The Tech Guy Episode 1913 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. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. Yes, I'm back. This is episode 1,913 recorded Saturday, July 30th, 2022. Enjoy the tech eye podcast is brought to you by userway.org UserWay, the world's number one accessibility solution, and it's committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you are ready to make your site compliant, the signing which solution to use is an easy choice to make. Go to userway.org/twit for 30% off UserWay's AI powered accessibility solution. And by CacheFly. Deliver your video on the network with the best throughput and global reach making your content infinitely, scalable go live and hours. Not days. Learn more at cachefly.com. Why? Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches.

Leo Laporte (00:01:15):
You know, you get the drill, all that tech technology, jazz phone number eight eight two seven five five three six tollfree from anywhere in the us or Canada, 88, 88, ask Leo. And I wanna give you all a chance to get through today. I'm gonna say first time callers welcome preferred only. How about that? So I wanna get some new folks on here. People who are going, oh, it's so hard to get in. Here's your chance? Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number outside that us and Canada, you can still call you Stu Skype out or something like that. There's a website. When I say I'm gonna, oh, I'll make a note of that. I'll put it the show notes or I'll do something, you know, I'll put it on the website. That's at tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. And that's free. There's no, no, no toll charge to use that.

Leo Laporte (00:02:08):
And the way it works is it takes a little while. Sometimes we get the notes up there, we get the links up there. And then after that we get the transcript of the show. We want a human to go through it, cuz it's made by a machine and you know how machines are, they're not <laugh> they do their best. You know, they're bless their little hearts, bless their little cog driven hearts, but you know, they make mistakes. So we get the humans who also make mistakes, but make a different kind of mistake. We get them to go through it. And I think between the two of 'em will get something there in a day or so also on Sundays, we put a link to all the songs that professor Laura, our musical director plays in case you want that playlist, a couple of people were confused about that. We do that on Sunday, once during the weekend tech guy labs.com.

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
Thank you, Mikah. Sargent who filled in for me for the last two Saturdays. It's nice. Isn't it nice to get a young young person on there. He did a great job. Thank you, Mikah. He's not here today. Because, and you may know the reason I wasn't here last week is I got COVID on <laugh> on the TWiT cruise or thereafter at some point in traveling and so we didn't want, we didn't, I thought best stay home best stay home. So I did. But if you're at all worried, I've tested negative twice now, so I'm good. I'm good. I'm not gonna breathe on you. You're gonna be okay. And yes, it was a fairly mild case, both my wife and I got it and survived it cuz we have the vaccine and the boosters and you know, and we drank a lot of vitamin C and I think we're all right, so thank you Mike. It's nice. I think every once in a while to get a, a younger person, we old people, we have something, you know we got a little something going for us besides, you know, bad knees. We got we got some some institutional knowledge. Yeah. That's it. Some knowledge of how the things happened. I mean, I've been using dos since 1.0 and windows since 1.0 and <laugh> max since what was the original Mac OS?

Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
I got my first Mac in 1984 when they first came out. So whatever that was system, not, I don't know what that was. First Android phone. Have it, got it. It's right behind me in my museum. Wouldn't want to use it today. First iPhone habit. Got it right behind me in my museum. A lot of that stuff ends up at the museum sooner than you'd wish. Good news. I think good news for the tech business this week on Thursday, the chips act cleared Congress now waiting for the president to sign it 52 billion in subsidies to encourage chip manufacturers, to build fabs, their semiconductor fabrication plants in the us. Yay. It's a 280 billion chips and science act all to make us more competitive. Some say it's too late. China's already, but no, I think, Hey, better, late than never.

Leo Laporte (00:05:15):
Right? took a while. You know, you know how it is, everything takes a while in Congress. As a result, Intel will do the groundbreaking on a $20 billion Foundry in Arizona TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company, the company that builds all the big chips for the apple iPhone among others opened their new fab in the us. This is good. This is good. It will also address the supply chain. Problem chips have been in a shortage as you may have noticed. And it re it doesn't just hurt computers. It hurt, you know, it's good luck finding a car. Some, some car manufacturers, I think it was GM were leaving out the seat adjustment capability. <Laugh> in their new cars cuz they couldn't get the chips. So supply chain issues now takes a while to build a plant like a couple of years.

Leo Laporte (00:06:13):
So it ain't gonna solve that right away. But Hey, it's a step. It's a step. So I, you know, I I'm, I'm excited. I'm happy about that. I think that's a positive, positive move. Bad news. If you use Amazon drive, do you, you know, there's Google drive. There's Microsoft's one drive. There's Dropbox, there's box, there's apples, iCloud. These are all ways to store your data on servers. I'm not gonna say in the cloud, I should be more clear shouldn't I on servers on the internet, is that clearer? That's what the cloud is. Other people's computers up there on the internet. Amazon, maybe you didn't know this. Apparently a lot of people didn't Amazon had one too. Yes. it's called Amazon drive and it's shutting down next year. So for the five people using that, just, you know, word warning, you'll get an email.

Leo Laporte (00:07:13):
If you have files stored that are not Amazon photos. Oh, that's an important one. Cause I've been telling a lot of people, if you're an Amazon prime customer, Amazon photos is actually a great deal, unlimited storage for the original versions of all your photos. Something even Google doesn't do anymore. Even Google now charges you extra for, for storage, not Amazon prime customers. So that, and that will continue. So let's be clear. Amazon photos continues. Although one does have to wonder <laugh> first of all, how much could it cost Amazon to run this? And they are an insanely profitable company starting January 31st of next year, no longer no longer will you be able to start new uploads. And by the end of next year, you won't be able to view or download old content. So you've gotta kind of migrate, move it over, move it on over, move it on over Amazon drive.

Leo Laporte (00:08:14):
You know, nobody who cares. Nobody, nobody even knows about that. This was a big week for tech company, quarterly earnings. Do we care if you're an investor in the stock market? You know, that's the theory you would care. How's this company doing? I should I buy their stock? That's the theory of all of these reports. Oh, we're doing great. We're not doing great. Except it seems to have, I don't know. I'm I choose not to invest in tech stocks because I don't want to be, you know, tainted my, I don't want my opinion to be colored by an investment in the company. So I only have index funds, which means, I guess some of the, some of the stocks are, are tech stocks, but I don't, you know, it's not, I don't don't live and die by their success, but I did notice that the result did not seem to have much to do with the price.

Leo Laporte (00:09:05):
<Laugh> a lot of the stocks, even though they had terrible quarters, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, apple, apple didn't have a terrible, but you know, even though they had week quarters, a lot of their, their stocks would go up 5%. I think 8% in, in, in Apple's case 8%, which a big jump my apple friends say, well, it's not the how they did last quarter. It's that? It's gonna be not as terrible next quarter. <Laugh> okay. See, I guess this is why I shouldn't be buying stocks or certainly giving you any advice about stocks cuz to me it's like, well, you know, we expected this new house that we're buying. We expected it to have a hole in the roof. Hey, good news. It doesn't have a hole in the roof. Just has a hole in the floor. So let's pay more. That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Leo Laporte (00:10:01):
Does not, does not make any sense to me, but that, what do I know? You know, everybody had a little, a bit of a weak quarter because of supply chain. It's a, it's a problem supply chain. But I think, I think what most of the market is saying, and maybe this is true is, Hey, it ain't that bad and there's a bright future ahead. Future's so bright. I've gotta wear augmented reality. Okay. Good, good, good. What else is, what, what, what really impacts us? That's I guess what I should be, I should be talking about the things that make a difference. It max headroom coming back. Yeah. Not that. Mm Ooh. <Laugh> Twitter's raising the subscription of Twitter blue from three bucks a month to five bucks a month. Yeah. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. 88. I'm just gonna punt. Leo LaPorte tech guy back in the saddle again, 88, 88. Ask Leah. Let's get some first time callers on now system one. It was called. Thank you, Mike. Be it was called system one. There you have it. I don't know. Do they call? They didn't probably call it anything, right? They just said Mac O S or Macintosh it's Macintosh.

Leo Laporte (00:11:52):
I mean, I'm curious. I think, you know, it's like they didn't call it world war. I

Leo Laporte (00:11:57):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:11:58):
They right. They called it. They called it the great war. What that happened in severance? What happened world war I, yeah. Yeah. Cuz they didn't know there was gonna be another one. They were hoping, but I think apple probably hoped there was another system. So maybe they did call it system one. What was that? Oh my God. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. I like it. Let's do it. Our genre says that's why I call it the first world war. <Laugh> now something weird's going on with I Mac it's been booting this whole time. That can't be, that doesn't seem right. Didn't Mikah. Screw it up. Didn't my get. Well, what? It doesn't like my account anymore. This has been the whole break. It did this, the war to and all wars. The big war. The big one. The great war is I think what it was mostly called, but was ma so really the question is what did apple say? It was they, I mean, they didn't, I think they, you don't need to call anything. They just it's, you know, it's the system, it's the operating system. They, I don't even think they call it Mac OS or Macintosh OS or anything.

Leo Laporte (00:13:45):
216 kilobytes. Wow. <laugh> wow. Six files system, which concluded the desk, accessories finder, clipboard and image writer, printer, drivers, scrapbook and notepad. That's it. You see, you see besides bad knees, us old timers have memories. We don't remember. 'em Very well, but we got 'em they're in there somewhere. Actually. I think it's the the long term memories that stay the best. Right? The Macintosh system. Yeah. That seems like what it would be called finder was one point. Oh, all right, here we go. No, don't call that number. No wrong number. Wrong number. Sorry. Kim Schaffer phone angel. Hello Kim. You're isolated in your soundproof booth, which is good at a great, a great distance from me. Yep. Although it looks like if you're watching the, the video. Yes. There's video of this radio show. You're over my left shoulder.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:53):
I am over your shoulder and I can look at you. Now we can look at each other.

Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
How are you do, is that a magic, a magic window. You can look right through. That's

Kim Schaffer (00:15:02):
Remarkable. John, John tried this with Mikah last week and I'm like, oh, we can actually look at each other now. <Laugh> although I'm

Leo Laporte (00:15:08):
And what do you see when you look at it?

Kim Schaffer (00:15:09):
The back of your head? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:15:13):
Okay. So if I look at you, are you there? Are you in that camera? Anyway, it reminds me of what I used to do is show for MSNBC called the site way back in the mid nineties, I was a virtual reality character called Deval. And so at O'Brien who was the anchor would sit at a coffee bar and pretend she was looking at me, but she was really just looking at a piece of green tape on the wall. <Laugh> so we'll put a piece of green tape where your eye should be and you'll be you just pretend your hand solo, looking at a woo instead of a tennis ball. <Laugh> so who should I, by the way, how'd it go? The last couple of weeks?

Kim Schaffer (00:15:51):
Mikah did amazing. Good. So yeah, he did an awesome job.

Leo Laporte (00:15:54):
He's really isn't he? He's a, I'm try not to say it, but I'm gone anyway. A talented kid.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:59):
He is a kid he's not even 30

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
Yet. I know, but gosh, darn he's

Kim Schaffer (00:16:03):
Smart, but very talented. And I, but I here, cuz these did nothing for me last night. So

Leo Laporte (00:16:07):
What was that?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:08):
<Laugh> mega millions tickets.

Leo Laporte (00:16:10):
Oh you didn't did you

Kim Schaffer (00:16:12):
Only when it's like 500 million and above, do

Leo Laporte (00:16:15):
I have to explain probability to everybody? Oh,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:17):
I know

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Three. I don't wanna be that, that guy, but there, you know I am,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:21):
But it's fun to think. It's fun to

Leo Laporte (00:16:23):
Think. Yeah. You dream. Yeah. That's what the lottery people tell you. That's what they say in the ads. Just imagine. But you understand when I'm gonna say it anyway, cuz this is a show about science and facts. <Laugh> when it goes up above a billion dollars there. When anytime there's more people, many, many more people buy it. And as it turns out, you're not gonna win more money. Cuz it's much more likely it'll be split. Now. I think somebody in Illinois in Illinois. Got it. It the one, right? Nobody else got it.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:52):
I don't know if it's a pooled. Like it could be a business that's pooled. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:55):
No I don't. I'm not talking about that.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:56):
Yeah. Only, only one in

Leo Laporte (00:16:58):
Only one.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:58):
Somebody in California and Fresno won 4 million on like the five

Leo Laporte (00:17:03):
Numbers, but somebody won one, 1.2, 9 billion spread out over a hundred years

Kim Schaffer (00:17:09):
And they'll get like 300 million of it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:11):
Of a total.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:12):
That's a, what I heard. That's all you get. Yeah. With all these stuff taken off time,

Leo Laporte (00:17:16):
The government takes rest.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:18):
<Laugh> pretty much

Leo Laporte (00:17:19):
How could somebody live on 300 million? I

Kim Schaffer (00:17:21):
Don't know. It's tough.

Leo Laporte (00:17:22):
Well, you can barely there. You could barely buy a mega yacht for that. Nope. I should call it mini millions. Wow. So, okay. That's good. 1.3, 1.37 billion. Ugh in Illinois. All right. But you only get a few hundred million, a few hundred million. Only

Kim Schaffer (00:17:38):
A few hundred million.

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):
<Laugh> who should

Kim Schaffer (00:17:40):
I let's go to Jamie and Tampa. Florida.

Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
Okay. First time caller.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:43):
Right. First time I think I, I don't recognize him as a,

Leo Laporte (00:17:46):
I wanna, I just wanna try this. Yes, I got you need some new blood. I got an email from a good friend who said, I keep hearing from the same five people all the time and I thought, you know, that's fair. There's plenty of people out there just cuz somebody's figured out the scheme that lets you dial in every single time. Right. Or something. I don't know how they keep getting in the same people, but good Jamie. That's good. Thank you. Hi Jamie and Tampa. Leo Laporte. The tech guy.

Caller 1 (00:18:12):
Hey Leo. How are you doing today?

Leo Laporte (00:18:13):
I'm wonderful. How are you?

Caller 1 (00:18:15):
Better than I deserve.

Leo Laporte (00:18:17):
Oh good. So yes

Caller 1 (00:18:19):
<Laugh>. So yesterday I had to get my iPhone battery replaced. 

Leo Laporte (00:18:25):
Oh which iPhone model was it?

Caller 1 (00:18:28):
It see 20, 20.

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
Oh, okay. So it was only a couple of years old. That's interesting.

Caller 1 (00:18:35):
Yeah. So I go to get it replaced. And the only apple store is like six hours or I forgot how many borrow is away from me now. But I went to an independent mom and pop shop to get it replaced.

Leo Laporte (00:18:50):
Okay. Which in theory now from apple says is okay. As long as they're, whatever it is certified, you know and all that. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:18:59):
Yeah. So now, now they went, I went I went in, I took an Uber to the apple store or apple store the mom and pop

Leo Laporte (00:19:08):
Store. Yeah. I break you fix yeah. Uhhuh.

Caller 1 (00:19:10):
Yeah, something like that. So I go, I go in there and they fix, it, took about 20 minutes to do it and then they, I get it back and I get a message on my phone saying this battery is not apple certified. I'm like, oh God. And they, and the guy at the store told me and I've been going to him for a few years and they've fixed my phones before with no problem. So he told me, he said, what, what happened is apple, for some reason doesn't want, even though we can fix them,

Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
They want you to use official apple parts is what they want you to do.

Caller 1 (00:19:46):
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I've read. And so, and now I'm rack my brain going, okay. Now what? Cause I really, I

Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
Really nothing. Nothing, unless it's doing it every five seconds and driving you nuts.

Caller 1 (00:19:58):
I mean, it, it, it really, really, the only time I ever see it is when I first boot is I go into the no, actually when I go into the setting, oh, when I go into the settings to do something else and the phone works, I mean, it works. I mean, I,

Leo Laporte (00:20:11):
I wouldn't worry about it. I wouldn't worry about it.

Caller 1 (00:20:14):
Okay. Yeah. Cause yeah, cause I was, I was worried

Leo Laporte (00:20:16):
About it. There's a, you know, there's a reason why you don't want to use kind of offbrand lithium ion batteries. They can be hazardous if they're not properly made, but you trust this guy, you know, you could ask him where do you get your batteries and presume that he's smart enough to get good quality batteries. They don't have to be apple branded to be good quality batteries that,

Caller 1 (00:20:38):
Huh? I asked him that. Yeah. What he said. Yeah. I asked him, I said, I said, he said, yeah, we're getting them right from, from apple. And he said, there have been cases of people would go to the, to the apple stores to get their batteries done. And the same thing would happen. So I

Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
Mean, he, so as long as you trust him, which sounds like you do, there's nothing to worry about. The reason you don't want to use offbrand batteries is they can O they may have poor circuitry that allows 'em to be overcharged and, and burst in the flame. If it gets really hot, bring it back. Otherwise I think you're good. I think you're good. Leola port, the tech guy, apple. So this is the other thing that may have happened. And he may be, be getting bit by this apple now because they have a repair program that he can use and get the parts from apple, blah, blah, blah. They may be, there may be a, an additional step that he doesn't perform that says, runs it through some software that says, okay. Certified. Okay, good. And that could be what he didn't do. In other words, it could be an official apple battery, but without being officially apple certified, I, I think there's nothing to worry about if, just if the phone just, just, you know, every once in a while, while I was charging, see if it's really hot, it should not get, it should get warm, but not really hot.

Caller 1 (00:22:02):
I tested it. I tested it cuz I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm the weird guy that plugs his phone in before he goes to bed every night and tends to sleep with the playing iHeartRadio all night. But that's a different story.

Leo Laporte (00:22:12):
Yeah. It should get a little warm <laugh> because that's such hot talk.

Caller 1 (00:22:17):
Right. <laugh> it's gonna, right. Right. So, so what I, what I did was I plugged it in last night and woke up this morning and it was still at the regular temperature. So it had it hadn't overheated. It hadn't good. And if it, if it had burst into flames, I would've heard smoke detectors, bland. You would've

Leo Laporte (00:22:37):
Known <laugh>

Caller 1 (00:22:38):
Right, right. You would've known right.

Leo Laporte (00:22:40):
If, if it, I think it's fine every once in a while, just check it, make sure it's not getting really hot. It's just apple being apple. They, you know, and by the way, for future reference, you know, you can mail it. I know you don't want to, you want to get it done while you're in in store. It is 49. It's $49 for an iPhone se battery. How much did he charge you?

Caller 1 (00:23:01):
He only charged me to 30. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:23:05):
So he's basically, he's pays charging a small amount for labor. It's not a hard thing to do if you know what you're doing. I, I wouldn't worry about it.

Caller 1 (00:23:13):
Yeah. And being visually impaired Leo, because I never told him I'm actually I'm visually impaired Uhhuh and I really don't feel safe being without a phone. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
Absolutely understand.

Caller 1 (00:23:28):
Yeah. Because, because

Leo Laporte (00:23:29):
You don't wanna mail it in that's. Right,

Caller 1 (00:23:31):
Right, right. Right. And, and what, and apparently I was talking to another customer while we were getting, because we, we both needed our batteries changed and he explained that, you know, apple does this because they want to basically scare you

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Yeah. Into using their service. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:23:49):
Yeah. Apple is known for scaring, the living daylights out of people because they're, oh my God, if you don't get this done, then like, like, like he told me there's some

Leo Laporte (00:23:59):
In their defense. I agree with you. I, you know, I think essentially apple is responding to the right to the repair movement, but they're doing it in a very kind of we call it malicious compliance in a very kind of yeah. Ry way, like, okay, if you insist, but, and there, but in their defense, there are legitimate potential issues with a bad battery. But as long as the guy who replaced it knows what he's doing and is getting batteries. If he says it's an apple battery, then there's no issue at all. He didn't do that. Whatever that last step was to say to the phone, Hey, no, no. It's okay.

Caller 1 (00:24:36):
Right, right. Right. And, and one thing I, one thing I noticed is Leo is, you know, you're talking about right to appear and it, it's hard to fix our stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:24:43):
Yeah. Apple says, Hey, you shouldn't fix it. We should fix it. It's our stuff.

Caller 1 (00:24:48):
Right. And, and, and one thing with apple is they use this. Cause a lot of people say, what, what? Say apple, apple, glues, the battery in, they use this adhesive tape. Yeah. You heat it. That is, that's very tricky to pull out. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (00:25:02):
I've done it. I know exactly what you're talking about. If you go to, I fixit.com, they'll show you the process. And what they sell is these little, little blanks that you heat up in the microwave. <Laugh> and they warm up the phone and soften the glue and then you can remove it. Did you watch the guy do the repair? Oh, you guess you couldn't watch him, but were you there while he did the repair?

Caller 1 (00:25:23):
I, I couldn't watch it, but I listened to it. And, and, and one of my friends, he described it to me. He said that, he said, though, a lot of companies sell the kit that let you fix your own phone. He tried it it himself. And it wasn't even five minutes until teeny weeny screws began flying outta the

Leo Laporte (00:25:40):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They don't want you to do it. Hey, I gotta run. Great to talk to you. I'm glad you got it done. Don't worry. And there with a horn stab, we know it's time. <Laugh> for the one, the only the man who can play any wind instrument on site. Mr. Scott, Wilkinson home theater geek. Hello, Scott. <Laugh>. Hello, Leo. Welcome back. Ah, it's good to see you. I, I know I sound a little congested but I I'm fine. You sound a little congested too, actually. Are you okay? No, I'm good. Oh, good. <Laugh> maybe it's. My ears are congested. <Laugh> Scott is our expert in AV. That means flat screen TVs. That means home theater surround. I just wanna ask you a question before you get into your thing. Sure. I, we have recommended in the past, over and over the Visio sound bars. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and I bought an M series sound bar. That was, it was only 300 bucks, which I maybe should have been the in, in indication that maybe it wasn't gonna be the best thing I got the 2.1, it came with a sub, a really tiny subs. <Laugh>

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:50):
Yeah. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (00:26:51):
True. And surrounds even tinier surrounds. This was so actually the full story might be appropriate for the show cuz I had a Sonos beautiful Sono soundbar.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:03):
Oh yeah, those are great.

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
But it Sonos one point. Oh, right. So it doesn't integrate it's Sonos abandoned us basically. Yeah. And I kinda stopped working and spent a th more than a thousand bucks on the soundbar and the surrounds and all that in the sub and all that mm-hmm <affirmative> and so I just said, oh, I can't use it anymore cuz I ha so I'm taking it out. Oh, but we've always recommended these M series Visio sound bars. So I bought that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:26):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
I gotta tell you I'm a little disapp disappointed.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:29):
Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
It's a little tinny. It doesn't sound that much better than the TV speaker. Oh now maybe, maybe I bought the one that's that's too cheap. Probably did.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:41):
Well, that may be, that may be,

Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
I'll tell you the, got the model and you can tell me if I got the, I got the wrong one. It's the M series 5.1 premium soundbar with Doby, atmo, DTS, X, Bluetooth, et cetera. Cetera. It was $342 and 9 cents on Amazon.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:58):
Well, and it, and it actually has the physical surround speakers. The little.

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
Yeah. But they're the size of a there's <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> the size of a eyeglass case. They're not. Yeah. And they're wired by the way, which is very annoying.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:10):
They're wired to the sub woofer.

Leo Laporte (00:28:12):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:13):
And the sub woofer is wireless.

Leo Laporte (00:28:14):
Oh, I guess I could put the sub woofer in the back of the room. Maybe that's what I should do. And then I could correct. You're right. The sub woofer's wire wireless. Anyway, we had reviewed another one that I thought sounded good. This is not what we had reviewed, but I think the, the other one's probably hundreds of dollars more.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:30):
Well, I just got the new Visio M series what's called the M series elevate, which is technology migrated down from their higher end line. Yeah. And it's like that it's a soundbar wireless sub woofer surround speakers, relatively small, but not tiny that are connected to the sub woofer with wires. And it also has these little speakers drivers that pop out of the end and rotate and angle upwards. So you get your overhead sound with atmo and I think it sounds great.

Leo Laporte (00:29:10):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:11):
But

Leo Laporte (00:29:12):
Maybe it's just my ears. I'm very, very, very unimpressed. It feels like it, something came out of a cracker Jack box.

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:18):
Well, I'm so sorry to hear that. That's alright. So we can't then unequivocally recomme vis sound.

Leo Laporte (00:29:23):
I apologize to anybody who's been buying those sound bars on my, and if you like it, it's my, you know, that's fine. But I have to say, I'm gonna, I am gonna be, you know, the reason I did recommend it, we had, and you were here in the studio tested the first one they did with atmo, but that was mm-hmm <affirmative> I think that was, was probably the most expensive

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:42):
Version. It was I'm I'm almost certain. And it was many years

Leo Laporte (00:29:46):
Ago. It was heftier too. It was bigger. And

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:48):
He much heftier.

Leo Laporte (00:29:49):
Yeah. Yeah. This thing

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:51):
Don't you still have that one?

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
Oh no, no, no, we returned it. We don't oh, you did. We don't keep that hardware. So, you know, we only, we only use it for review. I wish I had it. <Laugh> I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna toss this M series and get a get, I, you know, it's got an AV receiver on it, so I'm just gonna get regular speakers in that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:12):
I should have done that in that case. I certainly would.

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
Yeah. I should have done that in the first place. Anyway. So, but you like the elevate, you think it sounds

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:18):
Pretty? I do. Yeah. I, I, I think it sounds quite good actually. I will be reviewing it probably on AVS forum.

Leo Laporte (00:30:25):
It's a lot more, I mean it's 867 bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think you get what you pay for. And I was

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:31):
Be, I would have to agree with that

Leo Laporte (00:30:33):
Chintzy. I was being

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:35):
Cheap

Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
And I got bit, you know, and

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:39):
In a way sometimes,

Leo Laporte (00:30:40):
You know, it's important because sometimes people say, well, you recommend stuff. That's expensive. But I think sometimes it's a foolish thing to buy something, just cuz it's inexpensive. Cuz sometimes it's gonna cost you more. Like I'm now out $342 because I can't, it's just not good.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:54):
It's just not good. Okay. Well I'm, I'm sorry to hear that and disappointed a little bit in Invisio for not cuz, cause I I've heard a number of their inexpensive sound bars that I thought sounded really good and this just happens to be one that doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:31:09):
So yeah. Yeah. So I apologize if I've recommended the wrong sound bar to you, but the elevate, if you're gonna spend 867 bucks, it should sound good.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:17):
Oh yeah. And it does. It really does.

Leo Laporte (00:31:20):
I like the idea of a UN you know, wireless sub. That was a great, that was cool. 

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:25):
Yeah, just put the sub in the back of the room cuz you do have to connect the, the surround speakers.

Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
That's what I'm gonna do. Yeah. That's what I'm gonna do. Yeah. But I just I feel

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:38):
Like the whole, if the whole thing sounds kind of tin, it's

Leo Laporte (00:31:40):
Like a toy. Yeah. It's and, and when I opened the box and I looked at the sub cuz there's definitely a correlation to the size of a sub woofer and the, the, the amount of boom you can get

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:51):
Out of it. Yeah. Oh yeah. No doubt. No doubt. And

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
This has barely any boom

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:55):
<Laugh> it's

Leo Laporte (00:31:56):
The size, you know, it's a size of my head.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:59):
Okay. I plugged, I plugged ours in and, and my wife said, whoa, where is all that bass

Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
Coming? Yeah, no one said that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:06):
No. Yeah. Okay. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:32:08):
No one said it was doing it cuz I did the test and you know, I, but yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:12):
Yeah. It worked. It, it, I could hear it making some sound. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:16):
<Laugh>

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:19):
Okay. Alright.

Leo Laporte (00:32:20):
All anyway, I I'm sorry. Just that's okay. Just wanted to update my recommendation on that

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:26):
One. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. well quickly I've got three quick things to talk about. One is I've I've got two things up on AVS forum this week that I wanna make sure people check out. One is my latest podcast, which is my interview with Peter pakk, who is an, a quantum.expert. And he, we get into quantum dots at a, at a super geeky level. So that's gonna, that's really fun. I highly recommend you check that out. And then the other one is my next home theater of the month which is in outside of Milwaukee. This guy built it himself with his own hands, everything he and his family. He said even

Leo Laporte (00:33:10):
The speakers.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:11):
No, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte (00:33:12):
Oh, okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:12):
He bought the speaker.

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
Oh good. I mean I would've been impressed.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, no, no. He built the room.

Leo Laporte (00:33:21):
Oh wow.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:22):
Himself,

Leo Laporte (00:33:23):
Including

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:23):
His, his whole

Leo Laporte (00:33:24):
Family. That's you gotta be, you gotta be dead.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:26):
He said my daughter's learned to prime and paint walls. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
<Laugh> that? That is this one out. That's gonna be episode eight.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:33):
Episode seven is the tech is the is the podcast and then home theater of the month is

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
June. That's a feature. I

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:41):
Get it. That's a feature. Yeah. With a bunch of photos and stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
Powered. I see it now powered by Anthem.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:47):
Yes. Yes. We have a sponsor

Leo Laporte (00:33:49):
More congratulations. Oh, look at this home theater.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:52):
Isn't that amazing? Wow. Isn't that amazing?

Leo Laporte (00:33:56):
It looks like a, an actual kind of gilded age, movie theater.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:00):
<Laugh> I know, I know. Wow. Nice. And he built it himself.

Leo Laporte (00:34:03):
That's pretty cool.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:05):
Entirely. Almost entirely said

Leo Laporte (00:34:07):
He didn't do the drywall from the CDER blocks on up.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:09):
Wow. Uhhuh. Yeah. He said he didn't do the drywall mudding and taping. Cuz he said I've done that before and I was terrible at it. So

Leo Laporte (00:34:17):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:18):
He had somebody else do that, but it looks great. I'm sure. It sounds wonderful. So check that out. It's really cool. Yeah. Now the third thing I wanna mention quickly before we run out of time is this is the weekend as we speak, oh the value electronics,

Leo Laporte (00:34:36):
Shootout,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:37):
TV shootout is happening and you can go, you can actually go watch it live. They're live streaming it. You can go to youtube.com/spare change. I have no idea why it's spare change, but there it is. Go watch it live. Five 4k TVs, three eight K TVs today and tomorrow and next week. I'll tell you the results.

Leo Laporte (00:35:03):
Scott Wilkinson Leo. Leport the tech guy. Very exciting. Now you're not going this year, I guess.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:19):
No, no. I, I decided not to go

Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
A wise man with BA five going around. I've learned my

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:27):
Lesson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry to hear that. But 

Leo Laporte (00:35:30):
You know, the good news is be I think because we were, you know, quad, VAX and all that it was kinda like a cold Lisa wouldn't agree. She was really, she took her

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:40):
Two weeks. She

Leo Laporte (00:35:41):
Was sick. She had brain fog. She lost her sense of taste and smell. She, she had

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:45):
Pretty bad. She had all the classic symptoms.

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
Yeah. And it was pretty bad for me. It was. And I'm still a little congested, but it was like a cold. It was just, it wasn't too bad. However that's what one doesn't know ahead of time, right?

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:57):
Yeah, exactly. You wanna try to avoid it? Yes. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I'm not ready to get on a plane yet or go. And the, the shootout is in a closed room. Yeah. For two full days with like 20 people. Yeah. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:36:11):
Which TVs are they looking at this year?

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:14):
I'm sorry, I didn't get to say this on the air, but they're looking at the two QD O LEDs. Oh, okay. So the Samsung 65 and then they're all 65 inch for the 4k. The 65 S 95 B Samsung QD O led and the Sony 65, a 95 K QD O led. I don't know why the number 95 keeps coming up in these but model numbers, but it does.

Leo Laporte (00:36:39):
That seems silly.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:41):
I know. So anyway, they're looking at the two, two QD LEDs brand new technology. They're looking at the L G G two O led straight ahead, O led, which is one level up above the C two, which I normally recommend. And two mini L E D reg quote, unquote, regular LCD TVs from one from Sony and one from Samsung. And so they're it. They're doing it right now. As we speak, they, the live stream is probably they're. They're just looking at test patterns and content and they have a

Leo Laporte (00:37:17):
Bunch of, it's gotta be a very exciting life.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:19):
<Laugh> extreme. Now my next, my next podcast, which is in a week and a half will have people who were there and we're gonna talk about the event and the results and, and all that stuff. One of the calibrators will be there. One of the judges will be there. The owner of value electronics will be there. So it that's gonna be a great conversation.

Leo Laporte (00:37:42):
Here's the live. Let me see the live. See what's going <laugh> oh, they have a little open. That's why I was a little confused. Oh, they're on a break. That's

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:50):
What's going. Oh, are they on a break? Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:37:51):
Yeah, but this is what it looks like. Ooh, exciting.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:55):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
Very exciting.

Scott Wilkinson (00:37:59):
Yeah. I was, I was asked to be there. Robert zone asked me to be there.

Leo Laporte (00:38:05):
Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. You, you were the MC a couple of years ago.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:08):
I was Caleb Dennison is doing that this year from digital trends and he's very good. So, you know, I have no problem. So they

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
Show the same exact content on all the screens

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:17):
On all the screens. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:38:19):
And I notice a little tiny one in the middle there. I don't know why

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:22):
It's the little tiny one in the middle is the Sony. I've forgotten the model number. It's the X 300, it's a broadcast monitor.

Leo Laporte (00:38:30):
It's a reference monitor.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:31):
It's a reference model.

Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
So they can look at that and say, oh, this is what it should look like.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:36):
This is what the content creators look at. Yeah. To make their content interesting. And that's a $30,000 monitor. Yeah. At 30 inches, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:38:46):
So it's a for grading. It's specifically it's

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:48):
For grading. Yeah, exactly. And, and I love what Robert does that he puts that in

Leo Laporte (00:38:53):
There. Looks like jaws looks like they're watching jaws.

Scott Wilkinson (00:38:56):
Well, they might be, I don't know. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Why wouldn't they watch something more modern? <Laugh> I guess it's a ultra HD.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:05):
It might be an ultra. Yeah. Well they're, they're undoubtedly looking at mostly 4k content. So this might be a 4k remaster. Yeah. Interesting. Or something like that. You

Leo Laporte (00:39:15):
Wanna stick around for the top of the hour.

Scott Wilkinson (00:39:16):
Yeah, sure. Happy to stay

Leo Laporte (00:39:17):
Tuned. This episode of the tech guy brought to you by userway.org userway.org. I'm talking about making your website, ADA compliant, accessible. Not only is it the right thing to do because you're opening up your website to a much larger group, 60 million plus people, you have a responsibility to make your site accessible. It's a public entity. So you gotta make it accessible. And with UserWay it's easy. That was my biggest concern was, oh, I can't afford it. Or it's gonna be too hard. No UserWay's really affordable. And it's really easy and incredible. It's AI powered tirelessly enforces all the accessibility guidelines though. W C a G WCA guidelines. And I love this. So do our engineers. It's one line of JavaScript. That's it? Because UserWay is so good. It's used by more than a million websites, including the big guys Coca-Cola Disney eBay.

Leo Laporte (00:40:12):
These are companies that really have to be accessible and user weight can do that. As you get bigger, they scale with you. If they can handle Disney, absolutely. They can handle you. They make best in class enterprise level accessibility tools available to you. You small or medium sized business. And then as you scale, you need user weight and you're ready. It just makes business sense. Some of the biggest problems, nav menus, very difficult. So the way this works, if you're blind or you're using accessibility tools, there is what they call an accessibility layer. That's what the screen reader sees. So really what UserWay does, is make sure that all the information available to the front page to the sighted user is available to the browser in the accessibility layer. It changes colors. Now you've got your Pantone color for your business. Of course we do too.

Leo Laporte (00:41:01):
Doesn't change that, but it adjusts hu and luminance. So it's easier for people with vision issues to read. So UserWay will generate all tags. That's one of the reasons it needs AI. It can actually see the picture and generate an all tag that matches the picture automatically. You can go in if you want, you can modify it. Of course it fixes violations like vague links, fixes, broken links makes sure that your website uses accessible colors. And you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed on your website. So you know exactly what it did. Plus you can work with it UserWay, integrates seamlessly with your site builder software, let UserWay help your business. Meet its compliance goals. Improve the experience for your users UserWay can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant, and everyone who visits can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs.

Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
It's a great way to show your brand's commitment to the millions of people with disabilities. It's the right thing to do. It's UserWay. And we use it too UserWay can make any website, ADA compliant, fully accessible with UserWay. Everyone who visits your site can Browe seamlessly customize it to fit their needs. It's also a great way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's just the right thing to do. Go to userway.org/twit. Get 30% off UserWay's AI powered accessibility solution book, a short call, get their accessibility guide. I couldn't recommend it more highly. That's why we use it@twit.tv UserWay, making the internet accessible for everyone. Visit userway.org/twit today, Leo LA port, the tech guy, 88 88, ask Leo to come to come back around to this battery question. Remember our first call, the other day had an iPhone se from a couple of years back, he wanted to replace the battery.

Leo Laporte (00:42:49):
Did not wanna bring it to apple cuz he didn't wanna be wa and he didn't wanna mail it. He didn't wanna be without his phone in the apple store was six hours away. So he brought it to a local independent repair facility, which apple says is okay, as long as they get apple parts and their apple certified blah, blah, blah. In fact that we have a local one I've used where their apple certified and it should be identical to getting it done by the apple store. Price was right for our caller. But now when he, every once in a while, when he checks his battery, he says, this was not official apple battery. Even though he says the guy who replaced it did put an apple battery in there. He bought it from apple. So what's going on. And there's two interpretations of this one that apple really doesn't want you to do your own repairs.

Leo Laporte (00:43:33):
And I think people think that this is a profit center for apple. Apple is very clear. This we don't make money on repairs. And I think I believe them cuz they wanna price them as low as they can because that's part of the decision in buying a phone, right? They make the money on the phone. They're not trying to make money on you on the repairs. And I think that's, you know, that's reasonable. So I'm gonna believe I'm I believe apple. In other words, when they say, oh, we don't make money on repairs. So you, I think you can eliminate that as a motive for keeping people from going to independent repair shops. I think they really do want to keep control of it. However, because, and this is very happily. They want the best user experience possible. Which means if you, for instance, go to repair shop and you get a battery and you get this warning, that's not a good user experience and it might make you nervous as it did our caller.

Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
And you know, so I guess in my opinion, they maybe should make it easier for third party repair companies to give you a good experience that might be better. They've gotta recognize not everybody lives next door to an apple store and not everybody can let their phone be gone for a few days to get it repaired by mail. So you know it until apple opens a, a repair shop on every corner, you gotta allow third party companies to do it and do it right. I think Apple's trying to do this, but I don't think they're succeeding just yet. That's I guess my take on that. Nevertheless, there is a certainly there's a reason to be aware of third party batteries. If they're poorly made, they can cause problems including not limited to, but including fire and explosion, that's not good. If the all lithium ion batteries have circuitry in them to prevent overcharging and what happens when you overcharge a lithium ion batteries to keep pumping electrons into it, after it's reached its capacity, it starts to heat up.

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
It starts to swell. It can puncture the material, encasing it there's volatile liquids in there harmful to you, which expand. And when meeting oxygen can actually burst into flame. And then ultimately if the CA if it's too tight, a space, what happens when you have rapid oxidation a fire inside a very, very enclosed space. It expands very rapidly, blows the phone up. That's not a good, that's not a good outcome. So it is true that sometimes, you know, it's risky to buy batteries from just some random person certainly would be preferable to use apple official batteries. He says, the repair guy says, that's what he's using fine. Then there might be. And I suspect there is apple does this an additional step at the end of the repair where you plug it in a machine, the machine goes, you know, okay, that's all.

Leo Laporte (00:46:29):
Okay. And, and, you know, gives it the seal of approval so that you don't get that warning anymore. If that's all it is. I wouldn't worry about it. The warning's annoying, but you're not at risk. If it's really an apple battery, you're fine. There are other security concerns, for instance, when on the phones with touch ID, which that se has, if you're replace the screen, you're also replacing the fingerprint reader. There are security concerns, and Apple's very aware of this. And they're trying to figure out a way to make it possible to repair screens, which are the things that break most often on phones and maintain the security of your fingerprint recognition of your touch ID. That's more complicated and does again, require a connecting it to an apple machine to, to certify it say it's okay. But I, but I, I, I think to be fair to apple, I don't think they're, they're trying to protect their monopoly on repair cuz they make money on it. I really don't think so. They have other pretty much legitimate reasons for saying no, no, we, we wanna repair. Dennis is on the line from Monrovia, Wisconsin. Hi Dennis. Leo Laporte. The tech guy.

Caller 2 (00:47:36):
Yeah. First time caller.

Leo Laporte (00:47:38):
Yay. I love that. Welcome.

Caller 2 (00:47:42):
Wow. Thank you. So I have a 20 19 21 or 2021 Q L E D. Samsung 65 inch smart TV.

Leo Laporte (00:47:52):
You just woke, you just woke Scott up. I saw him sit up <laugh> I saw him sit up abruptly. Okay. Yes.

Caller 2 (00:47:58):
And it's hooked up to a RX V 3 7 9, Yamaha receiver. Okay. Sound sound works great. When I'm watching direct TV, everything it just for perfect. I reset the, the TV and the Yamaha receiver cause I was having some issues and everything is working fine, except for I'm watching TV. The sound is perfect. I hit the Netflix button on my smart TV remote or I go to the app on the bottom of the TV and select Netflix. And there's no sound on Netflix at all. If I hit the button and go back to standard television, the sound is there. And then if I flip right back and go to Netflix, now I've got sound. This is, I have to do that procedure.

Leo Laporte (00:48:44):
This is crazy to get. This is crazy. It's really weird. It's very common. I have to say this, getting the sound to work. I've been, I've beat my head against the, a wall for three days this week doing, having the same problem at first I would've said Scott, oh, you're not on the auto arc. The audio return channel on the on the TV. But it's how come you can get it working again?

Scott Wilkinson (00:49:08):
I, that that's a mystery

Leo Laporte (00:49:10):
Puzzle. It's that's a,

Scott Wilkinson (00:49:11):
This is a puzzle.

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:49:13):
Is a

Leo Laporte (00:49:13):
Puzzlement. So normally the way it works, you'll have, you'll see on your TV, you'll have a number of HTMI ports, but one's labeled arc or even better if you've got it E arc, your modern TV probably does have E a that's the HTM I port you want to use

Caller 2 (00:49:30):
To, it tells me to use port number three.

Leo Laporte (00:49:32):
Okay. That's the one that, is

Scott Wilkinson (00:49:34):
That the one labeled arc?

Caller 2 (00:49:36):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
Okay.

Caller 2 (00:49:38):
Then I think it is, I think it is E a R C.

Leo Laporte (00:49:40):
Yeah. I'm sure it is with that. It's a brand new TV. The Yamaha. Is that, is it a is it Doby? Is it a modern AV receiver?

Caller 2 (00:49:51):
Yeah. It's a pretty new receiver. It's a Yamaha 3 79.

Leo Laporte (00:49:54):
Sometimes that's a problem where the receiver can't understand what it's getting back from the E E a, you know, it's getting an encoded signal and the receiver goes, what's this, in fact, I think it's gonna be this my guess, Scott, I want you to weigh in a handshaking issue where the first time the receiver or is saying, I don't, what am I getting here? I don't know. And not playing anything back the second time it tries again and the handshake happens and it says, oh, you're sending me DTS, surround I can handle that. And then it decodes it.

Scott Wilkinson (00:50:25):
That makes sense to me, me, I, I don't know for sure, but

Leo Laporte (00:50:29):
I would check the audio settings on the Netflix app, the audio settings on the TV, the audio settings on the Yamaha. And then I hate to say it, but sometimes it really does matter what order you turn these devices on.

Scott Wilkinson (00:50:40):
That's absolutely true.

Leo Laporte (00:50:42):
That's so much.

Caller 2 (00:50:43):
Yeah. And I'm not getting, I'm not getting any sound like if I select go down and not select Netflix, but I select free free TV on my app. I don't get any sound there at all either.

Leo Laporte (00:50:55):
And it never works.

Caller 2 (00:50:56):
And that never works. I can't, I can't see. I can't

Scott Wilkinson (00:50:59):
Go back to the TV and then back to that and it works.

Caller 2 (00:51:02):
No, no, I can't get it to work.

Leo Laporte (00:51:06):
Hmm. This is, this is a great puzzlement. It is.

Caller 2 (00:51:09):
It is. And I was thinking of doing a reset on the TV again and see what happens.

Leo Laporte (00:51:13):
Yeah. I've done that. And that sometimes does help. It's kind of telling, is

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:17):
It working before you did all the resetting?

Caller 2 (00:51:20):
Yes, it was working before I did all the reset, but there was something going on with the receiver. So I did a reset. I had called Samsung and they told me to do a reset on both. And I did that and now I've got this problem. So I do now

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:33):
Wonder if the reset, I wonder if the reset also downloaded a, an updated firmware that had a problem in it?

Caller 2 (00:51:42):
I don't know.

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:44):
I don't know. As it ti, as Leo says, TIS a puzzlement,

Leo Laporte (00:51:47):
It's always this, I wish this worked better. The other thing, and I didn't even bring it up. We're running at a time is CEC can also cause issues. Aye. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. We gotta break Leola port the tech guy. Thank you, Scott. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> hang on Dennis. Cuz we can continue to discuss in the Blake in the Blake.

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:12):
Okay. Dennis, what was the model of the TV and the receiver again?

Caller 2 (00:52:18):
The receiver is a RX V 3 7 9. Yamaha.

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:25):
Let me, let me just quickly look that up. Hang on a second. R RX V 7 93,

Caller 2 (00:52:34):
No, 3 79 0 3 79.

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:43):
Let's see here. When did that come out?

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
You think maybe it's a, the

Caller 2 (00:52:51):
Receiver. I would say it's probably about, I don't know, four years old, maybe. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:56):
It's possible. The receiver can't understand.

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:59):
It's okay. Well it's discontinued so yeah, it is kind of older, but I mean semi older, four years being old is like what? Let's see here. I mean, it, it obviously does accept arc UN undoubtedly not E arc,

Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
But oh, maybe that's you think that's the problem?

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:24):
I don't think, think so. What's the model of the TV again?

Caller 2 (00:53:28):
It's a Samsung 65 inch Q L E D.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:35):
But you don't know the exact model number?

Caller 2 (00:53:37):
Oh yeah. I could give you the exact model number. 

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:43):
Do you think he needs a different HT. M I cable shouldn't well, again, it worked before,

Caller 2 (00:53:53):
So it's a Samsung, Q N 43, Q N 90 a a F X, Z a.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:07):
Okay. 43 QN 90 is really kinda all

Caller 2 (00:54:10):
I need that. That's that's stuck.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:15):
Yeah. That's pretty new.

Caller 2 (00:54:17):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:17):
That's pretty darn new actually. QN 90, a 43 inch. That's a 2021. So that's, that's that shouldn't be any problem whatsoever. You don't happen to have like a, an outboard streamer. Do you like a Roku or an apple TV? Something like that? Nope. Nope.

Caller 2 (00:54:40):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:40):
Nothing like that using the internal apps on this, on the TV and that's what you're using it for. Nope.

Caller 2 (00:54:45):
Yep. And, and I was working, like I say, just fine prior to

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:49):
Yeah. This the fact that it stopped working after the update makes me think that the update did something and what update sometimes do is they it wasn't an update. It was a reset. Oh, reset. A reset. But sometimes the reset will update. We'll do an update. Oh, I wonder that's that's my question. Yeah. and you did a reset on the receiver as well?

Caller 2 (00:55:23):
Yes.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:27):
Hmm. Well, the receiver is older,

Caller 2 (00:55:35):
So yeah, my, my my settings on my TV say HDM, I dash E arc mode and it says off,

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:46):
Oh, <laugh> maybe turn that on.

Caller 2 (00:55:50):
Yeah. I'll put it to auto once.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:53):
Yeah. And also, yeah, I always like to turn off or on CEC and play with that because CEC, right. I would turn it off.

Caller 2 (00:56:01):
And the, and the dig, there's another one that says digital output audio format, and that's on auto and there's a selection for PCM also.

Caller 2 (00:56:14):
But I don't have a digital output hooked up.

Scott Wilkinson (00:56:18):
I don't believe. Well, it could, that could also apply to the, to the arc signal as well. I would play with that. I would maybe the only options are auto and PCM, right?

Caller 2 (00:56:30):
Yeah. Let me hit once to see what happens.

Scott Wilkinson (00:56:33):
Not, not bitstream.

Leo Laporte (00:56:36):
Do you want bitstream sometimes

Scott Wilkinson (00:56:38):
Not necessarily. I think, I think PCM would probably be more likely work. Guess

Caller 2 (00:56:47):
What? Yeah. It's working.

Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Oh my God.

Scott Wilkinson (00:56:51):
Did you set it? Did you set it to PCM?

Caller 2 (00:56:53):
I said it to PCM and I said it to a auto. Yep. And I went I'm gonna, just, I'm gonna turn

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:02):
I betcha. I know what happened when you reset it. Reset those parameters back to the factory settings.

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
Oh yes, of course it did. Of course it did. That's exactly it. Mm. And those weren't the settings you want.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:16):
Correct. Got it.

Leo Laporte (00:57:18):
No,

Caller 2 (00:57:18):
Obviously, so I, I, I turned the TV off and the receiver off. No, I'm gonna hit.

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
Yeah. Let's see. This is the part where I wanna hang up on you and say, thank you for joining us. And we're glad we solved the problem. Bye. Yeah. Right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:32):
That it doesn't solve the problem. Right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
I won't do that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:39):
So we shall see you here.

Caller 2 (00:57:40):
It works.

Leo Laporte (00:57:41):
Oh, we fixed it. Yeah. So let, so I'll recap at, when I, we come back. Yeah. The, the reset of the TV reset to default parameters, which in fact, weren't the proper parameters you want, ER, to be on auto. Yep. And what was the other thing?

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:58):
Digital audio out to PCM

Leo Laporte (00:58:00):
PCM digital audio.

Caller 2 (00:58:02):
So I did both of those things. And now when I flip the Netflix or I go to one of the shows, the TV

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:09):
App,

Caller 2 (00:58:09):
They both work.

Leo Laporte (00:58:11):
Yay. Yay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:13):
We solved

Leo Laporte (00:58:14):
It well till next week. All right. Thank you. I'm glad you called. And I'm glad Scott was still here, Dennis. Good job.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:24):
Yeah, man.

Caller 2 (00:58:25):
Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (00:58:26):
You're welcome. Oh my God. I can't believe it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I think that's a first <laugh>

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:31):
<Laugh> oh, Mike Heis here had something about reset too. What did Mike have to say in the chat room? Where let me try to

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
Scott is also correct. Always try PCM first. See if it works bitstream may or may not work with his system combination is what he said. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:49):
Yeah. Mike said, said the same thing. Resets often put settings back to factory. Yeah. So he needs to make sure that arc is turned on for both sides. Perfect. Exactly. So perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:59:01):
Yay. Now you can have two minutes and 52 seconds to talk about anything you want to talk about.

Scott Wilkinson (00:59:09):
Hello everybody. I do hope you go check out my home theater of the month and latest podcast. I'm quite proud of both of them. So hope you can enjoy Mike ki. Yes. I'm also correct. Always try PCM first and see if it works bitstream may or may not work. That's true. Bitstream by the way, for those of you who don't know is Doby digital or DTS uncoded, it's the encoded bit stream and the receiver should be able to decode Doby digital or, or DTS. But if it's some other bit stream that happens to be coming from an app, then might not. So let the TV do the decoding.

Leo Laporte (00:59:57):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (00:59:58):
And, and it decodes to PCM and every everything can understand PCM.

Scott Wilkinson (01:00:06):
So let's see tech, Dynas asking about the new house. I, we are so pleased to have our, we will have a new house here in Santa Cruz. It'll be our very own, Hey loquacious. Always good to see ya. Always good. Hey Kay. Woods. yep. Just, just put a down payment on or a deposit down on my new hot tub for the new house. Woohoo. That's very exciting. Next week we have a, a designer coming in to help us design the remodel that we're gonna do. We're gonna put a third bathroom into the house. So that's very exciting. We don't even have to move in right away and we can do it slowly. It's only a couple miles away. All very exciting. Hey Gumby. Good to see ya friendly Manitoba, always good to have a friendly face. J me or, or Hames. So Sony or Samsung O led. This is a very good question. I am going to be getting one of them and I'm gonna be doing research and I will share my research with you as I do it about which one to get the Sony is a thousand dollars more expensive.

Leo Laporte (01:01:26):
All right, Scott. Thank you.

Scott Wilkinson (01:01:28):
My pleasure.

Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers and the internet and home, the inner internet and home theater and digital photography and smartphone and smart watches. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is my phone number. If you wanna talk high tech, I'd love to talk high tech with you. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. That's toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You could still reach us, but you'll have to use Skype. Something like that, Skype out something I call a phone number should be free. Still show notes, go@techguylabs.com. I don't know how I'm gonna put this in a show note, but we did after some time Scott and I and mostly Scott entirely Scott figured out <laugh> what was going on with the TV. And I'm happy to say the last caller of the, the hour.

Leo Laporte (01:02:19):
We were able to send him away a happy customer and ring the problem, solved bell, dinging, ding dinging. So it it turned out in case you're interested. It turned out, and this is something probably to put in your back of your brain and your make your note of the reset of the TV and the Yamaha as recommended by the manufacturer was the first step, the right first step. But it wasn't the last step. It set everything back as you would expect a factory defaults and he then needed to go in Dennis needed, then go in and do a couple more things. First of all, set E arc, which he had turned off to auto. So that means that the H D M I cabled plugged into the TV, talking to the receiver will, if the receiver understands it, send it things the receiver can handle.

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
So turn that to auto. And then most importantly, and this is interesting set the output of the TV, not to some encode it saying not to bitstream, but to PCM, which is essentially saying you don't do anything TV. Don't try to decode it. Let let the Yamaha let the receiver handle it, send the receiver, the PCM content, and then the receiver will decode it and having done all that we're happy to say we don't normally have the the time to do this on the air, but he stuck around during the news break a success <laugh>. So we, we ring the problem, solve bell, which I haven't, which I should get. I should get a little dinging, cuz problem is we rarely need it. Trevor is next on the line from CLA burn, Texas. Hello, Trevor.

Caller 3 (01:04:06):
Hello, sir. So my question is I'm a school teacher. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:04:11):
Wait a minute. I got it wrong. Don't do PCM do bitstream sorry. Vice versa. PCM does send it out and coded piece bitstream is the one you want. Thank you for the correction chat room. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Caller 3 (01:04:24):
Yes. So I'm a schoolteacher. I talked to you last month about a video thing. We're gonna get that block magic item you, we were doing TV broadcast, but yeah, my current, my current problem is this. So we had the old laptops, the screen was four, three, the projector that they had bought years ago, it, it can do 16 nine, but when you do 69, it's really, I guess the word thin, I don't know the, the correct terminology. So now I have a 16, nine laptop and a kind of four, three projector, right? And now I can, I can change the resolutions on the projector. I can change the resolutions on the computer. The best thing I can do to get the, be the biggest screen is go. And it's an NEN projector is to go to native resolution that's right. And then make and make my Chrome browser smaller and fit it on the screen. I was just curious if there was any other device or any other strategy, because even by going with native, making the Chrome browser small, and if I make it full screen, it cuts it off. It cuts off part of the browser.

Leo Laporte (01:05:30):
We have this problem all the time because we have computers that are one resolution, one aspect ratio. That's what that 16, nine is called aspect ratio. And then we send it to a device so that we can broadcast it. That's a different aspect ratio. You've got 16 nine, which is the modern wide screen aspect ratio on your computer, but the projector's older and it's doing the old four three, which is, you know, that's the, I love Lucy aspect ratio. That's the,

Caller 3 (01:05:57):
Well, what I'm saying is I can put it in 16 nine, but it gets so small.

Leo Laporte (01:06:02):
Yeah. What you'll get is bars right at the top and bottom, it's showing everything that's on the 16 by nine screen, but it, but it's a different shape. So yes, sir. So the only way a, a four, three shape can display a 16, nine shape is to, is to stretch the 69 all the way left to right, and then put black bars at the top and bottom where there's nothing, but you don't want that. So what you wanna do is tell the computer, in fact, the computer should kind of do this automatically. When you look at the display settings on the computer, there are two displays. There's the, the native display on the computer, but then there's the display that, that projector's capable of. It should be. And maybe it's not seeing the projector or it doesn't understand what the projector's capable of. It should be seeing that that's a four, three display and then adjust it. Now what will happen often? You're mirroring, you're mirroring the display from your computer onto the projector. That's right. What will happen then is your, your projector will look fine. Four, three, but your screen on your computer's gonna have black bars on the left. And right now all of a sudden, right? Yeah. Does that happen?

Caller 3 (01:07:11):
Well, right now I'm mirroring it. And so

Leo Laporte (01:07:15):
Maybe if you said it would work a little bit better, it might be worth a try. Anyway, what that says is I have two screens they don't have to match, so I can have 16 by nine on my screen on my computer. And then you'll have to drag Chrome to the right or left, you know, drag Chrome to the projector. And then the projector will be displaying it at four by three, but it's, it's gonna look like four by three. I mean, I understand that what's happening now is that Chrome everything's giant. You, you can adjust Chrome to make, you know, tech smaller and stuff like that. But you know, that's what happens cuz it's a, it's a, the screen aspect ratio is, is, is smaller than the wide screen. If that makes sense.

Caller 3 (01:08:00):
Yeah. I'm currently in my classroom som 

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
So that's a couple, so a couple things to play with. One, make sure that, that the display control panel sees the external screen as a four, three screen. And you know, if you, if you can get a driver for that projector that might help all a driver is a display driver is, is a list of as a text file with a list of things that the, the screen can do. And if it knows that the screen can only do four, three, then the, then windows should say, ah, fine. If it's mirrored, we'll both be four three. And if it's extended, I'll be 16, nine. And that's silly old projector before three one,

Caller 3 (01:08:36):
You know, I'm sorry. I just did that right now. Yeah. And yeah, when I did, I went from mirroring to extended and that solved my issue. I got a nice, full, big image now on my emitting from the projector.

Leo Laporte (01:08:51):
I think I really do need a problem solved bill. This is the first time ever. Holy cow. Okay. I'm not, this is where I hang up on you before you figure out I screwed you up. Okay.

Caller 3 (01:09:02):
No, it looks great.

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
<Laugh> okay. Good. <laugh> woo.

Caller 3 (01:09:06):
Well, you have a, you have a great day, Sarah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:07):
All right. Hey, I'm glad. Thank you for being a teacher. That's a, especially now that's a very important job. What, what do you teach?

Caller 3 (01:09:16):
I teach third grade math and science. Oh, the town's called Clayburn south of Fort worth. 

Leo Laporte (01:09:22):
Oh, I mispronounced it. I'm sorry. I said CLE burn. <Laugh> I'm so sorry, Clayburn. Yeah, I know C

Caller 3 (01:09:29):
And but as a I've taught for several years, I've taught K through five computers, seventh and eighth computers, nine through 12 high school journalism. So I've seen everything from pre-K to 12, but wow. My favorite is third and fourth.

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
I love that age. I really do. They're so adorable, but how are they doing? You're now in person again? Yes.

Caller 3 (01:09:51):
Yeah. We may I guess March 20, 20 to May, 2020 school was shut down, but in Texas back in August, 2020, went back to normal.

Leo Laporte (01:10:01):
Good, good.

Caller 3 (01:10:02):
And yeah, the you know, there's definitely

Leo Laporte (01:10:05):
There's an impact isn't

Caller 3 (01:10:06):
There I gap. Yeah. There's I mean, huge impact, especially on my case in mass it's subtraction regrouping. When you're doing like 61 minus 27. Got

Leo Laporte (01:10:16):
It all. <Laugh> they forget it all.

Caller 3 (01:10:18):
Yeah. That's the, that's the big thing I work on, but yeah. It's people like you and my friends and everybody helping out that we nice parents and administrators, all, we're all, we're all in this together to make a better world.

Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
You better, you, you bet. You're doing the most important job in the world. If, if you ask me, so thank you for doing that work. All right, Trevor, have a good one. Have a great one. I appreciate it. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number. (888) 827-5536. I'm gonna go get me a bell. <Laugh> and when we come back, we'll take some more calls. Leo, do you want me to do you don't you're pausing for some reason professor Laura, do you want me to do something now or no? No. You're just waiting for me to say, take it away or am. Thank you. <Laugh> oh, you can't hit that button too soon either. Can you all right. That's what they say. It's been a while. You know, I forgot how to do this thing called radio. Leah LaPorte. The tech guy. Yeah. We, we won't tell Trevor

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
We, we forget everything we learned the minute school end <laugh> don't don't tell him that. I still know how to do for subtraction. I do. I know how to do the grouping. I do. So, yeah, I apologize. Bitstream not PCM. Sorry about that. I almost screwed. Somebody said you snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Bitstream PCM is an encoded. That's the TV doing the encoding bitstream is just whatever you get, you pass it along to the Yama. The hammer. Yeah. Yama hammer. Aha. Anyway, his prob right? He's he's fine. Wait a minute, Scott. No, wait a minute. Now you're saying, wait a minute. I thought you, oh God, I'm gonna just

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:24):
Leo. Leo. Are you? Am I on?

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah. It's PCM. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:29):
You, you got it backwards, man. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:12:30):
Sorry. Say, well, wait a minute. The first time I said PCM and then everybody, and I thought you said no, no, no. Bitstream

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:37):
No, no, no, no. I said PCM. I said don't do bitstream.

Leo Laporte (01:12:42):
So the, so I said, oh God, I said it right the first time

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:45):
You

Leo Laporte (01:12:45):
Did. And then everybody in the chat room said, no, you get it wrong.

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:49):
No, no, no.

Leo Laporte (01:12:50):
Oh, son of it. You,

Scott Wilkinson (01:12:52):
I know, I know. I'm sorry. So sorry, but here's the deal you wanna set the TV to output PCM. PCM is not encoded.

Leo Laporte (01:13:00):
That's what I thought

Scott Wilkinson (01:13:01):
You are correct the first time. And, and so the, the receiver will be able to understand it at

Leo Laporte (01:13:07):
PCM is so, so I said it right. And I see I'm seeing in the chat room, you said it's the other way around.

Scott Wilkinson (01:13:13):
You said it. Yeah. When you said it was bit, when, when you said set the TV to output bitstream that's when I said no, it's the other way around.

Leo Laporte (01:13:22):
Okay.

Scott Wilkinson (01:13:23):
You, you set the TV to output PCM, let the TV do the decoding. It's gonna get it's apps are going to get Doby, digital or DTS or whatever bit stream the TV does. The decoding sends that PCM to the receiver and the receiver won't have any trouble with it.

Leo Laporte (01:13:46):
All right. Anyway, we, we got it, right? Yeah. I said it right the first time. In other words,

Scott Wilkinson (01:13:49):
You said it right the first time.

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
Yeah. And then I saw your post saying it's the other way around. And I switched. So anyway, but,

Scott Wilkinson (01:13:56):
But, but I I'm telling you, I, I wrote that post after you switched it yourself and said, no, no, you said it to PC.

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):
That's why I switched it. Why you

Scott Wilkinson (01:14:05):
Said, you said it to be, you said it to be bitstream. I don't know why you switched it to bitstream

Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
I switched it. Cuz I saw saw the chat room.

Scott Wilkinson (01:14:12):
Well, it was a negative feedback loop here then

Leo Laporte (01:14:15):
<Laugh> I'm looking at it right here. It's the other way around. That's the first thing. And I was responding to that. I don't understand it. Anyway,

Scott Wilkinson (01:14:28):
Well, I, I wrote that after you changed it from

Leo Laporte (01:14:32):
PCM to business, why would I have changed it though? I have no idea.

Scott Wilkinson (01:14:35):
I no, no. That's why I wrote it. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:14:40):
Okay. This is the first mention in the chat room. That's why I'm thinking it was because of that, that I changed it anyway. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Thank you, Scott. So just like Humphrey Bogart who came to Casablanca for the waters <laugh> Irish mission formed. I want to correct my correction of the correction one more time. And I'm convinced I'm correct. At this point <laugh> ER, auto and said it to PCM, not bitstream PCM, which is what I said the first time. Anyway, we got it. Now Megan, on the line from San Diego, California. Hi Megan Leola port, the tech guy.

Caller 4 (01:15:24):
Yay. <laugh> you are my superhero. Yay. Yay. I'm calling. Because I have a question regarding spam texting. Okay. I have an LG style of five mm-hmm <affirmative> and when I get, when I, I figured out how to hit it, you know, the text and get reports, spammer. I got through that. I was wondering, is there a way, because I'm still getting

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
And you notice it does nothing, right? <Laugh> it

Caller 4 (01:15:57):
Does absolutely nothing. And I, and I dunno if I, I have like the robo killer on my cell phone, which is great. I can take care of that. I can block calls on my mom's old Panasonic, which I'm talking to right now. Cause my phone is sitting in front of me, my cell phone or my yes, smartphone. And so that I can, I hit call block and it works and this is a, you know, 1980, right. Panasonic. Right, right. And so I, I would love to have something where I could say block it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:25):
Here's the problem and you're not alone. And this is a nightmare. Yes. and you can blame a couple of things I'm blaming now the FCC because they keep changing the deadlines. Oh,

Caller 4 (01:16:38):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:16:39):
First of all, those spam texts and robocalls too, for that matter. Yes. Those things are coming from bad guys. Yes. Most of the time out of the United States. Although not always. In fact, they arrested a guy a couple of years ago who had set some billions of spam robocalls. He was doing it outta Florida. They got him. But that's why most of these people are offshore. Yeah. But here's the most important thing to know. They changed the originating phone number all the time.

Caller 4 (01:17:09):
Yeah. They use like the spoofing thing.

Leo Laporte (01:17:11):
Yeah. Sometimes it'll be your not only your area code, but your exchange. So you think, oh, this must be the school calling or you know

Caller 4 (01:17:19):
Exactly. Yeah. And then the other problem is it's this actually, sometimes doesn't even come from an area code I know or anything. Right. And so there'll be random. And I would just love to be able to do the

Leo Laporte (01:17:30):
Blocking. Here's the problem blocking yes. Only blocks that phone number.

Caller 4 (01:17:35):
I know, but I still would love to block just any.

Leo Laporte (01:17:37):
But do you notice that any of those numbers ever repeat? No, because they're randomly chosen. So you're blocking a number. That's never gonna come up again. Here's why I blame the FCC. The only way to stop this mm-hmm <affirmative> is to make people use their actual numbers. Right. Instead of some fake number,

Caller 4 (01:17:57):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
Because then a block would work.

Caller 4 (01:17:59):
But then the only problem I'm concerned about is if like, let's say I get that number and let's say I put it in my phone and then I block that number from texting or calling me. I don't want them in my contacts. So that's the only option. And

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
They shouldn't be in your contacts.

Caller 4 (01:18:13):
No, they, but I was told that I should well put the phone.

Leo Laporte (01:18:17):
Oh no, no. Yeah. That's an even worse solution. I

Caller 4 (01:18:19):
Know they said hit the ad

Leo Laporte (01:18:20):
Button. No, no, no, no. That's an even worse solution. Cause then that a worst. Yeah, no, no, no, no. When normally what, what reporting it should do is report it to your carrier who will then block that number. But as I said, who cares? They're never gonna use that number again. You think spammers are dumb?

Caller 4 (01:18:37):
Well, I

Leo Laporte (01:18:37):
They're evil, but they're not dumb

Caller 4 (01:18:39):
Have the same numbers, but definitely the exchanges are always the same.

Leo Laporte (01:18:43):
Yeah. But you can't block an exchange. You don't wanna block an exchange. Right.

Caller 4 (01:18:46):
I know that's and I know that's the, I thought maybe I just block that. No, these exchanges.

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
So again, there is a solution. FCC has had this in hand for some time. Yeah. Is something called stir and shaken and somebody somewhere. Is it

Caller 4 (01:18:59):
James stir and shaken.

Leo Laporte (01:19:00):
Yeah. But it's not gonna help you. Hold on. <Laugh> okay.

Caller 4 (01:19:03):
I thought, oh, it's like

Leo Laporte (01:19:04):
James Bond. It's James Bond. Yeah. And what it does is it says to the person, the phone company, cuz every call has to come from a phone company somewhere to the phone company. You have to use technology that authenticates this phone number that says yes, this phone number is by, from a subscriber on my service. And then on the other end, your phone company T-Mobile at and T whoever it is, your phone company has technology that says, oh, okay, that's verified. Pass it on through. And what, this would be a great solution except the FCC keeps putting off implementation.

Caller 4 (01:19:43):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:19:44):
Geez. So the phone companies are ready to do it.

Caller 4 (01:19:47):
They're ready to

Leo Laporte (01:19:48):
Do that. They're ready to do it. The FCC see I think probably cuz companies said, well, wait a minute. If we have to implement this, it's gonna cost amount of money. Yeah. A problem. So in theory, <laugh> on June 30th, which was a month ago ago. Yeah. all the large companies had implemented stirred and shaken, but here's the problem the bad guys don't use at and T T-Mobile and Verizon, they use, you know, the Jamaica phone company, you know,

Caller 4 (01:20:25):
So gotcha.

Leo Laporte (01:20:26):
Small carriers were allowed an extension.

Caller 4 (01:20:31):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:20:31):
And now this, the good news is this, the world is shrinking for these spammers. So the extension means that only small voice service providers that have facilities that have a building cannot do this. Everybody else, the big companies and the little guys who don't have a facility have to have changed this by June 30th. At that point, your, your phone company can say that is not authenticated. That is not coming in there. The company that's originating, this call is not validating that it's a genuine call. So we're not gonna take it. Now we realize you why the phone company doesn't do that. Cuz they don't wanna block a call that you want from your mom in Jamaica.

Caller 4 (01:21:12):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:21:13):
<Laugh> so, so they're so they've got, you know, they're gotta be careful about this, but ultimately once and I, I can't remember when the next date is, I think it's it's a year off or something. Once all the carriers in the world are using this, then you can go to your phone company and say, why aren't you blocking unauthenticated calls? And then unauthenticated calls that, that, that the originating company doesn't say yes, this person's a subscriber and this is their actual phone number. Not some made up phone number. Okay. Once that happens, it's gonna go away. And I think because the bad guys know this, yeah, there is an onslaught now they're more than ever because they're going, this is it. Last chance. Gotta do it. According to the FCC, there were 4 billion robo calls a month in 20, 20 a month.

Caller 4 (01:22:01):
Well, I'm getting more the spam Rob robot

Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
And getting span, texts and stuff

Caller 4 (01:22:06):
More than,

Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
And again, same thing because this is their last chance.

Caller 4 (01:22:12):
And, and, and I've been really happy. Well, so I have Verizon and they have, they do have a spam feature and it says potential

Leo Laporte (01:22:19):
Spam.

Caller 4 (01:22:20):
Yep. I, I do it. It doesn't work.

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
Add your reg your number to the national call do not call registry. Yes. Cuz on this stuff works unless the caller is a law abiding citizen. Guess what? They're not,

Caller 4 (01:22:33):
They're not,

Leo Laporte (01:22:33):
They're not. So now it's gonna come down to the phone companies rejecting those calls cuz they say, well, we don't know who you are once they do that, it'll be a, his it'll be history. Let's cross your fingers. Leola port the tech guy. It there's an FCC page on all this that you might want to go to. I'll put it in the show notes. Oh she hung up. Oh, well I'll put it. I'll put it in the show notes right now. Whoa. That's wrong? What's that? What's that? Hey Johnny jet Leo. How are you? I am sick as a dog. No COVID I got COVID on that cruise.

Johnny Jet (01:23:09):
Oh my God. You know what? I was gonna send you an email saying to my friend just got off that cruise on July 9th. She took the July 9th one and she said everyone on the ship got COVID.

Leo Laporte (01:23:18):
Yeah. Well I don't think everybody on the ship got it this time. But in fact I think the cruise line, somebody told me the cruise line said 60 people. Got it. I don't think that. Okay. I

Johnny Jet (01:23:30):
Don't know. Well, she was like she said she was so careful she wrote a post on it.

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Yeah, we could talk about this. I mean she, I, the good news is cuz I'm vaccinated. Just like your dad. It was very mild. Yeah. Lisa got it a little bit worse than I did, but both of us are clear now, so,

Johnny Jet (01:23:47):
And you got, you were double you're both double

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
Boosted or yep. Double boosted.

Johnny Jet (01:23:51):
See, I'm not double boosted. I'm only single boosted.

Leo Laporte (01:23:53):
Well now you can't get double boosted because

Johnny Jet (01:23:57):
They're coming out with new

Leo Laporte (01:23:57):
One coming out with a new one in the fall, which will be preferable. Cuz it'll cover Omicron. Actually I supposedly they say boost, see it'll cover all the variants.

Johnny Jet (01:24:06):
Although I think you still can get double boosted. I was just watching one of the do

Leo Laporte (01:24:09):
On TV. Maybe you're 50 for sure you can. 

Johnny Jet (01:24:14):
Well I just turned over 50, so

Leo Laporte (01:24:15):
Oh congratulations. You're that old damn you look like you're 35.

Johnny Jet (01:24:21):
I appreciate it.

Leo Laporte (01:24:21):
Damn.

Johnny Jet (01:24:23):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:24:24):
I mean darn shucks. That's impressive. That's impressive.

Johnny Jet (01:24:31):
I'm the same age as JLo and you know the girl from all those, a lot of those stars, Jennifer Anderson.

Leo Laporte (01:24:40):
I know they all look good. How come I'm so wrinkly

Johnny Jet (01:24:44):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:24:48):
The good news was it was very mild. The also the good news, I shouldn't say this was, I started getting a sore throat towards the, you know, like the halfway, maybe, maybe Wednesday or Thursday. Right. And, and I sh you know, you're supposed to go to the ship's doctor at which point they probably put you in ship jail. I don't know what they did. They,

Johnny Jet (01:25:10):
They, they quarantined you.

Leo Laporte (01:25:11):
Yeah. So I just said crossed my fingers said maybe it's just a cold, maybe just cold. I didn't have any tests with me. So maybe just a cold that did, when I did tests, I found out, yeah, it wasn't a cold. But I did self quarantine.

Johnny Jet (01:25:23):
So

Leo Laporte (01:25:24):
How'd you test? I was very careful. Well, we got some tests later. Okay. But I was very careful. Anyway, I hope I didn't, I didn't spread it, spread it. I don't think I did. I was, I was, you know, really careful. Really, really careful.

Johnny Jet (01:25:39):
So do you think it's possible that it comes from the, the air conditioning unit? Cause I thought they were

Leo Laporte (01:25:44):
No, no, no. In fact I brought with me a, that carbon dioxide monitor. Yep. And everywhere in the boat was as if it was outside. Okay. 400, 400 to 500 carbon dioxide. It was fresh air. It was as good as if you were outside. Which I think the ships I'm sure. Blow fresh air into the whole darn thing you would, you would think. Yeah. But no, it wasn't stuffy anywhere. It was really impressive. I think probably it wasn't even the ship. It was probably the airport and the plane, frankly. Right. But here's the point, Lisa and I are very careful. We wore our masks, we wiped everything down. We were always very, very careful except eating and drinking on the airplane. Right. so I just don't know. I just don't know. I, I think BA is B five is so contagious. Yes. That it's even the, the, you know, now I'm wearing it's even though I've tested negative twice now I'm okay.

Leo Laporte (01:26:44):
But now I'm wearing this respirator, which is a hardcore, no air escapes at all. Cause it's got a rubber gasket and I feel like this I've been told, this is a good choice. American airlines block someone from letting them wear this scary looking, but nobody was masked anywhere by the way. Nobody and I, you know, I talked to a few people said, well, you know, we had, we've had Elron we just wanna live our lives. And I, and I understand that I really do. Right. now I, that question is for me, should what should I do? And I'm gonna just continue to be extremely careful. Here we go. Tech eye podcast brought to you and I mean, brought to you literally by those good folks at CacheFly go. We've been with them for 10 years now, more than 10 years, they solved a big problem, which is we had podcasts first audio, then video.

Leo Laporte (01:27:39):
And it was getting harder and harder to get those out to our listeners. Cash fly came along and man it's been nothing but golden ever since. And now cashflow is some new features. So what is cash flight? It's a CD and a content delivery network with more than 50 points of presence all over the world. That's a good thing for us, cuz it means when you're downloading our shows, you're getting it from a server that's geographically close to you. That means it's faster. It means if there are any outages there's another server that you can get it from there. So it's, it's very good availability. Now they're offering, I think something amazing ultra low latency, video streaming. So you can deliver your video with cash, fly with the best throughput, the best global reach, making your content almost infinitely scalable. And with this, you can go live in hours, not days, get this sub one second latency.

Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
That's amazing ditch that unreliable web RTC solution for web socket live video, scalable to millions, cash lies, ultra low latency, video streaming. They also have something we've been using kind of unofficially for a long time. And that I really like they call it their storage optimization system. Basically your cash hit ratios a hundred percent because you're storing on cash flies servers. It takes a load off your origin servers reduces your S3 bill or whatever you're using. And it means that whenever somebody wants to watch or listen to your content or download your game or whatever it is, your app, they're gonna get it directly. Instantly from CacheFly. They have fully managed CDN solutions. Most people don't wanna spend energies managing your CDN. I love it because we don't ever think about it. It just, it just works. Right? Ized elite managed packages will give you V I P treatment 24 7 support response times in less than an hour.

Leo Laporte (01:29:35):
Frankly, we've had VIP treatments since day one from cash flight. They're just a great company. So what do you get? Ultra low latency, video streaming, lightning, fast gaming, which delivers downloads faster, no lag, no glitches, no outages, mobile content optimization. So you have automatic and simple image optimization. That means your site will load faster on any device. And of course, multiple CDNs for redundancy and failover, the intelligently balance, your traffic across multiple riders, giving you the shortest route, mitigating against performance glitches. It works so well. Cashflow has had 100% availability over the last year. Not five nines, not 10 nines, a hundred percent availability over the last 12 months, 10 times faster than traditional methods on six continents, 30% faster than other major CDNs, a 98% cash hit ratio, CacheFly and best of all, of course, 24 7 365 priority support. So you know, they're always there for you when you need them. We love them. They've been great for us. Thank you, CacheFly. And as I always say, bandwidth for the tech guy provided by CacheFly@cacheydotcomcashfly.com. You check it out. It's good for you too. Cash. Fly.Com. Thank you. Cash fly. And now back

Johnny Jet (01:30:53):
To the show

Leo Laporte (01:30:55):
He's been everywhere. Man is breathing the mountain air man, Mr. Johnny jet traveling GU guru travel better with tech, Johnny jet.com. He's got newsletters there. He's on Instagram. He's on Twitter and he's back home. Welcome home, Johnny.

Johnny Jet (01:31:12):
Thank you. You know, I called in the last couple weeks and I totally spaced that you were going to be away cuz I was on a plane the week before that.

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
So you talked to mic, you talked to Mikah.

Johnny Jet (01:31:22):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Mikah's great.

Leo Laporte (01:31:24):
He's great. He really is. He's great. I'm fortunate that I can take some time off and have somebody so wonderful takeover. So but I'm glad you're back. You survived.

Johnny Jet (01:31:36):
I did.

Leo Laporte (01:31:37):
We're gone a long time. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:31:39):
Seven and a half weeks.

Leo Laporte (01:31:40):
Best thing about travel. I've decided is it makes you appreciate your home?

Johnny Jet (01:31:46):
Well, we did some amazing stuff. We were in on the east coast, Canada and I took my kids all over the place. And on the way from the airport home, I asked my son what was his favorite part? Yeah. And he was like coming home. Yeah. And I was like, what?

Leo Laporte (01:32:01):
Cuz you love your bed. You love your, you know, everything you've got at home, your coffee, whatever it's. But I mean, I love to travel. I look forward to it of course. Right. In this case Lisa and I both got C we got I'm sure was the new BA five version of COVID in our travels. I know some of the people cruising with us did also get, I know of at least three other people that got it. You know, we kind of knew that was a, a risk, I guess.

Johnny Jet (01:32:33):
So how were the flights going up? You flew, you flew out of Santa Rosa, right?

Leo Laporte (01:32:36):
Yeah. Which is great. But boy, and I brought with me that carbon dioxide monitor the terminal, no fresh air and nobody's wearing masks and you know, they have signs six feet apart we're sitting and somebody sits right behind me, like two inches away. And I'm thinking, oh, I guess you think because you're sitting faced another direction. It's okay. Nobody's wearing masks. We got on the plane. Nobody's you know, maybe, maybe one in three or one in four people was wearing a mask. We wore 'em and we still got it. Right. We wore 'em like, we're very careful. In fact, right. Two of two of my friends, Steve Gibson, Paul throughout both said Leo, you're almost a joke. You've been so careful for the last two years. Yeah. Just

Johnny Jet (01:33:21):
Shows you I'm the same way. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
Just shows you.

Johnny Jet (01:33:24):
So did you check a bag?

Leo Laporte (01:33:27):
Well it was a cruise, so we both had 50 pound <laugh> bags. Which

Johnny Jet (01:33:31):
Did you lose? Did they lose

Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
'Em they didn't because my bag Lisa's bag is not black. <Laugh> you saw the, my post, the guy who ran. Yeah. The guy who ran the Frankfurt airport blamed it on. Oh, so many people have blocked bags. Can't tell the difference. Yes, no,

Johnny Jet (01:33:46):
I wrote, I wrote a post about that

Leo Laporte (01:33:48):
That's cuz they fired 4,000 baggage handlers at the beginning of COVID and they've only been able to hire a thousand back. That's the problem.

Johnny Jet (01:33:56):
Totally

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Have actually I didn't lose any bags, although I do think it's a good idea to have a, I have a black bag, but it's a good idea to have a colorful bag.

Johnny Jet (01:34:03):
I use Rome luggage, which by the way, they're on sale right now till August 2nd sponsor.

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
Are they a sponsor?

Johnny Jet (01:34:09):
No, they're not a sponsor, but they did. They did give me a free bag. And this was a while ago.

Leo Laporte (01:34:14):
I don't even, I use Briggs and Riley cuz that's the classic. Right.

Johnny Jet (01:34:18):
But what I love about 'em is that you can design your own. We talked about it once before. Oh yeah. With a million, a million

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
Different. So not black bags, red and blue and green and whats the colors.

Johnny Jet (01:34:28):
I have it all different colors. And 

Leo Laporte (01:34:30):
I have to say they are, when you go to the carousel, they're all black.

Johnny Jet (01:34:34):
They are. They're all, you know, if you don't wanna spend money on a nice bag, get a strap, you can get straps

Leo Laporte (01:34:39):
To say G off. It's not your bag. That kind of thing. Yeah. But

Johnny Jet (01:34:42):
You need it. You need to strap like a cross. You need both directions. So you can see it if it's in a huge lineup.

Leo Laporte (01:34:49):
Good, good idea. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:34:52):
For that and you know, you know what

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
Your way, you know I do is I have an air tag in my bag, which also I, I think is helpful.

Johnny Jet (01:34:57):
I, I thought you told me you didn't like that idea.

Leo Laporte (01:35:00):
No, no. I do. I, you shouldn't go, you shouldn't climb on the conveyor belt and down the shoot to get your bag. People, people say, oh, I see my bag. And they literally, I don't know why they ever thought this was a good idea. Climbed into the conveyor belt to get their bed. Don't do that.

Johnny Jet (01:35:18):
I've never heard that's that's ridiculous. But

Leo Laporte (01:35:20):
At least, you know, well, my bag is

Johnny Jet (01:35:22):
Be UN killed that

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
Way. Yeah. I know the bag is around somewhere. Well, that's always the risk

Johnny Jet (01:35:26):
With this. So you do drop an, you do drop an air tag in.

Leo Laporte (01:35:28):
Oh yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:35:29):
Okay, good. I thought the only negative about a few weeks ago, you told me not to. I drop

Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
One in. I never said that the only negative is every time you leave your cabin or leave your hotel room, your iPhone says, you just left your bag behind you, left your bail behind

Johnny Jet (01:35:44):
Mine. Doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:35:44):
Do that. Well you can. I'm not sure. So the ans the trick on that is to go into your iPhone settings and say, I know where that that's a, that's a safe space for my bag and you just have to do it every time you get somewhere. That's a safe space. Don't tell me about it.

Johnny Jet (01:35:58):
Okay. So I might, so I must have already done that. But one of the services I mentioned to Mikah, while you were away is called blue ribbon bags. It's $5. They guarantee you that your bag will be at your destination airport within four days, 96 hours. Or they'll give you a thousand dollars. You spend $10, it's $2,000. And I'm like, please lose my bag. Especially the one with like dirty clothes. So that's, you know, that's a good little trick, although I've, I've heard mixed reviews on it, but you can look into it. Yeah. But the best thing to do is not check a bag. You really don't wanna check a bag. And if you're flying, let's say through on KLM, they're not even taking a check bag right now because Amsterdam is such a mess. And you also,

Leo Laporte (01:36:47):
They're not even taking check

Johnny Jet (01:36:49):
That's they a few days ago. They weren't. I think they still

Leo Laporte (01:36:52):
Aren't. That's amazing. Yeah, no, I, I am a big believer and you taught me this in, oh, you know, carry on if at all possible, but you know, in a cruise, you gotta have a tuxedo. You gotta have, did you wear

Johnny Jet (01:37:04):
The tux?

Leo Laporte (01:37:05):
Scott, you gotta have your top hat, your monocle, you can't just go on with a carryon

Johnny Jet (01:37:10):
Mole. Well, I've done it. So I'm, you're not the best dressed if I'm usually the least dressed. But

Leo Laporte (01:37:17):
If you don't mind not dressing up for the fancy dinners and right. You, if you have laundry service or you don't mind rinsing your unmentionables in the sink, right?

Johnny Jet (01:37:27):
Yeah. Well, some, some nice cruises do give you laundry services or

Leo Laporte (01:37:30):
You can buy it. It's expensive, but you can buy it.

Johnny Jet (01:37:32):
That's that's ridiculous amount of money. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, we used to do it all the time. Carry on, but now we have kids, we check a U-Haul truck.

Leo Laporte (01:37:40):
<Laugh> yeah, that's right. I actually use you as an example of somebody who at one time was very Spartan in their carry-ons, but then babies and diaper bags and playpens, and you know, car seats

Johnny Jet (01:37:54):
In a few years when these guys, guys were old enough to carry their own clothes on the plane, their own bag, you know, we're doing carry on only. Yeah. But for now

Leo Laporte (01:38:03):
You all other big news jet blue and spirit frontier was trying to buy spirit that fell through

Johnny Jet (01:38:10):
Well, jet blue, just through a wrench into that. I mean, I couldn't believe it. Everyone was upset with jet blue because they did it the worst time was when jet blue was having these huge breakdown meltdowns during spring break. Yeah. They couldn't get their own service together. And then they're trying to put in a bid to buy another. That's already been already said, they're gonna partner. Yeah. But you know what? Jet blue would not let it go. Even though spirit, the CEO was like, not a chance. They just kept going after

Leo Laporte (01:38:39):
Also, it was a hostile takeover,

Johnny Jet (01:38:40):
Big time, five or six tries. And finally they're like, the price was so high that everyone knew that a spirit was gonna drop frontier.

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
It's gonna jeopardize jet blue. I mean, is this too much? Tell them to

Johnny Jet (01:38:52):
Think. I think if you're a jet blue customer, you're happy. If you're a spirit, you're not because spirit

Leo Laporte (01:38:59):
Really people fly spirit are unhappy, no matter what, that's the worst.

Johnny Jet (01:39:03):
Well, well, the thing with spirit is that they've allowed people who do not have the money to fly. You could buy $19 tickets and you know, well,

Leo Laporte (01:39:13):
That's good. That's a good thing. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:39:15):
It is. Especially if you know that they charge extra for carryon, they charge for bag that's, Well's the thing they charge for

Leo Laporte (01:39:21):
Everything.

Johnny Jet (01:39:22):
But people who are savvy and are just flying and not checking a bag and are

Leo Laporte (01:39:27):
Not too tall, cuz there's not a lot of seat room or

Johnny Jet (01:39:30):
29 inch pinch inch

Leo Laporte (01:39:33):
Pitch. But it pinch is a better word to be honest.

Johnny Jet (01:39:35):
<Laugh> it does pinch you. Yeah. But so I think the people, the spirit airlines customers are not gonna be happy because they're gonna fly as jet blue. They're

Leo Laporte (01:39:43):
They're gonna get rid of the super low prices. You think,

Johnny Jet (01:39:47):
You know what they, right now they're competing. As they say, they're gonna compete until this happens, which could take up to two

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Years. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:39:54):
So we'll see. In,

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
In general, any acquisitions reduce the size of the market reduce competition and in the long run, increased prices. I mean, I think that's just, almost always how it goes. Johnny jet.com. Read all about it at his website. Thank you, John.

Johnny Jet (01:40:08):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:40:12):
They always say, oh, we're not gonna change anything. Right. This is good for everybody. We're gonna have more roots. They always say that. And then, you know, two years later,

Johnny Jet (01:40:25):
But we'll see if they, if the government even allows it, but their argument is is that they're gonna be able to compete now with the big four, which is American Delta United and Southwest.

Leo Laporte (01:40:36):
Yeah. Cuz they're number five

Johnny Jet (01:40:38):
<Laugh> so these guys will be number five. Yeah. And they said, you know what? We'll now be able to, you know, put more fairs in there and fly to different

Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
Prices. Does size matter in in airlines? I mean, is it, you have to have a certain size to make it

Johnny Jet (01:40:52):
No, but

Leo Laporte (01:40:53):
Mean, I wouldn't think so if you've got the right roots and you've got, you know, the right business model.

Johnny Jet (01:40:57):
Well I think jet blue believes that that's, which is why they are. They were like, yeah, we need to do it. It was like based on survival because they, they, one reason why they wanted spirit is because spirit had this huge order of planes, Airbus,

Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
Ah, they wanted plane, plane,

Johnny Jet (01:41:12):
You can't fly planes right now. They want,

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
You're not making 'em fast planes. That's interesting.

Johnny Jet (01:41:15):
And they wanted pilots.

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:41:19):
So, and they wanted their routes and their gates.

Leo Laporte (01:41:22):
So there were at Santa Rosa. It was so funny. Alaska bought horizon. So it's Alaska. And then there were two new airlines

Johnny Jet (01:41:33):
Ave.

Leo Laporte (01:41:34):
Avelo is one and the other one was like, aha. Or, Hey, Hey, <laugh> some, it was

Johnny Jet (01:41:40):
Their, that one. They

Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
Had balloons. It was their very first flight Santa Rosa. Yeah. Let me see if I could find

Johnny Jet (01:41:49):
Aha.

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:41:51):
By the way, I did see that United's gonna be pulling out of Santa Rosa.

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
What? Oh

Johnny Jet (01:41:57):
Yeah. Which is a total bummer. That's a,

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
Lot's

Johnny Jet (01:41:59):
A bummer. A lot of the airlines are pulling out of a lot of the smaller markets.

Leo Laporte (01:42:05):
It, you know, it's really nice. Yeah. It's

Johnny Jet (01:42:07):
Aha. A H a exclamation point fly. Aha.Com. Reno Tahoe base. Yeah. You know, I did read about it a time.

Leo Laporte (01:42:15):
Oh, you can only fly to like Tahoe, but that's actually kind of nice. I mean, for us and there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great. It's an hour and a half to Seattle. It wasn't very expensive. I think it was a couple hundred bucks round trip. And 

Johnny Jet (01:42:31):
What'd you, you flew Alaska. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
It's Alaska operated by horizon. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:42:35):
Right. I gotcha.

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
And it was great. It was a very nice flight. We caught COVID on it, but that's, you know, <laugh>, that could happen anywhere. Actually. I don't know where we cut. That's the funny thing is, yeah, you just don't know where you got it. Right. You don't know.

Johnny Jet (01:42:47):
Well, on our flight, back from Dallas, we had a, we had a kid in the back row behind us across the aisle. Two years old would not stop coughing, like a nasty cough, not wearing a mask mask. And I thought for sure, wearing

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
A gun, but I saw everywhere. There are people hacking everywhere.

Johnny Jet (01:43:01):
I had that little wind device in it. I, I think they saved us.

Leo Laporte (01:43:05):
Well, Lisa said on the flight out, there was a guy across the aisle. We, you know, it's two by two. So we were in our two by two across the aisle who had his headed like this in his hands, the whole flight.

Johnny Jet (01:43:16):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:43:17):
And so she

Johnny Jet (01:43:18):
Thought, was he coughing?

Leo Laporte (01:43:19):
I don't know. She just said it was like this, the whole flight. So I don't know. We don't know. Don't

Johnny Jet (01:43:24):
Know. Just

Leo Laporte (01:43:25):
Dunno.

Johnny Jet (01:43:26):
He could, as long as he is not coughing.

Leo Laporte (01:43:28):
So yeah. I don't know. Yeah. What are you gonna do

Johnny Jet (01:43:31):
Anyway? I'm glad you're back.

Leo Laporte (01:43:33):
And, and I survived. I'm safe and San, and now I have a little extra immunity against, oh my crowd. I'm happy about that.

Johnny Jet (01:43:38):
Yeah. Now you should be going now. You should be traveling the world

Leo Laporte (01:43:40):
Now I should. Well, well Lisa's saying, should we go next year to Europe and I said,

Johnny Jet (01:43:47):
Yeah, now

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
We should go

Johnny Jet (01:43:49):
Next year. Yeah. This

Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
Month. Well, I don't think we're gonna do that. <Laugh> speak to Dr. Mom. She'll know better. Don't we're gonna dry now ask Dr. Mom. We're gonna, our next trip will be Dr. We're going drive in our own car up to up, up to Seattle. That'll be her next trip. She wants to see more of Seattle. We're thinking maybe that's where we wanna retire. So. All right. Yeah. So we're gonna stop and I don't know, Medford and, and, and if you're quarantined this week and you're bored, I'll I'll interview. You talk about your whole career. I'm at I'm outta quarantine, but I'll be glad to talk to you. Yeah, it'd be fun. Okay. All right. Take care. Email me. All right. Thanks John byebye, Leo Laporte, the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leo the number. We're doing a special thing this week. I'm gonna take first time callers only. I wanna give everybody a chance to get in like Dan calling from Bakersfield, California. Hello, Dan.

Caller 5 (01:44:41):
Hello. How are you? I figured this was a good question for somebody who makes all kinds of broadcasts. I'm a musician and I play three different instruments. Nice,

Leo Laporte (01:44:52):
Nice,

Caller 5 (01:44:52):
Nice. I record 'em all into a, do I do it every single day? Most, every day. And it's a good routine. I enjoy it. But I'm looking to up my game a little bit, and I know that one thing that's missing is a live audience. So what I would like to do if it's not too terribly complicated with my max studio and my D is to record a couple of tracks as I normally do. And then the final track play along with everything that was just,

Leo Laporte (01:45:22):
Oh, and then

Caller 5 (01:45:23):
Broadcast.

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
Yeah. YouTube. I see a lot of people doing that

Caller 5 (01:45:27):
Audience without another dimension to the music.

Leo Laporte (01:45:29):
Yeah, yeah. Or YouTube or Twitch or Facebook or Reddit. I see people, musicians streaming all the time. I love it. And they often, when they're doing it live, get some nice audiences. The, if you do it on Twitch, they might even throw you some money. They have a chat room going, there's all sorts of ways to do this. So

Caller 5 (01:45:48):
You're not associated with Twitch. Are you

Leo Laporte (01:45:50):
No Twitch? And my podcast network is not related to Twitter or Twitch. We predate both and I'm still okay. Hopping mad over that, but <laugh>, but I have no relationship to either. Twitch actually is an interesting story. It was started by a guy named Justin Kah who start. He was the first, he kind of to a live stream, his life. He wore a camera in a backpack on his head <laugh> it was called Justin TV and he'd walk around and you know, you'd see his whole life. This was 20 years ago maybe. And it was very popular. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> eventually sold it or actually formed Twitch, renamed Justin TV to twitch.tv. And then Amazon of course owns Twitch now. So I think Justin's retired. If we could watch his life, there would be golden swimming pools involved, but that's good. I'm glad, happy for him. So Twitch is a good platform for that, but you're asking more about the technical issue.

Caller 5 (01:46:45):
The technical issue is what, what hardware is needed, how what's the easiest way to do it. So I can take maybe one or two cameras and set them up. Yeah. Et cetera.

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
So the tool you probably will want to use is called OBS OBS studio OBS studio. That's what all the streamers use in fact so much. So the Twitch has taken the software and rebranded it. So they have their own version of it. But if you go to it's free OBS project.com, you could take a look at it. It runs beautifully on a Macintosh. Actually I heard some people say it does not run well on the on the lower slower M one max. But I, as far as I know, it runs very well on, on the, you have the, the fancy new Mac studio chip.

Caller 5 (01:47:31):
I have the, yeah, I didn't get the upper level chip, but it's the M one max in the

Leo Laporte (01:47:35):
Studio should, should be plenty to do that.

Caller 5 (01:47:38):
I'm really happy with the performance. I was on a windows machine before that and

Leo Laporte (01:47:42):
Wow. Oh, for a musician. There's no question. And you mentioned a D let me define that. That's digital audio, workstation. Whose do which door do you use?

Caller 5 (01:47:50):
I use Reaper because it's so simple.

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
Yeah, Reaper's great. Okay. So Reaper will let you record all those tracks and then play them back and record a final one. Right?

Caller 5 (01:47:59):
I, well, I, I, from the video I saw. Yes. Yeah. But I saw nothing that

Leo Laporte (01:48:05):
A lot of musicians do that you were, you at least would record maybe a click track. And so that's going click,

Caller 5 (01:48:10):
Click track is everything would have to be timed.

Leo Laporte (01:48:12):
Yeah. And then you play clock, you're listening in your headphones to the click track, and then you play the guitar. Then you go back and you listen to the guitar and the click track and you play the keyboard, blah, blah, blah.

Caller 5 (01:48:21):
So that, yeah, actually the final track usually is the, the percussion. But yeah, that, that that's because I play piano in bass. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:28):
A lot of people go the other way. They lay it down the rhythm track and then they do the, but what they, whatever you like. But that's, I mean, almost all Daws will do that because that's a very, very common way. You know, that's how Tom shot made the Boston album. Right. He went down to his basement and he didn't have a DAW or computer. He did it on tape, played back the tape and recorded on another track, played it back, recorded another track, all dos will do that. And OBS, which is nice will hook into whatever it has. Essentially. It has two things. It has, it's a camera switcher. It'll pick up your camera. Doesn't switching. Not so much, but, but you can, but it's the idea is you've got a camera stream. You've got a second camera stream. So you can do an inset.

Leo Laporte (01:49:09):
Typically with OBS, a lot of gamers use it. The main screen will be your game. You know, the screen coming off your computer. And then the other picture will be you playing the game. Then it also has a mixer. And you can say, I want the audio to come from this source in this case, Reaper. And I want it to mix in with a microphone, which I'm gonna be playing into. So you need a mic cameras and mic is all you need, OBS will handle all the kind of mushing it together. So

Caller 5 (01:49:38):
OBS also has some kind of hardware device to interface.

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
No it's software only the hardware device is your, is your Mac. And then, but you would need absolutely cameras in a microphone. Right.

Caller 5 (01:49:53):
And how do you, I, I, I think I've got the, the audio part figured out, but how do you interface the video? Like, and what cameras should be used?

Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
Well, you can believe it or not use your iPhone. Hmm. In fact, that may be the best camera you have. Any, any camera that you have will work with the proper interface coming in over Thunderbolt into your Mac. But honestly what I like and I would recommend is using you have an iPhone.

Caller 5 (01:50:26):
No, but I will get one too.

Leo Laporte (01:50:27):
Well, you don't have to get no, no, no. It's just that most people do. You can use an Android phone as well. So there,

Caller 5 (01:50:33):
My, my note nine works fine until it doesn't. Yeah, but it's been going great.

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
So I, I used, I tried all these different cameras. I have using a, a program called camo CA a M O from rein incubate.com. You hook up in this case for me, cuz I'm doing it on a Mac. I have a lightning cable going into my Mac studio and then I run camo on my iPhone and I could put it. And now it's a, by the way, the iPhone camera is a great camera. So it's perfect for that. If you want, you can add the Reaper mix on there, which some people might enjoy, or you could have another camera that's, you know, I mean, you could do whatever you want. Basically what you'd probably wanna do without a lot, spending a lot of money on switchers and stuff is one camera on you. And then O OBS will either let you do that full screen. Or if you wanted to show the screen on your computer. In other words, if you wanted to show Reaper, you could do that. 

Caller 5 (01:51:28):
Yeah. I don't need to really show reefer. I just need to play back in time. Everything that's been recorded. Yeah. Along with the video.

Leo Laporte (01:51:36):
It's what you're think, what I'm thinking about and what you should think about is what does the audience wanna see? And then just decide <laugh>,

Caller 5 (01:51:42):
You know, good question.

Leo Laporte (01:51:43):
Yeah. What, what do they wanna see? What you'll learn? Believe me, when you start doing it, you get feedback. You'll learn. Mostly they want to hear the great music, but they like to see you playing too. So I think it's a nice idea to have that camera. The other choice that you might wanna look at, I think is very good is a company called E cam E C a M M. They actually would do the whole thing. They kind of replace, and it's made for the Mac E camera live they'd replace OBS studio. They'd pick up your iPhone. There's a it's it would let you do all the stuff you wanna do. A lot of people on Twitch and YouTube are using EAM. So that's another choice, ECA, double M dot com. And so that's another excellent choice that would let you switch more cameras. If you decided you wanted one over your head and one behind you and one in front of you, one on your instrument, whatever you, yeah.

Caller 5 (01:52:35):
Yeah. I, I wasn't, I, my mind will probably change as you said, as I get into this, but I, all this is, is just to add a little kick to what, what I do, because I know it's being performed live. So I,

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
Yeah, I think it's great. It's great. And you know, this is you know, you've probably seen this, but this is a huge thing on YouTube. People will you know, remember the see shanty craze. <Laugh>

Caller 5 (01:53:03):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:53:05):
A couple of years ago, maybe a year ago on TikTok. Oh, there once was a man. So somebody sing a Seehan and then other people would add their instruments to it. And they'd build up these Brady bunch style screens with all the instrument. There's a lot you can do. Oh my goodness. You are getting into an exciting area. And if you're a good musician, I know you are. I think Dan, this is a great opportunity. I really do. E cam is probably the right choice for that Mac Leo Laporte, the tech guy, camo camo will work with your Android phone, although not as well. I've used it with my Android phone.

Caller 5 (01:53:38):
I'm I am totally prepared to get an iPhone. It's been three years. I

Leo Laporte (01:53:41):
Think it's time. Phone. Yeah. Your note nine's pretty old. Yeah. an iPhone is nice, cuz it can double as a camera, but you can use anything for a camera. You can go out and get a Logitech cam. You don't need to spend a lot of money. And if you D if it gets to the point where you really wanna do a lot of switching, then you might want to get a hardware switcher, but that gets now you're getting kind of, kind of crazy. I

Caller 5 (01:54:05):
Would, I, I envision just a single screen with three different windows and the final windows saved for instance, on the bottom is me tapping out the beats to what I've just perform

Leo Laporte (01:54:16):
Performed. Perfect. Yeah, I would, I think your, your first step is to go into YouTube and I would actually go to Twitch and look at musicians performing. I also see on Reddit, Reddit has a live thing. I would look at that TikTok, I would look at people performing live and see what they're doing.

Caller 5 (01:54:35):
I was watching this guy this morning. He had 10 different squares of himself playing the sit bar and very

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
Exactly he's playing to himself. So not only does he record the audio, he records a video track. Yes. And is that cool or one?

Caller 5 (01:54:50):
That's cool. And I thought, wow, I, I want to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:54:53):
Yeah, you totally can. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:54:54):
Maybe not 10 squares of it, but

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
So the way he most people would do that is they would record that first, you know, each track and then on the computer screen, composite, all those tracks play them back and then you have one live square that's you? And you can, and if you're doing it on the computer, you can add them in, you know, you notice he doesn't add them all at once. He adds them as he starts playing and stuff like that. Correct. Yeah. So you could totally do that. OBS studios would, a lot of people use, I think for a Mac, I think you probably should look at E cam. It's not free. OBS studio is free and open source, but E cam you can try for free for a couple of weeks. And I, you know, it's like 10 bucks a month is not hugely expensive.

Caller 5 (01:55:35):
That doesn't sound too bad.

Leo Laporte (01:55:36):
I think. And that's one of the reasons I mentioned Twitch is I know people make money on Twitch because you have a, a, a, a chat room and that Twitch is set up for people to throw, throw money at you to tip you. So I know a lot of people actually make a pretty good living on Twitch, believe it or not.

Caller 5 (01:55:53):
Well, that's, that's good to hear. I, I, I, I like about half of what I do, so I'll make sure you the good half,

Leo Laporte (01:56:02):
Maybe, maybe, you know, you don't my son is a TikTok star. I mean, he's got more than 2 million followers and what I, what he did, which I think was really smart is he tried stuff and noticed the response. It's a feedback loop. And, and if you get good at, you know, he pays attention to comments, to response, to, you know, how many follows, how many likes and all that. And then he does almost does AB testing, you know, does this work better than that? Oh. And if you really do wanna make the success of this, that's how you have to do it. You really have to, you know, tailor

Caller 5 (01:56:40):
It. Well, the success of it would be, would be icing on the cake. That's not the perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:56:43):
You just wanna do it for fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Caller 5 (01:56:46):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:46):
I think you're gonna

Caller 5 (01:56:47):
Love it. That happens. That's cool. I, I would gladly do the research on that.

Leo Laporte (01:56:51):
Yeah. I think you're gonna love it. Well, that's what happens. You start doing it and then you go, this is great. I have a hundred people watching. I wonder what it would be like to have a 500 people watching <laugh> and what I would need to do to get that etcetera, et cetera. It kind of it's it grows on its own

Caller 5 (01:57:04):
Original music

Leo Laporte (01:57:05):
So that, oh, I think this is wonderful. I highly, highly recommend you. I, I watch these guys all the time. I love it. Especially now when we can't go see music, right.

Caller 5 (01:57:17):
Well, this has been a great phone call. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
You. <Laugh> enjoy. And definitely look at E cam cm. That's what most Mac people use. It's it's quite well

Caller 5 (01:57:28):
EAM on Twitch.

Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
Well, just look@ecam.com and then they support Twitch. So you can go, they support, they support all of it. All of them OBS does as well. They support streaming to, do

Caller 5 (01:57:39):
You have a recommendation for an iPhone or are they all about the same?

Leo Laporte (01:57:42):
They're all, you know, might as well get the new one. There'll be a new one out in a couple of months. If you wanna wait. Okay. The iPhone 14 comes out, probably they'll announce in September for October ship date.

Caller 5 (01:57:54):
Well, it'll probably take me a couple of months to get my nerve up to do this anyway.

Leo Laporte (01:57:57):
Oh, I think it's and you know, that's, my suggestion is to start small. Do you don't have to make it be the perfect thing right out the box. Just mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, don't what happens a lot of times people over buy, they go crazy and you don't really know what you need until you start doing it. So start small. That's a good point. Do little tests, have fun, make it fun and slowly work your way up.

Caller 5 (01:58:23):
Now I record in a very high resolution audio, and I would, does that matter to the end result as far as bandwidth or anything like that?

Leo Laporte (01:58:36):
No, because what'll happen. Your recording is gonna get played back by your Mac and then whatever software you use will take that input and do whatever it needs to do to make it work.

Caller 5 (01:58:48):
I said 44 kilohertz. 16 bit probably.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:58:54):
Okay. Awesome. Thanks

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
Dan.

Caller 5 (01:58:58):
Thank you. Take care. Love your show, man.

Leo Laporte (01:59:00):
Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate it. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo? LePort here. The tech guy. Yes. It's that time again, time to talk computers, the internet home theater, digital photography, sponsor, phone smart watches, augmented reality, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. We're a first time caller day today. I love it. Meeting a lot of new people. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 that's tollfree from anywhere in the us or Canada, the website. And I put a lot of links up there today, especially from Johnny jet and others, the website tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. That's free, no charge. And links will be up there. Later, maybe Monday or Tuesday. We'll put a transcript of the show up there, audio and video from the show. So it's, it's everything that you need is right there. Tech guide labs.com. Lennon's on the line from Waco, Texas. Hello, Lennon.

Caller 6 (01:59:57):
Hi Leo. How you doing?

Leo Laporte (01:59:59):
I'm well, how are you?

Caller 6 (02:00:00):
I'm doing great. I apologize. I didn't know that this was a first time caller day. This is my third time calling.

Leo Laporte (02:00:06):
Oh, well that's all right. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll let you through in this case. It's good to have you back. Welcome.

Caller 6 (02:00:13):
Thank you so much. Cause my daughter's been driving me up the wall with her

Leo Laporte (02:00:17):
What's going on.

Caller 6 (02:00:19):
Okay. I tried call you last winter. Well, before Christmas, cuz she really wanted a gaming in PC and I didn't know which one to buy her and I couldn't get through. So I said I'm, I'm pretty technical. I know what to get her. So I looked online. I said the saw computer said, okay, you can play Fortnite. It plays Roblox. It can play grant theft, auto apex, legends, all the games. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:00:43):
That sounds pretty good. How old is your daughter?

Caller 7 (02:00:46):
She's 13.

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
So she's mostly play playing Minecraft and Roblox at this point,

Caller 7 (02:00:50):
Correct? Yeah. And she plays apex, legends, Fortnite, stuff like that also. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
Okay. None of those by the way are super challenging. So what'd you get,

Caller 7 (02:00:59):
I got her a computer from Viper tech. I don't know if you've ever of this company is called a flurry.

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Okay. The Viper tech flurry certainly has a good name. Yes. What's wrong with it?

Caller 7 (02:01:13):
Well she complains that it keeps crashing on her. Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (02:01:16):
Not good. Real <laugh> it crashes

Caller 7 (02:01:18):
Mostly the Fortnite and apex legends. It crashes and it lags real bad on her. Yeah. Was she playing with her friends and stuff? And she says, she's trying to also stream it or record the game play. And she says, when she plays it back, it's like very pixelated.

Leo Laporte (02:01:35):
So this is not an issue probably of the manufacturer, but of, of the components that you chose to go into it. So tell me, do you remember or do you know offhand? What the, what processor you put in there? What video card you put in there?

Caller 7 (02:01:52):
Well, it all came with it. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (02:01:55):
I mean they sell, I'm looking right now at their website and they will sell a fairly low end system. I would never buy, for instance, a gaming system that had eight gigabytes of Ram and they do sell those.

Caller 7 (02:02:08):
Oh, that's probably what I got there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
So that's the good news is you got a tower case, right? It's not a laptop.

Caller 7 (02:02:14):
No, it's, it's a, it's a desktop it's

Leo Laporte (02:02:16):
Yeah. So the good news is you can always add more Ram. That's the first thing you might want to do.

Caller 7 (02:02:21):
I did. That's the first thing I did. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Okay. I,

Caller 7 (02:02:26):
I added I, well,

Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
When I do, you know, do you know what the Intel, what the processor was in there off the top of your head?

Caller 7 (02:02:32):
I'm sorry. Say that one more time.

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
What's the processor? The CPU. Is it Intel?

Caller 7 (02:02:36):
I'm looking for now on the CPU.

Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
Yeah. It'll be the first thing in their spec. It'll say AMD, Verizon or Intel. Yeah. I five

Caller 7 (02:02:46):
AMD AMD rises five, 1500 X.

Leo Laporte (02:02:49):
Okay. And the, and the, the next one is the GPU. These are the two things that, that matter. The GPU, the pro I'll tell you the, the truth about Viper protect. And I'm looking at their website first time I've heard of them. They sell very low end stuff as well as very high end stuff. And so regardless of, oh, it'll play, regardless of them saying it'll play those games doesn't mean they will. You spent about 500 bucks on it.

Caller 7 (02:03:17):
About 700 X

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
700. All right. Well that's, that's a good start. Gaming PCs are much more expensive. So they have on their website entry level mid-range and high end. Right. And anybody who's really doing gaming is gonna say one of these entry level and mid-range these, you can't play a game on those. And some of the things that she's experiencing probably mostly have to do with the video card. Do you know off the top of your head? What, what AMD or NVI graphics cards in there?

Caller 7 (02:03:52):
I'm looking at the, the screen now. It says AMD radi on RX 5 64 gigabytes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:58):
So, I mean, they're not wrong especially since you put extra Ram in there now you certainly need 16 gigs. I can't believe any gaming machine companies selling eight gig machines. You, you absolutely need 16 and, and most gamers would want more than that even. Oh, I see. You did say you got the flurry. Let me look at the flurry. I forgot. You said that I'm looking at that's in their mid-range

Caller 7 (02:04:22):
Right. I'm looking at the page right

Leo Laporte (02:04:23):
Now. The great for streaming. They say, well, that's what she wants to do. Sometimes if the streaming is block blocky or pixelated, it could also be her settings and so forth.

Caller 7 (02:04:33):
Yeah. That's what I told her.

Leo Laporte (02:04:34):
So she, she, you might wanna work with her a, a little bit on, is she using OBS to stream? Do you know?

Caller 7 (02:04:41):
Yeah, she is.

Leo Laporte (02:04:41):
Okay. So that, you know, this is a, by the way, great opportunity for the two of you, especially her to learn. And if she wants to do streaming, she's gotta, gotta learn how OBS works and what the tweaks are. And there's certainly are plenty of YouTube videos, helping her get the best out of that. You put 16 gigs that was absolutely necessary. The rise in five, 1500 X, not the fastest, the radi on RX five 60, not the fastest, but this is their mid-range system. I think it should be adequate, certainly for her to play. Remember if you're streaming, you're doing two things, you're playing the game. And then the computer is still working very hard to compress the video, to compress her image and then stream it out on the internet. You're doing two things. That's why Ram is so important, right? And it's why you need a high end processor.

Leo Laporte (02:05:34):
So I, it may not be enough of a machine for her to do a good quality stream. I ju I just don't know, but it should be a good enough now that you put the more Ram in, I think it should be good enough to play those games, but at a lower frame rate. And that's the other thing she's gonna wanna mess with she roadblocks and Minecraft, no problem. They can run on very low end stuff. You know, maybe not so much for the, for apex legends. But you can go into the settings on legends and lower the graphics, quality, lower the resolutions you could play with settings to get, you know, what matters in games like that is frame is frame rate and latency because you're playing against other people online. And so she needs to be able to move quickly. And so she doesn't get attacked <laugh>.

Caller 7 (02:06:27):
Okay. So basically you want me to try to drop the F rate?

Leo Laporte (02:06:29):
I say, play with the set, the graphic settings. What's your internet. Tell me what your internet speeds are.

Caller 7 (02:06:35):
OJ 600. Okay. And I got plenty ethernet plugged in

Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
Plenty. Okay. So it's not a bandwidth issue for her. Yeah, the machine's probably working too hard. And so lowering the quality of the image on the screen will certainly help in responsiveness on apex legends and on Fortnite. Those two games, you know, responsiveness is what matters the most.

Leo Laporte (02:07:02):
Okay. You know, I'm looking at their website, it says meets minimum specs meets recommended specs, and it does look like it supports, but look at this on meets recommended specs, FPS, low, medium, and high. Well, they're claiming it can do it. So it looks like, you know, based on their claims, it should be able to do it. So maybe play with the, the settings a little bit make sure she doesn't have other stuff running in the background that could be slowing it down. You got, did you put 16 gigs in, you put another eight gigs in,

Caller 7 (02:07:35):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:07:35):
Correct. That was very important. I'm glad you did that. Minimum specs, you know, often say eight gigs. I don't know anybody who runs with eight gigs of Ram. That's nuts. That's crazy talk.

Caller 7 (02:07:46):
Yeah. That was the first thing I did. Like,

Leo Laporte (02:07:47):
Yeah, you're smart. Yeah. you know, partly some of this is the stuff that PC gamers deal with. They spend a lot of energy trying to get everything to work. Optimally, what you got is not bad. Don't feel bad about that. I think it's it's, it's certainly adequate to what she wants to do, but you just mean they need to do some tweaking.

Caller 7 (02:08:11):
Right? I wanted to get her. I like this was her first game. PC of wannabe or something. That's an entry level. I didn't wanna go overboard yet.

Leo Laporte (02:08:17):
Yeah, no. You spent a lot of money. Are you kidding? That's you spent a you're a good dad. Don't don't don't knock. Don't knock that at all. You, you that's a lot of money to spend in a gaming PC for a 14 year old <laugh> yeah, I think, I think just, it's gonna take some, some tweaking. There's nothing that you did wrong. Heat is something else to pay attention to heat can slow a machine down. Make sure it's that she's got the, the fan is working and it's cooling it properly and it's not up against a wall. It's not blocking the fan because what will happen as these machines get hot is they will slow down. And that can also also be an issue.

Caller 7 (02:08:54):
Yeah. Pulled her desk away from her desk away

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
From the good you're doing all the right things, Len. Yeah. Yeah. And it's summer and it's summer in Waco. It's hot. Oh God. <Laugh>

Caller 7 (02:09:04):
We haven't had a day under 110.

Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
I know. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh, we were in Alaska looking at the, where it was 60 degrees looking back at the, the weather across the country. And it was just burning up. Heat is bad for these things, you know? That's another, another thing to be aware of.

Caller 7 (02:09:22):
I know. And she's upstairs too. And you know, heat rises. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
Plays upstairs. I used to stick my kids upstairs too. It's good for the good for the constitution. Develop strong, strong buddies. Yeah. If you can maybe put, blow a fan over it, then something like that. Just get that heat away from it. That's that's that's gonna help too.

Caller 7 (02:09:43):
All right, Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:09:43):
Hey Lenon. A pleasure. I'm glad you called. And I'm sorry that it's not living up to her expectations, but that's true for all teenage kids.

Caller 7 (02:09:51):
<Laugh> true. Very

Leo Laporte (02:09:52):
That's life. Life's not living up to their expectations,

Caller 7 (02:09:55):
Right? It's not fair.

Leo Laporte (02:09:56):
It ain't fair. No, you know what? She's very lucky. I don't know a lot of parents that would, that would go out and buy this very nice machine and then, and then spend the time to make sure it works right. Good on you Lenon.

Caller 7 (02:10:08):
Thank you so much, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:10:09):
All right. Have a good one. Stay cool. Hey Leo, LePort the tech guy. More of you calls coming up. Stay right here. <Laugh> Leo Laporte, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Doug on the line from Sam Clemente, California. Hello, Doug.

Caller 8 (02:10:31):
Leo. Doug. How you doing?

Leo Laporte (02:10:33):
Good. How you

Caller 8 (02:10:35):
Good man? I'm I'm entering the sharing economy. I just booked my first pool rental on swiftly. Not sure if you've heard of swiftly

Leo Laporte (02:10:45):
Swim. You're not making this up. Are you swim? No swim play. <Laugh> I love the name. <Laugh>

Caller 8 (02:10:53):
You can rent pools by the hour

Leo Laporte (02:10:55):
Rent private pool. So you, you go, you go on there and there's a guy down the block. Who's got a pool he's not using. You can rent it. I think that's actually smart. How many pools are just not being used most of the time.

Caller 8 (02:11:06):
It's the Airbnb of pool. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:11:10):
By the way, you can also list tennis courts if you wish.

Caller 8 (02:11:15):
Ah, ah,

Leo Laporte (02:11:16):
Excellent. Yeah. You must live in an area where there yeah. San Clemente. There're probably a lot of pools. Right?

Caller 8 (02:11:22):
Lot of pools not being used, I guess.

Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
Yeah. Yeah, sure. You know, you know how it is. You build a house, you build a pool. You never use it. I understand that. So good. So are you, have you done this before? Or is this your first time,

Caller 8 (02:11:37):
First time? This afternoon?

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
How much an hour are we talking?

Caller 8 (02:11:42):
$60 an hour.

Leo Laporte (02:11:43):
Okay. You gonna bring the kids?

Caller 8 (02:11:46):
Yep. Bringing the kids.

Leo Laporte (02:11:47):
I think that's great. I like this idea.

Caller 8 (02:11:50):
Yeah. You can bring you can bring a hot dog or hand. They've got a, a grill, you know, each person has, has different.

Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
Yeah. It's like Aaron, Airbnb. Yeah. And you can look at a picture and you look at ratings and all that.

Caller 8 (02:12:01):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
Nice. I love that story. Pretty good. Yeah. Well have a wonderful, a simply wonderful time. What can

Caller 8 (02:12:09):
<Laugh> thank you, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:12:11):
What

Caller 8 (02:12:12):
Can I, yes. Yeah. About network video recorders. So, so I've had nest cams for a number of years. I recently put in a firewall gold router. Oh yeah. Seen just, yeah. Seen just how much data is being sent to Google servers.

Leo Laporte (02:12:33):
Oh, you don't even wanna know.

Caller 8 (02:12:35):
Well, I, unfortunately now I do know because firewall is, is telling me exactly, you know, how much data

Leo Laporte (02:12:41):
Each camera when you're using something like those can be sending as much as a megabit per second, because you're sending high definition video. And as you know, with those cameras, when you wanna see what those cameras are outputting, you don't just go to the camera. You go to the website, it's all being sent to nest so that you can go to the web webpage and see it. So you have to, you're basically those cameras, which are always on are uploading all the time. High Def video megabit a second mm-hmm <affirmative> per camera. What did you get?

Caller 8 (02:13:14):
Well, and especially the, I have an old drop cam and it's it's even it's oh yeah. Meet even more band.

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
Oh yeah. That's when I discovered this newer one. Yeah. We put in drop cams and all over the studio. That's when I discovered you gotta have a lot of bandwidth if you're gonna do this.

Caller 8 (02:13:29):
So anyway, I'm thinking about bringing it on site. I looked on Amazon, you know, and, and they're saying Rio link is a way to go. But just wanted to get, get your opinion. If, if I'm tired of the cloud services, I wanna bring my security cameras back on site. I'm looking at a, a power over ethernet set up. I already have some power over E ethernet devices. I've got some, some Poe hubs switches. So I'm good on that front. You know, I know there's Lorax, there's wan

Leo Laporte (02:13:58):
Oh's. I wanted to give there's so many companies to do this. This is a really common thing. I, I overwhelming it is overwhelming. I don't, I don't actually have any experience with any of them. So I'm not gonna give you firsthand experience. Rio link looks quite good. Remember that the ideal would be that you, even though they're getting power over the ethernet, that that's not gonna be ethernet on your main router, that they, you wanna give them their own network, cuz otherwise they're still gonna, they're still gonna <laugh> you know, drive your network crazy. Right. They, it looks like they've got some good, some good stuff. Here's what I would say is important. You wanna, and it's a little less important with these, but with anytime you put a camera in the house, you wanna make sure they're secure. So you know, one of the things about the cloud is, and this one of the reasons Google's probably a good choice.

Leo Laporte (02:14:50):
You wanna anybody who's a clouds provider darn well, better secure all that data. It better be encrypted on the way to the server. And, and why's gotten a bunch of trouble. We've been recommending the wise cam because they had a horrible security flaw and they didn't disclose it right away. That's a cost of concern. So storing it locally actually is one way to handle that. Isn't it? Because if you're storing it locally, it's not going over the public internet, then all you have to worry about is, well, it's on my network. If it's got a flaw, can somebody use it as a gateway into my network? And that's true of all IOT devices. So that's why probably the ideal would be if you can have it on an isolated, either a VLAN or its own network. But I, other than that, this looks pretty good. I have no opinion. Maybe somebody will call in Leo Laporte, the tech guy I'll have to, you know, I'll really have to check you know, you're reading the reviews I suppose. 

Caller 8 (02:15:47):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:15:47):
I just don't have much experience. The only thing I have any experience with is Sonology has a security camera system. It's what we use here. And that's,

Caller 8 (02:15:57):
I saw that.

Leo Laporte (02:15:58):
Yeah, it's a NAS, right? So they, they really, their business is selling hard drive, you know, networks, hard drive storage, but they have among other things, they have a security system that they, you can use with that. So that's the only one I have any experience. That's what we use. Right. John is Sonology and John uses ology station at home. We're very, very happy with Sonology station, but

Caller 8 (02:16:19):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:16:20):
It, it, it adds to the expense in the sense that you're now buying a big Sonology as well, but right. Sonology knows how to do storage. You're gonna buy storage from Rio link or anybody else as well. And Sonology has IP based cameras. They have doorbells, they have all that stuff. So that's the only company I have any experience with. And John uses it at home. We use it here. Okay. Might be likes it. I mean, I think that I would have no hesitation into that, implementing that. Yeah, yeah.

Caller 8 (02:16:53):
Yeah. I mean, just for the price point, you know, I've been on Reddit on all the home security boards and all that

Leo Laporte (02:16:58):
And, well, that's a great start. Yeah.

Caller 8 (02:17:01):
Price point Rio just seems, seems pretty, you know, it's not, nothing's perfect, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:17:09):
I mean, it looks, I'm looking I'm on the website. It does look good. Yeah. I would try certainly, you know, join the Rio sub red at the Sonology sub Reddit. Look at what people are using the home security subreddit. That's actually a very good idea. Yeah. I always do that before I, before I try any of these things.

Caller 8 (02:17:27):
Yeah. Well

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
The other, the other company that I've I haven't used their home security, but I'm aware of is ubiquity. I have a ubiquity network. Yeah. If you had a ubiquity network at home, they also have IP stuff, but, but we we've been, we've been using ology in the studio for as long as we've been here. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and it's been fantastic. Easy to add.

Caller 8 (02:17:48):
I tell you, I I've got that firewall of gold as the core of my network. That's a smart, and that thing is that's smart. It is awesome.

Leo Laporte (02:17:55):
Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you like that. That's a, that's a really cool device,

Caller 8 (02:18:00):
Loving it. Migrated from migrated from Google, the Google pucks, the, the now, now nest wifi.

Leo Laporte (02:18:08):
Yeah. These that's, this is much better than that. Yeah.

Caller 8 (02:18:11):
Much better. Well, you know, I'm a, I guess semi sophisticated user, I've got a couple VLANs. I got about 80 devices on the network and but I, I, you know, it doesn't come with, with access points, so I've got the T the TP link. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:26):
Good choice

Caller 8 (02:18:27):
Again, grade price point and so far. So good. Really? Yeah. Increased my, my wireless bandwidth on, on my iPhone and laptop from say a hundred megs up to three, 400 megs. Download speed.

Leo Laporte (02:18:41):
Wow. That's nice. That's really nice. Yeah.

Caller 8 (02:18:45):
I'll call back in sometime. And maybe we can talk about firewall up.

Leo Laporte (02:18:49):
I'd love to. Yeah. I meant we ran outta time. I would've loved to ask you about that. Yeah. Good.

Caller 8 (02:18:54):
I'm really impressed with their support too. They're they're just on it.

Leo Laporte (02:18:57):
Well, this is on the podcast and that's all that really matters. So everybody's hearing it. <Laugh>

Caller 8 (02:19:02):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:19:03):
Okay. Hey, I appreciate it. Doug

Caller 8 (02:19:05):
Awesomely, try. Enjoy

Leo Laporte (02:19:07):
Your, if you enjoy your pool, apparently KTLA did a piece on a dog dog walking solution similar to that called sniff spot.

Caller 8 (02:19:21):
Oh, I'll tell my wife,

Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
Oh my God.

Caller 8 (02:19:24):
Dog walking.

Leo Laporte (02:19:25):
Sniffs spot. Lets homeowners ran, ran out their, their dog park. I guess <laugh> what a world, right? They're on what? A worCaller 8

Leo Laporte (02:19:38):
Yeah. What a world. It's all online.

Caller 8 (02:19:42):
What do they say? Buy utility rent luxury. Bur I'm I'm practicing.

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
Oh, I like that. Buy utility rent luxury. Ooh, that's a good one. Bur I'm gonna remember that. Thanks dog. See ya gotta run. I like that. I,

Leo Laporte (02:20:06):
You should have played these before I left. <Laugh> Leo Laporte Lee tech guy. Yes. I'm back. Thank you so much. Mikah Sargent for filling in, and I know Kim Schaffer and and professor Laura helped a lot. Our studio manager, John Salina, who really comes through always in the pinch. Thank you for helping out. We were talking about home security cameras with Doug and John at home and here in the studio we use Sonology security solution. It's a, Sonology a network attached storage maker. So they sell those big honk and containers that you put hard drives in and actually was smart of them. They said, well, could we use those hard drives for oh security footage? So they also have a IP based security solution. And I know Sonology is very secure. So that's another one for sure to look at. And we've got that's the, that's the testimonial. We we've been very happy with Sonology eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number, GWiz, Dick de Bartolo coming up. Meanwhile, Sam's on the line from Tussin, California. Hi Sam.

Caller 9 (02:21:16):
Hi. How are you Leo?

Leo Laporte (02:21:17):
I am. Well, how are

Caller 9 (02:21:18):
You? I'm a first time. Listen, first time caller, long, long time listener. See,

Leo Laporte (02:21:24):
This is good. This is good.

Caller 9 (02:21:26):
I heard I heard today that today was a special day for us. It's

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
A special day.

Caller 9 (02:21:31):
Yeah. I have a simple question. Yes. I use YouTube. I listen to YouTube videos and then download to my storage on a tablet. What

Leo Laporte (02:21:44):
Do you use to download YouTube?

Caller 9 (02:21:46):
Well, I don't wanna say you had, you had given you had given it about three weeks ago. Okay. I tried that. Yeah. And it worked.

Leo Laporte (02:21:54):
Yeah. It's pretty great. <Laugh> yeah.

Caller 9 (02:21:56):
<Laugh> I don't wanna say because the Google will stop it.

Leo Laporte (02:22:01):
No, I, you know, yeah. Okay.

Caller 9 (02:22:04):
It's a, it's a, it's a German German thing. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I don't wanna say that one. Okay. But so when I, when I upload to Google's app yeah,

Caller 9 (02:22:16):
Yeah. And then I do a search on that saying recently added. Okay. Okay. I just, you know, put, put the word recently added. Yeah. And it shows me what was added Tuesday, what Wednesday, you know, this day. But now that when I see the videos, some of them shows, you know, the picture of the video, what of the video is about. Yeah. But some videos show completely dark blank screen blank, that space, which is like an one inch square. Huh. And, and, and it shows the, how, how long the video is, you know, it shows,

Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
But you just don't get the so-called thumbnail. Yeah. And is that in the Google search results only? I mean, if you went to YouTube, you'd see it, right?

Caller 9 (02:23:02):
Yeah. Yeah. YouTube. I see the whole thing, but, but it's under photos and it hasn't bothering me for a long time. And I, I say, I've been thinking about asking you for a few months now, then, you know, look,

Leo Laporte (02:23:12):
I'm glad you called, but then so you're doing okay. So you're searching, let's say you like Veritasium videos on YouTube by the very good science videos. So you search YouTube space. Veritasium space recently added that's what you search for?

Caller 9 (02:23:27):
No, no, no. On the, go on the Google app, you know, the Google's app, the one app, which is in my storage.

Leo Laporte (02:23:35):
Oh, in the, on the phone?

Caller 9 (02:23:36):
Yeah. On the phone. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Okay. Not on the web. Okay. So

Caller 9 (02:23:39):
You do not on

Leo Laporte (02:23:39):
The web. I see. So you're in the Google app

Caller 9 (02:23:41):
From the YouTube. I've downloaded nicely the video on my, in my, oh, I

Leo Laporte (02:23:46):
See. You're searching your local storage. I get it now. I'm sorry. I apologize.

Caller 9 (02:23:50):
Well, I'm, I'm connected wifi. I'm connected on a wifi to the, you know, to the network internet. And then I'm starting the photos app on my tablet.

Leo Laporte (02:24:03):
You've downloaded it into Google photos.

Caller 9 (02:24:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And then on, on the app itself, I start the photo app and then

Leo Laporte (02:24:10):
Does it eventually, will it eventually show the thumbnail like maybe in a week or two?

Caller 9 (02:24:15):
No, no, no. It has never,

Leo Laporte (02:24:16):
Never, it's just dark.

Caller 9 (02:24:17):
And that is, that is you know, I have a tablet, Samsung tablet and I have a another one phone, you know, old assholes tablet. Yeah. Which it's happening the same, even though my, well, I should say that my the operating the Android is nine, not 11 or 12. So

Leo Laporte (02:24:43):
The way YouTube works those videos, the YouTuber can pick a, what's called a thumbnail when you upload it, you could say, yeah, I want my thumbnail to be this. Yeah. it's my guess that when you use the YouTube downloader

Caller 9 (02:25:01):
Yeah. That same downloader I use on

Leo Laporte (02:25:04):
All of it. It's my guess that it's throwing out some of that. We call it metadata, additional data beyond the video that says things like what the thumbnail should be, in which case the default in Google photos would be the first frame of the video. Yeah. Yeah. On some videos. Yeah. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fairly common. The first frame may be dark. It may be blank. Yeah. in fact, you could test it by playing that video. You'd have to be very quick. Yeah. And see if you can see a black blank frame, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if in those cases, those videos have blank frames. Yeah. And so when you see a blank thumbnail, it's just the first frame of the video. You wanna see something from the video, right?

Caller 9 (02:25:51):
Yeah. So that I can recognize it. Yeah. So these dark sparks, I played, I say, oh, okay. This one is that one. You know, so what I was doing was in the photo app where there is edit in there. So I would say, let me see, edit, I can cut off the beginning frames of the video, you know?

Leo Laporte (02:26:10):
Yeah. But

Caller 9 (02:26:12):
Doesn't,

Leo Laporte (02:26:12):
You, there is actually a way to do this. Yeah. so I'm looking at a Google photos help. And it says video thumbnails are always the first frame of the video, which for most people is black <laugh> <laugh> so, so there we go. Now we know what you would like to do is to set a thumbnail in, and, and in the Google photos. Yeah. So how do you choose the thumbnail? I think you should be able to in editing.

Caller 9 (02:26:47):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
Select a thumbnail, but it maybe not. Maybe not. Yeah. oh, wait a minute. Let's see here. Scooter X are master chatter, who is very good on the quick, on the Google. How does set video thumbnails? Yeah. Well, that's the one I'm looking at, which doesn't have an answer scooter. <Laugh> let's see. Here's the reply. Try some more things, blah, blah, blah. Try download the services. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is just the way it is. Unless we can find a way to set video thumbnails in Google photos. This is what you're gonna get. Not all of them though. It's interesting, but the ones, so it's essentially the first frame. There is something you could do kind of annoying, but you could do it is edit the video and cut off the first few frames.

Caller 9 (02:27:33):
Yeah. How do I edit? I

Leo Laporte (02:27:37):
Any video editor

Caller 9 (02:27:38):
I see

Leo Laporte (02:27:39):
Would be, would let you do that. Can you edit Google photo videos and edit videos and Google photos? That's an interesting,

Caller 9 (02:27:46):
Yeah. Photos have on the top, you know, you, they have

Leo Laporte (02:27:49):
An edit button.

Caller 9 (02:27:50):
Yeah. I edit, but I, I saw edit and I see all the frames, but I

Leo Laporte (02:27:53):
Don't know. Yeah. Open like, yeah. So you can adjust. So you open Google photos, select the video. Yeah. Open the editor menu and tap on adjust from the bottom menu.

Caller 9 (02:28:04):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:28:05):
And I'm gonna guess that there is somewhere, that'll show you a scrubber.

Caller 9 (02:28:10):
Doesn't show me on

Leo Laporte (02:28:11):
Doesn't show you a scrubber.

Caller 9 (02:28:12):
No, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:28:14):
I use Google photos to edit video. I'm looking at some websites here that say download the Google photos app on your Android phone. Edit icon, trim. What you want is trim. Okay. Yeah. And how you can trim your video by choosing the desired start and endpoints of the clips. Okay. So yeah, it says you can do this. So trimming don't trim much cuz you don't wanna really cut off the budget of the video. You just wanna cut off the first frame or two. Yeah. Now it's not gonna be the ideal thumbnail. It's not gonna be the same thumbnail that the YouTuber chose, but at least you'll see something,

Caller 9 (02:28:50):
Something yeah. I can visualize.

Leo Laporte (02:28:52):
Yeah. I'll put a link in this show notes to the article I'm looking at. That definitely says, yeah, you can trim. Trim is probably the word you're looking for. Okay. You wanna trim that video? Okay. Which means te just trim off, trim off the, the first few things

Caller 9 (02:29:08):
And these are called thumbnails technically. So

Leo Laporte (02:29:10):
Yeah. Thumbnails is what the, so people who make videos yeah. Don't necessarily want the, the thing that shows up on YouTube to be the first frame they want to pick it. Yeah. So that's called a thumbnail and they can in their Google video yeah. Portal, they can say, you know, pick this part of the video to use the thumbnail. You can't do that. Probably you could with a video editor, but in Google photos you could just trim it off Leo report, the tech guy. Let me see here. How to fix no thumb BAS in, in yeah, this seems like no, this is not it. This is not

Caller 9 (02:29:52):
Okay. You have put show, you know, some,

Leo Laporte (02:29:54):
I'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah. I what it really, it's good for you to understand what's going on. Is that the YouTubers chosen thumbnail? Yes. Is disappeared when you download it.

Caller 9 (02:30:02):
Can I, can I take some more time for sure?

Leo Laporte (02:30:05):
Sure,

Caller 9 (02:30:05):
Sure, sure. I I'm a long time. I'm a techy guy, not a techy techie, but I, I used computer in 1968.

Leo Laporte (02:30:13):
What, what kind of computer was it?

Caller 9 (02:30:16):
IBM, 1600. Nice. I did my research and master's, you know, thesis on that.

Leo Laporte (02:30:23):
Are you a physicist? Are you a mathematician?

Caller 9 (02:30:26):
Yeah, I'm a engineer

Leo Laporte (02:30:27):
Engineer.

Caller 9 (02:30:27):
Nice. I worked, I worked started with IBM in the 19. Awesome. 98.

Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
Awesome. Oh, you are a techie

Caller 9 (02:30:34):
And well, I was a techie. How old school? And I was a system engineer. IBM and I used to read the dumps.

Leo Laporte (02:30:42):
Oh my God.

Caller 9 (02:30:43):
What? The, the IBM 360

Leo Laporte (02:30:47):
Dumps. Were they in hex?

Caller 9 (02:30:49):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:30:50):
He hex dumps. Wow.

Caller 9 (02:30:51):
You know, 41 and register 11 register.

Leo Laporte (02:30:54):
Oh my God. So you were looking at the machine code?

Caller 9 (02:30:56):
Yeah. Machine code. And and then I went into sales. Totally. I went into the sales cause

Leo Laporte (02:31:03):
That's where the money is. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:31:04):
Money is DP. And then, then IBM transferred me to Singapore.

Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
Oh nice. I love Singapore. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:31:12):
Very beautiful. And and I, I, we used to market IBM computer to, to India from Singapore.

Leo Laporte (02:31:19):
Oh, what fun? Sounds like fun.

Caller 9 (02:31:22):
Fun, fun, Jack.

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
How long were you in Singapore?

Caller 9 (02:31:24):
I was 10 years Singapore.

Leo Laporte (02:31:25):
Oh my gosh. You must speak Malay now. Right. Go

Caller 9 (02:31:28):
Back and live there.

Leo Laporte (02:31:29):
<Laugh> I think Singapore's beautiful.

Caller 9 (02:31:31):
Beautiful country. Love it much more ahead in techy and oh yes.

Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
All that. That's why they shoot Westworld there because it looks like

Caller 9 (02:31:38):
The future. I don't wanna do all that history. I have a quick, quick question. Yes. should I buy tablet? Android or

Leo Laporte (02:31:48):
I iPads are the best tablet easily. Yeah. Google lately has started to make moves to make Android more appealing for tablets, but it's still way behind because almost all Android software is designed for a phone though that, so get an iPad.

Caller 9 (02:32:01):
I bought the Chromebook on your device about years ago. Good. And I'm not happy because there are only certain things you can do in there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:32:11):
It's very limited. See you're you need something you can run Fortran on.

Caller 9 (02:32:16):
Yeah. Well listen, I still have it Dell XP machine, which is works perfectly. Of

Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
Course. Of course

Caller 9 (02:32:23):
I use, I don't use it on internet, you know, just to, yeah. Yeah. So, so, so I'm a little techy, you know, more, more and more now all your questions are being you know, like a you're

Leo Laporte (02:32:36):
Soaking 'em up like a sponge mobile,

Caller 9 (02:32:39):
Mobile centric. Nice. Nothing about

Leo Laporte (02:32:42):
Isn't that interesting how times have changed. Yes. But if you think about it, that Android phone in your pocket was so much faster than IBM 1600

Caller 9 (02:32:49):
Computer. It's the

Leo Laporte (02:32:50):
Same. It's a super computer phone than

Caller 9 (02:32:52):
IBM 1600. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:32:54):
It's a super computer. Yeah. Yeah. Hey Sam, what a pleasure meeting you call back again.

Caller 9 (02:32:59):
Thank you. I'll call.

Leo Laporte (02:33:00):
I appreciate

Caller 9 (02:33:00):
It. Thank you. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:33:01):
Bye-Bye all right, Mr. Dickey, D who is living in the state of anxiety.

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:10):
Yeah. And, and I have I'm on Dean's list.

Leo Laporte (02:33:16):
Oh, you went to anxiety, state. You're on the Dean's list

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:19):
And, and I'm living in it.

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
Get it. I think I get it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:22):
I think 75% of the country is living in it.

Leo Laporte (02:33:26):
Was it really hot this week?

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:29):
Someone in thet room just said that it hit 90 in New York. Yikes. I think

Leo Laporte (02:33:33):
We had 90 here. Ninety's not that. I

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:35):
Think we're showing a little bit.

Leo Laporte (02:33:37):
Ninety's not

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:38):
88, 88.

Leo Laporte (02:33:39):
Oh, that's nothing

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:40):
Myra said. It's only 88.

Leo Laporte (02:33:41):
It's only 88. It's disco time here. He comes dancing across the tech eye dance floor. He's looking good in his satin suit and his high heeled boots, Mr. Dick D Bartolo, Mads mad writer and our GIW and disco F hello? Dickie. D

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:59):
How are you, Leah?

Leo Laporte (02:34:00):
I see you

Dick DeBartolo (02:34:01):
Wearing outside of

Leo Laporte (02:34:02):
What? Beside a COVID. I'm fine. Yes. I'm feeling much better now. Thank you. Oh, good. Oh great. Oh yeah. I tested negative twice now. I'm good. I'm that's all over, man. I see you're wearing,

Dick DeBartolo (02:34:13):
I have four shots too, so yeah, if I get it, it was mild to you.

Leo Laporte (02:34:18):
Yeah, it was very, it was like a cold. Oh, good. Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm I'm not saying that would be true for everybody certainly, but in fact, Lisa who also got at the same time, we should have, we should have stopped kissing, I think my wife, so it's okay. Oh yeah. She it's been a little worse for her. She says, oh, I don't ever want this again. So I guess it really does depend on the person, but yeah. Don't still be careful, I think, right?

Dick DeBartolo (02:34:44):
No, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:34:45):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I see you're wearing your college colors.

Dick DeBartolo (02:34:48):
It is. Yeah. I went to anxiety, state <laugh> and was on the Dean's list and I am still in anxiety state. That's that's the state

Leo Laporte (02:34:59):
Of normal state these days.

Dick DeBartolo (02:35:01):
Yes. You know, I, I saw in some poll that 75% of the country said I'm anxious, so wow. It it's a, a big college campus.

Leo Laporte (02:35:12):
There's plenty to be plenty to be anxious about. Yeah. Yes. We're all living on campus at anxiety state.

Dick DeBartolo (02:35:17):
Oh my God. Oh my God. I,

Leo Laporte (02:35:19):
Your stuff, you always bring something fun and, and interest.

Dick DeBartolo (02:35:22):
Yeah. You know what? This, this is a fun thing. So there was an event in the city called sweet, sweet. It's a toy event of toys that are coming out in the pool. See, see? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So this one is great fun. It's air Titans, Jurassic world attack. T-Rex <laugh> okay. It's

Leo Laporte (02:35:45):
A, a ver your very own T-Rex.

Dick DeBartolo (02:35:47):
Yeah. So this is, this is great fun. This is six feet

Leo Laporte (02:35:51):
Tall. Oh, it's huge.

Dick DeBartolo (02:35:53):
It's huge. Okay. And it's remote controlled, but they have a little let the T-Rex have control so he can chase you around. Okay. Wow. And yeah, I mean, it's not Inex well for what it is. It's not that expensive. It's 130 bucks. Okay. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:36:12):
But for a six foot Tyrana so I think that's a good deal.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:15):
Yeah. And in the foot is a constant air system, so that as he moves around, he stays totally inflated

Leo Laporte (02:36:25):
It's inflated.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:27):
And it has a dozen Dino sounds and actually unlike other events, kids are allowed at sweet, sweet, and also <laugh> a lot of kids at sweet sweetie becoming millionaires because they're they're channels and their videos. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:36:45):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's big on YouTube. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:48):
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. So this is starting a ship now I believe for the first few months it's exclusive to Walmart.

Leo Laporte (02:36:58):
Is it on wheels? Wheels? What is,

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:00):
What is it? It's on wheels. Yes. It's on wheels and it's not,

Leo Laporte (02:37:03):
It's not attached to anything. It's a standalone. There's no wire

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:07):
It exit no wire, no wire. It it's a has a 2000 milliamp battery and the fan system in one of the legs that inflates it. Wow. And then you control it with the remote control. Or as I said, you can give the it's called attack mode. You put an attack mode and then the Rex <laugh>, it's free.

Leo Laporte (02:37:27):
<Laugh> I can decide this. I definitely want

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:30):
One of these. He, he can decide where he wants to go. Yeah. I think it's pretty neat. I think they're gonna do well with it. No, no. I was sort of amazed that it's supposed to be scary, but kids kept running over and chasing it around, wanting to hug it. Not real.

Leo Laporte (02:37:43):
They know they're not done well. So Walmart has it. It's 130 bucks.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:49):
Yep.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:50):
And it's from Jack specific and it's called air Titans, Jurassic world. Massive attack. T-Rex

Leo Laporte (02:37:58):
Remote control inflatable arc over six feet long with more than a dozen T-Rex side effects included at signature T-Rex stomps. And I want to hear the sounds. Do you have the sounds,

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:08):
You know what the sounds are on the video that they, that I added on, I added on their th their 32nd. Okay. So I can, I can go there so later on when you, yeah, you can let's

Leo Laporte (02:38:20):
Let's see here. I got, I got you talking comes in a box. I got the nice, the nice little, the nice

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:26):
Lady. Oh yeah. Go, go toward the end. I think it's the last 30 seconds of the video.

Leo Laporte (02:38:29):
Yeah, there it is.

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:31):
There it is. It's fun.

Leo Laporte (02:38:37):
That's the sound?

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:39):
Well, they've done a bit of amplifying it. <Laugh> RO RA.

Leo Laporte (02:38:48):
I love it. Okay. I think that's a very cute tool now toy. I should say. Now, if you wanna know more, you can go to Dick's website. He is our gizmo wizard. So his website is Gaz whiz. G I Z w I Z do biz. Yeah. I see it all rhymes, gwiz.biz.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:03):
Very clever.

Leo Laporte (02:39:04):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Whoever thought of that smart person click the button that says the GWiz visit is the tech guy. While you're there, you might wanna play Dick's little game. What the heck is it now? The, what the heck is it? Contest shows your close up of a gadgets gonna end at the in one more month. So you get a month to end of August to identify this little. I don't know. I don't know. It hooks on it does something. I don't know. You're in the running for autograph copies of mad magazine, Dick autographs from his very own self. And it is the

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:42):
Horrible we'll be playing for the October issue.

Leo Laporte (02:39:45):
Yeah's scary.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:46):
And you will have yours. Mine came yesterday. So I'll by next Saturday. That's very nice to,

Leo Laporte (02:39:52):
I had to go. Dick sends me

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:53):
A

Leo Laporte (02:39:53):
Copy of every mad magazine.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:55):
That's okay. The cover is black. So I had to go to staples and buy silver pens. Oh yeah. So I could, could find a look at

Leo Laporte (02:40:02):
That though. It looks, that's gonna look good. So if you, so the way it works is there's six autograph mad magazines for the right answer. There's 12 for the wrong answer. If there's a collision, if there's more than 12 or six, then he does a drawing and all the rules are at the website. GWE exactly.bi. I think they're gonna sell a lot of these. I think this is it's perfect. If you're in an anxiety, if you go to anxiety, state, cuz you'll, it will improve your in heighten your anxiety state to have a T-Rex chasing you around campus.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:36):
I think you're right. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:40:39):
GIZ whiz.biz, Dickey. D I hope you have a wonderful, did you you, you worked with Michael the last two Saturdays.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:47):
Yeah. he's really adequate. Yes, no, I, I, I, I said Michael, that's what I said, Mikah. I know. I said, Mikah, you are really great. Yeah. I said, forgive me. I'm gonna tell Leo that you're just Soso. But no, I, I think you must be relieved that you have somebody that if you want to take more,

Leo Laporte (02:41:05):
I am, I am. And some people were asking about rich Durrow who is of course the K T a tech reporter. Yeah. And rich is absolutely still in the mix for fillin. We've been train, I've been working with Mikah for the last, you may know, for the last six months. I just really, yes. Wanted to give him a chance to solo. And I thought this was a perfect time to do it. And he was, no,

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:22):
It was great fun. We had great

Leo Laporte (02:41:23):
Fun. Yeah. So that's great. Thank you. Dickie D have a

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:26):
Wonder buddy,

Leo Laporte (02:41:27):
Next week. We'll see you next week. You too. And thank you all for joining us on the tech guy show. It worked really well to do first time callers today. Didn't it gave everybody a chance to get in. I hope our regulars don't feel too slighted, but I think that's a, we're gonna keep doing that for a little bit of time. So write down the number 88 88, ask Leo and come by next time. And I will take your calls. Maybe we get to ring that we got it right. Bell again, once more, twice. <Laugh> if you enjoyed the show, you or you have questions you should know about the website tech guy labs.com. We put all the shows up there, audio and video. After the fact, we also put the show notes with links to things I've mentioned. So if you hear something and you're saying, oh, and what did he say?

Leo Laporte (02:42:12):
What was that? It'll all be. It'll all be there. Techguylabs.com. And yes, that's free. There's no sign up. I don't need your money. I don't need your email address. It's just like webs used to be. You just wander in. Everybody knows your name. You go in, you say hi, no, every nobody knows your name. Nobody, nobody nowadays. That's more important. Thanks to professor Laura musical director. Great. Job's good to be back. I am not sailing away for a while. Now. I shall stick around. Thanks to Kim Shafer our phone angel. Thanks. Most of all, of course, to you couldn't do the show without your calls and and your ears keep listening and I will be back next time. Leo LePort D tech guy have a great geek week boy on, well, that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget twit T w I T it stands for this week@techandyoufinditattwit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS, today's security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all@twit.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guy show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.