The Tech Guy Episode 1892 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts you 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 networks on Sunday, May 8th, 2022. Happy mother's day. This is episode 1,892. Enjoy this episode of the tech guy is brought to you by Blueland. Stop wasting water and throwing out more plastic. Get Blueland's revolutionary refill cleaning system. Instead. Right now you can get 20% off your first order when you go to blueland.com/techguy. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography. We got your smart phones. We got your smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight Asley of the phone number (888) 827-5536. Toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. I am in Northern California, but Google, for some reason thinks I'm in Wilkes bar PA <laugh> all I wanted to do was watch the Kentucky Derby <laugh> boy, you know, Google's really gone downhill.

Leo Laporte (00:01:28):
Am I wrong? Google has really gone downhill. The search engine's still, you know, okay, it's gotten worse. There's a lot more junk in it. And you know, a lot more greed and it's certainly clear that Google is under no obligation to protect our privacy anymore. And in fact is actively seeking to prevent us from doing the same for ourselves. But I subscribed foolishly perhaps to YouTube TV. You know, it was kind of a cable substitute, 65 bucks a month. That's, you know, cable, TV, territory. But I got the locals and, and all of that. And then foolishly, when the Olympics were on last winter, I spent another 20 bucks a month for 4k, even though there's very limited 4k content on there, mostly the Olympics. But that's 85 bucks a month. Now we're really talking some money and I should have paid more attention because about two months ago, Google started to say, Hey, you're in Wilkes bear again.

Leo Laporte (00:02:30):
No, I'm not in Wilkes bear, but there was no seemed to be no way to tell it otherwise, I don't know why it thought I was, it had something to do with locations, permissions or something. I don't know. Probably I'm thinking had something to do with the all the stuff I run for my privacy, like VPNs and, and you block origin and next DNS and all that stuff, stuff to protect me from advertisers, snooping on everything I'm doing. I don't think Google likes that so much kept saying you're in Wilkes bar PA. I said, no, no, I'm here in the bay area. No, you're in Wilkes bar PA. Well, finally today I wanted to, like I said, I wanted to watch a Kentucky Derby and I said, no, you can't watch anymore because <laugh>, you're in Wilkes bar PA and or you're supposed to be your home is in Wilkes bar PA, but you seem to keep being in this, the bay area. Well, yeah, because when I signed up, that's where I was. I have never left. In fact, in the last two years, I haven't spent a lot of time traveling and I've never been to Wilkes bar PA ever.

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
So I thought, well, no problem. I'll go to tech support. You, you know where this is going. <Laugh> If you have any issue, it says there's a link on the page, contact us. I click that link. It takes you to a bunch of useless suggestions and there is no other way to contact them. Now I understand if you're not paying Google for a service like Gmail or Google search, you can't really expect them to offer much support. It's expensive, but I'm giving them 85 bucks a month. <Laugh> I think I should get at least a little bit. I mean, as much as I would get from Comcast, no nothing. Then I tried to cancel. Oh, good luck. <Laugh> it seems to have decided that since I am insisting on being in the bay area, even though I clearly live in Wilkes bar PA, it's not gonna let me cancel. <Affirmative>. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
You know, I've been for a long time, I've been mentioned, you know, when we, we talk about email, oh yeah. Use Gmail it's free. But, and you know, every once in a while we'll get the calls. Remember the, the, the very nice person who called and said, she went to Google's offices in Irvine and banged on the door because they'd taken away her account and she couldn't find it. There was no way to talk to a human <laugh>. She banged. Nobody came to the door and Irvine, I don't, maybe there's somebody in there. Maybe not. I don't know, but they sure as heck aren't going to the door if somebody's banging on it. Yeah. <laugh> yeah. I think Google has, I don't know, what's the wheels are coming off. Aren't they? My friend Mike ELGAN, who's been a Google watcher and, and like me a Google fan in the, since the early years, he was a big promoter of a Google plus, which is Google's failed social network. He was all in on that. I think, yes. He learned a lesson.

Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
He says the problem is the CEO. The guy at the top of alphabet soon, Apache is be sun. DARPA Chi is terrible. And I said, well, come on. How bad could be he be? But here's a company that really should own the world at this point. And instead the wheels just seem to be falling off, falling off. It's it's it's too bad. I'm gonna have to stop recommending YouTube TV and Gmail, I guess, you know, what are you gonna do there? You know, you could use duck dot go that's. Another search engine probably will start using that. It's kind of hard to get out of the Google verse though. People have tried <laugh> was it cashmere hill who a couple of years ago, did the New York times piece on you know, trying to get big tech out of her life, including Google and failing miserably. There's this is probably cause for concern they're so tightly embedded in everything we do that. It's almost like you can't get out of it. You can't.

Leo Laporte (00:06:52):
Yeah. I know. Are people in the chat room? Well, there's all these support pages. I went to all those support pages <laugh> believe me, trust me. I'm not an idiot. <Laugh> in fact, I'm the tech guy and this is what's really comes home to me is I, it's hard if, if, if a person who spends his life as I do immersed in technology, using technology, using it at a high level, I believe, you know, writing my own code and things. If I can't navigate it, I don't know how any normal person is going to.

Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
And oh yeah. Support.Google.Com/Youtube. Yeah, sure. <Laugh> good luck on that one. <Laugh> we've always joked that Google support is a a bunch of Python scripts, programming scripts, and I think it's true. Eighty eight, eighty eight LIO is the phone number. Let's see what else? Oh, I will tell you a thumb. Something Google won't like Firefox 100 came out Firefox is the also ran browser. You know, I feel bad for them. They're slowly going down the charts. Google is again, another place where Google is totally dominant. Google Chrome is vast majority of browsing. You probably use it. Most people do edge is number two because it comes with windows. It's the default with windows. Safari is number three, cuz it comes with oh, you know, iPhone and, and Macintosh. So it's, it's kind of the default. So people, you know, who haven't changed, browsers are still using the browser that came with the operating system.

Leo Laporte (00:08:24):
Everybody else seems to be using Chrome, but I'm a fan of Firefox for if, for no other reason that it's nice to have variety. We don't wanna live in a monoculture where Google dominates completely com. Competition's good for us as users may not be good for Google, but it's good for us as users. So I use Firefox Firefox 100 just came out and it, there's an interesting little switch that you can turn on and Google's not gonna like this. This is a switch that Google has continuously avoided putting in there used to be a switch called do not track. Remember that, which as it turned out do glue not do not track was a lie, a lie. You would switch that thing in your browser and everybody ignore it. Well, there's something with some power now behind it, a little a stick as well as a carrot behind it.

Leo Laporte (00:09:22):
Thanks to the EU and GDPR, the general data protection regulation, privacy law that has come into effect. Actually it's been in effect since 2018. And one of the things it's supposed to do is enforce global privacy. And boy was, was the EU smart when they did this because instead of the traditional slap on the wrist finds that you get here in the us. If you know, you hire the federal trade commission there, fines can go up to 10% of your global revenue, like billions of dollars, 10% of your global revenue. That's that's designed to hurt.

Leo Laporte (00:10:04):
That's designed to hurt. So they've got this global privacy control that they're enforcing. And now California is enforcing through its C CPA with some severe fines. Oh, so companies can't ignore it as they did do not track. When you turn on this setting where you may say is the setting <laugh> well, at least right now it's hidden away. I don't think Google ever implemented in Chrome, but you can get it in Firefox. Now it's a little tricky. So I'm gonna put this in the show notes, but if you wanna follow along at, at home, you open your Firefox browser and you go to the configuration page, the hidden configuration page. You do that by typing in the address about colon config about colon config. It says proceed with caution war, proceed with caution except the risk and continue. That's fine. Go ahead. This is not risky. <Laugh> Leo said you could do this unless, well, it might risk your YouTube TV. I don't know it's gonna risk Google's ire. If you type in global privacy in the search, you'll get two settings, global privacy controlled enabled global privacy control functionality enabled. Now, right now it's disabled. It's false. But over on the right, there's a little double-headed arrow. You click that. It turns it into true.

Leo Laporte (00:11:34):
Suddenly you have turned your browser into a privacy protection superhero, and you can verify that if you go to global privacy control.org, which is the homepage for this initiative out of the EU in California at the top, it'll say if you've turned it on GPC signal detected. Now what that means is you've told the browser to tell any site you go to. I want privacy do not track me at the risk of a severe penalty. That's the change, right? We, we had do not track before, but there's no penalties. So everybody said, yeah, right. <Laugh> excellent committees. Now I'm hoping, I'm thinking they're gonna have to pay attention. Cuz it's 10% of your global revenues kids. That's a lot of money for the go pay attention. When I say don't collect information about me, it's probably one of the reasons I, I, I have to cancel my subscription to YouTube TV, but we wanna know what you're doing.

Leo Laporte (00:12:40):
Leo, how are he supposed to set, give you advertisements for a long time? I thought it was about advertisements. It was. But lately it's been about more than that because we've seen in the case of Google, apple, Snapchat, and others hackers, being able to trick them into giving out personal information that they've been collecting for dosing purposes, teenagers looking to follow around other teenagers have been able to call Google, pretend or email Google pretend to be law enforcement and Google goes, yeah. Yeah. What do you wanna know? No warrant, nothing. I'd just like to know her home address. Oh, no problem here. We have it. And that's that. So suddenly I'm and of course law enforcement can do this as well. And government can do this as well. There was a story about data brokers the other day that terrified me data brokers, selling information about who was visiting planned parenthood clinics, 167 bucks vice got it. The website 167 bucks. You can get a list of everybody who's visited a planned parenthood clinic over the last week. That's all no warrant, nothing. Hmm. So suddenly this becomes important. Doesn't it? So just to mention, I'll put a link in the show notes. You can turn this privacy protection on. I know it's not enough. It's just a start, but we need to start doing this. I think eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number? (888) 827-5536, toll free in the us or Canada outside that area. You can use Skype out website tech guy labs.com.

Leo Laporte (00:14:33):
Hey Mr. Sam. Woo salmon. How are you? Hey

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:36):
Leo. How

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
Are you? I'm good. I'm living in Wilke, spare PA. And I didn't even know it. So,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:42):
So I've heard so, so you're like only an hour away from where Paul is.

Leo Laporte (00:14:45):
<Laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:46):
I looked it up on the map.

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
I could go visit Laura MCCE yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:50):
It's only an hour from McKenzie.

Leo Laporte (00:14:52):
Maybe Paul's been using my YouTube TV,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:55):
You know, or, or if he hasn't, you could give him your login and have him cancel it for you if you want.

Leo Laporte (00:15:01):
I should started while I

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:02):
Cancel it from California.

Leo Laporte (00:15:03):
I oh, I, you know, I've, it's ridiculous. I wrote him a nasty note. It's I started to see this when we were trying to watch the football playoffs. So that was last December here and it, and so maybe we have something that's defeating the location stuff here anyway, and then I I've never been able to fix it. And it says you can only change your home address twice and you've changed it more than twice. So stop it's like I've never changed it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:34):
You got any kind of VPN or DNS.

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
Oh, I have all sorts of things. And that should be none of Google's business. I log in you know, to Google. Yeah, I have next DNS running and I have but here, I don't know. The funny thing was it was here that it happened that it first thought I was in Whitten books bear. So, and I don't think we're doing anything weird. We're we're, you know, normal business. Hmm. I think it's a it's a flaw in their system to be honest. And I was, I'm really disappointed if I can't watch the Miami GRA Prix I'll have to TiVo it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:15):
Well, you can, you can sign up for the F1 streaming service and watch it that way.

Leo Laporte (00:16:20):
Yeah. I just think, I think really the problem is Google. If you ever have trouble with Google, you're outta luck. You just,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:27):
Well, my, my wife, one of her pixel buds was dying last week and I got online and got into a chat with a Google support rep and they quickly set me up with a replacement

Leo Laporte (00:16:39):
Unit. Nice. So nice

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:43):
That worked out. All right.

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Yeah. I, this is fine. I, I have to say, I, I I've been happy up to now, but I haven't had a lot of problems. So I'm following there. Open the YouTube and smart TV gaming counselor streaming device proof profile, like a location cream playback area, update mobile device, open a YouTube TV app. Clearly their location verification stinks

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:11):
East, east coast is asking in the chat. If I have any recommendations on a car that doesn't get flats. Well, it doesn't really matter. What you, what car

Leo Laporte (00:17:19):
You, when do have, when do solid wheels, solid tires?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:22):
There, there are some some stuff, there is some stuff being done, not so much with solid because you, you wouldn't want a solid rubber tire cuz it's gotta have some compliance. Yeah. To get, to get traction and also, you know, for ride comfort. But

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):
Hold that thought, hold that thought. I thought <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:39):
Wish somebody would take me to

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
Dinner. <Laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:42):
I'm old Kim.

Leo Laporte (00:17:44):
Oh, she's a lead Kim Schaffer. The unbreakable phone angel. That's a theme. This is a good theme. I like Tom.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:52):
I love this song.

Leo Laporte (00:17:53):
Yeah. Tom Jones probably could not have gotten away with Z in modern times. <Laugh> but we can look back on it. Right.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:01):
Isn't he? One of the ones that girls throw things on the page. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
Too. Yes. They're underwear. Yes. But again, I don't know if you can do that nowadays. <Laugh> things have times have changed

Kim Schaffer (00:18:13):
Times have changed. I worked for a Spanish radio station and we gave a blank thong underwear as one of the swag from the radio station really station. Yes. And this was in 2006, 2007, 2008,

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
Mo

Kim Schaffer (00:18:28):
I'm thinking that I don't, well, I don't know. They have their own set of rules. Everything's changed.

Leo Laporte (00:18:32):
Everything's changed Kim, my dear. Who should I? 

Kim Schaffer (00:18:37):
I would love to go to our good friend, Julian, cuz he always has

Leo Laporte (00:18:40):
Julian Vargas. Yes.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:41):
Has a lot of information. And he heard a call yesterday that

Leo Laporte (00:18:45):
Tech jv.com tech JV. I've learned his address.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:47):
You have

Leo Laporte (00:18:48):
<Laugh>. Thank you Kim. Hello? Julian. Leo Laporte. The tech guy. Good,

Caller 1 (00:18:54):
Good morning Leo. And first of all, I'd like to wish all the mothers and mother figures out there. Very happy and well deserved mothers.

Leo Laporte (00:19:00):
Oh, I was so caught up with my own woes. I forgot. Happy mother's day. You're right.

Caller 1 (00:19:07):
So yesterday at the very end of your show, you had the guy talking about Astro photography and no, I can't help with anything about that. But he happened to mention something either about his dad or grandfather losing his vision and wanting to have access to the wall street journal.

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
Yeah. This was actually, he had called about it months ago. And yeah. You know, we, we, one thing we tried was of course the wall street journal podcast, but he can't hardly read the header on that. So that's not working out. What do you got for him?

Caller 1 (00:19:38):
So there's a service called NFB newsline. It's done by the national Federation of the blind as long. And I believe the national library service for the blind is involved in it. There's various entities that fund it, but this makes newspapers and magazines. It's like several thousand of them I think available free of charge to anybody who has any form of print impairment or deaf blind or anything like that. And if you just Google NFB, newsline, you'll get to their site. Or if you go to nfb.org and look for the link that says NFB newsline, you'll get to it that way as well. And it explains what the service is and there's various ways that you can access it. There is an iPhone app, unfortunately, no Android app, but they do have an iPhone app that gives you access to that as well as they include a very basic OCR capability, lets you take pictures of something and have it read aloud to you. So that's one way. And then for people who don't want to do the smartphone they have the old fashioned telephone portal. You can literally call in and type in some numbers and and read all kinds of newspapers, have them read to you over the phone, be a computer mechanic, you know digitized voice. And through the lady, a, there is a skill you can enable there. And as long as you have credentials, once you've been approved for the service, you can set up your lady a to oh,

Leo Laporte (00:21:03):
Newspaper. Wouldn't that be nice? So I could say, Hey, you know who read me the wall street journal.

Caller 1 (00:21:08):
Yeah. I think you have, have to, you know, call up the skill NFB newsline skill and then tell it which paper you

Leo Laporte (00:21:13):
That's a skill. Got it. NFB of course the national Federation of the blind. That's the NFB in there and nfb.org and that's one of their programs and FB newsline. I'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you. JV tech.com. You're welcome. Julian Vargas tech JV. Darn it. So close <laugh> thank you, Julian. Leo. Leport the tech guy. Sam bull. Sam car guy coming up. So close. So close <laugh> that's okay. Thank you Julian. I appreciate you're so welcome. Have a great wonder take you too. Thanks. Sorry, Sam, you had to did that interrupt your worries. I'm sorry. So there are some cars with some kind of solid rubber tire, but it's not

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:04):
Very

Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
Good for the road.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:05):
It's not, it's not actually solid rubber it's 

Leo Laporte (00:22:08):
Pockets of

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:09):
They're they're airless, non pneumatic airless

Leo Laporte (00:22:11):
Tires. There you go.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:12):
Yeah. Michelin's been working on this for a while. Good. Year's got some and basically did, did you watch Westworld?

Leo Laporte (00:22:20):
I did

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:22):
The, in the second season, you know, those carts you saw running around those offroad vehicles mm-hmm <affirmative> they were on those, those airless airless tires. So if you think of it, you have basically an outer perimeter. That's got the tread on it and then where you would normally have a side wall and the, the pneumatic part, the airfield part of it, basically it's got like flexible spokes mm-hmm <affirmative> pliable, spokes. And so that gives you some pliability to the, to the wheel. And so that's that's what they, they Michelin calls. There's the TWE and they're actually testing them now on some, some of the autonomous mobility vehicles,

Leo Laporte (00:23:06):
The TWE. Yeah. So see I'm in Wilke, spare Scranton area. Maybe it thinks I, I watched the office so much. It thinks <laugh> I'm in the SCR and current playback area, unknown update. And I'm sure that's because we are protecting ourselves and Google. I think this is Google's subtle way of saying no, no, no, you can't not let us know everything about you. Let me see what I have turned on here.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:37):
I guess. I guess Michelin actually is selling the TWI.

Leo Laporte (00:23:40):
Oh, nice

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:41):
Offroad applications. Nice. Not for onroad but for offroad vehicles

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Offroad. Well see, but wouldn't that be? Even bumpier?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:51):
Yeah, but like I said, it's not a solid rubber wheel if you, I just dropped a link in the I see

Leo Laporte (00:23:58):
In the chat.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:59):
Yeah. TWI Michelin man.com. Nice. You can see what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
So would you not wanna drive on us?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:06):
You, no, you can, you can drive on them. And they're, they're a little more expensive than pneumatic tires right now. It you know, it's a matter of getting it to the point where it's got the, the load capacity and the handling capability for for on road tires. But yeah, the technology's out there. It's an interesting concept. It's it's been a, they've been, I think they've Michelin first showed the wheel, the T wheel back about, I know almost 15 years ago. Hmm. I'm not sure when they actually started selling it.

Leo Laporte (00:24:47):
So would you recommend I get a TWI for my Ford? I don't, I'm not worried about flats,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:53):
But no, no, you can't. You can't, you can't buy them for on road use.

Leo Laporte (00:24:55):
Oh, that's right. You said offroad only. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:57):
Just offroad. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Why is that?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:02):
Controlled. They're not yeah, I mean right now, I think they're, they don't necessarily have the, the durability or they haven't been D O T approved and they may not have the handling capability, the, the lateral load capability that typical vehicle tires have mm-hmm

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
<Affirmative>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:23):
I drove, I drove another electric Ford this week, but I can't.

Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
I know which one you drove.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:29):
I don't drive impressions of the F-150 light F150

Leo Laporte (00:25:32):
Wednesday. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:34):
Kill. But I have a, I have an F-150 hybrid in the driveway right now. I just wanted to talk about his hybrids.

Leo Laporte (00:25:41):
Oh, nice. Okay. The tech guy program this week, I gotta tell you, I love these guys brought to you by Blueland. I am on a quest, Lisa and I on a quest to eliminate single use plastics in our life, paper bags, grocery buy our own grocery bags, bring 'em to the grocery store. We don't use Ziploc plastic bags anymore in the house. We use reusable, silicone, rubber bags, Tupperware, and things like that. But there's one other area where, where we wanted to do better. And that's the plastic bottles for the hand soap for the household cleaner, the, you know, the plastic bottles for the dishwasher and the washing machine. And we found Blueland and I love Blueland. Did you know that an estimated 5 billion with a B plastic hand soap and cleaning bottles are thrown away every year. And, and that's not the whole cost of it because they're, you know, the, the contents of those bottles, the soap 90% water.

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Leo Laporte (00:29:46):
It's time for Sam at bull Sam, our car guy. He is a principal researcher at guide house insights. He does the wheel bearings podcast@wheelbearings.media and we find podcast. You sold. He also joins us every week to talk about car tech. Hello Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:05):
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:30:06):
What happened to your car? You've you've got all this luggage. Are you moving?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:10):
Are you moving? No, no. Earlier, earlier this week I had a chance to drive the new Ford F-150 lightning electric pickup. Oh, can't talk about driving impressions until next until Wednesday. So we'll talk about that next Sunday.

Leo Laporte (00:30:25):
You're embargo

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:25):
You're on the show

Leo Laporte (00:30:26):
Embargoed.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:27):
Yeah. Yeah. But I just wanted to throw that picture up there just to show how much the the front trunk can hold and the lightning that's four standard carryon bags plus two stuffed backpacks we got in there. Another thing that they were showing us that forages come up with a new term, they call front gating as opposed to tailgating because like your, like the front in your your mock E there's a, a lower compartment here. That's got a drain plug. So they had, they had one at the event that was all filled with ice and drinks and stuff. And so they, they they're, they're promoting the idea of front gating. In addition to tail,

Leo Laporte (00:31:05):
I have never used the front on my mock cuz it has those dividers, which makes it, well, you can

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:10):
Take those out now.

Leo Laporte (00:31:11):
How

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:13):
They're pretty easy. You can, you can either take it to the dealer and have it done or they're, they're just plastic pins. If you just take a screwdriver and just prime,

Leo Laporte (00:31:21):
I'm allowed to do this.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:23):
Yeah. You can do it now because you should have gotten an OTA update that enables the no, the, the interior trunk release,

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
You know, I made a mistake by being the first to the mock. I haven't gotten a lot of the updates that people who buy a mock have like blue crews and that update

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:41):
You haven't gotten your blue crews update yet.

Leo Laporte (00:31:43):
No I'm and I'm even in the early beta program plus, and this is a constant problem. Dealers don't understand electric vehicles. I have a recall on my windshield and my and my sun roof. And I keep calling the dealer every month I call 'em and they say, well, call next month we don't have any, we haven't found anybody to go fix that yet. It's like, I'm just, you know, when it comes to electric vehicles and dealers, this is why Tesla's winning.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:09):
Yeah. Well I think that's that that's not necessarily an EV issue with, with that

Leo Laporte (00:32:14):
Might just be a Ford issue. Huh?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:15):
I, I, I think it's just a matter of they, they may not have the parts available yet for the,

Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
The fix. Well, I think the real thing is what I've been reading on the forums is the glass breaks often. <Laugh> when they replace, when they're supposed to regl the windshield and the sunroof, cuz apparently they, they fall off <laugh> and when they do that, apparently then a certain percentage of times the, the windshield breaks or the thing breaks and they don't you're right. They don't have the replacements. So

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:41):
It's, it's a very large slab of glass you've got on the roof there. Yeah. Which is you, one of the, one of the downsides of having a glass roof,

Leo Laporte (00:32:48):
I'm just gonna cross my fingers. It doesn't go flying off when I'm running down the highway. And if it, if,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:53):
If it has, if it hasn't come off yet, you're probably

Leo Laporte (00:32:55):
Probably fine. Okay. That actually would be a good topic. When can you ignore recall notices? We're still waiting for the battery swap on our Chevy bolt.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:04):
You, you should, you should never ignore them. I mean, once, once you, I mean, once you get them then once you get a recall notice you know, contact your, your dealer and you know, as soon as they have the parts and in fact usually once they have the parts, they will usually contact you. Ah sometimes yeah. You know, sometimes they'll issue a recall before they have replacement parts available. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
This recall came out in November. Yeah, yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:32):
Yeah. Right. And, and there there's still vehicles out there that have Tata airbag. Inflaters

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
Really, those are the ones that have little

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:40):
Bits of that's that's a recall that's been going on that's metal

Leo Laporte (00:33:42):
Several go to your forehead or something. They're

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:44):
Not good. Yeah. And you know, the prob the problem there is automaker had to find different sources. They had, they basically had to get other suppliers aside from Takota to tool up compatible inflaters airbag inflaters to replace the original ones because they were getting corrosion in those. And, and they were, they would sometimes you know, go off for no apparent reason and they, we would have some shrapnel from it. So there are still vehicles out there waiting for replacement parts for those which is, which is not good. But yeah, when you, when you get a recall, you know, contact the dealer, see if they have the parts available and get the vehicle in and get it, get the recall done as soon as possible. You know, fortunately, you know, a lot more and more recalls are software based.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:37):
And as automakers roll out over the air, soft software update capability, they'll be able to fix a lot of things without you actually having to, to go in. They can, they can do that OTA, but, you know, there are some things like, you know, the glass roof or Tesla has had some challenges with some of their airbags some seatbelt issues. You know, those are the kinds of things you can't fix with a software update, you have to replace hardware for those. And so you know's, they, you know, they, they don't <laugh>, they don't issue recalls if they don't feel that it's really a safety issue. So, you know, really, you know, pay attention to it seriously. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
Yeah. Unless your dealer can't fix it, in which case I'm driving around with a windshield that could fly off at any point in time. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:22):
Yeah. <Laugh> parts

Leo Laporte (00:35:25):
Aren't, it's kinda the worst of both worlds. Isn't it?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:28):
<Laugh> yeah. Unfortunately. Oh, well

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
That doesn't, I love my mock not complaining. But you know what? That probably is good advice, which is don't what what's going on here. My phone, my phone is, is trying to tell me how to YouTube.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:42):
Music's finally, are you YouTube TV finally playing

Leo Laporte (00:35:44):
Now? No. Finally

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:45):
Think you're back in Wilkes bar. No,

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
No yeah. Things I'm back in Wilkes bar. Maybe that's the solution. Tell it I'm in Wilkes bar. No. what was I about to say, oh, don't buy a car in the first year of production probably is a good idea, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:58):
Yeah. Well, for fortunately these days, you know, a lot of vehicles are in very limited supply in their first year. Anyways. Yeah. You can.

Leo Laporte (00:36:05):
That's right. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:06):
So you're okay. You know, if, if you wanted to order one, now you, you know, or, or, you know, the lightning, you know, if you wanted to get a lightning, you, you you're gonna have to wait until next year. If you haven't already got one ordered.

Leo Laporte (00:36:16):
When can you give us your impressions of the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:20):
Wednesday is the embargo for the driving impress?

Leo Laporte (00:36:24):
So you can't even say I like it or anything you just have to. Nope. Nope,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:27):
Nope. But next, next Sunday, we'll talk about the lightning now.

Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
What are these wheels you've got on your, over your left shoulder

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:33):
Here? So, so what's on the screen here right now is a schematic of a hybrid drive system. And because right now in my driveway, I do have an F-150, but it's not, it's not a lightning, it's a, it's the power boost hybrid. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about hybrid power trains and how they work. So what a hybrid is, is when you combine an internal combustion engine and one or more electric motors and a mechanism for blending, the power delivery between those and the, the advantage to this is, you know, because electric motors, as we've talked about have deliver instant torque from zero RPM. They're great for drivability. They're also because the process is also reversible when you're driving an electric motor. So if your vehicle is coasting, you take your foot off the accelerator and you're coasting the, the kinetic energy of the vehicle is turning the motor.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:27):
So it's generating electricity. That's putting back into the, into the battery, which is what we call regenerative braking. And then that, that energy that's in the battery. Next time you go to accelerate, that can be applied back to the motor to help drive and propel the vehicle. And so the engine doesn't have to work as hard. So one of the things that engineers can do is they can use a more efficient combustion cycle, something like an Atkinson cycle that is more, more fuel efficient, but ne doesn't necessarily produce as much torque because they're getting the torque filled in by the electric motor. And so you can have, it's a small battery typically typically about one and a half kilowat hours. So it's, it's not gonna be able to drive very far on electricity, but it, it can do a lot of assist and really help improve fuel economy. And that's why, you know, cars like the Toyota Prius and the Hyundai ionic hybrid and, and the Elantra hybrid and others, they can get upwards of 50 miles per gallon with their hybrid power trains. And they're, they're extremely fuel efficient. They're relatively low cost, especially compared to an EV you can, the, the Ford Maverick now comes standard. That's their new compact pickup truck comes standard with a hybrid power train. It gets 42 miles per gallon. Nice from a, from a pickup truck, good solution to $20,000

Leo Laporte (00:38:47):
For people who are worried about range. Maybe you're in a rural area where you don't have chargers. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, that's great salmon, bull salmon guide, house insights, wheel bearings.media. Thank you, sir.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:57):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:39:04):
This is even more fun. I okay, so right. It won't, but when I do, what is my location, it says you're the you're in the brick house. <Laugh> so, you know, I don't what I don't, what is my location now? Right here, according to GPS coordinates.net. I am right where I am yet. According to YouTube, I don't know where you are. You're in Wilkes bay. You know, it doesn't know where I am.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:39):
See. I mean, we, we, we did the, the trial of YouTube TV a couple of years back, you know, for a couple of days. Yeah. And then canceled it because we suddenly realized that after not having cable for five years, it

Leo Laporte (00:39:51):
Is cable.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:52):
We really didn't wanna watch commercials.

Leo Laporte (00:39:53):
Yeah. I mean,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:54):
Commercials were, but just a nonstarter.

Leo Laporte (00:39:57):
It's a, it's how, you know, yeah. It is cable. Yeah. I, you know, on can, it was way expensive. It really, it was a bad idea, but and I was, I was very happy with it, but if they can't figure this out, apparently this is a known problem, I guess. I don't know. But oof. Anyway, anyway, I am gonna give you, now let me get a clock up for you. Oh, not all the time in the world, but much time <affirmative> anytime. Let me watch my clock. There it is. There you go. Enjoy. Thank you. And you wanna stay for the top too?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:36):
Sure. I can do that.

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
Okay. Thank you. All

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:39):
Right. So continuing the, the conversation about hybrids you know, hybrids are a, a great solution for a lot of people who, you know, especially if you live somewhere where you don't have access to off street parking, there may not be a lot of public charging available for you locally. Or you just can't afford an EV cuz you know, Mo the reality is most of the EVs that are out there are still considerably more expensive and you can get, you know quite a few of the hybrid vehicles out there in the low $20,000 range, which I think is, you know, you know, it's still, it's not inexpensive. I mean, a lot of the, the majority of people never actually buy a new car in their lifetime. Most people only buy used cars because new cars are too expensive right now in 2021.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:27):
The average transaction price for new cars was $43,000, which was a jump of almost $6,000 from 2019. And you know, it's only getting worse especially as manufacturers have discontinued a lot of their smaller cars that people weren't buying anyway or not enough people were buying. And so there's a lot of there's quite a few really good comparatively low cost hybrids. If you want a new vehicle and you want something with really great fuel economy, there's, there's actually quite a few options out there. And if you, you think about it the, the energy you know, in, for a lot of people, if you were to actually do the calculation of cradle to grave emissions, CO2 emissions, in many cases, you might actually be doing better with a hybrid than you would with a battery electric vehicle because you have a much smaller battery.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:27):
They're, they're, you know, they are a little more mechanically complex than an EV obviously, but as I said, you can get 40, 50, almost 60 miles per gallon in a lot of cases. And they're you know, they, they, they work really well. You don't have to plug them in. You can also get plugin hybrids, which are basically the same thing, but with a larger battery. And we'll talk about that in the next segment, but excuse me, but the hybrids are, are a great solution to partial electrification of your vehicle. Let's see Something I'm not sure what user 82 61 is talking about when he says, feel like you left your ere on. But yeah, I mean, my

Leo Laporte (00:43:15):
Hold on Leola port happy mother's day now I've said it, the tech guy happy mother's day. I don't worry the people in my life already heard it. First thing in the morning, right? Yeah, it was cute. Our our 19 year old got up and made a cup of coffee for his mother <laugh> that's all she wants in the morning. Eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536. Back to the phones. We go joy on the line from Houston, Texas. Hello, joy or Jay? I'm sorry. Hi, Jay. Hello, Jay. Is he mad? I, Hey. Oh, he's not mad. Cuz I called him joy. He's just gotta press the button there.

Caller 2 (00:43:56):
Okay. So can you hear me okay.

Leo Laporte (00:43:58):
Hear you great. Yes,

Caller 2 (00:44:01):
I thought so I thought you'd like a follow up story to my sad one plus smartphone. Yeah. That okay. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
Yeah, this was last week. Fi fill us in though. For those who have short memories. Yeah. I bought

Caller 2 (00:44:17):
A phone back in September. It was refurbished looked on consumer reports, you know, good reviews. I thought what the heck? Okay. So I'll get it. And I told you, Leo, I love the phone except every so often it would I would do a, I would get an Android update and it would, it would download the update just fine. And then it would do a hard reset on the phone

Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
And you'd lose everything. It'd be back to the way it was when it came from the factory. Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:44:46):
Exactly. Yeah. So hold on one second. So 

Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
And that's clearly not intended <laugh> behavior.

Caller 2 (00:44:54):
Yeah. And you made it very clear that that's not normal, not normal operating procedure.

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:44:59):
Okay. So I thought I'm gonna have to have a strategy here. Do you remember back in the seventies, a book came out called you can negotiate anything. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:45:08):
<Laugh> classic a classic. Okay.

Caller 2 (00:45:11):
It was, and you know, it was sort of yeah, kind of a pop culture thing. Right, right. So, you know, I'm old enough. I know you mentioned your 50 year reunion is coming up.

Leo Laporte (00:45:22):
Yeah. I'm old enough to remember it. That's for sure. Exactly.

Caller 2 (00:45:25):
Yeah. So I thought, okay, I need a strategy. What do I wanna do? I've got a phone that I think you were basically saying you better, you better ditch at some point. Yeah. So my strategy was I'll go to best buy and call them first. So Leo, first of all, here's a little news item. I didn't realize that when you call best buy, you can't get through to the store. At least you get a call center that fields calls for the store. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
And they, for all the stores.

Caller 2 (00:45:55):
Yeah. What's

Leo Laporte (00:45:56):
That for all the stores. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:45:59):
Yeah. And I had no idea and this store's only 10 minutes away. So I tried three, I tried three days in a row

Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
And they never, they never got back to you. Wow.

Caller 2 (00:46:09):
I just need to make a personal appearance. Yeah. So I go walk in, ask for the manager, seem like a nice guy. I said, yeah, what's the problem. I said, well, I have this phone that I like, but it keeps killing. My data, keeps killing my apps. So this is where you come in, Leo, you get an assist on this, you get a major assist. I looked at my wife and she smiled as if, to say, go ahead, play back part of the podcast.

Leo Laporte (00:46:34):
Oh.

Caller 2 (00:46:34):
So, so I asked him, I said, do you have a computer that's sort of free and connected to the internet? He goes, sure. Oh, we go back. We go to the back

Leo Laporte (00:46:44):
Of you. You invoked the power of Leo.

Caller 2 (00:46:47):
Oh Leo, you have, you have no idea. <Laugh> you know, here's the thing. You gotta kill him with kindness. Yeah. You can't walk in.

Leo Laporte (00:46:54):
No, no. Don't beat him up. No, no, no. Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:46:56):
Exactly. Yeah. You know, I know he doesn't set the policy for all of best buy the corporation, but you know,

Leo Laporte (00:47:04):
He can help you though. He can help you. Exactly.

Caller 2 (00:47:07):
Yeah. So we go back, he said, can I ask what you're doing? I said, I was on a national radio show and the host was very helpful. And I said, I, I didn't denigrate best buy. He goes, well, I'm sure. Glad to hear that. So we, we bring up the podcast and I put the slider at about, it was about an hour and 45 minutes and I okay. Can you turn the volume up as loud as you can? Cause it was kinda loud back, lean forward. And he heard where you said Jay in Houston. Yeah. And he goes, and then he looked points at me. I'm like, yeah, that's me. Yeah. And he plays it back. He said, okay. So he said, I've heard enough. But he said it in a nice way. Like he didn't say I've heard enough. Get the heck outta you. <Laugh> he goes, that's not supposed to happen. Yes. so Leo long story short, he said, what would you like to do? I said, listen, I don't need a refund. I just really need a phone that doesn't kill my data every so often.

Leo Laporte (00:48:06):
Yeah. That's fair.

Caller 2 (00:48:08):
Unbelievably. Leo gave me full credit. Nice. I ended up, ended up getting another phone. I bought a I love these names. I don't know who comes up with these names. Why don't they just say Moto one? Moto.

Leo Laporte (00:48:19):
Oh, I know you can't keep track <laugh>. Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:48:21):
Exactly. So I bought a Moto G power. No, not Moto G. They got rid of the G it's Moto power, 5g ACE. And it seems to be working,

Leo Laporte (00:48:31):
But you had had a Moto before and liked them. So that's a good replacement,

Caller 2 (00:48:36):
Correct? Yeah. I asked you about going back.

Leo Laporte (00:48:38):
I liked the motos. Yeah. I think they do a good job.

Caller 2 (00:48:41):
And Leo, one thing about one plus thanks to James or whoever put on the show notes. Yeah. At the end of the podcast last Sunday, put a link that might help me. It went to OneNote's website. Ah, and message board. They've been aware of this problem. Oh, For, for two years.

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
Yeah. Thanks scooter X in the chat room. I think he came up with that link last week.

Caller 2 (00:49:03):
Oh, that's right. Scooter did.

Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
Okay.

Caller 2 (00:49:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And that was very helpful cuz I looked at it after I talked to

Leo Laporte (00:49:09):
You, it's kind of a known issue, right? Yeah,

Caller 2 (00:49:11):
Exactly. And I thought they've had two years. They could do a fix. They obviously I guess refused to. Yeah. So I bought this phone. The phone is great Leo and you'll be glad to know there's been about four or five updates cuz it's getting me caught up from yeah. Yeah. I guess when, when the phone came, so every time data is intact, apps are intact. Good. So no problem.

Leo Laporte (00:49:33):
And thanks to best buy. Let's give em credit and you can play this back for if you want, but they did the right thing. They took care of you. And I'm glad to hear that they

Caller 2 (00:49:40):
Did. Yeah they did. And Leo, I wanted to mention, you said your 50 year reunion is next year

Leo Laporte (00:49:45):
High school and they have to high school,

Caller 2 (00:49:47):
High school reunion.

Leo Laporte (00:49:48):
Let's not, let's not go crazy here. <Laugh>

Caller 2 (00:49:51):
You're you're going to have to put a sign Uhhuh because I'm sure most of the people in your class know what you do. You would be pestered the whole night. <Laugh> you? You would be, you would be in the buffet line about to pick out chicken tenders and someone would go, Hey, oh, you know, my GrubHub app

Leo Laporte (00:50:08):
Happens to me all the time. I there's a t-shirt, which I will get before I go that says, no, I will not fix your computer. <Laugh>

Caller 2 (00:50:16):
Right. Or, or just say no tech talk tonight.

Leo Laporte (00:50:20):
Not tonight. Let's talk about

Caller 2 (00:50:22):
High school talk.

Leo Laporte (00:50:22):
Let's talk about Santa Cruz. High class of 73. Exactly.

Caller 2 (00:50:26):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I wanted to, I wanted to thank you because had I not invoked the power of Leo? I don't know if I would've. It was funny. We were not very far into it. He goes, okay, stop.

Leo Laporte (00:50:37):
Yeah. I've heard enough.

Caller 2 (00:50:38):
I stopped.

Leo Laporte (00:50:40):
I'll help you. He

Caller 2 (00:50:41):
Goes, he goes, I've heard enough. He goes, he's right. That's not supposed to happen. Good. And Leo, the amazing part about it. This phone was refurbished. It only had a three month warranty. I extended it. It was out of warranty.

Leo Laporte (00:50:54):
So he didn't have to do anything.

Caller 2 (00:50:56):
No. Yeah, no. And it, it was really nice credit

Leo Laporte (00:50:58):
Credit to, to your your local. Is it your Houston best buy?

Caller 2 (00:51:03):
Yes. Houston Gulf gate, if we're gonna Gulf gate specific. Good.

Leo Laporte (00:51:07):
Yes. Nice people there. Thank you for doing the right thing by our buddy, Jay. And did you get anybody contacting you about a high school, about getting your high school reunion service?

Caller 2 (00:51:17):
No. It's funny, funny, you mentioned that about an hour before the show started. I get an email nice Mar Martin from Burnsville, Minnesota. If you're listening. Thank you for that. I don't know that we can actually coordinate it, but we can give him some tips. Very nice to, to make it a little bit easier. So yes. Thank you for that

Leo Laporte (00:51:36):
Too. That's great. Give us a plug one more time. What's the what's the website?

Caller 2 (00:51:40):
The website is reunion scoop. I'm a former newspaper writer. A colleague came up with it reunion, scoop.com. Cool.

Leo Laporte (00:51:49):
Jay, a pleasure. I'm so glad it worked out for

Caller 2 (00:51:51):
You. Thanks Leo. Great. We really appreciate it.

Leo Laporte (00:51:53):
Sometimes the hardware's just bad and you know, it's misbehaving and the right thing to do is to bring it back. It's too bad. A lot of times you don't find out that it's gonna misbehave until after the warranty has run out. But a good and I think best buy is very good. I think the big box stores like Costco and Sam's club are pretty good about this too. They often will, and they have a lot of discretion as you've discovered. They'll often stand by a product even after the warranty has run out. So I'm glad that that that worked out for you. 88 88, ask Leo website tech guy labs.com. This is episode 1892, a very good year. If you go there, you'll have links to everything. We talk about transcripts, audio and video later. And now ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you Sam abou Sam, it's all yours. Oh, women. It will be when I turn on

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:58):
Following, along in the chat here. Yeah. One of the questions that somebody had was I, I think I previously mentioned a special edition, a special issue of motor trend. That's coming out software defined vehicles. Oh, that's not coming out till about the end of the month. The end of may. But if you're, if you're interested in learning more about software defined vehicles, I'm actually gonna be moderating a panel. This Thursday at 11:00 AM Eastern that's May 12th at 11:00 AM Eastern. I just dropped a link in there in the chat for Reuters events on the software defined vehicle. It'll have somebody from Toyota pole star, AI and continental on there to talk for an hour about software defined vehicles. Also I think Greg builtin was mentioning that he took his mini into the dealership for some recall work.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:52):
And ever since for the past year he is been getting constant emails about selling his car. I suspect you know, or trading in his car. I suspect that he'd probably be getting those those notifications anyway right now because car dealers have so little inventory of vehicles to sell. I get them all the time, probably at least once a week or so from car dealers. In fact, sometimes even for cars that I no longer even own you know, saying, Hey, you can trade in your car. We've got a five year old Honda civic that I can trade in for about the same that we paid for at five years ago. But unfortunately there isn't much new to buy and I like not having a car payment, so I'm not taking anybody up on that offer just yet.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:44):
But yeah, a lot of dealers are sending out emails and notifications to customers saying, Hey, you know, if you wanna come in, trade in your car you know, we'll give you a great deal on it right now. And if you don't need a car to replace it with, then, then might not be a bad idea. It's probably a good time to sell your used car. Also let's see, Phoenix warp was asking about a time limit on recalls. You know, if you, you know, if it's been three years since a recall went through, you know, can you still take it in and have the work done? Yeah, there is, there is no time limit on recalls. And in fact manufacturers actually have an incentive to get the stuff done as soon as possible, but if you don't take it in, and this is, you know, one of the challenges with hardware recalls that you know, you, because customers actually have to bring the vehicles in to be serviced.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:40):
They don't they, they don't you know, they don't have any control over that. You know, with OTA updates, they can push out and update, you know, over the air and, and, you know, they get done very quickly, but with physical recalls, it's more challenging and NITSA. The national highway traffic safety administration actually does have rules that, you know, when it says for a safety recall a certain percentage, I think it's 85% of the vehicles in the recall have to be done. They have to be repaired within a certain time period. And I don't remember exactly what that time period is, but they have been known to find automakers if they don't get the recall done, you know, or get, you know most of the vehicles repaired within a certain time period. But from a customer perspective, you can go as long as you want.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:28):
You, you know, there's, if you, you know, it could be five years and you can still take it in and have the work done that it can be done at any time. Let's see somebody asked about battery recycling and this, this is one of the challenges with EVs and, and hybrid vehicles for that matter. You know, is at the end of life for the battery, we all know batteries do eventually reach an end of their useful life. Although for EV and hybrid batteries, that end is generally much, much longer than the lifespan of batteries in your consumer electronics devices, because, you know, batteries in our vehicles, manufac, you know, they're much larger, much heavier, much more expensive. And manufacturers are concerned about about the the longevity of them. You know, they, they do have to warranty them.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:19):
And so they, they put a lot more effort into thermal management temperature management, which is the, the enemy of battery durability. You don't want your battery getting too hot or too cold when it's being used. And so they, they put a lot of effort into ensuring the durability of the batteries. So most automakers warranty their batteries for either eight or 10 years and a hundred to 150,000 miles. And then at the end of that lifespan there are second life use cases for batteries. There's been pilots done with used EV batteries using them for stationary storage for, for power backup, for data centers and things like that. But as we go forward as more and more EVs are built we're gonna need a lot more batteries and a lot more of the raw materials that go into batteries.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:12):
And so there's a lot of effort going into recycling now, battery recycling and actually lithium ion batteries are one of the areas where a lot of progress is being made. And then there's actually several companies that are doing lithium ion battery recycling and a fairly large scale right now. Most, most particularly a company called Redwood materials that is based in Nevada is started by JB Stroble, the former chief technical officer of Tesla. And they are collecting both used EV and hybrid batteries from vehicles but also consumer electronics batteries and the, the nature of these batteries. There are processes process called hydrometallurgy where, you know, they they can basically, they shred the battery, they break it down and then they put it, you know, in a solvent bath essentially.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:13):
And they can separate out all the key, raw materials, things like nickel, manganese, cobalt, copper, and aluminum and then they reproces it back into the forms to go right back into new battery production. And as the number of, as EV production ramps up over the next several years, this is gonna be a key part of meeting the demand for raw materials for batteries. We expect, you know, prob eventually, you know, by sometime in the 2030s, when there's a critical mass of EVs reaching their end of life that you know, that a significant portion of the raw materials going into battery production will be recycled materials. And there's actually evidence that the performance of batteries made from these recycled materials can actually be better than from Virgin materials, right outta the ground. Because each time you recycle the battery, you are continuously refining it, you're taking more impurities out of those ode materials.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:17):
And so you can actually get superior performance with batteries made with recycled materials. Right now Redwood is doing about six enough materials for about six gigawatt hours a year worth of batteries, which is probably about about 60,000 vehicles, 60,000, 60 to 80,000 new EVs, depending on the size of the, the batteries. But by 2030 or by 2025, they expect to be at a hundred gigawatt hours. And by 2030, they wanna be at 500 gigawatt hours. And there's several other companies doing this as well. So we're gonna see a lot of battery recycling as the number of available batteries to recycle increases over the course of the next 10 years. You're gonna see a lot more battery recycling done as well. Up until now, there hasn't been much of it, cuz there's just weren't enough batteries, enough EVs that are reach end of life.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:13):
Let's see user 82 61 says hoping a third party will come along to offer replacement Tesla battery packs. Yeah, I wouldn't bet on that. <Laugh> I wouldn't wouldn't hold your breath on that one. Let's see. Lithium ion batteries like 18, 6 52 seem to last much longer than predicted from twisted twisted or Doug M yeah, I mean, it, it actually doesn't really matter what the battery cell format is, you know, the 18, six fifties like Tesla originally used or larger charismatic cells. You know, in the early years of the modern EV era auto makers were very conservative with how they used the batteries and they've found that you know, with improved battery management software they can actually get very good durability. The batteries hold up very well, as long as they have good thermal management. The one exception to that is the early Nissan Leafs because they were using an air cool battery pack instead of liquid. Cool. And some of them did have problems with degrading when they were exposed to excess heat. Thank you, sir, back to Leo

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
And have a wonderful week

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:18):
Man, same

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:18):
To you. And we'll talk next week

Leo Laporte (01:02:20):
About the lightning. Oh, good. I can't wait. Thanks Sam.

Leo Laporte (01:02:33):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk about computers, the internet home theater, the evil Google <laugh> eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo that's the phone number. If you wanna talk high tech, I hope that this but I have fear that this will be the case that this show doesn't become just a litany of gripes about big tech, cuz it all seems to be going downhill. It just gotten to the point. Now it's so big, whether it's Facebook or Google or you know, apple or that they just can't respond to consumers very well. And increasingly, you know, the wheels are gonna come off on these companies and it's just gonna be, so I hope this doesn't become the litany of complaints <laugh> that are, especially if they're insoluble, unsolvable, you know, there's just no solution. And you know, that's the problem, I think more and more but, but we're gonna, we're gonna look on the bright side and solve your problems.

Leo Laporte (01:03:39):
One computer at a time, eighty eight, eighty eight LIO. That's the phone number website tech I labs.com changed a little bit over the last few months for variety of reasons, mostly economic. We are now hosted on the podcast website, twi.tv. That's my podcast network, my company. And so if you go to tech guy labs.com, it'll redirect you there. You'll see all the shows. And just as before we're putting audio and video from the shows there we're putting links from the shows there. And we are doing something new, which is a transcript from the show. Those things take a couple of days to get up there, but once the transcript's there, you can search it. They're time codes. You can go right to that part of the audio or the video. You can hear the question and the answer and you can see the links involved and I'm hoping that that's gonna work for most of you. 1892 is the episode 18 ninety2@techguylabs.com. Rick on the line from Sherman Oaks, California, our next caller. Hi Rick.

Caller 3 (01:04:41):
Hello. How are you?

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
I am fine. How are you?

Caller 3 (01:04:45):
<Laugh> I don't know why I did that.

Leo Laporte (01:04:47):
No, it's good. It's good. We talk like that. It's fine.

Caller 3 (01:04:50):
There you go. Yeah. I'm from Cleveland. It's not quite the same, not the same. So love your show. Here's the dilemma I had. I had to take some stuff off my C drive in order to make room for an upgrade update, whatever. And discovered that I had so many photos and videos on my C drive and I have

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
That's what was filling it up?

Caller 3 (01:05:13):
Of course. Yeah. I had this two terabyte, you know, external that I use because I have too much stuff on my C drive. I know I've got multiple external drives and I don't know there has to be some software out there, something that will help me determine I've got multiples of everything that I don't need to keep.

Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
Oh, that's the worst. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very common problem, especially with photos. And it's also a difficult problem because people edit their photos. And so it's the same photo, but it's been modified now, which do you keep, do you keep the original? Do you keep the modification are those duplicates and those are things software has to solve and you know, different people have different answers to that question. So it's a tricky thing to do, but there are a number of programs out there designed to solve this problem, especially with photos. Are you on windows or a Mac

Caller 3 (01:06:09):
On windows?

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
And, and is it just photos or you said there's other media files you wanna de-duplicate as well.

Caller 3 (01:06:16):
Well, it's, there's a lot of movies, of course, video, lot of video, a lot of, you know, photos. Yeah, lots.

Leo Laporte (01:06:25):
Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:06:26):
Years and years and years, my whole life. I mean, stuff is all over the place. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:06:30):
Well, and you know, of course everybody says, oh, I'm gonna be organized. But you know, it's not in, you might even be organized and it's not always your fault because you know, programs do this in a way windows has built in a duplicate file remover. I probably would not want to use that because I feel like this is a specialized thing. You really want something that's going to understand this issue with photos and is gonna, is gonna look at the content and give you a chance, you know, some, some of these better, better programs actually show you side by side. That'd be amazing. Yeah. And then you could say, well, I like this version better. You know, this looks like the same photo so piece. So there's a number of programs that will do this. There's there mostly called things like duplicate finder. <Laugh> I, I don't, I've never used on, on on max. I use a program from Ukraine, interestingly enough, called Gemini. Yeah, it's a company called MACPA that's in Ukraine. There's a lot of good software companies in Ukraine which is no fun. Let me ask the chatroom. I always ask you this what, the best, what the best de duper cause you can search DUP or, you know, remove duplicates and windows and you'll find well, of course, thousand. You see,

Caller 3 (01:07:59):
But that's why you are here.

Leo Laporte (01:08:00):
Yeah. That's why I'm here is to cut through that. So duplicate cleaner pro is one. I see a lot of see cleaner. You may already have. That's one of the features of sea cleaner windows, as I said will do it, but not the way you wanna do it. Cuz what you really want is something that's smart. Steve in San Diego says he's been using duplicate detective. I've heard good things about that. Duplicate detective.com. You're gonna wanna look when you look at it, here's what you're gonna be wanting to be looking for is something that doesn't just go by, file name, creation, date, that kind of thing. That's just too stupid. You want something that actually looks at the file and creates what we call it. A hash creates a, a, a, a relatively small number, reflecting the contents of that file and then matches the hashes. And if files, hashes match, they're absolutely identical regardless of name, date, anything else? So those it can remove. Sounds good. That's you want to, so you wanted to look into the content, look deeply into the soul of these images and see, but then you also want, if it says, you know what, this is really close. You want 'em show 'em side by side. So I tried duplicate detective there's a free, you could try it free and I would do it. Do that, try it for free first. It doesn't look like it. So

Caller 3 (01:09:17):
Com it's it's a website

Leo Laporte (01:09:19):
Do no, no, it's just, that's where the software lives and you could download it from oh, the

Caller 3 (01:09:22):
Software lives.

Leo Laporte (01:09:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another one's called double killer. I've never heard of that one, but the chat room seems to think that's a good one. <Laugh> it's certainly a good name. All right. And it allows you to delete them major geeks recommends it and he's pretty good at major geeks. So double, double killer. Yeah. I I've not used any of these on windows, so I'm not exactly sure there are so many good programs for this because, or it's such a common problem, but you don't wanna spend a lot of money on this. The other option would be to consolidate without deleting and since drives are so cheap. I think a lot of people have just said, I'm gonna have duplicates. I've done that.

Caller 3 (01:10:03):
Well, I did buy, I bought a new external three terabytes would have room for everything in multiple duplicates. That just can't be the way to live. Yeah. Multiple

Leo Laporte (01:10:12):
Duplicates. Yeah. There's there's people.

Caller 3 (01:10:14):
And I save them everywhere. Who knows where I'm saving.

Leo Laporte (01:10:16):
Right. There's people who just are offended by the notion that the <laugh>, these duplicates might exist and and you just don't want 'em around. So yeah. I think that this is,

Caller 3 (01:10:28):
They followed by date though. I mean, if there was one that,

Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
Well, no, see, but if you do it by date, that's not gonna work because the date changes the modified date changes when you get copied them over when you oh,

Caller 3 (01:10:37):
By the way. Yeah. Thank you much that there you go. That's logical. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
Yeah. You can't do it by date. You have to do it by context.

Caller 3 (01:10:42):
I realize I couldn't do this.

Leo Laporte (01:10:43):
Yep. That's exactly.

Caller 3 (01:10:45):
All righty. Well, this is very helpful.

Leo Laporte (01:10:46):
Good luck. I yeah, I don't blame you. I mean, this is a, but if you particularly, I would search for stuff that removes duplicate photos, cuz that's a specific kind of a thing that is a, I don't have

Caller 3 (01:11:00):
To worry about that. Yeah. That's the great fear right. Of, you know

Leo Laporte (01:11:03):
Yeah. You and the, and of course you want to err on the side of caution, cause you don't wanna delete that one picture of mom, you know, from 19, you know, whatever 73 when she was a teenager. Right. You wanna keep that around. So that's the truth. That's right. Truth. D this is an interesting one. It's called duplicate sweeper that does do that side by side thing, which I really like seeing those images and seeing what they look like. So that's another one. Take a look, take a look at duplicate sweeper. Mm. All right. There's three for you. I got 'em down. Have fun. Thank you very much. Yeah, no, this is a big problem at it's a universal problem. And there's two schools of thought, you know, there's the, the person who's, you know, I am not gonna allow duplicate files to exist. It's a waste of space. It's confusing. And I agree. It's nice to get it all organized at some point at some point, but the problem is it's gonna come back. It really is. It's just, it's the nature of computing, eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo that's the phone number every once in a while. I clean up and you know, and I have to do it every, every few years, 88, 8, 8, 8, 2 7 5 5, 3, 6, toll free anywhere in the us or Canada tech, I labs.com the website.

Leo Laporte (01:12:27):
What do you do, Chris? I should ask you, if, do you worry about duplicate photos? Do you have any particular

Chris Marquardt (01:12:33):
Message? No. Yes and no. I'm I'm a bit wary of throwing away duplicates because some of those might be inside some library, and then you, you chose problems downstream if you delete the wrong one. So 

Leo Laporte (01:12:49):
And the library goes where go,

Chris Marquardt (01:12:51):
Especially on the Mac, you have these library formats that are actually folders. So some of these programs are not aware of those. So they go inside and they just see the pictures and find some that are the same. And if you, if you, if you're not savvy, then you can mess things up. So I'm yeah. Kind of cautious on that.

Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:13:13):
But of course, if you have like three different copies, I mean, digital, digital tidiness is is difficult if you're not very techy.

Leo Laporte (01:13:28):
Exactly.

Chris Marquardt (01:13:32):
So I'm trying to be, I'm trying to be cautious, not to generate too quick as if I can avoid it.

Leo Laporte (01:13:37):
That's a good, that's a good thing. And then somebody was complaining yesterday about Lightroom, not being able to tether with his brand with relatively new on icon and just bitching and moaning. And

Chris Marquardt (01:13:50):
The tethering feature has been a bit, I wouldn't say neglected, but they are not the quickest to add tethering support for new cameras. Yeah. It looks like one of those features that that gets implemented and then they go me.

Leo Laporte (01:14:07):
Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:14:08):
We're done.

Chris Marquardt (01:14:14):
And I've, I dunno how often, how, how often I have used tethering maybe once or twice. So I haven't really tried. I I've really had to dig into that. I know people who work in studios often use stuff like that, but then there's other tools what you can do in Lightroom. You can use the software that comes with the camera to trip the shutter and have that offloaded into a specific folder and then have Lightroom set up with a watch folder. So it looks at that folder and imports, what comes in there that would be kind of word, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:14:51):
That's a, that's an interesting idea. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:14:54):
Yeah. Cuz most cameras come with some software for tether.

Leo Laporte (01:14:56):
Right, right. And they just have a watch folder so they can, yeah. That's

Chris Marquardt (01:14:59):
A good idea. So, and lighter watch folders are pretty useful for these kind of things.

Leo Laporte (01:15:05):
So then as long as you can get it into the computer, the light room can import it

Chris Marquardt (01:15:10):
Again. And yes. And, and the, and the cameras often come with software that does that. So that would be an alternative approach to that.

Leo Laporte (01:15:21):
All right. We'll be with you soon. Leo Laporte, the tech guy, eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number, Greg on the line from Denver, Colorado. Our next caller. Hi Greg.

Caller 4 (01:15:34):
Hi. I'm a year younger than you. So I get my 50th high school reunion next year.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Aren't you lucky? <Laugh> yep.

Caller 4 (01:15:41):
We've got a website and everything else going though. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:15:44):
So nice. Nice. 

Caller 4 (01:15:46):
I'm a, I'm an administrator or treasurer for a charity and we've used QuickBooks for a hundred years and they've now gone online. You have to use their online stuff $40 a month as, as of May 1st. Yes. So I've done a lot of searches internet wise for a check writing program to keep the foundation going. And what I found is that everybody's going to credit cards. Right. So I went out and found wave accounting. I think that's put out by H R block. And

Leo Laporte (01:16:26):
Do you, is this for a business or for an individual for yourself? Charity. Charity. Charity. Okay. Yeah.

Caller 4 (01:16:33):
So I found wave, I've gotten my accounts going with that and of course they're they would like us to link to a credit card and take credit card payments and all that. But we're an old, don't do too much of that yet. Yeah. It sounds like I need to grow up and get into the new age.

Leo Laporte (01:16:55):
<Laugh> well, everything's you know, wait, this is the story of technology everything's in flux now. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and accounting is, is one of them, you know, a Quicken Intuit would love for you actually is, is QuickBook still into it. I think it is. They would love for you to do their QuickBooks online. That's what we use as my business you know, because it's a monthly fee and as you say, it's a steep monthly fee and you might check to see if they have a lower cost for nonprofits. There are a lot of nonprofit solutions out there and they might to keep you around say, oh yeah, yeah. For you're a nonprofit. Okay. We can, we can make a better deal for you. That's be the first thing to do. Okay. But I have a link to a site called double the donation.com that has a fairly recent article about 11 lowcost non-profit accounting programs.

Leo Laporte (01:17:53):
Hmm. So I will put that in the show. I have no experience with any of them. As I said, we use, we use QuickBooks and my wife, who is the CFO CEO, chief cook and bottle washer. <Laugh> that, you know, that's what she, what she uses QuickBooks. Yeah. Somebody's just sent me a note that there is a nonprofit plan from QuickBooks. So that's the first thing I would do. Okay. And see, well, see the, okay. Okay. This is great. So QuickBooks plus for nonprofits, $40 a month, advanced is $90 a month. And there's the enterprise nonprofit for the big nonprofit, which is $91 a month. But those prices, this is really bad are for the first three months. And then it goes right back up.

Caller 4 (01:18:45):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
The heck with you QBO,

Caller 4 (01:18:49):
The internet advertising for QuickBooks has been just off the chart from letters to me saying, you've got to switch as of May 31st to, you need to switch to $40 a month to $20 for the first three months. They're desperate. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:19:07):
Yeah. They're desperate. And it really is, and this is, there are a number of companies like this Adobes like this, where their kind of mainline software that everybody in a certain area has to use and they've realized, wait, we're just selling this outright. No, no, we need to charge a monthly fee and it's exorbitant. So I, I have no expert, but I'll, you know, this is there are no, I P fund accounting file nine 90. Aplos Cougar mountain. I'm running through these fast, but I'll give you a link where all of these are slow fund, easy GMs, nonprofit plus one NFP financials, Serena navigator zero, which is, I, I am familiar with is kind of the big X, E R O the big competitor for for QuickBooks online. Yeah. They also have a nonprofit pricing plan. Okay. But it looks like it's 25% off plans from $12 a month. I think that may be a much more appealing thing. Everybody's gonna want a monthly fee. I think these days.

Caller 4 (01:20:08):
Yeah. Yeah. And cloud based, which is fine. That way I don't have to get a new fancy computer.

Leo Laporte (01:20:15):
Exactly. I think cloud based is a good way to go. As long as you trust the cloud, people are starting to get around to the idea that the cloud is safe. In fact, in many cases it's safer because these people, this is their profession. They keep it secure. Whereas our computers at work are a little more vulnerable, you know, we, you know, because people get email and get phished and stuff like that. So <laugh> I think it's, it's probably a good idea to to move it to the cloud. As long as you PR do all the right things, security wise, you know, two factor authentication and all of that. Right. So we'll give you a couple of links. You know, I guess X o.com would be one to check out for sure. But there are some other ones and we'll put that@techilabs.com or you can, if you want to do it right now, you can just Google double the donate donation.com top 11, low cost, nonprofit profit accounting software.

Caller 4 (01:21:10):
Thank you very much for your

Leo Laporte (01:21:12):
Help. My pleasure. Yeah. I, you know, glad to help. Thanks for the work you do at your nonprofit. And given your age, I'm guessing you probably were a CFO, you know, finance person and in retirement, you're kind of helping out with the local nonprofit. So bless you. That's a great, great way to use your time. Account edge has some nonprofit stuff, as well says, scooters in our chat room. L L Hurst or li Hurst in the chat room says I was the bookkeeper for a nonprofit LL Hurst for 22 years. We use software written by our national headquarters. That is a temptation I would resist <laugh> they call it in business, the build or buy issue. Should you build your own software or buy it?

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):
And speaking from experience and hearing the experience of many others, it's almost always better. If you could find something off the shelf that works to do that, you build your own, you're now buying into a much higher monthly cost from maintenance support. You've gotta make sure that the person who knows how it works, documents it well enough. So the next person who comes along can use it. The person who wrote it, you know, we had software custom written by one of our employees. And then he left. He quit. Of course, that happens. Right. Took another job. We said, would you like to support your software that you wrote for us? He said, no, thank you. <Laugh> and now what do you do now? What do you do? <Laugh> eighty eight, eighty eight as Leo, the phone number (888) 827-5536. Guess what? We're getting ready for Chris. Marwar our photo guy, a little more spring photography coming up, plus our photo assignment. So if you love photography, stay tuned. Chris Marwar is coming up. Space guy, rod pile will be next hour. And of course, more of your calls to 88 88. Ask Leah, we're gonna go back to Denver bill. Hang on. I'll be with you when we return, or at least after Chris Marwar Leo LaPorte tech guy.

Leo Laporte (01:23:40):
It's time for the photo guy. Chris mark wor is here my personal photo sensei at sensei photo. He has written some great books of photography, film, photography, wide angle photography. He is an expert. Are you still offering Chris the Lightroom you know, quick scanning photos. Was it a thousand photos in an hour? Something like that.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:04):
It sort of, sort of, it's kind of out of date, but if, if, if someone asks me nicely, I'll send them a copy.

Leo Laporte (01:24:09):
Well, then you need to update it. My friend is, if you had nothing else to do every week, he joins us to inspire us to take better photos. What's our topic of the week, this week, Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:20):
Okay. So the winter is finally over. We are spring is here and photographers are beginning to feel very carefully, slowly poke their feelers out and try to get back into that groove of taking pictures and a good way to do that is to look into macro photography. So,

Leo Laporte (01:24:42):
Oh, well, we talked about that last week.

Chris Marquardt (01:24:45):
Now we talked about this over a month ago. I think

Leo Laporte (01:24:48):
So. Oh, it feels like recently anyway. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:24:50):
It is. It is something that, that you can do winter, but I, I like to, to go out and just outside into the garden and look at different things.

Leo Laporte (01:25:00):
It's a little easier, cuz the light is brighter. So you don't necessarily have to have lights

Chris Marquardt (01:25:05):
And macro gives you, gives you a lot of interesting things look and no good. Let's let's start with the garden. So just a simple thing. You have flowers out there. Very obvious flowers are coming back insects. Of course, if you if you have a macro lens that is there, well, there's two different kinds of macro lenses. There's macro lenses that are very close. Like you have to get really close with with your camera. If you have an iPhone 13 pro do you have a macro lens built in that? Lets you get as close as like under one inch to something, but that won't work with, with insects cuz well they won't like you being that close and they won't fly away. So the, the good, the good thing is that if you have a, a mirrorless camera or DSLR, there are macro lenses that allow you quite some distance. So you can Ooh,

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
Be

Chris Marquardt (01:25:56):
Like two feet away from something. And and this way get a macro shot.

Leo Laporte (01:26:01):
No one wants to be close to a B that's for sure.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:05):
Then of course there, there are everyday objects that make a lot of sense to, to look at, especially if you look at you, you know, some, some things close up are just very different. I remember as a child, we had a magazine and that had once a week that had a, a really interesting, very close up macro shot. That was kind of difficult to, to understand. But nowadays with macro lenses being more ubiquitous or let's say ways of shooting macros it is easier for everyone to participate in this. I mean, here's a photo of a cos crew. That is not, that is not something that you see this close. Usually here's a, here's a macro of what are those like little eyedroppers that look really interesting when looked up looked at really close up. Here's one of those tabs of a, of a, a, a soda camp.

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
Sometimes it takes you a while cuz you never seen these things from this perspective, even though you've, you've seen it a million times.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:08):
<Laugh> exactly here. Here's an interesting shot of a fork where only the tips are in focus. That is something that macro photography. It's very typical for micro photography that everything is out of focus. Only a very thin sliver is in focus. And that can be interesting, but if you want more then you can, well, there are ways to deal with that. There's for example something called focus stacking, if you are a bit more advanced, Ooh you can, you can look at things. You, you can take pictures of things where the camera will kind of take multiple shots at slightly, very slightly different focus.

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
So instead of a very shallow depth of field, everything's in focus, you

Chris Marquardt (01:28:00):
Can see at all. Well, and then you have a, a piece of software that, that, that does some math and, and puts all these pictures on a, on a stack and only pulls out the in focus part of of each of the photos that is something that that prose would do. But there's some cameras out there that can do this in camera. So that is interesting. Here's an interesting photo of a mushroom that would not be that sharp with a regular macro lens. And then of course there are the specialists like the, the really crazy ones. Here's a photo of a snowflake and this is there. You will really need a very it's it's beyond macro. That's more like a, like a, almost a microscope type of lens. So it is even more magnification than than your average macro lens. Mm. And then of course there's even more specialists. This is one photo, you know, Donka, he's like a macro.

Leo Laporte (01:29:02):
I know him and I love it. And I like the Ukraine colors here. It's great.

Chris Marquardt (01:29:07):
So he, he, he did something that is really amazing. He took a, a plant and put a drop of water on it. So you have this spherical drop of water and then behind it, he put a, well, in this case, it's a it's Ukrainian flag. It's the colors of Ukraine. And what happens is that this spherical drop of water acts like a magnifying glass and it turns the picture upside down and focuses it. So

Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
Very cool. Very cool. This

Chris Marquardt (01:29:36):
Is very cool. This is very amazing. Yeah. So yeah, macro is, is one of those playgrounds that is it's, it's a very helpful way to get back into the whole photography thing. If you have a newer smartphone, like a, again, an iPhone 30 pro, for example, that has a built in macro lens. So you can start right away and it will even be smart enough to automatically switch to macro mode. If you go really close to something and then you'll figure out how dirty your keyboard really is in front of your computer. I

Leo Laporte (01:30:08):
Like <laugh>, you don't wanna see it. I know, wait too much. Trust me. 

Chris Marquardt (01:30:12):
If you, if you have a, a camera with an exchangeable lens, like a mirrorless or, or DSLR, there is special macro lenses, but if you don't wanna shell out for one of those, then you can try what's called extension rings, which are not, not so expensive rings that you can put between your camera and a regular lens and turn the lens into a micro lens this way. Or, and this is interesting. There's something called a reverse Mount. Some of those lenses that you like, if you have a 50 millimeter lens for your, for your mirrorless or for your DSLR, if you rotate this 180 degrees so that the front lens points towards the camera, then that turns into a macro lens. Nice. So there are ex so-called reverse mounts. There are few, a few dollars that lets you attach the lens to your camera the other way around and turn it into a macro lens. So you might have a macro lens without even knowing it. So,

Leo Laporte (01:31:14):
And of course, many phones, although macro, are they fake macro when the phones do it?

Chris Marquardt (01:31:19):
No. Well the, again, the iPhone 13 pro does real macro. I'm pretty sure a lot of Android phones do it as well. There's some fake macro where they will use your regular camera and just drop in really tight. So they will, yeah. Those don't throw up away. Yeah. But some of those are, are very, very good. So definitely worth playing with

Leo Laporte (01:31:41):
It's so fun to play with it. Get those close up shots. Yeah. Except don't do it of your keyboard. Cause it's terrible. Terrible. Yeah. It' filthy. So <laugh> so what is our assignment? I think next week you're probably gonna do a review. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:54):
Yep. That's the plan. Current assignment is still elegant.

Leo Laporte (01:31:57):
So elegant last chance to take a picture, illustrating the concept, the word elegant. If you find something you like upload it to our flicker group, the tech guy group on flicker.com. It's free. If you tag it, TG elegant. We'll know that that's a submission. Then Chris is gonna review all the TG elegant photos. And next Sunday, we'll pick three and talk about 'em on the air. That's your only reward. It's really the real reward. The best reward is getting out there and, and taking some photos. TG elegant, the tag, Chris Marwar sensei.photo for his workshops, his coaching and for his books too. Right? Sensei S E N S E i.photo. Chris, have a wonderful week. Take more great spring photos. I'm glad you're getting some spring weather and we will talk next week. We'll review our photo assignment. Thank you, Chris mark. Thank you, Leo. Leport the tech guy. I don't wanna interrupt this. What a great song. Leo report. The tech guy happy mother's day one and all bill on the line from Denver, Colorado. Thanks for hanging on bill.

Caller 5 (01:33:21):
Hey, what's up? Hey, I, I got another a comment before we get to the phone. You, you, because I missed what you were talking about with the EVs, right? Yeah. Okay. What happens? You are four wheel driving and the battery's dead. Cuz she used more power cuz one time, 40 years ago, me and my wife, we had to walk for eight hours to get

Leo Laporte (01:33:42):
<Laugh> you ran outta gas, huh? No. Well, same thing happens if you ran outta gas, I might add

Caller 5 (01:33:48):
No, I got better than that. My wife thought she'd be a smart one. And we were drinking beer and stuff, you know? And I get out to do a thing and she jumps behind and we like go fine. You drive. So she goes, bouncing off the road, comes back up. The truck stops. I go, come on. Let's go. She goes, whoop won't move. She steps outta the gas. Whoops. I look looking at the truck. The drive shes busted.

Leo Laporte (01:34:10):
Oh no.

Caller 5 (01:34:11):
Yeah. Two wheel drive vehicle. Ah, a night there. They had to walk out the next day. But I mean, what if, what if you ran outta gas doing that? I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
Same thing, right? Evs. the EV now has, and Tesla has this, but others have it. They come around a little battery. Car Ford has it. They have a little battery car that comes around and charges you up. <Laugh> and you get going.

Caller 5 (01:34:34):
Yeah. What if you, what if you are 10 or 20 miles back?

Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
Well, it's the same problem. If you run outta gas, I don't know how that's any different for an EV or running outta gas, but well

Caller 5 (01:34:43):
It's gas. You can carry a five gallon gas can with you.

Leo Laporte (01:34:46):
Oh, okay.

Caller 5 (01:34:47):
Right. Anyway. I'm not trying to argue with on it. I just <laugh>. I'm just saying. I mean, I,

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
I, I yeah, I mean you could run out of electricity, you sure can. Right. And you can't really carry a gas can of electricity with you

Caller 5 (01:35:01):
Because I mean, we're not there yet. I don't see nothing on the roads to, to charge a car, to tell you the truth. I'm not looking for it. No, but you know, I mean, you know, and, and then plus I don't know about you guys there in California, you know, my electric bill is higher than ever.

Leo Laporte (01:35:17):
Yeah. Well that's why we put solar panels on the roof. So we're, we're charging for free from the sun. It's a nice feeling.

Caller 5 (01:35:24):
I'm I'm re I'm retired from the utility company. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:27):
Well that's another thing by the way, the utility company in California, won't let you overbuild. They don't want you competing with them. So I can only put enough solar panels to provide my own needs. I can't do more than that.

Caller 5 (01:35:40):
Hey, well, vote know if they wanna put a smart meter on your house?

Leo Laporte (01:35:44):
Oh, it's too late. And we all have,

Caller 5 (01:35:46):
Did you get the

Leo Laporte (01:35:46):
Little, we all have smart meters now. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Caller 5 (01:35:49):
Did you get the little chart when you, how more expensive it is during the daytime? The evening?

Leo Laporte (01:35:54):
Oh, I know. I know how much more expensive it is. In fact, we don't charge our EVs between during peak period four and 9:00 PM, but I also have Tesla batteries the power wall batteries. So the what's one of the nice things is the, the panels will charge those up so that at night or during peak hours, if we're buying electricity off the grid, it we'll use the batteries instead. So there's ways around it. There's ways we look at something we're gonna have to do something. Honestly. I think the best solution is to get rid of personal car ownership entirely <laugh>, but we can't do that until we've got autonomous vehicles. That's one of the reasons there's so much investment in Uber and Lyft and, and and self-driving from cars, companies like Google and apple, because the future is self-driving vehicles. And when you need a car, it comes to you, you get in, it drives you. Home drives you wherever you want to go drives you off road. You lose, you run outta power off road. You say, gimme another car. Then another one comes down and takes you on. So I think that's the future. We, we waste so much of our national resources on automotive vehicles.

Caller 5 (01:36:54):
Sure. You know, it's, it's like you know, like I said, I'm retired from the utility company, you know, we burn coal, coal, and then, but I retired, but then Obama pushed the thing and they made him shut all the plants down, go to natural gas. Well, you know, when we were burning coal gas was always a backup. You know, if the equipment Ash handling the pollution stuff, all that stuff, and it would take an act of God to switch the gas.

Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
<Laugh>

Caller 5 (01:37:21):
Serious because if you ever see what it took to burn cold,

Leo Laporte (01:37:25):
We shouldn't be, we shouldn't be doing either. <Laugh> we get so many millions of IGS from the sun every day. If you were an alien planet, alien racing, you came to this planet and you said, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me get this clear. You got all that energy coming from the sun every day. And instead you're digging into the ground to find something you can burn so that you have energy. That makes no sense. Yeah, we can do better. We will do better. We have to do better because in a couple of years, and I'm not talking probably not in your lifetime or my lifetime, but iron our kids' lifetime. Yeah. The, the planet is gonna become uninhabitable. If we don't do something about that soon, and that means not burning coal, but not even burning methane, not burning anything. We're gonna have a big problem.

Leo Laporte (01:38:07):
And it's coming and you know, to hide your head in the sand and deny it is, is insane. It's insane. It's, it's it's, it's very disappointing to people who believe in science and believe the scientists and you don't even have to believe the scientists. See it happening all around us to say, ah, what the hell? Let's just burn more coal, methane and gasoline. What the hell? Let's just do it. When in fact solar power, wind power, water, power, gas, hydrothermal power is available. It's actually better for the economy and is sure a heck of a lot better for the planet. We gotta do something. We can't just sit here and continue to burn stuff. <Laugh> and and hope it's all gonna work out. And if you think technology's gonna save us, got bad news for you. They're not Marlon Hinkley, Minnesota, Leo Laporte D TECA. Hi, Marlon.

Caller 6 (01:39:09):
Hi. say got a couple quick questions. I think one first one is I've got an iPhone 13 pro and a bit embarrassingly. I did bite on a a FedEx actually delivery thing from India. And I wait

Leo Laporte (01:39:25):
A minute. You got your iPhone pro from India.

Caller 6 (01:39:28):
No, no, no. I'm sorry. I, I have an iPhone pro.

Leo Laporte (01:39:31):
Oh, you have one and oh, and you got a text message saying it was from FedEx, but it wasn't

Caller 6 (01:39:39):
Correct. And I did use my credit card to pay this item. I actually know people in India so that it could have been something, but it, it wasn't I later found out. Yeah. But and so I, I put my credit card in and after I did that, I started thinking and checked with FedEx. They said, Nope, actually that good, that package, they, they had a valid package number. Oh, wow. But that it wasn't addressed to me. And, and when it went to that site, it said it, you know, the V a T value added tax, which is a European thing, which we don't do over here, but it, it certainly seemed legit. And it was all of like $3 anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:40:22):
But now they have your credit card number too. That's even, even more of a cost for

Caller 6 (01:40:26):
Well, and I, I immediately canceled my credit card. Good. Literally like an hour after I did the, the payment.

Leo Laporte (01:40:32):
And the good thing about a credit card is you're not liable for fraudulent payments. So go back and look at your statement.

Caller 6 (01:40:38):
Yeah. They, they were reassuring about that. They're gonna send me a new credit card, I guess I'm wondering one, do I need to reset my iPhone or am I okay? Just leaving it as it is.

Leo Laporte (01:40:49):
Well, in theory, it is possible for them to hack your iPhone with what they call a zero click attack. But these attacks are so tricky and that they are very expensive. There's a, you might have heard in the news about an Israeli company called the NSO group that has an attack called Pegasus, but to get it from the NSO group, you have to spend literally millions of dollars. So only governments do it, and they do it to go after dissidents diplomats, spies, that kind of thing. So unless you're working for a three letter agency at a Langley VA, I take it. You're not you're, I am not, you're not a target. In other words, for another nation state, you're probably all right. They, it was a simple fishing attack. They got what they wanted, which is some money and your credit card number. And you're not liable for either. So that's the good news.

Caller 6 (01:41:43):
And I did end up sending that to FedEx after I said, are you guys interested in this? And they said, yeah, actually, if you could,

Leo Laporte (01:41:49):
Oh yeah, they do. And, and of course the question is, how did they get that tracking number? So that's a flaw in the FedEx system that they need to patch. You've learned your lesson, everybody listening, be very careful about those text messages. They can be fraudulent. And in theory, your iPhone could be compromised. But again, it's such an expensive attack. It's highly unlikely for just a normal person. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy, if, if you were really concerned about it the good news is it's fairly easy to do a factory reset on your iPhone. In fact, it'd probably be worth doing it anyway, Martin, just cuz Marlon, just because it's not such a big deal. Make sure your data's backed up to iCloud. You're probably already doing that. Yeah. And then you just,

Caller 6 (01:42:34):
And that's my, and that's my question, cuz I thought, well, you know, I'd rather be on the safe side cuz I wanna do, you know, occasional banking or something on there.

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Yeah. You wanna feel safe in your phone? Absolutely. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:42:44):
That's it. And so, so if it's up in the iCloud and I do a factory reset, will it automatically boot it back down then? Or how does it do that?

Leo Laporte (01:42:52):
Yeah. It comes down automatically. You'll see. As you, you may not remember when you first got your iPhone 13. It's gonna look just like that long

Caller 6 (01:43:00):
Ago.

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
Yeah. Wasn't that long ago. It's gonna look just like that. And it's gonna say, do you have data that you'd like to copy from a previous iPhone or from an existing iPhone? And you just say, and you just say, yeah, I want to copy the data from my iCloud backup. It'll all go group. Perfect. You may have to reenter every once. Every few things, if you do an encrypted backup, it'll remember wifi passwords, you may have to re-log into some apps, things like that.

Caller 6 (01:43:25):
Perfect. I say one other fast question here. I'm trying to get more ethernet, plugins, ports, whatever you wanna call 'em, you know, cuz my cables are all to things and I've got an old device that I inherited and, and, and, and again, you're my tech guy. And so I, I feel like now when I kind of go after technology stuff, at least I got a half shot at getting it right now. <Laugh> I mean, you, you do it correctly.

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
I get it wrong a lot too, but okay. <Laugh> well,

Caller 6 (01:43:51):
Anyway, so you give me at least a half a shot.

Leo Laporte (01:43:53):
I'll give you half a shot. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:43:55):
And, and that's because of my limitation, not because of your limitation. Anyway, my, my question is what I, in, what I inherited was is Cisco ASA 5, 5 0 5 series, adaptive security appliance. Oh, and I'm and I'm wondering, you know, if it's, it's, it's old, I mean, it's from, you know, like certainly before COVID, you know, like three, four or five years ago. And is it okay just at home? I mean, and I'm out in the country at home. Can I use this as a way to get more ethernet ports?

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
Oh yeah. Cause that, that device <laugh> was end of life, you know, no longer patched in 2017. So it's, it's certainly, I would say probably vulnerable by itself. But if you are using it inside your router, just as in effect a network switch, it's probably okay. Because it's not as accessible to the outside world. I wouldn't put it on the public internet, you know, put it, no, don't put it right on your cable modem, but if it's inside a router and you're just using it as a, as a switch. Yeah. It's probably okay.

Caller 6 (01:45:06):
So if I run it off like cuz I have my, my main, I I've got the DSL I'm out in the country here and and then I, I run that to my actually have two wifi units going net gear. And so if I plug this into one of my net gear, wifi routers then, and then run it off of that, that's safe enough. You

Leo Laporte (01:45:29):
Probably, I mean, look for 50 bucks, you can get a 16 port switch.

Caller 6 (01:45:34):
Okay. That would be well then, then I guess I did well, I'll just do that.

Leo Laporte (01:45:38):
That'd be safer. Realize it was yeah, no they're cheap.

Caller 6 (01:45:41):
That kind of thing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:41):
I mean 16 ports. That's a lot of ports. Yeah. You probably don't even need that many.

Caller 6 (01:45:47):
No, that's a lot of cable too, but no

Leo Laporte (01:45:51):
That's yeah. Get a, you can get an eight port router for even less just get what you want is a network switch. And they're pretty cheap. The Cisco, if it's inside your network probably is not dangerous, but it, you know, Ciscos have been known to have.

Caller 6 (01:46:05):
That's what I

Leo Laporte (01:46:06):
Yeah. Send a life and they're known to have flaws, so

Caller 6 (01:46:09):
Sure. Yeah. You know? Okay. Well

Leo Laporte (01:46:11):
A dumb switch is dumb. Switch is gonna be safer because it just dumb. Done do anything.

Caller 6 (01:46:18):
Yeah. Perfect. Well, well excellent. Hey, thanks so much. You always do a great job. I really appreciate, I appreciate the information.

Leo Laporte (01:46:24):
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it. Have a good one. Good one. All right, thanks. See you Mar.

Leo Laporte (01:46:36):
Oh really? Oh. So when we did, it was P you don't have PG and E Dr. Mom probably when we did it with PG and E they said you can install solar panels. You may not install more solar panel capacity than you use, which see may, that's gotta change. That's gotta change. Right? Why not? You know, the problem is the PG and E's business is not selling electricity. It's building plants. Yeah. See San Diego gas and electric probably lets you do it. Their, their business. They're, they're a for profit business. And their business model is, you know, building plants. So they don't want us to compete with them. They see us as competition, which is not a good solution. <Laugh> to our woes. If the, if the power company, which has an absolute monopoly is a for-profit entity And won't let you compete with them. That is not the way to energy independence.

Leo Laporte (01:47:37):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Yeah. All of our, all of our but they have different policies, right? All of our in California, this is crazy why the state doesn't own the electrical grid is beyond me. It's just insane. Well, good news pirates Cove. You won't need furnaces in about 30 years. Your climate will be equatorial. See, everybody wins as long as you're not under water. By then. I think one thing to understand about customer satisfaction ratings in electrical vehicles is a lot of what people like is the fact that it's an electrical vehicle. If it's their only electrical vehicle they're going, oh, I love my Tesla cuz they understand what they love about the Tesla is that it's electric. Not that it's a Tesla, An electric vehicle is so much more fun to drive and so much cheaper to own, not cheaper to buy Alaska, but more cheap, more, lots cheaper to own that. People love it, but don't as, but sometimes I think it gets subscribed to Tesla because most Tesla owners are first time electrical VI vehicle buyers. And they've never tried anything but Tesla Supercharging helps. But honestly there's more electrify America supercharges near me and everywhere I go than there are supercharges. Now

Leo Laporte (01:49:19):
There's only one supercharge in Petaluma and in most places, Cars, chainsaws, and cows. It's funny. I, I did an interview 25 years ago with a guy talking about climate change. And he said the big three CS cars, chainsaws and cows are the biggest problem with climate change. Chainsaws being, you know, deforesting, particularly in the Amazon, the lungs of the earth. And even 35 years ago, we knew this.

Leo Laporte (01:50:03):
They don't kill a lot of birds. Jeff go do some research. That's another BS statistic from the right, from the gas industry. Do some research. You know what kills a lot of birds windows far more than turbines, far more millions, more cats. <Laugh> more than that. Just Google what kills birds <laugh> and you'll see. Wind turbines are way down the list. Cats kill 2.4 billion birds a year turbines 1, 1, 1, 100000th of that. <Laugh> kitty cats then collisions with building glass almost 600 million birds a year in the us only collision with vehicles. 214,000 a million poison, 72 million electrical lines, 25.5 million electrocutions, 5.6 million land based wind turbines, 230, 4,000. So if somebody says to you, oh, can't have wind turbines. They kill birds. As Dr. Bird once said on this show, we just, you know, give them some facts,

Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Facts.

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
Oh, that's right. We don't have facts anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphone, smart watches technology. That's what? This show's about anything with a chip in it or not actually I've said that for years, but I realize, wait a minute, the internet doesn't really have a chip in <laugh>. I mean, it runs on things with chips in them. So anything with a chip in an, or that runs on a thing with a chip in it. How about that? Eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo as the phone number lines are open (888) 827-5536, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area, you should be able to use Skype out. It shouldn't cost you anything. The website where all the links go is tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com and that's open and free to all. So please, if you hear something on the air, you don't have to write it down. Just go to tech guy labs.com Gabriel. Next on the line from Los Angeles. Hello Gabriel. Hey Leo. How are you? I am well, how are you?

Caller 7 (01:52:45):
Well, I'm good now. I'm hoping you could explain something to me cause I think there's, there might be some little secret between the the cell phone companies and internet companies.

Leo Laporte (01:52:57):
They're all out to get us. That's the secret?

Caller 7 (01:53:00):
Well that too, I noticed I was going home and I noticed like five bucket trucks working on some kind of you know, fiber optic lines, power lines, something. Apparently there was a fire as soon as I get home, the, my spectrum internet was out and I have Verizon for wireless because I figure, Hey, if Spectrum's down, then I can still, you know, access my mobile data through my cell phone. That was out too <laugh> And I called both the both spectrum. Verizon couldn't really explain how one had to do with another

Leo Laporte (01:53:48):
<Laugh>. Cause the poor guy answering the phone, the, the $7 and 25 cent an hour employee answering the phone only knows what's in the notebook in front of him. And that's a fairly complicated <laugh> thing. You know, but essentially all networks interconnected. So it depends where the outage was that's that's really, the answer depends where the ultimate outage was. Was power out. Was that what caused it or was it just, it just went out? 

Caller 7 (01:54:16):
I, I'm not sure if it was power. I, I had power

Leo Laporte (01:54:19):
To you had power in your house. Okay. So it was something upstream yeah. From you. The, the topology of the internet is complicated, but it's all interconnected in some way. So the, the probably what was out, if you had new numerous providers who were out at the same time was the, was the may and you're in LA. So it be may, west <laugh> may stands for metropolitan area exchange. And it is where all it's think of it as the, if you think of the internet as a wagon wheel and we're on the rim and there's all those spokes going in, there's a hub in the middle. That hub is may west. And if may west goes down, all the providers that are connected to it go down may west is what then connects to the backbones that go across country and across the world.

Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
So it seems like for instance if you plug into your fiber, that it should connect anywhere in the world independently of anybody else, but it's in fact, not, absolutely not the case. The internet is very interconnected. It also is designed to route around problems. And that's why I'm thinking it was probably may west that went down because there are some problems that are so significant that they can't be routed around. If just one of the servers you go through, for instance, went down, it would just go to the next server over and the next server over. But there are, there are big interconnect points that when they go down everything's down. So

Caller 7 (01:56:02):
Now it makes me wonder, do, do the, does the cell phone mobile data without us knowing access? Let's say the wifi, like from my neighbors,

Leo Laporte (01:56:12):
No, no, no, no, no down, but it's ultimately going from the same source. So to understand how your cell phone data works, there's towers, you know, that that's how your voice works on cell phone, but those towers also carry data. They're antennas. They have what we call back hauls big fat, usually fiber connections back to a central point, the central office for the mobile carrier, for instance, who is then connected via more fiber to another connect, interconnect, interconnect up to may west in your case. So if those interconnects go down, it will bring down your spectrum, your cable modem, it'll bring down your cell, cuz they're, cuz it's it's way upstream. So they are independent, but only to a point at some point, it all kind of like a wagon wheel comes to a hub. Yeah. So when you, it's not typical, it won't always, yeah, it won't always happen. It's rare. That's a big thing. If that goes down

Caller 7 (01:57:09):
This time it happened and you know, the, the phone calls worked, but with the dad, I, I guess it makes sense. Everything wireless relies on wires

Leo Laporte (01:57:18):
<Laugh> oh yeah. There's yes. At some. Think about it. Your WiFi's the same way. At some point it goes to a wire in the wall, right? Yeah. So there's no, yeah. So it, it it's it's, I'm making it much more simple than it is. It's very complicated. It's very interconnected. It is designed, you know, they used to say, it's not exactly true, but they used to say the internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack because it was Def designed originally for the us defense department as part of the defense advanced research projects, administration, art, DARPA back in the sixties. And when they designed it, they did want it to be redundant in the sense that it would be less like less prone to failure. They didn't really design it to avoid nuclear attack, to get a route around nuclear attack. But it does route around a lot of issues. If both your cable company and your phone internet go down and your fiber goes down, that means there's a problem way upstream. And that you probably your not only your whole neighborhood, but maybe that whole city are you in Los Angeles? Proper

Caller 7 (01:58:25):
Los Angeles county county. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
So maybe the interconnect from the county into something downtown went down, you know, it's, it's actually, it's a very complicated system. I'm I've oversimplified. It

Caller 7 (01:58:39):
Was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. When I, when I, I pulled up into the neighborhood and there was kids playing outside neighbors outside.

Leo Laporte (01:58:46):
Oh my God.

Caller 7 (01:58:47):
So

Leo Laporte (01:58:47):
I brought there's children. I know, you know, maybe it's not such a bad thing. <Laugh>, Isn't that funny?

Caller 7 (01:58:54):
Well, thank you. And yeah, I think this, this kind of exposed them a little bit and I'm like, okay, now I, I, I was a little, I, I wasn't I was little incorrect to think if I, if I give my business to different,

Leo Laporte (01:59:08):
No, you're not

Caller 7 (01:59:09):
Providers.

Leo Laporte (01:59:10):
You're not. So for instance,

Caller 7 (01:59:12):
I'm full proofing myself. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:14):
I mean, I mean, think about it. If, if if the United States, you know, were under attack and the entire internet went down, there'd be nothing you could do to route around that. But redundancy does help. So for instance, here in this studio, because we stream live you know, much of the day Monday through Sunday we have three redundant connections. We have a fiber connection, we have a cable connection, we have a phone company connection, and we do that for that exact reason, but you can't prevent all failure. So it's completely possible if there are catastrophic failure that all three would go out, but we're banking that most of the time, one of the three will work. And you're, so you're doing the right thing. If, I mean, if you don't mind the expense.

Caller 7 (02:00:01):
No, no. And you know, the, the when I called Bryon, they did say that like, Hey, if one, if one network or infrastructure goes down, it should, it should back up to another one. And I did the phone restart. But like you say, it was probably a bigger problem than, than, than we realized at the

Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
Time. Yeah. And the person you're talking to may not have the be of a proper pay grade to understand what's going on. Yeah.

Caller 7 (02:00:27):
Well,

Leo Laporte (02:00:27):
I get it. If you're, if you really, if you're curious, if you're curious about this, there are internet maps that will, if you look at 'em, we'll give you some idea of how crazy it is internet map.net, internet-map.net. You can look at it and you will see how interconnected we all are. And yet how brilliantly designed it is to route around errors and failures. But if a failure's big enough, nothing can route around it. So there's a number of places you can, in fact you know, for a long time, wanted to get one of these printed out, just for instance, the undersea cable map, fascinating 88, 88, Ashley. I'm glad you asked. It's a great question. And it really, I hope it, it prompts some curiosity to look into kind of how the internet works, cuz it's, it's really a remarkable achievement. It's amazing that it works, frankly, Leo Laporte, the tech guy. See if I could find a, a good internet map.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:01:42):
Hello, rod Powell. Hello, sir. How are you? I am very well. How are you? I'm okay. I didn't know. You went to Santa Cruz high school. I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz around that, that time. What seven? You kidding? Yeah. It was one of my favorite places. The loved to hang out at the boardwalk and yeah, wander town. And couldn't wait to get out of there. <Laugh> all the weird, all the weird people downtown and then, oh yeah. So called hippie shops back in the day. Yeah. Before the earthquake, before the 19 earthquake, it was amazing. Yeah. It was amazing. It was a cool little town. I, I could never figure my way around though. The, the it's a confusing the first few times, you're there. It's kind of a confusing layout. Well, you know, if you'd just gone up the hill a little on maple street to Santa Cruz high, you could asked me, I could have helped you.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:02:30):
If only I had known I could have showed you. I was too busy riding the giant dipper three and four times in afternoon. Oh yeah. We love doing that. Oh my Lord. What a great rollercoaster doing that. I don't mean to geek out about, about the wrong stuff, but man, that an old wooden roller coast like that, there's just nothing else like it. Well, you know, I've told my story about that before, but when I was in high school, I never, I didn't like rollercoaster never went on. And my, my girlfriend persuaded me to go on the big dipper. And it is, it's a rickety old railroad car not the safest probably in the world. And the thing that's most terrifying is there's a wooden tunnel that you go into and you can just feel the beams over you going yes. At all, IES above your head.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:03:16):
If one of those things had come loose, having built, been built 1924, I believe if one of those had come loose and come down, you wouldn't know it. Yeah. Just your head's gone. Yeah. And, and people have died on it. So you know, I went on it cuz because you know, I was 16 and my girlfriend was beautiful and I said, okay, you didn't wanna be shamed. Right. Didn't wanna be shamed. But of course I was shame because as soon as I got off of it, I fell to my knees and tears <laugh> and said never again. And, and you know what I've been on space mountain, cuz that's kind of doesn't, you know, that's not as bad. Yeah. I trust Disney not to kill me, I suppose. Although Santa Cruz has a good record, you know that, that, well, when I was a kid, there was a sailor who stood up on it and ran promptly, ran into one of those beams.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:04:02):
Well, whose fault was that? Yeah. No, that's not their fault. Don't and now they have a crash bar. So it's a little harder to yeah. You could upgrade the whole thing. Yeah, my God. Yeah. It was really like little mining carts. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There was one like that in San Diego built about the same time also outta wood. Yeah. And I remember going to that as a kid and when the coaster rounded the curve, I kid you not the whole structure leaned yeah. From the force. Yeah. And that was designed in, I mean that wood does. It's great fun, isn't it? Yeah. But that one had no seat belts and just a hand bar that you have <laugh> and a number of them had little welds on them where they had suit and stuff. <Laugh> maybe it was for a effect. I dunno. But I thought it worked worked.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:04:41):
Wasn't stick it. It got, we're looking at maps in the internet here. This is fun. Oh, sorry. I'm dragging off. No, that's fine. The, were you a fan of the Felton railroad? Yes. God, that was fun. What was it? The skunk train? No, that's up for the north. This was roaring camp roaring camp. That's it? Yeah. Loved roaring camp. And now they run a diesel down to the boardwalk. No really? Yeah. Yeah. That train track used to be commercial traffic. Right. Right. So I guess that closed. So they run a couple a day least during the summer down there, which you know, it's not the steam train, but it's still fun. The only bummer was when that trestle burned out, I guess still the steam trains go about halfway up and then they have to reverse out and come back down backwards.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:05:27):
Oh that's hysterical. Cause of wooden T trestle burned out anyway. That's right. I'm geeking out over steam trains here. Oh I love trains. Now you got, you've been to the Sacramento railroad museum I'm sure. Years ago. Yeah. Yeah. What I haven't done is the, what's the one, is it in Colorado or New Mexico? It's called. Yeah. I gotta run. We'll talk soon. Leo Laporte the tech guy, somebody in the chat room found a great map of the internet. Infra pia.com/app. I N F R a P E D I a. And I'm just looking at the map of interconnects in LA county and holy KA moly. You know, I said it was like a wagon wheel with spoke in a hub. It's a little more complicated than that, but you could see, you can look at this map and you can see where the, where the connects are, where the backbones are, where the peer, where they call it peering.

Leo Laporte (02:06:22):
When two providers connect to one another to eliminate bandwidth costs outside of their network and you can see all of this stuff and it's incredibly complex and it's completely conceivable that at some point a provider lost its interconnect. And you know, I mean just things go down when you really understand how this works or not understand, but at least see how it works. I think you get a pretty good idea of how complicated it is. And that's when you say I can't <laugh> how do we, how do we get here? How do we invent this? It's amazing. And you've gotta give a lot of credit to the early pioneers of the internet. These really brilliant men and women who spend a lot of high end brain power, thinking about how this could work and expand. It always blows me away. When you hear things like Facebook has three and a half billion users, and yet you can go to a Facebook page and it loads like that. <Laugh> I mean, imagine that the, the pros, the network skills, the amount of hardware it requires is just mind. It's hard to believe it works. And yet it does easily. The most complex thing human beings have ever made Julie on the line from Downey, California, our next caller. Hi Julie.

Leo Laporte (02:07:50):
I pressed, oh, wait, I have to press one more button. There we go. There we are. Hi Julie.

Caller 8 (02:07:55):
Okay. Good

Leo Laporte (02:07:56):
Morning. My fault. So

Caller 8 (02:07:57):
No problem. So my 87 year old mother has an HP laptop that she hates.

Leo Laporte (02:08:03):
Yeah. I don't blame her. I would too. <Laugh> yeah. If I were

Caller 8 (02:08:06):
87, sort of a hand me down. Okay. Yeah. So E is sold on running an apple product. She has an iPhone. She has an iPad and I'm not very well versed in apple. So she how's

Leo Laporte (02:08:18):
Her vision. How's her vision.

Leo Laporte (02:08:21):
Does she want a big screen? I think she does.

Caller 8 (02:08:25):
I'll tell you what yes. Her vision. She goes like every six weeks to get a shot in her eyes. So yeah, her vision's not

Leo Laporte (02:08:30):
The best. Yeah. So you, so she'd do better with a bigger screen. I would think not a laptop in other words.

Caller 8 (02:08:36):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:08:37):
I'm just thinking. Yeah. Okay. That's part of the reason she hates that HP laptop, she probably has to put her nose against the screen just to read it

Caller 8 (02:08:45):
That, and it just takes forever to boot up. Yeah. Then to go from site to site, she does a lot of research on, you know, medications and her finances, things like that.

Leo Laporte (02:08:55):
So for most people, my mom's 89 and she loves her max. Okay. And she loves her iPad even more. But her eyesight's pretty good. The iPad's a very small screen, so I'm not sure I would for your mom. I would recommend that. In fact, we've

Caller 8 (02:09:08):
Already got one

Leo Laporte (02:09:09):
Of those. Okay. And normally what I recommend for people who aren't aren't anxious become computer wizards is a Chrome book or in this case a Chrome box. But if she really wants a Mac, that's fine. It's just, you know, they're a little more pricey. So look at Chrome boxes, these are little boxes that attach to screens and you can make 'em as big as you want. I would say for her, you know, a 27 inch screen, it'd be great. And, but they're very limited. There's much more secure cuz it's just a Chrome browser and nothing else. But I bet you that everything she does is in the browser, her email the sites she's researching, all that stuff. And those it's very hard to get into trouble with those, you know, you can't accidentally click a link that gets you malware or anything like that.

Leo Laporte (02:09:55):
So that's prob and it's, they're less expensive Chrome box. You can see 'em on Amazon. You go to the big box stores and look at 'em and get an ice big screen. The other choice, if she's, you know, a set on a Mac is to get a Mac mini, which is like a Chrome box. It's just a little small square box that has all the Mac stuff in it. But you buy a keyboard, mouse and monitor and you could get one that suits her needs. They make keyboards for seniors, they get mice or all different kinds. You might prefer a track ball to a moving mouse. But for sure you could then put a big screen on it. And I think a big screen with a Mac mini would be a good choice, but Mac mini, I think they start six or 700 bucks. That's minus the keyboard mouse and monitor

Caller 8 (02:10:39):
All the other stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:10:40):
Okay. Yeah. So it's so it's not inexpensive, but I'm using a Mac mini right now on a on a Samsung 31 inch monitor it's over here to my left and I love it. It's just great. It's really fast. It's easy to use she's if she she's already in the iPhone universe, she's somewhat comfortable with apple as a company, you know, that's that's I understand why she wants a Mac. So that's a, that's a possibility too. I, I honestly, for most people, a Chrome box or a Chrome Chromebook are the laptops, Chrome boxes are the Mac mini style box that you attach to a computer. I mean a key a monitoring rather.

Caller 8 (02:11:24):
And if she wanted the laptop because she lives in apartment and she works on her dining.

Leo Laporte (02:11:28):
Oh she wants to move around. Yeah.

Caller 8 (02:11:29):
Right. So if people come over, she wants to

Leo Laporte (02:11:31):
Cook. I understand then the MacBook air, which is under a thousand bucks, get the new one, the M one based MacBook air. Very good choice. Very good choice.

Caller 8 (02:11:41):
Okay. She's been talking to someone about refurbished things and 

Leo Laporte (02:11:45):
Yeah, you'll save a few hundred bucks refurbished though. You buy the problems that it had, that it got returned for in the first place, unless you're buying refurbished from apple, apple does have their own refurbished store. Those are absolutely as good as buying new, but they're not much cheaper. They'll save a few hundred bucks.

Caller 8 (02:12:06):
Okay. Got it.

Leo Laporte (02:12:07):
Okay. So you can Google apple refurbished and you'll see the refurbished max. And they're they say save up to 15%. It's not a huge savings.

Caller 8 (02:12:16):
Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (02:12:17):
If, if you know, you gotta, as you know, <laugh> you, you, you, you can't do something. If you buy something she doesn't want, you're throwing your money away. So right. While a Chrome box would probably be a better choice for her. If, if she's really says no, no, I want an apple get her a MacBook air. They're very thin, very light. Very nice. And you can get it refurbished from apple for 850 bucks.

Caller 8 (02:12:43):
Okay. That's a pretty good place. I'm in LA, she's in New York. So I have this like small window.

Leo Laporte (02:12:48):
Oh, I know out there. Right. My mom's in Cranston, Rhode Island. And I'm out here in California and oh, I miss her. I miss her. But now that now that things are turning up, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out there next month and yeah,

Caller 8 (02:13:00):
I'm heading out later to this

Leo Laporte (02:13:01):
Week. Yeah. Bring her a MacBook air. You go down to the apple store. If you wanna buy it online, you can order it online. From the apple refurbished store, save 150 bucks. That's a, you know, that's not an insignificant that's 15%.

Caller 8 (02:13:14):
Yeah. Okay. All right. Awesome. Well, thanks for your help.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:13:17):
My pleasure. I'm glad to help. My mom of course is well equipped with technology as you might imagine. And it's so funny cuz it's confusing. Cuz when I FaceTime her, everything in the house rings and she invariably answers on the wrong thing. I said, mom, just answer on the, she says, I want to answer on the old iPad cuz it's got a headphone Jack. I say, okay, only answer on that then please. Leo Laporte Pete tech guy. I call my mom all the time. I do ha ha ha ha. There's so much space news. Rod pile. Yes sir. Well that's what happens. Joy. I call her on video on FaceTime. She answers on the phone and I say, mom, I, I know, I know the phone rang, but so did everything else and I can't transfer it over to the iPad. So you just, I'm gonna hang up <laugh> and go over to your iPad, plug in your headphones and I'm gonna call you again and answer on the iPad.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:14:20):
It's just, oh, okay. <Laugh> every single time. But when I call, I can hear cuz she'll answer. And I still hear all the other devices. It's like a Swiss watchmakers clockmakers shop at noon. Everything's going off in the whole house, everything <laugh>. So it's time for a great big steaming pile of space as Rin says, wow. <Laugh> I would never, that's kind of frightening. I would never say that. No. And you know speaking of mothers mine's gone now, but Aw, you know, it's not gonna be too long before we are those technological backwards. Not you as much as me. No, no, no. I think about that all the time. What picture do I click? I tell my kids. I said that I hope you'll be nice to me. When I say, I don't know how to use a transducer phone for transmitting an object to you, dad, you just press the parameter and turn it to seven, please. The who's the parameter dad. I told you what what's aunt Pruitt doing in the chat room. He wants me to tell you a joke.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:15:32):
Oh yeah. Your dad jokes that you and Tarek the battling jokes and is John has got the weekend off because John has to take time off. So what he does is he, you know, aunt and S his, his his coverage on Sunday. And and I think Berk's here too. And then Saturday, I think it's Burke. And so, but John is so conscientious. He came in both days to make sure they're ready. Aw. And then he leaves them after a little while on their own, but he's gonna get hip surgery in some, at some point in the near future and be God for few weeks. Oh, he's young. Yeah. You know, ants had hip surgery. It's not uncommon. We had Cory doctor row on last week. He said the show has to be two and a half hours cuz I can't sit for any longer than that.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:16:18):
He got both hips. Did he saved his femur at the top of his femur? He's gonna make it a knob on a walking stick. He got it. He got, gotta think a gear shift knob, but not he got a it's hysterical. I got a cast in brass. <Laugh> he put it on thing averse if you and on the internet archive. Oh I think I read about this. Yeah. Became kind of a thing. Yeah. Yeah. If you want Corey's femur, if you wanna make a 3d printout of the top of Corey's femur, you can hysterically. He also has his hip socket in the Tupperware. He said, well, you know, so if it's between that and a great big steaming pile of space, I think I'll take the steaming pile. Yes. Thank you. <Laugh> what do you wanna talk about today, Mr. Paceman? Well, we got a couple of things.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:17:03):
Rocket lab caught their, their falling booster with a helicopter. Oh good. It worked but kind of more, I mean that's exciting, but it hasn't been reported much, but DARPA has solicited the second round of contracts from big companies for nuclear rockets, which isn't being talked about enough because that's, that's the big thing. I don't want nuclear rockets. They are fantastic. It cuts. What if they blow up in space? I mean on the way up space, the way up that's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well that's bad, but, but rockets blow up. Okay. But, but this has happened a couple of times and at least on the American side and these were, were nuclear fuel containers. They weren't reactors, but these things are sufficiently casketed that they can survive plunging into the ocean and you just go fetch 'em so it's, it's not, you know, it's not ideal. So they're impervious to explosion. They don't, they don't explode. We hope they're impervious. That's a strong word. They're you know, it's like, it's like a water resistant tent when you're camping. Right. Don't touch it when it's wet or it's gonna cease to be water resistant. I think they're explosion resistant. <Laugh> let's say that. No, this is terrible idea. <Laugh> hold on. Here we go. All right. All right.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:18:29):
Well they caught it with a helicopter, but then they dropped it. Rod pile is here. Let it go. They let it go. Cuz it was well anyway, rod pile, our space guy is here editor in chief of ad Astro magazine. So come the books he's got, I got a pile of books that he's written. He is a master of explaining space stuff. His podcast. He's the editor in chief of Adro magazine of the national space society. His partner is tar Mallek editor in chief@spacedotcomandtogethertheydoashowcalledthisweekinspaceattwit.tv slash space, which is a shame shameless plug since it is my podcast network. Here is ladies and gentlemen, rod pile. Hello rod. Thank you for the killer intro was always and hello. <Laugh> well, it's a little self serving, but okay. That's okay. I gotta start recording those. Just playing them everywhere I go. I'll just carry a little ladies and gentlemen around boys and girls.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:19:27):
We report things. Yeah. Astronauts of all ages. <Laugh> no, I'll just have you do your uncle Walter. That'll be oh yeah, yeah. Her is the man of there. Ron. I think I was pile 12 years old and he was covering all that stuff. So yeah, we had, we had a, a cool in space and I'll just hit a couple highlights. So rocket lab, which is a small company out New Zealand, that's also co-located in the us has been flying their rockets for a few years now. And they're small. They're about two thirds of thrust of the X 15. So they, they carry very small payloads. But last week, Monday they launched 34 micro SATs. And then as the first age booster was coming back as planned it's parachuting down towards the ocean and they went out with a helicopter to attempt to catch. They had tried that before and not succeeded this time.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:20:15):
They did succeed in snagging, the parachute lines, which is what they intended, but the loads were too much and the helicopter pilot said, I gotta let it go. So they dropped it. So they did recover it from the ocean. It's like when you know, you think of the right stuff. Yeah. So, well, no, I'm just thinking like somebody says here, catch this box and you go, I got it. I got it. I don't got it. And it's coming at you at 30 miles an hour. <Laugh> well, and this thing was falling fast. So I think the problem probably was the load because of the amount of motion it had, you know, heading down. Yeah. So they had tried to test an account for that, but you can only test so much this thing's coming back from neuro orbital velocities. So you know, it it's like SpaceX, you try it and you keep trying it, you get it right.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:20:57):
And you know, this was the first time clear. Yeah. But we've been doing this since the space age. I mean those military satellites used to take pictures of Russian launch sites in the sixties. Didn't transmit back that stuff electronically. They dropped, they injected film cart, which is right. You caught those with a helicopter. It was very dicey business. So it's something that's known how to do. And actually United launch alliances has been trying to test the same thing for their new Vulcan rocket. At one point they were gonna eject the engine pot and catch it. I don't know if that's still the plan or not. So it's something that we'll probably see more of. But you know, I, I mean Musk flies as rockets back autonomously. I like that a lot. The idea of being out there with a helicopter when this thing is hurling back, I'm sure it's very safe and I'm sure they've got it wired, but it would be a little scary.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:21:47):
<Laugh> wow. Nothing's hurling down. You're there at a chopper, but also cool. Yes. DARPA our friends at the, I was just talking about them, right? So they're the ones that do all the cool stuff for the military, but, but a lot of civilian applications too, they issue a new solicitation on May 4th for nuclear rocket engines. This is phase two. And we covered that on our first public episode episode. Wait, wait for this weekend space. Wait, wait a minute. Yes. So a nuclear rocket engine. Yes. How does that work? So this isn't the old project Orion you may have heard of where it actually sets off Adam bomb's propel itself. This, that seems like a bad idea. Well, in space it's okay on earth. It's not so good. This is efficient reactor. It's only used in space. This doesn't launch at the ground. Oh, launch it up on a traditional rockets, conventional rocket.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:22:35):
And then once in space, you fire up the reactor. It's miraculously simple. You just have a hot, a heat source from a and reactor. Yeah. Which of course you have to, you know, shield it properly to make sure if something goes wrong during lunch, it's safe and falls into the ocean and can be retrieved. But you've got a fishing reactor that just heats up hydrogen that comes blasting out the back end and off it goes. And it's between two and four times more efficient than any chemical rocket ever. So you're talking about cutting transit times to the moon and Mars by as much as anywhere from 30% to half. Now the only concern, and this is a concern with Orion is when you're launching nuclear, physical material as a plutonium, right in, well, this is actually low enriched uranium. So it's not nearly as dangerous as it would've been in the past.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:23:25):
Cause if it blows up not great on the way into orbit, you potentially are spreading that visionable material all over now. Plutonium is very poisonous. So you uranium's bad. You wouldn't want that in the atmosphere is enriched uranium, less of a problem. Less. So half life is shorter. It's only 235 years. <Laugh> well now you're now you're getting picky 238, but I mean, they've been working with this stuff a long time and I don't mean to sound like a nuclear Hawk cuz I'm not, but they've been working with this stuff a long time. They tested this basic technology in the sixties with a nuclear test engine. I think I've talked about that before. So what is it? They include it in something. So if it blows up it it's not gonna blow up in, in the atmosphere. That's the idea. Yeah. And that's part of what I think these validation tests are for.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:24:09):
So they're the, the second phase of the contract. They wanna fly this by 2026, the second phase is to design and test an experimental unit. And then the third phase in a couple of years will be to actually fly it in orbit and test it there. Nice. But we ran one of these things that, that was designed by the military in general, Atomics back in the 1960s, out in Nevada desert for over an hour. So there's one here, a lot anymore. Rockets, general Atomics, general Atomics and the place they tested it, which I love was jackass flats. <Laugh> because if you're gonna pollute something with nuclear fallout, it might as well be jacks jackass flats. Yeah. So the new testing though will be self-contained so nothing, you know, there'll be no fallout escaping. So, so this is all good. And while there are some concerns that they, that they do have to work past, I mean, people are watching this very closely.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:25:03):
This isn't 1959 anymore where it's, you know, Adams for peace and all that. This really changes everything up there because now you're not to make a Mars flight now, depending on who you listen to, we'd have to launch possibly as many as 10 SLS just to get the fuel up there. Yeah. You got one nuclear rocket, you load it up and you go can fly back and forth 10 times. Can it go a long way? Basically these things will run for any, depending on how much fuel they're carrying, they can run for years and years and years. Interesting. Okay. So yeah. And there's a lot of places, something like solar, solar sales or something like that is that well, so there's a solar electric variant on, on the nuclear rocket. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that is less efficient and, and bulkier solar sales work well for leaving, they're hard to come back on <laugh> oh, because it's solar wind pushing on, right?

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:25:56):
Yeah. It's just like a sail boat and then accelerate, you don't have to tack all the way home. Right. And they accelerate very, very slowly. So the good thing is they're constant and the energy's free. Yeah. The bad thing is, you know, they take a long time to get there. So you know, there's, there's gonna ultimately be a calculus to figure out of, okay, what do you wanna put the people on? What do you wanna put the cargo on? You want the cargo to get there cheap and slow. You want the people to get there fast. So they're not exposed to radiation for any longer than they have to be. And zero G and all that. So this may end up being the deluxe ride for humans just to get there quickly, but we'll see. Hmm it's as as captain pike said in star Trek, strange new worlds.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:26:36):
Oh, you watched it. Yeah. I finally watched it. How was it? You know, it's just like the old star Trek, hokey corny Uhhuh, you know, with a nice moral at the end. Yes. You know, he's, I don't think it's saying anything to say. He saves the aliens by telling him the story of how everything went wrong on planet earth. And here you have a chance to avoid that and, you know, have a better, and for some reason, the aliens, unlike us go, oh, you're right. And and peace reigns and all as well. And it's, it's one of those, you know, it's a, a classic star Trek. So if you like the original series and the kind of the nice, you know, alien, there was even a fight, the moralizing, a bad fist fight where they, oh, did his shirt get torn on the shoulder?

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:27:24):
Or so, you know, I didn't notice that no. And there was, and there were no red shirts who died. In fact, nobody died in this episode. So but it was fun. It was, it was, it was, it was very reminiscent of the original star Trek with better effects. Oh, cool. Okay. I gotta check it out. Rod pile editor in chief. Thank you, sir. At Astra. Thank you. Leo Laporte, that guy I'm watching, Elise's only listening with half an ear while I'm commenting all the way. Spock is great. I mean, so first of all, it's a prequel, right. But it's a, it's like just, there is apparently we haven't seen him yet a Lieutenant Kirk on board. And so it's just like right before the original series and and Spock is Spock, but he's, he's a young Spock. Right. And it's, it's a, they got somebody perfect for the parties even sounds like Spock.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:28:17):
And although he takes his shirt off, which is pretty exciting. Whoa. Yeah. <Laugh> yeah. And Lisa says, not that bald, old guy as the captain again, I want the sexy young guy. Oh, oh ow. And I said, you're gonna like captain pike, Lisa he's he's he's gray, but he's not, this is bald. This is, this is pike before they turn him into a, a, a mound of swag. No, in fact that was so in fact that there's a, he has flashbacks. It's very interesting. He apparently has seen his death ahead of time. Oh. And so he has FLA, I guess they flash forwards. It's definitely for the star Trek fan. And if, if you had never heard of star Trek and you watched it, you'd say, you'd say this is the corniest show ever, but it was no, it's the same corn ball as the original in the same spot.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:29:05):
Well, you want corny, you watch the original pilot that first pilot, they shot a track. Cause they shot too. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the PI was yeah. And Spock was yelling and the emoting and waving his hands around. He was not the cool vault. He was, no, they they're. This is the cool spot. Yeah. And they have a little nurse you know, nurse, chapel, nurse chapel is young and hot. Yeah. And she's in it. And she has a little kind of rise, sense of humor. It's pretty it's, it's cute. Yeah. It's definitely tongue in cheek, you know, knowing that you'll, you're a star Trek fan if you're watching it. So is it 50 plus years of evolution from the original, oh God. Yeah. The, the CGI and everything's good. Yeah. Well, have you watched any of the originals since they remastered them with new effects?

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:29:55):
No, I hear they're quite good. Yeah. They actually are, you know, by, it was a few years ago. So by today's standards, it's not quite it's DVD card. They're watchable now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But they're, I mean, you look at one, you don't see the strings, you can work here, but well, yeah, but the dooms day machine, if you remember that yeah. Where they had that, that big thing that looked like a bugle, it was attacking all the planets and I made the bug bugle, the corn bugle, the one you eat that's quite good. Okay. And the acting is first and they redig digitized everything. Yeah. They re transferred it all. So it actually really holds up the colors are a little fluorescent, but it's worth checking out. Well, you, you like this cuz I think they didn't the look of it is great.

Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
Yeah. yeah. I liked the crisp pine movies actually quite a bit, but I liked the first two. These aren't their reboot. These are, these are back the old universe. Yeah. That second one with the, I only liked the first one con yeah man. It's like, they took a plot element from every show and movie ever made and jammed it all into two and a half hours. You watching us thinking. Yeah. Is this ever gonna end? What's going, oh, another switchback. How about that? Yeah, but yeah. Yeah. Geek, you know, if you strike Trek fan, you're gonna, you're gonna wanna see strange new worlds. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I just, sorry, but I have to go here. If we have a moment. Do you remember the lost in space pilot? Did you ever see the pilot episode of the original lost in space of the original was space?

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:31:20):
Probably did loved that show. When I was a kid, there was no Dr. Smith pilot. There's no need to fear Smith is here and it was actually kind of dull as much as I Dr. Smith. You gotta have Smith. No, no. And he was a bad guy or yeah, he was really bad know. Yeah. He was really, but he was comedic. Yeah. Well then, then he got silly. Yeah. When he asked the robot to hold his claw and all. Okay. That's a bit much. Thank you. I've gotta run Mr. Fly. I have a wonderful, wonderful week. We'll see you. Thanks for indulging me. Okay. Yes. See you bye-bye.

Leo Laporte (02:31:55):
Thank you for letting me be your personal geek. Once again, Leo LaPorte, the tech guy, thanks to professor Laura, our musical director. Always good. Always good, great music again this week. Thank you, Laura. We'll put a link to links to all of the songs she's played over this past weekend@thewebsitetechguylabs.com. Give us a little time. It's there at the bottom of the links. It says songs, but it might not get there till tomorrow or the next day as we'll audio and video from the show, all the links will be up there. Thanks to our team that does that. John Ashley and Victor bona and Kevin King. And if I'm leaving somebody out, thank you to, and of course, thanks to Kim Shafer our phone angel, lots of people work on the tech guy show and I appreciate each and every one of you, of course, the real heroes of the show. Are you those who you, who put up with me every week and listen to this show and call in. Thank you very, very much and happy mother's day too. Clyde on the line from Torrance, California. Hello, Clyde.

Caller 9 (02:33:01):
Hello. this is very interesting show today. Thank you. Especially about the interconnection over half a century ago, I attended an amateur radio club meeting on a Friday night here in Inglewood, California. And they'd had a speaker from the phone company, ma bell,

Leo Laporte (02:33:23):
The, the phone company. You didn't have to say anymore than that. There was only one

Caller 9 (02:33:26):
That's right. All 60 states.

Leo Laporte (02:33:30):
Yep. <Laugh>

Caller 9 (02:33:31):
We spoke about all our communications across the country, how we were all connected and talked about cables to Europe. Yep. And Asia. And then he talked about cables from California to this Hawaii and cables from Oregon and Washington to, to Alaska. He, he closed these meeting out with, say, by saying we're just like a big computer and that was big stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:34:04):
So

Caller 9 (02:34:04):
I got my little compact car, went home. It had no radio. I walk in my apartment. The wife is in bed already. I didn't turn on the am radio or my little Nova station in the corner went right to bed. Got up early in the next morning. The news clear across the am radio spectrum was about the Alaskan earthquake. Otherwise known as the good Friday earthquake.

Leo Laporte (02:34:34):
Yeah. In Anchorage. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:34:37):
And at about the very moment that guy was talking up, showing all those cables to the, for, to the 49th state, they were being parted. Wow. That earthquake.

Leo Laporte (02:34:50):
Wow. Yeah. Leaving Alaska isolated for some time. It was 9, 19 60.

Caller 5 (02:34:56):
Well you're licensed amateur. Yep. In case you didn't hear the propaganda, then most of the major communications for hours was, was by amateur radio.

Leo Laporte (02:35:09):
And it's still the case. And of course we have emergency ham days, every year where Ham's practice. And, and when, when Katrina happened, it was the amateur radio operators that stepped up and kept people in touch. Let people know who's alive, how everybody's doing it. It is a huge service amateurs provide and will always be there for, because it's a very important part of our service as ham amateur radio operators. So Clyde, are you still an active ham?

Caller 9 (02:35:39):
Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, will we be hearing from you on field day?

Leo Laporte (02:35:44):
You know, I don't participate because I spend many hours a day transmitting and receiving <laugh> for a living, but I can tell you, I can be assure you that that is my plan in retirement because I'll be saying where's my microphone and I'll know exactly where it is. It's in my shack with my radios. And you better believe it. When is field days coming up?

Caller 9 (02:36:05):
Okay. Well, yeah. Well, we'll be, we'll still be, we will be gathering this this year. We'll still be yeah. Doing it from

Leo Laporte (02:36:13):
Home. That's all right. That's all right. Hams are used to that.

Caller 9 (02:36:16):
Okay. Well, I just had to tell you that because that's, I've always remembered that's right. Fragile or

Leo Laporte (02:36:23):
It's very fragile. It really is. Yeah. It's very fragile, but, and I think you, thank you client, a pleasure. What's your call sign.

Caller 9 (02:36:31):
Oh you want, do you want, can I give it to your secretary?

Leo Laporte (02:36:36):
Yeah. Give it to my secretary. <Laugh> client a pleasure speaking to you field day, coming up. It's a full, always the fourth full weekend in June. So that means this year, June 25th and 26th, 40,000 amateur radio operators throughout north America set up temporary stations in public places to show the world what what hams do and the service to community is huge. And I think that's a lot of the reason people become amateur radio operators. If you wanna know more about amateur radio the amateur radio relay league, a R l.org has everything you need to know, including how to become an amateur radio operator yourself. And it's, it's much easier now you don't need the Morse code. I'm sure Clyde learned Morse code in the day. And I wish I had, I that's another thing I plan to do in retirement. <Laugh> but it is really a, it's not only a wonderful hobby. It's an important public service. Hams are absolutely vital. 

Leo Laporte (02:37:51):
There is an issue apparently with the universal licensing system right now. So the FCC is not processing new applications. I'm sure that'll be resolved soon. I'm sure. I'm sure that will, but look for your local ham club. That's how I got my license. There's lots of they call 'em Elmers older hams there to help you learn this, learn the skills, take the test and and get your license. Maria on the line from Burbank, California. Hi Maria. Oh, you know the button I've been pressing it, but it's not been working. There we go. Now you're on. Hi Maria.

Caller 10 (02:38:31):
Hi. Welcome. I'm saying that I've been listening to you for a couple of years and this is the first time I get through. So I feel lucky today.

Leo Laporte (02:38:38):
Bravo. She's finally here. We've been waiting for you, Maria. Welcome. Oh, welcome. Welcome.

Caller 10 (02:38:47):
So Leo, I have a problem with my Moto E Android. Yes. I, I cannot get into the Google play store when I try it says no connectiogn. It says error server not found. And it gives me an error thing. It says DF dash D F E R H dash zero one. Huh? Everything else is working.

Leo Laporte (02:39:10):
So your browser works. You can get email all of that stuff. So you, you know, you're getting data. So that's what that means is the Google play store is broken. So. Okay. Yeah. So the first thing to do is just turn off the phone and turn it on again, reboot it. So I did that. You did that. You pressed and held the on off button until it says, you know, restart and you press restart and you start it up again. That didn't that one.

Caller 10 (02:39:33):
Yeah. Not just turn off the phone. Yeah. Just reboot, reboot,

Leo Laporte (02:39:36):
Reboot. Yeah. Because sometimes people think they're turning it off when they're just turning off the screen. Yeah. I mean a real, a real restart.

Caller 10 (02:39:44):
Yes, I did that.

Leo Laporte (02:39:45):
Okay. And, and it's interesting because you do, you, you are, I just wanna confirm this. You can go into the browser and you can go to a website.

Caller 10 (02:39:53):
Yes. Yeah. And I can also use all the other Google things that go directly like YouTube music, YouTube and Gmail, all

Leo Laporte (02:40:02):
Of that. Still working

Caller 10 (02:40:03):
All the other stuff. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:40:04):
Yep. So that

Caller 10 (02:40:06):
Check the settings. Yeah. On the app. I went and to see if, you know, if it was only,

Leo Laporte (02:40:14):
So here's what I want you to do. This will probably fix it. You're gonna go and I have to go fast cuz I hear the music, which means we're almost out of time. So you're gonna go to settings. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> in the settings, there's an applications manager or it says apps and you're gonna go and look at all your apps and you're gonna find the one that says Google play store.

Caller 10 (02:40:34):
I did. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:40:35):
Force stop it. There's a button that says force stop. And then this is the most important one clear data. It's gonna clear all the cashed data. That's probably causing the problem uninstall updates, which will basically strip it down and then reinstall. And and actually before you reinstall do one more time, restart the phone and then do the reinstall. And that should in almost every case, fix it. As long as your other Google stuff is still working. That means your Google account is working. Your data is working. It's pro it's almost certainly just a problem with that one application. Great to talk to you. I'm glad you made it. Maria. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Thanks to all of you for joining me. I will be back here next time. I hope you will too. Have a great geek week. Bye-Bye So I'm sorry. I had to wrap it up, but I'm still on the line with you, Maria. Don't worry.

Caller 10 (02:41:30):
Oh, I love you.

Leo Laporte (02:41:31):
I love you too. Yeah. And well, you, you spent the last two years trying to get in. I mean least I can do is help you here. 3, 3, 3, okay. Three who's counting right? Three. Okay.

Caller 10 (02:41:41):
Okay. So what happened was I, I did go into the app information. I did clear the data. Good. I had, had updated everything until February of this year. So I did 

Leo Laporte (02:41:57):
Take out all the updates you wanna get rid of them all now. Right? So you're but you're doing is you're stripping it back to the version of the, you can't exactly uninstall the play store. So all you can, all you can really do is, is kind of get it back to the version before you when you first got the phone before you installed any updates, so you can't uninstall it, but this is like installing reinstalling it so

Caller 10 (02:42:24):
Well he says UN install updates. Where, where do I go to do that?

Leo Laporte (02:42:27):
So let's see, let me do it right here on my phone.

Caller 10 (02:42:30):
There's a three little dots.

Leo Laporte (02:42:33):
Yeah. So you're gonna force stop it. Okay. So we forced stopped it. That's the first thing to do under storage and cash. You're gonna clear both storage and cash. Okay. Let's let's delete everything. That way we'll have a completely fresh and all that's all of that will get redownloaded. So it's not the end of the world. You're not losing anything here. And then let's see here app details. See if it's under app details. Nope. That's not. It, it says, not found maybe there isn't a, maybe there used to be a way to to remove all the all the set, all the updates, but not anymore. Remove permissions, free up space modify system settings. Let's see if I can do that.

Caller 10 (02:43:25):
Well on the three little dots, it says uninstall the updates. That's

Leo Laporte (02:43:29):
It? Oh, there it is. You're right. You found it. Do that. <Affirmative> so that puts it and it says we'll set it back to the factory. Now, now before you before you do anything, turn the phone all the way off, you know, restart it. Right. So on, on my phone, reboot it, yeah. On my phone, I have to press the volume up and the on, off switch at the same time and then I'll get emergency lockdown, power off and I'll get restart. So then you restart. And then after you do that, you can go to the store and update it and you've in effect. That's the closest thing you can do with the store to uninstall it. You can't really uninstall it cuz there'd be no way to reinstall it. <Laugh> so,

Caller 10 (02:44:11):
So right when you go to the store it, well, if this works, then I should get, be able to get into the Google play store. But if it doesn't, then I can't get in there to

Leo Laporte (02:44:21):
Reinst update it. Yeah. But it'll update as part of the updates. So I think that that's the, that's the key. I just, by the way, I just did everything I described to you and I'm now rebooting my phone just to prove <laugh> that'll that'll work <laugh> but it's taking a little while to boot up. I think after you reboot if you do updates, that's when it'll come in and you'll get the latest version. So you go, you know, you, you, you go to the bottom of the settings and you say, update my phone and that'll get you back to the story. And it should, at that point it should work.

Caller 10 (02:44:55):
But when you're talking about the update is the whole update of the phone or only the

Leo Laporte (02:45:00):
App. Yeah. Well the app gets updated when you update the phone. Here we go. Okay. So let's, let's do that now so I can unlock it. Let me enter my super secret unlocking code. Okay. And now I'm gonna go here. Oh, it's already see it's already doing it. I think it just automatically but if it doesn't go to the gear and then, you know, you go to the bottom and you go to the part where it says system update and you just, just do the do the whole updates and then it should be working again at that point. Okay.

Caller 10 (02:45:34):
Yeah. I mean, I even reset the network that this at that, you know because I, I only use mobile data cuz I, my, my wifi got hacked,

Leo Laporte (02:45:43):
So oh yeah. That's no good. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Caller 10 (02:45:47):
Oh, so I'm gonna try that. I wanted to ask you, how do you completely alleviate Bluetooth?

Leo Laporte (02:45:53):
You mean not have it anymore? You don't want it anymore.

Caller 10 (02:45:56):
Well, I to get rid of it as much as possible.

Leo Laporte (02:46:00):
Yeah. All you can do is disable it. You can't really cuz it's built in to the phone, but you can go to your Bluetooth settings. Oops. And let's go to the Bluetooth setting.

Caller 10 (02:46:11):
It doesn't, it doesn't let you 

Leo Laporte (02:46:16):
Doesn't let you turn it off

Caller 10 (02:46:17):
Disable.

Leo Laporte (02:46:18):
Oh, it doesn't doesn't

Caller 10 (02:46:20):
First stop. And then it has all the permissions and that's the way they got in. Huh. And you know, with the Bluetooth, it, I think you should have like a,

Leo Laporte (02:46:29):
So here's a button password. No, there is a way to turn. Yes. Bluetooth's not very secure. I, I agree with you. So here's the thing to do. So you're gonna, you're gonna go to connected devices and you're gonna see all your Bluetooth devices and you're gonna then get info on the or connection preferences, I guess. And then you'll tap Bluetooth and then there's a switch to turn it off and you can just turn it off and then it won't work anymore. Anything you use like headphones or your car, whatever. That's not gonna work anymore either.

Caller 10 (02:46:59):
Well, okay. Let's see. It's it's 

Leo Laporte (02:47:02):
Might be a shortcut. Might be to long press, to long press the Bluetooth. Now you still have to do connection preferences and then Bluetooth and then turn it off.

Caller 10 (02:47:15):
Yeah. Okay. So where is that? Because I mean it's turned off.

Leo Laporte (02:47:22):
Yeah. So, so, so go to your, you know, the, the quick settings, my phone's a little different than yours. Cause I have a pixel, but go to the click quick settings, you'll see Bluetooth, you long press that that's gonna give you all your connected devices. At least on my phone. It may be different on yours. I see connection preferences, and that's where I can go to in there Bluetooth and turn off

Caller 10 (02:47:44):
Bluetooth. And after that it says well, the Bluetooth has turned off. What was happening is it would turn on by itself. I don't think I was turning it on. I mean the frequency hack were doing it.

Leo Laporte (02:47:55):
If you turn it off in the quick settings, you know, just by tapping it, it will turn itself back on. When you go to a new location, it, it acts as if, oh, you just wanted to turn off for the day. You have to go into settings to turn off for more than just a day. So, so te so long, press it in this quick settings, go to connection preferences, Bluetooth. Turn it off. Then it shouldn't come back on.

Caller 10 (02:48:21):
Well, people are getting in that's because apparently it it's a very low level signal to do that. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:48:27):
Yeah. Bluetooth. Bluetooth is not secure at all. Yeah. Make sure you do your updates on your phone. You're doing all the security updates.

Caller 10 (02:48:35):
It's up to the, the latest one is February. Okay. And there's one in April, but it hasn't come out yet.

Leo Laporte (02:48:43):
Yeah. Yeah. That's a, you know, of course the main one has come out for Google phones, but other, other manufacturers and other phone companies are slower, but February's pretty good. That should protect you against any known Bluetooth problems out there. If you don't use Bluetooth, you should turn it off. If you don't use it. Absolutely.

Caller 10 (02:49:01):
Well, I, I, I for stop it, is that at the app?

Leo Laporte (02:49:05):
Yeah, but I think it's gonna turn itself back on cuz it's gonna figure, oh, you didn't mean that <laugh> so find it it's in the setting. So you have to dig around, but you'll find it

Caller 10 (02:49:15):
Where oh no, no, no. I yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:49:17):
You should. You forced. Oh, I know. Yeah. Good luck Maria. I'm so glad you called in. I have to run now, unfortunately. Oh,

Caller 10 (02:49:24):
Thank you for your time.

Leo Laporte (02:49:26):
My pleasure. Appreciate it. My pleasure.

Caller 10 (02:49:29):
Take, take care

Leo Laporte (02:49:29):
Of yourself. See you, you too happy mother's day. Well, that's it for the tech eye show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget twit T I T it stands for this week at tech and you'll find it@twit.tv, including the podcast for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all@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.