You Biggie, Me Smallie - Twitter Outage, VPN's, Denon PerL Pro

well hey it's me Leo Laporte coming up uh review of the most expensive earbuds I've ever purchased and a little sidebar on Bluetooth codex and I'm Micah Sargent and we answer a great question who exactly are vpns for that is Johnny jet with some great tips for travelers this summer it's all coming up next I'll ask The Tech Guys podcasts you love from people you trust this is TWiT this is ask The Tech Guys with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte episode 1981 recorded Sunday July 2nd 2023 you biggie me Smalley as The Tech Guys is brought to you by Electric e-bikes ReDiscover your Independence this summer with XP 3.0 from Electric visit electricebikes.com to learn more explore the Epic models electric has to offer and by twit as an ad supported Network we're always looking for new partners with products and services to benefit our audience 99 of our audience listens to most or all of our episodes you can grow your brand with authentic ad reads that always resonate with our audience reach out to advertise at twit.tv and launch your campaign now it's time for ask The Tech Guys with Leo LaPorte and Micah Sargent hi I'm Micah happy Fourth of July oh my goodness it's coming up happy yeah yeah Day After Tomorrow we're gonna take the day off so if you watch our Tuesday shows don't well you could but they won't be fresh yeah it'll be uh the stale Pantry but we're doing it today this is fresh yeah this is fresh this is new this is uh the show ask The Tech Guys where you uh call in or zoom in or somehow get in touch with us so that you can ask your questions and have them answered live on air Leo what are some of the ways people can reach out if you're uh on your computer or your phone better yet your phone call.twit.tv in your browser will pop up zoom and uh we'll put you on video with us which we like you'll show up in our Stargate but you can also call we have a phone 888-724 2884 what is that spell John that's 888-724 a t t g and uh that's so that's easy to remember yeah so sure so you can also email atg Twitter TV well if you call that phone number by the way when we're not on there you can leave a message so we have some voicemails I'm told A Fistful of uh voicemails we have some emails but we also have I already see some callers uh before we get to that are you gonna see the fireworks on Tuesday uh the no petaluma's gonna have fireworks oh I didn't know that we're doing what they call high altitude fireworks so you can anywhere that you can see the sky in Petaluma you should be able to see the fire well then I'm definitely going to see the fireworks many towns though according to the New York Times are no longer doing fireworks they're doing drones and the drones are cool but they're missing something I remember when uh I was at a lecture by St The Stig who's the former Formula One driver who drove for uh the uh the BBC TV show about cars I can't remember its name now but the Stig top here thank you Benito is younger than me his brain's still working The Stig said I don't like Formula E the electric cars because there's no Roar and Rumble like there is a Formula One and uh and kind of that's what's true about drones they don't explode yeah that's one of my favorite moments boom rattles yeah exactly rattles your chest that's part of it the drones are cool I mean they can do a cooler things I saw a drone uh show in the French region Bordeaux region I saw the video not that I wasn't there uh where it formed a wine bottle it formed a wine glass and then a bottle tipped and the wine poured out of the wine that's pretty cool with lit up drones so yeah because you're computer controlled but when people were in the the Revolutionary War and they looked up in the sky there wasn't wine bottles pouring wine and two American flag waving yeah this crew the British no no that's supposed to resemble Warfare and there's rumbling in air so uh I yeah I wonder if I think drone shows are great for let's say the Super Bowl and places where you can't light things on fire and have big explosions uh you know Disneyland has a firework show every single night in Disneyland next door the California Adventure they have a electric light show and I have to say the fight you look forward to the fireworks yeah you're really there's something about it yeah so Elon Musk ddust Twitter this weekend oh my God that's hysterical so so Musk was a he says oh this is terrible everybody's scraping our content so we set what they call limits on how many tweets you could see on Twitter yeah and if you were blue check I think this is what it was really all about is to encourage blue trek check you could watch thousands you know you could see thousands I think 50 000 tweets but if you were not verified in other words didn't pay eight dollars for a blue check he calls it verified it's not verified it's paid yeah uh only a thousand and if you weren't even logged in none zero zip and uh unfortunately the way they implemented it apparently uh brought Twitter down on Saturday morning Twitter was gone because they in effect ddust themselves the way they did this rate limiting affected even Twitter's ability to to show Twitter and uh on Mastodon there's a web developer who I follow Sheldon Chang who said uh because a bug in Twitter's web app is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite Loop Twitter is ddosing itself which is which on yesterday took the home feed down for most of the morning 10 requests a second to itself try and fetch content that never posted a video of the developer console on his browser these are requests unfulfilled requests hundreds of requests a minute coming in so as more users become rate limited then they're also causing this what Sheldon said is of course uh if I had been a nice person I would have logged off immediately but I The Evil Sheldon was in charge so I stayed on for a little while because everybody stayed on uh killed it so anyway I think it's back to back to normal but it just shows you you fire all the engineers that's what's going to happen and you also like Implement things last minute that's what's gonna happen yeah yeah and I have to say I feel sorry for the woman who they brought in as a as a CEO of the company because she can't fire the engineering team I think it was Lisa schmeiser uh who at one point pointed out that a lot of times in Silicon Valley you see this happen uh when a company is worried about it Go itself going under they bring in a woman CEO they did it with Melissa Mayer at Yahoo she mentioned several others she cited examples uh HP did it with Carly fiorina uh interesting interesting it's a bummer yeah let the lady handle it and then it ends up going down and then it's you know June 30th couple of days ago the end of the line for many third-party Reddit apps Apollo of the best known you interviewed Christian selig the creator of Apollo on Tech news weekly last week um as as they started started charging for access to its site same kind of the same issue as Twitter which is they don't like these AI a large language models scraping data for their benefit but not for the benefit of Twitter or Reddit uh so reddit's going to start charging for Access and the many third part not all but many third-party apps said we can't afford that yeah I saw some of them did still they figured out a deal with Reddit it's still going so uh but the real issue of course is the the then Revolt by Reddit moderators who said hey wait a minute this is a bridge too far all the people who moderated the very famous Reddit ask me any things I've done one where you get famous or in my case Infamous people on and then you can ask them any question and that takes a lot of moderation all those people were doing it for free they've all said well you know Reddit if you want to keep doing those you can hire somebody but we ain't doing it for free anymore I I don't know if Freddie will survive this so far it has we shall see we shall see yeah the choice to have groups open back up their Reddit Pages their subreddits and several moderators getting these sort of increasingly more vicious messages from the moderation teams and one one thing that moderators have done on some sites like the Synology subreddit is Markham not safe for work there's a little switch they have you could say well it is not safe for work and why is that uh it of course is safer work it's just about a network it's that storage solution uh but it's a bad thing for Reddit because advertisers mostly say no we don't want to be on NSFW got it subreddits so it's a way of trying to take money away uh I think it's just a matter of time before uh Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit and the Reddit management just takes the site away from those moderators and says no you know it's not NSFW and that's where I think it's headed yeah um I think that's pretty much it except to say that we have a all in studio twit this afternoon Father Robert is in town uh so is Brianna Wu so is Ian Thompson so that table over there is going to be full of real live people in just a couple of hours Father Robert is going I'm it's going to be the official Handover Remember The Flipper zero the hacking tool that I had the multi-tool for hackers uh Father Robert is going to take it over because he has even though he's a Catholic priest he apparently has a dark side so so uh I'm gonna give it to my better angel I haven't done anything since uh since I got it so it's good to him turns out even though Amazon refuses to sell the flipper zero they have they're on track to make 80 million dollars wow 80 million dollars worth of sales since they came out earlier this year uh that's pretty darn good coming up in just a little bit uh we've got a visit from Johnny jet our travel Guru and I will tell you about a long journey I went on but a journey in my own mind I bought these uh very expensive the Denon calls them their Pearl p-e-r-l personal listening and I said well let's go in for a penny and for a pound for the pros these are earbuds that say they are going to shape the sound uh to your actual hearing automatically but there's even more the story is very interesting it has a lot to do with Bluetooth codecs and more so a review of these Pearl Pros plus a discussion of high quality Wireless listening does it exist Does it but first we should get to some calls what do you say let's do it oh and scooter X says like everybody else around here hey what's the status of your color eating project well now Leo's coding in Pearl so it's gonna be a while no no I will I will do it I have to pick up some python to do it and that's what's uh slowed me down a little bit but I I will I'm not I will do it I promise I will Tokyo Tony has his hand up in our Zoom chat Tokyo Tony come on down and join us in the Stargate he calls himself Tokyo Tony even he lives in Arizona hi Tony how you doing from Arizona yes that's correct top of his head is from Arizona anyway I prefer not to be on the video actually oh you don't have to be on video good good you're anonymous yeah but I I told you told me I think that you look call yourself Tokyo because you lived in Japan for quite some time that's correct I lived there for 17 years wow how come you came home uh for work I I my son was uh he was getting into high school and I wanted we actually did it after that Singapore for uh 10 years so if you have a choice between Tokyo and Singapore which would you choose I would choose Singapore for living it's just a lot safer Tokyo it's very cramped it's nice to be there in your 20s or 30s but for a family Singapore you can't beat it yeah it's safe that's for sure that's for sure it's also 80 degrees day and night all year round yeah there's no weather weather people there it's the same it's like Groundhog's Day yeah wow I hear though the durians are very popular in Singapore and the prices have plummeted of late have you ever had a durian I've smelled them that's all that was enough right yeah I am told they taste better than they smell but you know I don't blame you first they couldn't get past it what can we do for you Tony yeah I've got two questions about routers my router I got an Orbee um router it's a it's a thick Wi-Fi stick okay and do I need to install any type of security stuff it comes with for example on the app the armor app and I've been using this I get these strange messages from armor saying we blocked a malicious site you tried to to go to and that's not my my video server they have an iMac set separately I have no idea what URL it is is it actually necessary to have any type of security program or something for these routers I don't even worry about it I don't think so all the routers offer uh some form of not all but many do some sort of upsell the uh or the heroes offer a 99 a year plan does Orbee charge you foreign for the first year the 99 after that but I just don't know if it's worth it I don't think I don't think you need I would see what other features you get for that 99 bucks that's a lot of money to spend you can easily if you want security um you can do what I do look at you know in in theory the router is going to do the best job of security because it sees all the traffic if they inspect the packets as they come in it could see if they're hazardous it so there's a number of things it can do that something like my my Preferred Choice uh which is uh nextdns.io uh can't do it's a DNS server so it's sitting out there whenever you make a request it could say is this a malicious site and block it it could do some additional filtering but it's never going to be as good as stuff on the hardware the question really is do I need it it one of the things I bet it does is ADD uh gets rid of ads yes get rid of the the Armor security software yeah does it get rid of ads no no it just doesn't it surprising the only other the only other thing it did was it said it blocked I I have a port that I'm forwarding and it blocked a malicious attack on a port forward that's but I just really don't know I mean I've got a firewall set up on my computer I think you're fine I mean yeah I so I use ubiquity uh and ubiquity does also have a malicious uh attack software and I actually use it uh I for instance I forbid any incoming traffic from China Russia or Ukraine because a lot there's a lot of hacking attacks that come from those three countries so and I don't deal with any the Ukraine's the only iffy one because some of the stuff I use is from Ukraine but if if I want to download software for instance from you know from a Mac fun or macpaw or whatever I will I will I will say okay fine uh let's take the shields down download it then turn them back on um so there is some value to that you know just saying no no IP traffic from China a lot of attacks almost all the attacks on my Synology for instance come from China um and they and probably your Orbee can can sense can using stateful pack what they call staple packet inspection can inspect the packets and sense some malicious or malformed packets so there is there's absolutely security value to it so that's why I don't want to say turn it off um I don't I'm not familiar with that particular software maybe it's not you know if you're getting are they they're all false positives right when you get those yeah I guess so I don't know if what what site my my video server is trying to to uh request the URL for it because it's a shame about it in the warning what the URL is it says unblock URL I go I don't know what you're early yeah I've had that issue with ero as well that's this the software is like black box you don't know exactly what it's doing and I've had issues just visiting normal sites because of it so I've taken it down temporarily and been able to visit the site and then realized that it had just mistagged something for a long time on the radio show if somebody had problems with accessing a site I'd tell me I'd say tell me what security software you're running because very frequently it was security software doing it and this is the I guess the the the tension between security and you know complete free access security is going to lock you down somewhat and sometimes you're going to get false positives you get a lot of them then I think it's not good security software yeah and that's the question right um but on the other hand that's a very valuable thing my my ubiquity silently Rejects malicious packets malicious traffic when I look at the log there's a lot of it um I am not going to turn that off but the ubiquity does a very good job and it does it silently I don't have too much trouble getting the sites that I want to I used to run next DNS uh and my wife complained that a lot of her sites wouldn't work in fact it's true a lot of sign up forms and so forth didn't so I actually uh for her I disable it I leave it on for me because I know what's going on we had trouble with the PlayStation Network because of next DNS it was having trouble connecting and doing next DNS is like a uh is like a pie hole that's that Raspberry Pi security software I think is there something I can I can use otherwise other than armor can I actually oh yeah is there something I can run on the router oh yeah there's a lot of choices like the fire wallow which a lot of people like I think Stacy recommended that Stacy Higginbotham on um on this week in Google the firewalla is a bit of hardware kind of a Raspberry Pi like device that sits between your router and the outside world they have three different levels of protection as you can see and uh it's fast it's gigabits so it's not going to slow you down but it's doing in Hardware uh what that software is doing on your Orbee so that's an interesting alternative there's a number of products like this but you can see it's the the fancy ones I think 500 bucks it's not cheap sorry 485. I'm just curious maybe it's not worth it I just was thinking the basics of what the router should block and my fireworks on my Macs firewalls it should be okay right yeah if you talk to I mean hardly anybody's using these right and uh so I think you're probably all right I I guess ultimately this conversation comes down to and we always use this term and I don't like it but your threat model in other words how threatened are you you know if you're working for a three-letter agency out of McLean Virginia well then maybe you should run all the security software you can get your little hands on but you're a normal citizen you're not probably the target of a nation-state attack much more likely uh like all the rest of us all the attacks are kind of network wide kind of Internet noise and that kind of thing they're probably harmless as long as you do the right thing you know you don't open attachments you you're careful about the links you click you got you're glad you have a firewall running on your systems um yep the one thing I would do sometimes on a Mac that people don't do the firewalls on Windows and Mac are inbound only it's not a bad idea to run something that looks at outbound traffic because if somebody does get into your system the next thing they do is they contact you know home base and so something like little snitch which is not paid and then there's a there's a good one I can't remember the name of it either from uh OB uh oh I can't remember the name but there's a good open source one we've talked about it before uh objective design does the the little snitch but I can't remember who does the free one but there's a there are a little free programs you can run I don't even run those but if you're nervous you can watch for outbound traffic Lulu thank you very much Doug M it's called Lulu l-u-l-u and it's open source and it's free and it doesn't it impinges a little you know we've talked in the past about uh you know Steve always said uh and Steve Gibson our host of security Now always says you know you should run no script until you do and then you go well I can't even use the Internet it's blocking all JavaScript yeah I'm safe but I can't run any uh any JavaScript objective Dash cse.org it's a little pun on Objective C the language Lulu objectivec.org and I've used this a little bit it might annoy you a little bit did you run it for a while yeah yeah I just didn't end up need yeah I think for you and I we we do a lot more stuff but we just don't need all of this stuff we aren't to some degree targets too um so it's our threat model is different than your threat model I think you're fine Tokyo Tony but I have a very quick very simple second question should I turn on IPv6 is there any benefit to do that no okay I mean theoretically there's a benefit any theory for a lot of harm in turning it on I guess uh yes okay what's the harm uh well there are a lot of sites that don't support it I mean there's just issues with it that just because it's better in theory so this goes back to Vince Surf and others uh one of the fathers of the internet saying we're gonna run out IP addresses and Steve Gibson has covered this in the past uh for a while ipv4 which is the one you're all used to you know 128.1.6.0 uh dotted quad but that runs out of addresses fairly quickly and we were afraid everybody was afraid that we were going to run out of Internet addresses because it's such a small number nobody anticipated that the entire world would be on the internet but guess what happened a couple of things happen if one ever your router only uses one internet address all that stuff behind the router has its own private address so most people are only using one and then there is also ISP level Nat which which is helping even more so it turns out the sky might have been falling but we're temporarily holding it up in IPv6 uh implementation has rolled out slowly and there are issues with it um you could turn on and see if you have any problems but I don't think the point really is you don't need to turn it on so why take the chance okay eventually it's something like somebody the IPv6 is the metric system there you go eventually we'll do it someday right eventually we'll stop doing daylight savings time so Tony because you lived in Singapore and Japan for so long you probably the metric systems you know you know it like in your head yeah the temperatures and and and distance yeah and weight was I'm a lot I'm a lot less heavy uh in metrics I only weigh eight stone it's an amazing thing it's great I prefer Stone myself thank you Tokyo Tony thank you guys thank you very much yeah um I I'll have to I haven't done any research on IPv6 in some time my experience was I turned it on and things stopped working and I thought I don't need it and I think that's really the bottom line is you don't need it yet I've got mine turned on and I've not had any issues okay the ipv4 does ipv4 IP that's why I was asking yeah what your router is probably going to do is have both of them yeah and since most sites will most sites get a lot of stuff doesn't yet support IPv6 exactly uh you can't turn off ipv4 I guess right yeah exactly so one of the other mistakes yeah um I do see we got someone who called in to the number 88 wait I shouldn't do that because then I have to do 88.87 24 2884. you fall into the Trap I do every single time 888-724 a t t g is the number and uh we do have a wireless yeah and we're uh we're all uh wide open for that I see wireless caller let's do I do I do that too do I send them to the breakout room now you'll have to press star six to unmute wireless caller but go ahead and say hello hey there we go we heard something what's your name what's your first name and where are you calling from my name is Mark what city are you from oh Malibu oh you're on the beach there is it a beautiful day in Malibu it's a beautiful day but I'm on the uh the east side of Pacific Coast Highway uh if you know where Malibu is you know uh uh Duke's Restaurant is yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and you go up the hill to the top of the hill yep and I'm right there in that little Ridge you look down on all the movie stars yep as a matter of fact when the Sean Penn was married to a Madonna instead of about three quarters of a mile I can see their footprint when they uh had a house over there the fire burns it up so it's just a footprint now but I remember when they said they all there nice were there a lot of helicopters during the wedding flying overhead what can we do for you mark oh here's the deal this is 2008 I bought a Toshiba Cosmos media Edition that's when it had Comp USA beautiful computer yes the the keyboard was easy the screen was clearing part of the speakers and I used it for a while and then I just got busy with working other projects but I'll put it aside and started doing a lot of stuff with my Apple phone I had two Apple phones since then so now I got some time and I want to go back um to use my computer because I have a lot of instructional discs and all that kind of stuff and uh it just makes things easier the problem is that when I haven't used it for so long it went into the biosphere now this is Los Angeles this this company is just stores here that could you know get it back or remediate it because I want to go back to start using it and then so when it booted up when it booted up it went into BIOS setup did it did it say I can't see the hard drives I think that's probably what happened well it just said biosphere yeah when it does that you know it does that normally a computer you know when it boots it'll look at the master boot record on the hard drive go okay good the master boot records say go look at Windows startup it'll all start up if you can't see the hard drive then it's going to say well I'm going to go into setup now you can in the Bios you can see what Hardware is installed you could see if it can even see the hard drive so yeah that computer has been sitting on a shelf for five six years yeah yeah it could well be that the heart is worth it yeah so you you said replace the hard drive well they may you may not okay so get ready for this you may not need to replace the hard drives if it's easy to open I think it is with some screws on the bottom open it up disconnect the hard drive reconnect it maybe after you disconnect it whap it give it a good whap with a screwdriver handle because one of the things that happens with spinning hard drives they call it stiction the heads of the hard drives if you let them sit for a while no they're not they're supposed to retract they're not supposed to touch the platter but sometimes if you let it sit for a while it'll hit the head of the platter and stick and then there's not enough juice to get the platter spinning because I know you never heard of this no this is it sounds like I'm making it up doesn't it anyway it's called you could look it up I'm not making an abstiction sometimes a whap with a screwdriver just enough to get that head free so what I would do is open it up take out the hard drive whack it nuts don't like dentist don't beat us just a tap just to kind of give it a little jolt put it back in and try again it may be either the connection got loose or you know somehow corroded so look and see if it's rusted and so forth make sure the battery isn't swollen uh and there's nothing leaking out of it sometimes that can happen but if you if you take it out you look and make sure the connection is good you whip it put it back in nice firm connection then try again it might work if it doesn't is there stuff on the hard drive you need mark well here's the thing um if it's not there if you have to put another hard drive in that would be okay because I have enough stuff work okay I can uh so you could put another driver yeah so that's that's what I want so what it is uh and what I've heard that Toshiba has been sold several years ago somebody else owns it they don't make a laptop and then you know yeah so there's one other there's one other thing that the chat room scooter X is bringing up in the chat room there was a problem in the 20 mid 2010s 2014-15 with capacitors leaking and uh it is possible scooter X is saying that the capacitor in the power supply has failed and the power supply is not coming on I don't think that's that may or may not be the case you're seeing a screen right and you're seeing stuff on the screen right well the only thing I'm seeing is all black but I get the little text you know um bio at the top and that kind of stuff this is the same aggressive F12 or anything like that does it give you anything yeah that kind of stuff yeah so I think the power supply is working it may not have enough juice to spin up that drive but I think you're probably okay um what I would do is get so take out the drive and and see what it is it's probably a two and a half inch laptop drive that's got it's a it's got a special connector in it and it looks like you know a credit card size Drive a little thicker obviously if it's one of those you can get an SSD to replace it you're gonna have to a solid state drive that would be a big replacement it would fix a lot of the problems no no it's worth it yeah no so what is if you can refer me uh to one or two places even if you guys have an outlet I could go to because it's worth it to me to get it back up and and moving so to speak Mike has found a site because you know I don't Yeah so basically you're wondering you're asking Our advice on where you can find a hard drive to replace or are you asking for a place you can go where they will do it for you which of the two that's yeah that would do it for me the place that you say these people are very good you know that kind of stuff got it or or you know because a lot of times like a lot of these uh music places like you know you buy a music book and they won't give you the disc you have to go online you know who wants to use that you know so if you have like a up-to-date on your visual uh Media Center computer which I don't even think they make any more but really somebody here in the LA area these guys are going to take care of you here's the big problem I don't think you want to put a lot of money into this thing it's a Pentium M so it's really slow it's really old it's somewhat out of date at this point and uh you could bring it to Best Buy you know and get the the I want to call them the Goon Squad get the Geeks I went there I went there with the Goon Squad and they couldn't do it they said no they couldn't do it yeah they go for the like the last two or three years they go for the they're not really yeah yeah they see a cheapskate coming a mile away they say I don't want to deal with Marcus yeah he's trying to get an old computer up and running I think yeah you could probably do it yourself yeah I'm thinking you could do it so I I have faith in you mark all you need is a uh is a is a pretty much just a screwdriver yeah the cosmo has it's literally the hard drive has its own little area on the bottom of your uh laptop so you can just get it so just yeah you just get at it um I we will include in our links uh in the show notes which you can find at twit.tv atg um the page and it has a walk through set of steps it's got photographs and everything and essentially you would just get a new hard drive and you can buy that in almost any place you know if you get it at Best Buy or you order it on Amazon or you any of these there's some other issues though your CMOS battery may be dead I was wondering about the CMOS but we could put a link in the show notes for you to get a new one of those they're about a buck two bucks in the laptop we've got to have a place in Malibu I really don't that's the problem I don't I'm just no no I know Dukes my car goes all over okay I know dudes okay but we're up here in Northern California and we're not uh I'm afraid experts all right in uh repair places in Southern California uh if if the Geek Squad one of the reasons that chat room's telling me one of the reasons they don't like to handle uh dead Lithium-ion batteries because sometimes charging them up causes problems and so they're nervous about that as well uh if you could if you could spare a few hundred bucks I would it would probably be a smarter thing instead of spending that money to repair it to get a new one to be honest with you and your concerned with getting a new one is that you won't be able to use these discs that you have is it was that the big concern yeah so this is a great thing too and instructional just yeah go ahead you can get for hardly any money on Amazon and external disk drive a USB yeah a USB even if you end up getting a laptop you know a new laptop you just take that USB drive you plug it into the other side Mark are they floppy disks or CDs or DVDs not even CDs or DVDs okay you know and so what it is for 30 or 40 bucks you can get a USB DVD drive I have one because they don't build them into computers anymore like they did in that day but honestly it a new computer and get a decent computer for five or six hundred bucks you plug in the Flop the CD drive and you'll be able to watch those instructional discs still oh there's no computer right now that would have that feature of having a putting a disk inside the computer that's that's done with it well you could try going to a big box store like Costco or Sam's Club and see sometimes they have older models but nobody's putting CD-ROMs into computers anymore I don't think yeah yeah the technology wow I know the way yeah here's a typical portable drive yeah we've got a one that it even it plays Blu-ray it's from Pioneer yeah um we've got an overhead I have one at home uh you know I never use it it's pretty dusty because it's just sitting in a drawer I've got one that when Apple used to make them they don't make them anymore but I still have one I bought in college and it yeah it just sits there it's a USB 3 Connection on the back of it so it'd be fast enough uh to run Blu-rays so I you know this is a tough one I mean ideally ideally you'd get something you could probably run those DVDs on a TV too yeah do you need a computer for it totally you could um yeah it's like well I just bought an 85 inch with the admi uh feature on it oh and then I have a couple of the uh video uh players yeah Blu-ray player what happens when you put the disc into that yeah well I have a technician coming by Wednesday and he's going to hook it up so let's see what happens see what happens there it just depends if it's a Windows if those discs are windows disks that need the Windows operating system or their Standalone discs that you could just watch on a regular DVD player uh let's hope they're the latter otherwise you'd have to get a new Windows PC I don't think it's worth spending hundreds of dollars to get this thing working yeah instead of trying to put a bunch of money into this older machine it's well worth just getting a new one I would say and then yeah 30 30 40 on uh buying that external drive and you're good to go for as long as those cvds last save a little money and get a nice piece of uh of uh hula pie at Dukes the restaurant over here is Joffrey you ever been yeah yeah that's a funny funny little place I love Joffrey's right off the PCH right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah man that's how we're moving over here you know I you know it's one of my favorite areas I love driving the coast on the PCH it's so pretty so beautiful and today it must be gorgeous Malibu was 25 miles long it was like a strip of bacon and they got 33 billionaires yeah that's amazing people who have like 880 million dollars uh Beyonce just bought a new uh Jay-Z and Beyonce bought a new house on Malibu I think I thought I saw that 200 million they paid cash nice walking around money you know man let me see if I have this in my pants yeah here you go I'll take it Mark a pleasure talking to you all right guys thanks Mark I don't think we were much help except to say it's got a new machine it's not worth fixing it probably and I'll like that there's so many things don't forget to eat your vegetables why do you say that I can't eat my vegetables do I look like I need to eat more are you the vegetable king of Malibu no no that's the key to everything man it's the vegetables that's the secret sauce oh I hate vegetables longevity right yeah yeah the nation I gotta eat more vegetables if it results in me having 200 million dollars and walking around money I'll eat everything's eating his vegetables I probably Beyonce definitely definitely she's eating her vegetables Queen B hey you pay that much money for the house and you can have all right take it easy man you don't have to eat vegetables see you Mark just filter out your body every three weeks or something let me think of the last time I had a vegetable are you kidding you eat vegetables I had cream spinach last night I don't like spinach is good for you creaming it not so good I just don't like how it I want to show you how I stay in shape you want to see how I stay in shape these I can't wait to see how you I love my e-bike from Electric vroom vroom electric e-bikes are so amazing uh this is uh this is one of the models this one I've been riding around that I really like that folds up in all of that stuff no better time to get out there thank you for hefting that very nicely done getting out there getting out there and uh exploring and just in time electric is bringing you a fast fresh new ride the XP3 it's their latest e-bike model featuring High doll hydraulic brakes snag your electric XP3 e-bike this month experience freedomlike never before electric e-bikes has created a mode of transportation anyone can ride with quality feature filled models Finance as low as 73 bucks a month your adventures won't cost a fortune they all include powerful removable batteries a bright LCD powered by the battery and there's a nice red backlight as well I like that seven speed gearing five levels of power assist to your right and get ready for this the xp3's top speed is 28 miles an hour it's the most popular e-bike in the industry newly reimagined starting at just 9.99 now right now I'm writing the cargo Expedition which is great if you've got stuff to haul the cargo Expedition e-bike makes it easy with a carrying capacity of 450 pounds you can bring all your gear along for the ride just don't let Bert drop it when he takes it off there's also the trike they now have the industry's first fully foldable fully assembled electric tricycle the XP trike features a third wheel for stability and can accommodate a wide range of abilities and preferences here is the XP3 all folded up I'm just taking it out of the trunk so you can go anywhere go to the best trails in the area and unfold your bike take it out of the trunk and you're ready to go I really love this bike pure throttle on demand too that's really great when you get to a stoplight you don't have to step on the gears and pedal your way at slow speed across the intersection just put that throttle and you got as much as 28 miles an hour it's fantastic ReDiscover oh by the way did I mention they come fully assembled Burke likes that because I've made him put my other ones together roam freely reach up to 28 miles an hour The Twist of a throttle or use their next level pedal assistant Mike and I are riding around at cargo baskets bags Comfort upgrades even passenger accessories to specific e-bike models I see a lot of families riding their electrics around these days it's really cool they cost way less than the competition they're foldable they ship free they come fully assembled I I I gotta tell you this is the bike for you ReDiscover your Independence this summer with an XP 3.0 from Electric l-e-c-t-r-i-c visit electricebikes.com to learn more and explore the Epic models electric has to offer l-e-c-t-r-i-c-e-bikes.com I love my e-bike so you know you know uh you still get the exercise by the way people sometimes say oh Leo you're not getting exercise in your bike oh yeah I pedal you get as much or as little as you want right I pedal when you if you use the throttle okay you're you're just riding happy but uh what I like it is that I can I can go out and I don't have to worry about hills because I know I'm going to be able to get up those steep hills yeah without having it's so embarrassing at least it goes up the hills and I have to get off and walk so now we both have electric e-bikes in there great Electric e-bikes.com uh I don't know what we should do next what should we do next is Johnny at one okay uh we have some uh voicemails let's do a voicemail hi my name is Winston I'm calling from Boston Massachusetts hey Winston and I wanted to ask a question about vpns who are they actually for I mean for corporate users or the average home computer user someone who just uses a computer for watching movies at home or gaming or things like that I I don't I really don't understand what the VPN is for can you explain that thanks uh they started for for corporate that's my first experience as a VPN in fact it was on the radio show I needed to control the phone system in LA from up here in Northern California so they sent me this Cisco program that I put on my computer it let me log into the corporate Network in La securely and that was the whole point of a VPN virtual private network is I'm joining the corporate Network securely over the internet and it encrypted my traffic and I was able to run the phone system and all that it was kind of a janky system it was coming a long way a lot of people have bad relationships with vpns because of that I I anecdotally I've heard five or six people anytime you mention VPN they're talking about their work and they're grumbling about corporate well the good news is that's not what these commercial vpns are they work kind of the same way um in the case of expressvpn our sponsor you have a piece of software you put on your computer or your phone you start it you press the button what it does is it makes a connection to a VPN server so in all cases there's a client that was the Cisco client that I used to run for the radio station and there's a server which is usually on the network you want to join the difference between a business VPN and a commercial VPN for consumers like expressvpn is instead of getting on the company server you're getting on a server that they run that then lets you access the full public internet so what are the advantages why wouldn't I just join the internet from my house instead of firing up a program join the internet somewhere out there well there's several of them first of all everything that comes out of your computer once you're on that VPN is encrypted that was more important in the old days when we weren't running https everywhere you know now we run secure browsers when you log into your bank Amazon pretty much everywhere including our website you're honest you're on an encrypted connection so it is encrypted so that benefit has kind of disappeared although there is another benefit if you're at a open Wi-Fi access point a coffee shop a cruise ship a hotel when you're running the VPN nobody else in the network can even see what you're doing or what your computer is if even if you're on an https site in that environment not running a VPN they can see oh there's Leo's computer you know you probably gave it a name right that's why I don't give my computers my name I say I give them you know weird code names oh there's Leo's computer and they can start messing with it they can use things like the Wi-Fi pineapple which is uh freely available uh anybody can buy it and one of the things the Wi-Fi pineapple can do is impersonate other Wi-Fi access points so one of the tricks bad guys might use you're sitting in a coffee shop you're on the internet you're on the Starbucks Wi-Fi this guy can see your computer he can even query your computer find out what Wi-Fi access points your computer knows about and then say Oh there's his home access point says Leo's home access point let me turn that sound off so you don't hear here's Leo's home access point and he could pretend it is that now my computer is going to say hey I know I'm on the Starbucks Wi-Fi but look we're home honey we're home and that's a stronger connection so it gets off the Starbucks Wi-Fi and gets onto the hackers Wi-Fi pineapple and now all the internet's being routed through the Hacker's computer yes it's encrypted but still he's he's now got network access to your computer that's not a good thing so that's there's still some value to having a VPN running at an open Wi-Fi access point the other Advantage you have is yes it's encrypted coming out so your whoever's providing the internet your internet service provider your telecommunications provider your cell company they can't see what sites you're going to all they see is it sounds like instead of the ground instead of yeah instead of Mike is going to see yahoo.com yeah though your isps and and many telecommunications provider record that and sell it they're allowed to so that's another potential privacy not security issue but privacy issue there are other the other thing that happens is when you get to the end when you get to the server you're going to come out onto the public internet we're not with your IP address but with the server's IP address which is going to be a VPN IP address now that has advantages and disadvantages one it's an IP address shared by everybody else you know many other people so it doesn't identify you specifically now I should really point out if you're logged in as most people are to Google and you go to a Google search even through a VPN Google says oh hi Leah yep they know what you're doing because you're logged in so you would have to log out of Facebook Google all those things and now they don't know who there was this 100.3.4.5 it's nobody I know so you're anonymous at that point so if you run true and anonymity remember that you're often giving up that anonymity by just logging into Google or Facebook or whoever else so that's important to remember but if you don't if you have no connections to any of those servers when you get on the internet all they see is the IP address from the VPN so that's privacy that also has an advantage because you know if you want to watch video TV in a country where there are country restrictions you can pretend you're in that country you say well I'm in England today that's where the VPN server is running or I'm in Germany today and so sometimes not always that gets you around it BBC iPlayer is a really classic example BBC says look the we only want our content available to people who pay the license fees in England so they're really aggressive about pursuing uh VPN access but the only way they know you're I've asked around how do they know you're on a VPN the only way they know you're on a VPN is by the IP address the vpn's IP address so that's why those addresses could be a disadvantage because they go oh yeah we know 100.1.1.1 that's expressvpn we're not going to let you in a good a VPN service will rotate those we'll buy new addresses so some work better than others I have I have a friend who would watch an Australian show pretty regularly yeah and my friend would have to watch it at the beginning of the month and then about seven or eight days in then system would catch on you'd have to wait until the next month to start watching again yeah left off yeah that makes that makes perfect sense so um I think that's the those are the benefits and I think there are some genuine benefits do I run a VPN all the time no because they're disadvantages it will slow you down you're going through other people's servers sometimes not a lot depends on you know how good a VPN you have uh some people say well I'm just gonna run my own VPN out of my house but that eliminates everything but the Security Bank exactly because the IP is going to be your IP it's your IP address but you still have the security benefit um so to your original question of who's it for honestly a VPN can be for everyone it depends on your use case so if your use cases like my friend who wants to watch Australian content while in the U.S that's a good use case that's a good use case if you are trying to if you end up you regular you're uh you're a writer to the stars and you regularly go to coffee shops and you're worried about your I don't know your mortal enemy stealing the work that you're doing then it wouldn't be a bad idea to be running a VPN while you're at the coffee shop again with a threat model and what's your security posture yeah uh well it's not very good yeah I know right um so you know I it used to be you had to have one because of this coffee shop attack and people you know there were I remember being on a cruise ship and Randall Schwartz who was a famous Pearl guy but also liked to hack around uh we'd get on the cruise ship it was for a geek cruise and Randall would saddle up to you with a piece of paper he says that your email password I'd say yeah he said well you're sending it through the clear on the ship because you're not using a VPN wow oh nowadays Gmail fast mail all the good providers are encrypted so he couldn't do that anymore but when he did that that was a real eye-opener that was like oh you're sending these passwords in the clear so we really we needed vpns a lot more before secure HTTP became widespread credit Google for that by the way they really lost https everywhere yeah so there's the answer that's a good question um yeah really good question yeah and then again it depends on your threat model your situation your security posture and and how much you like to watch Australian TV can I show you these I have a little story I'd love to hear I want to get more Micah in the show so you can answer the next five calls okay but I I wanna because there's a story that goes with this so I got a email uh I usually I shouldn't respond to these but I fall for this stuff all the time from Denon uh which well-known stereo company in fact I have dead on receivers throughout the house so I paid attention and they said we've got these new super good earbuds the pearls you should check them out Pearl per capital L stands for personal listening but it turns out after I and I bought them 350 bucks that's 150 more than my airpods Pros I thought well but less than the airpods max yeah a lot less than earpods Mac but I thought can you get better wireless sound that's the key Wireless so the first thing I'm going to say is wired is always better you know it with the same uh devices if you have wired headphones and and and so if you have really good wired headphones you're always going to get better sound because Wireless has to compress and in order to get the you know the sound through at a more limited bandwidth sometimes they compress an awful lot but that's when I went down the rabbit hole and probably Benito you're aware of a company called neura and you are a about five years ago they did a Kickstarter where they raised millions of dollars for specialized Bluetooth headphones that would sound better and they had a couple of secret sauces one of which was that they would measure your ears kind of passively you just sit there for a minute they'd play some sounds they'd measure your ears and after they measured your ears they would modify the sound of the headphones they made over the ear and earbuds they'd measure the sound of the headphones or modify it to give you better sound so this is what they proposed as their personalized sound technology the idea is they play a range of towns they're Australian can you tell them into your cochlear engine and then they get it back somehow I don't know how they've got eight microphones on these things but somehow they get it back and they say oh this is what your ear did now it works pretty well I gotta say I think I've seen that video before as I was looking at the reactions yeah I probably went to this page and you thought about backing it I did think about backing it but then Denon bought this coming actually their parent company denon's parent company Massimo bought it a few months uh or maybe a year ago and within a few months of buying it they released these These are identical in every way to the neuro neurotrues except that they've now put the den hunt uh name on on the thing yeah even the little uh pad is the same everything's the same so I thought well I you know I didn't get in the first place let me talk about why you might want this one is that technology which they've rebranded Massimo the parent companies uh automatic sensing technology so that is kind of fun in fact I'll show you on my phone I could show you my now I ran it a few times I thought well if this really is doing the right thing it should come up with the same result each time it kind of didn't oh so uh you know but maybe I suppose that could also be because I was in a maybe a different environment I don't know it also just like the air uh pods it it uh it tests your um uh how the ear tips because it comes with a variety of ear tips and even like a little outside ring that goes on it and it helps you choose the one that gets the best seal here's the personalized curve now this is a little weird way of showing it I've never seen anything quite like this looks like you dripped your pen ink on the yeah the theory is there's a circle there where orange is showing is where your deficit so my deficit at 12 o'clock is one of the frequencies and then it goes around these are all the frequencies so my deficits are here but I can hear better in these frequencies Okay cool so this is the shape of my hearing curve according to the Massimo automatic sensing and I have to say they give you a chance to listen default and personalized I've used this technology apple offers it as well with the airpods pro you could do what is much more like a traditional audiologist hearing test where you hear tones your left and right ear and you push a button when you hear it uh Samsung offers something similar for uh for Samsung's earbuds and on their Samsung phones but those are all more traditional this one you just sit there for a while and listen to some tones and it generates this I have to say it definitely improved see because I have I find myself doubting myself when I'm doing those little tone tests I too much I'm doing too much thinking about it am I clicking right am I doing it right am I hearing it or am I making it up in my head my audiologist will give me when I go into to get hearing aids so you know but this is different this is something a little different and I suspect somewhat less accurate otherwise audiologists would probably start using this one right so once you've got it customized you put it in and then you pair it now this is where I ended up going down a rabbit hole because as I said at the beginning wired is always going to be better so we're talking about Bluetooth here now in order to understand what you're getting what you're not getting you have to understand Bluetooth codecs compression decompression algorithms in the beginning Bluetooth was designed designed for those really silly Bluetooth headsets that Michael Douglas would wear right and you know and Wall Street that kind of thing you know you see people walking around wearing these all day the sound quality was terrible they were for one ear they weren't for music they were for phone calls eventually the Bluetooth Sig came up with a2dp which is a stereo High theoretically high quality Bluetooth profile for music and then underneath the a2dp they started coming up with new ways of compressing uh the base compression SBC almost everything can do it's not great it's low bandwidth it doesn't give you a whole lot of quality but it's Universal is Apple sorry just to clarify I can't hear you I've got potatoes in my airplane it is SBC that came after they started doing this part of the a2tp so it's too deep it was still better than what originally it was from the headset yes that's that was my question yeah it was Musical and in fact a lot of times you're listening to SBC when you pair oh in your car in a variety of different places it's kind of the de facto that everybody uses got it Apple decided to go their own way so all the most recent Apple stuff uses AAC which is the same encoding that they use for the music when you listen to it and in fact they say it's AAC 256 kilobit which is pretty good not CD quality but pretty good but that's the only choice you have Sony has their ldac compression also they claim nearly lossless very good but the Bluetooth folks also created their own standard now you see why it's a rabbit wow called app decks I've heard that hearing about Optics right aptx has a number of different uh codecs different ways of doing it uh and the latest one uh which is aptx lossless it was SBC oh by the way there was also mpeg-2 MP3 Apple's AAC there was high efficiency AAC because one of the things one of the I should mention one of the problems is you don't want a codec that takes a lot of energy either to encode on the phone side or to decode on the earbud side because battery is at a premium right so you you've got to balance audio quality bandwidth and how much computation you have to do so all of these are ways to kind of balance all three of them there's also a a track I think that's a Sony thing but let's talk about app decks because aptx is not specific to anybody in general there's aptex uh HD which they clear claim you're going to see this claim a lot and all these Bluetooth codecs to be near lossless no there's aptx adaptive which changes the encoding depending on the music oh so if it's complex music it says well you're going to need more bits we're going to need more bits and we're going to do more computation but then when the music is less complex it will go down using less battery uh and and less bandwidth so if you're doing a phone call it probably doesn't need all of that extra yeah absolutely that's interesting so yeah so there's all these modifications there are newer app dexes now and that's what intrigued me about this there is something called aptx lossless which the aptx folks claim is as good as a CD it is not nearly lossless they say we are not compressing now it is 1.1 to 1.2 megabits a second so that's a lot of bandwidth going between your earbuds wow and the phone but there's a second problem with app deck lossless aptx losses it was announced in 2021 no one supports it I've been looking they're actually that's not true the Asus Rog phones do some of the Zen phones do a number of weird Chinese phones like the xiaomi that you can't get support aptx lossless I don't own anything that supports app deck lossless So in theory these earbuds are capable of Better Sound than I can get wow now they work fine with an iPhone with a Samsung with a pixel all of which can do some variation of a2dp AAC or ldac or and these these supports every codec Under The Sun Will I tell you which one it's using it will it will tell you if you look I I ended up buying something creative offers for under 50 bucks this this is the weirdest little thing it's a little dongle it's a Bluetooth dongle the btw4 and you can plug this into anything that has a type c connector so even though you're for instance your laptop has um you know a variety of Bluetooth codecs might even have you know if it's an Apple laptop it has pretty good AAC you can plug this in it's got a little button you can press on it and it will let you go all the way up to aptx Adaptive which is you know for 279 to 420 kilobits it's about half the bandwidth of aptx lossless so still not lossless it's still not lossless now I have played with this and it sounds pretty damn good yeah so now that you understand the Codex you it will be helpful to understand that because now you understand why if you have an iPhone you don't care about aptx you don't care about lossless unless you're willing to go out and buy this little dongle and plug it into your iPhone or your or your laptop I don't know if it works with an iPhone it does work with Macs and PCs uh if you have a PC that doesn't have Bluetooth this is actually a nice way to add Bluetooth and pretty good quality by the way you might notice there's a couple of other things that it comes with one is a microphone because this is intended also to be plugged into PS4 or PS5 controllers or Nintendo switch controllers to give you Bluetooth I don't need headphones which is kind of cool this is just an adapter for the type C to type a but so now you have a microphone so you can talk to your gaming buddies and you have the aptx adaptive anyway the better quality app decks among others um so getting back to the den ons this is the Pearl Pro so probably all that really you really care about is the sound quality but I have to point out you're not going to hear the sound quality unless you have a device that's taking advantage of it do these sound better on an iPhone than the airpods pro that's the first question I had to ask yes okay that's a so the hardware itself is better it's better sounding Hardware it also has a a feature which some people will like and some people won't like called immersion mode which is really just bass boost got it if you like bass this has incredible bass this is the best base I've heard on any wireless earbuds anywhere you can turn it up even louder if you don't like Bass the good news is you can turn it down and it can sound more normal the zero mode is pretty is heavy bass kind of a kind of similar to the beats the high ends are excellent very clear the definition is good the Sound Stage is good but there's one thing the earbuds do the airpod pros do that the den ons do not do spatial the air pods are using oh I'm sorry I heard music and that's because are you playing music so spatial is interesting because apple is supporting a standard which is Dolby Atmos right they'll be uh surround which a lot of record companies have jumped on the bandwagon because it's Apple and they said oh great so they've remixed stuff in Dolby these do not support Dolby they support a virtualized spatial from a company called drock it's drock's virtuo and uh it is not true spatial it's simulated spatial the advantage of that is it works with everything you listen to the disadvantage is it's not the record company or the producer or the artist who made The Sound Stage is just being generated but it is a nice full Sound Stage doesn't do head tracking now I don't think head tracking is such a good feature to be honest with you when I use the airpods and I'm watching my Apple TV and I turn my head the sound starts coming out of this year because the TV's over there yeah who cares oh yeah I don't want that's silly she could turn that off in the airpods Pro this doesn't do it at all um the sound quality though is better I would say than the airpods pro so you're giving up some apple specific features like transparency this does have noise cancellation it even has adaptive noise cancellation so if somebody talks to you the noise cancellation shifts and you'll be able to talk to them and so forth it's not as aggressive noise cancellation as the airpods pro in fact I'm not sure it would be as good in an airplane I'll have to try this in an airplane but it is it is noise cancellation it gives you some isolation from your environment makes the music sound even better you can turn that off in fact this has a lot of different Taps that you can have four different tabs single tap double tap triple tap tap and hold and you can assign them to everything from turning the music up and down next track activating your voice assistant Siri on an iPhone Google assistant on a pixel uh you can have it uh pick up the phone this does support a phone this is one thing it might be a little bit better in the airpods Pro but this has four mics in each Bud two of them are bone conduction so the idea is this is going to get better sound I did record some sound if you want you have sound from my computer this is I recorded just uh in a fairly quiet environment so you can see this is recorded directly from the microphones super rich and vibrant but too many okay certainly for a phone call it's a little it's good you can hear the noise cancellation actually working um it's not full Fidelity right A little crackly it's maybe a little bit better than the airpods but it's it's interesting they're trying to do something the one place where it's really better is a variety of Bluetooth connections including Bluetooth lossless Optics lossless if you can find anything that plays it in theory that should sound a lot better than anything else out there I think probably to most people Apple's AAC 256 is going to be as good to be honest with you uh as Sony zeldoc is going to be as good uh it does have a better battery life eight hours on the earbuds and then 32 hours so you basically go forever it's type c charging Apple's rumored to be going to type c charging in the Next Generation airpods but right now it's lightning so I like it that it's type c charging will the battery life drop if you're using that better codec Ah that's a good question the key to having any of the aptech stuff work is that's a snap it's a it's a Qualcomm technology you have to have a Snapdragon processor on the phone side or the player's side and you have to have some specific Snapdragon Qualcomm chips on the earbuds side and I think they're fairly efficient in terms uh of receiving the most of the calculation is done it's sending got it so that's where it would mostly affect your performance these are weather and sweat resistance um I you know a lot of earbuds have vocal cues for pairing and so forth these are very good it's a nice lady who's who's very explicit so she says okay now turn on the scan on your phone so I like that I think they're very good um I would say these are probably as good as you can get in Wireless okay okay uh even better at least raw sound quality than the airpods max which I compared it to and the Apple's airpods bro Max wow yeah they're very good they seal very well they come with five different tips there's lots of ways you can configure it um the negative I think I think they're good looking I don't know if you looked at this the microphone unlike the um unlike the airpods pro there's nothing hanging out of your ear so when I put this in my ear in fact it's great for sleeping because when I put this in my ear it's flat that's honestly what I was thinking about yes for sleeping so you can actually I don't know if you if you listen to everybody listen to audiobooks when I sleep at night yeah so that was always the problem with the air air pods if you thank you she said welcome back Bluetooth connected I like the prompts so I'm now hearing music in this ear but if I'm on a pillow it's not pressing up against it and there's no maybe that's why the microphone maybe isn't as good as the airpods pro because there isn't a Boom coming out but I think it works now I'm going to stop the music by tapping once and it stops much like the airpods it's not you don't have to do that weird stroking that you do on the airpods to turn them up and down you just just tap one ear is up and one ear is down for you can set it the way you want um the negative is it's 150 bucks more than the earpods Pro it's 350 dollars uh the surround is simulated it's not real and you're buying some technology that isn't yet widely available which is aptx losses so I forgot to mention it's also wireless charging oh nice bottom on your your Apple charger your cheat charger it'll charges cheese Sports G so there's some definite positives to this the price is going to be a stopper for a lot of people yeah if I had to listen if I was sitting here with my airpods Pro versus the the denim Pearl Pros uh if sound quality were the most important thing I'd probably listen to The Pearl Pros but there are features on the airpods you just don't get especially on the iPhone things like that adaptive sound and your head turning and the true Dolby Surround which is I think quite nice on the Apple airpods so I know you were Benito very interested in these did you know about the neuro uh trues is that why you were interested or you just I didn't know about that yeah that sounds very interesting yeah when the neuro came out people were crazy about this literally raised millions of dollars just for these 1.8 million dollars on Kickstarter and then they sold the Denon which I find very frustrating that is frustrating but the good news is now these are much more widely available you don't have to wait in line to get them you don't have to go to Kickstarter to get them you can buy these direct from Denon although I think they're already sold out the Pearl there's a lot of interest when these came out Perl stands for personalized listening and these are the Pro Models which cost a little bit more uh in fact I think it's probably worth getting the pros so way too much information poorly presented why do we think though that it takes so long it seems to take longer for people to hop on uh audio the audio Improvement train these days yeah because we're just all well Apple doesn't want to do it because it's Qualcomm right now it doesn't want to be tied Qualcomm so Apple's going its own way Samsung doesn't want to do it because it doesn't it does use Qualcomm chips in many of its phones exynos its own chip and others I think it also doesn't want to be too tight because then that's one more qualcommer Sony of course has their own thing that they do so it's it's a weird space and I think there are people who don't like aptex maybe because it's Qualcomm maybe because they think it doesn't quite sound as good I could tell you using aptx adaptive which is the best I could get on these with the current devices that I have including this cute little dongle from creative formerly creative Labs it's the same people's assemblaster people um it sounds better it sounds very good to me uh it's richer it's Fuller music the definition is better the high end is very crisp and clear the bass is remarkable I think that's more the physics of the device than it is the actual uh drivers I think they put a lot of energy and effort into designing a the best possible ear wireless earbuds Wireless being the gating factor and I think they've done a very good job so if you have a aptx device to play that would certainly be a reason to look at this especially if some sometime down the road you get aptx lossless I look forward to hearing something in aptx lossless I haven't yet um maybe a Asus Zenfone 9 or the Rog if you've got one of those phones this might be the right earbud for you okay very cool boy that was a long way to nothing I disagree I found it very interesting well that was the only thing I just thought well I'm gonna buy these earbuds and try them out and stay said I had this Rat Hole that yeah we learned all about Bluetooth codecs yeah how they're I there's so many more than I it's very complicated out there in the in the wireless world if so why you kind of have to admire Apple which you said no we're just going to do AAC we know AAC everybody's using AAC you know already if you're on the Apple platform Apple's really simplified things quite a bit uh but I have to say Apple's not famous for sound quality and I don't think any of the Apple devices the airpods earpods Pro or the airpods max are great headphones right best headphones wired absolutely no matter what period yeah uh should we take a card with a call what do you want to do why not we've got some folks who've called in since uh we just started I kept them waiting should we go to the phones let's go to the phone let's go to the phones wireless caller uh press star six to unmute you are on the air with ask The Tech Guys Micah and Leo Michael Leah something to talk to you that's nice what's your first name in what city uh Tom and orange hi Tom welcome thank you thank you what can we do for you my question yes sir I have a rather new Denon receiver that has Dolby Atmos obviously I cannot play Dolby Atmos music from my iPhone when I use Amazon music even though the songs are encoded in Dolby Atmos I believe I've got all the switches set to the proper positions it's premium Amazon subscription how are you collecting your iPhone to your receiver I tried to run a lightning connector to an adapter an HDMI adapter and then I ran a HDMI cable to an input on the back of the denim so I'm going to guess that the what's not getting passed along that connection is the atmos encoding yeah that the iPhone comes up stereo on yeah you're only getting stereo the iPhone is and this is where apple is not going to probably let you get into the guts of this but I bet you the iPhone's looking at the connection and saying yeah that's a stereo so we're going to send you left and right and forget the atmos Atmos encoding all that Dolby encoding is it is an additional level on top of the sound and it has to know that there's a Dolby decoder on the other end of it or the sound won't play so I'm trying to think how what would be the best way to connect so uh scooterx has posted in the chat from a Dolby forum and uh rather from the Dolby support site and it says that Dolby Atmos on Amazon music it just doesn't work on anything other than headphones yeah you can only listen to it through the headphones so this seems to be a limitation of Amazon music uh which is unfortunate um I yeah that's that's disappointing that's very disappointing now I don't even know I try uh with Apple's uh music on my stereo which is Dolby capable and my receiver through an Apple TV which in theory should all work my receiver still says stereo really so I don't know what I'm doing wrong I think it's hard to it's worse to flip the right switches yeah the coerce it all but that's too bad the Apple the Apple music app has not been enabled for Atmos nor has it on the Apple TV version either so if you if you tried to play instead of from your iPhone from the Apple TV you'd have the same problem yeah so Emma you should contact I know what does this do but uh Amazon music needs to hop on that and get that turned on as opposed to passing it through I would imagine that what's happening right now is they're going the best uh music listening experience you can have for Atmos is when you're listening via headphones and so they really are you know trying to get people to listen to it through that experience but with you you've got this great Denon receiver that can do it yeah you want to hear it I've spent I've spent a lot of money on my home theater system I've got a 5.1.4 and Dolby apples of speakers in the ceiling when I listen to 4K DVDs and stuff it's just it's just beautiful you know the F1 series on Netflix I'd like to survive the music and yeah yeah it sounds great but I'm disappointed now that I can't get the uh the audio well you can try Apple music I don't you know I bet you you'd have better results than I did I I've been fussing and feuding with it and I'm not sure in theory the Apple music with a uh connected now it's connected via HDMI maybe I need to get the right HDMI cable uh to go into my receiver the receiver can do Dolby the uh in theory it should be doing 5.1 I don't have Atmos like you do you've got the speakers in the ceiling that's awesome wow I'm even seeing that um title doesn't very few people have enabled that yeah that's why Apple music is probably your best bet and then you'd be able to hear Apple music spatial yeah um but because you could HD it'd be yeah over the HDMI connection directly there's no adapters involved with anything yeah I if you know if you haven't used up that um free trial of Apple music that's the thing to do try the free give it a go yeah and then you'd at least get to get to hear what that sounds like I love I have what you do which is the Amazon HD music and that's hi-res uh music which is nice yeah but it's stereo yeah yeah and I just uh I mean I just don't want to be Tethered to the to the headphones all the time I don't blame you exactly especially what you've got you you're seeing the Apple music isn't really Atmos either well that's probably me well it is it's that's Dolby Atmos uh so in theory it should show up as Dolby Atmos to your receiver which should then decode it and get all the speakers fired up in theory I honestly through Dolby Atmos yes yeah Leo was just saying he was having an issue of getting his working but that doesn't actually mean I still think conspiracy minded uh and I've talked to a lot of people and I can't get a straight answer maybe Al uh Micah with your uh connections at Apple you can that Apple really sees their spatial music as being binaural as being designed for two speakers giving you spatiality because they sell airpods airpods Pro and airpods Max are two speakers and that's their preferred way for you to hear spaceship that or two home pods or two homepods which is again but not 5.1 right you're not so it is technically Dolby Atmos but I'm wondering if Apple doesn't think of it that way that Apple thinks of it as a binaural a two-speaker solution because all of the calculations is doing are designed to trick you with two speakers and then you're you're getting to more of an audience right because not everybody can afford to do the full experience but I say focus on that binaural I haven't got a straight answer from anybody and I went out and bought a new 5.1 receiver specifically for this and I've slipped every switch now I'm not convinced that I'm doing that I'm not doing something wrong but I've really tried and it still comes out of two speakers so now you get spatial attitude speakers by the way uh and it does fire up the sub but uh yeah where's the rest of it where's where's this where's the where's the helicopters flying overhead you know where's the submarine pinging me from behind I don't know I just I just look at all the music that I I pull up on my Amazon music app and I'd say nowadays at least 50 of them say they're recorded in so we'll be asked for headphones designed for headphones okay binaural it's why we call binaural remember what binaural was big they were to record uh albums with a literal head two microphones in either here it's still the the the whispering people still do that the ASMR crowd still they still do binaural stuff yeah I am I am I am very confused about Apple's intent here it is Dolby ammos which theoretically has up you know downward firing speakers Left Right Center sub rears maybe two rears if it's 7.2 or whatever but um I I think that they really think of it as something designed for two speakers and I assume that these artists that record in Dolby Atmos are getting the music mixed in a full 5.1 7.1 yes I think so I mean the situation there was actually just an article that on Tech news weekly uh I talked about I believe it was from the New York Times talking about Apple's push into Dolby Atmos and one of the things that was talked about in the piece was how from the get-go now many musicians are and their producers especially are doing this with spatial in mind because uh the the companies that are really jumping into the Dolby Atmos are jumping on the Dolby Atmos train they are genuinely thinking of this as the next step in making music valuable to the youths essentially and not and not primarily for Apple users right and this is where I get confused so I'm on the Apple page about spatial music with Dolby Atmos and apple music at no point did they mention any other playback solution then two speakers either their headphones or dual homepod speakers they do not and they say you know if you want to listen to other headphones turn off automatic but they don't mention a 5.1 uh or Atmos setup so I'm I I just I'm it's not clear to me I think as a come on to the record industry they say Dolby Atmos and you can use the Dolby tool to mix it because they want these producers that you're talking about to say oh yeah we're making something everybody can listen to but I think when you're using I don't know but I don't get it I think when you're using Apple stuff that it's designed for two speakers I've just I've not been able to get anybody to tell me the truth on this one and I've not been able to do it with more well yeah you guys made me feel a little better then because I think I've been doing everything right yeah and I'll just have to uh use my headphones or hope for the something in the future yeah or go to or try you know get do the trial I love it if you do the trial and let us know yeah because you're probably more than this you sound like an audiophile I'm just a bozo but uh I don't know you know I'm on the Dolby page which scooter X has sent us a link to and it implies that it will work with any any device enabled with Dolby Atmos they do say yes any set of headphones or using the built-in speakers you can also listen uh with a Dolby Atmos capable home theater speaker system sound bar television and of course they mentioned homepod speakers but will it fire up more than the Left Right speakers I don't know yeah we don't know can I list use my existing home theater system to listen to Dolby ammos if you're existing home theater here we go sports Atmos I found a support page from Apple let me get that over and that this the title is play audio and Dolby Atmos or surround sound on your Apple TV they talk about 5.1 okay they talk about uh but see they also mentioned stereo on it so yeah you're on to something I'm so confused I'm so confused please will never work right no no forget Bluetooth yeah they're what they're doing with the with the surround and Bluetooth but I'm pretty sure it's not designed to work with five speakers or six speakers or seven or eight or nine or ten speakers yeah it's unclear I think Apple's I think Apple's been somewhat unclear on this I want to see a statement for them yeah you can use it with your denim receiver and your 7.2 system setup and all the speakers will be playing what they may be saying is yeah you'll be using Dolby Atmos out of your left and right speakers which is not what you want so let us know I wanna I want you to go put your ear up against the surrounds and get on a ladder and see if the speakers at the ceiling are working I want to know I can do that please have a problem call us back yeah I'm gonna give it a shot thank you guys I appreciate it great to talk to you all right phone number is 888 thank you 724-28 84. so you have found a number of links yeah but again it doesn't say yeah but I do like there's this the the last link I shared has some great diagrams showing how to plug things in so this is good for me because I can send this to people who are asking about it uh and it walks you through the steps of getting everything plugged in properly um it says some sound bars don't support video formats like HDR 10 and Dolby Vision uh in this case you can plug the TV into the sound bar to play sound and Dolby Atmos or you can plug your Apple TV so yeah they but again what you're talking about here about it will take full advantage of the 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system that you have it's not saying that all right all right we'll figure it out yeah I should at least see on my receiver which is Atmos enabled it should say Dolby Atmos or at least Dolby on the receiver and it doesn't I don't know why it just says stereo so I don't know let's see macbookie in our IRC I do listen to Dolby Atmos and apple music on my Sonos Arc and Sonos era speakers perfectly and his brother does it on his den on Atmos setup so there you go some somebody in our chat room someone's got it working and Leo next time you're lit you're watching something that allegedly is Dolby Atmos press the menu button on your Apple TV remote yeah and then you should see the Dolby Atmos logo and if you don't for some reason it's not playing in Dolby Atmos I think the Apple TV is doing the right thing it's the oh it's just once it's the receiver is gone I don't know what you said to me and it's just on music it's not it's movies and stuff oh that's right I'm not I'm getting surrounded on movies it's the it's the it's the music it's spatial what I and I think this is what our caller wanted spatial music in all and all this yeah and I'm not I still think that when Apple says spatial what they really mean is simulated Dolby Atmos through two speakers but I'm that's a yeah that's it's unclear you know one thing I can do too is uh Apple put out a few logic programs from actual producers who did this I'm gonna pull open one of those there were case studies essentially I'm gonna pull open one of those and see how it was designed and see if it is targeting actual speakers or if it's just oh it's over here and to the left of the head let's go to uh it says Pasadena Maryland could that be a place let's see we're gonna pick up this uh why uh the cell phone or a phone uh and uh press star six to unmute and you should be on the air with Micah and Leo ask The Tech Guys it worked what's your what's your first name or what city are you calling from my name is Brenda and I'm calling from near Fort Smith Arkansas hi Brenda um and I spoke to you back in the 1900s in the last century isn't that wild if you can say oh yes back in the last century you and I before Micah was born probably what did we talk about yeah what do we talk about back then I had a question of get on IRC so people couldn't uh track you and did you and at the time there was no way to do it oh but you sent me a webcam which was great oh I mean you talked to us on tech TV no no you after I called somebody came in the chat room and asked if they could send me a webcam and I was a little suspicious but then they confirmed everything and they sent me a webcam wow didn't you have that webcam Network yeah yeah well that was tech TV I don't know I don't know who that was anyway webcam maybe it was us I don't know what can we what was Mike B wasn't it what can we do for you now Brenda if you need help if you need support for that webcam I don't know yeah yeah hahaha uh my father was in the military and we're doing a lot of va stuff and he recently passed away and I want to back up this stuff but it has a very very personal information and I've put it on hard drives and things but you know if the house burns down it doesn't matter how many hard drives I've put it on but I want to know what of the cloud stuff I've seen some people tell me oh go to this one in New Zealand it's cheap but it may be gone tomorrow I want to know what your idea of somewhere safe to put this information that has very PRI like Social Security numbers and things in it yeah definitely don't put it on Mega in New Zealand those guys are going to jail so I'm not sure I would trust them um any any Cloud you put it on is uh gonna be a little bit of a risk um there is only one cloud service I know of that is fully end-to-end encrypted and it's one Steve Gibson recommends it's sync sync.com and it is and this is what you're looking for is end-to-end encryption every cloud service is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest Dropbox Apple's iCloud but the owners of the company have the keys so if uh they decided you know they had a rogue employee they could look at it if the law enforcement came to them they could look at it uh and we know this is the case with almost all Cloud providers uh sync.com is the only one I know of that is fully handed and encrypted for all the data there are some others uh that have encrypted enclaves including Dropbox apple is going to offer I don't know if they've yet offered it a fully end-to-end encrypted solution they've been talking about it yeah it's it's complicated to set up but yeah yeah that's the advanced iCloud Drive yeah I think here's my suggestion instead of putting it in the cloud at all just put it on a second hard drive and take it to work okay or is it home or or you know so you got one at home and one at work and unless Fort Smith it falls into a sinkhole you'll be all right uh or if you're worried about that happening oh well it works at home that's not a good solution but give it to somebody else get it off get it out of the house you trust your family right okay yeah yeah so send it to your sister I do remember putting information on floppy drives thinking that would be backed up forever too no it's not that's definitely concern so that is one of the advantages of cloud is that there you're going to presume they're going to continue to to make sure it's accessible over the Internet uh as long as they don't go out of business right there's no guarantee there's no really that this is a great question and I don't know Leo for you but I always feel like sometimes some of our listeners have even more concern about you know the Privacy aspect of some of these things because I back up my stuff to backblaze for example and I don't I'm not worried about my social security number or my I you know like I've got a scan of my photo ID that's in backblaze but I'm not concerned about that but technically it's not encrypted right exactly yes so here one thing you can do is what Steve Gibson for a while called p I convinced him to change it to Pi pre-internet encryption he was he was calling it pre-egress which was not good so pre so the idea is if you take a program encrypt dad's data first into one single encrypted mob then you can put that on iCloud or Dropbox or anywhere and it's completely safe because they can't they don't have the key all they see is a blob is it how much data is it is it a lot of data Brenda I say around a gig yeah because there's a lot of photos and Maps oh it's so wonderful that you have that where did he serve yeah uh he served for 21 years in the Air Force he was in Vietnam Thailand a lot of places out there wow and he was just recently approved for his service-connected disability so we're very proud of that we have all that information to back up was it agent orange or yes it was agent orange and I have Lupus and a brain condition caused by Asian orange as well my goodness oh I'm so sorry we're happy to have all that data that's what did it absolutely yeah you want to preserve that too so yeah encrypted first there are a lot of ways to do it the probably the one that every the open source one that everybody knows about is Vera Crypt v-e-r-a-c-r-y-p-t it's free and you can encrypt encrypt it with veracrypt don't lose the keys because that's they're not gonna there's no way to get them back uh they're right you can't I mean honestly it's probably okay to use one of the zip programs many of them have strong you want to end-to-end encryption that are is just as strong so uh there's a lot of ways uh to do that um I would personally prefer that you do that then trust sync.com or OneDrive then if you do that by the way you can put it on two Services exactly so if you know Dropbox goes out of business you got it on Microsoft or Microsoft goes to the business you have it on apple or if you have it on multiple services and no one can actually they can't do it yeah once you've encrypted it I think that's a good okay great I'm sorry uh about your dad um but thanks I thank you for your service and uh thank him for his service and I'm sorry about your health issues but I'm glad you got a handle well hey oh yeah there's a reason I have it and I can take care of it I do accessibility training for the blind I couldn't do that if I want to own so that's wonderful it's all good you you have the great attitude that's thank you for what you do honestly yeah well thank you thank you for your helping maybe I'll talk to you in the next Century every Century Brenda we gotta talk it's just part of the deal yeah thank you gentlemen thank you take care enjoy your net camp uh now do I press the hang up I don't even know how this oh it works shall we go to uh I think I can hear the engine hum yeah Johnny Johnny Jets firing up the engines Johnny Jett he's traveling he's been everywhere johnnyjet.com our traveling Guru hello John how you doing you're not at home no no those look like the giant forests of Sumatra behind you are you in our neighborhood because it could also be the the forests of Northern California um I'm right outside Toronto Canada ah nice visiting the fam I'm visiting a family we just got in from Europe just went to six countries in 12 days and um wow yeah and I was set up in the other room at a much better location but my in-law just came in the dogs here the kids are running around crazy and I was like I better go I better go in the guest bedroom nice to see you as as always uh Johnny jet was for many years a regular not only in the radio show but in our Canadian TV show and he joins us every month now on ask The Tech Guys to help us every first Sunday first Sunday travel like a rock star so are you going to be home for the fourth are you going to be in Toronto no we're in Toronto we go back to L.A um not till next week no Canadian celebrations for our independence day and day yesterday yeah yesterday oh that's good I heard it's a really good idea to travel on the fourth I've been traveling on the fourth often often I think I was in Russia on the fourth one year I don't know what it is well I guess you travel in the summer don't we so where did you go in Europe John uh we flew we flew to Barcelona jumped on a cruise Princess Cruises nice and the Enchantment of the Seas which I'm telling you with kids it is the best did the kids enjoy it I I was nervous I was like I don't know they're gonna get seasick it was their first cruise they absolutely loved it and um lots for them to do oh there's a kids club they were like really we had no idea we brought them to it and they were like they didn't want to come back to our cabin that's great they they loved it and then we you know we went to we went to Gibraltar we went to France we went to Italy we went to the Vatican City we went to my grand grandparents home Island ishia um and uh then we just we flew through Germany went down to downtown Munich and uh you know it all happened I bought I bought the tickets two weeks before everything happened two weeks before now I'm confused because you said princess but the enchantment that sees is RCL right no oh sorry the Enchanted princess oh yes that's less confusing if you get the name of the boat right yeah yes Enchanted Princess um correct have you been on it I have not actually uh I've never been on a Princess Cruise that's the original Love Boat right Captain stubing gopher Julie yeah yeah well they gave me they gave me a 50 deal so the last minute I was like you know what I found a cabin it's very difficult to find cabins I mean almost everything is sold out oh yeah flight and I was just searching and I just kept finding I just kept looking for flights and I found a great deal I was able to get premium economy there and business back for cheaper than coach fun this is not a probably I'm guessing a good weekend to travel in the U.S no it's terrible I mean apparently Newark is a mess right now yeah yeah what was that I mean first of all there's been very bad weather for the last seven days there's been thunderstorms in in the Northeast in Newark you know all the airlines just they Max it out so so if there's there's fine the weather's fine there's no problems but once something goes wrong then everything just hits the fan they just can't keep up they can't escape yeah yeah they don't have enough staff to back it up so people get stuck their flight attendants their their pilots were stuck in different cities it was similar to what happened at Christmas with Southwest and then to make matters worse the CEO who's a great guy I've met him multiple times but he made a bonehead decision by hiring a private jet for himself to get out of Newark to go to Denver that did not look good every all your passengers stuck in Newark and you're flying out in a private jet he shouldn't he should have spun it I mean he in a hero by saying you know what I'm going to grab some crew members that are stuck or passengers I don't want to take a seat away from the other passengers and I'm gonna hire a private jet and then take him he would he wouldn't look like a hero instead of a zero so um yeah he really messed up on that one that is too bad because he he's been doing a good job until then so easy though these days to make up everybody's watching this step yeah everybody knows what everybody's doing definitely looks like the worst airport according to flightaware's misery map right now is Chicago's O'Hare is it okay this morning was Newark yeah newark's still pretty bad I think yeah yeah and that's also another United Hub so they are uh newark's number two we're number two we're number two then Dallas Fort Worth Miami LaGuardia Boston it's gotten better since the last couple days ago two days ago it was a mess and then but anyway last week uh last month I should say you know I always look at the chat room after I end the call so I can answer questions and I missed one one was from i-tech he asked me hey I'm traveling to Europe specifically France is buying a local SIM card the best option um for talking data and you know what back then I didn't know a month ago but now I know so I do have a T-Mobile phone which does work really well but when you get on a cruise ship you got to make sure you put that in airplane mode oh yeah you don't want to do that ASAP the cellular at Sea it's so expensive it's ridiculous so always I set a reminder every night or every afternoon yeah when we come back from tours to turn off um turn on airplane mode but um my buddy Sebastian who has Cellular Abroad he recommended a company called you biggie have you heard of them no big upigi maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong okay so anyway you biggie me Smalley so anyways it's for for phones that have esims and I have a new iPhone 14 uh this is a new thing I know I know people use Google fi I've never used Google fi but when I when my data started slowing down a little bit in Italy I was like you know I don't want to mess around getting taxis and things so I did um sign up and I bought a plan for I think 14 for 10 gigabytes which was way too much I should have bought the plan lesser for one gigabyte because I didn't even use one gigabyte um because Wi-Fi's everywhere now but this is interesting because because of esim you don't lose your local phone number because you can have two Sims in there right exactly so you can have both you can keep your regular number that way you're still getting phone calls so with you biggie it's it's for data but you can use you know you can get on FaceTime or um WhatsApp everyone in Europe uses a WhatsApp I mean everyone around the world uses what's happening yeah so so definitely download WhatsApp and by the way if you are going to Europe and you're looking for taxis I highly recommend free now have you heard of them no free actually now yeah my actually my buddy Sebastian who's who lives half the year or not half the year but part of the year in Italy he's like this is the one you want not only just in Italy but around Europe because so it's the it's kind of the Uber of Europe it's but it's not Uber it's taxis so in Italy especially especially um an Uber from my hotel to the train station was 33 to 33 euros in a a taxi with seven euros and but the problem is trying to get a taxi right now in Rome or in Europe I mean they are inundated with Americans and travelers from all over but especially Americans it is difficult so with free now but so many of the locals said they use it they love it but you do need to give yourself some time because a lot of the taxis either are too far away they end up canceling on you or you need to cancel on them and um but it is the best way to keep the taxi drivers honest you know in Italy they know that you know it's knowing that some of these guys take the long Roy this way they can't because it works just like it works just like uber and you put your credit card in there this way you don't have to you don't have to exchange money it's all on your credit card and it's really easy to use but the problem is they don't have a lot of taxis right now that are open yeah so if you are looking for one you need to go to a taxi stand and try calling this um try and calling free now I mean we almost missed our train to uh Naples from Rome because we were pushing it it was difficult to get a a taxi did you end in Rome we ended in Rome Chevy Takia which is not the greatest um no that's not Rome that's just a port yeah but then you took it did you go into the city totally we spent two nights we got hotels I do too it's my new favorite City yeah Rome Paris London my buddy uh Stuart who is a cruise guy he's like you know what get off the night before in Florence just tell the ship in advance oh and that way you can spend the time in Florence at night when all the cruise passengers are out yeah and then take a train down to uh that's smart yeah and you avoid the whole rush because the next morning it was a mad house and there's nothing in shivito to see it's nothing it's just nothing yeah and and my Camp my taxi canceled on me the night before oh yeah so trying to get a ride was I use free now I used everything Uber you couldn't get anything I was like a I was like a pigeon at the beach trying to get potato chips every time a taxi or driver pulled up I was just right in their face and so was everyone else trying to get them oh my God I ended up I ended up spending 350 Euros just for a ride into Rome yeah for that hour and 15 minutes yikes schmikes but it's hot man you just you know it is packed I also was talking to my buddy Steve Perillo who has prillo tours oh yeah and he helped me he helped me see their ads all the time go to Italy I'm Steve Perillo come with me in Italy use a friend of yours yeah he's a good friend of mine he's a great guy but his dad I think might even his grandfather that started a company but his dad was known Mr Italy he's known legendary yeah definitely but he's like I interviewed him from my podcast I haven't uploaded it yet but he's like I was like what advice do you have for people going to Europe this summer he's like don't go yeah this is a guy who runs tours in Italy yeah no Italy was he's crazy when we were there in the spring in May in April um people are you know now that they can travel they're traveling it's incredible they really are yeah but April is one of the busiest Seasons I learned that this trip as well they said April May is packed for and Steve said his busiest time of the year is September oh interesting which I was shocked but you know it's going to get later and later right as people try to avoid the crowds I'm thinking I'm going in December right I'm going I'm going for Christmas or something it's crazy but it's crowded too but and it's cold so I mean I like I like the warm weather although I don't like the hot yeah and it is hot I mean yeah it really is boy you are full of good those are really good trips you Big E for your phone I'm gonna have to do this because I have Google fine I have T-Mobile but uh that sounds like a good way to go especially if you have an e-sim phone totally and I just brought it up for here in Canada to see if it works and they said yeah I mean you can you can get Canada actually and then I but I put in France and the prices are cheap I mean you can get a three gigabytes for seven bucks for seven bucks you might as well download it that way if you're if you're T-Mobile or whatever your phone says exactly it slows down you just switch it you go into your settings cellular and change the primary it's super easy it takes four minutes to set up and um it's just a nice little safety net to have and free now the for Mobility to get a cab in many European cities free now yeah and Perillo if you're going to Italy I'll give your buddy Steve a plug yeah I mean great guy and um yeah and I'll give you a plug go to johnnyjet.com that's his website he's got free newsletters he's got lots of travel tips he's a great guy he's got a YouTube channel he's on Twitter Instagram him and he's got electrical tape what do you have what's the Gaffers do this is Gaffer Tape yeah what's that for right before I got on my headset broke so I mean all throughout Europe I was using gaffer tape for everything I mean my my kids headphones broke on the plane that's like a nightmare um the there was a light behind the TV that was so bright I just threw a little piece off and put it right on the lights that's the best reason for it you can cover up all those LEDs terrible lights all over the place where you're trying to sleep and on the cruise ship they had a um sensor so when you go to the bathroom at all night also there's a whole room lights oh I know I wish I'd had that bring it bring it this is so bring the tip of all bring a roll of gaffer's tape remind me John next time I leave town to take some Gaffers tape from the office you can buy travel size now too they have travel size which is great before yeah that's right travel size mattress tape go ahead yeah I'll catch it oh Leo that's it that we have we have this is very expensive yeah but get this get the travel one it's tiny yeah so don't you don't want to carry that no that's too big it's in your carry-on you want this in your carry-on unless you make a hand of it then you can you can buy like three rolls for I think 14 bucks or so that's not bad travel Gaffers station you are full of great information Johnny jet always a pleasure safe travels home when you get to how long are you gonna stay in Toronto we got to go to New York I mean we're traveling you're trying back I'm back I'm finally back it's like everybody two years dude we're gonna get Micah on the road he's never been anywhere well Mike I I would love to take you man you tell you I know I'm happy to take you you want to go to Italy where what would no I said as long as we're not going down Japan oh that's smart I remember let's take ass The Tech Guys on the road to Japan let's do it let's do it all right ready all right all right thank you Johnny thank you so much all right take care bye-bye really Japan that's a good idea Japan's wonderful I've heard yeah Singapore is a good place for children just in case you want to know did you want to show me something I already did it oh I gotta do another one there's a marker time is time is time is ticking there you go I just want to pause briefly to invite those of you who watch you know I just saw a really cool thing uh on Squarespace they're doing their like their 20-year history 3. in 2009 Squarespace which no one had ever heard of the time took a flyer Anthony Castellano great guy said you know let's try podcast advertising he bought one ad on twit they say on the site so I gotta believe him that it was such a success that one third of their sign ups for the next year came from twit listeners holy cow advertising on twit works right now it's a slow time you're going to get a great deal if you're interested in advertising we put together a very good uh I think program for people who are new to podcast advertising we take care of you we'll hold your hands because we have a great team here half our listeners are in management positions 65 percent are involved in company decision making they're we have a great audience smart audience and I would love to introduce your product to them you'll get a full service continuity team we'll write your copy for you we'll help you with the graphics you can get ads that are unique every time as you know Micah and I and other hosts we we read them live every time we always over deliver on Impressions we always make sure that you get as many Impressions if not more uh we also will help you we got ad Tech that helps you know whether your ads are working we'll give you courtesy commercials you can share on your social media and your landing pages I think Squarespace in fact has an ad from 2009. wow that I did on their landing page it's amazing yeah uh lots of free goodies including mentions in our Weekly Newsletter that goes out to thousands of our listeners bonus ads social media promotion we know we work so does Squarespace so does it pro so does authentic the CEO of authentic Mark McCrory who who did that early buy I think with Squarespace says we've partnered with twit for 16 years the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are going to work for a brand they're going to work on Twitch shows I think we do the best job anywhere so if you're interested in elevating your business let us help visit advertise at twit.tv today and you can work with twit TV's world-class audience advertise at twit.tv that's the email address and Max or Ryan or Lisa will get back to you and we will get you on board we look forward to that I should also mention that for those members of Club twit they don't see any ads we want to encourage our club twit members to keep on keeping on we really appreciate the support if you're not a member of Club twit which you're not because you're seeing this ad uh then you might want to go to Twitter TV slash club twit it's seven dollars a month we intentionally keep the price low so it's affordable for as many people as possible you get ad-free versions of all the shows you get access to the really incredible Discord what a Thursday we had Stacy's book club at 9 00 a.m with Annalee new it's his newest the terraformers and then at 1pm an interview at Pruitt did with Hugh Howey the author of you know if you've seen Silo on Apple TV that's the wool series what an incredible uh exclusive for club members we do a lot of those we're gonna do a lot more including Micah's Hands-On Macintosh show hands on Windows Scott Wilkinson's home theater Geeks I can go on and on uh I think the club is a great value it really helps us and it helps yourself right so go to Twitter TV slash club twit And subscribe and we thank all of our club subscribers for making this show podcast we wouldn't be doing this show to be honest exactly yeah uh more calls should we should we do some I see Robert on the line here let's put it Roberts on the line Robert on the line likes to welcome to the show says Robert is uh is there but I don't I don't hear it you want your Gaffers tape back don't you no these guys this stuff costs a lot of money this is pricey yeah yeah I can't believe four for 16 bucks I got some Amazon Basics kind and it was expensive so I can't imagine how much it was cheap Gaffers tape don't get cheap well I guess for covering up a light yeah doesn't really matter uh Robert are you there one more chance press star six hello let's do a voicemail while we're getting Robert on the line what do you got yeah this is Jimmy Fallon Charlotte Area hi Jimmy iCloud storage is there a way to store my photos and stuff in the cloud without them staying on my phone or my Mac cause I'm running out of space and the only thing I can seem to find online is turn it off but at that point you know or if I delete anything from my my Mac it's going to delete it from the cloud but I don't want to delete it I just want it off my map my space so you have two options here um and you know one of them is set by default so I'm wondering if you're even running out of space in this case but basically on your Mac and also in uh the app on your iPhone you have a setting and the setting is going to let you essentially save a small version of every photo and video locally and then the full version is stored in the cloud so it sounds like he doesn't even want the small version how big is the small version well so this is the thing it does it all automatically and so it don't get a choice yeah you don't get a choice it will actually pull even older photos or photos that it thinks based on the AI whether you are going to be looking at those or not yeah yeah it's it's smart it's actually a smart system I have often though if I go back to an older folder it says okay downloading it shows you a little yeah because it downloads the full quality for you to share or to edit and that's nice so you get the thumbnails yes exactly so the first thing I would suggest is make sure that on both your iPhone and on your Mac you do have the setting called optimize Max storage now once we get to that point in the flow chart if you have that turned on and you're still getting this no storage option you can go the new kit route which is essentially to use your iCloud drive as the place to store your photos so store it in the cloud and I think this is what it was saying yeah but not on my Mac but not on my Mac so essentially what you're going to do is export your entire photo library and you can do this from your Mac because it's going to then do the same thing on your iPhone so you'd export your photo library you could put it in if you wanted to an archive or you could just keep it as is you take that and you put it in your iCloud drive and then remove everything from your photo library on your Mac now here's the thing obviously if you want to gain access to those photos and see everything that's there you're not going to have a lot of the same features so it's going to be a little bit more difficult for you to for example pull a wallpaper from a photo and put it on your phone because instead it's sort of the files app so you may find yourself having to kind of re-save photos from the files app back into your photos library but this is a way to make that happen so I think the reason you're not seeing any uh suggestions for how to do that online is because people are going to go why would you want to do that but if that's what you want to do that's how you do it and the chat room is screaming they've been very well trained saying if you only have one copy of something it's not backed up and that even if that one copy is in iCloud which is a pretty safe place it might be prudent to take that blob that export that folder and put it on a hard drive external drive or thumb drive and put it somewhere just so you have a copy of it it's always nice to have a local copy as well as a cloud copy um I guess you I mean like if you're willing to do that you don't really even need the iCloud you could just cut but I like having both yeah and someone did bring up a good point if you don't have an issue with uh Google and its method of doing things Google actually does include a pretty cool automatic feature in the Google photos app that they call cleanup and essentially once you've backed up all of the photos from your iPhone to Google photos you can hit that clean up button and it will also remove photos from the local library uh again it's kind of the nuket option so you do want to make sure that you're putting these photos somewhere else you're making a copy of them but that's also a possibility and it's a way that I've helped some family members who said I'm out of storage space what do I do I had them download Google photos and use that as the means to do it that's a nice and that's the key is it backs up the cloud but then it gives you the option to delete everything that's backed up to the cloud I wonder if Amazon Prime does that if you have an Amazon Prime membership you get unlimited backup at least until they plug but for now you get unlimited backup of all your photos in original quality not even a reduced quality which is what Google does but I wonder I have to look at the Amazon yeah I haven't seen like a cleanup utility oh I've got it all copied can I delete it now yeah that would be nice wouldn't it yeah that's a good question though I've heard people say that before and what I've always ended up doing is convincing them to spend five dollars a month on more storage space that's that's what I would suggest to you but I know that's not possible for everybody I know that that's a hard sell uh or even the 12 a year that uh Cloud yeah exactly just increasing your iCloud storage oh that yeah that wouldn't save you locally yeah that's a good point never mind um so in that case it would not work for you uh buy a bigger hard drive yeah work for you all right um should I do an email John Ashley producer do some producing email voicemail email okay phone call you don't blame me blame John Ashley aunt just walked in did you have a good interview with uh Hugh Howie I bet it was incredible it was great yeah it was outstanding yeah club members you gotta go check that out we'll put that on twit plus feed right so they can yes yeah I think it's there now Bruce Bruce writes hello Leo and Micah hi Bruce longtime listener after using years of using Microsoft Windows started in 90 Windows 95 all the way through windows 11. I finally took the plunge into becoming a Mac User I Blame You Micah it's been very frustrating of late with Microsoft's updates continually causing blue screens my older i7 HP Desktop which was operating just fine so I got a Mac Mini base an M2 based Mac Mini after learning this is just what an aunt did too right yeah yeah after learning the subtleties of how things are done in the Mac world I'm glad I made the switch who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks I did check out a few of your hands on Mac episodes found them very helpful thank you Micah good I'm glad to hear that but he has two questions do I need an antivirus program no not even on Windows do you really need an antivirus program you really don't know Mac they do a very good job of keeping you safe uh I don't use one you don't use one I don't use oil I there every once in a blue moon I have a free subscription to Malwarebytes I'll download Malwarebytes and do a scan just because my my what is it my uh not my threat posture but the other one is your threat uh no I forgot I know security threat Dynamic whatever it is the threat method mine is heightened a little bit so but yes no you're fine I'm having one of those days where I can't remember anything did you notice that Aaliyah it's all slipping away from me uh two I imported all my photos into the Mac here we go the one minor issue was the individual photos now show the date of imports oh rather the date of creation which means I cannot sort by date anymore oh can this be changed photo viewer does allow me to view by ear so the creation date does exist somewhere but not in the filing for it is in the file info it's been what we call the extended information I abbreviated e x i f and there's actually a really it's a geeky I've mentioned it before there's a very geeky tool that and I've used it that lets you take you run this program and it will go through all the photos and change the modification date if you wish or the file name to match the creation date all of which is stored in the X if perfect data so it's called it's free it's from a guy named Phil Harvey hi Phil very geeky it's called exif tool and there's a Mac OS package there's also a Windows version if you ever decide to go back uh and then it's command line so you're going to have to learn the command line and let me tell you the this thing has command line options till tomorrow yeah look at it it goes on and on and on and there's really nothing it can't do but it's going to take a little while for you to understand it and craft a command line that'll do what you want it to do look at all the file formats it supports not just you know jpegs and uh and uh you know traditional files does Mr Harvey provide any examples Mr Harvey probably does but uh because that would be helpful for someone who's not yeah here's there's some command some examples there we go yeah uh it is complicated I spent a little bit of time playing with it before I actually ran it Paul Harvey was the radio announcer Harvey unless that was a joke yeah so this is I I mean maybe I'm getting a little uh out over my skis here I don't know if you want to use something this powerful but it is the way to do it that's what I did yeah and I'm wondering too your method for bringing them in because if you just brought them in as files versus importing them directly into iCloud or into your photos app it may have properly sorted that data if you brought it directly in so if you basically launched photos and said import it may have been smarter about what it was doing when bringing them over versus bringing them into the finder first where that modified date is going to be more important so I I think that this tool is something well worth using um but you might try importing if you're maybe not as comfortable with the command line importing directly into the photos app and seeing if that takes care of the issue where it's not finder that's going well I think what's most important to you right now is when these were modified and I would also recommend checking out an episode of Hands-On Mac where I talk about the find and I talk about how you can make more sort options available to you within finder so you can easily right click and choose when these were you can sort by date created date added date last opened all sorts of options that might be able to help you sort better as well oh and look at this thank you scooter X somebody has written a GUI a graphic interface for Phil Harvey's exif tool it's available Linux Mac and windows so it might make it a little bit easier for you to figure out what it's going to do I have not used this but uh it's certainly worth taking a look at my suggestion is before you run it on all the photos create a demo folder and try it you know make copies and try it on a handful just to make sure it's doing exactly beautiful yep so now you know the rest of the story yeah your mom made you listen great grandparents great grandma and I would sit down and listen to Paul Paul Harvey the rest of the story good day they wouldn't miss a day I have a friend who was in Chicago used to do a show out of Chicago who got in the elevator in there lo and behold is Paul Harvey and he said hello Americans hey we're out of time we're done we are Hello Goodbye Americans uh thank you for joining us we do uh ask The Tech Guys every Sunday right before the twitch show that's about 11 A.M Pacific 2 p.m Eastern Time 1800 UTC you don't have to watch live you can get uh download versions of the show at twitch.tv atg or on YouTube or better yet subscribe in your favorite podcast player that way you'll have it on your device and you can listen or watch we do audio and video uh but if you like to watch live and if if you do watch live you can interact with us live you can make the phone call for instance all you have to do is go to live.twit.tv actually there's always something going on there if we're not doing it live we'll do reruns of the shows live.twit.tv and if you're watching live irc.twit.tv is our open to all public IRC the one Brenda was trying to get into anonymously and there's also a Discord where you can be anybody you want for club members only um but again I hope you will watch and listen now remember the phone is open for all week so you can call and leave a message for us we're not on the air at 888 724 -2884 you can also email us atg twit dot TV we get lots of emails now it's great it's a lot of fun yeah and a lot of voicemails too which is great yeah thank you for your calls and for watching the show we really appreciate it um anything else to say uh no I think that's it honestly okay Michael happy fourth if that's have a great celebrate yeah no shows on Tuesday for our International every every year I'll get an email saying what happened to the show macbreak weekly security now no show what happened ah cause they don't know July 4th holiday it's because we switched to drones they can't hear the fireworks they don't hear the explosions so we send the whole team home everybody gets the day off which is a good thing um but we will be back here uh I'll be back here on Monday you'll be Tech news weekly on Thursday with Jason Howell um and then we'll be back next Sunday no iOS today though no iOS today and we'll be back next Sunday so thank you everybody we appreciate it have a great fourth and we'll see you next time on ask the tech guys have a great geek week now bye bye hey there Scott Wilkinson here in case you hadn't heard home theater Geeks is back each week I bring you the latest audio video news tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system product reviews and more you can enjoy home theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club twit which costs seven bucks a month or you can subscribe to home theater Geeks by itself for only 2.99 a month I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater geekadoo [Music]