Caller 5 (01:29:34):
Yeah. So I can see that putting one

Leo Laporte (01:29:35):
Step closer to the, the muscle beach documentary.

Caller 5 (01:29:39):
Yes, sir. Exactly. And now I I'm encountering another little problem, which is I check my internet my yeah, the internet via the Atel mode. I think you call it for wifi. Okay. And it connects to my PC, my tower and my cell phone. Yes. Now in the evening when I'm done watching a movie, I wanna go to bed. I put my computer to sleep and by the time I wake up, my phone is disconnected from the internet. So because as you know, the, the Alka tell little mode box is connected with USB on my computer, on my PC tower.

Leo Laporte (01:30:16):
So the Altel is joining is getting its internet, not from the wall, but from the LTE, from the cell towers. Is that right?

Caller 5 (01:30:24):
I don't know about that. That's more information than I know. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:30:30):
That's more than I understand. Huh? Let me think here. 

Caller 5 (01:30:35):
I can tell it was provided to me by this system for you know, low income and they give this box for free or

Leo Laporte (01:30:41):
Does it, does it okay, so plugs into the wall for power. Is there another connector going into the wall from that?

Caller 5 (01:30:47):
No, it doesn't actually, it's just the USB. It goes to my

Leo Laporte (01:30:51):
Tower. So I think that the AEL is what we call a a MyFi it's a it's a device that gets its internet from the cell towers, not from cable or phone company, but from the cell towers and I'm betting, it's going to sleep itself to that's interesting. So you wake up and what do you, do? You have to rejoin it?

Caller 5 (01:31:14):
I yeah, there's this little button that sometimes works. It's called a WPS.

Leo Laporte (01:31:19):
Yeah. So WPS, which, by the way, I recommend disabled because it's an insecure technology. Makes it easy though. You don't have to type in a password in a name, you press the button, the WPS button on the Alka, tell the WPS button on the device and they magically join up. That's nice. But it's also insecure. So I know I'm not a fan of WPS, a lot of devices have it. You probably could tell we'll probably have a password on it that you could probably find <laugh> maybe it's on a, a sticker. You have that. Okay. So

Caller 5 (01:31:57):
Yeah, I changed that the first time. The one time I, the perfect

Leo Laporte (01:31:59):
Good man. So you've entered, so my recommendation enter that into the computer. So it has the, what we call SS I D, which is the name of the wifi access point. And it has the password and use that have, have, are you using that? Have you used that?

Caller 5 (01:32:16):
I don't think I have.

Leo Laporte (01:32:17):
Yeah. That's my B w PS WPS problem. I think if you should certainly try that anyway. So go on to the windows machine and go to the where the wifi is and enter in a password and you might have to disconnect and reconnect without WPS. Don't use that WPS button disconnect and then reconnect. So if you disconnect from the out, could tell, you'll lose your internet, but you'll see it there in the list of available internets, given that you're in Santa Monica or Venice, you'll probably see quite a few of them pick the one that's yours. And then at that point, it windows will say, oh, and what's the password. So in other words, you're not using this w PS shortcut, and it'll say, what's the password. You enter the password in, and now it should not ever get off of that. It should always be available to you.

Caller 5 (01:33:03):
Oh, interesting. I will try that one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:06):
Yeah. WPS yeah, a lot of devices. I think people have stopped putting WPS on their devices, but it was, the idea was, oh, it's too hard for people to do what I just described, find the name. And then they ended the password. That's too complicated. So put a button on there that you just pressed, but you could see there's already problems. Right. So,

Caller 5 (01:33:29):
Yeah, exactly. And, and then what you said we should do is only done once. Right. We don't have to do every time we turn on the computer.

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
Yeah. Once you enter the password, you'll never have to do it again. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:33:37):
Well, there we go. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Yeah. Forget the w PS. It, it stands for wireless protected setup, I think. And the idea is

Caller 5 (01:33:47):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:33:48):
Protected. Yeah. But it doesn't protect anything because it turns out hackers figured out, oh, we can use this to get into your device. So if you can disable it, I would, you probably can't. But don't. Yeah. Don't use WPS and use the password that should work.

Caller 5 (01:34:00):
I excellent. All

Leo Laporte (01:34:02):
Right. We know. Hey soup. Always a pleasure.

Caller 5 (01:34:05):
Leo, I'll talk to you some other,

Leo Laporte (01:34:06):
If I come down to Venice beach, will I see you working out, down there?

Caller 5 (01:34:10):
Only every day. My friends <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
In Santa Monica or Venice beach.

Caller 5 (01:34:15):
I never know. That's the beauty of it. Ali is exactly between both wor so

Leo Laporte (01:34:18):
You can go to either one. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:34:20):
And I never know my, my mood I'm on my bicycle. Should I go left VE or right to Santa Monica.

Leo Laporte (01:34:25):
I'm jealous now. I'm really jealous. And, and you're the guy doing all those balancing acts where you're like five people in a pyramid, things like that.

Caller 5 (01:34:33):
Yes. We love that.

Leo Laporte (01:34:34):
Do you do slack wire too?

Caller 5 (01:34:36):
Slackline. Yes, I do that a

Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
Little bit. Okay. I know. I probably have seen you cuz I've, I've seen those guys is down there doing that crazy yoga positions and weird contortionist stuff and all sorts of things that does. That's you

Caller 5 (01:34:48):
Favor next time. I'm gonna look for, in touch with me and I'll help you. Cause there's some things that are very simple and very easy to

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
Do. I would love that. And then my wife would take a picture, put it on the internet and I'll be humiliated. It sounds wonderful. <Laugh>

Caller 5 (01:35:02):
No, you won't. No. Some things are just physics, just physics and not difficult. If you have 10 fingers, you'd be fine. Honestly.

Leo Laporte (01:35:10):
Honestly let me count. Yes, I can't wait. So what a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much. Anytime I can help.

Caller 5 (01:35:17):
All right. Excellent.

Leo Laporte (01:35:18):
And tell me, and when the documentary comes out, you got a call. We'll give you a big plug. I wanna see it.

Caller 5 (01:35:23):
Ooh, excellent. But we'll first start with the original muscle beach.com. Check it

Leo Laporte (01:35:26):
Out. Muscle beach.com. Oh cool.

Caller 5 (01:35:29):
No, the original,

Leo Laporte (01:35:30):
The original muscle beach.com com much better. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Caller 5 (01:35:36):
Excellent. Thanks. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
You. Take care. Max lake worth Florida. Leo Laport. The tech guy.

Caller 6 (01:35:42):
Hello Leo. Long time. No talk my friend.

Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
Hi max. How are ya?

Caller 6 (01:35:48):
I'm doing just fishing. Living the dream in a south Florida in the lake worth beautiful town. If you remember, I used to work. I used to live in Boca.

Leo Laporte (01:35:58):
I totally remember you max. Of course. I know who you are. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:36:01):
I was living in a condo and I realized that's not the lifestyle. No. I moved to a beautiful brand new home in lake worth and I have ours cat six in every freaking room to each room.

Leo Laporte (01:36:16):
You moved to a palace. My friends that is the live in the dream

Caller 6 (01:36:22):
Palace

Leo Laporte (01:36:23):
Live in the dream. You've got ethernet in every room.

Caller 6 (01:36:27):
I got a gig. One gig fiber at&t

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
Oh, shut up. Now you're just making me mad. I

Caller 6 (01:36:33):
Know one gig up and down. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
Symmetric gig E internet, internet.

Caller 6 (01:36:41):
$75 a month. I have internet every room. All the, oh that's that's nice. All the 

Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
Are you happy?

Caller 6 (01:36:47):
The TVs are connected.

Leo Laporte (01:36:49):
Oh yeah. Perfect for that. Right. See, this is why when Scott's talking about ATSC 3.0, I don't care. I've got internet in every room. That's better. Nice.

Caller 6 (01:36:58):
And I do nice. And one thing I'd like to let your listeners know wifi in my humble opinion is a trip wire. I hate wifi. Yes. That why every place I need, I have wired connection.

Leo Laporte (01:37:14):
This is the name of the show. Now wifi is a trip wire. Max. I have to take a break. Pleasure talking to you. Leo Laport, D tech guy. <Laugh> why, okay. You said you had some other pointers. Let's keep 'em going. What else?

Caller 6 (01:37:29):
Right. So you know about the scam scam calls and all that stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
Hate those guys. Hate those guys. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:37:36):
Yeah. I am talking to you on my ultra two ultra 5g running on T-Mobile right now and I'm driving actually. So as you could see, it's very,

Leo Laporte (01:37:48):
That's really good. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:37:50):
Yes. In this area T-Mobile 5g coverage is pretty good. I actually, if I'm the right place, I get 600 mega down

Leo Laporte (01:38:00):
600 megabits.

Caller 6 (01:38:01):
That's amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:38:02):
You know, it's funny cuz my mega down, my daughter just moved a new apartment. We were gonna get her Comcast cable and I thought I should try this new Verizon home internet. I just set it up for her yesterday 380 megabits down 19 up for 25 bucks a month. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. As long as you live in an area with the 5g ultra wide band you're golden. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:38:25):
Yeah. Well that's that's for Verizon. I'm talking T-Mobile

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
No, I understand. It's the same thing though. They have, they have mid range. And I I'm on T-Mobile in my cell phone, I was getting 500 megabits down. I was blown away.

Caller 6 (01:38:38):
Yeah. I'm I'm, I'm blown away with it. So, but of course not everywhere, you know that the respond, the responses.

Leo Laporte (01:38:43):
Yeah. Yeah. And a time of day. But I've been doing I've been logging into a system and doing speed checks around the clock just to see if it gets worse at, you know, commute time or something like that. It's been very good. I'm IMM quite impressed by so you like the T-Mobile good.

Caller 6 (01:38:59):
Good. Yeah. I'm very, I'm very impressed with, so about the Sam calls and spa text, what you know about all that stuff? Yes, already. Yes. So the trick is you know, my ultra phone, there's a setting to essentially block the calls. And does it work?

Leo Laporte (01:39:18):
Does it work?

Caller 6 (01:39:20):
Yes, it does. As long as you punching some magical numbers ah, on your phone.

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Okay.

Caller 6 (01:39:29):
Okay. The magical number is pound 6, 6, 4 pounds. That is,

Leo Laporte (01:39:36):
And this is for T-Mobile.

Caller 6 (01:39:39):
Yes, yes. I know about the other one, but you do that then magically? No more of those scam calls.

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Okay. Wait a minute. I'm gonna do this on my T-Mobile phone right now. Wow.

Caller 6 (01:39:52):
Six, six, four pound

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Pound. Okay. Hold on. Pound 6, 6, 4 pound. And then the

Caller 6 (01:39:59):
Yes, dial it.

Leo Laporte (01:40:00):
He says please wait. Oh, scam ID is now turned on

Caller 6 (01:40:04):
To exactly. You said brother.

Leo Laporte (01:40:06):
Oh brother, you fixed me.

Caller 6 (01:40:08):
That's the end of the misery with mother F <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:40:12):
Well, we'll see. That's nice. That's and that's free from T

Caller 6 (01:40:19):
And now what happens is that you get voicemails notifications. Oh, okay. Never

Leo Laporte (01:40:25):
Ring. Good. Cause I don't, I don't, you know, sometimes you get the false positive. I don't wanna miss a call. Like my doctor sometimes uses well unknown

Caller 6 (01:40:32):
New York case. I don't know. I don't have any of those false positive. I mean if somebody, a phone call is important, they'll leave a message. Oh, just check my message and my leisure.

Leo Laporte (01:40:42):
Yeah. As long as they can leave a voicemail. Yeah. I do that with my iPhone. I say don't ring my phone unless that person's in my contact list. Right.

Caller 6 (01:40:50):
Yeah. Right, right. But anyway, that's a magic code. Six pound 6, 6, 4.

Leo Laporte (01:40:53):
I wonder what it is for other other phone companies. I wonder if the other phone companies are doing this. I bet they are.

Caller 6 (01:41:02):
Yeah. But I don't know what, what,

Leo Laporte (01:41:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to. I'll see if I can find that. What else is, what else is going on in your world, max? What else is going on? Well

Caller 6 (01:41:12):
Not whole lot. Except leading the dream here. Love it here. And you got

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
The beautiful, the best internet ever.

Caller 6 (01:41:20):
Oh, oh. I'm telling you is beautiful. Wow. 1000 megabit per second.

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous and ethernet in every room, which means man, you plug TV and you're set. You could, everything looks gorgeous. Yeah. It's nice.

Caller 6 (01:41:36):
Well, I do have access points around the house. Sure. A guest. Sure. When the guest wants, I wanna connect sure.

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
For a cell phone. You're not gonna connect that to the ether. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:41:48):
And I do have a, I do have a,

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Was it built that way or did you have, did you make it happen?

Caller 6 (01:41:57):
Well I I'll make it happen. You

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
Did it come. It didn't come that way. The, the place didn't come that way you put it in.

Caller 6 (01:42:03):
Yes. I actually option to the house. So you

Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Ah, nice. I'd pay for that option. You bet. They're

Caller 6 (01:42:11):
Building it a hundred dollars per oh nice. I good. Like I dunno. Seven, eight plugs everywhere. Yeah. Every

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
Room we did it after the fact we had some people crawling around in the crawl space and do that, but it really is nice. Yeah. It really

Caller 6 (01:42:25):
Let me, let me give you a pointer right here.

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
Okay.

Caller 6 (01:42:29):
You may know, or you don't, there is a brand new technology in flat ethernet cable flat.

Leo Laporte (01:42:38):
Ah.

Caller 6 (01:42:39):
You buy from yeah. Okay. Go.

Leo Laporte (01:42:40):
What's it called? I did not know this. What's what's it called?

Caller 6 (01:42:45):
You just type in on Amazon flat ethernet. Enet cable.

Leo Laporte (01:42:49):
Okay. Yeah. Any, these are cat beautiful cat six cat six cat six. Okay. Yes.

Caller 6 (01:42:54):
Yes. They come in different them. Now every, every home that I've seen, they have baseball. Okay. Then you all, you gotta do just get those you know, tables, the platform with the length that you need. Okay. Then you get two sided 3m tape. Yeah. Essentially when I'm trying you use.

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
Oh and you go around the baseboards. So you don't even have to go into the wall,

Caller 6 (01:43:21):
See them anymore. Yeah. You don't even see them

Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
Anymore. Right. Cause it's underneath and it's flat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And these are cat six. Actually. They even have cat seven. Wow. Yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. 30 feet for 11 bucks. That's not bad.

Caller 6 (01:43:33):
Yeah. Yeah. You'll see 'em anymore. You could wire your own. Well here's

Leo Laporte (01:43:37):
Cat eight

Caller 6 (01:43:38):
Gold cables.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:43:41):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
Gold plated cables. 20 feet for 13 bucks. It's cheap. I'm gonna buy a bunch. I'm gonna buy a bunch of these.

Caller 6 (01:43:49):
Yeah. 3m, 3m tapes, double sided. Put em what P one attached and pull the other one. Brilliant. Attach the cable. Brilliant. That's it. Then if you have to go around the, let's say you have to go across a door, right. With a threshold. Just lift the threshold, put underneath and put back on. That's it. Wow. Then your household in order to cut through the walls or through the ceilings,

Leo Laporte (01:44:15):
Is that what you did? No. You, you you're lucky cuz you got the builder to do it. So it is in the wall for you. Yes. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:44:21):
I already knew. Cause that's what I did in my condo. That's ah,

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
Got it. Okay.

Caller 6 (01:44:26):
Got it. And then my new home there and I have I have everything I already for them. Is

Leo Laporte (01:44:32):
Max, are you retired or are you still working?

Caller 6 (01:44:35):
My dear, my dear friend retired to me is an install. Retired is a new six foot under <laugh>. I am doing what I want

Leo Laporte (01:44:42):
To do. And what, what is it that you do max?

Caller 6 (01:44:45):
I, I do I know I, I actually, I'm a electrical engineer. I have a PhD in electrical. I

Leo Laporte (01:44:52):
Had, I had a feeling. I kinda had a thought you might be. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:44:55):
Yeah. But actually 

Leo Laporte (01:44:57):
Is that why you lived in Boca? Did you work at IBM?

Caller 6 (01:45:00):
No, no, no. I used to live in Northern California before I moved on.

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
Okay.

Caller 6 (01:45:05):
And let give you some keyword. R L L

Leo Laporte (01:45:09):
R run lengths, R L and MFM. M I remember those hard drives, man. I was so excited when I got my LLC gate. Is that what you're talking about?

Caller 6 (01:45:23):
Yeah. So remember the size of the, this drive, this washing machine side.

Leo Laporte (01:45:29):
Yeah, yeah,

Caller 6 (01:45:30):
Yeah. They got used to the small one.

Leo Laporte (01:45:32):
You work on hard drives guy

Caller 6 (01:45:34):
Behind it.

Leo Laporte (01:45:35):
You're the guy behind it. Wait a minute. You did RLL

Caller 6 (01:45:39):
Well, I leveraged RLL and the MFM. That's what we use the size of those flatters. Then I implement that. The error detection correction system. Who

Leo Laporte (01:45:49):
Were you working for? Who were you working for? Control

Caller 6 (01:45:52):
Control data corporation.

Leo Laporte (01:45:54):
CDC. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I remember control data max. I it's an honor to meet you. Thank you.

Caller 6 (01:46:01):
<Laugh> I remember the size of the platter got reduced the flow. Oh yeah. On the platters becomes blew up and you could have, you couldn't have any data. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:46:10):
Right. Absolutely.

Caller 6 (01:46:11):
We had to had to, and the whole reach solo codes with a very high detection and correction in hardware. So I'm the guy behind all that stuff

Leo Laporte (01:46:22):
You did EC was it EC?

Caller 6 (01:46:25):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
Yes. In hardware

Caller 6 (01:46:27):
EC the hardware. Wow. Back in 1982 using the CDC LSI technology. Wow. It was a huge

Leo Laporte (01:46:35):
Max. It is. It's an honor to meet you and thank you. And I remember I had 10, 10 megabit, hard, 10 megabyte, hard drives until Seagate came out with the LLS. And I got 20 megabytes on a five and a quarter. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh yeah. That max. I gotta run. It's a real pleasure call again. Okay.

Caller 6 (01:46:54):
Same here, Tim. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
Take care max. Bye bye. Wow. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet home of theater, digital photography, smart phone, smart watches, all that stuff. Phone number (888) 827-5536, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. Outside that area. You could still call just you Skype out to reach us. 88 88. Ask Leo the website tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs dot calm. On we go with the show and Alex is on the line from Upland, California. Hi Alex.

Caller 7 (01:47:36):
Hello Leo. How are you? This is, I am

Leo Laporte (01:47:39):
Great. How are you Alex?

Caller 7 (01:47:41):
Doing fine. Thanks. It's 82 degrees out here in the inland empire and it doesn't look like any COVID issues going on. Cause the streets are packed.

Leo Laporte (01:47:50):
Yeah. You know, we had our big up here in Petaluma, our big butter and eggs day. Last weekend. It was jammed. It was so it was like the old days. It was so much fun.

Caller 7 (01:47:59):
Nothing, nothing says any, nothing says greatness, but butter

Leo Laporte (01:48:03):
<Laugh> butter and eggs. And we got a few pigs too. So you can have some bacon with that. I I am just so nice to be with people again. Isn't it. It's just amazing. It,

Caller 7 (01:48:12):
It, it sure is. And, and family, especially. Yes. you know, over, over time, the matriarchs of family pass away. Yeah. And family separate and start doing their own things. But I think it's high times as everybody gets back together again,

Leo Laporte (01:48:25):
So agree with you. And I told my mom, we're gonna come out and visit you next month. And she said, you can't come cause of COVID. I said, mom, I'm coming. <Laugh> it's yeah. She's 89. She'll be 90 years old next to January. And I said, mom, I'm coming out. I don't care what you say. I'll I'll sit six feet away from you.

Caller 7 (01:48:45):
That's a great, that's a great age. 90. She's got a lot of experience and just tell her it's over. And she'll UN she'll. She'll understand. It's it's

Leo Laporte (01:48:53):
That's what I said. I said, mom, well, she lives in Rhode Island where it's actually kind of not over, but it'll be over by June. I'm gonna go out in June. Cause I, I gotta see. Yes. Good. Yeah. I miss her. Good for you, But thanks. And she says this every time, thank goodness for FaceTime or Skype or zoom or whatever you use. But cuz it's like visiting. It's not the same. Can't hug her, but it's like visiting. It's pretty good. And it's kept us going for two years, but I think the time has come to gone out and see

Caller 7 (01:49:20):
Yeah, it, it is a, it is a good connection this way. When you get out of line, you can see her facial expression that <laugh> that's right. Get back in line again.

Leo Laporte (01:49:28):
<Laugh> so what can I do for you Alex?

Caller 7 (01:49:32):
Well, well first of all, do now that you hit star or pound 6 64 and pound again, to get rid of the Stemmers, do you know that your car warranty is about to expire?

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
<Laugh> Sam, they're gonna still call me on the radio. I can't help, but I can't get away from so yeah, we should mention that was something max after the show was over, you heard it cuz you were on hold. He told me if you're on T-Mobile they, they have a new, and this is a we'll put the sh the press release in the show notes. This is not made up. They have a new scam protection product that you turn on on weirdly by going to your dialer and dialing star six or sorry, pound 6, 6, 4 pound and hitting return. And it turns on this, this scam protect technology just rolled it out last month. And so I'm, I'm, I'm thrilled to do that. I'm sure other companies are doing something similar, but thank you. T-Mobile for doing that. Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:50:29):
And with, with our modern technology now for crying out loud, every, every phone carrier should be able to

Leo Laporte (01:50:34):
No reason service. Exactly. No reason they can't block those spam calls. Those are terrible, right? Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:50:40):
Anyway, so here's what I, here's my dilemma. My son plays college baseball for UC Riverside, and they're constantly on the weekend, out at his games. Nice. And we have two small dogs that we sometimes leave at home. Yes. And it just breaks my heart. Oh, I'm able to see him on a, on a one way camera, you know, sitting by the door, waiting for us to come in where I'd like to, to turn on a video of some kind or, or hook up with him to where they can see my face. You know, those are something that's maybe on the floor you

Leo Laporte (01:51:11):
Need, you need the VRBO, VRBO, the VRBO F U R B O it, it not only does it have audio, so you can talk and you could see the dog it'll toss a little treat out of it. <Laugh>

Caller 7 (01:51:31):
I just heard that from, from your your associate there, who answered the phone,

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
She knows all about dogs. You knew, you knew about, you knew about the VRBO. 

Kim Schaffer (01:51:40):
Yeah, but this doesn't have, he wants to the dogs to be able to see him.

Leo Laporte (01:51:45):
Oh, well the dogs don't care. Honestly, I had a device once though. Yeah. I had a device that had a, a, a screen on it and I couldn't, in fact, Ozzie wouldn't even look at my voice. I think the treat is the, is the most important thing, but you, yeah. Okay. So VRBO is something that will do that, but not does not have, cuz it's only 169 bucks does not come with a screen on it that they can see you. Let me see if anybody makes something with a, see, they that's an expensive piece that they, I, I

Caller 7 (01:52:18):
Thought I thought Google had come out with something to where you can just like, oh, to where you can do. Just like I thought they did. You

Leo Laporte (01:52:25):
Could, you could put echo show on the floor from Amazon or a, a, a Google nests hub on the floor. It's got a screen and you could make just like a FaceTime call. Like what I was calling my mom. You could make a face, a Google meet call or

Kim Schaffer (01:52:42):
They have to accept,

Leo Laporte (01:52:43):
Oh, how's the dog accept. <Laugh> no. Well, okay. The echoes do drop in so you don't have to accept with drop in, but it's does drop in, have video or only audio. I don't know. Here's the chat room is I'm not talking to you. You keep interrupting Google. It's just very, you know, pushy. This is something from the chat room. Maybe this is@petchatswithzpetchatz.com. It says we're temporarily unavailable on our way to a new distribution center, but it is exactly what you want. It's on the ground. The dog can accept by putting his paw on a little paw print. Oh, this is so well, you train them. Right? You train them, put your paw. Now put your paw. Maybe you have to it's too bad. It doesn't spit a, oh, wait a minute. It does have a treat

Caller 7 (01:53:34):
A treat. I was gonna say,

Leo Laporte (01:53:35):
I think it does have a treat, put

Caller 7 (01:53:36):
Their paw. Then they can answer and get a treat at the same time. You can

Leo Laporte (01:53:40):
Play games with the paw call accessory. So, okay. Two, two way. Audio visual interactions. So you got cameras on both sides, sound and motion triggered smart video recording dispenses four ways manually app Paul call or echo. So you can dispense treats pet messages. You, the pet can message you <laugh> the dog can tap the paw and oh, wait a minute. Now they've sold me. It also diffuses calming aromatherapy. <Laugh> to ease anxiety. I need one of these. Yes. And I guess it'll work with cats too, although probably not. So, yeah, they're currently probably because of, you know, the supply chain and all that, but you can order it and just you'll get it when it's, when it's back in their backend distribution, but P E T and that's C H a tz.com. Pet chats, scooter XT. Got it. Yeah. Scooter X says it is no longer sold, but they do act as if they're going to get a new distributor. So

Caller 7 (01:54:47):
Well, even, I, I don't know. Maybe Amazon might have something similar.

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
Somebody could steal it. Yeah. Somebody should just steal it. It's not cheap. It's about twice as much as the VRBO. 350 bucks. All right. I'm gonna have to get a dog so I can try this. <Laugh> what do you think?

Caller 7 (01:55:06):
I've got two babysit on the

Leo Laporte (01:55:08):
I'll babysit your dogs. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Wouldn't this be fun? You're at the ball game. You're going. What's your dog's name?

Caller 7 (01:55:17):
I Cleo is the female and Milo is the male.

Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
Milo Cleo. Come here. Take a treat.

Caller 7 (01:55:23):
Yeah. Oh, I've got him here with me right now. Aw, you just turned her heads looking around.

Leo Laporte (01:55:27):
Oh, what? Milo Milo, come here over to the radio

Caller 7 (01:55:30):
Is crying in the back.

Leo Laporte (01:55:32):
<Laugh> what kind a dog is. Milo.

Caller 7 (01:55:35):
Milo is a multi shit, shit mix. Okay. And Cleo is AOO, which is

Leo Laporte (01:55:42):
So they're tiny.

Caller 7 (01:55:43):
Multi. Yeah. They're tiny, small dogs. Nice. Sit in my lap all the time. Oh,

Caller 8 (01:55:48):
And

Caller 7 (01:55:48):
They steal the covers that night. Oh, see here, Milo. I hear her he's in the driveway. Cool. He sees to wear at home and he wants to get out.

Leo Laporte (01:55:56):
Well, I'm gonna let you get out and take Milo and Cleo out for a walk. It's a pleasure talking to Alex. There's a couple of good CLE.

Caller 7 (01:56:02):
It was, was a pleasure for talking to you as well. I greatly appreciate your time and I'll let you do for our checking people out here and, and you enjoy your trip with your mom. You cherish every minute you can.

Leo Laporte (01:56:12):
I totally agree, Alex. God bless you. Take care. Bye Milo. Bye bye. Milo walkies walkies eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo of phone number (888) 827-5536, Tory from anywhere in the us and Canada. I'll put links to both these devices in our show notes, tech guy, labs.com more to come right after this. Leo Laporte eight tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is my phone number. That is whiz. Dick DeBartolo coming up with his gadget of the week in about half an hour. Meanwhile, Gary on the line for I'm Sunnyvale, California. Hi Gary.

Caller 8 (01:57:07):
Hi, welcome. Thanks for taking my call.

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
My pleasure. Thanks for calling. What can I do for you?

Caller 8 (01:57:15):
My wife does her computing on a Mac notebook. I do mine on a HP PC laptop.

Leo Laporte (01:57:23):
You got a mixed mark. I feel for you, man. Yeah, yeah,

Caller 8 (01:57:27):
No, no problems though, until kind of recently. Yeah. I started noticing that ads were showing up on my computer <laugh> for stuff. Oh, you already heard that for stuff that my wife

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
Right.

Caller 8 (01:57:45):
Had been browsing. Cause

Leo Laporte (01:57:46):
From the point of view of the internet, you are one. So a lot of the ways this works most of the time, the way this works, you you're you're right to be a little puzzle because there is, you know, one way companies know who you are is via your browser by cookies on your browser or fingerprinting your browser. So then they do know the difference between Gary and his wife, but another way a company works. For instance, when you go to do a Google search, Google knows your IP address and for you and your wife, that's the same number. And so in the case where you're getting the same ads, it's because that company uses ad tech that's based on IP address. Unfortunately advertising technology has gotten very sophisticated in the digital world. You know, here on the radio, we'll play you an ad, but we don't know who you are.

Leo Laporte (01:58:43):
Right. You're hearing an ad on the radio and, and it's really totally based on the, the radio station's ratings. And when they do the ratings, they can do some demographic stuff. And the zip codes and whoever the advertiser feels like is listening to that station. At that time of the day in that, you know, area of the country, that's a very, you know, kind of not imprecise system. Let's put it that way. Digital is incredibly precise. This is why the bulk of advertising is moving to digital. Now Facebook and Google are the, the two big winners because they know everything about you. Facebook, partly because you tell them Google because chances are everywhere you go. You are logged in to Google. Do you share a Google ID or do you have different Google IDs?

Caller 8 (01:59:37):
No. Okay. No, I do not have a Google ID.

Leo Laporte (01:59:41):
You don't have a Gmail account.

Caller 8 (01:59:44):
Nope.

Leo Laporte (01:59:44):
You've never logged into YouTube or your Chrome browser, huh?

Caller 8 (01:59:50):
Maybe once in my life,

Leo Laporte (01:59:51):
All you have to do is once just once is all it needs. Cause once

Caller 8 (01:59:57):
You, I do not have a Facebook account. Good,

Leo Laporte (02:00:00):
Good. So this is probably why you're more likely to see the same ads as your wife, because they're, they don't have a way of distinguishing you from your wife. If you don't wanna see the same ads as your, as your wife, sign into Google signing to get a Facebook account, get an Instagram account. All of those ads will be based on your activity, not, not hers, but if they don't know more about you, they're gonna base it on your internet address and for per household. That's the same. Does that, does that make sense? And

Caller 8 (02:00:32):
That's the only way to stop it.

Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
Well, you don't wanna see the ads that you, your wife, your based on your wife's it's not the, okay, this is a larger conversation because no, there's no way there you can. You can. Yes. There are ways to stop it. You're you can, you can either see ads that have nothing to do with either of you or see no ads at all, or see ads that are targeted towards what they think are your interests. Those are your kind of three slot you're currently in that last one where you're getting ads targeted at what they think you're interested in because they can't distinguish you from your wife. That's what your wife's interested in. That's the way, the normal way. That's the default. You could use software and services to hide your IP address. Typically VPN is what people use. When you use a VPN, a virtual private network, you probably heard ads for VPNs or seen them.

Leo Laporte (02:01:32):
Yeah. When you use those, instead of your address, Google sees the VPN's address. So that will, you're not gonna stop ads, but the ads will no longer be targeted at your interests. I think I'm not sure that's a improvement. I mean, I guess it's really up to you. Some people find it creepy that the ads kind of match their interests. Some people find it creepy that you search for, you know, something, a car. And now you're getting a lot of car ads, but understand. That's just the advertiser saying, oh, he's interested in a car. Let's, you know, let's send him some ads. Otherwise you're just gonna get a random sampling of ads. The final, the, the first bucket is no ads at all. And that would involve using an ad blocker. And there are a number of software technologies that will let you ads at your house.

Leo Laporte (02:02:21):
And you know, that takes a little more doing, there are ad blockers. You can run in your browser. There are services. I use a service. I like a lot called next dns@nextdns.io. They can block malicious stuff, gambling adult sites. They're good for, for instance, controlling what kids can see, but among their other services, if you go into the security tab, you can turn off advertising as well. And that will block it either for the whole house. If you put it, you know, use your router to turn that on or per computer, if you use a computer to turn it. So there's certainly ways to do go into any of those three slots, no ads at all, ads that are random, not targeted or targeted ads. I personally prefer targeted ads. I'd rather see ads for something I'm interested in. One of the complaints people have reasonably is that targeting is terrible. So, you know, sometimes you oftentimes you get ads for things you do just bought. Like I just bought it. I don't don't, but advertisers don't wanna do that. They wanna advertise to people who are going to buy or interest in buying something. They sell that's the goal.

Caller 8 (02:03:30):
You know, it doesn't bother me if you're looking at it on a big screen, but on a 13 inch laptop, these ads take up so much. They,

Leo Laporte (02:03:41):
Yeah. So you might wanna look at an ad blocker. I use something called U block origin. It's free. It's an extension. You can run on edge. If you're using white Microsoft edge, you can run on fi I run it on Firefox. And it, it, you have some control over it, but it is very good ad blocker. Just remember though, those ads are what pay for the sites you're visiting.

Caller 8 (02:04:06):
Yeah. I understand that.

Leo Laporte (02:04:08):
One of the things you can do with U block origin is turn it off for sites that you really appreciate, or whose ads are not overwhelming. You know, I, I understand from your point of view, you probably don't mind some, you know, ads. It's just that taking over the whole green or they're dancing and annoying, or, you know, sometimes they even can transmit malware. So this is part of the problem is the, the advertising industry has gotten out of control. So you block origin will block all ads, but you have some control over it and you can unblock any individual site.

Caller 8 (02:04:41):
Is that U block

Leo Laporte (02:04:43):
Or the letter? U B L O C K origin. Now there's other U blocks, but only get U block origin. That's the free one, the right one from a guy named gore hill, G O R H I L L. It's in the extension store for many bra house. Not for your wife's safari. Unfortunately Leo Laporte DECA. Yeah. Safari. Doesn't allow you to use those extensions. Thank you

Caller 4 (02:05:08):
So much.

Leo Laporte (02:05:08):
Hey, you're welcome. It's a great, I'm actually a great question, Gary. I think people don't, you know, don't understand what's going on. So it's nice to be able to kind of explain that.

Caller 8 (02:05:17):
Yeah, I sure didn't. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:20):
Thanks Gary.

Caller 8 (02:05:22):
All right. Take care. Have

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
A good one. Take care.

Caller 8 (02:05:24):
You too.

Leo Laporte (02:05:26):
Can we be friends? Sure. We can. Leo Laporte I'm the tech guy and you are eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo that's the phone number you can tell. Tell me, introduce yourself. Like in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hello, Gary.

Caller 9 (02:05:41):
Hello, Leo. Welcome for taking my, Hey, I have been a long term user of the desktop version of outlook, which I subscribe to or purchased through the annual Microsoft 365 subscription. I have never, never kept my data in the cloud. It's always on my desktop version. Now. I'm wondering what I need to do if I chose to continue to use the desktop version, but can I sync it to the mobile outlook version? And if I can, I've also read some warnings that doesn't really work with the PST file. So,

Leo Laporte (02:06:22):
So yeah, so this is really more about where you get your mail from than how you get it. Who is your internet service provider? Where does that email come from?

Caller 9 (02:06:32):
Both outlook and Gmail.

Leo Laporte (02:06:34):
Okay. So if you already have an outlook.com account, which sounds like you do right?

Caller 9 (02:06:44):
No.

Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
So you get it from outlook. I'm not sure what that means.

Caller 9 (02:06:49):
Well you know, the desktop version, which everything is.

Leo Laporte (02:06:52):
Yeah. Okay. So, but it's coming from Gmail E Gmail's your mail provider. I guess that's what I should have said. Not internet service provider, but mail provider.

Caller 9 (02:07:00):
Right. And I get my mail and my iPhone just

Leo Laporte (02:07:04):
Through the yeah. Cause it's from Gmail. Right,

Caller 9 (02:07:06):
Right,

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
Right. You're using, so this is, I know it's a source of real confusion and Microsoft hasn't helped by using outlook to mean many different things. So no matter what you, your email comes from an email, provide into an email client, the client varies. You can use outlook as your email client. You can use outlook.com. You can use Gmail, but the provider is what's relevant here.

Caller 9 (02:07:33):
Right. But I'm not concerned about my email. I'm only concerned because I get that on my phone. And it does sync with, I mean, when I delete something on my phone, right. It stills on my outlook desktop. It stays on the server for as long as I choose. I'm really interested in being able to sync my outlook column, my outlook, desktop,

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
The calendar.

Caller 9 (02:07:56):
Yeah. And the contacts with, I guess I would have to use mobile outlook on my iPhone, but there's no way I've been able to determine how to sync. No,

Leo Laporte (02:08:07):
There's an easy, there's an easy solution to this, but again, it comes down to who is your calendar provider and who's your, a address book provider. Do you keep your calendars and address book on Google?

Caller 9 (02:08:21):
No. I keep my calendar only within outlook desktops.

Leo Laporte (02:08:24):
So it's only in the desktop. It's actually not on the cloud at all.

Caller 9 (02:08:28):
Correct.

Leo Laporte (02:08:29):
Okay. So the first thing to do is you want to pick a provider just as you have Gmail as your email provider, you wanna pick a calendar, an address book provider. Now, most people end up just using Google for this. You already have a Google account. It's almost the same as Gmail calendar dot, google.com and contacts.google.com become the web interface to it. And all you really need to make that work is an outlook to Google connector,

Caller 9 (02:09:02):
Right? And I've heard you say in the past that those things do not work very

Leo Laporte (02:09:06):
Well. They're not great. <Laugh> also they're not free. If you had a Google workspace account, Google offers one, but otherwise you're gonna use a third party tool that will sync those up. Honestly at that point, the, the phone is fine because Apple's calendar. And you'll see this in the settings, on your iPhone or on a Mac will sync up to Google. So it will get its calendar information from Google automatically. It's the, the, and, and so will many, many, many calendar and address book programs. That's one of the reasons I like Google because it's a good server. You don't have to obviously put your calendar and address book on the internet. In fact, you haven't, but if you want to easily share it between multiple devices, that's a good way to do it. And that's, so you need a central server that is all always online, that these devices can connect to.

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
There are other ones, but I think, you know, for instance, I use as my email provider, fast mail, and they also will synchronize a calendar and address book. So it, but since you already have Gmail, I would say, just use Google. So now it's gonna come down to which tool you install that will automatically sync your Microsoft outlook calendar with Google calendar. And there're quite a few of these and I don't have much experience, so I'm gonna defer to the chat room. I know people have in the past sent me after the show sent me programs and I wish I'd written them down. I have a, a link at me make use of, I'll put this in the show notes that has about five or six. So you, at least you can see the choices. There's one called calendar sync for outlook and Google, Google calendar. That's pretty straightforward. There's outlook, Google calendar sync. <Laugh> there's. I think those two are probably the first two choices you can, I guess, do your own thing with Microsoft's power automate. That seems like it'll be very tricky, but at least it comes from Microsoft. So again, I'm gonna put this, this note up here. That'll let you do that. The other thing you could do, if you don't wanna do synchronization is export your calendar and address book from outlook, and then you could easily import that into Google and now Google would have it. All

Caller 9 (02:11:25):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:11:26):
But it wouldn't be it wouldn't be continuous synchronization.

Caller 9 (02:11:30):
Yeah. That's what I mean. I can, I can single wirelessly between my, my laptop and my phone whenever I'm at home, but travel

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
Well. Oh, okay. So that's another, so, okay. That's interesting. So right now you've got your address book syncing from your laptop to your phone,

Caller 9 (02:11:46):
Correct? Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:11:48):
And your phone's an iPhone then, then it's easy. Yes. So you're already doing the sync part. Now, just have to go into your phone and sign into your Google account and then check that box that says synchronize calendars and address book, cuz it it'll take it off your phone.

Caller 9 (02:12:05):
Okay. Right. I'll give that a try. Very good. Take more question. Sure. I'm a big user of last pass. I use it for keeping all my passwords, but I also love the, the notes capability where I can just put secure notes, like my children's social security numbers and that sort of thing.

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
I use that too. I agree. Yeah. For passports and driver's license it's yep.

Caller 9 (02:12:30):
For convenience. If I start a contacts list within my outlook and I put some of that information in contacts within outlook. How secure might that be?

Leo Laporte (02:12:42):
Not <laugh> the answer is not it is secure in the sense that, you know, you, your laptop is sort of protected. You're probably not gonna let somebody get it, but if they got it and they could log into it, there it is. And clear it's gonna be it now we're gonna be synchronizing. So it's generally gonna be synchronized in an encrypted form. So if you're in a coffee shop and it's synchronizing, it's not that somebody could sit there and spy on your traffic nowadays. Everything's encrypted, but it's on this. It's on public. Well, it's on G Google servers. Google has no history of being hacked. They're very well run, but it's unencrypted on a server. That's kind of risky. So that's why you would use last pass for the really stuff you really want to keep private or any password manager for the stuff you really want to keep private in that case only you can unlock it even last pass can it's on their servers, but they can't touch it. That's. That's kind of what you want.

Caller 9 (02:13:45):
Okay. Well thank

Leo Laporte (02:13:45):
You. You're welcome. Yeah, I wouldn't put I don't put well, you know, this is an interesting question because I do have phone numbers for people who probably don't want their phone numbers to go public and they're in my contact list. So not only am I synchronizing it with all my devices in Google or fast mail in my case anytime I sign into something, you know, WhatsApp or whatever it will say. In fact, this happened to me the other day, WhatsApp said, I'm gonna synchronize with your contacts. Okay. And there was no cancel button. There was only a yes button. There was no, no button, which made me really angry. I forced closed WhatsApp. I said, absolutely not because you should remember this anytime you are allowing, you know, and they say, well, then that way we can tell you when a friend of yours joins WhatsApp or telegram or Facebook or whatever, but what you, what they, this is not for your benefit. What they really want is your contact list. So if there's stuff in your contact list, that's private. And if at any time you agree, when an app says, can we look at your contact list? It's not private anymore. Your docs and your friends, Leo, Laporte the

Dick DeBartolo (02:15:14):
Hello Dicky.

Leo Laporte (02:15:16):
I I'm very hello. So I like this aura ring. I've had one for years, PRI the founder who is no longer CEO came on the new screensavers sometime ago. And actually it was Kevin Rose. I think it told me about it. And appre came on and I had this second or first generation order ring. This is the new one, the third generation, which I recently bought they're expensive. Honestly they're not as good an activity tracker as like, like the Fitbit or the apple watch, but they do do some things that are cool for an, since it monitors my well, I can show you monitors my temperature and that I started wearing it during COVID because you can you know, if your temperature goes up, it's kind of an early warning, sign, it monitors your heart rate, your heart rate variability, and it gives, and it does a readiness thing.

Leo Laporte (02:16:13):
I just put it on again for the first time in a couple of months. So that's why it's not very complete right now. See if I go, yes, he's not gonna have, oh, there's some old, is there old information? No, let's see. Yeah, this is when I stopped wearing it. So let's go back. There you go. Now you can see readiness body temperature, sleep, sleep balance, things like this heart rate variability, which higher is better on that. So these are all things that it does a good job with and it, because it has a five day battery life, you can wear it, you know, while you're sleeping. I have now one of the reasons I stopped using it is I have the the eight sleep, our sponsor, eight sleeps mattress. And it does all the sleep and monitoring. So I don't really need the aura, but you know, I thought it's a good thing to have one. Yeah, apparently they have pulse Sox sensors, but they haven't enabled them. So that'll be interesting. So you wear one too, Dr. Mom, or you just won't do it until you get one disco. Dick T Bartolo is dancing in, he was born to be a geek. Hey, disco, Dick. How are you?

Dick DeBartolo (02:17:31):
I'm good, sir. And you,

Leo Laporte (02:17:33):
I am wonderful. It's been a fun show today. We've had some fun callers and it's gonna, it's a, you're always a great way to end the show cuz Dick joins us every week with a gizmo or a gadget. And, and part of the game is can we talk Leo into buying it?

Dick DeBartolo (02:17:48):
Oh, okay. Well before would do that, I have a great letter here from it's time for my trademark to be renewed. You know, I have two

Leo Laporte (02:17:55):
Trademarks. You have a trademark to GW biz, really?

Dick DeBartolo (02:17:59):
And the GWiz, I have two trademarks.

Leo Laporte (02:18:01):
Oh, you are smart. That's good. Oh

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:03):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:03):
Cause I know that that darn Regis Philbin wanted to steal it for years. <Laugh>

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:09):
So I got a official looking letter yeah. From the patent and trademark bureau. Oh. But I knew it couldn't be real because toward the bottom it says in very small print by signing, by letting us renew for you.

Leo Laporte (02:18:23):
Yes.

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:24):
You authorize us to represent you for all business in the future.

Leo Laporte (02:18:31):
Sure. <Laugh> yeah. Okay. Were they gonna do it for free or were they also gonna charge

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:36):
You? Oh no, no, no. I went to the, I went to the patent office website to see what the current rate is of renewal. Yeah. And it's $550. Okay. Per trade market.

Leo Laporte (02:18:46):
And what do you get? 10 years. How long do you get it? 10

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:48):
Years. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:49):
Okay.

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:49):
Get it for 10. That's

Leo Laporte (02:18:50):
Not that bad. Okay. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:51):
It's so this company says it's $1,650

Leo Laporte (02:18:55):
There's so they charge you money and take all your business

Dick DeBartolo (02:18:58):
And take all your business and tell you to rush because your PA your, a trademark is about to expire well on the website, <laugh> tells you, you have one year to renew it.

Leo Laporte (02:19:12):
Wow.

Dick DeBartolo (02:19:13):
Okay. My, my patents ended April 22nd and it said you must renew by April 22nd, 2023.

Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
Oh, okay. So they don't expire it forever? No. No. Okay.

Dick DeBartolo (02:19:26):
So anyway, right. So there was a pep com event, an in person, pep com event.

Leo Laporte (02:19:33):
Now you better explain what a PCOM event is because, okay. A pep, I, most people don't have the luxury of being invited to these very special technology. Well showcase. Well,

Dick DeBartolo (02:19:43):
We, we go to them at all. Like CS always has a monster pepper. It's it's actually great for the press. It

Leo Laporte (02:19:51):
Is because they feed us <laugh>

Dick DeBartolo (02:19:53):
Yes. Yes. Well, two reasons food is absolutely first. Yeah. The second

Leo Laporte (02:19:58):
Chocolate, first time I ever saw a chocolate fountain was at a pep com showcase,

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:03):
But it wasn't for sale or you would had,

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
But you could dip anything it and then eat it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:08):
<Laugh> yes, exactly. Doesn't work good with a cell phone. Don't worry. No,

Leo Laporte (02:20:12):
I tried. No. Yeah,

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:15):
No. PCOM is like at this one, there are 40 tables and you walk around and there's, what's new from the company with someone who works at the company and usually the PR person. It's

Leo Laporte (02:20:27):
A great way. New stuff. Those companies made a lot of money for the privilege and you can go through a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. In a couple hours. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:35):
Okay. So I saw something called bite away and I, I said to the guy, so is this, is this the way to let insects eat you? What, what

Leo Laporte (02:20:44):
Bite away? My friends bite away. So

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:46):
He said, no, no. It's to take the bite away. If an insect does bite you, what? Okay. Yeah, I know. So that they call it pen size. Well, it's a little bit bigger than any pen you would normally carry, but it's kind of interesting because it uses

Leo Laporte (02:21:04):
It suck the venom amount.

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:06):
No, it does it with heat. Leah. It's a, it heats the skin to 124 degrees ferry. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. And

Leo Laporte (02:21:16):
Not burning hot, but pretty but warm.

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:17):
Not, not burning. Yes, exactly. You'll exactly. And there are two settings on the pen, three seconds and five seconds for people who have no skin problems you hit the five can think if you have sensitive skin or you're under 12, then you use the three second. If

Leo Laporte (02:21:35):
You get bit by a rattlesnake, does it have a 42nd?

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:39):
No, but it, it issues a little death certificate that comes outta this.

Leo Laporte (02:21:43):
It comes right outta the side. That's nice.

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:44):
It says, sorry, I can't help you with this. So this

Leo Laporte (02:21:47):
Thing now, did you, I mean, do they have mosquitoes there that you can try?

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:51):
No. No. They, they don't and, and meant this has been our coldest spring, so I, I am plagued by mosquitoes.

Leo Laporte (02:21:58):
Oh, I hate it. Yeah. Oh yeah. If this works, I'm buying it. I mean really seriously. Yeah,

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:04):
It is. It is really, so I had 'em do it on me and you certainly feel the heat, but just to think, oh, this is gonna be very hot. It, it goes off. Cause five seconds is not a lot of time. So I'm, I'm looking forward to using it. Also it's less expensive than I thought it's 30 bucks.

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
Oh. So even if it doesn't work, what the hell? It's only 30 bucks.

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:27):
It's it's only 30 bucks. Yeah. And I had put an Amazon link on, but since I did the website last night, it's gone up to 39 at Amazon. So don't help me out by going to Amazon target has it for 29, 99 and home to has, is there

Leo Laporte (02:22:45):
Science behind this? Is there something that says, you know, heat up a bite, it's gonna go away? Or

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:50):
It says that by heating up the bite, it, it draws whatever the, whatever the bug put in there. Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
It draws

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:00):
It out that you, it draws it out. Okay. So maybe it just, maybe it cooks it out, you know, 124 degrees, huh? Localized heat triggers the body response that will automatically reduce itching, pain and

Leo Laporte (02:23:13):
Swelling. It makes the, the bite go TUI <laugh> and spit the venom. Cause there is the reason you itch is cuz there's the, the mosquitoes injects a little saliva in there that to keep the wound open so it can drain your blood. Sorry about this folks. Hope you're not eating lunch. And I guess this would like push that back out,

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:35):
Back out.

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
I, I think I'm gonna let you try it before I buy it. How about

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:38):
No, absolutely. Absolutely. I, I, I will try it and it just runs on two double a batteries and the guy said, you can, you get 300 applications on just two AA batteries.

Leo Laporte (02:23:51):
So we used to, you know, you'd put kine lotion on. I went, do they say it works for beasting?

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:57):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (02:23:57):
It does.

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:59):
It does work for, for these stings also, you know, I looked on Amazon and 4,500 verified is, gave it 4.2 stars. What a that's pretty decent it's.

Leo Laporte (02:24:13):
I mean, it's a good, they could charge hundreds of dollars and say it's some strange medical thing. So that's good. It is FDA cleared. They say yes. So it's, you know, it's, it's not fly by night. Wow. That's cool. I think I might. I'm gonna wait and see how it works for you.

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:30):
Yeah. Okay. What else?

Leo Laporte (02:24:32):
Mosquitoes? bees

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:35):
Bees 

Leo Laporte (02:24:36):
Pretty spider bites will work for spider

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:38):
Bites. You know, I'm looking,

Leo Laporte (02:24:40):
Lisa's make it. My wife is, is as I will vouch for tasty. And so the bugs, they don't, it's great. She is the best mosquito repellent for me. Cuz they go, let's eat Le and then they go wait a minute and they go over Lisa,

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:55):
Look at that,

Leo Laporte (02:24:56):
Look at that. Wow. I'm buying that. So she will get covered with mosquito bites and I will be unscathed. So I might get this for her as a gift.

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:05):
But I think that thing, Lisa put the, putting on your skin before you go out.

Leo Laporte (02:25:10):
Well, it's her beauty treatment. I'm not gonna knock it. It's not gonna knock it. It seems to be working for her. No, I think it's a, I don't know if it's blood type or or something, but there's something that my sister, no, I'm one of this too. Are you one of those? They love you. No, no. Noden I, they like they go for and dentist. They don't eat. No, they go to me. No. The only thing is dentist has terrible allergies. Oh. And mosquitoes don't bother him. I am the reverse good GI wiz.biz. You know what? Lisa has allergies too. I wonder if they're related. If that's related somehow GI wiz.biz is the website. You'll see the, what the heck is it contest a chance to win an autograph copy of mad magazine autograph by this guy right here. No, not the rod with the new game tomorrow.

Leo Laporte (02:25:55):
Oh, this is your last chance. Yeah. Last chance. Go on over there. Six Mads for the right answer up to 12 for the best silly wrong answer. Judges' decisions are final GWiz type biz. Also his great podcast@gwiz.tv. There's lots of other great stuff at the site too. I highly recommend now fully trademark protected GWiz <laugh> biz. Thank you. Dickie D. Okay, bud. I see you next week. Have a great week. You too, too. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Thanks to professor Laura musical director playing some great music. Kim Shaeffer, the phone angel angel, who answered all your calls. Thanks to all of you who called fun day today. Thanks to all of you who listen. I really appreciate it. Leo Laport, the tech. I have a great geek week. Well, that's it for the Tech Guy should show for today.

Leo Laporte (02:26:44):
Thank you so much for being here and don't forget TWiT T w I T. It stands for this week at tech and you'll find it@twi.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh on Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and, and of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.