Amazon wants to track your sleep

tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the folks watching on Instagram live. From time to time, I will Instagram live depending on my mood. Really, that's what it comes down to, because it is a different level of show to have live viewers, you know, watching what you say. Responding. People are are sitting there commenting on stuff. You know, everyone's trying to get a little joke in there that that might catch my eye.

So I get it. It's it's a whole different show. But anyway, it's a lot of fun. If you're watching the show on Instagram, you might have noticed I'm wearing a new ring. So long story short, my wife got me the aur A ring for my birthday. Oh you are a And I've been wearing it for a couple of weeks. I had to exchange it for a bigger size because they said go small, and then I did, and I felt like my circulation was being cut off.

So I got the bigger size and you know, it's it's I if the best way to describe this ring is sort of the anti Apple Watch. There are there's no screen on it, there's no fancy like you know, notifications, it doesn't vibrate. It just literally watches your metrics throughout the day and especially at night. And so the app really kind of gives you guidance on how you're feeling

and why you're feeling that way. So it gives you like a score for each day, like I think it's called the readiness score, And so if you get something like a ninety, you feel good. If you get something like an eighty, you're like ugh, if you get like a seventy or sixty, you're like, Okay, what am I doing right now? I got to go back to sleep. So it's really been interesting and I'm gonna have a full review of this soon. I'm still forming my opinions. I will say if you have an Apple Watch, you

don't need the Aura. If you have the Aura, you don't need the Apple Watch. I'm wearing both right now, and it's definitely it's like too much. It's like I just feel like everything I do, every move I make, is like being recorded and processed and somehow sliced and diced and like it's just too much. And so I actually went back to my regular watch. I had to bring it to a watch shop to get the battery replaced and then to get the clasp fixed, and I

put that on for a while. But then I and I realized, without having an Apple Watch, it is so calming, Like I can't tell you if you've worn an Apple Watch for a long time like I have. I'm just so used to being interrupted all the time with little pings and dings and up but up up, and without that, it was like life was so silent for the while, and I was missing things, like people would be like where are you, you know, like I'd be like, oh,

my phone is in the other room. It's really you know, it's just a really different experience because you're checking your phone every once in a while and uh uh, Coco on the on the comments says it is hard to wear an Apple watch to bed, so better where a ring. I agree, but my wife now calls me et because the ring at night is really firing these sensors and

so it lights up. I think it's red, and you're literally like, because it's nighttime in your room, you can see this so bright, and uh, it's it's really it's so funny because if you and anyway, and there's a whole nother side of doing your sleep metrics, which is the anxiety side of things, like where you're worried about your sleep metrics because you're awake, and so that's a whole other side of like when you don't, like typically I don't wear my Apple watch or anything to you know,

like any ring or whatever to bed because it's just too like nerve wracking, like sleep should be a nice kind of like relaxing time. And so anyway, there's a whole bunch of complications. And believe me, we are just at the beginning of all this stuff. But I will say, if you want something that's calm and interesting but still getting your stats, the Aura ring is really unique. It's expensive. It's about I think three hundred dollars plus the monthly

service I think is like five or six dollars. So I'll do a full review and kind of put some of my thoughts into a TV segment, but it is it's different. I don't know if I'm gonna stick with it. I'll be totally honest, and I've told my wife, I said, please don't buy me tech because you know, I test out a lot of tech and I go through a lot of it and it's tough for me to stick with one thing for a long time. And so the

ring is great. But I do really enjoy my Apple Watch, and I realized that after a couple of days of not wearing it, like I kind of really really like that. So we'll see. All right, let's get to the first topic of the show. Amazon is having another Prime Day sale, and you're probably tired of hearing about Prime Day because Amazon seems to have a bunch of these and only historically has happened once a year. But this is the second one. So it's happening October eleventh and October twelfth.

Not too many details on this Prime Day, so I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time on it. Other than you should know about it. I always recommend that you put stuff that you want in your shopping cart now so that you can see if the price drops on it later. Don't just go around buying stuff just to buy it. But this is kind of an idea. The idea behind this is to give you an early kickoff to the holiday shopping season. And they are doing

something and I think is very very smart. They're doing a top one hundred list of some of the most popular and giftable items. So notice they don't say of just the most popular items, because if they did that, it'd be filled with like you know, filters for your air conditioning system and stuff like that. So it's probably it is. I'm sure it's curated, and so they'll put stuff on there that's interesting, but they'll also put popular

items on there. So top one hundred list I think is really smart because on a day like Prime Day, sometimes you're kind of looking for stuff to buy, like you don't necessarily need anything, and so you're just kind of like looking around the site and you end up buying like a you know, some sort of weird like you know, smoothie straw that or something I don't know whatever, and so by having that top one hundred list, it'll

give people more ideas. So that's basically it. I'm not going to spend any more time on sun Prime Day. All I know is that I've got to I've got I'm gonna talk about a bunch of the Amazon products that they unveiled this week, and I've got my eye and a bunch of them, like I want to buy the TV, the Kindle, the Fire TV Cube, and so I will be watching the prices of those items over Prime Day. So let's get to the first question of

the show. All right, Jim says, Howdy, I'm taking a page out of your book, and it looks like paramount Plus is one of the services that will let you cancel before the trial membership ends and lets you keep using it until the actual renewal date. Thanks for the tip, and he forwarded his Paramount Plus subscription has been canceled, but you can still use it until October sixteenth, and so, yeah, this is a great tip here, and I think this

is one of the smartest pro tips. When you you know people, they it's very easy to get these free trials of services. But what happens is you forget about it, and their entire mo is to get you to forget about the fact that you subscribe to that service and then boom, you will be paying an extra month of that service. And I talked about this in the last show,

I believe, and I think that's why Jim emailed. But I did that Panera like free coffee thing, and it was like free for three months, and I was like, oh, of course I'll remember to cancel this, like I've got three months to cancel, and s off looking at my statement on my card, and next thing, you know, it's

like eleven ninety nine for Panera. I'm like, ah, they got me Panera, And so that eleven ninety nine paid for all the Panera that, you know, the two or three coffees that I got for free for those three months. Same thing with these streaming services. I'm guilty of it. I forget all the time to cancel. But my one pro tip is that you can go and cancel a majority of these services as soon as you sign up.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but you can sign up for something like Paramount Plus and then immediately cancel it. Go into your settings and cancel it and it'll still allow you to use that service through the time that your free trial goes through. And not every service lets you do this. I've noticed with a lot of the Apple services, surprisingly as soon as you cancel, it's like, now you're done, we cut you off immediately, So that's

kind of interesting. But I would say a majority of the services let you stay using the service until the time runs out on your free trial, so little pro tip. And it also works on things that you subscribe to on your phone. So if you subscribe through Apple on iTunes, you can go into iCloud and then subscriptions and cancel those and even a day or two after you subscribe,

and it should still let you use those. It's very convenient for apps that have like a short free trial like three days and then it's like three ninety nine a week or something. You're definitely going to forget comments coming in on the live stream, bd Castle says, just said reminder on your calendar when to cancel. Yes, I absolutely do that for sure. That's another good way. Rosa says,

my husband adds it to his calendar. Yeah. I do that as well, but sometimes I forget to see it on my calendar or it's not a convenient time when I see my calendar to actually go ahead and cancel it. And Sarah says, or Sra says, you can ask Siri to remind you twenty nine days from now to cancel your subscription. That works really great. That is a very smart thing. Take advantage of those voices and reminders, whether

it's Google, whether it's Siri, those are very handy. Even if you have you know, alex A in your house, you can ask her and she will. She will help you keep tabs on that as well. So all good ways to avoid paying for things that you don't need to pay for. All right, let's talk Google. And this is a major problem I have with Google is that they are all over the place. I've talked about this before, but you just can't trust Google to continue a product

that they come out with. And one of those products that many people thought they would never back or never continue is called Stadia. Stadia is a controller that is it uses Chrome casts and it streams your video games to your TV. So it was just a piece of hardware that literally really never needed to be upgraded because it was the like, Okay, let me explain this in

a better way. So the when you're playing a game on your TV, it's actually being played on a giant supercomputer somewhere on a server farm that Google runs or whatever, and then it's just being streamed to your TV like that. Gameplay is being streamed to your TV and real time, just like Netflix. And so the idea is that you wouldn't need to spend money on a big expensive console. You would just need any controller that could play this game.

And everything was being run through the cloud, and so it's basically always up to date, it's always fast, there's no lag, it's like you know. But this took a lot of technical know how to get this to work properly because video games are all about latency. Like you want when you press that a button, you want that thing to fire right immediately. You can't have a delay between pressing a button and having something happen on the screen. And so that's what Google figured out how to do

with this streaming. Well, that was all great, but apparently, according to Google, the streaming games for consumers that's built on a strong technology foundation, but it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected. So they'll be winding down Stadia. So that's sad. So here's the cool thing that that Google is doing. They're refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store and all game and add on content purchases that were made through the Google

Stadia Store. Players will continue to have access to their games library through January eighteenth, and they expect all refunds to be completed by mid January, so not all is lost. Google says that they're going to use the technology that they figured out for things like YouTube, Google Play, and their augmented reality efforts. So there's something here to this.

But yeah, it's really really kind of sad that. You know, Stadia was this thing that a lot of people didn't want to get invested in because they figured Google might shut it down, and their worst fear came true. Google shut it down. All right, let's get to the next quest question of the show. Carol says, Hey, Rich, I think I heard you say that those of us who have a z flip three can upgrade to the z Flip four for one hundred dollars. How do we do that?

And then a follow up said, I'm hoping the battery, life and camera are better. What do you think is it worth the hassle of the upgrade? And I say absolutely. Now, what Carol was referring to is that for a while, Samsung was doing a deal where if you bought the new z Flip four and traded in the three, it would only cost you one hundred dollars to upgrade. So you send them your old phone, you send them a hundred bucks, and they'll send you the brand new phone.

And in my review of the z Flip four, I found it to be a very pleasant experience. It's totally different. It's a phone that flips like a flip phone, but it's got a nice big screen inside. So just imagine your typical Samsung phone, but it flips closed right like an old flip phone, like a Motorol erasor and you have all the beauty of a smartphone. They made the outer screen bigger, more functionable, they made the cameras better, they made the battery last longer. I felt like this

phone was really really fun. It's not for me because I need a phone with a stronger camera setup because I'm doing a lot of creation stuff on there for TV and also for social media, but for general kind of social media if you're not trying to, you know, you know, do a huge bunch a ton of stuff, it'd be just fine. Like the camera is just fine

on this thing. I found the front facing camera left a little bit desired for me personally, but you know, they've improved it and so, and it folds in half so it fits in your pocket, and it's a really nice little phone. And I think it's come a long way since the first generation. And so Carol was saying, should she do the upgrade? Is it worth the hassle? And I say absolutely. I mean for one hundred dollars. Now, the one hundred dollars deal, as far as I could tell,

is gone. I think it's closer to two to three hundred dollars to upgrade. But at the same time, three hundred bucks to upgrade your phone to the brand new one. One's gonna have a better camera, better battery, a more useful screen, you're gonna reset the clock on the hinge mechanism. I think that it's it's definitely worth it, so I say go for it. The flip for is probably at this point the only foldable phone that I would recommend in a big way. The fold is really fantastic. That

one opens and closes like a greeting card. But the problem with that is that it's a very small it's just a it appeals to a very small group of people that need something like that because the technology is not fully there yet. The fold is still a little bit chunky. It's a little bit bulky, it's a little bit heavy. So I really really like that phone, but I just don't think that it's ready for prime time

just yet for the average person. If you want a foldable and you've made that your life, and you've made it your life mission to have something like that, like I only want a phone that's going to do both a tablet and a phone, then yeah, the fold is fantastic. It's a great situation. But the price is still really expensive as well, at eight hundred dollars, So i'd recommend

the flip over the fold, just for the average person. Also, if the screen on the outside was just a little bit bigger on the fold, it might have convinced me to switch, because there are some advantages, especially for someone that travels a lot, of having that foldable phone. It's just such a such a cool device. So great question, Carol, and good luck with the new phone. All right, let's

talk about a new kindle. This is so Amazon this week had their big Amazon Fall event where they talk about all of the gadgets that they are going to launch over the holidays, and they just throw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And because it's Amazon, because they are you know, really interesting, you know, smart about their prices and stuff and their promotions, they will sell a ton of these gadgets. They may not sell all of them to the same amount, but

they will sell a lot of these. Now, one of these is it's a little bit of an unknown. We'll see if this works or not. But it's called the Amazon Kindle Scribe. And this is the first kindle that lets you not only read, but also write on the screen. It is a ten point two inch screen. It's the same kind of screen that you see on your typical kindle, but now it responds to writing, so you can use this included pen to write on the screen. It's a

frontlet display. It includes the pen. The price is very high, especially for a kindle. It's three hundred and thirty nine dollars, which uh ah, quite honestly, I would not pay that for this. I think that the target price for me on this is two ninety nine, which I know is still wildly expensive for a kindle, But you have to remember that you're also getting a notepad in this, and it's a really cool notepad because you can take you know, digital notes on it. And you might be saying, well,

for three hundred and three forty, I can get an iPad. Well, the iPad is great, and I agree, and you can write on the screen, but the you know, the pen is going to the pencil Apple pencil is going to cost you another one hundred dollars. Your minimum for the Apple pencil with the with the iPad is going to be you know, you're looking at four to five hundred

dollars for that situation here you're talking. I think the target price is closer to three hundred, so you know, it's one hundred dollars, but you're not getting all the apps and stuff that you would get an iPad. So let's just imagine that this is more for the person who wants that kindle e paper experience but also kind of likes the idea of having a notepad that you

can write in. And I'm kind of a notepad. Guy, I like pen and paper, even though you know, the older I get, the less I use it because the more I kind of like put stuff into my phone. But I still love the idea of it. So what can you do with this thing? You can write in the margins of the book that you're reading, So if you're I'm a big fan of highlighting passages in my kindle books that I read, and so you can do that. You can now write things in addition to take notes.

In addition to the highlighting, you can organize with to do lists. You can use it as your planner, which would be kind of cool. I like that idea of a calendar. You make journal entries, you could review documents that you imported from your phone or computer. And again it's all sort of distraction free. Because it's a kindle, you can't do too much on it. But the fact that you can use this as a as a notepad,

to me is very appealing. USBC charging. The battery is designed to last much longer than the standard you know, you know, like a iPad battery. Let's say, so you're talking, you know, weeks or months depending on how you use this thing. It's not gonna last months if you're writing on it on a daily basis, But again, that's kind of the basics of this kindle scribe. I think that the reality is we're gonna have to see how this is because it's a bigger kindle than most people are

used to. So is it gonna be comfortable for reading? I'm not sure. I have not tested this personally, but I think they've got some of these things right. Where it comes with the pen, there's a basic pen that never needs to be charged, so it's you're never gonna be in that situation where you want to use this pen and you can't because you need to charge it up. The magnetically attaches to the side of the device, just

like a wood on an iPad. And then there's a premium pen, which I think they probably should have made this whole thing a premium pen. But the premium pen is a dedicated, dedicated eraser on the top, plus a customizable shortcut button. I think that they should just make

that the default pen. And the cool thing is all of your documents are backed up to the cloud for free, which I really like, and in twenty twenty three you'll be able to access those documents via the Kindle app, which again I feel like this should have been something out of the gate where you can take a note on your Kindle scribe and you can see that note on your phone in the Kindle app. But you know, look, these things sometimes take a little bit of time. I

also like to send a Kindle feature. Now, this is a feature. If you don't have this installed on your computer, this is something you might want to look into. So I use a service called Pocket, which allows me to read articles later, and so it's in this kind of nice, uncluttered fashion where you can look at these things when you have time to, like really read a long article. The problem is I always forget to open up Pocket on my smartphone, and so I never end up reading

these articles that I bookmark to read later. So with the Kindle, I do open my Kindle pretty much on a nightly basis at home, so I can see you can get into a routine of every night you just open up your Kindle, you read some of the articles that you sent to your Kindle from your computer throughout the day, and then you read your book for a half an hour or forty five minutes at night. So they're definitely onto something and then you kind of journal

jot down. I think I'm a big fan of journaling, even though I don't really do it on a daily basis as much as i'd like to, But I'm a big fan. I was doing for a while, I was writing down three things that made me happy that day and just writing that down in a journal. I don't even remember what the name of the journal is because I don't I didn't use it enough. I think it's

called Day one and let's see. And it really was an interesting thing to do every night, Like just think about I know, we go through our lives and there's so many things that frustrate us during the day, and you know, if you live in Los Angeles, like the city could really you know, bring it down in certain ways, especially with all the problems we're having right now. But I think that if you write down, yeah, like someone on the Instagram sete of Gratitude journal, that's yeah, that's

pretty much what it is. But if you start writing down things that make you happy, you kind of remember that it doesn't take much throughout your day to make you happy, Like sometimes just you know a little bit of an interaction with your friends or family or your children, or something someone says to you in passing, or you know, just even getting like a coffee in the afternoon and like really enjoying that or you know whatever, it is just the sun shining, like and you write those things

down at the end of your day and you really reflect on like, wow, these are things that you kind of overlook in your daily life because we're just so busy and you know, just just everything is just so like busy these days. But if you just started sort of think about these little things that really are just like you know, we had the cats in the house when we were fostering, like just like sitting with you know, petting the cat for the you know, for an hour

in the afternoon or whatever. You know, it's like, wow, that's just so so like nice and calming. And so just write those things down and you reflect and your brain starts to get wired to recognize all these little things that make you happy. And then now you just start recognizing more of them. So anyway, this is not a self help podcast, but you know, sometimes it is kind of nice. So, oh, I don't sometimes these usernames I don't know how to say, but miter boo says,

I like to do this with my students. Yeah. It's funny because when I was in school, we never heard about happiness or how you're feeling, or gratitude or any of these things that now kids are exposed to all the time, and I think it's a really good thing. Todda nineteen sixty three says, any idea the launch date for the pixel Watch, Well, the launch event is next Friday in your city. And then the launch date, I think expected is the fourteenth of October. So I don't

quote me because they haven't announced that publicly. Well they haven't announced it. Sorry, I don't know what the launch date is, but I do know when the event is, and so usually you know, these things are available a week or two or three after the launch. I know, very highly anticipated to have a nice, simple Android watch, especially that pixel Watch. So yeah, all right, let's get to the next question of the show. Karen says, I'm wondering if I should turn on cross site tracking. Not

sure what this is. Thank you, Karen, sent from my iPhone. No, Karen, you want to turn off cross site tracking? And so people are finally getting hip to this idea that we are tracked in so many different ways. When you visit one website, it reports to another website. They all report back to you know, these advertising forms and these data collection firms. So yeah, you want to turn on turn off cross site tracking as much as possible. And I turn it off on Chrome. And if you look on Chrome,

it's third party cookies are being blocked. If I go to this website, it blocked thirty third party cookies. What does that mean? That means that when I go to a website to shop for something, it's reporting my activity to thirty different tracking companies and other websites. And so what does that mean? It means that when I visit one of those websites, or if I just surf the web at large, I may now start getting ads for the product that I looked at on that first website.

So here's how to turn this off in Chrome. Just go to the menu which is in the upper right hand corner. It's the three little dots. Then you go to settings, and then you go to let's see here, I think it is privacy and security, and then you go to cookies and other site data, and there's an option to allow all cookies or block third party cookies in incognito, or block third party cookies, or block all cookies.

I do not recommend blocking all cookies. That will make your life a nightmare because then things like your login are not saved and you'll have to log into websites every single time. But third party cookies you can safely block, and that means that different websites can't see your browsing

across different websites. So it's just really it makes it so that websites can't really talk to each other and say, oh, Rich visited here and looked at the blanket that we're selling that's embroidered with his kid's name, and then they'll try to sell you a blanket that's embroidered for cheaper or whatever. Now, on Safari and a lot of the newer browsers, this stuff is starting to be blocked by default.

So if you're using something like Firefox or Safari, basically anything except Chrome, it's all this third party stuff is blocked mostly by default, even on the iPhone if you're using Safari, But if you're using something like Chrome, you do need to turn this feature on so you can block third party cookies. Also somewhat related is that when you're opening up an app for the first time, it's going to ask you allow it says, can allow app to track you across apps. You want to say no

to that question. It seems like you might want to say yes, but you want to say no. You do not want to allow apps to cross track you because that means it's the same thing that I just talked about with the web browsers, except it's inside apps on

your iPhone. And so when Apple did that and they gave customers the option for that, it really really changed the advertising industry because advertisers no longer have this really rich data set about which apps people are using and which apps which where people what people do inside those apps on the iPhone. E Flores says, have we been heard from our phones for ads? I just noticed by talking about buying something and not searching for I'll get an ad later for that product. This has been a

common occurrence for me any many years. Know, your phone's not listening to what you say out loud, but it is using a lot of different cues to help figure out whether it's just show you an AD, And many times it does feel like we're getting ads for stuff that we talk about in passing with our friends. But the social media companies and all the advertising companies swear swear swear that they are not listening to the microphones on our phones, and I would tend to agree with that.

So I don't have any evidence that says they are listening, but I do have a lot of evidence that says they're not listening. And it just seems very unrealistic for them to be processing, you know, thousands and thousands of minutes of conversations every second to figure out what people

are speaking. And also that's a privacy nightmare if they were really found to be doing that, which you know, if you've ever seen news kind of news segments where people really test this, they like really truly test it, it never works. Like they'll be like, oh, I just mentioned about going to this secret island in the Caribbean, and they name something random and then they wait for an ad to show up for that island and it

never does. Now, if you search for islands or search for an island vacation, yeah, the chances are you're gonna get a lot of ads for advertising against island vacations. And so it happens. Believe me, people mentioned a new mattress that they got to their friends, and next thing you know, you know, they get an AD for that mattress. And it's because they're using a lot of cues and

a lot of signals. And so some of those cues and signals are that they know that your friend just bought that mattress, they know that you were around your friend's phone, and so they say, hey, they might have talked about this mattress. Let's send them an AD for that. Just read three sixteen says best smart TV. I always

recommend the TCL, the TCL sixth series. I think the TCL six series is probably one of my favorite TVs, So I will recommend that, but I will also Now I think I'm gonna start recommending, but I'm gonna have to test this first. This is another thing that was mentioned at the Earth announced at the Amazon event. It's called the fire TV omni q LED series. And so this is Amazon's like top of the line television QLED. It's not O LED, but it's still it's a really

nice display technology. And so this smart TV. The number one feature that I really like about it is that it doubles as a picture frame when you are not using it, and I really really enjoy that feature. It's something that Samsung has had on a TV called the Frame for a long time, but it's something that I think every TV should have because I love seeing my family photos in the background when I'm not using my TV, and so the fact that these TVs are smart enough

to do that is something I really like. So this new q LED series has fire TV built in, it's got hands free Alexa. Plus it has this new ambient feature and so it's always on when you're not using it. And so this TV has little sensors in it to know that if you're not home, it's going to turn the screen off, but if you're home, it's going to turn the screen on and it's going to display whether it's pictures or artwork or information like the weather, and

so I think that's really really cool. It's got the hands free Alexa. This is going to be available for pre order for eight hundred dollars for the sixty five inch model, and then they also have a seventy five inch model. Again, it's called the fire TV Omnique QLED series, And again I think this is probably the biggest competition I've seen for my recommendation over the TCL six series, which I've been recommending for many, many years, and people

love them. And they do have some new models available, as I see in the comments that yes there are new models available of the sixth series, so those were recently updated, so be sure you're getting the newer model if you want the latest and greatest features on the sixth series. But the sixth series from TCL has Roku built in and it just has It's really hit its stride with like being one of the best smart TVs out there, just because it's been around for a really

long time now. A lot of people have purchased it, including a lot of people that listen to me, and the feedback I've gotten is that it's just fantastic. Now here's the only caveat, I would say, And this happens over and over. People go in for the TCL six series, which you know is a bit more of a premium price tag compared to some of the other TCL five four series, And so people go into best Buy looking for the six series and they say, I can get

the five series for like two hundred dollars cheaper. They buy the five series and I'm just telling you go with the six series unless you're putting it in a spare room that you don't need all of the best features. Then you know, then you can go with the five series or the four series or something like that. But if you're getting it for your main TV, spend a little extra. You know how much time we spend watching

our TVs. Spend the extra two hundred dollars to get something that's that's an upgrade from you know, the other stuff. Can you say the name of the TV again? You say so fast? Yes, The TCL series is my overall pick for a smart TV. Otherwise, I like the lg C seven for an OLED that's a really premium set. And now I haven't tested this yet, but the fire TV omni qled series is something that I think is going to be a really nice TV for a lot of people as well. Cheryl says, Hey, Rich, I need

your help. I keep getting the Recapsha puzzle to complete with each and every website I want to visit. With Google, it seems impossible to talk to a real human at Google. Yeah, so I'm hoping you can help. What could have gone wrong to turn this annoying chore on each and every time I want to search for something. I think it has to do with Google, but I'm not sure. I'm using my MacBook Pro with up to date software. I'm usually browsing with Safari. Can you help solve this annoying problem?

Thank you? Cheryl from San Diego. Cheryl, these Recapsha puzzles you've probably seen. They are super duper annoying. But what they do is, and you've seen them before, it basically says, please identify all of the squares with a red light in them, or a traffic light, or a bike or a I got one the other day that have all dead plants in them. I'm like, what is this? Dead plants? Like, what is that all about? And so you've seen them before. It takes a while. It takes an average of thirty

seconds to complete one of these puzzles. But what they're doing is they're trying to make sure you're not a robot, because what happens is robots they'll send, you know, people will create bots that do certain things on a website like check the prices, check airfare, book things, reserve things, and companies don't like this because it puts a big

tax on their system. And also they don't want robots booking airfares or reserving all the PS fives that are available, or scooping up tickets to a concert, So they put these recapture puzzles in place so that a real human has to move the mouse and make sure that they're doing something that a computer or a robot can't or an automated system can't do. But yes, they're annoying for you and I, and they're coming up with ways of making these easier. But until then, I see them all

the time. They're super annoying, But and I get them wrong half the time, like, wait, is that red light on the edge of that other little square or is it only in that square? And then you pick it and then it's not right, And so it's a whole big thing. If they did if they did Seinfeld today, recapture puzzles would definitely be a part of the show for sure. But I digress. So what can you do

about this? Usually when you're seeing a lot of these things over and over, there's something happening on your computer that is not right, whether there's something running in the background, whether your IP address is doing something kind of weird, whether you have a helper app on your computer that's

doing something funky. So what I would do is, if you're using Safari, because I was gonna say if're using Chrome, I would go through and get rid of all the extensions, or at least pause them temporarily and see if this key happening. But you say you're using Safari, which historically does not have a lot of extensions, But I'd still go into Safari and check out your extensions and make sure you don't have anything. Usually, helper apps are the

culprit in things like this or a VPN. If you're using a VPN, so first things first, I would I would update all the software on your computer. Then I would go through and I would uninstall anything on your computer you don't need or you don't use, whether it's a VPN or a helper program or whatever you're not using. Uninstall it, and then you can restart your computer. If you need a good program to help you uninstall stuff, I recommend clean my MacX. That's a really fantastic program

to help you get rid of stuff. It may cost you something, but I do really like that program and so it works really well. The other thing is try a different web browser, so you can try Chrome and see if this still happens on Chrome. If none of that stuff works, I would go through your Chrome extensions or your Safari extensions and see if you have anything installed there, and you can go to Safari and it says extensions in the menu and you can delete those

as well. So I would go through into your preferences and just go through every single preference on your Safari and see what's in there. If anything looks weird or strange, then you know, get rid of that. Now, they used to have a way in Safari that you could reset the entire Safari all at once. I don't know if that's possible at this point. Like you used to have just literally a way to reset your entire web browser to default settings. I'm I guess now you can just

do it with clear history. So if you can, you can try that and see what happens. But if none of those things work, I don't know. And yeah, you're right, you can't just call someone at Google and say, hey, you know, I'm having a problem with my Google, like can you help me? Like nobody's gonna answer the phone at Google to do that. So yeah, I don't know, it's a very odd problem, but I would turn off

your computer, restart it, see what happens. And then if none of that stuff works, if you're still getting the problem, you know, maybe you might have to take it as someone that knows what they're doing. And you know, I'm getting a message on my Instagram to thank my supporter. So if you've supported me in this live in this live stream, thank you, You're awesome. Thanks for buying a badge. I'm still not exactly sure what that means, but it seems like it's a good thing, and I think it's

really cool. So thank you for supporting me in that way. That's very very nice of you to do that. All right, let's get to the next How much more time do we have? Okay, we got some time here. Let's get to the next topic here. Halo Rise. This is another Amazon gadget that is was released or I guess unveiled this week. This is now. They say it's a first

of its kind bedside sleep tracker. But I'm gonna say nuances there because Google does have the Nest Hub that performs a very similar functionality, so I can't say this is a first of its kind. It's first of it's kind with Alexa. It's first of it's kind with an echo, but it's not first of its kind. There's technology that already does this. And what this does is it's a bedside tracker that is meant to help you improve your sleep. There's nothing that you have to wear. Remember I was

talking about this earlier. There's nothing that you have to wear. It use the sensors to measure your respiration and movement patterns, and then an algorithm to figure out if you are sleeping right now. John says, I'm not sure I want Amazon on my nightstand. And this is a problem that you talk about that actually is a problem that Amazon's trying to figure out. How do you get more Alexa in the bedroom. I know that sounds a little U

la la, but hear me out. You know, people don't want to put an echo show in their bedroom, or even an echo speaker because it has a microphone and some of the echo shows or all of them, all of them, I have a camera. You don't really want put to put something with a camera and a microphone on your bedstand, right because you just don't. It's your bedroom. You don't. You don't want Amazon peeking into that world there. So how do you get more analytics in the bedroom?

You put this Halo Rise hold on. So how do you get more analytics in the bedroom. You put this Halo Rise. It sells for one and forty dollars and it uses contactless low energy sensors to figure out how you're breathing, and that will figure out your sleep stages throughout the night. There are no microphones, there's no cameras, and this is something that will give you a little

report when you wake up about how you slept. Now, I have not tested this one because it's not available just yet, but I did test the Google one and it worked as promised. It, you know, basically tells you how you sleep at night. You know your rem sleep, your light sleep, your whatever you're doing you're well. I don't know if this one didn't mention snoring, but the Google one does figure out you're snoring as well. It also measures your room temperature, your humidity, and light levels.

This also has an alarm clock and a wake up light built into it, so you get that as well. Now, if you're on a normal or a typical sleep schedule, where you wake up with the sun. This could be a really nice thing to help you wake up gently. And by the way, pro tip, if you're using a standard alarm to wake up on your iPhone, please stop. Do not use a standard alarm to wake up on your iPhone. Let me explain. There is a feature on the iPhone called sleep or called bedtime whatever, however it's

marked in the iPhone. And what that does is when you set your alarm through bedtime, your alarm will gradually increase and it doesn't come up blaring like the standard clock. If you're just setting a regular alarm on your iPhone, alarm is just it's immediate, it's loud. Those alarms are more like a timer. It's more like, oh, alarm at three pm, I need to go take out the dog. This is not something that you want to use to wake up. Set the bedtime feature on your iPhone. Okay, bedtime.

I think it's called bedtime. Let me just make sure that's what it's called. Yeah, set the bedtime feature on your iPhone. It is inside the clock app. I know it's a little bit of work to get it started, but then you use that and you can adjust it every day. If you wake up at different times. You can set different schedules for the different days that you wake up. But believe me, when you start hearing that gradual alarm come up, and if you use it, you

know what I'm talking about. The alarm does not blare all at once. It starts out really soft and gentle, and it gently gets louder, so it wakes you up gently. That is the way you're supposed to approach a new day on this earth, not with a blaring alarm. So please go into your iPhone, take the three minutes to figure out the feature and set up time. Your your sleep and your your awakeness will really really thank me.

I'm telling you that. Yeah, like Beady Castle says, do I do not feel good after waking up for my alarm? Absolutely not. It's to you're literally like this, like sleeping, it's so nice and all of a sudden like ah, alarm, Oh my gosh, what what's going on here? If you if you use the bedtime, you'll notice it's it's a very it's like someone just gently kind of pushing your shoulder, gently tapping you, saying hey, rich, hey, rich, rich, rich rich.

Time to get up and it's and the snooze functionality is so much better, So please, I don't know why Apple doesn't really advertise the fact that, And I also, quite frankly, Apple should let you set a gradual alarm on the standard alarm, so they don't. But that's the way to find it is to go into the bedtime functionality in the clock and and set your wake up time and you're and I'm also kind of I love the idea of getting a certain amount of sleep every night.

I think my target is like seven hours. So you can use a little spin wheel when you get this thing set up to make sure. Like when I'm on the road and I have to wake up for an event. Let's say the event is nine am, I backtrack from nine am. I want two hours a week before that, so that means I have to be up at seven. So I backtracked the little wheel, and I'm like, I can go to bed at midnight. I'm like, wow, that's seven hours sick now, really I wouldn't do that. I'd

probably go to bed at eleven. But the point is it's anyway, that's one feature I think you should know about. So back to the Halo Rise, Halo Rise. It does. It doesn't require the Halo membership, but it does come with six months of Halo membership. After that, it does cost you. I think it's like three to four dollars or four dollars a month for the Halo membership. You don't need it, but you probably need it to get the most the most features out of this thing. And

we're definitely seeing the trend of all these wearables. Like I just talked about the Aura. You know, you got to pay for these these add on membership fees that they get you monthly. Now everything's a monthly fee because the days of just buying a piece of hardware and it working forever is kind of behind us. Even the apps, even a lot of the apps that I use, they're no longer just letting you buy that software. It's now

like either a monthly or a yearly. So it's really we're getting into this world of everything is a subscription. And you know, I get it. These companies have more revenue. They they like the idea that they can improve the products and push out software features over time. But it's just something that we have to get used to as consumers.

But Halo Rise one hundred and forty dollars if you you know, it kind of goes back to what I was saying, where the bedroom should be this kind of this oasis, this like closed off area where you know, you're not really having a lot of you know, it's just not many things should happen in there, right, And so by having all these trackers and gadgets and gizmos that are trying to track your sleep and help you wake up in this and that it gets very it's

it takes away from what you're trying to do, which is sleep. And so I think the the idea of these gadgets that sit on your bedside that don't really do much. They seem like an alarm clock, but they're tracking you. I think they're on to the right They're on to the right path there. All right, Uh, let's see Marcia. What's the difference between Marcia and Marcia Marcia m A r Cia. Is that Marcia or Marsha I don't know, so either way, Hi, Rich, love your show

and Instagram very informative. By the way, do you know, I just started doing TikTok and I had like two viral videos on TikTok within the first week. Now, I'm not bragging about that. It's actually a bigger I see why TikTok is so popular with creators. It's because you can go on someone like me. I had zero followers on TikTok and I posted you know, five, let's say, six videos, and out of those six videos, two went viral with over five hundred thousand views or something of

that nature. And so, you know, not a huge hit, but still with zero followers, the fact that you can accrue a half a million views is quite remarkable. And the reason that's possible is because TikTok has a method where it kind of lifts you up and it puts you down the stream, right, And I'm using that as kind of a euphemism for how they do things on Instagram. Historically, you had to build your followers, and your followers would

see your stuff. And now they've switched gears to this reels and suggested method because even if you don't have followers, they'll still show your stuff to people. And that's way TikTok has done it all all forever. And so now you're seeing all the other social media companies say, hmm, okay, I see what TikTok's doing. It's become so popular because people know that they can make a video and have it go viral without having a basis of followers first.

And that's really powerful for creators because it means that you can pick up followers along the way by doing good stuff. And you know, I'm not gonna say everything on TikTok is good, but it's a really it's an inverse of the way all social media started. You build your followers, your stuff is seen by your followers. Your followers may or may not share. There was never even

a shareability feature in the uh Instagram. And I think we're gonna see more changes to Instagram because of this, because those same videos and Instagram, yeah they did okay, but they're not doing as well because they are you know, it's it's limited. Instagram is still just kind of playing with the idea of suggested stuff, and you still need

that follower base to really have your stuff shown. And so TikTok, you could post one video, it can go instantly viral and now you've picked up a bunch of followers. And anyway, uh uh okay, so uh yeah, and and hot hot bait, Hot Beebie says peeps want info for knowledge enhancement, not just and I agree. Instagram has always been this place where pictures kind of ruled, and TikTok you would flip through and get a lot of information about how to do things or whatever, just a lot.

It was just to me, TikTok was a lot of people just sharing their their knowledge and their head on whatever they're smart about and putting that in a video. And it's still a huge amount of that stuff. There's also a lot of stuff you got to watch out for that's not super true. And so you gotta be careful because a lot of things, a lot of people like my kids, are getting a lot of information from

TikTok that is just misinformation. It's just not true, and so you have to kind of you know, as an adult, you're looking and you're like, that's it doesn't like it doesn't seem very true, all right, So uh, Marcia or Marcia says question, I have an eight iPhone eight plus. I can hear the laughter. That still works great. I'm recommending I'm wondering what you'd recommend in the form of a power bank for travel. I have an anchor, but it went out in a couple of weeks, time a

couple of years, so time for something to replace. Any suggestions would be welcome, Thank you so much. I would still recommend an Anchor iPhone eight plus. I do believe iPhone eight was the first with fast charging. So what you want to look for on the iPhone eight yeah, is you can basically get a charger that supports twenty watts versus five watts. So what you want to do is, I think you want to find a charger that lets you charge with USBC. So a lot of these chargers

are kind of shady. On Amazon. They will have a USBC port, but it's only to charge up the charger. You have to then charge your device through the USB, the old school, the big USB. So you want to look for a charger that lets you in and out through USBC. And they're a little bit more expensive. So if you notice the chargers when you're looking on Amazon, the cheap ones you can get one for fifteen bucks a power bank, but the expensive ones, you want to get a power bank that has USBC in and out,

so read the fine print. I still recommend Anchor as my go to power bank. They have done really well with these things. They work great, So let's just look at the top. Okay. So the top one, okay, let's look at the top three. Okay. So the first one is the power anchor three thirteen twenty two dollars. It's got USBC recharge only that means we don't want it. It's not going to charge your phone as fast as it can. Next one is the same one. Next one

is the three thirty seven. It's sixty dollars, so it's a lot more money. So it's going to turn people off. But if you look at it, let's see does it have input and output USBC. Let's see, you gotta you really have to look at these at the fine print here. So it's got three USB USBU and it's got dual input ports. Okay, I don't think this one has USBC either. Output. Oh yeah, output is maximum of yeah. Nope, So we don't want that one either, Okay, So let's keep looking

three thirty seven. Uh, let's see here, okay, three twenty five. Oh wow, there's too many of these for me to look at them right now. But if we look at this one, okay, so if we look at this one that is fifty dollars, this is a magnetic one which is wireless, which you don't need, but it does have USBC and it seems to be in and out. So anyway, just look at the look at the writing because you need to make sure look at the fine print that USBC lets you charge it through USBC but also lets

you charge your phone through USBC. So yeah, okay, this one says built in by directional USB c ports. That's what you want to look for, by directional USB. If you don't see that on the charger that you purchase, I would go somewhere else because USBC is going to give you the fastest possible charge for your phone. iPhones charge really slow to begin with. They're not the fastest in the world to charge. Samsung charges faster, Pixel charges faster.

One plus charges really fast, so you definitely want to find a USBC BI directional to charge even this older even this older iPhone eight plus. All right, got a couple of things to get through. Let's just get through this T Mobile expanding their Wi Fi So if you have Tea Mobile now you can get free Wi Fi in flight Wi Fi on United as well, including if you're on the Max Plan, you get it on every flight. If you're on the Magenta, you get it four times

a year, I believe. But definitely a great thing to take advantage of. So they also do this on American Alaska and Delta. So if you have Tea mobile in flight, in flight charging is great or Wi Fi oh, Gil says yes. So Gil says, my daughter watched reels video and all her Facebook videos now or his or her I'm not sure, is cooking reels. Is there a way to stop this? Absolutely, And the same thing you can do on TikTok. On TikTok, you press and hold the

video and it says not interested. This happened to me when I was looking up how to make salmon bowls and every one of my videos was flipping through. It would be cooking videos for salmon. Press and hold and it should say not interested. On Facebook, I'm not completely sure, but there should be an option in the menu to go into the menu on that video and just say not interested. I know you can press and hold on the explore page and it will bring up a not

interested menu. But you can definitely train these algorithms. If you looked at one video one time and now all you're seeing is that sort of video. Look for the option that says not interested. That's what you want to do. Let's see. I think that's it. I do want to just mention one more thing before we go. If you have an and alex A in the house, you know that A L e x A. You can do some fun stuff with this for the holidays, for the you know,

the Halloween. So you can hear a couple of the commands. You can say a let's get spooky, and it will give you some ideas on how to make your home more festives, such as Halloween themed jokes, games, and creepy noises. A start Spooky Halloween Sounds that's pretty self explanatory, plays a loop of spooky Halloween noises. A launch ghost Detector. If you want to become a real life ghostbuster in your own home, you can try this game A trick

or Treat. It'll play bad Halloween jokes and fun surprises. A give me a spooky rap, super corny but fun Halloween themed rap. A tell me a zombie joke or a Halloween joke, Dad jokes but spooky, and then ghost A start ghost stories. This says not for the faint of heart, for that's a little bit more, maybe not for the kids, so that sound does mean that is going to do it. For the end of the show, Francis said, this was great info. Thank you Rich. Thank

you Francis for tuning in and watching. I do these from time to time. There is a lot of pressure on me to do a performance that is good for Instagram Live, but also keeping my podcast that most people listen to audio only, keeping it fun and not distracted for them. So this is it really flexes a lot of different muscles when it comes to somehow answering questions and doing things with people on live at the same time. So I don't always do it, but it is fun.

Purple Girl sixty three says, thank you. This my first time listening to your podcast. How often you do it on Instagram any time I feel like it, So usually on Fridays, depending on the time, but I don't really announce it before because it depends on my schedule. Thank you Rich. What's the podcast name? The podcast is called rich on Tech, So if you search in Spotify or Apple podcasts, just search rich on Tech. You can subscribe and you'll get the audio. Anna says, just update on

my sleep alarm to wake up gradually. Yes, I love it all right. I got a whole bunch of stuff to stay here, so let me close out the show here. That's going to do it for this episode of the show. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or go to rich on Tech dot tv hit the email icon. I'd love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Go to the listening app of your choice, write a

quick line about what you like about the show. If you can find me on social media, I am at rich on Tech, So if you're not following me on TikTok, find me there TikTok, rich on Tech, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all those places same name, no matter where you live in the US. Download the free ktla plus app on fireTV, Apple tvn Roku. Scroll to the tech section. You can watch all my TV segments on demand. My name is

rich Demiro. Thank you so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here with me. Have a great weekend. I'll talk to you real soon.