Ring cameras can now help you find a lost dog. Amazon and Google are in a battle for smart home supremacy. Meta isn't listening to your phone, but they will start eavesdropping on your AI chats. Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on on rich dmiro And this is rich on Tech. This is the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology, and yes you have a lot of them. I believe
that tech should be interesting, useful and fun. Let's open up those phone lines at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. Email is also an option. Just go to the website richon Tech dot tv, hit contact, submit your email there. Yes, it goes right to my screen. All right, Guests, This week, friend of the show is going to join us once again. She is a smart
shopping expert at truetrade dot com. She's going to talk about scoring the best deals on Amazon Prime Day, which is coming up this week. Later, Steven Roboles, tech journalists and content creator, is going to share insights on Apple. He came out with a cool shortcut that went viral to help you find a stolen iPhone. He'll talk about that and later in the show. Mark Vina, CEO and principal analyst at Smart Tech Research, always a guy that I hang out with when I go to these tech events.
We're going to talk gadgets. We're going to see what he likes these days. All right, this was a big week for Amazon and Google. The two companies are locked in a battle for smart home supremacy. So on one side, you've got Echo speakers, You've got Ring cameras, and Alexa Plus.
You might want to.
Mute that right now because we're going to be hearing it a lot. On the other side, you've got Google, Nest cameras, Thermostats, Home Speed, and Gemini. So which one is gonna win? You've probably got some of these gadgets in your house. Let's start with Amazon. They held an event this week in New York City. Now, typically I say I went to New York City for this event.
Yes, I was invited, No, I did not go.
I was celebrating my kid's birthday this week, and I am not gonna be out of town when it's my kid's birthday. So I'm just putting that out there, you know what I mean, Like you got, I gotta ride the line of family and this stuff. And so I watched from Afar. I got all the info, but you know, it would have been nice to be there. But you know, I do what I can. But Amazon's game is to just throw a lot at the wall, right and see
what sticks. Usually they have pretty good prices on their tech stuff, and this is what they came out with new this time around, So new Kindle Scribes. These are the kindles that you can write on. So the new one they have their flagship, is thinner and lighter than ever larger screen eleven inch.
It's got glare free.
That's one trend we're seeing with all these screens is glare free, which is really nice on the ice make that's a big difference. There's also a new color Soft that's a color version of the kindlescribe.
Now these are expensive.
The scribe starts at five hundred bucks, the color version starts at six hundred and thirty dollars. You might be saying, rich, why not just get an iPad at those prices, Well, these are much easier on the eyes because it's e ink,
which means it looks more like the printed page. Now these are color well, the second one is only get the color e inc reader if you read comic books or something that is colorful, or you need the color screen because you're highlighting or something like that, or you're writing and you need that color because the contrast of the black ink on the color ones are not as good as it is on a standard black and white e ink screen.
Just keep that in mind.
I mean, it's nice to see the book cover in color, but do you really need that if that's your only thing?
All right?
Next up, Ring Ring is releasing their first ever four K cameras, so more details in your videos. That means you can zoom in on things like if you have a license plate you're trying to make out, or face you're trying to make out. They call this retinal vision. Not to be confused with something else. You don't want that. This is mostly for wired cameras right now. They also have two K cameras for a bit more clarity there.
They've got that on their indoor camera and a wired doorbell, so basically the standard battery doorbell that everyone has doesn't seem to have gotten an update, but there are a few new features that will make their way to a lot of these cameras that are already out there. Number one, Alexa Plus Greetings, So basically you can now have Alexa Plus this is their smart Ai answer the doorbell for you.
So right now, if you have a ring doorbell, if someone rings it, you can have a canned response that says something back to them like hey, sorry, no solicitors, or please leave a message or whatever. But now you can actually have Alexa Plus say hey, can I help you? What do you what are you here for? Okay, can you come back? Or whatever, so Alexa can relay that info to your phone. Well, so that's kind of a neat thing. I've not played with that, but I'll be
curious to see how that works. Then they have this feature called familiar Faces. So this cuts down on notification spam because it will ignore the regulars at your house if you choose, and you won't get a notification when your kid takes out the trash, but it will get a notification when a stranger walks up to your door. Now, the most interesting new feature, it's probably already getting a lot of publicity is called Search Party. This one uses
AI to help find lost dogs. So if your pet goes missing, you can upload a picture to the Ring app. And they said last year a million people did this alone and just last year but they didn't have this feature.
It was more manual.
Ring will use AI to comb through the video footage of nearby cameras. Yes hear that again. Ring will take the picture of the dog and use AI to try to find an image of that dog on your neighbor's cameras. What if it finds a match, it will alert the owner of that camera, not the pet owner, and it will ask you, hey, do you want to share your footage or this location with the other person that's pet is missing and you can decide. So they're trying to put privacy in first place here.
But you can see the ramifications. You can see where this could go.
It's pretty wild to think that Ring can scour so much footage for a match of a pet. When you think about pets, they all look kind of similar anyway, don't they. I mean, I know, if it's your dog, they're different. I know your cocker spaniel is unique. But imagine if they expanded this to other things like Silver alerts for missing people, child abductions, car license plates. They're not doing any of this right now. Right now it's just dogs and eventually cats and other pets. But the
tech is clearly there for a surveillance scenario. I mean, what if you commit a crime and the Ring cameras can track you down instantly? Now this feature is they're not doing that. They're not saying they're doing that, but I'm just saying the technology is there clearly.
Now.
This feature is turned on by default in the Ring app. If you don't like the idea of finding other dogs helping people find their lost pets, you can go into the app and turn it off. So go into your Ring app if you just want to see the option. It's under menu, control center and search party and it is enabled by default. So that's an interesting one. I mean, look, they're wading into this with dogs. Who doesn't want to find a lost dog?
I mean, come on.
But it's the other stuff that this could potentially be used for that is very interesting. There's also new Blink cameras with higher resolution and a way to combine two Blink cameras for a one hundred and eighty degree panoramic view. People love these Blink cameras because they have a super long battery life.
That's like what Blink invented.
That's why Amazon paid so much for them. These are good if you just want to keep an eye on an area of your home or outside. That's just simple and easy. You put the batteries in last for like a year. Then we got some new Fire TVs, a new Fire TV stick that's forty bucks. And then the interesting thing is Echo speakers. They've got a new Dot Max for one hundred bucks and an Echo studio that's
even bigger for two hundred and twenty dollars. So right in on Sonos right now, they're getting in on their game. You can now connect up to five of these speakers to a Fire TV stick for instance surround sound.
How cool is that?
Affordable and easy instance surround sound wireless, And this is a trend we're seeing with a lot of the streaming devices, almost all of them at this point, whether it is Roku, Google, Apple TV, and now fireTV. You can connect their speakers wirelessly and have a simple wireless home theater setup. That's pretty cool. There's also two new Echo shows these are the echo speakers with a display on them.
Now powering all.
Of this is Alexa Plus, which I have been testing and I think it's pretty cool.
I think it's a big upgrade.
But I have gotten some mixed responses from listeners about all the smart home controls and what works right now and what doesn't. Remember, this is pretty early days, so if you have a complex smart home setup, it might not be the best time to accept that upgrade email when you get it from Amazon that's inviting you to use Alexa Plus. But overall, Alexa plus is very conversational, just sounds much smarter. You can go back and forth. All of these ais are great if you're just trying
to have a conversation. They seem smart, they sound smart. Sometimes they make mistakes, just remember that, and they're not your friend, even though they sound like your friend. We literally were using an AI the other day in the car and it laughed. I was like, wait, what did you just laugh at me? I had never heard an AI do that. This was grock by the way, the AI from x I guess. I couldn't believe it. It sounded human like. I was like, wait, what you laughed? Is
it gonna cry next. Overall, I think Amazon has built a compelling and affordable smart home ecosystem with its own products and thousands more work with Alexa. So while I don't think their announcements are super groundbreaking, I do think there are some good upgrades. If you're in their ecosystem, if you want to be again, you don't need to upgrade. If your fire TV stick is working from three years ago,
stick with it, no pun intended. But the Echo speakers to me are really interesting because I've had my ups and downs with Sonos over the past couple of years. But I will say they finally fixed that one feature I wanted, which is the ability to adjust all the volume across all my speakers at.
The same time. So I'm excited about that. All right.
Coming up, we're going to talk about what Google announced with their hardware and software this week. They're doing some big changes as well.
Eight eight to eight.
Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one the website rich on Tech dot TV.
Good to have you here.
We'll take some more of your calls coming up next right here on rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology.
Oh do you recognize this song? Not yet?
Oh you will. This will be played a lot in the next couple of months. Taylor Swift's new album dropped. Whatever you think of Taylor, you know whatever. My wife is obsessed. She was sending me all kinds of things yesterday, all about Taylor's album. Yes, I listened to it twice and uh, you know, it's good.
Look my wife said it today.
She goes, if you don't like Taylor, you know, it's fine, you know, don't tell anyone. So anyway, I'm enjoying it, and it's it's darker and deeper than her previous albums, and also not so much for kids. There's a lot of a lot of things she says in there that you're gonna have to explain to your kids. I'll just leave it there.
Eight to eight.
Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one the website for the show rich on Tech dot TV. I mentioned this on my Instagram stories at rich on Tech and people were like, wait, what what? So I got my nest thermostat replaced yesterday. The guy comes to my house to replace it. First thing he says, like rich On Tech. I'm like, oh okay. Like every time when you're on TV when someone comes to your home, there's always this moment of like is
this person going to recognize me or not? And I think it's an amazing thing that people know who I am. That's great because it means I'm doing something right. But at the same time, you know, you're welcoming someone into your home, a stranger, and it's like, so long story short. He's like rich On Tech and then I was like so embarrassed because he's like, how come you're not doing this? I said, I said, look, I do a lot of
my stuff myself. I go, but when it comes to something that my wife is going to be using on a daily basis, I don't mess around.
I do not want to.
Have to say, honey, I messed up on the thermostat. I missed a wire. It's not working. And then it's like I got to hear it. So he comes in. It took him about, you know, seven minutes to replace this thing and so and you know, a couple hundred bucks later, which, by the way, you know these people ask for a picture at the end, you.
Know, hey, can I a selfie? I'm like, sure, sure, sure, no discount.
Ever, I feel like you pay more because they're like, oh, you're on TV, you could afford it. I don't think so, not the case, just putting it out there. Uh okay, So my story. The reason why I tell you all of that is because I posted to my Instagram that I replaced this, and people are like, wait, the original Nest thermostat is like going away.
Yes it is.
If you've had a Nest in your house like I have for like ten years, you need to know this Nest Learning thermostat the first gen from twenty eleven and the second gen from twenty twelve. Google is ending support for them on October twenty fifth, So after that date, yes, your thermostat will still.
Work manually on the wall.
You can adjust the temperature up and down, but it's not going to connect to Nest or the Google Home app. So that means no more remote control, no more status, no more notifications, no more app settings, no more home away assists, no more third party assistants that can control it. So basically it becomes a dumb thermostat you've had ten years, and yes, I got a lot of good life out of this thing, and the new one's very nice, so everything on device will still work. There's not going to
be any software, no security updates. So if you have one of these original Nests, look in your email. Google sent you an email that said important service update for your Nest Learning Thermostat, and they gave you a special price. It's like one hundred and fifty bucks to upgrade to the new one. So that's what you need to do. So October twenty fifth, that's the date. And of course, yes, I procrastinate, just like every other good American and waited
until the last minutes to do that. Daniel writes in I use Apple Photos with iCloud and Google Photos with backup on my iPhone fourteen pro. When I delete a photo from Google it deletes from my Apple too. Is there a way to stop this? If I delete the Google Photos app, will it delete my Apple Photos? Is it a good idea to even have both on my phone? Okay,
so here's the thing. It's when you delete something when you have Google Photos and you delete a photo out of Google Photos, Yes, it will delete it off your iPhone. If you delete something off the iPhone Photos app, it will not delete off Google Photos. So think of Google Photos as sort of a one way street. Everything goes up into Google Photos but does not come back down. Now, if you delete something in Google Photos, yes, it will carry over that change to the Photos app, So just
remember that. The best way to do what you're talking about, Like if you want to clean up your Google Photos without deleting them off your iPhone, is to go to the Google Photos website photos dot Google dot com on a desktop computer. Any changes you make there will not be reflected on your iPhone. Now they will inside Google Photos, but not in the Apple Photos app.
I know this is very complicated.
If I delete the Google Photos app, will it delete my Apple Photos? No, because again you're just deleting the app, and it's data your Google Your Apple Photos stays there. I use Google Photos for all my photo management.
I love it. It's great.
But of course you want to keep your pictures in two places, so I think it is a good idea to have both on your phone. And there's some things I do inside the Photos app on iPhone, and there's some things I do inside Google Photos. Sue writes in Hey, Rich, I was wondering if you have any suggestions for an app on my iPhone to monitor my blood pressure.
No, you can't do that.
It doesn't there's no blood pressure monitoring built into the iPhone. Now, if you have a third party device, you can so Apple Watch series nine or later can give you alerts if you may be experiencing hypertension, but it does not take real time blood pressure readings. They just added this feature, so yes, it will say, hey, we think you might have hypertension, but they're not going to say here's your
blood pressure. So that's one thing. If you want accurate tracking through your phone, you have to get a cuff right now. In the future maybe not, but right now you do need a cuff Withvings Witings. They really are the leader in this area. They've got FDA cleared models that sync with your iPhone and let you keep a detailed history of your numbers. So that's the best way
to do that right now. If you suspect you have hypertension, Oh, we got to go eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one coming up more. We'll take some of your calls and we're going to talk about Amazon Prime Day. Don't shop until you hear this. This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple A rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to.
Two four one zero one.
Uh.
Notes on the website if you hear something I mentioned you need more information like that nest thermostat end of support. Everything is on the website rich on Tech dot tv. And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to my free newsletter. It's got all the goodies that you need to know about the tech world each and every week. Now, well, Prime Day is coming up coming up this week. Yes, it's yet another Prime Day, and there are some new things happening this year and there are some deals you
can score right now. So let's hear from Trey Boge, smart shopping expert at Truetrey dot com with all the tips and tricks.
What is Prime Day and why does Amazon continue.
To do it as a Prime Day is a member's only sale. There are sales on millions of items, from say a small countertop appliance to paper towels, and so it's a great time for Prime members to save money. Prime Bay started about ten years ago. Amazon and other retailers have been trying to figure out a way to generate excitement in a slow period in July, and Amazon figured it out with Prime Day, and so now it's
a very big shopping period. And of course now we have the second one of the year, which is October, and Amazon again has done it. They've created a lot of excitement around this time, and many other retailers throw their hats into the ring as well.
That's a big part of it is when Amazon throws these events, Target gets on board, Walmart gets on board.
So should we look around or just stick to Amazon?
We should absolutely look around. You know, Amazon will have millions of things on sale, and that's very exciting.
But like you said, we've.
Got best Buy, Walmart, Cohle's so many other retailers having big sale moments. So it is really important for cost conscious consumers, which is you know, pretty much all of us. We should be shopping around. We should be comparing prices because the best price may be on Amazon, or it may not.
Be anything new about this year's Prime Day.
So around Prime Day, Amazon will launch special things on and just kind of reframing certain sales as well. And so that's what I would look for. They are always really good credit card offers. There's a one medical offer right now, There's an Amazon Unlimited music offer right now, so look for those, and then a lot of the
deals will be held on the Today's Deals page. And this is a page that lives on Amazon, but it will also house Lightning deals as well, So that's kind of a good go to if you're a consumer looking for those best deals on Prime Day or otherwise.
Now, I always see a lot of discounts on Amazon products. Can you give me some of the ideas of the Amazon brand names out there that we should look for on this Prime Day for those discounts.
Sure?
So, of course Amazon owns many many brands. They have Amazon Basics, Amazon Essentials, and there are other brands that they own like Ring Fire, Kindle. Those are where you're going to be seeing the bigger, more generous discounts because Amazon has more wiggle room with the price. So I always say start with those brands, and then we will see many, many other sales from brands big and small.
So be sure to look around when you're shopping on Amazon Prime Day because the deals are going to be very widespread.
That brings me to my next question, how do you know if a deal is actually a deal. Yeah, that's a great question.
And you know this is it takes a couple of minutes, it's totally worth it because we do see these other retailers having sales as well. So it's good to use a tool like Yahoo Shopping or Google Shopping. Enter the name of the item that you're interested in, and then you'll see where it's being sold in how much. PayPal Honey has a historical pricing feature, as does a tool called Camel Camel Camel, which is specific to Amazon, and they will give you a sense of whether it's a
good deal right now or not. And I think it's really good to use one or two of those tools just to really get a sense of if this is a great deal, it's the very best deal, and if you should make.
Your move now. There's been so many Prime Days over the years, and now twice a year, are we getting Is there any sense of Prime Day fatigue among consumers?
So that's an interesting question. I mean, Amazon experimented in July with a four day Prime Day, and from what I could hear, people didn't need four days to shop on Amazon. So they've pulled back and now they're at two days. Again, I don't necessarily think there's fatigue. I think that these Amazon Prime sales have created a shopping moment one in July and one October. So I don't
think there's fatigue necessarily. But it's really important for Amazon and these other retailers to keep things fresh and exciting, because then, of course you do risk that fatigue if it becomes kind of the same old, same old.
And what do you make about all this, anything that people ask you about Prime Day or any observations on this as someone who's covered shopping for a long time now, Yeah, I mean.
The main thing that question, the main question that comes to me, and it's usually by DM. It's like what should I buy?
What should I skip?
So I'm always trying to share that information in my segments and on Instagram. I think that's a big question.
You know.
Obviously we have those brands that Amazon owns where you can really find those deep discounts. But then we do see discounts on things like Apple products. I mean, that's very exciting and that doesn't happen too much. The way I like to approach Amazon Prime Day is what are the things that I need maybe from my home, what are the things that I'm maybe thinking of buying for holiday gifts and then kind of approach it that way,
and I'm looking for deals. I'm only buying things that are on sale on Amazon Prime Day because otherwise I could just get.
Them another time. All right, there you have it.
Trey Bodge from Truetrey dot com Amazon Prime Day. My advice every year is to put the items you want in your like, stop buying stuff right now in Amazon and just put the stuff you want in your cart, and that way you can watch for price drops over the next couple of days, because pretty much everything goes on sale.
Thanks for that interview. That was great.
Let's go to Hank in South Michigan. Hank Southeast Michigan.
You're on with Rich Southeast Michigan. I got you on nine to ten am on my drive to work. This is Saturday afternoon.
Love it Rich.
Rich. I just bought a brand new Gateway computer Windows eleven unit because my ten year old Ace Windows ten. Actually it was a Windows eight point one that I upgraded at ten, but it's not upgradeable to eleven. So I bought the eleven unit and I got it all set up Microsoft of cloud one drive, transfer all my settings and everything to the new computer. But I don't know how to get my local files for my seed drive, all my documents and photos that weren't on one drive,
and that to my new computer without you know. My missile thought was just and I just did a USD cord and and find the seed drive and transfer that. But I don't want to clone it because I don't want the operating No.
So what, there's a couple. I mean there's many many ways you can do this. You can use a program. But how I mean? Are we talking.
Without?
You know?
My missile thought was just and I just did a USD cord and and find the seed drive and transfer that. But I don't want to clone it because I don't want the operating No.
So what, there's a couple. I mean, there's many many ways you can do this. You can use a program. But how I mean? Are we talking like terabytes of files? Are we talking thousands of files?
Oh?
No, no, no, no. The the SSD on the new computer is five to twelve okay, and the seed drive on the old computer was one terabyte. But I think I've only got I didn't look at it today but I think there's maybe three hundred gigs total.
Do you have do you have a good well okay, do.
You have a good Internet connection?
Oh?
Yeah, yeah?
Okay, So I mean you've already got one drive. Is one drive built into your old computer? Yes, okay, So you can just create a folder on one drive as long as you have some space there and just drag all the files into there. And it's gonna be a little bit of a clim which I think is good anyway, because you probably have a lot of stuff to accumulated on that old computer.
But just go ahead and drag all the stuff that you want.
And if you don't want to deal with it all, as long as you have enough storage and one drive, I think they give you like five gigs. As long as you have enough in there, you can put in all your files and there may you know, if you're if you're talking a lot of videos and photos, then you may have to get a USB drive like a flash drive or a hard drive.
Okay, but that was my thought too. Get a couple of decent size flash drives and just move those files out of that and then plug it into the new computer.
And well, so here's here's how I attack this, Hank. It all depends on how much you have to transfer. So if it's a couple of gigabytes, go with the cloud.
It's easy.
You drop the files in on the one computer, they'll show up on the other computer. If we're talking hundreds of gigabytes, you may be able to get a flash drive, but those get kind of expensive, you know, so and they top out. You know, you can get one for like one terabyte, two terabytes, but those are going to be a lot more expensive than something like one hundred
and twenty eight gigs. So Elf, my advice to you there, to anyone listening when you're cleaning up your cloud drive, slowly but surely, because I made the mistake of trying to move like hundreds of gigabytes of stuff all at once. It really messes up your computer. So slowly but surely clean this stuff up. But Hank, I'm glad you got onto the Windows eleven I know it's a big thing with this Windows ten end of support. So glad you're on the right page there and getting those old files
over again. Cloud drive, flash drive, hard drive, depending on how much you have, easiest way to do it.
Thanks for the call.
Today. Appreciate you listening there on nine ten am in Southeast Michigan eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Coming up, We're going to take some more of your calls. Plus I still have to promise you the the Google stuff I'm going to talk about. Google came out with the whole bunch of smart home stuff. Bobo producer Bobo's talking about the rice increases from Microsoft on the game Pass.
We also have some price increases from Peloton. A lot going on in the tech world. We'll talk about all of it coming up right here.
I'm rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple A rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two, four one zero one.
I see we've got a caller.
Carla wants to talk about the Taylor Swift film last night. I guess they they screened it in the movie theaters, like if you're a real diehard. So we'll see if we can get to her in just a bit.
Uh.
But first Tim writes in, I've been listening to you for years. I love the weekend show on the Radio. Thank you, Tim. I usually buy otter box to protect my phone, but I just purchased the new iPhone seventeen Promax. Nice going. Do you have any cases you recommend? Oh, my gosh, of course. You know how many cases I get sent when a new phone comes out. It's so many that I can't even Literally, I'm sitting there just trying them all on my phone to see what which
one I like. I'll tell you the ones I like, over and over and over. And by the way, I did drop my iPhone seventeen Pro Max and it did suffer some damage even with a case on. And that's not a case I'm going to recommend, So that's not None of the recommendations I'm about to.
Give you were the one that was on when I dropped it.
But if you want something, I like something that's thin and simple and usually clear to show off the color of the phone. So if you like that outer box symmetry you mentioned, outter box auto box symmetry I think is great. It's simple, it's clean, it's clear. I love that and it's a great great protection for your phone. UAG if you've heard of them urban armor gear, that's
what it stands for. They make really rugged styles, so some of their cases I think can are drop tested up to like eighteen feet, so it all sort of depends. And they have some cool it's just cool looks. They do less of the clear stuff, but they do a
lot of like looking cases. And then if you just want the case that I put on every single one of my test phones as soon as I get it, except this new one, I like the Spegan Ultra Hybrid, which is just a simple clear case has got the charging ring on the back, and it's like dirt cheap. I mean, you can get those on Amazon for under twenty five bucks usually and it works. I've dropped many phones with that on there and it just works perfectly.
So those are my choices. There are many many others out there, but those are the ones that I really like over and over and over. Hey, this segment is sponsored by Shopback. What if best Buying Amazon actually paid you to shop there? Yes, you shop at a store and you get cash back. I found an app that makes buying electronics a lot smarter because this is the
best part. No matter how much you spend, you actually can stack what shopback gives you with the retailer coupons in the store deal, so you find your best deal, you find your absolute best promo code, whatever you got, and then shotback is going to give you money back on top of that. You can get up to three times higher than other cashback apps. It works with major retailers, so if you go to their website shopback dot com, you can see all of them. I mean there's names
you recommend, our names you recognize. Best Buy, Amazon, that's the big one, Walmart, I'm seeing, Nieman, Marcus groupon Macy's. I mean, it's the who's who of big name companies out there. You get real cash back that goes straight into your PayPal account, which you can actually withdraw, no points that expire, no gift cards to lose track of. So this makes it perfect for electronics purchases because that's the stuff I'm typically recommending and you can get some
decent cash back there. But it also works on digital purchases, travel purchases. It's a great time to pick up that new gadget you've been eyeing, especially since you know what's coming up very soon. Shot Back gives you fifty cents cash back on orders over five dollars on Amazon Shotback's biggest Amazon on cash back event, Lightning Deal Days is happening now through October twelfth. You can get five percent
cash back one per customer, capped at five dollars. That is a lot five bucks just for shopping right there, Join shop back for free today. Just go to shopback dot com. That's shopback dot com to download the mobile app, the desktop, and the browser extension. Amazon rates available for a limited time only. That brings us to our Gear of the week. If you want to charge your phone faster, you gotta upgrade your charging gear. So I've been testing
a couple of things. First off, this Belkan Ultra Charge Pro three to one magnetic charging doc. This is what's called CHI two. So you might be hearing this terminology G two and it's written out QI so when you see it's that said CHI.
So G two is the.
Newest wireless charging standard. It's faster than it was before. So if you're using the newest iPhone with an old charger, not getting the fastest charging speeds. So this one is twenty five watts of charging, which means zero to fifty percent around twenty five minutes on new iPhones or newer phones in general, because some of the other phones support G two as well. It also has this chill boost, which is this active cooling situation which speeds up your
charging because it's cutting the heat. You know, these phones heat up when they charge. I do notice there's a little tiny bit of a fan sound. It took me a minute to realize that. I was like, wait, what's that sound? And so you might hear that once in a while. But the cool thing is this can charge your phone, your Apple Watch, and your AirPods all at once. And it ships with a forty five watt USBC power adapter in the box, which is nice because you don't
have to go find something. So if you've got an iPhone sixteen are up, you probably want to upgrade to this and take advantage of those faster charging speeds, especially if you have the seventeen. That one really can charge fast. Price is about one hundred and thirty bucks. The other thing if you don't want to spend that much, is
the U Green forty five watt USBC wall charger. And this specifically if you got an iPhone seventeen model this year, even the standard one or the Pro, it can now support two times faster wired charging, so you need to upgrade your charging plug that you plug into the wall, not your cable. The USBC is still fine, but this supports up to forty five watts of USBC charging, so you're gonna get a lot faster charging. The new iPhone basically charges twice as fast, so that's only gonna cost
you on Amazon. I think it's about twenty five bucks. Anyway. Gear of the Week, thanks to shop Back. Let's go to Let's go to Carla. Let's hear Carla. How was the Taylor Swift film last night?
Oh?
Hi, Rich, thank you for talking with me today.
Absolutely, how was it?
Well, you know, I want to we heard you talking about Taylor Swift and your reaction. We feel it was a little muted her because your boys went a little higher when you said it was good.
Okay, So I mean, look, yeah, go ahead, keep going.
Yeah.
So, my daughter and I, you know, I'm a moderate adult swiftie and my daughter, she's thirty, and we went to you know, I bought tickets last week and we head down to Century City to watch.
The film.
And we had to leave because we started laughing because our expectations were completely different from what we were seeing on the screen.
What was on the screen.
Well, I'll tell you, I don't know how old your kids are, but I would say a seventh or eighth grader would have probably been able to produce a film that was just higher quality than I would expect from this list.
Oh gosh, Okay, that's not right.
And I'll tell you I'm a little nervous because I feel like we're not going to get honest reviews.
Well, we got one from you, we got I got a run. But sounds like, look, as with anything in pop culture, reviews are going to be mixed. Eight to eight rich one oh one back after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here talking technology at Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Show notes are up at the website. Just go to rich on tech dot tv. This is episode one forty Show notes are up at the website. Just go to rich on tech
dot tv. This is episode one forty two. And if you missed the show live, yes, you can follow the podcast. Just search rich on Tech in your favorite audio app. And while you're at the website, by the way, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. Laura writes in on the email listening on KOA, Hey, Rich, I love the show. My question is the al one of to switch or not to switch from a Samsung S twenty two plus
to an iPhone. The reason is aging mom and mother in law both live independently and have new medical issues. I want to track them FaceTime with them and their medical teams. Additional factors out of state daughter is also an iPhone. Most important feature beyond beyond what I stated above is photo quality. I do consider myself tech savy thoughts suggestions, thanks Laura. Yes, well, okay, She says she used a Microsoft Surface and a Samsung tablet, which is mostly used for reading.
I would say switch because.
You're gonna find that it's going to be easier to keep in touch with these folks because of the FaceTime situation. As much as I hate that whole FaceTime thing, like the fact that it's a you know, yes, you can FaceTime someone on Android, but it's not very easy.
You gotta sent them a link and all this stuff. Like Apple, please just.
Come out with an app make these things independent where you can use face time on an Android. You can use I message on an Android, just please make these apps. Why are we dividing folks, Let's bring them together. So anyway, until that happens, you do have to switch. And I would say switch because the medical stuff that you're talking about, a lot of those things work better with the iPhone. The tracking you can all be on find my FaceTime is simple, medical teams. It's just a lot easier when
you're all on the same page. So for that reason, i'd say switch. Otherwise, I typically tell people stick with what you like, but I think it sounds like in this situation it might be a better fit. Now let's go to the other side of things. Debbie is wondering about Debbie and Murieta. You're worrying about Gemini.
What's up?
Yes, Hi, Rich, thank you for your show. First of all, great information.
Happy to do it. Thank you.
Yes, I have a question for you about Gemini on the cell phone. And I just bought a new samsong a sixteen to five g okay, a cell phone, Okay, So I was using it. I started to use it. Everything's going fine, nobody said anything about Gemini whatever. I had it for about two days and then all of a sudden, a screen came up and a prompt and it said, would you like Gemini something like this, would
you like Gemini loaded? To load Gemini on your phone for efficiency or something like that, better use see your phone. I'm a senior. I'm kind of reluctant about that. I didn't want that option. So I was like, oh, no, no, no, I don't want this. And before I could even do anything, I swear I didn't phone. It's all there, all of a sudden, I've got Gemini, Well my phone?
What what are you worried about? What don't what don't you want about? It? Is it the AI aspect?
Okay? Rich It's it's like I feel like it's taking over my phone. It started doing things. It changed things on my phone immediately, like it went to a dark screen for better efficiency of the battery or whatever. I don't want a dark screen. I don't want that. So it started doing that, and then the other thing, I'm having trouble shutting it off, and then it constantly is giving me these prompts about AI. Do you want as.
Okay, okay, I think I think I know what's happening. So I think that a simple reassignment of the power button might help.
Okay.
So basically, once you have AI, the side button turns into the Google Assistant.
Okay.
So I think if you go into your settings okay, and I think this, I think that's gonna this is gonna make you a lot happier.
I'm telling you.
Yes, uh, you go go into your settings and you go into Advanced Features and underside button and I will I will tell you how to find this in a second. But under side button right now, your long press. If you press your side button, like if you want to turn off your phone, it's bringing up Google Assistant, which is Gemini, right, and it's like.
Saying all this UF.
You don't want that, that's right.
You want to go.
Back to the old school method of powering off your phone.
You press the power button.
So all you have to do is go into that long press menu and it says Google Assistant, Bixby or power off menu. Once you select power off menu. Now when you press your power button, your phone will actually turn off. Oh my gosh, there's an idea. People spend hours trying to figure out how to turn off their phone because the side button's been reassigned to all those things.
So, yes, I talked to other people. It's a common process.
It is a common problem just in the future, and I'm testing this right now in the future. I'm trying to figure out how to There is a way to turn off your phone like manually. If you swipe down from the upper right hand there's a little power button.
But I tried that.
Okay, anyway, so here's so here's I got to find out how to how to get to this advanced features. So if you go into your settings, uh, and then uh, let's see here advanced features. Okay, Okay, got that, and then we're going to go to side button to see that.
Right now, you see where it says long press digital assistant.
Okay, I'm just I'm taking notes on back and I'll.
Put these in the show notes as well.
But anyway, you press as long as you tap words says long press, and you switch it from where it says digital assistant to power off menu and Debbie, I think that's going to save you a lot of headaches over the time. Now, Google Assistant, when you want to call it up, if you want to, you can always just open up the Gemini app to activate it. You could also say hey Google to your phone that may
activate it. But I think just having that power button reassigned to the actual power is going to make a big difference.
Okay, Rich, Still that's one problem with so turn up. But let me ask you this second part question.
Sorry, but how do I charge for the second?
I want to get gem Andi like off my phone. It's on my phone now, and I went into the carrier store and even they don't know how to shut it down.
There you can't, you can't. I've looked into it.
There really not all.
There's not a way, not an easy way that I know of, to disable it. But here's the thing, Debbie, embrace it. Embrace the AI. Have some fun with it, ask it, some fun questions.
Ask it.
Here's what's what I think gets people when you can ask it a really complex question, maybe something from your childhood, maybe a movie that you love.
Like it.
It's true, I've already done that. I do like it for that, but I don't want it loaded on my phone.
I like when you have.
Old style and it says AI answer to that, yes that you're right. It's great, it's great. But I so there's no way to once it's loaded, No no getting at.
All there's not an easy way. I will I will look into an easier way, but there's not like a switch. Let's put it that way, because these things, you know, these companies are making. You know, this is the future of Google and and Apple, and they all want to put this stuff on us. And right now they're not giving us the off switch. But the other thing you're talking about, and thanks for the call, by the way, is the dark mode I think you were talking about.
You're just dark mode went on on your screen, So you can go into your display settings and turn that feature off. So if you want your phone to you know, like my phone goes into dark mode at night and then in the morning and then it comes into the standard mode throughout the day. But you can go into display and you'll see it says dark mode settings and you may have turn on as scheduled. You can just toggle that switch off and you can also see the setting to go dark or light. Thanks for the call,
Debbie and Mirietta really appreciate it. I know this stuff. These companies like to change stuff, and it's kind of their way or the highway a lot of the times, and they're like, you know, we're changing this.
You have to deal with it.
And you know, millions of people are using these devices, and so when something changes substantially, it affects a lot of people all at once.
What do we have about two minutes? Two minutes?
Okay, I'm gonna try to get through this this Google stuff. So Google, you know, we talked about the Gemini stuff. Google had their own hardware announcements this week. No fancy event, just pressure releases. But the the main thing to know, as we just spoke, is that Gemini is going to replace Google Assistant on your smart home speakers.
That is rolling out right now.
Now.
I know that deb was not a fan of Gemini, you know, being forced on her phone, but I think it's actually pretty good on the speakers because it's going to be much more helpful. It's going to be a lot smarter. It can answer complex questions. You can also have natural conversations, so that means you'll be able to control your smart home more easily. The other thing, another change. The Google Home app is getting a big redesign. You might have already seen it. It just hit mine yesterday.
It looks a little bit different, some things are moved around, but I think I can get used to that. The big new feature is called Ask Home. This means you can use AI to ask questions about things that your camera sees. You can say, hey, find the red bicycle that went in front of my house yesterday, and it
will find that footage on your camera. The other nice thing is that if you're paying for Google One, So if you're paying for AI or storage through Google, you're now going to get more premium features included in your Google Home products, like your cameras and your Nest So you might have more features and included now, like more
recording history. And by the way, Gemini is going to go on all Google Home devices and Nest devices shipped in the past decades, So if you have one of these things in home, you're probably going to be hearing a new Gemini voice that's going to be a little perkier, a little more excited to talk to you than Google Assistant was.
They also have a couple.
Of new cameras and doorbells, so those are getting better, and then they're going to start selling Google cameras at Walmart, So twenty three dollars for an indoor camera at Walmart for their on brand, and then fifty dollars for a wired doorbell. Of course, all through Google as well. The name of the game is AI. Again, we just talked about it. If you have Google or Amazon, everything is getting these smart upgrades. Apple, where are you? We're still
waiting on your smart home strategy. What's going on there? They've been kind of a slow go. All right, good conversations, good calls. We'll take more of them after this. Eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. My name is Richdimiro, and you are doing something smart for yourself.
You are listening to rich on tech. Welcome back to rich on tech.
Meta is going to start using your chats with AI to personalize the ads that you see on Facebook and Instagram. Yes you heard me right, So anything you say canon will be used.
To show you ads. Uh so.
This is with Meta AI. So if you are chatting with Meta AI. Uh So, for example, if you ask about hiking, you're asking about trails. Whatever your vacation, you may start seeing ads for hiking trail. Uh you know, hiking boots, you may see ads for anything related to that. Or let's say you say you're going to Hawaii, you might see ads for Hawaii hotels. You're going to start getting notifications about this this week and then changes. So
this will take effect on December sixteenth. So until then, anything you say will be fine, won't It won't be used for this new ad gathering, but after December sixteenth, it will be. Meta says more than a billion people use Meta ai every month, and this is everything else that you know. This goes into everything else that Meta collects about you, your likes, your comments.
Who you follow.
That all shapes the things that you see on Instagram. People are always saying, oh, Instagram's listening, Facebook's listening to my phone. They're not listening to your phone. You're doing all these things on your phone that they are noticing. So when you like an artist because they just posted something to Instagram, they're going to show you ads for that artist concert coming up.
That's how this works.
This is this is very sophisticated and there's a lot of signals that go into the ads that you see, and that's why they're so good. Meta might be the best at ads because we give it the information, we feed it where we're going, what we're doing, and by the way, they have the location of our phone at all times, so when you're on vacation in another state, they can start serving you ads for that too. In addition to everything else you've looked up over the past,
you know, twenty five years of using Instagram. Meta says sensitive topics like political, health, religion, all the fun stuff to talk about around the dinner table, that's all off off, off limits for AI ads. They're not going to use that, thankfully. You cannot turn off. You can't opt out of this. You can adjust what you see, but you can't entirely turn off this anyway. So just remember anything you say to AI on Meta is going to be used for
ads on Facebook and Instagram or Messenger. Speaking of wild stuff, open ai released this new app called Sora, and it is basically a deep fake.
Version of Instagram.
And if you want to see an example, go to my Instagram average on tech I posted a video that I created of myself.
It's a deep fake video. It's a fake video of me.
Now they call it something nice, they call it a cameo, so it sounds nice and sweet and you know, not dangerous, but it's really a deep fake. It's a fake version of you saying something. By the way, So Sora is Sora too is open Ay's new audio and video model. It's much more realistic at making things than before videos. And then they came out with this app that uses Sora on the back end, and it's also called Sora. It's a iPhone only. It's invite only right now, so
you have to know someone to get it. But basically, you take a little video of yourself in the app. It only takes about ten seconds. You record yourself, you look you left, you look left, you look right, and you say a couple numbers to the phone and then it uses that to make videos of you, and you make the videos, or your friends can also make videos of you, including you.
Yeah, this is just wild.
I mean it's really like, I'm actually surprised that open ay launched this so easily without a lot of uproar.
Maybe there is a lot of uproar.
I'm not sure, but it's pretty much they've put guardrails in place so you can't make things that are you know, political videos, this kind of stuff. You know, it's kind of fun videos like you could say, put me riding a roller coaster, a wild roller coaster through flames or whatever and they'll do that, but they won't do other stuff that might be a little bit dicey. Anyway, Sora is pretty popular already in the app store, and I don't know, I'm like blown away that this is a
thing right now. It's just one of those things that you see and you're like okay now. And by the way, the Sora app itself is pretty much a version of Instagram, but filled with all these fake videos of people of your friends, so it's like interesting. Like you see your friend, like you know, as a farmer or something, you know, and they're doing something wild and you're like, Okay, that's crazy. And then you see another crazy video and another crazy video.
And if you see a crazy video that you like, you can remix that with yourself in that video.
It's just anyway, check it out. It's called Sora.
I'm on there at rich On Tech if you want to see me, but you can also see the video that I posted. You can download these videos that it generates and put them on your Instagram or other places. So I put out on my Instagram at rich On Tech. I said, does it give me the prompt of what I said to make you can basically prompt it with anything.
But I said, uh, let's see. Does it give?
Oh?
Yeah, I said, how about a video of me saying you should listen to my radio show in a cool radio studio, futuristic, high above the city scape.
And that's what it came up with. So you can see what that looks like. Uh, you said, two minutes? Oh see here?
Oh one? Now, oh my god. By the time I get to a call, it'll be zero. All right, I'll do an email because a little bit simpler to get to here. Sherry writes in We've had Verizon for mobile and Spectrum for internet, but Spectrum just raised our bill by twenty five dollars a month after telling us our rate was locked. When I called, the rep actually said it's a game. Wait until your bill closes, then threaten to leave. I told her it's not a game, and
we're canceling. So my question is, viewer fifty five, who would you pick for home internet? Maybe bundled with mobile? I work from home sometimes, so reliability is huge. Do any providers not raise prices after the first year? The price hikes are a part of this world. Sadly they've been going on forever, And yes it is somewhat of a game. Some companies will play with you and kind of give you a better deal if you say I'm leaving.
Some won't. Last time I called my company was like, Nope, we don't care.
You can leave.
We don't change prices. Spectrum, I think may play ball a little bit more. If you can get fiber in your area, that's always my first pick. It's the fastest and most reliable. You can also look into wireless home options from T Mobile or they have good prices right now. Just make sure you have a good signal and good speed. Do a speed test on your phone or a friend's
phone before you sign up. All right, coming up, we're going to talk all things Apple and smart home and shortcuts and all things Apple coming up next right here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple eight Rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Joining me
now is Steven Roblez. He is a tech journalist and content creator, and he had a shortcut go viral recently that would basically help you locate your stolen iPhone.
Steven, Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks so much for having me. So first off, give me the website. Where do you post all your stuff?
I mean you can go to beardfm. That's my website and have links to my YouTube channel where most of my content is. And yeah, find on my up there.
And beard fm.
So I must have gotten The reason I got in touch with you is because I must have gotten like twenty people that sent me your real about this shortcut that you know does all these things if your iPhone gets stolen. So explain to me, first off, what do you do typically, Like what do you cover most of the time, Like, what do you focus on?
And then tell me about this shortcut how it came to be.
Yeah, we'll to cover a lot of iPhone tips, Apple software, I'll do hardware reviews as well, but a big part of my content is Shortcuts, which is an app that's on every iPhone, iPad and the mech And what's really powerful is you can automate a ton of stuff everything from being as simple as when my battery falls below twenty percent, turn on low power mode automatically. That's just simple one that a lot of people could probably benefit from.
But you can create more complex shortcuts that are also triggered via automations. And so I actually seen someone post about, oh, here's some shortcut things you can do when someone steals your phone, and I kind of wanted to take it to the end degree. What can you do? And basically one of the triggers can be when someone texts you with a certain phrase, it can fire off a shortcut, and a shortcut can do a number of things like turn on low power mode so your battery will last longer.
It can take a picture from the front facing or rear facing camera and then automatically texted back to the number that texted the phone. It can play a sound like this phone is stolen out loud of the out of the speaker, and you can even disable silent mode and turn the volume all the way up. All of those you can do inside of a shortcut action. And that's the one I created that you can download. I think it's a beard dot FM slash stolen and you can just download that shortcut and run it yourself.
I can't believe that the iPhones, you can text the phone and the shortcut app is like sort of monitoring the text for that whatever you say, that keyword is well, and Shortcuts.
Is built by Apple. Apple it's Apple's application, and so it is access to the phone you're you know, it can be triggered by emails that come into your phone to text messages. And I've actually had a lot of my followers and community ask for those text automated responses for people who have clients and businesses because they want to when they're on vacation to be able to auto respond to texts but not have to do it themselves.
And so I have helped people create where if someone texts you that's not in your context, or if it's anyone besides these two or three people like your family, that it's going to fire off an auto response that says, hey, I'm on vacation. And so that's not something you can do in the text message by default. You can do
it for your email. But a lot of contractors and people who work in like that kind of field, they get a lot of texts, and so little automations like that for texts emails they can be really useful for people.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, I'm sure you're aware of this app, but you know, I used to be an Android guy, like through and through and I what I liked about it is because it lets you tinker with things more than the iPhone. And they had this app called Tasker and that was like it, but it was so nerdy. I mean like like shortcuts is nerdy, but it's like you can, you know, the average person can kind of see and create a
couple of simple things on their own. Tasker was like really, you know, it's like you have to really take a deep dive into like all these automation things, but you could do make your phone do whatever you want. And so I was very surprised when Apple brought shortcuts to the iPhone because it's really like it's simple but very powerful.
One it's powerful because one I've I have Android phones and I use Tasker because I have tried to use it. It's actually not as powerful as shortcuts, because every one of my YouTube videos where I talk about shortcuts, someone will inadvertently comment, oh, Tasker for Android does all this. It actually does not have as many actions and capabilities as shortcuts. With shortcuts, you can use APIs from third
party websites and developers. So I have a shortcut that uses the movie database API, where I can search for a movie find out where to stream it, get the link exactly to stream it, and then add that information to my Apple Notes. And that's something I can do all within shortcuts, and you can build upon that with external sources. Make dot com is another great resource that can integrate with shortcuts using some of those web hooks.
But Apple Intelligence actually just came out with io was twenty six built into shortcuts, and not a lot of people know about this because shortcuts still struggling to get mainstream, but those Apple Intelligence actions are actually really powerful. And another reel that went viral was actually to save recipes that you see in incogram reels two notes, and I actually created a shortcut that uses Apple Intelligence to pull
the caption. So if the creator put the ingredients and the steps in the caption, it will get the raw HTML, it will pull those ingredients out, format it nicely, format the steps, and then create an Apple note with that recipe and a link back to the reel. And that'll also one viral. You can get that one at beard dot fm slash recipe. Oh my, I mean you just sold me on that one. That's that's an incredible thing. I was just literally.
Saving a recipe from Instagram yesterday and I was like copying and pasting and like all this time. I put into chat ebt to like, you know, hey, clean this up, like all this stuff, but this is great. I mean, so you've got okay, So she had the stolen one go viral, you had the the AI recipe to notes go viral. What really resonates with your followers?
You know, it's all about everyone has very specific needs, and so a lot of my content is just tweaking shortcuts to be specific to certain people. And so like I've had airline pilots reach out to me and say, can you create a shortcut that when I run it, I will run it at the hotel that I arrive at. I can put my room number in and it finds restaurants near me, and then when I run it again, it'll get me walking directions back to the hotel and
remind me of my room number. And so just that simple thing, which a lot of people could use it if you travel a lot to go on vacation. But when people realize that you can tailor shortcuts to really meet your specific need and ease your workflows, that's when it really starts becoming powerful and resonates with people, and I could not create the amount of content I do
without shortcuts. I have shortcuts that pulls news from RSS feeds from popular websites, runs those articles through chat GPT, summarizes them and turns them into a podcast, a script for a daily news show, and I can do it all with one click and it happens in the background. And even as simple as like well, I create a daily journal and I just want to be able to create a note with today's date, a couple headings, and I don't want to have to type or copy and
paste that every day. Well, a shortcut can do that. And I created a shortcut that when you tap it, it creates an Apple note, says today's date up at the top, a couple headings, and prompts some questions and then people can get off writing. And so just a little simple like that just takes one shortcut that you could use every day, and it starts you on the rabbit's trail of finding some great ones.
Again, we're talking with Steven Roblez at Beard dot Fm. He does YouTube videos reels and he primarily talks about the Apple ecosystem and especially shortcuts on your phone making your phone do all these cool things. The app, if you want to find it on your phone, it's pre installed on the iPhone. It's called Shortcuts, and you can go in there and just see some of the things that you're able to do that are kind of pre loaded. But then you can also create your own or you
can import these from other places. So if you go to Steven's website and you find something you like, like you just mentioned this stolen phone one the recipes shortcut, you can just bring those into your system kind of like someone else did the programming for you. So that's another fun thing about this community is that people come up with these and they share the shortcuts that work.
Is there any danger in downloading a shortcut that you find online that could do something nefarious to your phone?
You know, you do need to be careful. It is possible not for shortcuts to like install viruses or get your information. But you know, you can create a shortcut that automatically emails some information or like pulls your device infoe and then text to someone. But what's great is it's always going to warn you before you download the shortcut. You can always go in and see the actions and if you see one that looks too complicated, then just
don't install it. You know, you don't have to put it on your phone before previewing.
Just tap.
When you tap a shortcut link, you just have a little three dots and you can kind of see how it's built. Get them from a trusted source. Of course, there's actually an amazing Reddit community are slash shortcuts that build shortcut It's there, and that's why I also created
a private community where we just talk about shortcuts. I share some that I don't put in videos, and I just put one there and I'll just I can't actually share share this one on YouTube because it's against their community guidelines, but I'll share it on your show with no guidelines. Well, the reason why video Yes, okay, yes, it's to download YouTube video, but more so to be
able to do it through shortcuts in your phone. And what I've done is I created this Rube Goldberg machine where I use an app on my iPhone called Transloader. So if I'm on YouTube on my phone, I tap Transloader, it actually sends that link to a Mac at my house. That Mac can open that link in an app called downy, which can download any Internet video. Could be YouTube and Instagram,
rail TikTok or video on a website. Download that video and now with mac os Tahoe, the latest software, it can actually take a video, transcribe it, summarize it with Apple Intelligence, create an Apple note with that information, and then I can move that video file to my Plex server or so in just a few seconds after I tap that button on my phone, I can watch that video from my Plex server either from my phone. My kids, you know, they can watch videos. That's how we do
a lot of video stuff. They just use the Plex app on their iPads. And so that one I can't put on YouTube because you can't put how to download videos there. But you can go to create beard dot fm. That's my shortcuts community and that's actually what I shared for my paying supporters directly, and so that's you can find that there.
That's wild. I love the stuff that.
Now can your kids and other people in your house figure out all these automations that you do, because that's the important part.
That's when you know you have a winner.
They do, and we've helped them create little automations like you can have an automation that whenever you open an app, something happens. And so for my middle son who struggled to have all his tasks done, but there's apps that he always opened, whether it's a game or whatever, admit a little shortcut that says, when this app opens, pop up this pdf which is his schedule for the school day. So when every open of that app, it pops up.
And so you can do things like that a simple Another simple one is you could set up yourself if you ever lock the orientation on your iPhone, you know how to make sure so it stops rotating when you turn it, which is great unless you want to look at the photos and the photos app and then that rotation is locked. Well, with shortcuts, you can go to the automations tab, tap new automation and when an app is opened, and you can choose photos and say, when
photos is opened, unlock my orientation. So when you open the photos app, now you can rotate it the photo rotates, and then you can create another automation that says when I close the photos app, meaning when you swipe to go home, it locks the orientation back up. Now. I just share that on my Instagram reels and just a simple little orientation like that is a little quality of life improvement every day. You multiply that by creating dozens of shortcusts for yourself. They're really powerful.
All right, this is fun Beard dot FM, Steven Roblez, thanks so much for joining me. I have realized from this conversation that most of us are using about one percent of the capacity of our iPhones.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
Eight eight eight rich one on one eighty eight seven four two four one zero one. Rich on tech dot TV. I'll put a link to Steven's website back after this. Welcome back to Rich on tech Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. Eighty eight rich one O one eighty eight seven four to two four one zero one. Let's go to Cheryl in Phoenix, Arizona. Cheryl, you're on with Rich. Welcome to the show. Hi Rich, thanks for taking my call absolutely.
What's up?
I have a question about the subscription service delete me dot com. Okay, I've been told that if they search the web, the Dark Web, the Purple Web, the white webs and find your information on data brokers and they remove that and you get a month they report it's especially nine dollars a month. Do you have any insight on this, So.
You're okay, well, number one, I mean the dark web. No one can remove stuff from the dark Web. So if you're looking for that, that's not worth it. Now what these what these data of removal services typically do is they remove your personal data from websites that display it and also data brokers that sell it. So if you're looking to do that, these can do a lot of that stuff. And there's there's you know, there's a lot of them out there. Not just delete me. There's
a bunch of there's a bunch of others. I've other Well okay, well, let me give you a a great tip that this will work for pretty much anything that you're you're looking for in the future. So if you go to Google, do you use Google or use something else.
I use Safari on the phone, but I can sign on to Google.
So if you just type in something and you say delete me versus, okay, this is I love. This is one of my favorite searches in the world. You type in delete me versus and you will see Google automatically gives you every single competitor to that company. So you've got Incogniti, one rep or a optery privacy, be cloaked, LifeLock, and you now have a lot of options to choose from. So where do you go? So Consumer Reports did a study. They found that some of these are worth it, some
of them are not. And the two that they liked the best is called easy opt Outs and optery. Now that was a year ago, but you know, I'll put this in the show notes as well. There is a place that you can start for free, and it's called Google Results About You. So you can go there and Google will actually find a lot of the personal information
that's in the search results. So if you search your name, you know, Ryl and Phoenix and it comes up with your home address, you can actually remove some of those results from Google. It doesn't remove the website, it just removes the Google results. So you know, okay, it's gonna be. So it's there's a there's a varied prong approach. Now there's a couple of things that I've done in the past. I have done this manually. So there's a website called joindelete me dot com and they have a bunch of
opt out guides that are DIY. So you can go to all these websites and you can find the little tiny thing at the bottom of the website and say, you know, hey, you know, can you take me off your page? I don't want my information there, And so you can do that manually. It just takes a lot longer. And my experience with these data brokers personally, I use Incognate.
It's a sponsor of my newsletter, and I I have found great a great response with that, Like it works really well, and so it's not going to get rid of everything, and I think you have to be realistic about what it can remove. But they do go through and on their own, they'll just remove hundreds of sites that they know. They can just go and send an email on your behalf and they've remove it. Some you
are a lot tougher to remove. But this is you know, this is a very popular thing on the Internet because there's so many companies at this point that are trying to profit off of our personal information.
And it's kind of scary too.
Like the other day, a website popped up on my dashboard and had all of my information about my house and pictures and all this stuff, and you know, I didn't want that there, and so I submitted the link and got it removed, and so it can be done. It's just not and it's not gonna be overnight. By the way, it's a game. I always say this, it's a game of whack a mole. So one, you know, you may get rid of one of these websites. Two more pop up.
Okay, well it sounds like it as the thing to start working on, thank you.
Yeah, I would check it out.
Do your research, see which see which one of these services appeals to you the most, which one has the best deal for you, which one seems to do the.
Most for what you want.
So they all kind of approach it a little bit differently, but you know, they all at the end of the day, they try to do the same thing, which is really just remove as much as your information from the Internet as possible. Just keep in mind none of them can remove information from the dark web. The dark web is not a business. It is not professional. It is people moving large amounts of your information amongst each other and selling that information in a way that is not regulated
or you know, it's not official. And so those websites, they're not posted anywhere. You can't visit a dark web website on your own and just say hey, can you get rid of my information? So when we have these data breaches, these AT and T data breaches, these big data breaches that have your social and your passwords and your user names, that's the stuff that really, once it's
out there, can never come back down. And so that's why I always recommend you have to use a unique password, you have to use a two factor authentication because you know, let's just say you're secure on your end, but AT and T gets breached and you know they have your social, they've got your data birth, they've got your password.
All that stuff is going to go out in the web.
And now that they've got that password, let's say you're using it at five different websites.
The hackers know that, and they're.
Going to these other websites trying that same exact username and password. And now, by the way, they've got your data birth and your social. So you have to be very careful. There's only so much you can do to protect your information. And when it comes to your social specifically, do not give it out unless you absolutely must.
Every time someone asks you for that, just say do you need this? Do you do? I have to give that.
Most of the time you do not unless it's something like a mortgage or something. Eighty to eight Rich one on one back after this, Welcome back to rich on tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. Eighty to eight Rich one oh one. Two quick price hikes to tell you about before we get back to the calls. Uh, let's start with Microsoft. I know Bobo was interested in this one. Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate going up to thirty dollars a month. Okay, he's getting his mic ready,
he's ready, he's like ready to pounce. What do you want to say about this? Are you excited to pay fifty percent more?
No?
Going up from twenty dollars a month to thirty a month. Now, what they're saying is that you're getting more value. Four hundred titles available, seventy five day one releases up fifty percent. She'll get more games you'd be soft plus classics included.
You're gonna play those, maybe Fortnite crew Membership. That's where they get you.
Battle bucks battle Pass one thousand V bucks monthly.
How much is a thousand V bucks?
So when you look at it like that, So right now, if you're playing Xbox Ultimate, I pay nineteen ninety nine a month.
Yeah, so if you add.
In Fortnite Crue, you're paying eleven ninety nine.
A month for that.
Okay, so if you add them together, you're paying about thirty one to thirty two bucks a month.
Actually drops it two.
Bucks only if you're playing that game. Only if you're playing four and you have both subscriptions. Yeah, not everyone's gonna have both exactly, So but if you do, I mean, it's it's like, okay, fine, I just I'm almost saving a dollar a month or two almost, But you know, you're still now you're locked into paying this every month for yeah, you know, and.
Before you used to be able to go to a game stop or a Target or a Best Buy and buy an Xbox Live subscription card.
You can't do it, dude.
No, they're all getting rid of those because they're thirty bucks a month.
It's a pretty penny just to play video.
Games, not including you buying games, right and all the stuff you buy in the games.
But you know, here's the deal. All these prices are going up. Everything just keeps going up. People are just gonna have to choose, like do I want this to want to keep it? Let's see what else PC game Pass, if you're on that, that's twelve bucks to seven almost seventeen dollars a month. So and apparently I guess is Xbox Series X console prices raising this week too.
They raised fifty bucks, just like PlayStation did.
Gosh, all right, yeah, Peloton also raising prices. I got this email, so you're all access. So if you have a Peloton machine, you were paying forty four dollars a month for your monthly, that's going up to fifty a month. If you're using just the app like I was or I am, that's going up from twenty four to twenty nine. And if you're on the cheapest app plan, which was thirteen dollars, didn't give you access to everything, that's going
up to sixteen. All the bike prices are going up, but they're adding AI to this stuff, and you know, look, it's just these streaming services. I say, the free ride is over.
It's just it's.
They're no longer doing this for their you know, for your benefit. It is now for their benefit. They started all these during the pandemic. They needed to build as many subscribers as possible, and now it is like nope, we've got to have a business here. People are you know, people are buying less physical games, so what do you have to do? They're they're renting them now, so you got to make the rental price higher. It's just that's what's happening. And I've just continued to report on all
of these price hikes. It's getting wild. I mean when you compare it to what we used to pay, like one movie ticket used to be, you know, it's probably still is thirty bucks twenty five dollars depending on where you live. So it's like, okay, well I get all the gaming I want for thirty dollars a month, or Peloton you know, you can't get a gym membership for I guess you can for fifty dollars a month. I mean it's just look, if you got these things, you're
paying more. Let's see, let's go too. Oh my gosh, the phone lines are Let's go to Bob and Denver. Are we on more stations? Like every calls from a different state right now? Bob, you're on with Rich.
Hey Rich, it's good to talk to you.
Yeah, welcome to the show.
I have a Mac computer and an iPhone and both have music on them. There's at one time there was the same things on both the computer and the phone, and over time and software updates and stuff, I've lost a lot of the music songs from the computer. And in talking to Apple Tech, they say you can transfer from the Apple to the Mac, I mean to the iPhone, but iPhone's the one that's complete. Yeah, So if I did that, I'd lose stuff there.
I know, Oh, I need.
To transfer from the iPhone back to the Mac or something.
Yeah, And Apple does not give you a way to do that. There's there's always been a one way transfer. So when they say sync, it's always been we want to go from your computer to your phone. And these people have figured out with their iPod they've got all this music on there from forever and they go, oh, let me just transfer it back to my computer.
You can't.
There's no way that Apple gives you officially to do this, no easy way. The good news is, Bob, there are third party programs. The bad news is you're probably gonna have to spend a little bit to buy them. So a couple programs I'll give you the names that I know. Work number one I Amazing. They make a program that basically is kind of like the Swiss army knife that Apple does not give you.
So it allows you to do all these.
Things on your phone, back up your text messages, print them out, back up. I mean basically anything that you've wanted to do on your phone where you're like, oh, I should be able to do that, and Apple's just like, Nope, you can't do that. This lets you do it, so you know, again, download your I messages, transfer photos and videos between Mac and PC, transfer your music back and forth between those things, local backups, anything you want to do.
I Amazing will do it. Let's say I'm trying to find a price.
They don't. Let's see do they put the.
Price subscription five devices for one year's fifty bucks, So it looks like they're doing the whole subscription thing there. Okay, so that's number one. Then you've got one. I've not tested this one. I've tested the I Amazing. I've not tested this one, but it's recommended. It is called touch copy and this is similar. But I have not tested this one, but it says it does the same thing. So that's another one that is. Let's see how much
this one is. Lifetime license seventy bucks six months thirty dollars twelve months forty dollars, So you can get that one. And then the other one, which I have tested, is called alt tunes. This is for Windows, all right. Do they have it for Mac too? Oh, they do have it for Mac. Okay, it started on Windows. I guess it came to Mac. But alt tunes lets you back up your iPhone transfer any file from your iPhone to a Windows PC. Oh it is Windows. Okay, I'm very
confused here. I thought this was Windows. But anyway, so that's another one you can do as well. So you mentioned you have a Mac, so I'd probably recommend the ie amazing. But if you're listening and you have Windows and you've been trying to, you know, pull your hair out of your head, trying to figure out how to get files from your phone to your computer, all tunes can help you do that. And it can help you
do the other stuff too. You can get your messages, your call history, your photos, your music backups, all that good stuff. And it comes from a company called soft Areno, which they just make great apps.
In general.
I rely on a lot of them on a daily basis, so check them out. Company out of Ukraine actually so we've talked to them about what's going on over there in the past, and we're thinking of them as well. Anyway, Bob, that's the way to do it. You got to get that third party software. Unfortunately, that's really the best way to handle that task. Let's go to Mark in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Mark, you're on with Rich.
Yeah, Hi, Rich, Thank you for taking my call.
Absolutely.
I just recently retired and I was looking to get a new laptop of some sort to Windows eleven, and I didn't know whether or not I needed like Microsoft Office all those kind of add ons, or go with something like a Chromebook.
What are you going to be doing on the computer?
Just basic every day surfing, you know, taking care of bills, those type of things. I'm not going to be doing anything in spreadsheets or word documents or anything. I know, I can do that through Chrome, you know, I can use their little suite they have. But I just just trying to figure out which would be the better way to go as far as is it necessary to to buy something with a licensed product suite like Office, and I.
Don't think so.
I've I've worked for twenty five years now without paying for Office because I just don't need it, and I, you know, I actually think Google Docs is a superior product.
Oh my gosh, those are some fighting words right there.
But it's just it's more flexible, it's easy, it's always up to date. It has never failed me, and I've been like I said, I've been using it since day one. There is a version of Office on the web. They have their their answer to Google Docs, and if you go on, let's see, I got it. They hide the link because they don't want people to know about this. But yes, you can access a free version of word Excel and power Point on the web for free. You don't have to download anything. You can use it just
like you can Google Docs and the website. I don't have like a simple website to find it on, but if you Google, it's so funny, like the website is. I can't even read it on the air because it's just so long. But yes, use Microsoft three sixty five apps for free on the web. Get free access to word Excel and PowerPoint using Microsoft three sixty five for the Web formerly Office sign in and that's it.
Now.
There are some things you can't do on the free version versus the paid but you can do pretty much anything you need the basics. So how much you want to spend on this computer?
Three?
Okay?
In that range a couple options. I would say a chromebook will probably serve you well. The problem is chromebooks are traditionally very underpowered, so at the very least I would look at a chromebook. Plus those have the better specs compared to the standard chromebooks. So if you're going to get a chromebook, go that route, which I think is fine for what you're doing. I just think look
for a high quality screen. That to me is the key, because typically chromebook screens are just not very good compared to the traditional computers.
Otherwise.
The other computer to look into, which are expert recommended the other day, is the Lenovo Idea Pad Slim. This has got the new Snapdragon X processor, which means the battery is going to last a really long time. It's got a nice fifteen inch screen. This thing is only five hundred bucks. That is an incredible deal, and it's got great specs. It's got that snap Dragon processor which is kind of a mobile processor, which means its going to be very power efficient. Sixteen gigs a RAM one
terabyte hard drive, it runs Windows eleven. It's got an SD card reader. I mean, I don't see a album with this computer at all. Lenovo Idea Pad Slim. I'm looking at the micro center website. Fifteen inch laptops typically seven hundred and thirty dollars. It's on sale for five hundred that I think is going to be a great option for you there as well. So good question Mark, Thanks so much for the call today. Enjoy retirement. Thanks for getting in touch today.
Eighty to eight. Rich.
I shouldn't even give out the number. We don't even know if we can get to more calls. Eighty to eight Rich one O one rich on tech dot TV.
We'll be back after this.
Welcome back to rich on tech rich on tech dot TV. During the breaks, you know, I am busy, I am taking show notes, So they're all on the website rich on tech dot TV. Look under where it says radio show and this is episode one, and so if you click that, you will get the links to everything I mentioned, including all those software apps that we just mentioned, any of the the articles I mentioned, and I'm putting up
the computers that I mentioned as well. Let's go to let's see here, line four, Kelly in Quartz Hill, California.
You're on with Rich.
Hi.
Rich, I've been watching you on KTLA for years. I'm so glad you're on KFI now.
Oh, thank you. General here too.
I generally prefer using Safari on my iMac and it doesn't work quite often on banking and other websites, and so I have to go to Google and open up Chrome, and for some reason, it takes forever to switch, because you know, I close down Safari and then I open up Chrome and it just takes forever.
Is there an easier way to go back and forth.
Between the two, Well, it sounds like your computer might be low on something like RAM or you know, the memory on the computer, and that's what's causing it to take a while, because when you open and close apps, that's pretty much the most effort your computer is putting out, and so that's probably what's.
Going on here.
So basically, when how many apps do you have opened when you're doing this? Do you just have the browser? And what kind of computer are we talking here?
I have an IMAX, but it's a twenty.
Eighteen, okay, so it's older. Yeah, it is older.
So yeah, it's probably feeling the it's probably feeling the way of these You know, the computer doesn't slow down, it's the apps just keep getting more and more complex. So when you open up these apps, they're just demanding a lot of resources from this computer. And that's I think, what's happening here.
Okay, okay, that makes sense. I was just thinking maybe I could have them both on a tag or something.
Well, you can leave them both open. You can leave Chrome and Safari open at the same time. Does your computer allow that?
I don't know. I guess I've never tried it.
I mean, so you're saying that would probably drain my computer.
Well, when I'm both open.
I actually think it's easier to leave them open once. It really depends on how your computer's running. Are you when you're running these programs? Are they Is everything kind of fine for what you're trying to do?
Yeah, it works pretty good.
Okay, Well, here's what I would do, and in general, since you've had your computer so long, in general, what I would do is kind of a little bit of a spring cleaning on this computer. So I would go through and you know, make sure you're not maxed out on your hard drive. So go through and just kind of delete some of the files you no longer need. I would go through and get rid of some of the apps that you no longer use or need, because you know that's those could be hogging some resources.
I would also go to.
Your your section of your settings where there's a section called open at login and that's something that like a lot of apps will try to creep in there because it's their benefit to always be open and running on your system, so they can be doing things like looking in the background for software updates and stuff like that. But you can go through and actually delete some of the apps that are trying to open up at startup.
That means every time you turn on your computer, these apps are using a little bit of resources in the background to do things. And I just found one that I can delete because I don't need that opening every single time I turn on my computer.
So that okay, that's a great idea. I've seen that before.
Yeah, So go to open at login. It's called Login Items and Extensions. And then when you're on your computer. You know, with these two apps, I would try leaving them running at the same time. You can easily do that. It's not going to hurt what's going on in one or the other. They don't talk to each other that way. But you also might want to close out other apps
that you're not using. So I'm always using different apps on my computer, but when I'm not using them for a while, I will close them out from time to time just to kind of free up some resources.
Okay, I do try and do that, close them out red then keep them all open.
But that's a good idea.
Yeah, but I would say, see what your computer can.
Hell, this is definitely an older machine, so you know, like anyone that's gotten a little older in their years. You know, it's a little more sophisticated and refined, but it also needs a little, very true, a little coddling every once in a while, you know what I mean.
Yes, yes, actually has lasted this long. I'm surprised. It's been a great computer.
But the only reason I haven't switched it is because I have the old twenty seven inch the whole computer.
Yeah, the all in one.
Yeah, I mean look, yeah, again, if it's working for you, you don't need to change it. And they do make I don't know if they make a twenty seven I know they make a twenty four.
I don't if they do the twenty seven anymore.
But you know, if a computer's working for you, as long as your software is up to date, as long as your security, you know you're secure in that aspect. I have no problem with keeping up a computer for as long as you possibly can. And that's a testament to Apple and how they build these things that they last a very long time.
So yes, Apple is the best for sure. I mean I've found just great results and it doesn't crash.
I don't have problems like that.
Yeah, and no virus issues usually ninety nine point nine percent of the time. All right, Kelly, they're playing us off. Thanks so much for the call today. I really appreciate it. Oh oh that was cold. Oh my gosh, that was bobo.
What back after this?
Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology. We had a great call from a Mark in Saint Petersburg. He was asking about if he should buy Word and I mentioned that you can access Excel, Word and PowerPoint for free on the web and I just signed in with my Microsoft account. I'm not paid on anything on there. It's not a corporate account, just my personal account, and sure enough, here I am typing in Microsoft Word on the web, and
I'm trying to figure out what's not included here. I don't see anything that I can't do. There must be some sort of limitation. But I just downloaded my document as a maybe let's see, can you download it? Okay, maybe that's the catch. So I wonder if you can't download it. Okay, you could download his pdf, oh, export to Kindle, but maybe you can't download it as a word document. Okay, maybe that's the catch. But I mean, okay, there you go. So pdf is the way you have
to download it, looks like. But I put the link on the website rich on tech dot tv, So if you want to access those, test them out. Google docs is gonna be just fine too. But this is another way. If you're used to word and you want to check it out, it's all there. Let's bring on Mark Vina. He is CEO and principal analyst at Smart Tech Research.
Mark, Welcome to the show.
Hey, how you doing.
I'm doing well. We often chat at these tech events. We're often sitting next to each other and near each other. How are things going in your world? As an analyst. Explain what an analyst does, by the way, because I feel like your job is kind of like mine as a journalist, but maybe more fun.
I'm not sure.
Oh well, I think they both have the pluses and minuses.
I think the big plus is that you can't, you know what the work that I do maybe a little bit different from you.
You have an.
Obligation to cover, you know, work with most clients are you don't really call them clients. You're covering businesses that are announcing new products, whereas I, you know, cover them from an from a market analysis standpoint. Do they have really good products? Do they are they write for the marketplace? Is there a market for them? I mean, you broadly can apply that principle to everything. But the nice thing is sometimes I get your customers that come to me, Hey, Mark,
I've got the greatest product in the world. Please tell me that it's going to take over the world, and you politely tell them, well, it's really not the next iPhone. So but if you know, I've got a podcast, as you know, I write quite a bit. If you don't like writing, you don't want to be a marketing a market analyst.
So that's what I kind of tell people.
Yeah, I imagine you're just writing a lot of reports about stuff, like, you know, company comes to you and says, hey, here's our new product, give me a whole rep on the you know, the marketplace for this product. And but now you can just use AI to write all that.
Right.
Well, I mean, I'm not going to say that that using Chatchipt or Gemini is not helpful, but it gets you you might be sixty percent down the field.
And then you have to customize the content.
You're going to make sure the content is accurate, because despite what you may think, a lot of the AI content that's generated is not always accurate.
So you've got to make sure that it's it's consistent with whatever was announced.
And you know, most of the time, you know, uh, depending on how you use AI, it's not going to give you a point of view.
The point of view is in your head.
So again, I think it's helpful, But at the end of the day, it's all about you.
Who's winning right now? In AI? To you?
I you know, I have.
The open eye and I think Google now with Gemini Gemini has been huge improvements.
They've done some incredible anime.
I mean, people kind of associate with AI with you know, chatchipt and you know, conjure up an article for me about this topic. Some of the things that they've added to the list iterations of chatch ept and Gemini AI
is pretty remarkable. I mean, you can go into Gemini and say, make a nineteen eighty six baseball card for me, and here's a picture of my brother for the New York Mets, and it will create a unbelievable not just front but back baseball card with fake statistics, with fun facts that will blow you away.
Now that's kind of a goofy thing to do, but.
People do it.
Why not.
You've got a birthday party coming up, You've got an anniversary you want to do. I mean, this is the thing, Like I feel like people need ideas for how to use this stuff because it's all there, like the stuff that Gemini can do and open AI with chat GBT. Most people are only scratching the surf when you're saying what's the best place to go on vacation this summer? That is like a no brainer question for these ais.
But what you can really do is analyze things, and especially with Google's AI mode, that is incredible in fact, now prompts you right on there, says please ask complex questions because that's when you're going to get the best answer.
So where should I go on vacation.
In July with two kids eleven and thirteen who don't like to do this, that and the other thing, and we also like nice restaurants and you know, outdoor activities. Then you get an answer that AI can bring you.
No, I think you're right, because for the last twenty five years we've been trained to use Google and kind of just a declarative one question. It's not even a question, it's really you know, searching on whatever phrase you put in there. But the idea of complexity and a prompt where you can ask for multiple things at the same time, it's pretty amazing. I mean, I'll be very honest with you,
I don't Google anything anymore. When I have a question about a product, you know, how do I do this feature? I'll ask that a fairly complex question, and I will get a very detailed answer that will say the twenty five steps if I were doing things the old fashioned way. So it's really amazing, and I'll go one step. What we haven't seen, at least with the mainstream and it's gonna happen very soon. Is that the ability to use video and create video using AI but doing some really
interesting things. I mean, I'm seeing some demos under the coverage with tools like, right, let's say I do a video.
Of one of your kids at a birthday party, and in.
The back of it, it's a thirty second clip, and maybe let's say the garbage fan is in the backyard and he's walking around the back and it's making the clip look bad. Now, in the old days, you could go into a video, you know, you'd have to be a pretty good video video editing person to remove that artifict.
That those tools did exist. But now you'll be able to use a prompt with some of.
These tools, say please use the moving object in the back, and it will, you know, emulate what a studio could do twenty five years ago. So I think the video implications they are going to be unbelievable.
We're just just starting that. I mean, because just we saw at the Pixel event in New York City when they released Ask to Edit, you know, like basically instead of you doing edits to your photos on the Pixel phones. And now they've expanded this to Google Photos on Android, I believe only. But you can just ask for the edits you want. So, like you just said, remove the person in the background, make this a better background, or brighten up my picture, or just reframe my picture so
it looks better. It'll do all those things without you having to actually move the sliders around. That is probably coming for video, you know, we have. We've just scratched the surface with video.
No, and the quality is so unbelievable.
I did the thing the other day with my after the Yankees won the other night, I took a picture with my dog and simply say, hey, put this picture that as if I'm at Yankee Stadium celebrating. Now, I clearly wasn't at the game. I wasn't dressed for it. You know, most people didn't pick it up. Once I put that on Facebook. I must have gotten twenty five people. They allowed you to have a dog in the stadium.
Why, Oh, it's crazy, crazy stuff.
So this week, and we'll get to we're going to talk about some of the gadgets that Mark likes right now. But the Gemini Google posted on their Instagram an idea of how to use this nano banana thing. They basically said, you can make a picture of you with your parent that never existed. So they gave the exact kind of phrasing you should use, where you upload a selfie of yourself, a selfie of your picture of your parent, and then you tell it to create this picture of you two
together like a polaroid. I mean, it's just the stuff that's happening here. And nano Banana is what Google's doing with their image generation. It's just it's a fancy name for like very high end AI. It's really good, like scary good. Like you were just mentioning, all right, So you came to the table with a couple gadgets. You like, every time we go to these events, we always compare
the gadgets that we're carrying. But you have a couple that you like for podcasting if you want to start your own podcast.
But it's not like you you know, now you're you're a professional journal assignment. You know, I kind of got into this about five or six years ago. And you know, I've got a video, I've got a YouTube podcast. It's got a lot of it's a lot of views, a lot of subscribers. But you know, to me, when people approach me and I get that all the time. Hey, Mark, how do I become a How do I become a podcaster?
And I'm really sensitive as I know you are, about avoiding that kind of wing wings world effect the men years ago, Hey, a couple of kids down in their basement. That was that hope, that hope that hold stick on sating it live and it was amateur hour. But the tools that exist today are broadcast quality tools.
You know that you don't have.
You don't adoperate in the studio, you don't have five or six highly pain trading people. And I find like one thing that I love that I'm a big, big time on because it's the first thing that will tell people that you're an amateur versus a professional is having really good audio. So I'm a big, big believer in using these. And there's been a whole plaus throw them out there. But the latest DGI Mike three is fantastic. It will support the.
Four wireless mics. They're probably as big as maybe a quarter. They have magnets so they can go on discreetly on your clothes. They have a great carrying case and you pop them in.
But the fascinating thing is is that up until recently you really only could have two wireless mics with a bluetooth device like an iPhone. And when you're doing, like Rich, what you and I do, sometimes that's a limitation.
But four is a big deal.
Yeah, it's for you, you know, the conduct conversation with four people at the same time.
Yeah, without any wires. I mean, that's that's unbelievable. I'm getting the one minute from my producer here. So we've got two more picks. I'll link these up on the website. By the way, Rich on tech dot tv. And by the way, what's the name of your podcast so folks can find it.
It's a smart tech check podcast.
Okay, so search that on YouTube and find it. You also have a green screen that you use.
I'm a big believer in that. Now I'm not using a green.
Screen right now because I'm using which is tool to participate. But normally speaking, you know, do yourself a favor is go out these and these.
There's a lot of goods green screens out there.
This one's really good because you know, you don't have to put it against the wall. It's like a projector that you pull up. You can Stubb it in the closet, which is what I do after I use it, and it will make all the difference in the world in terms of what that artifacting that goes around your head, you know when you're doing it then. So I'm a big believer that if you're getting into the podcast world, get a green screen.
It will be the best one hundred bucks or so you ever spend.
And you've got this one E Mark green screen.
It's got like a little a little place to like a little projector holder. And then finally this super cage.
Now that one is really really cool, and you know this, I can see Witch getting this. This is a really interesting item in that and it's a bit more on the professional side. It essentially turns your iPhone or any kind of phone into almost like a port replicator. So you plug this in, it holds it professionally and it gives you three or four other ports. So when when you're when you really get good at this and you start doing all kinds of advanced stuff, you can you
can put an external power plug in one thing. I'm doing more increasingly that when I'm doing podcasts locally, I want to have some type of screen. It's showing the person who's in front of the camera what they're looking at. Again, that's very common in professional setups. This would allow you to do that, and it's just a terrific Godamosi has an SD slot.
If you want to put memory. Oh wow, the store big file, very very handy.
All right, A couple of good recommendations, Mark Vina, thanks so much. Smart Techresearch dot Net. Check it out, subscribe to the podcast. Always good to see you. See you at the next event.
Rich, go yankees our peculatory.
All right, coming up, we are going to open up the feedback. These are the emails you sent all week. We'll get to that coming up next.
Oh now I'm on right.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here I said, we got Rick rolled at the end of the show. Isn't this the Rickroll song?
Yeah, we got rickrolled. Thanks for rickrolling me.
Hey, can I do something?
What can I give?
A happy birthday shout out to my wife absolutely, Brittany, Happy birthday. I love you so much. Enjoy your day.
And have fun today. And I know sorry I'm at work, but I know Bill's got to be paid. It's okay.
Bobo's got a nice dinner. We're talking five star dinner plan for tonight, five star dinners.
Out on Rich. Thank you, Ron, I appreciate it.
Rich is gonna send us to a five star restaurant for your birthday.
Let's let's open up the feedback. Happy birthday, Brittany. Anita writes in from California. I bought a Mac desktop last week and at first struggled to get used to everything.
I called Microsoft for help. That was frustrating.
Little by little, I'm learning how to use the Mac and using the mail app has made things so much easier. I can't say enough how much you taking the time to help me has me. By the way, I heard you were in an accident, So glad you're all right. We need more people who are kind enough to help out A quote old lady, Oh thank you.
Anita.
Glenn says, I had to switch back from Alexa Plus to what I called dumb Alexa. I got two Echo show fives that I mainly use as clocks. I love the full screen clock that I would customize both Alexa plus. Amazon completely changed the home screen. There's no settings to restore the old view. Their online help bot just kept sending me to menus that did not exist. I bought these devices. I should get to decide how they look and work. Not Amazon funny enough. After the update, they
asked me for feedback on Alexa Plus. They should have done that before rolling out the changes. Thanks for your show. I listen all the time, Robbie. I really enjoy your show and learn something new. Every time I was trying to enroll in Windows ten Extended Service updates, couldn't find the option in settings. You told me to make sure all the updates were installed. After switching back to my admin account, changing the password, and running all the original updates,
the option finally appeared. A couple clicks later. I was in Thanks for the quick respet rich. I don't know how you find the time to answer individual emails, Robbie, don't tell people I do that. Pat writes in saw your segment on KTLA about updating Windows ten security. I followed your instructions, which were the simple and easy to understand. Now I have Windows ten Protection for another year. Your advice was very helpful. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Pat,
Mike love the show. I recently replaced the battery on my Dell XPS fifteen. I bought it directly from Dell. After installing it, the laptop wouldn't power on until I plugged in the charger. Some tutorials online suggested it should start up right away, but I learned that some computer batteries need just a little juice from the charger before they start working. Just a friendly word of encouragement for anyone else swapping a laptop battery.
Keep up the good work.
Chris writes in my five year old Dell was not eligible for the Windows eleven upgrade. I asked around and people mentioned to work around. Instead, I took it to a local shop for two hundred and twenty bucks. They put in a new hard drive, bypassed the annoying login screen, and installed Windows A. Now my machine runs faster than ever, and I didn't have to copy over all my data to a new computer. Chris Oh He says he's also
been watching since the Tech TV days. Oh wow, that was my dream job back in the day Tech TV. That's where I literally hounded them to let me work there. Never got a job there, but anyway, Gary writes in Rich, I love your show and I look forward to it every week. Great advice on taking photos of rental cars. I actually take video when I pick up the car when returning to make sure to include the hood, roof
and glass. Recently I got a letter saying out four grand for hail damage on a rental in Phoenix, even though I only had the car a few hours. Luckily I had the video and never heard anything more. Hurts is now doing high resolution cameras at some airport locations to inspect cars for damage. If you don't have proof, you might get stuck paying. Yes, Gary, definitely, I recommend take at least four pictures of the car in the highest resolution that your camera will allow.
Scott, I was.
Listening to your podcast. I want to call her asks how to get a photo of his daughter off an old Nokia. I found myself yelling at the show. Just bring the picture up on that phone and snap a photo of it with your current phone. Then just run it through an app like Gemini Nano Banana to clean up the graininess. It's fast, free and gets the job done. Mary Anne, Yesterday my computer was taken over by a spam pop up. It told me to call Apple support and not log off with a very loud recording that
locked up my computer. I didn't use the number on the screen. Instead, I just looked up Apple Support's real number, just like you always suggest good that you avoided that, Mary Anne, that would have been really bad. And Alan in Deerfield Beach, Florida, I was walking home from the gym listening to your show when you played an Olivia Dean song. I didn't recognize it. I loved it, though, which one was it? I want to make a ring
tone from it. I taught electronics and computers for thirty two years and always told my students this was a great field because you'll always be learning. I never once woke up not wanting to go to work. Thanks for listening. That song was Nice to each Other by Olivia Dan. It is on repeat in my house for sure.
Let's see we've got kloy. Chloe says.
I've never been an alarmist, but when my bankell out in ach on my checking account without confirming it, it was clear financials are going to be a bigger risk going forward. I've also received fake emails from Social Security. I asked my provider how they're slipping through. Their long reply didn't answer the question. There isn't one be careful out there?
That's going to do it.
For this show, you can find links to what I mentioned on the website rich on tech dot tv. I'm on social media at rich on tech. Thanks so much for listening. Next week we'll talk about scams. There are so many ways you can spend your time. I appreciate you spending it right here with me. Please don't drive distracted, put that phone down. Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible. My name is rich Dedmiro.
I will talk to you real soon