Amazon hikes it's prime membership price. Netflix gives users a small but useful feature. Who's selling the most tablets, phones, and chromebooks? The latest numbers are in Plus your tech questions answered? What is going on on Rich Jamiro And This is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer the questions you send me. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
in Los Angeles. In case you don't know that, in case you're just tuning in, I'm broadcasting on Twitter spaces as well. Last time I broadcast the whole show on Twitter Spaces and I didn't realize till the end that the microphone is off by default. Now I don't know why that would be, but I guess to to save you any troubles of a mic that you didn't know
was on. But let me tell you, I hope you don't have all your savings in Facebook, Snapchat or bitcoin this week, because man, what a rough week for the markets. I guess it started last week and it just kind of continued. But I personally have not looked at anything in the past two weeks.
I don't want to know. I mean, I've got a long time.
All I have is retirement stuff, So I mean, I'm not looking to access any of the savings for a very long time, thankfully, But if I did, I'd be kind of sad right now. But I'm just not looking at anything. I'm just gonna let it ride. Let it ride until retirement, and that's it. I'll check it then and hopefully some of these things will be figured out by then. I took the Tesla up to San Francisco this week. I shot a bunch of stories up there.
It was great.
I actually shot an entire vlog about driving the Tesla to San Francisco.
I think that's the longest I've driven it.
Yeah, Vegas was previously the longest, so San Francisco definitely the longest. Had to charge I think two times on the way up, two times on the way back, and I got home with less than thirty miles I think twenty seven miles on the tank, so to say. And it was kind of nerve wracking because it was it was really down to the wire and so it worked out. I got home, it was all fine. I was a little nervous, but a good thing. The last part of the trip was downhill. They call it the grapevine here
in California. It's like, you know this, you weave through these mountains, but at the end when you're coming back, it's like you're basically going downhill. So I picked up a lot of miles going downhill there.
So that's cool. Look for that video soon.
And last week on the show, I talked about reformatting my computer. Let's just say that did not work. There's some sort of lock on the hard drive on the newest MacBook pros that have this like security chip on them, and then the new I don't have the M one chip yet, but it's got this T two chip and apparently you can't just like reformat it the way you used to. You have to like go through all these hoops to do it. And I remember doing that last time, but somehow I figured it out.
This time.
I just didn't feel like figuring it out. It takes a really long time. And I was doing it like on a Friday afternoon after the podcast, and I was sitting there at the table and you know, I'm like, I got to format my computer now to my wife, and you know, we had like two or three hours before we are going out for the night.
So it's like, I don't think it's the.
Right time to try to figure this whole thing out right now. So all I did in the meantime was switched to Brave the browser. It's a lot faster than Chrome, but I'm definitely missing Chrome because there's so many little features I use on Chrome that I just I want to like Brave and it's cool and it's actually a lot faster.
I just can't keep myself to it.
So I downloaded Chrome again today and eventually I'll get back to that, but I haven't installed it yet. Let's talk about the big story of the week, the big talker, Amazon raising the price of its Prime membership by twenty dollars to one hundred and thirty nine a year. So this is so ironic because just a couple of days ago I paid for my Prime membership and it was like one hundred and nineteen dollars one hundred and thirty with tax, and I tweeted, like, just renewed my Prime membership.
You know, it's still worth it to me, And the next thing, you know, they raised the price, and so I spoke too soon.
I guess. But the reality is I.
Still feel like I get a pretty good value out of my one hundred and thirty dollars a year soon to be probably one fifty with tax here in California, So I think that's probably fine. I think that, you know, I did a little tweet about the last time they raised prices, and so people have been retweeting that and discussing it, and on my Facebook page especially, a lot of people have been discussing whether this is worth it. So let's just say it started in two thousand and
six at seventy nine dollars. The first time they raised the price was in twenty fourteen to ninety nine dollars, and they rose it in twenty eighteen to one hundred and nineteen, which it's been until twenty twenty two, which is one hundred and thirty nine. So it looks like they're on that cadence. It's getting shorter and shorter, because at first it was like six years. Well let's see one two, three, four, five, six, seven eight years, nine years,
ten years. No one two three, four, five, six, seven eight years, then one two three four years, then one two three four years. Yeah, so we're on like a four year cadence, So I mean and look for one hundred and thirty nine dollars. I did a bunch of orders last year. I put it in my tweet just how many orders I did. I can't really find that tweet right now, but I think it was like one
hundred and thirty. If you go to Amazon dot com and then you click returns and orders and then you just look at your orders and it s has forty six orders placed in the past three months. So I just did twenty twenty one and I placed two hundred and thirty five orders in twenty twenty one. So one hundred and thirty divided by two hundred and I say two hundred and thirty five, So that's fifty five cents shipping for each order. That's that's pretty good.
I'll take that. I'll take that, so fifty five cents.
So even if it's one fifty divided by two thirty five, that's sixty four cents in order for shipping. I'll definitely do that. And here's the thing someone asked me on Twitter. They said, hey, do you do a lot of like one item orders? And I said, yeah, I do, because I said, here's how how Prime actually saves me money. When I walk into Target for one thing, which is nearly impossible to do, you're going to walk out of there spending an extra fifty sixty bucks. That's just me
so because you, oh this looks really cool. Oh that looks cool. Oh I need this. Oh yeah I need that, and you walk out and you've spent a bunch of extra money. With Amazon, you buy the thing that you need. So my kid wanted a computer keyboard the other day, and I.
Bought the computer keyboard.
It was fourteen dollars and twenty cents Amazon Basics, and it was it was there the next day, it arrived the next day, and so super simple, super easy.
I didn't spend a lot of money.
If I went into any other store for that one little thing, I would have spent a lot more. So, Yeah, Amazon's raising the price. You get a whole bunch of stuff for that money. Personally, it's still worth it for me.
But when you look at these subscriptions as a whole, you know, when you look at Amazon and you look at you know, Hulu, and you look at Netflix, and you look at Disney and you look at Spotify and you look at YouTube, all these things that I pay for when you put them in aggregate, it's still not that much money yearly, but you know, or monthly, I should say, but it's you know, it all adds up, and all of these prices are going up. And it used to be Cable was so evil. Cable always raises prices.
But now we're just seeing the same thing with all these other services. It's just a dollar here, two dollars there. It's not as like a parent as it was with cable because people just I don't know, they really got to know their cable bill apparently. So so that's a big story with Amazon. Still think that Amazon is going to it is still going to keep most of the people or a majority of people that are on Prime.
They've got a lot of memberships there. I also wrote on my Facebook page how much they made last year and let's see what was it? Oh gosh, oh okay, I can't find it. It's the way that they organize things on Facebook. I just can't find. But a lot of comments when I asked people if Amazon Prime was still worth it to them, and I think a majority of them said they were annoyed by the up by the fee, but they still get a lot of value out of it. So that's pretty much where it's at all. Right,
let's get to the first question of the show. Dominic says, what are the best options or apps to use for pixelating text on photos when posting pictures on social media? Thanks Dominic, this was such a well timed email.
I can't believe it.
I got this email right as I was scheduling my newsletter, which if you haven't subscribed, just go to rich on tech dot com dot com and you can subscribe to my newsletter.
It's free.
And it used to be I was trying to send out like this big, lofty newsletter at the end of every week.
Well guess what.
I gave up after a couple of years because it just became too much. And then I thought, well, wait a second. All these little things pop into my head, like ooh, I should share with people how to do a speed test. I should share with them how to redact a photo. And I said, oh my gosh, I have the perfect place for this.
Now.
I post a lot of this stuff on social media, but it's not always the easiest on social media because you're scrolling through whatever. With the newsletter, I can just send out something really quick and it's just like one little tip and it really helps a lot of people. And so far I've been keeping myself to this. I think I've sent out three newsletters so far in the new newsletter system and yeah, one, two, three, and it's been you know, January twenty eighth to February fourth, so
it's been pretty good. I thought I was gonna do it every day, but I feel like that's way too much for people. So I've been doing it kind of like, you know, every other day, every three days whatever, three times a week. So that's the cadence. I'm gonna try to keep rich on tech dot substack dot com. But to answer the question, the tip I shared today is a website called Redact dot Photo. Now I've used a lot of ways to cover up things in photos over
the years. This one is definitely the easiest. For a while, Skitch was my favorite. That was the ever no app, but they've discontinued support for that one. But that was pretty good. I actually had an app on my computer called redacted, but I don't think that's around anymore. And so now this redact dot photo is super super easy.
You drag and drop a.
Picture in there, you hover your mouse over the part that you want to blur, it blurs it out, and the guy who created it or the person who created it explains kind of how they do it and why it's private, and it's just fantastic. It works perfectly, so redact photo if you need to get rid of something in a picture before you share it on social media, and you can even like rotate the blur area or
expand it. So it makes it really really easy, super simple, and it's just one of those things that you just bookmark. I think a lot of the tips you're going to get through the newsletter are just going to be things that you'd bookmark, and like you might not need them that day, but you know when you need them, they'll be there for you. All Right, Another big story of
the week. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I just thought it was interesting and it just goes to show that when you've got a dream, or I guess I should say the American dream is still alive and very well and it's very much evidenced by Wardle. So we talked about this story a couple of weeks ago. This was the word game that kind of blew up and everyone was playing Josh Wardle. So the guy who created is Josh Wardle, but the
game is Wordle. So w A R D L E and the game is w O R D L E. So kind of funny there, But you know, everyone started playing this game and it's like basically this little game that gives you six tries to guess a five letter word. Well, guess what New York Times is purchasing it to go into their game's portfolio. So this software developer out of Brooklyn, Josh Wardele, released this game in October twenty twenty one. Ninety people were playing it on November first, two months later,
three hundred thousand people were playing it. And now the puzzle has millions of daily players. And he got a seven figure buyout from New York Times, which is just unbelievable.
Congrats to you, Josh. That is amazing.
You came up with a fun game, and New York Times says it's going to be free to play for new and existing players and no changes will be made to the gameplay. At the time it moved to the New York Times, so they didn't say what's going to happen in the future, but who knows. They could do different variations on this. But the good news is what a cool experience. This guy wrote a game that I think it was for his friends, or maybe it was
his girlfriend at the beginning or partner. And then next thing, you know, this thing just blew up and so many people started playing it.
New York Times takes notice and isn't that cool?
So this person, just by doing something that was fun to them, is now going to be living very comfortably for hopefully the rest of their life. I did a similar story up in San Francisco. I interviewed this developer, twenty two year old who came up with an app and same thing. I mean, this kid, I call him a kid because he's twenty two, no disrespect there, but you know, he's a young, young person and came up with an app, actually wrote it to exchange pictures with
his girlfriend. And now he hasn't been bought out yet. But the reality is it's gone so popular that there's going to be a great ending to this story.
Hopefully. I mean, he's going to get noticed by.
A Google or an I don't know, an Amazon, or a Facebook or a Twitter or an apple. I mean, who knows the possibilities are unlimited for this guy too. So just love doing stories like that because it just goes to show that when you've got passion and you've got drive, it's still a very good indicator of good things in life.
And I know it's tough.
It's been a really rough two years with the pandemic and people have been staying home and it just seems like there's so much closing in on us. But there is a world out there and things will clear up at some point and you still can do pretty amazing things and make some pretty big moves no matter what.
It just takes a lot, believe me.
It's you know, I get up early every day for ten years now working on KTLA and it's there's not an.
Easy day, let's put it that way.
But it's fun, it's enjoyable, it's dynamic, and I do love it. And so if you've got all those things going, no matter what you're doing in life, it hopefully will work.
Out and be a good thing. So that's it. This is not a motivational podcast, so I.
Could be, because you know, I feel like I'm a pretty positive person. I feel like you know, it's just there's so much to be thankful for in this world, and sometimes it's not clearly apparent what the end game is for anything we do, and so you really have to be on yourself and just kind of that fire has to come from inside. It's not always someone else's that's lighting it for you, all right, Dean says random music on my nine S Samsung. I've had issues as
of the past month. My phone all of a sudden starts playing a musical tune over and over. I've deleted apps, games, contacts, etc. That I've added or added in the past month. I've gone to AT and T store. There's no help. I've followed YouTube instructions the best I can. Nothing works. There is no set time. It happens one pm, three am, eight pm one am. It's driving me crazy. The only way to stop it immediately is to restart my phone. If I don't, it just keeps playing. If I have
the volume down, then i've volume. If I have the volume down, then I volume down everything I watch. I watch you as much as possible, and some of your tips have been very helpful. I don't recall you ever addressing this problem.
Please.
I'm begging you help me. Regards Diane from Newbury Park, Dianne, I feel for you. I don't know what is going on. I mean, this is quite the odd thing, but I will say what I think is happening is it's some sort of alarm that has been set and the alarm it could be an alarm or a timer, and at
the end of the timer, it's playing this music. And the reason I say that is because my kid had something similar on his iPad and it was driving him nuts because his iPad was making a sound just randomly, like all the time, like we'd be sleeping and we'd hear his iPad. And it took a while for me, the tech person, to figure this out. I looked at his iPad, I was looking at his alarms, I was looking at his things. I was like, there's no alarm set.
And finally I did find I think it was a timer that for some reason every time.
I don't know.
It's just finally I got deleted. My kid was like, oh, you got it deleted. I thought that was just like a you know, a part of my iPad forever, and so I did get it deleted. And I think you should look in your clock app and your stopwatch app and your timer.
And see if it's in any of those.
Now, notwithstanding any of those things, what I would do is you can check your reminders as well. It sounds like some sort of notification has been programmed to play a song.
If I can guess properly, I don't know.
And I'm mentioning this on the podcast because maybe someone can chime in on Twitter or on you know, just email me hello at rich on tech dot TV what they think this is now, Dean, If you cannot figure this out, I don't know why the AT and T
store couldn't help you. That seems odd. Maybe you just got someone that wasn't really wasn't really excited to help with this issue, because I think that a good tech person, any tech person that you know, I think if you bring their phone to them, they will look at a few of the settings and figure out what's going on here and why this is happening. Something has got to
be playing this music on your phone. The other thing I would do, and this is kind of the nuclear option, is just reformat your entire phone so it's a nine Samsung nine S.
I'm getting.
I guessing that's an S nine, so Samsung Galaxy S nine, it's been around for a while. My advice would be to format the phone, make sure everything's backed up, any of the important stuff at least, I mean you could you know, you could probably do without your apps and settings. Just make sure your photos are backed up, any of your voice messages or your yeah voice messages, recordings, things like you might not think of, and then just give it an old format.
Go into the.
Settings and do a factory reset and it'll start fresh, and then you can start over, install the apps that you want, that you need, and hopefully you should be fine. I would recommend something like Google Photos for your photos if they're not backed up. There also Samsung Integrate with one Drive. You can back up your photos there, or you can download I Drive photos and you can pay. I think it's what is it now, Let's see how
much it is. It's ninety nine cents for the first year of unlimited photo and video storage I Drive Photos, and then after that it's five bucks a year. So I would do that and you should be fine, hopefully. I don't think this phone is like possessed. I think there's some sort of explanation for it, and so.
Hopefully that will be uh, that will be sufficient.
All right, if you have Google Messages and you talk to someone that's on an iPhone, and I'm not going to get into the whole I message versus everything else debate, but the reality is when someone on I message likes if you're exchanging texts with them. And this means that if you're on an Android and you text someone on an iPhone and they like your comment or that your message or they there's a.
Couple of things they can do.
They can thumbs up, they can thumbs down, they can heart it, they can haha, they can send an exclamation point, or they can send a question mark. And when they do that, historically you will get a message on your Android that says, you know, Rich liked whatever you said, and it'll name the message or Rich disliked whatever you said, or rich hearted or loved or whatever. So it's kind of annoying because it's like this weird thing where your
phone doesn't really know what to do. On an iPhone, if you have I message to I message, you just see a little thing that says haha or thumbs up or whatever. But if you're on Android, it's just like it writes out what people are doing, and this can get really annoying on group texts when you've got one person on Android and the restaurant iOS and they'd start doing this and it's just like a whole bunch of
messages that are like nonsense. So in all of Google's smarts, they are now translating what people do on I message what's called I Message reactions into a reaction in the Google Messages app. So there's a couple of caveats here. This is not like an official feature through any sort of SMS thing. It's just basically Google Messages. When they see that someone right, you know, when they see that syntax of like rich liked whatever, message, they're gonna now
map it to an emoji. And so nine to five Google has the emojis that they map to it, which are kind of weird. The heart the heart emoji actually converts into let's see the smiling face with hard eyes haha, is the face with tears of joy. The exclamation marks becomes face with open mouth, and the question mark is thinking face thumbs up thumbs down is the same. So it's kind of a weird translation.
A little bit.
It reminds me of that movie Lost in Translation. It's like, why can't they just use a heart? Is there no heart emoji on the Android side of things? So if you notice that these things are happening, it's because you're using Google Messages and they're kind of doing a It's kind of like a little hack they're doing because it's not like an official thing. They're just kind of translating what's happening. Because iPhone makes it simple from iPhone to iPhone,
but it's not simple from iPhone to Android. So if you notice those little reactions happening on your Google Messages app, that's what's going on now. Google Messages is not necessarily a default messaging app on all Androids, but I would recommend using it because it's pretty good. I wish that they would do like a maybe they do at this point, But if you have an Android, I would also recommend installing the Android one app.
I'm not sure if Android Messages or sorry.
Google Messages by default backs up to the cloud, but it's been a while since I used it, But if you have Google One, you can now set in there to back.
Up your SMS messages.
So I would do that because if you switch to a new Android phone. Your messages will be backed up as well and brought back to that new phone. If you're on Samsung to Samsung usually when you switch phones, it's fine because it's backing them up as well. I think it's using you used to use the Samsung Cloud now I think it's using one drive for all that stuff. But anyway, small thing, but good to know about.
All right.
Next question, terroln says, any recommendations on the best in printes easiest way to download my one hundred plus CDs to my iPhone twelve?
Tia, Oh, Tia.
Tia, thanks in advance. I thought Tia was short for Arrelin.
All right.
I don't always get it right on the podcast, but man, Terylin, you're a little late to the party here.
Who still has CDs.
That are going onto an iPhone twelve? You've got this amazingly, you know, new iPhone twelve and you've got one hundred plus CDs that you're bringing to it. But I understand, I get it. You've got your collection, you want to bring it to your phone. You're not paying for this, you're not paying for streaming, So the hundred the easiest way to do This is to rip these CDs to your computer and then to transfer them to your phone.
So there's a couple of ways you can do this.
As for CD I think the toughest part of the process is going to be does your computer still have a CD what is it?
A CD ROM drive, a DVD.
Drive like a way to rip these Like most computers in the past, like whenever, don't have these drives built in anymore.
Now.
I actually purchased the external CD drive from my laptop because for you know, once in a while I'll need to use it for something.
But you know, you can do that if you have.
A computer, maybe like a Windows computer, like a desktop, maybe you'll have a CD drive built in. So if you have a CD drive built in, it's pretty simple.
You can just use iTunes to do this. And even with the you know how iTunes is all weird, iTunes twelve point twelve on Windows will import songs from CDs into iTunes, So all you have to do is open up iTunes and then make sure you go into your preferences, then click general and when a CD is inserted, click when the CD is inserted, pop up menu and choose the option you can do show CD play CD as to import or import or import and eject, So I would choose the import and eject option.
And so what happens is.
It will import your CD and then as soon as it imports it onto your drive. And what I mean by import, it will copy the files from that CD, all those music files onto your hard drive, and then it will eject the CD and get ready for the new one. So it takes about ten minutes, Apple says, I'm reading the Apple support site, takes.
About ten minutes.
And then once it's done with that, now you can put these songs onto your iPhone. And so if you want to put them on your iPhone, you're gonna have to just use that setting in iTunes to do that as well. So pretty simple process. The other thing you can do is rip them with another piece of software.
Let's see this Windows.
I don't know if Windows ten even has that built in, but it looks like maybe you can get something in the Windows Store. Let's see Express CD ripper free. Yeah, I mean, it looks like it's available for free. So if you do that, you can use that. If you have a Mac. I'm just assuming you have Windows. If you have a Mac, computer. It's all the same. You know,
you can use these similar things. But the other program I like, if you already have the files, is called Walter Walter Pro and this works with any file actually, and it's so easy. You can drag and drop to your iPhone. So it's Walter is from soft O Reno and it's really easy for any file. So if you have any basically anything that you want, you can drag and drop onto your iPhone. It's kind of a lot easier than anything else that you've used in the past.
This is videos, this is music files. I think it even works with like PDFs and stuff. It just works with a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, any file. Realistically, you can use pretty much anything, photos, kindle stuff. I mean, it's just really really easy. So again it's a Walter Pro and it's just a simple, easy way.
To drag and drop things onto your iPhone. Good question, great, great question.
All right, speaking of phones, I dc out with their quarterly numbers, and I just you know, I'm kind of
a numbers guy. I just you know, not that I'm good at math, but I just love like putting things into perspective, and I think that sales numbers really help us do that because if you live in the US, it's a very iPhone slash Apple centric world that we live in, and when you kind of zoom out to the bigger picture of things, you realize that there's a lot of other companies out there in the bigger world
that are making things that people are purchasing. So with that said, Apple still dominates in a lot of a lot of places. But let's look at top five tablet companies fourth quarter shipments. Apple did seventeen and a half million tablets, Samsung was behind them at seven point three. Then Amazon was three point six million, so that's a
pretty good number. Three point six million tablets that they sold, probably a fire tablets, and Samsung with their tabs, and then Apple of course with the iPad, they're just killing it. I mean they're really really doing an amazing job. And that's the only tablet I really recommend. Unless you want to go super cheapy, then go with the Amazon tablet. Like if you're only consuming content like watching videos on it,
then the Amazon ones are fine. But if you're doing any sort of like education or playing games, you really want an iPad.
Because they have the best software.
So if we look at this by market share, thirty eight percent for Apple, sixteen percent for Samsung, and then eight percent for Amazon.
So then we get into the let's see top five.
Oh that's just hold on, that's just in the US top five tablet companies worldwide shipments, top five tablet companies, okay, and then they get into okay, so now let's get into chromebook So top five market share in Q four twenty twenty one, so ACER with chromebooks and they did one point three million, Dell number two at one million, Lenovo, then Samsung, then HP so Acer is killing it with the chromebooks.
That's and then Dell, you know, a little bit after them.
But it's interesting the chromebook shipments really went down, like you're talking. I mean the numbers are way down over over year over year, so down forty three percent, down, sixty percent, down seventy percent, down, twenty two percent, down eighty six percent for hp SO overall down sixty three percent over last year, so year over year.
So what does that mean.
It means that during the pandemic, people bought a lot of chromebooks, and this last three months of twenty twenty one not so much because they they were going back to school, they're going back to work. They just didn't need the chromebooks as much.
I guess that's it. I thought it was gonna be phones.
But anyway, so all right, we got chromebooks and tablets. So's the what's the message here? Chromebooks were popular during the pandemic and then people, you know, fell off a cliff, or the sales fell off a cliff, and when it comes to tablets, Apple is really really still king. Let's get to the next question analyin Amy Lynn. Let's see, Amy says cell phone booster. My husband and I both have iPhones. He's on Verizon, I'm on AT and T. Neither of us can talk on the phone due to
poor signal. Would you recommend any cell phone signal that does not require an outside antenna. We're in a condominium. We can't add any kind of outside equipment. Amy, I don't think you need Oh wow, Amy said Tia as well.
What is up with this?
I I've never seen Tia more in messages in my life. Okay, Amy, I don't think you need a signal booster. So I think that all you have to do is turn on Wi Fi calling. Uh signal boosters used to be really popular back in the day, before the days of Wi Fi calling, But Wi Fi calling has been around forever. It's been perfected. I keep it on on my phone ninety nine percent of the time, and it's kind of annoying.
I'll be honest that I'm like, why am I routing my I've said this before on the podcast, but like, why am I using my Wi Fi to make phone calls in my own house? Like your Verizon you're AT and T your two mobile? Yeah, can you figure out your networks that it works inside my house? I mean, come on, like, I gotta I got to use my Wi Fi from my wired connection to make calls at my house.
Like I get it.
I mean houses are you know, they're their own thing. You know, if it works, it works, if it doesn't. Every carrier is different. Like where my one family member lives. You know, they don't get any Verizon inside their house at all, But T Mobile works just perfectly, and AT and T kind of in the middle. And so when I'm there, I have to have my phone on Wi Fi calling no matter what because Verizon has zero signal there.
Now things have changed a little bit with this whole you know, five G, the new network that they're opening up the nodes for because a lot of those are on telephone poles, so maybe they're closer to houses. I don't know, but the reality is amy, I think that if you just turn on Wi Fi calling, you should be fine. Now, if you're having trouble with Wi Fi calling, that's probably a router issue. So I would look at your router settings. I would make sure the speed that
you're getting. But to make a phone call, you do not need a lot of bandwidth. Now, the late and see could be a problem if your latency on your signal on your Wi Fi is not very good, like if it's really slow to kind of like and latency means like when you go to a website like Google dot com, how long does it take for that website not to load but to basically yeah, I guess it is. It's not how to load, but like how long does it take to show up on your computer? A lot
of that is latency, not speed. So speed sometimes is really fast, but the latency, like kind of that back and forth of when you click to what when something actually happens, could be a lot slower.
So if you have latency issues.
Yeah, you might have Wi Fi calling issues, but other than that, you shouldn't. Now if you really want a signal booster, the only signal booster company that I know of that I think you know may work is Wilson amplifiers, And so you can get those, but I don't think you need that. They're way too expensive, even like the cheapest one here is like seventy dollars, sixty dollars. I don't think you need that. I think you just turn on Wi Fi calling and you should be just fine.
All right, let's talk Netflix, everyone's favorite topic. This is a very small, but you know, kind of a meaningful advancement for the Netflix app on TV. So you know that row that says continue watching. Have you ever just like sampled a show on Netflix and next thing you know, it is on your continue watching forever? Because there's no
way to get it off of there on your TV screen. Now, if you want to your mobile device, on your iPhone Android, yeah, you can click the three little dots or whatever and get rid of it by saying remove from my you know, now watching or whatever however.
They say it.
It's always been easy to do it from your phone. Or mobile, but not from your TV, which is where ninety nine point nine percent of people actually manage what's going on in their Netflix and watch Netflix.
Well maybe not watch, but anyway. So now on.
Your TV screen, you can remove a TV show or movie from your continue watching row.
With the click of a button.
All you have to do is click on the show and then select remove from continue watching on the page options, and if you change your mind, you can undo that
removal by clicking the back arrow. So the bottom line is that if you you know, if you get if you get lurered in by one of these little thumbnails, you know that they constantly change on the Netflix pages, and you just kind of click something and you know, it starts playing and then all of a sudden it's on your playing list forever or you're continue watching list, and you're just like.
Oh, I don't didn't even care about that. I just I just I just tapped it to see like what the deal was, and it started.
Playing and whatever. So now you can finally change that. It's funny the uh, the Netflix, let's see what I'm looking at, the top ten they now have like, you know, their top ten list of everything, and it's kind of funny. So top ten right now on films is The Royal Treatment, Home Team Munich, Don't Look Up. I watched that, The Secret Life of That's two, Red Notice, Hotel Transylvania three
and Anyway. There's a couple more, but it's just the stuff that people will watch Netflix, Like we watched that Don't Look Up. It was I mean what I If I went to a movie theater and watched that, I'd probably be like a little disappointed. But because it's Netflix, I'm like, eh, I mean, it's like it's basically free.
Right.
It's like, I mean, I hate to call Netflix free, but it's like it's like running water in your house, you know, if you're paying for it, it's just there. It's like anytime you watch something on it, it's a value, even if it's not that good. You're like, well, I got free entertainment, even though it's not free. I mean, we're paying for this, and now I think I'm paying twenty bucks a month.
Didn't they just raise their prices too? So that's a lot.
I mean, it's like twenty dollars a month. It's still okay, I say it's a lot, it's still not a lot. Compared to one movie ticket, especially in Los Angeles. But twenty dollars a month, I mean, for the rest of your life, is is a decent amount of money. Let's see, let's say I keep Netflix for Let's say I keep Netflix for thirty years. Okay, thirty times twelve is three sixty three sixty times twenty. That's only seventy two hundred dollars.
I mean, that's really not that much. Seventy two hundred bucks for like all the entertainment you can imagine for thirty years. But the thing is, it's not just Netflix. It's a lot of other things too, So I mean you add all these things up, and believe me.
It's it. Again.
It doesn't add up to a ton of money, but it definitely adds up. And it's like one of these things where I'm always angling for, like what's the least I can spend every month on recurring subscriptions because the moment you get into a recurring subscription, it's tough to get out not to cancel. But like in general, it becomes a part of your life, like Spotify, Like I ran the I ran the idea of canceling Spotify by my wife. The other night, She's like, why do you
always want to make life so complicated? Cancel these things that we've gotten used to. And I said, well, because we're paying for YouTube music and so why shouldn't we use that. But the problem is YouTube music is not available on the Apple Watch and we use.
It for Apple Want and there's a whole big thing.
Oh, needless to say, IM pain from the month of Spotify. Spotify survived, but you know, maybe not next time. All right, did I I can't remember what I just did?
Did I just do Netflix? I do? I can't remember. I think we did the cell phone boosters and then we did Netflix.
Okay, So Joseph, hey Rich, we have a challenge I'm sure resonates with many. We have about twenty years of email with our provider, Cox, likely some on the desktop and some still on the Cox server uncertain which is where the Coox dot net email addresses are linked with numerous accounts and account recovery processes. We are moving out of a state. We are moving out of state to
an area where Cox does not provide service. They only provide forwarding for about thirty days and no other options to keep the email while setting up a new email and forwarding might solve some items, it would be much more preferable to keep the Cox email address. Is there a way to take the email address with us and have it reside on a different hosting service, similar to how you can take your phone number to another provider.
If so, what would be the least painful and reasonable priced way to make this happen taking all of our old meal email and keeping access to the account and keeping the existing email address. Thank you, Joe, Joe, I think you're in a pickle here because I'm not really sure there is a way to do this, So I this is why I don't recommend. This is why I recommend that people never ever use the email address that comes with their ISP, because chances are you're setting yourself
up for failure. Now you've had this for twenty years, that's that's pretty wild.
Now.
When it comes to actually downloading the email, that part's pretty easy. You just log in with some sort of email app, whether it's on your computer or maybe it's a webmail app that will download the emails and that and for that you want to use pop three. So if you're using SMTP, that's going to be just checking the email and or sorry, imapp is going to be
checking the email on the server. So if you want to download your actual emails from Cox and get them onto your computer, you got to use pop three and download all those And it depends COS may not. I don't know how far back they go, but you want to make sure you just download those. So that's that's an easier situation. The tougher part is with all these recovery emails, so you know most of the time you will be able to.
Well try to think about that.
You got to actually go through and get some of your bigger websites moved over.
So what I would do is open up.
A Gmail and start forwarding the COS to the Gmail number one, like, just do that right off the bat, and then I would go through your main accounts and change that email address. It's gonna be tricky because if you leave some of these on that account recovery email, they may have. Some of the bigger websites will have other ways to recover, but not often, so I would I would really try to make sure your main websites banking, you know, financial, you know, your other Facebook, social media,
anything that you access on a regular basis. I would switch over that email address immediately. But this is a problem. You know, they may give you a little bit more grace period on these things, and you might want to call them and see what their deal is. I don't know personally, and maybe they maybe they let you keep it forever, maybe they let you pay a dollar a month.
I don't think so.
I think it's just one of these things where the whole point of these email addresses is to keep to keep the service sticky.
And they will.
That means that, you know, they want to keep you in. So if you start signing up with like you know, dot att net or you know, bell South or whatever these things were back in the day, you know it keeps you on that service because you're like, all my email's here.
So that's why I'd always.
Recommend a third party independent email, you know, something like a Google, something like a Yahoo.
I don't know.
Maybe I wouldn't recommend Yahoo so much. I mean, what is there? I say, Google and maybe outlook Google. Let's see Gmail, I'm going to use my Gmail. I'm gonna use my versus operator. So yeah, Gmail, I just type into Google Gmail Versus and Outlook. Yeah, I'd recommend that Yahoo maybe iCloud. That's okay if you're if you're Apple, uh, and you know there's other there's other email providers you can get. But I think that Gmail is probably gonna be the easiest. Outlook is pretty good one.
Does Outlook get free.
Outlook Yeah, free personal email and calendar for Microsoft. So I would say outlooker or Gmail is probably gonna be your best bet. Good question there. All right, this is interesting. So you know, if you've listened to this podcast, then I'm not a huge points person, right, Like I don't. I don't And this is kind of like tech but also finance a little bit. But you know, I'm not
like I don't like spend for the points. I you know, I do have a credit card, but I am a big fan of like debit cards because I like to.
Spend the money and be done with it.
I don't want to have to look back and every month, you know, get this giant credit card bill. I know a lot of I know this is going against a lot of people, uh and how they think because points points points.
I get it.
There's an entire multi billion dollar industry made around points. But when it comes to debit cards, which is my preferred, the points are not there. And so when I spend money on my debit card, which is where I primarily spend money, it's like, that's it.
It's done. It's not a big deal. It's not exciting.
And part of that is that it keeps you from over spending, because when I'm spending money at Target and whatever the bill is, if it's not my credit card, I don't think about it.
It's like, ah, yeah, sure, swipe.
So swipe, Like the credit card just seems to like well back in the day when you swiped, or maybe even when you tap, it just goes through easier, right, It's just like it authorizes faster. There's no signature needed, there's no pin. When you use a debit card. It's like, eh, debit card's like you're not getting anything in response to it. You got to put your pin in all this stuff. So I stumbled upon this new thing called the point card, and it's a it's a debit card that gives you points.
And so I thought that was pretty interesting. And so if you go to point dot app you can check it out. And I know for nine ton percent of people, you probably just don't even care, Like you just say, Rich, I use my credit card. Fine, I like it, but
personally I want to be off the credit card. And one of the reasons I like the credit card is because it protects me for certain purchases, so especially travel purchases, rental cards, and so the interesting thing about this point card is that not only does it give you points for your you know, debit card usage, but it also gives you protection like a credit card on certain things. So you know, you get different different levels of points
depending on what you're spending money on. And then you get like travel protection, you get purchase protection.
And there's no fees.
And the other thing that's interesting is that you can transfer money from your debit card.
To this point card instantly.
So if you've ever used something like a third party debit card, it takes like three to five days to transfer money typically, and so this does it instantly, so it's really cool. And for all those things. It does charge a monthly fee. That's kind of the only catch is that it's either ten bucks a month or ninety nine dollars for the year.
So I don't know.
I signed up up and I didn't get to the point where I paid for it yet because you can sign up and then decide on the on the and so I'm still kind of like, I don't know, So it's anyway, I tell you this because if you're if you're looking for a solution, that's a little bit better than a standard debit card, but not so much a
credit card. And the other thing is you don't need a credit check with this, which is kind of cool too because even though they did ask for my social Security number, they didn't it wasn't a credit I guess they didn't check my credit but I don't know. But anyway, it has you know, you can use it with Apple Pay. It's got you know, no no international fees, so if you like use it overseas, you're not gonna pay that.
You can get two free ATM withdrawals. So it's a really cool like way to kind of still be part of that points game, but you know, not being in the.
Credit card game. So I may switch. We'll see.
I'm still kind of deciding on this thing, but I just thought it was really interesting. It's one of these like, you know, tech companies, these like high tech companies that you know are redoing finance. Oh the other thing I really liked about it is that you get virtual card numbers, so you can use those for like purchases that you may want to do for like free trials or like one off things or sketchy websites.
And then they also have the app.
And this is really cool. I've always wanted this on my debit card. So I use my debit card kind of like a reversed credit card. So I'll put money on the debit card and then spend it, and so I always like to know what my balance is because that tells me how much I can spend. And so this actually puts your current balance right on your home screen of the app, so you can open the app and without having to actually log in, you can just see what you're or maybe you have to log in.
I don't know.
It says it says heads up display, but it just seems like it's like right on the front page of the app. So that makes it really easy too. Anyway, Point Card is the website. I'll link it up in the show notes. But kind of cool. I know, I'm so weird that I don't like to use a credit card. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love using my credit card.
I love it but that's why I don't like to use it, because I just don't. I don't like the idea of the bill, you know what I mean.
And I got into trouble when I was younger about overspending on credit card, so I will never let that happen again, even though I still think I spend too much when I'm using a credit card. All right, let's see Steve says settings on an LGO led TV by coincidence. Sunday, the day before we saw your segment on buying a new big screen, we bought a sixty five inch LGC one. Great choice, but OMG, the horrors of going through all
the settings and options to fine tune the TV. Day two of going through them, and we're not close to a picture of perfect TV. There has to be a better way. What is out there to help with settings? The YouTube quote unquote experts have too many opinions and not enough how to Thanks.
Steve, well, that's a great TV.
When I did my story on the best big screens for the Super Bowl, I recommended the TCL six series and the lg C series and you got the C one.
I saw this puppy at at Costco.
It was eighteen hundred bucks and it's a beautiful, beautiful TV that was for sixty five inch, and the TCL series sixth series is like closer to I think eleven hundred bucks for a sixty five inch. The prices are actually up on that one, if you can believe it, or all TVs, I guess, but good TV choice and yes, the picture setting is this is an interesting thing about TVs.
When you go to the store and see the TVs on display, they all look great because they all they do is just pump up every single option brightness, contrast, color, you know, whatever, sharpness, it's all just pumped up. And so when you get at home, clearly you're not going to watch your TV on one thousand percent brightness, and
so you have to go through and adjust those settings. Now, it took me a while with my TV and so what I So, I used to work at c NEET and there's a guy there, David Katzmeyer, who is like the TV king. He's been there forever. He knows everything about TVs. And when I was there, uh, you know, I was lucky enough when I bought my TV, I think it was a Visio Plasma TV just to go to show you how old that was. You know, he told me like the exact specifications, like the exact numbers
on how to tune that TV. And he would actually do this online for a long time. He would say, Okay, here are the popular TVs, like here's the LG whatever, and here's how to tune the exact like put your black level at this, put your contrast level at this, put your color level at this, put your you know whatever brightness level at this, and it was amazing. So you'd get this finely tuned TV. So I don't think he does it like that anymore for all, like you know, every.
Specific TV model.
But I did find an article that he kind of still gives some like pointers on it, and I think that you can find other websites. So what I would do is I would search lg C one. Let's see picture settings, and you know it's got like yeah, like calibration settings. Oh, here you go, ratings, dot Com, r T I, n G S they do it, and so general settings they they do all the settings for this. Motion settings generally, what do they say, motion you should
be off? Yep, So motion setting you typically want to have off unless you are watching sports and then I would put that on. And then another expert I talked to Will Greenwald, who I also worked.
With a c net Now he works at PC mag.
He said that cinema mode is the best kind of generic picture kind of setting if you wanted to use that.
So, you know, cinema mode is kind of the the main one that you want to do.
So all right, So there you have it. I mean, there's a lot you can do. It depends also on what you like. Like on my TV, I had it on cinema mode for so long, but it's kind of an old TV, so it's getting kind of, you know, kind of older, and so I decided to uh, to change it to vivid and it's like, whoa, this looks so much better. So anyway, that's that's that, all right. I got time for one more quick little thing and then we'll go. But if you're in the La area,
I'm sure some of you listening are in LA. There's a new website that's really really cool. I've been waiting for this to come to LA.
For so long.
It's called good Eggs and it's a startup. I actually was in the Bay Area for a story one time, and I saw this van and it was a big van that said Good Eggs on it.
I was like, oh my gosh, and it reminded me of this.
Old service I used to get deliveries from called Milk and Eggs here in Los Angeles, and it was so cool because they would deliver like really really fresh stuff right to your front door. I'd get a delivery on Saturday morning of like, you know, some eggs, some bagels, some oranges, some bananas, and it was all really fresh, because what happens is throughout the week you go and like whatever you bought at the beginning of the week kind of like dwindles towards the end of the week.
And then so it was so nice to wake up on a Saturday morning with all these like great fresh options for breakfast. Well that only lasted a little bit, and so I kind of kept track of this Good Eggs and they said they were coming to LA and by the way, they finally did, and so I actually did a story with them for KTLA where I went to their warehouse, which is amazing sixty thousand square feet. It's like one giant refrigerator and freezer.
It's huge.
They've got the best, like coolest stuff. Now, I will tell you right now, this is not inexpensive.
You are not buying.
This is not Amazon Prime grocery delivery that's like at your house in two hours. It's like, you know, super good prices this and that. I mean, you're this is a very high quality play. So if you are into like high quality meats, high quality cheeses, high quality prepared stuff, really really fresh produce, this is gonna be something you want to check out because I looked at it, and you know, the prices they're good, you know for someone
bringing stuff to your front door. But believe me, there is definitely you can you can do cheaper, for sure, one hundred percent. So don't don't come yelling at me if you're like rich, are you kidding me?
Like, don't do it then.
But for me personally, like I I love the idea of really really high quality stuff. And I'm not gonna do, of course, all my shopping here, but I'm definitely gonna try to see how some of these these deliveries are. I did taste test a couple things that they gave me, and so far, I was very impressed. I tried an orange, I tried a salad all very very fresh, and so check it out.
It's called good Eggs.
I'll put a link in the in the show notes. I'm very excited to try it out. So they're delivering to a lot of Los Angeles, but they tell me they are going to expand to more areas, so if they're not in your zip code just yet, they hopefully will expand to more areas soon. Good Eggs again is the website. Gosh, is that really gonna do it? For this episode of the show. I can't believe how fast these things go. Yeah, I guess that music means that's it.
If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, you can go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or you can go to rich on Tech dot tv and hit the email icon. Also, I would love it if you had a rate and review this podcast. Just go to the listening app of your choice write a quick line about what you like about this show to help others understand why they should listen.
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I am at all social media at rich on Tech, and no matter where you live in the US, you can download the free ktla plus app on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the tech section and watch all of my TV segments on demand. My name is rich Dmiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I appreciate you spending it with me. I'll talk to you real soon.