Black Friday, shopping Tips, is Hive the new Twitter, some personal news plus your tech questions answered.
What's going on?
I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer the questions you send me. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles and soon host of Rich on Tech on Premier Networks, debuting January seventh, twenty twenty three.
Yes, you heard me correctly.
This little podcast is becoming a radio show.
Oh wow.
Feels kind of wild to say those words because I've been doing this podcast for so many episodes pretty much, you know, almost every week for years now, and it's it's something I always dreamed of doing and something I always wanted to do, and and kind of in the back of my head, I always imagine, like, wow, what would this be like this was actually on the radio, and now it's happening. So the story is Leo Laporte.
You know him as the Tech Guy. He's had a show on radio for many, many years and he is retiring. So it came to you know, who's going to take over this show? Who's going to do this show, who's going to be on the radio. And I got some calls and you know, said absolutely. I mean, there there was not a there was no decision to be made other than the details of the decision. So, I mean, I this is an incredible opportunity. I am so honored that Leo trust me with the show. It's changing. I mean,
it's a new show. It's a different show, but some things are similar. I mean, obviously I'll be taking.
Callers live callers on the radio.
Obviously I will be talking about technology, talking about gadget reviews. But I think what's going to be the most different is really trying to fuse what I do on TV with the radio. So when I have an interesting guest on TV for my TV segment, I'll bring them on the radio, bring them on the radio to talk about whatever is interesting, and so we'll have a rotating cast of guests in that regard. But also just the useful nature. I just want to make this show really, really useful.
And how do you do that? Well, I don't know. I mean I've tried to do that over the years with my TV segment, and that's kind of what I'd like to do with this segment is just anything, whether it's the callers, whether it's the news that.
I decided to talk about.
I just wanted to be very useful to people. And realistically, you know, when you're talking the radio, Yes, some people will tune in specifically to listen, but a lot of people, you know, I call them drive by on TV. They're just they're just passing by and they see me on TV and they say, oh, that's interesting. Same thing with the radio now, so you know, we'll see what happens with that.
I mean, obviously there'll be.
A bigger opportunity to reach more people. And so it's just gonna be really, really fantastic. So Leo's last show will be January. First, we've already talked about it on his show. We kind of discussed some of the things that are happening here. And if I don't sound excited, don't get me wrong. This is just really really a
lot to navigate, right. I mean, I'm gonna continue doing my KTLA stuff and now this this is on Saturdays from eleven am to two pm, or if you're on the you know, East coast two pm to five pm in Los Angeles. It'll be broadcast live on KFI and then in the rest of the US just various new sorry, various radio stations around the US, and then of course there'll be a podcast to be able to live stream it.
I don't believe we're doing video live stream, which, to be quite honest, you know, I do video every day with Katla. So if I can you know, be incognito one day a week on the radio where maybe a'all you know, a bit more relaxed, that would be really welcome. Although I will say Leo always dressed up for the show, and so you know he he was you know, he always dressed up. I mean he brought it, and you know his show is on video, so but who knows.
We'll say everyone who has had a part in making this happen, I am so grateful, And to the listener, I just really want to reassure you that this is going to be a great new show.
It's going to be exciting.
And I know Leo is retiring from radio, but he's going to continue doing his stuff for Twitch, so that's very exciting. He's not going away, but this will be a new chapter for the Tech Radio and so Rich on Tech I don't know what's going to happen with this podcast RSS feed. I don't know if I can update it with a new RSS feed or what. That's to be determined.
So rest assured.
You don't have to change anything yet. You don't have to delete this, you don't have to say you know whatever. Just hang tight and I'll see what's going on with that situation and we'll figure that out.
Anyway. Thanks so much for.
All of your dedication to the show and listening to the show, and the feedback and the amount of emails I get from people saying I love the podcast is just incredible, and that's what kept me going for so long to do this show the way that I did it, and that enthusiasm clearly transferred to this show becoming what it is.
In the radio. So I think I've spoken enough about this.
Anyway, I am very excited, and I'll give you more information as I have it. But January seventh, twenty twenty three, Saturday, January seventh, twenty twenty three, rich On Tech Radio show three hours on the weekends, live callers will be happening. All right, Let's get to the first story of the week, Black Friday Shopping So Black Friday is, you know, the day after Thanksgiving. It's when the retailers traditionally, I mean, the story goes that they, you know, get back in
the black after being in the red all year. I don't know if that's still true, but you know, who knows.
Maybe it is.
But Black Friday is really morphed into an entire weekend of shopping starts, you know, it starts earlier and earlier. But I think the best deals really do happen on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
But that's what's happening.
Of course, I hope you have a list of things that you want to get so you're not just like aimlessly shopping now. According to wallet hub, discounts are around thirty seven percent this year, which is up from last year and the year before is thirty two percent, but down from the recent high of forty percent discounts we saw in twenty nineteen. So bottom line, there are going to be good deals this year. I think, incredible deals. Some of the best places to look for deals. I
love the website Slick Deals. I mean, this has been a website I've checked daily now for many many years. I mean, going on I can't even tell you how many years. So I go to their front page deals every single day. I typically find something that's interesting and usable, and whether it's a coupon or whether it's a promo code, or whether it's just a sample or something I actually purchase.
I mean, they've been really really good about that.
And it's crowdsource, so anyone can submit a deal and then.
The rest of the community votes it up.
The best ones go to the top, and that's how it's kind of like this almost like an eBay for deals, because you know, it's almost like the perfect market. Deal News is another great website. And what I like about deal News is that they don't really miss the thing.
They've got a lot more and.
The way, you know, it's not as like, oh, here are the top five deals, per se, like slick deals of the day, but they're more like, hey, here's the things that our editors have evidenced as some of the best things out there on the web. And so that's a great place to go because and what I like about it is that whatever deal they have, so like, let's just see, let me see, because I think they let's like Hulu, I know, is doing this thing where
they're doing like this great yeah Black Friday sale. Okay, so this is what I like. So the thing that's cool about about deal News is the way their editors explain the deal and why it's a deal. So Hulu Black Friday sale one year at two dollars a month, and they say the best offer we've seen since last Black Friday. New and eligible returning subscribers get sixty five percent off the ad supported plan, a savings of four
dollars a month. So what I like is that they say the best offer we've seen since last Black Friday. So they give you that perspective and that basis so you really understand why a deal is a deal, because not every deal is a deal.
You know.
Sometimes these things say they're a deal, but it's like, well this was a better deal on Cyber Monday last year or whatever. So I really enjoy that about about deal News. Another site to look is called best Reviews.
This is a site that's owned by KTLA's parent company, Next Star, and Best Reviews is kind of like similar to Wirecutter, where they test a lot of stuff and they pick their favorites and then they've got deals that they put on there as well, and so I'm growing to love this site because obviously it's in the family, and I'm becoming friends with Jacob who helps run it out there in San Francisco, and so it's just as it's really like a nice website. I like how it's organized,
I like how they give the perspective on things. So check out best Reviews as well. My other tip for Black Friday shopping is to and this is sounds simple, but this is what I do whenever someone's like, hey, Rich, is there is this on sale? Or how do I get the best price on this? So all you have to do. Let's say you want the Apple Watch Ultra. So you type in Apple Watch Ultra into Google and then.
Type the word deal.
So apple Watch Ultra deal is your search term, and then you go and once the search terms come up the search results, you click news and this is going to give you all the blogs that post about the best deals on the Apple Watch. So first result is CNN the Apple Watch Ultra is on sale right now for the first time ever, and Gadget the Apple Watch Ultra is sixty dollars off in early Black Friday sale and so again you can instantly go to this report from Engadget and see what the deal is, which they
already said in the headline sixty dollars off. So that's the first time we've seen that. So that is a really easy way to find anything that you want on sale. So let's say, let's say if we want the fire TV Cube third generation and we want it deal, and you can also try putting in sale, so right away the first result. Now see I didn't click news yet, so actually hold on. So yeah, so they don't say that the third one is on sale, but it says
the previous is super tempting. So again it gives you that perspective of Okay, I'm not really seeing anything with this new one, but the old one has something, so very very easy way to search for stuff that you want on sale. If you're according to best Reviews, prices that you should look for on electronics or even toys should be about twenty to thirty percent off.
That's the regular price.
So if something is one hundred dollars typically and you find it for eighty or seventy, that's a really good deal. So and that kind of aligns with what while at Hubs said around the discounts are about thirty seven percent, so twenty to thirty percent is pretty good. And it all depends on what you're getting. Some things you know are marked up so they can be marked down. Other things are just you know, they don't go on sale very often, So.
Good luck with the shopping.
And my advice, please keep a list of the stuff you want to get so it's much easier to shop for that stuff and not be distracted by all of these sales out there. All right, let's get to the first question of the show. Marissa says, Hey, Rich, hope you're well. I've emailed you before with questions. My husband and I have been using the same Apple iCloud account for ID for years on two phones. Our two sons have their own Apple id cloud with their iPads and
Apple Watches under family sharing. We are wondering if the time is finally right to create a separate Apple iCloud ID for my husband. Under family sharing, our workarounds for I Message are okay. I Message send receive is set to our respective phone numbers, so we don't receive each other's texts, but it would be nice to separate health data. However, the biggest issue in not sharing has always been the photolibrary, not sharing an ID. We are reading about iCloud shared photol library.
Is this a solution we need? Help?
Love Love Love your podcast, Marissa, Marissa Absolutely. I actually can't believe that you're still sharing your Apple ID because this was something that was very common when the iPhone first arrived. Pretty much every family shared the Apple ID, so they would have mom and dad sharing the same Apple ID, signed in on different phones, but it would be the same thing, and so people were getting each other's texts. They're really I messages, not texts per se.
Same thing with the kids. You'd give the kid the Apple I D and it was a big mess because it was not very pretty to share in this regard. And so I'm surprised you've stuck with it this long because most people have gotten frustrated. But you did find that workaround for I messages with the sen received, so good job on that. But yes, absolutely, shared photo library
is the solution you need. This will allow you to share your photos and have them show up in a shared library, but also maintain separate and private accounts, which I think is important.
It's important for a lot of reasons.
Security is the main reason, I'm not too worried about your reading your husband's text or him reading yours.
I think it's more about.
Security because if one of these devices is breached in some way, then technically they're all breached. And so I don't like to see I don't like to see sharing of any sort of credentials. I mean, I know people do it for like Netflix and stuff like that, but there's not really too much of a security risk there. But any sort of sharing of anything else, even you know, giving your password for a website to someone is you know, there's a lot of implications that come along with that.
So Yes set up the iCloud Shared Photo Library. I have not played with the iCloud photo Shared Photo Library because personally, I do the same thing on Google. Google has had this for many, many years, and it's it's amazing. So my wife takes a picture on her phone, it goes to my Google Photos.
When I take a photo on my phone, it goes to hers. And it's a really slick setup.
It's very similar to the way iPad or the iCloud Shared Photo Library will work, and you can I think they take it a little bit of a step further, where the way that you share. I think you can share everything or you can share certain things. So there's like a manual sharing, and there's like, you know, where you can share just stuff that you want to share. So and every photo is marked, I guess that's sharing.
I should probably test this out just to see, because I haven't really really played with this because I think personally I don't typically recommend iCloud photos because I think it's very complicated.
I think that it is confusing.
I don't like that it's not cross platform, even though they have come finally to Windows. But I don't like the fact that if you're, you know, wanting to switch to an Android, how do you see these pictures?
So there's just no way.
And also it's just you know, like I prefer cross platform products, and I know that the iPhone, notoriously is probably the least cross platform device you can use because you know, whether you use I Message, whether you use you know notes, whether you use I mean, basically everything on the iPhone is kind of locked to the iOS ecosystem,
and I don't like that. So some ways they're open, and obviously the iPhone is still an amazing device, but I don't like having all my pictures in a place that are just not very accessible anywhere else or on any other device other than an iPhone. Now, Google Photos,
I have my problems with that too. Like I do think that, and I've talked about this before, I do think that Google needs to have a way for me to back up my Google Photos in a simple way to a hard drive, like sync my Google Photos collection to a hard drive. I don't know why Google's not doing that, obviously, it's some sort of financial play in the background that I can't really figure out. I would be willing to pay. I mean, I already pay twenty five dollars a month to use Google Photos, so why
can't I just have that functionality? I mean, yes, some people will download and run, but that's I mean, I'd rather have people do that, and I'd rather have them be able to back up their pictures on a physical device that they have in their home.
So anyway, good question.
Definitely do it and get the things separated out, set it all up, and I think it'll be a great thing.
All right.
Twitter, we know that there's been a lot of chaos at Twitter right ever since Elon Musk took over. I'm still kind of like, I don't know, I'm kind of watching it. I haven't really stopped using Twitter.
I mean I would.
There would have to be like a real reason for me to not use Twitter at this point.
And I've never been a huge Twitter user.
I love certain aspects about Twitter, but really I've built my following primarily on Instagram, Facebook, and to a lesser extent, YouTube. But Twitter has always been a really good tool for journalism. And it's a tool that allows you to reach everyone because everyone has a Twitter. It allows you to, you know, get information out in real time. I love the fact that it works on all platforms. I love the fact that you can upload photos, you can upload videos, you
can put in links. I mean, it doesn't like restrict you in any way like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram do. I mean, Instagram is the worst. You know, it's like to put a link on there, it's got to open in their own browser and this and that. I mean, it's just such a it's such a process. But I do like Twitter. So anyway, people have been looking for alternatives ever since Elon has kind of taken this big, this big stir and just like stirred the pot and
it's just like it's very chaotic there. So one of the things that people have been trying is masted on, which, you know, I think that that seems from everything I've I've read and everything I've seen from friends, it just seems like it's it's way too complicated for the average person to ever really get on there in a big way.
So what's a simpler alternative.
Well, this app called Hive, according to tech Crunch, has hit a million users, and so I don't know how people discovered this, but it was founded in twenty nineteen and by a twenty two year old. It was aimed at Jen Zeer's and it's it's very much so a Twitter clone. It looks like a mix of Twitter Instant and also a bit of MySpace thrown in there. Now
there's no story aspect on here. It's just mostly posts, but there's also an explore tab and you can you can put music on your profile, which I think is kind of the homage to MySpace. But using this app, it's clean, it's organized, it's kind of like the same
thing where you have followers and this and that. The only problem I have with it is that it's really slow, and I'm sure that's because they are just totally overloaded at this point, because they went from nobody using it to now over a million users, and you know, at this point.
It's probably a lot.
So if you go like it just took you know, a good ten seconds to load up my my homepage, I've got forty six followers.
Now, I did reserve my username.
And in fact, I interviewed a guy named Matt Swider for a story recently. He runs a newsletter called The Shortcut, and he was like his advice on all these new social networks, He's like, at least reserve the username that you want. And I thought that was pretty smart because that way you can, you know, if they ever become a thing, you can actually use that username with.
That with that service.
So that's probably a lot of what's happening right now with with Hive. I can't say to switch, I can't say to sign up. I really don't know if it's like the next Twitter, But if you want to get your username on there, Hive, I believe the website is Hive Social Hive Yeah, hivesocial dot app. So hivesocial dot app. If you want to check it out, I mean, it's it's one of these things that we'll just continue to watch and see what happens. And if you want to
be there now, hey, you'll be an early adopter. All right, let's get to the next question. Fred says, congratulations on your new radio show.
Thank you, Fred.
I'm trying to find a device that will pair up with my cell phone and that device will broadcast Bluetooth signal to multiple speakers simultaneously.
The best I could.
Find so far was one speaker to pair up with the cell phone and that speaker will broadcast its own Bluetooth signal to the auxiliary speakers. The problem is there's a delay between the main speaker and the auxiliary speakers. I'd like to set up eight Bluetooth speakers in my backyard. I want the music to be in sync. Any ideas, Thank you, Fred, Fred, great question, and this is why
Sonos was invented. I mean, you know, Sonos tackled this problem many many years ago of whole home audio, and now we see the same thing with the Echo speakers, with the Home pods, the Google speakers, they have all sort of taken on this idea of just adding multiple speakers to the same stream. Now these speakers are not using Bluetooth. They are using their own believe on the back end. It's Wi Fi or some other frequency that
they're using to communicate, so it's not Bluetooth. And the reason they're not using Bluetooth is because I'm not sure Bluetooth is really a quick to do.
Something like this. The most I've seen, and a.
Couple of like a TLC TLC TCL phone had this feature, and a couple other phones have had like dual audio output and so it's able to send one signal to two phone or two speakers at the same time. And also iPhone with their air pods and those kind of things have a built in share audio functionality. I don't think that functionality is built into Android at large, but
Samsung may have it as well. But the reality is I probably wouldn't recommend eight random Bluetooth speakers synced up because you're just never I don't think you're ever really going to get a good signal that sounds good and is in sync across all of these speakers. I think that there's a lot of software at play on the back end with Sonos and with Google and with Amazon and with the HomePods to make them sound perfectly in sync.
And so the old only thing. I mean, I'm looking at like, there's this website or this this product line called twelve South, and they do a bunch of like probably the most popular device, which I need to buy actually because I needed this on a plane the other day. But it's a device that allows you to plug in your use your Bluetooth headphones with the three point five
millimeter jack on an airplane. So if you're on an airplane or a treadmill, you can plug in this little Airfly device and then you can use any Bluetooth AirPods that you want. So and what this says, Airfly says connect two pairs of headphones. So I think that the two pairs is kind of the max for a lot of these things. I do know that they do this thing called Silent Disco, and so I'm wondering what those headphones use?
Are they?
Yeah, so I'm looking at this. So if we look at these silent Disco headphones, how are they broadcasting?
What is that?
So a ten piece bundle is okay? Yeah, So the transmitter does not look like it's Bluetooth. It is some sort of other does it say what it does for the transmitter. Okay, Yeah, the wireless kit uses RF two point four gigahertz technology, not Bluetooth, and that reduces the audio lag, which is thirty milliseconds, significantly less than the two hundred and twenty milliseconds of standard Bluetooth. So I
think that this situation is best solved by buying. If I was going to recommend speakers, i'd recommend the one.
Where is it. I'm trying to look for mine right here?
Oh there it is the Sonos Rome, which is just a fantastic little speaker. It was I think it was about two hundred dollars, might be a little bit less than that. It's probably a good time to buy it over the Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping weekend. But those speakers are small, their weather proof. You can set them up all over your backyard. Yeah, you're talking about one thousand dollars for eight those things, but I think.
That will give you the best solution.
Or you can just go with the SOS Move and the Soas Move is a much bigger speaker. You may not need eight of them. That's what I personally use, and I just it's always on the charger in the house. When I go outside, I just take it in the backyard and it sounds great. Sometimes I bring the room as well, depending on how you know how much of
the backyard we're using. But this is this is one of my best purchases that I got during the pandemic because it's just every time I go outside, sit by the fire pit, whatever, grilling it, just take the Sos Move with me and listen to the music. The cool thing about the Sonas Move and the rom is that they work in your house with the Sonos network, and then when you leave your house, they will work with the Bluetooth.
On your phone.
So but you can't have them SYNCD up with the Bluetooth as far as I know.
All Right, great question and good luck.
Sounds like you want to have some real fun out in your backyard, and I don't blame you on that one.
All right.
Let's talk about a new website called way Away. This is a travel website, and I'm always sort of suspicious about new travel websites because you know, I mean, everyone I personally really like to book direct.
In fact, I booked a hotel.
In Japan that was not direct, and I was very surprised to find out that you don't get any points with that hotel when you don't book direct. Now I'm not sure if that is something that happens across all hotel brands or if that was just IHG, but I was very surprised that you don't get any points because it was booked on a third party website. So I guess I never do that. I always book direct, and so when I heard that, I was like, wait, really interesting. So I stick to kind of like booking on the
airlines and hotels own websites. But I also do look at some of these search engines just to see what's out there, like I do like hotels dot Com. I think their app is the best when it comes to finding the hotel closest to where you're going. So it's the only app I know of that lets you put in an address and then sort hotels by that address. And so what I'll do is I'll put in, you know, let's say I'm going to the San Jose Convention Center.
I'll put that into the app hotels dot com app, and then once the results come up, I'll sort by distance, and I'll kind of see based on those results, like okay, I want to stay at, let's say, a Hilton. Okay, so that's that's like this is the closest Hilton to that hotel or that that place, but not just a Hilton. Maybe there's a maybe the Hilton is three miles away, and there's a hotel that's point one tenth of a mile away, and I'm like, ah, that's the one I want to stay at. I phone a walk to the
convention center because it's much easier. And so those are the kind of things that I think even with like Kayak and all these other ones, they'll do like city center, but they don't really do like an actual address, so I do like hotels dot com for that anyway. So this this website is called way Away, and this a new travel website that lets you do flights, lets you do car rentals and hotels and so basically, you know, it's a standard travel website, but they compare options from
seven hundred different partners for flights. Then they have this membership plan that basically it's one hundred dollars for the year. Right now it's fifty because they just started, but they pay you cash back on your travel purchases. So not only can you see the best deals, but you also get a percentage back. So when I tested it, I saw a flight that I typically would take to New Jersey. It was like a five hundred dollars flight. You got
about seven bucks back. So you're not going to become rich with this cash back, but it kind of depends on what you're doing. I think that if you book your own travel and you work for a company that lets you book your own travel on third party sites, this could pay for itself in you know, with one thousand dollars worth of bookings at five percent at fifty
dollars for the service. So so you know, it's kind of cool if it's the same price that you're paying on another website, with the same perks you're getting, especially with airfare, like why not and I don't know, I mean, you know, these sites, these travel sites really push you to book direct, and so I think that that's kind of like the main thing is that you do lose some privileges when you don't book direct, But if you're getting the same stuff, then all things considered, it's all
things equal.
It's kind of cool.
So flights up to five percent back booking dot Com up to ten percent back, and then rental cars up to five percent. They have ticketing and hostels. Those are all you know, different percentages back. So the other cool thing is that there's customer service. You can you know, get in touch with this way away and they'll help you with what you need. They also work with two hundred local guides in ninety five cities to create travel guides, so it can tell you like where the best bars
and restaurants are, the must see places, and also neighborhoods. Now, I think that's great that they've curated that. I really like this tool on Google Travel. If you go to Google Travel and you go to the explore tab or no, the things to do tab, it's pretty phenomenal. You type in any city. Let's just type in let's see hold
on what's the cool city Chicago. So if we type in Chicago, it will give me the top sites, the top sites by interest, kid friendly, outdoors, museums, top experiences, notable neighborhoods, and then travel articles.
I mean, it's.
Really really pretty good how they've used the wisdom of the web to you know, and just use AI to pretty much slice and dice all that information and make it into a travel guide on Google. So Google dot com slash travel, look at the things to do tab, but I was looking at the in the nutshell guides. There's something to be said for that too. An editor, an actual human has gone through and said, here's the
cool place is. I just am concerned as how up to date they can keep those right, because that's a lot of that's like a whole you know, travel site, like a photo how do you say a photos f O D O R foot I don't know how to say it, but you know that website and all these other guide websites like that's a full time job, the ones that are not crowdsourced. And they say, on average, our users cover the cost of their plus membership with
the cash back from a single trip. And with the cash back you do get PayPal cash back, so it's not like a rewards program. It's literally just cash back on your travel. So if you want to check it out, it is way away dot io, Way Away dot Io. All right, uh, Resa says, convert videotapes to digital? Can you recommend a trustworthy company that can convert family home videos from tape to digital? Great question, And this is something that I've done a couple of years ago.
I ended up doing these myself. But you can do a couple of ways.
So number one, I recommend, if you have the Camquard and you've got a computer, and you've got a VCR or whatever plays these tapes, do them yourself. I mean locally in your home is probably the best way to do these. It's time consuming, but it also means that you don't have to send these out. That it can't get lost in the mail. You know, they can't get messed up, you know, all these things that can happen when you send them out. But I would recommend doing
them yourself. So the two things that you can do that is Roxio is a big brand that does that. And then gosh, I can't remember this. I can't remember what this other one is called. Ah, I'm trying to remember. Let's see if I can remember this. El Gato, El Gato and Roxio. So those are the two that I tested and they worked pretty well, and I think those are the easiest ways. It's very analog, it's very you.
Know, old school to do this, but it works.
And it's time consuming, but once you do it, you have a nice digital copy. Of your tape, you can throw that into Google Photos. And the coolest part is that it will actually identify the people in your videos, which is just phenomenal to me. So all you know, your nephews and cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, all these people that.
Appear in these videos over the years, Google will find them and put that in.
You know, when you search for your uncle or whoever, it'll show that they're in this video, which is which is really really cool. So the other are two ways I would recommend is there is a website that I like and a service called scan my photos dot com. This is based in Irvine, California, and I've recommended them many many times over the years scan my Photos. They will digitize just about everything, slides, videos, everything. And the cool thing is if you're in California, you can actually
drop off your stuff. I know they were offering that before the pandemic. I'm not sure if they still do that. You'd have to check with them, but you can drive down there and drop them off if you don't want to put your stuff in the mail. I mean, I think the biggest risk with putting your stuff in the mail when it comes to getting these things scanned is you know, something can go wrong, and if you lose those tapes, that's it. There's no there's no recourse. You're
not going to get them back. So scan my photos dot com is another good one. And then the other one I like is is to go on Yelp. There's a lot of local places, a lot of little small businesses that have popped up to do this in local places. So go on Yelp and just look up VHS digital and just sort by.
Let's see.
Let me do this in real time so I can tell you what I would do. So if I go to Yelp and I search VHS digital, okay, VHS digital d I T I g A l okay, this will come up with a bunch of places that will, oh gosh, hold on VHS to digital. Sorry, I gotta I gotta spell the words right otherwise it's not gonna okay.
There we go. VHS to DVD is what suggested came up? Okay?
So if I go sort by recommended or most reviewed, So I'll do most reviewed, and now I can see I've got in my area. After you scroll through the all the sponsored stuff, it's got the results and so one of them is about a mile from me, that's top reviewed.
Another one's another mile.
So what I would do is I would call these places and I would get someone on the phone. And if you can't get someone on the phone, well that's your first clue that there's a problem. And so I call these places, call the top two places, and just talk to them and just see what they say, and you can get an idea about how this service is going to be from one of those two people. Go with the one that you feel more comfortable with. The
one that you feel most comfortable with. You can order and bring your stuff in, and since it's local, you can just drop them off. But that's what i'd recommend. That's what I would do if you can't do them yourself.
All right.
Next story here, Lift is teaming up with Motional to launch driverless taxis in Los Angeles.
So I am very excited about this.
It's also quite scary, and I don't mean that it's just scary because it's like different.
You know, I've been in self.
Driving cars like this and it's a little odd, you know, to have the car making the decisions fully autonomously is kind of wild. So Lifting, Emotional will launch their ride hailing service in Los Angeles. Residents will be able to request an autonomous vehicle in the Lift app. They're using motionals all electronic ionic five based robotaxis. LA is the second city they're doing this in, following Las Vegas. I
have not been in the Las Vegas automated car. In fact, when I was in Vegas, I was trying to get one of them on the Lift app. I never got it, but I would. I would definitely try it there.
Let's see.
Riders in LA will have a choice. Obviously, you can do autonomous or you can do classic ride share. They say that La is one of Lift's largest ride sharing markets. Emotional has been learning stuff about this for a while and they're just very excited to put these taxis in Los Angeles.
Now.
This comes on the heels of Weimo announcing a couple of weeks ago that they are doing robotaxis in Los Angeles as well. So if all goes as planned, people in Los Angeles will have the option of two different robotaxi companies in the next couple of years. And that's pretty wild. I mean, we're seeing things really change with this stuff now. Uber tried this many years ago and they gave up on it. They're not really as far as I know, they're not focusing on robotaxis anymore.
But I think that.
Lift and weimo it's a very slow process. I mean, these companies have been doing this for many, many years.
It's very slow.
They've got a lot of regulations, a lot of hurdles to get it through, and it's nothing that happens very fast. And so I think they're taking that slow approach because they don't want they know that this is kind of a big deal and they want to do it right, and I don't think they want the media, you know, latching on to any sort of major accidents that may happen with these cars, and so I think they're just taking it slow, taking it easy, and methodically building these
services slowly but surely. So in my informal Instagram poll, people were overwhelmingly against this, and not against the having it, but against going in these cars. And so I said, you know, would you take a lift, an automated lift, and seventy percent said no, thirty percent said yes, I'm kind of in the you know, I would probably do it obviously to test it for a story. But I mean,
I would hope that these things are well tuned. But honestly, driving Tesla, I've seen that it's kind of scary sometimes the idea that your car is making these decisions and if it makes one wrong decision, you know, you could be toast. And it's not like that with a lot of other things. You know, you've got automated this and that. It's just very different when it's your car because it's such a big piece of machinery that's moving as such a fast rate of speed. There's not much room for
error there. And I think about this a lot when I'm kind of cruise controlling in my car, and I get it.
The level of.
Autonomy that my Tesla has is not the full and so mine is just basically glorified cruise control. But still it definitely slows down around big trucks and things like that, and it you know, kind of jerks the wheels sometimes when it's you know, making a correction or something, so you know it could be I don't know, it's just dicey.
At times.
It feels like, oh my gosh, like that, you know, that was a close call, but maybe the car knows better than I because it has more sensors than I do.
Who knows.
We'll say, all right, let's get to the next question of the show. Let's see where are we up here? Sometimes I lose track of where we are. Okay, Samsung tab A eight, Mike says Rich. I had to buy my wife a new tablet because the battery puffed enough to distort the screen. The new one is a tab A eight. I want to add a five hundred and fifteen gigabyte SD card. Amazon has Type A one and
A two. Is there a preference? Well, if you find a five hundred and fifteen gigabyte SD card, I think you won the lottery because most of the time they come in five hundred and twelve megabyte.
SD card.
So I'm just giving you a little grief mic, just because it's probably a typo.
But I know what you're talking about here.
The type you say that, it's got the type A one and A two. So let's just type in SD card five twelve on Amazon. And so I'm looking at these, and I see A one and I see A two, So you are right now. The A one has two hundred and eighty seven thousand reviews. The A two has thirty two thousand reviews, So immediately that is telling me that the A one is more popular. I'm guessing it's cheaper, and is it?
Well, these are.
Different sizes, so I guess it's kind of tough to compare. Let's see, I was trying to find. Oh, here we go, here's the five twelve. Okay, so five twelve A one And does the A two have a five twelve?
Yes it does.
Okay, so now we can compare apples to Apple. So the the A one if it will come up here for some reason, it's not the A one is. Let's see thirty nine ninety nine for a five hundred and twelve gigabyte model, the A two is for some reason.
Oh here we go seven. No, I can't. I can't seem to get this to load the price of this. There we go.
Okay, the five hundred and twelve A two is, and I'm still trying to get this price to come up, but it just won't come up. I've got the one terrorbyte is one hundred and seventy two dollars, which wow, so and the two fifty six is twenty six sixty seven. The five twelve just will not come up for some reason. I don't know why.
But here's the thing.
So it depends on the speed of these cards. So A two is rated for faster loading and in app performance. So basically it's a speed thing. So if you look at the speed, A one performance is fifteen hundred read five hundred wright and if you look at A two, it's four thousand read two thousand.
Right, So the A two is.
Going to be a bit more expensive and it's going to read and write faster. Now with that said, what do I think you need for this tablet? I think you're gonna be just fine with the A one. I don't now if you were doing like real, real intense like photo or video work on this tablet, I would say, okay, go with the A two. But I just don't think that's the case. I don't think that you need that. I think that the uh, the A one is going
to be just fine for this solution. I don't think you have to spend more money to go with the A two. And I wish I could tell you how much the A two was, but it just for will not show up. Oh there we go seventy two to fifty. Okay, So it's double the price. So h yeah, I'd save
the money go with the A one. I think it's gonna be just fine in that, in that Samsung tab A eight, which, by the way, I've i've kind of pooh pooed the Android tablets in years past, but and I might have talked about this in a previous show, but I will tell you when I tested the Amazon Fire tablet. Now, the fire tablets are notoriously slow and kind of slow.
And basic whatever.
They're good for just watching movies, not really much else, but or listening to music, reading books, whatever.
Like basic stuff.
But what was refreshing about the Android tablet over the iPad is that the iPad doesn't do anything in the background. So if you're trying to download a bunch of movies for the plane, you've got to have those apps open, and they only download when they're open and sort of alive. And so it was really a breath of fresh air when I loaded up a bunch of stuff on the Fire tablet and I closed out the apps, not closed them out, but just you know, put them in the background,
and oh the movie is still downloaded. That was like really really nice. And so anyway, the iPad I still think is the best tablet out there. It's got the best apps, it's got the best accessories. But I'm not against these Android tablets. In fact, I had someone the other day at work that said, hey, what do you think of the A eight, And I said, it's great.
You know, Samsung tablets I would recommend obviously getting on sale because it's just a lot of the Samsung prices are you know, they're kind of I don't know if they're inflated. They're just a little bit more expensive than they should be, and then they go on sale and they're a much better deal. So the Galaxy tab A eight is, oh, this is a really basic one. So I'm not sure this is, uh the one the person was asking me about. This is the tab a So
this is only seventy five bucks. So yeah, I guess to answer your question even more, Mike, is that if you're talking to seventy five dollars tablet, I don't think you need to put that other card in there, because I think that's going to be way too much for that tablet. So if I look at let's just see what's the.
Top of the line tablet here? Oh tab essay?
Sorry, Okay, the essay is the one the person asked me about. So that's a much much more high powered device, and I think you're gonna pay more because of that. So right now, if I look at the website and apparently nothing's working on my computer right now, I don't know what's going on with my Wi Fi here, but anyway, yeah, that's that's probably gonna be on a good Black Friday Cyber Monday deal since everything's at a pretty big discount.
Good question, all right.
Speaking of Android, if you want to protect your Android with the same sort of protection that Apple has on their iPhone with the app tracking Transparency.
That's where it asks you.
It asks apps not to allow third party tracking, which most people say, you know when you see that little screen come up says can this app track you? And who's gonna say yes to that?
Right? Well, now you can have this.
Across your entire Android phone and this is through Duck Duck Go for Android. Basically they're using a VPN that will filter out anything that is you know, these apps that are trying to send information to a third party tracker, and this could be your precise location, your age, a fingerprint, a digital fingerprint, of your phone.
And so this is.
Called app tracking protection in Duck duck Go. And so you can download the Duck dot go app. This is free and it will give you that similar protection. I think they say it's even better than what the iPhone does. And so, you know, if you really want to protect your privacy and not have these apps talk to each other, then that's probably a good thing to do. So according to Duck douck Go, the average Android user has thirty
five apps on their phone. They found that with thirty five apps, you can experience between one thousand and two thousand tracking attempts every.
Day, and those.
Apps might contact seventy different tracking companies.
Wow.
So they give the example of let's say you're planning a getaway on Southwest Airlines app, then you look at Zillo, then you look at seat geek, and then you check the weather on the weather network. With these four apps, they say forty five over forty five tracking companies will collect your information your precise location, your email, your phone number, your time zone, a fingerprint of your phone like your resolution,
your device making model, language, your internet provider. All of that stuff can be used to identify who you are. So this will block that sort of information from leaving your phone. Now, the way they do this is with a VPN, and so not everyone's going to be excited about that situation because you got to run a VPN on your phone at all times. They do the filtering of this stuff locally so that it's.
Not going out to the wider web.
So anyway, if you want to try it out, I'll probably download this just to check it out on Android Duck Duck Go for Android. The Duck Duck Go is you know, I think that they're doing a lot with privacy. They're really putting this like, you know, stick in the ground and saying, look, we're we are the privacy centric sort of you know, Apple, but for everyone, and I like it. I just don't know about the search results from Duck Duck Go. I don't know if they're very good, and.
I don't know.
I can't really vouch because I don't really use it. But you know, they've got they have my story from today up there, but yeah, it kind of takes a no Like I just searched for myself on here, and like literally after the first result, it's like the second and third and fourth results are pretty bad. And then the next one's pretty bad.
Yeah.
So I mean, look, it's gonna be fine for some things like basic stuff, but if you're really like, Google is still the best when it comes to actual search results, and that's kind of why.
I stick with it.
All right, Tesla might be coming or Apple Music might be coming to Tesla.
Just a small little story here.
Tesla apparently is teasing the integration of an Apple Music app and it's vehicle software. The information, according to Electric, came from the Peterson Automotive Museum. They are opening up this Tesla exhibit and I guess one of the cars someone who went through here saw. They're like, wait a second, is that Apple Music on the Tesla home screen? And sure enough, it seems like it is. This would be
huge because Apple Music. If you have an iPhone and you're like me and you've got this whole Apple one bundle, you're using Apple Music because you kind of have to to get your money's worth over Spotify, and so I had. In fact, I subscribed to Spotify for the first time when I got the Tesla, and so I was using it. I actually don't think the integration of Spotify is very
good in the Tesla. I think it could be better, and so anyway, let's just hope that this does happen because I think it would give people one more option for getting the most out of their music service. So we'll keep an eye on that one. The other little story I thought was interesting, maybe just because I use it, I think it's interesting. But Evernote is being purchased by a company called Bending Spoons, and so Bending Spoons, You're like,
who's that. Well, I wouldn't have known Bending Spoons from anyone else except for the fact.
And it's always nerve.
Racking when a company like ever Note, you know, with all of your data inside, is being purchased, because you never know what's gonna happen. But Bending Spoons happens to make one of my favorite mobile editing apps in the world, which is called Splice. And so I am very trustworthy of this company. I believe they're They're located overseas, and you know so, but.
I really feel like, gosh, I don't love.
To see where Bending Spoons is. Let's see where they are.
Bending Spoons is in. Oh, Italy. Oh wow, they're had another Italian Milan Italy. Wow, it's.
So so they've got Splice, which I really really love. They've got this AI powered photo app. They've got let's see what else they have. Well, this is too long for a website to do AI remedy Remedy, and I think that's it for now. Oh they've got thirty Day Fitness and now they'll have ever Know. So I'm excited because I love the Splice app is really really slick, Like,
it is such a great looking app. It's it's very well written, it's very well designed, and so I really think that that's going to be a good thing for ever Note because Every Note is kind of it's kind of lost its way over the years, and it's it's kind of gotten clunky, it's kind of gotten slow. I still use it because there's a lot of features on it that I like and that are useful to my job.
But every year when I have to pay that whatever it is they want, you know, sixty seventy bucks, it's like, ugh, do I really need this? Apple Notes does like ninety nine percent of whatever Note does. But again, that's one platform, and I like Every Note because it's cross platform and it's independent, and so you know, I've been using it for many many years. Sometimes I've paid, sometimes I haven't. And I think that bending spoons purchasing them will be
a really good thing. So that's exciting to hear. Oh wow, that sound does mean that's gonna do it for this episode of the show. If you would like to submit a question for me to answer, just 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 and hit the email icon.
You can find me on social media.
I am at rich on Tech and no matter where you live in the US, you can download the free ktla plus app on Apple, TV, Fire TV, and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the tech section and there you can watch all of my TV segments on demand. My name is Richdmiro. Thanks 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 happy Thanksgiving, have a great holiday, and enjoy I'll talk to you real soon.