One of my favorite segments here.
And if you haven't yet, you got to get on Rich Demuro's newsletter. It's a great read and incredibly informative. He's kfi's tech guy, Rich DeMuro. You can hear him live Rich on Tech every Saturday from at eleven am to two pm, which I do. See him on KTLA, follow him on Instagram at rich on Tech. His website website is rich on Tech dot TV.
Good morning, Rich, Hey Neil, good morning to you. Thanks for the newsletter plug just past forty five thousand people getting that newsletter.
Started it a couple of years ago, so very exciting.
Good on you and no smoke. I really do love it.
And you've become a super resource for me and keeping me up to date with everything and what's going on.
And I enjoy the show, of course.
And you've got some stuff going on, including iOS, which I've been a member of for a long time. iOS eighteen point four came out. I like how you call it that I've been a member of.
I like that.
It's like I have been a member of the iOS family. A lot of people have, which is interesting because iOS has slowly changed over the years.
But it's largely.
Remained kind of the same, right, Like, I mean, the iPhone still kind of functions the way it did when it came out in two thousand and seven, but with a lot more features. Apparently, by the way, that's getting totally revamped next month. Not next month, in June. We've got this thing called WWDC coming up, and that's where Apple usually shows off the new software. And apparently the rumor mill says that iOS nineteen is going to be like a complete revamp, So anyway, stay tuned for that.
But today, if you do have an iPhone, they've got iOS eighteen point four. You might have seen that there's a software update. So a couple of notable things. Number one is going to use more AI on your phone, so you can do this thing called priority notifications, which I usually do on the weekends already, where it can kind of figure out which notifications are actually important, and we'll just surface those first. Let's see what else here. New emojis, of course, I mean those kind of come
out all the time in photos. This is the big thing. When they redesigned the Photos app, people had a lot of problems trying to find their pictures and things like that. So now they just kind of revamp that once again
to kind of give you some further refinements. So if you have not done this already and you're having trouble with your photos and finding them and how they're organized, open up the photos app, scroll all the way way to the bottom and where it says customize and reorder, cap that and get rid of like almost everything except the stuff you need. And you can also reorder the stuff.
And I think those will be a nice improvement. And by the way, Neil for you, Apple News Plus, if you're a subscriber, just added this new food section with all kinds of stuff like recipes and a step by step cook mode. But you do have to be a subscriber to get that.
Numb num numb. I'm on it.
Hey, So I h listening to you before I went to Italy with the handle a couple weeks back, went and got an e sim through.
What is it.
Arlow Ara Low?
Yeah, So heard about that on your show and went ahead and did that, and this helped me avoid roaming charges well traveling.
What are some of your other tips?
So, I mean, I'm getting a lot of questions about this right now because a lot of people taking trips, but you know people don't want to pay.
You know, it used to be you went.
Overseas, you came back with a huge roaming bill. Right, So if you've my number one tip is call your carrier because a lot of times you may have days included or even international data included on your plan. So sometimes if you're on the priciest plan, like the ninety dollars a month onlimited plan from Verizon or AT and T, they typically give you like a roaming day per month, and you kind of bank those. So when I went to Europe last time, I had like twelve days in
my bank. I didn't have to pay to do anything. I just said, okay, cool, I'll use these twelve days. So that's my number one tip. If you want to just keep your plan, keep your phone number. Make everything the easiest. The simplest is really just to pay your carrier. And that's AT and t's twelve dollars a day, Verizons twelve dollars a day, T Mobile. Almost every plan has the roaming included. But if you want faster speeds, you
can pay five dollars a day. Now you mentioned the e sim I think that's the most value because you buy it from an app, like you said, Aarlow is one of them, Gigsky's another, Saley is another, and you basically activate that from your phone. There is a little caveat if your phone is locked to your carrier. Sometimes they don't allow you to do the ESIMP, so you do have to check to see if your phone is unlocked before or if your carrier allows that.
But that's the most.
Value because you just activate that and you can basically use it all month for like thirty thirty dollars and if you don't want to make any charges extra on your bill, be sure to turn off roaming.
Be sure to turn.
Off all the apps that automatically update, like the photo uploads and the cloud uploads, because you don't want them to gobble up all of your information. Make sure they're only set to Wi Fi. And of course you can use Wi Fi hotspots too.
Yeah, it worked out nice, So my wife did. She went through her carrier and did it that way, and I went through having an aim so we had a little of both and it kept us.
That's what I did with my wife. Yeah, she didn't want to do anything special. She was like, I just want to stick to my you know, carrier, and I was like, all right, that's fine, We'll pay the ten dollars a day for you, you know.
Yeah, So we did a little bit of both in that way. We always had a signal or always had the ability to do whatever we needed and hopefully no no major costs in that.
So Rich Gmail turns twenty one. Do you use Gmail?
I do.
Yeah, I've been using it since day one. Yeah, I love Gmail. I think I think they do an excellent job. And you know, let's hope that they stick around forever and ever and ever.
I hope.
So I've got forty one gigabytes of stuff in my Gmail. So I don't know what that is. That's twenty one year's worth of emails.
You still have your AOL account somewhere.
I do not have my AOL account. I pretty much was I was a I think I was a Yahoo guy before Gmail. He always kind of like, you know, a lot of people were using hot mail at the time.
Aol was popular.
But they were giving you like a couple megabytes of storage, and Gmail gave you a thousand in counting. And yeah, it's been been interesting ever since because it kind of changed the way people saw email.
You just save stuff forever. You don't have to delete it.
Man, I was like, God, they used to call me boy toy when I was an intern because the male is because the producer at the time was a female for the Bill Handle show. I was his intern and she didn't want a girl. Everyone else was guys on the team. They wanted girl. So they would refer to me as boy toy because she wanted a boy. And so so I think my Aol account might still be around. It was talkboy six forty from back at ninety something.
AnyWho, what about April Fools today?
Any tech stuff going on we should know about?
Well, that's so okay.
So the whole Gmail thing, I don't know if you remember this, but it actually launched on April Fool's Day, April first, two thousand and four.
Oh I did over that, that is Yeah.
So a lot of people thought that it was a joke when it launched because it was so different than all the email out there, and it was from Google, you know, kind of an upstart back then, and so people were like, wait a second, what is this?
Is this real? Is it fake?
So Ever since then, tech companies have gotten a little bit more and more elaborate. For many years, they were doing all kinds of jokes. This year, I'm not seeing too many yet, but I didn't fall for one. But I did get one pitch last night that kind of like made me go, wait what.
So it's a company called Nothing.
They make smartphones or based out of London, and they sent me this email saying, hey, we're coming out with this pair of beautifully designed wired earphones. And I'm like, that's weird because most phones don't have an earphone jack anymore, right, the three point five millimeter sure, And then it went on to say, Neil that it has a fifty meter cable and I'm like, wait a second, hold on. I may not be, you know, versed in metrics, but let me ask chat GBT what's going on here? And they said, oh,
that's one hundred and sixty four feet. I said, mistake in your press release. So I email the woman who sent it, and I know her pretty well from the past, you know, ten years of working with her. Said Jane, I think you got something wrong. This should be five meters, not fifty. She goes, no, Rich, it's a joke.
And that's the only punchline is one hundred foot Well, it's just.
What, Yeah, it's like it's silly.
It's like, who needs one hundred and fifty foot cable? Also they plug in. It's just you know, look, this is nerd humor, Neil, this is you know. I'm sure there's food humor, which I see you post on your Instagram.
By the way, I'm pretty nerd. You do love your posts.
I really I do stop on your posts and laugh every single time.
That's all.
You know what, there's so much ugliness, as you know, in the work that we do because we're surrounded by news. All I'm trying to do is bring a little levity to things. That's all same, same, it's yeah, so ugly. Okay, So I'm gonna do a handle real quick because Handle always makes it about him.
I have been using Apple forever.
I came kicking and screaming in nineteen nineties, maybe even late eighties, when I was a young designer and artist and they wanted me to use this machine. And I'm like, what it's like glorified typeshetter. So, needless to say, I've been in the environment and eco system for a long time. I have an iMac on my desk get home. It's
only a couple of years old. And when I updated recently to a newer operating system, not the newest, it started giving me smart issues, saying that there was that there, there was their smart issue, which is tried to predict issues with my hard drive.
Oh what the what?
Interesting? So is that I wonder if you have one of those fusion drives which which mixes the the standard like hard drive with the SSD drive, that might be what's giving you some issues.
I will, I would that out because there's nothing on it. I keep everything you know on a separate drive, and I back up and do that. So if it did, God forbid, crap out and I wouldn't lose anything.
Yeah, I mean, well that's the main downside of SSDs. They're a lot faster, but if they crap out, they're done. Yeah, there's nothing you do. Hard drive you might be able to recover, but that feer that weirdness.
You remember all that?
You put it in a freezer and see if you could get the information back on the old spinning drives.
I don't remember that, you don't.
Yeah, you would be able to get like on some of the older drives. Man, But I go way back with all this stuff where you put them in the freezer and you could take them out and maybe get some information off the just weird, well stuff.
Just too quickly, I know we got to go.
But to bookend your whole change to to Mac or making you use a Mac. I remember when I switched, and it was such a big deal because I was Windows my whole life, and I bought a MacBook at a place called the Good Guys.
I don't remember that electronics store.
I think it was called the Good Guys in LA and it was like it was a transformative moment in my life. So I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm trying this thing because I heard it's better for video editing. Yeah, And I've been Mac ever since for my laptop and it's it's been great. And of course now I use both because I get a lot of questions on the show about Windows.
Me too.
I'm a dual platform here at the station and at home. And funny enough, going way back, rich I was I headed up the computer department and the graphics for Kinkos for seven or eight locations back in the day, so I was I was doing all the computer and everything back when you'd have to do everything yourself and figure out what was going on with the computers. Yes, so this is one of the love that old school name
Ugh Kinkos. Yes, it has a it was a fabulous place to work, said that doesn't exist in its original form.
All right, Rich DeMuro.
Hear him every single Saturday from eleven am to two pm. Get his newsletter. It's a wealth of information, and check him out on KTLA and of course Instagram, Rich on Tech and his website, Rich on tech dot TV. Thanks Rich, nice talking with you buddy.
Thanks Neil, have a great day.