California's new privacy rights, whys suffers a data leak, What you need to know about it, Why it might be easier to file your taxes for free this year, And the best journaling apps if you're trying to kick off twenty twenty with a fresh start.
What's going on. I'm Rich Dmiro.
This is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. Plus it's where I answer your questions. We've got producer Megan here ready with your questions.
Yes, Happy New Year.
I would like to say that we improved the podcast for the new year, but we didn't.
Let's be honest.
I mean I'm basically rolling in here fresh off of vacation for a week, and I will tell you I was trying to figure out what made this vacation different than other vacations.
And here's what I've realized. It is the first time.
That I had a week off without going out of town or having family members in town. So by like day three, day four, I'm like, what is why does this feel so good? And that's what it was all about. Yeah, So I literally did not do anything, didn't check email. I you know, I was on social media once a day and that was it. It was like it was just very like get let go of everything and kind
of come back. And now we're getting back into it because it is it is twenty twenty, and there's no more fooling around because CS is happening very soon, which means I try to avoid my emails for the entire week, but that is nearly impossible because every day and every tech person I know, you're just getting bombarded with emails from CS. I'm looking at my calendar for next week
and it is more filled than I've ever seen. There's no way I'm gonna be able to do all these things that I actually put in the calendar.
But I will try, yeah, and will be It will be tough.
But my goal is to always bring the coolest CS coverage. There's so many things there. I try to find the stuff that is for the everyday person and stuff that like will actually come to fruition because a lot of times there's like pie in the sky, these big ideals, you know, eight K, sixteen K, that's cool, but I want to know this stuff that's going to come out in the next year that's going to be really useful.
And that's going to be uh, maybe not as flashy as the big stuff that just looks cool on TV, but but that you know, you can actually use. Like what you know, if you have Hugh lights in your home, like, well, what are they coming out with to make those easier? Or you know, we just had this story come out today. C by Ge makes some of my favorite lights, and you know, just last week I was looking for like a motion sensor for those lights, and it turns out
they're going to be unveiling those as ces. So it's like little things like that that I think are more interesting. I also saw a refrigerator that lets you grow your own indoor vegetables, so I thought that was pretty cool. I can't wait to see that. Perfect for urban gardeners. I have a feeling in California people be growing something other than carrots.
But yeah, we'll see, all right.
So you have probably been getting a lot of emails from companies about new privacy changes and their privacy policy, and I know in my email it's just been one after another and I ignored a lot of them until I looked into it because a lot of people emailed me and they're like, Rich, what is going on.
Well, here's the deal.
As of January first, we have a new thing called the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, And even if you don't live in California, this probably will affect you in certain ways because it's similar to what happened over in Europe with GDPR. That was their General Data Protection Regulation. Basically,
it's privacy protections for consumers. And even though Europe enacted those for European consumers, a lot of it transferred over to the US because look, if you're a company like Facebook and you have to abide by all of these privacy regulations, in many cases, it's much easier just to put them out for everyone instead of just people in Europe. I mean, how do you filter a person coming from Europe to your website and say, oh, only these apply
to you. And it's the same thing with California. So now I have to filter someone from Europe and California and everyone else. It makes it very complicated. So a lot of these companies are just blanket updating their privacy policies to kind of apply to everyone.
Here's what this CCPA does for you.
Number One, you can ask a copy to produce or ask a company to produce a copy of all of the information it has gathered on you. And a lot of this is coming from the La Times story. It's twenty twenty, and you might have some new privacy rights online, they say, And so that's number one.
Now, that's what GDPR did as well.
And companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google have allowed you to do this for a long time. They call it takeout or things like that, where you can just download a bunch of the information. This is very specific about what you should be able to download.
Now.
The other thing you can do is ask for that information to be deleted, and they will delete it, and
so you can do that as well. And the third is what they're calling opt out, which seems like it would be pretty straightforward, but it's really not, because when you're talking about the internet, like I looked at the bottom of the La Times website and a lot of these websites have a new button that says do not sell my personal information, and you can click it, and then there's a toggle at the bottom that says, basically, opt out of all like everything you just collected from
me on this website, don't share it with anyone else. Don't sell it to anyone else, which is kind of odd. So you can do that, but it feels like it's a one time thing, Like I don't think that that continues for like over and over for every visit through the time. Well, that's through any website, Like if you go to the bottom of like a lot of these websites. Now, let's just look at BuzzFeed, because I'm curious if they're you know, they're in California, right, they're serving up California.
So let's see if I go all the way down to BuzzFeed.
Now, the problem is a lot of these websites, you can't scroll to the bottom of the website.
There is no bottom on BuzzFeed.
It's just loading.
It just goes and goes. They call that infinite scroll. So I guess I can't see BuzzFeed. Let's try New York Times dot com. What's another like news? I guess we can try ours and see Yeah, okay again New York Times. I scroll to the bottom and it just refreshes the whole page. Okay, wait, I think it stopped. Oh no, I can't. Okay anyway, So that's that's what the deal is. And you if you really want to
have some fun. I think two takeaways from this. Number One, California now has one of the strictest online privacy laws in the nation, which is good. California has always been ahead when it comes to privacy and rules and regulations and.
All that good stuff.
So it's good it's happening here first, but I think it kind of filters out to the rest of the nation.
That's number one.
Number Two, these companies are collecting a lot of data on us, and that's pretty apparent if you want to look through, like just open one of the emails that you've gotten that says we're updating our privacy policy and just kind of click to the updated policy. And it's
actually written in pretty clear terms what they collect. Like I was reading the one for Postmates, and they're collecting like everything like when you're using the app, when you're opening the app, where you're going, when you're using the app, They use when you're in motion, so that they know if you're traveling in front of a business that you might want to get something from.
I mean, it's really crazy. Wow. Anyway, so it's wild. It is wild. The new Frontier.
Yeah, well, so that connects to our first question from Gwendolyn, what is the Facebook privacy notice about? And should we as users ask for information to be deleted?
So I'm trying to see if I actually got the Facebook privacy notice from Facebook. I imagine that was probably one of the first to come through. But let's see, that's kind of tough to find. There's so many emails with Facebook. But what she's asking is if you should if you should opt out with something like Facebook. I'm not sure you can opt out because if you go to their private policy, I mean, to use Facebook, they have to collect information on you. I mean that's kind of how
it works. Yeah, And if you don't agree to that policy and you want to opt out, I believe you basically have to stop using the service because how can you use Facebook, which is tracking you, your friends, your contacts, where you go, where you check in, your location, the things you like, the things you share. How can it do anything without that information? So if you opt out, there's really not much you can do.
Basically, you delete your account, Yeah.
That's what I would say.
I mean, you can't really use it without, you know, without giving them that information. So I think if you want to opt out, Number one, you can't really use Facebook, and I'm sure Facebook in their privacy policy says like, look, if you want to opt out of this, you're welcome to,
but we have to close your account. Because unless there's a way to use Facebook without all this data being collected, I don't know it, but that would be pretty amazing because the way that Facebook makes money is through our data. I mean, they sell ads against what they know about us, and that's where you get all those crazy little ads that people email me about all the time that always seemed too good to be true.
You know, like what did my wife buy?
Like Lindsay bought like a dress off an ad she like looked up and all of a sudden, she's like, the perfect dress popped up in my feed?
Was she talking about it? She was searching for dresses.
But I guess whatever keywords she searched, the companies had then sold an ad against that, and next thing, you know, it was like the perfect dress and I forget if it worked out or not, but you know it's all these companies do the same thing, but that's how they work.
Yeah, they get your data.
So Gwendolyn, I think if you are not comfortable with what Facebook is doing. Then you can opt out, but really I think opt out means that you got to quit the service. That's kind of the agreement is like, hey, we'll use all the stuff that you feed to us and give you this free service that has connected billions of people around the world in really interesting ways. And let's not forget that Facebook also owns Instagram, so the same thing is happening there and Instagram.
At this point, I would argue.
It's probably not more popular, like theoretically, like it feels like numbers wise, yeah, but it feels like when I'm looking at people scrolling, they're on Instagram.
Not so much Facebook anymore, although I still see a lot of Facebook. All right, let's talk about more privacy stuff. This happened over the break. I call it the break.
I mean, we didn't have a podcast last week, so theoretically there was a little break. Why you might remember that name because myself, along with a lot of other people, recommended their cameras and this is a very popular security camera because it was super cheap. It was I think about twenty dollars for the wisecam, and that's what made it seem too good to be true. And I hate for people to think like, oh, I told you so rich, because you said this was such a good thing, and
now look at what happened. They got breached. They suck, And I don't think that's the case here. Yeah, the camera's twenty bucks. They actually have a nice black version. Now it's kind of cool. But the beauty of this little camera is that nobody could believe, in a world of one hundred dollars security care, that any company could come up with a twenty dollars camera.
And what they did was they just made it simpler and easier.
And these were smart guys that used to work at Amazon and gals and they just said, hey, let's make a device you know that's twenty dollars and it does all the things you need. And the best part about Ways or whys rather ways, is the way you navigate. The best part about Whys is that it will take little clips and send them to the cloud for you for free.
And it's not unlimited.
It's like fourteen days worth of clips, and they're limited to a certain amount of time, maybe ten seconds. But if someone breaks into your home, oh you need is a thirty second clip of them, you know, moving in front of the camera and you've got their face.
So that was really cool, and a lot of you bought these things.
I mean, I think this Wyse story was one of the most popular stories we did in either twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen.
I can't remember what year it was, but it was a couple of years.
Ago and it was super I mean, I got emails about this camera four months on end, and I don't think that I was wrong about this company.
I still would recommend them.
In fact, I have one of these in my house that my kid used to try to capture Sanna on Christmas Eve. But here's what happened in this breach. Basically what was stolen was or what was exposed I should say, because no one has necessarily used this information in nefarious ways. It's just it's out there.
But why is nickname?
So what you called your cameras in the app, device names, user emails, your profile photos, your WiFi router name, and also some Alexa integration tokens. So if you had one of these connected to either Alexa or Google Assistant, that connection you might have noticed broke over the holidays and you're probably sitting there going wait, why is this no longer working with Alexa or Google.
That's because as a precaution.
They just reset all those tokens, so you just have to go in and re establish that connection.
So who was affected by the breach?
At first they were saying people that signed up December fourth through twenty sixth. It's all users that created an account prior to December twenty sixth. But what was not taken or what was not the information did not contain is passwords, personal financial data which aka credit cards, and video file. So those three things arguably are the things that you would worry about the most in a security breach.
So with that said, it's like, okay, you could breathe a little sigh of relief, but at the same time, if you named your camera you know, something really interesting, you know, like a funny name, and it's linked to your username, that could be kind of embarrassing. Otherwise it's it's kind of like we dodged a little bullet here, because you know, it's it's bad. Anytime that data is stolen or exposed, it's not good and we don't like
to hear that. And it gives whyse kind of like, you know, people are like I knew that was a cheap camera.
Maybe their security is not that good.
And if you look at Whyse's forum where they talk about a lot of these questions, they say they actually have a question that I thought was.
Great, let me find it here in this paperwork.
My hands are so dry every time before CES, my hands get it like the driest possible. And then CS doesn't help because it's the driest place on the planet.
You need those gloves. I like lotion gloves.
Okay, so your full disclosure. There was a year at CES I actually slept in those, Yeah.
Because I had to.
I was so my hands were so dry that I was like, this is who wants to see dry cractically red hands. It's ridiculous. And we live in LA which I don't even understand. But and then at C, yes, you're washing your hands a lot because you don't want to get sick.
So it's this whole big thing.
But it's funny you say that because I actually went out and bought those one year and I slept in them, and I.
Thought it was the funniest thing ever. If it's weird, it's weird, but it.
Worked, Okay. So in their blog posts, they say. We've often heard people say you pay, you pay for what you get. I think people say you get what you pay for. I think they got wrong. But assuming WISE products are less secure because they're less expensive, and why says this is not true. We've always taken security very seriously and were devastated that we let our users.
Down like this.
It's this is a clear signal that we need to totally revisit all WISE security guidelines and all aspects, better communicate those protocols to WISE employees, and bump up priority for user requested security features.
Beyond two factor authentication.
And I think they might force you to put on two factor authentication at this point, which you should. But what happened here? How did this get exposed? Well, let's see how did they do it?
One or something?
Yeah, I guess, let's see here, let's see. Says, we've been auditing all of our servers and databases. We discovered an additional database that was left unprotected anyway. Basically, yeah, something went wrong, so they figured it out. And if you have a WISE camera, I don't think all is lost. I just think that with anything, always set up two factor authentication and always understand that with all of these
IoT devices, there's always a chance this can happen. Yeah, and I will say in this respect, I think we got the best case scenario, which is your credit card and your video files were not leaked, right, So.
That's good news. Okay.
Our next question comes from Lucy and she wrote in on rich on tech dot tv. She filled out the contact section and that's how she was able to send this question. As we begin a new decade, I would like to clean out my drawers and closets of old technology devices. I have broken tablets, iPhones, trio, refurbished laptops, basically a decade of old technology and power chords. I don't want to just trash them in an e waste collection. I would really like to go through saved pictures and documents.
Is there a way to do this? Can you help me?
Okay, a couple questions, I think.
Well, let's see the first question about these saved documents and photos. I mean, there's not really a simple way to do that. You kind of have to power all these things up and go through and just kind of collect the stuff that's on them. I mean there's no like magical formula. Now, there used to be a device I would have recommended, but it went out of business.
It was this little box and I'm trying to remember the name of it, but it was a little box that you would plug your devices into and would basically like find all the pictures off those devices and kind of put it on that box. Oh and it was kind of cool, but it went out of business. So I have this box sitting at home with all these
pictures on it that I can no longer access. And I will tell you that they did give me a runway of like times running out, you need to get all those photos off, and I just never did, okay, and so now I just have this box forever.
That's uh, You'll never be able to get anything out of it.
Yeah, basically, I'm sure maybe one day if I've really tried. But yeah, So the first thing you got to do is go through and try to get all these documents off, which means powering up those computers. I would recommend probably the easiest thing to do is just get Google Photos for the photos. You literally install it on the computer with their special helper app and it will scan the
hard drive and upload all the photos to there. I would do that with the documents you're just gonna have to go through and kind.
Of grab what's what you need. Yeah, I love that you have a Palm Trio. I will tell you a story.
I've been obsessed with cell phones for my entire life basically, and I remember making my wife drive.
When I lived in Louisiana.
The closest best Buy was like three hours away, and so I think it was three hours, and so we had to drive three hours to buy this phone. This Palm Trio that came out was brand new, and I had to have it the first day. And I drive there and then we get to the checkout and it was like eight hundred bucks, you know, like full price or whatever. Like I think it was five ninety nine, which seemed like a lot, you know. And I get there and she's.
Like six hundred bucks. She didn't tell me it was that much.
Because like a lot of times, cell phones were like free at the time, you know, like right, one hundred bucks or whatever. This was before iPhone and anyway, so I just remember driving to this and getting and now I think of that phone, Oh my gosh, and that phone is like it was cool at the time. Now it'd be like nothing.
If you had it.
Yeah, so anyway, so I'm glad you have the Palm Trio. Now, when it comes to recycling these products, no, you don't want to just throw them in your trash can. You can recycle them. Two places i'd recommend looking into because I just did this with my mom. Yeah, I didn't you tweet about that's Staples. So Staples, if you look on their website, items accepted for free recycling is basically everything.
So you know, let's see a cell phone.
Yeah, cell phones are on their laptops, are on their GPS devices. Everything is recyclable there and you just bring it to your local store. They will recycle them securely and responsibly, any brand, any condition. The only things you cannot bring are alkaline batteries, appliances like giant printers like the floor, like the ones you have at your work, like a printer like a kitchen, electronics, bulbs, speakers, smoke detectors,
and TVs. But they will take monitors now in California, and this is what this is why my mom and I actually went to Staples versus best Buy in New Jersey.
Best Buy will take a lot of this stuff as well.
There is a limitation so you have to put in your zip code and it will tell you a lot of times you can only bring back like three items a day, so you can bring in like three you know, computers, but they I'm at three household items per.
Day because they just don't want to have They.
Don't want to you know, bring like a dump truck, you know, and plus that could. Yeah, I think it's mainly for like let's say I started a company where I go to your house and like collect all your stuff. Then I just dump it off like at the end of the week at best Buy. They want to keep that probably at Bay. So the average person, you know, three things.
So again, in a.
Lot of cities or a lot of states, if you want to do a monitor at best Buy, they're going to charge you twenty five dollars, which is still pretty darn good. You can bring it for free to Staples, so I'd always go to Staples. Yeah, if you can, if you can. But in California they don't have any drop off fees. So again, California, like I talk about, is very progressive and a lot of their laws and things, they clearly want people to recycle properly, and so there
are no fees for drop offs in California. Now I'm telling you this based on what I see on the website. I would call just to be sure. Like I called Staples before I went in and asked them, and you know, they told me all that stuff.
So just call wherever you are. But two really easy ways to recycle stuff.
And believe me, it's I actually have a TV because I upgraded a little TV in the playroom and I'm gonna bring that to one of these, probably just Staples, and just bring that in and get it recycled.
No, it's too it's too Yeah, it's too small.
And nowadays you can buy TVs for let me see, Actually, can I not bring a TV?
Oh?
Never mind, I can't bring a TV into Staples? Can I bring a TV into Best Buy? Let's say TV and video? You can recycle for twenty five dollars a two a flat panel less than fifty so perfect, twenty five bucks. So and I might also check and see if California, like if LADWP, since we live in Los Angeles, might.
Take that for free.
There's an app called the LA three to one one app that is very good about helping you understand if they'll haul away this stuff for free. Good question, and I'm glad I just did that with my mom. I was a little concerned with the hard drive on the laptop or the computer, because you know, it's still had some stuff on there, and they say they're going to wipe it and do it responsibly.
I just hope they do that, you know.
And that's the other thing my recommendation. I just recycled my other laptop through Apple. I did wipe everything off there manually with my moms. It was too old and kind of decrepit that we didn't want to do that. But I would recommend if you can, to wipe your stuff, even though these companies say they're.
Going to do it for you, but you never know, just in case, yeah.
You might get some kid in there that's like, uh, let me take a look at this, and you know, it's just yeah, yeah.
Better better just to feel secure in knowing that your stuff is gone.
Speaking of personal information, it might be easier to file your taxes this year for free.
And I always knew that into it. You know, the.
Developers of Turbo tax, which by the way, I've used to file my taxes, and I actually was very impressed with their system. But what I don't like is on the back end of what into It and TurboTax are doing is their lobbying to make taxes way more complicated than they need to be. And if you've ever filed your taxes, which I'm sure you have, is this year your first year?
Maybe this is like my second year. Yeah, it's it's kind of crazy.
It's it's just this whole big thing where like nobody really knows, and you talk to five different people, you get five different answers, and so it's just kind of annoying.
But anyway, so here's the deal.
IRS and into It and all these companies that make these these turbo or these tax filing systems. They basically had a deal for many years that they would hide their free products from search engines like Google, so that it made it tough for people to find them. So when you search for like online tax filing, you wouldn't
immediately find the free filing from Turbo Tax. You would just find their paid and maybe if you hunted down on their website you might see something about free, but then you might not be able to cross reference.
You're like, well that seems kind of shady, Like why would I do.
So, apparently this is all ending and now you can. You'll be able to find the free filing options a lot easier this year, which is good. Now, when you look at free filing options, it doesn't apply to everyone. It's you have to make under a certain amount and your your return has to be a certain simplicity. So if you run a small business, you're doing an LLC, or you've got a schedule see or all these random things that people have, you're not gonna be able to
file for free. You still need to get and you probably want to have a tax professional that knows what they're doing. But if you have like one W two and you work one job like I think you do, it's pretty simple. You put in your stuff and you can file for free.
That's nice as long as you as long as you have to. There's an income limit.
Yeah, and I don't know what that limit is, but they're you know, you can see it on there. But the point is, isn't it crazy that these companies like the I R S and you know these other you know, tax companies had a deal. And by the way, I got to give props where it's due. Pro publica is the I guess journalistic or the journalism organization that sort of forced these changes because they kept doing things about highlighting these little kind of shady deals that these companies had.
And I read somewhere that they were targeting students too, out of student like just out of college students.
Oh, I believe it, yeah, because think about it. If you have one W two and you have like, that's a lot of people in the US. Yeah, and so if they can all file for free, but a lot of times you don't realize that.
And even if they can get five or ten dollars out of.
You times millions of people in the US, that's a significant amount of money totally. So we'll see if this year it's better. The other thing that it frees the IRS up to do is to create their own system for filing.
Now.
I kind of have mixed feelings on this because on the one side, I say, well, who knows taxes better than the irs?
Right?
And the IRS should theoretically know how much you made because all of these companies are reporting to them. Right, if you're a legit company, when you get your W two, your company is also reporting that information to the IRS, And so for you Megan, you would log on and just you'd like put in your social and they'd be like, oh, here's your information that we got from your company. Is this all correct? And then they would calculate your taxes and say, boom boom boom, you're done.
Why can't they do that?
Now they can? Now they're free to do that. I haven't created that system. Now, the other side of me says, oh, wait a second, do I really trust the irs to say.
Here's how much you made?
And now let's say they say you made more than you made? Now you have to fight that information and kind of like and then I'm like, you.
Owe us exactly thousand dollars and you're like, oh, I thought I was going to make some money.
Right, So I see both sides, yeah, and you know, so we'll see what happens. But the bottom line is I think it's good that they kind of dropped these weird do not compete agreements they had that we didn't.
Really know about.
This next question comes from Marsha Love Love the show. What is the easiest way to get MP three music ripped from CDs that are on my Windows ten computer to play on my iPhone without using iTunes. Is there an app you recommend that will sync with my computer?
Oh? Yes, there is.
I love this question because I love this app. It is the best app you'll ever find what I phone. It is called Walter two and I believe I've talked about it on this podcast before. It might have predated Megan, but wa l t R two. And once you install this on your computer, whether you have a Mac or a PC, you literally drag and drop any file, not just an MP three. You can drag and drop a book file. You can drag and drop a MP three file.
You can drag and drop a PDF. I don't know, maybe not PDFs, but basically yeah, maybe pdf let's see, Yeah, PDFs, ringtones, videos, anything that you can find. The iPhone is amazing because it plays all these like crazy files and stuff and you can have your music on there, your.
Videos, your books.
But a lot of times to get them on there in the past, it's been kind of tough. And that leads a lot of people to just buy things from iTunes. Yeah, and to buy books from Apple Books because when you go to like a lot of people when they're buying my book, they would say, rich, you'd go to the Amazon app, I would say, if you go to try to buy the Kindle version of my book, it would say this is not compatible with this app or this iPhone or something like that, which is totally confusing because
it is compatible. It's just you can't buy it from the Amazon app. You have to actually buy it from a desktop and then download it to your phone.
So it's right anyway.
So it's little things like this that makes Walter Too so cool. And what they did was they kind of reverse engineered how iTunes works, and they figured out where when you drag something into iTunes and sink it to your phone, they figured out how to make it route into the right app. So if you drag a video file, which by the way, it can be any format because iPhone is very picky about the formats that it plays. So you can take any format video file and just
drag it into this app. It will convert it all in the background and.
Put it on your phone.
It is really fantastic. And you know people that have old music, you know old music videos, old like like old CDs that you want to rip and back in the day and what was the person's name again, Oh, Marsha, Marsha was saying that she doesn't want to use iTunes. I mean, iTunes, as far as I know, back in the day, always had a ripping solution in it. I don't know if it still does now that they've you know, changed iTunes and they've changed it now to just music
it's called. But it was very easy to just rip things and also get them onto your phone or your iPod.
Now I think that's a little bit too tough.
Anyway, Walter two is the app that you should definitely try out and just go ahead and you know, try it. You can download it for free if you want to use it indefinitely.
I believe you have to pay. I think it's forty dollars. Okay.
I've had this app for years, and I kind of forget about it every now and then because so much of what I do now is like, like I pay for YouTube so I can download. Actually I don't pay for it anymore. I just canceled that, but I'm probably gonna reget that. But you know, like YouTube, you could, you know, It's just I don't really have a need to put all these random files on my phone anymore. But if I did, this is the way that I would do. It's so easy when you drag and drop stuff.
You will not believe how.
Simple it is. It's really cool. That's awesome. So anyway, Walter too.
It's made by a company called softer Reno, soft O Reno.
Oh, great question.
All right, let's talk about what people ordered on Amazon over the holidays. It feels like the holidays were so long ago because we've gone through Christmas, we've gone through New Year's New Year's Eve. So but let's take a look back at what Amazon said was most popular. This was a record breaking holiday season. Of course they say that because Amazon continues to grow at a fast clip, so every year is going to be record breaking. When it's not, we have a problem. That means that Amazon
has stopped growing. And Amazon, as big as they seem, you know.
They still have a very far away to go.
And I know a lot of people think that they rule the world, but believe me, there's still other places out there. I have a theory that at the end of the day, the only places left standing have I told you this before, are going to be Target, Walmart, Amazon, and like Kroger. Oh, and then once those are the only four and they put all the little places out of business. It's like game over for prices. It's like all the prices are gonna go all the same.
Oh yeah, they're gonna go up. Yeah, because it's like now you have no other options. Like it's crazy. It's pretty crazy. So anyway, interesting theory.
Some of the most best selling products are most or some of the best selling products this holiday season. Where the Echo Dot, the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, the Echo Show five, Lol Surprise, Glitter Globe Doll, Winter Disco Series with Glitter hair, I Robot, Roombus six seventy five House laboratories.
What is that? What ha Us Laboratories? What is that? I have no idea what that is?
Oh, it is Cruelty Free Vegan cosmetics by Lady Gaga, Sore you go on Amazon, Yep, Carhart, Amazon Basics, and Champion Items. Amazon said they now have seven hundred and fifty thousand employees worldwide. Top ten cities that use an Amazon Locker or Amazon counter where Chicago, followed by Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, San Jose, Berkeley, Austin, and Columbus. The last delivery from Amazon occurred on Christmas Eve at
eleven to fifty nine PM in Seattle. That makes sense. Seattle is like their hometown. Some of the most popular recipes that folks asked the A word about, you know, rhymes with babexa were Thanksgiving turkey chocolate chip cookies and fluffy mashed potatoes. The most searched for holiday movie on Fire TV was Home Alone, followed by Elf and The Grinch. Nothing has changed with holiday movies in recent years. It's
like nothing has there been a new one. I did watch that new one called Noel on Disney Plus with.
Cups. Yeah cups? Is it called cups or so called cups? Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, Okay, it was okay, Yeah, it's okay.
And some of the best selling books at Amazon Bookstore was dog Man Fetch twenty two, which I actually bought from my kid but at Target. So I didn't contribute to that, okay, And that was not a Christmas gift, but that was just a flying on the plane gift.
So uh. Anyway, So that's the information about Amazon. Nice. I love I kind of like, I'm.
Sure you saw this, but all the end of your lists, I mean there's so many, there're a dime a dozen. I kind of like I don't find them that interesting. It's like the top artist that people listen to, it's like Drenk.
Yeah, like oh.
Taylor Swift, Oh okay, I could have you know, It's like there's not much insight. There's one going around very predictable. There's one going around about like the top rock songs, and like nine out of ten were like imagine dragons or something. You know, it's just kind of like, yeah, we get it.
We already know.
Okay.
This next question comes from Tony Love your segment on Channel five. Is there a way to recover deleted texts, especially those containing photos on your kind of phone?
But?
Uh, be sure with iPhone once it's gone, I'm.
Gonna guess it's iPhone.
But there's a couple things even if you have iPhone or Android, and I don't think either of these methods are gonna be one hundred percent, But if you do an iCloud backup of your system, there is if you look in your like, okay, so there's two ways that I messages are backed up. The first way is in the messages app. If you look in there, there's like a little toggle in iCloud that says backup messages and if you ever notice if you sign into like a
new phone or a new computer. And this is new by the way, as of like last year when Apple introduced this, but all your messages are synced now across devices and that's I message, that's called I Messages in the cloud. You may or may not have that turned on a lot of people don't want to turn it on because I don't know about you. But I have like five different devices, and when I get a text, they're like all going off with the I message, kind
of annoying. I go to my iPad and like, all my text messages are there that like you know, I've.
Already seen and stuff.
But I see the benefit of it because you have all your messages in all your different places. That's number one. Now if you deleted it from there, I would say. The place to look is your iCloud backup. And this is kind of the master backup of your entire phone that happens every night when you plug your phone in and you leave it overnight to charge. So to find that, you have to go into your iCloud and just look
for your iPhone backup. Now, you can't just go through your iPhone backup and kind of rifle through it.
It's all like mix exactly.
But there are programs that will allow you to decipher what's on that backup. So the iPhone backup or the iCloud backup was never really meant to like, it's not like a file where you can just click through. Like ideally it would be a file system where it would say photos, text messages, apps, whatever, data, and you would just be able to click through everything.
It's Apple. They don't make it like that.
They make it all compressed and weird, and it's a million things. But there are apps that will sort through that data and help you find those text messages. I don't know why this person needs to find those. I'm assuming there was a password contained in some of those, or a screenshot of a password. The screenshot of a password that he forgot is the only way to recover it. I'm assuming this is not like, you know, cheating or spousal or whatever, or just assuming this is very kind,
kind natured. But that's what I would say, is you got to find some sort of a third party app to do this.
Now you can retrieve that backup and then.
Put it back onto your phone. But like recover it, but it gets kind of complicated exa then erase it.
All this stuff on your phone. It seems like a.
Third party app, which, by the way, you have to pay for these things. I think a popular one was like doctor Phone. Doctor f O n E is a popular one for a long time and that has data recovery solutions for and I haven't used this app.
Often.
These companies will send me these apps to kind of look at, and I'll a lot of them are are from you know, overseas companies, and I'll try them and it's.
Like, okay, I see it.
But anyway, doctor Phone from wonder Share is one that you might try. But I would check into some of these things and just see and you can. By the way, Android also does backups of your data as well more and more now, so I would check you can use these programs for either one of those.
But if you've deleted a text, like if you delete a thread, yeah it's gone.
It's pretty much gone.
Yeahah, but if you wanted to find it you could.
Well, Okay, I'm giving the theory of let's say you deleted it, you have to look at your backup and let's say you have several backups. Yeah, like almost like a time machine backup of like Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Like you have to go back in time to find that text.
Got it?
Because if you're just doing a backup every night that erases the old backup, then it's gonna be gone because if you waited twenty four hours, that backup has pushed out the old one. So again, this is tough because it all depends on how you back up your phone and what you're using to back it up, and how you back it up and how often if you didn't. Sometimes people plug in their phone and they look in their backup and it has not backed up in three weeks and you don't even know that.
Then that might be.
Your best case scenario because this text is in there and it was You're like, yes, I didn't back up last night. So it really sort of depends on so many things. That's why I say it's very tricky to do this. Well, it is a new year, and people are trying to be more mindful in the new year. People like my wife who was like, I'm downloading a journaling app to journal my life every day, and I said, good luck with that, because most people basically do this for a couple of weeks.
It's kind of like going to the gym.
You go for the first couple weeks of the year, and then you drop off, and that's it.
What's negative?
You're right, it's hard.
And I say this because I actually downloaded one of these apps last year to try to start. It wasn't actually for journaling, it was more for a daily It actually was for journaling because I wanted to keep I remember this because I don't use Facebook anymore, like personally, and Facebook used to be basically a journal because you would write, like what you did that day, and you'd show a picture of you with your kids, you know, back in the day with your friends, like going out
to dinner or whatever, and it would be shared. Now Instagram is kind of like that, but you're only doing that like once a day, or you know, for a lot of people are not even doing once an Yeah, it depends on you know, you know, it depends on how often you're using that, right, But the point is a journal is much more private.
You can put you know, private.
Thoughts in there anyway, whatever your need. I did some research on some of these journals to see which one I like, and which one I think you'll like. I came up with one, two, three, four five, And there's one that really stands out to me.
Out of all these journals. There's actually two that stand out.
But anyway, the first one is called Reflectively and this is kind of there's two journals that I've noticed.
Two types of journals.
One is just like a diary that's online and you just type in stuff and it helps you kind of like put dates on there and pictures. The other is a guided journal, which I think is actually more useful in this day and age because if you're going to have an app that's a journaling app, it should prompt you with certain things like how do you feel today?
Or what you do today? Or who would you hang out with, so that you don't have to think of everything, you know kind of yeah, and it's asking you different things throughout the week. Theoretically, if you just want to write down your thoughts, you get a pad and paper.
That's what I have a journal.
Yeah, yeah, wow, you do well.
In my intro, I say that journaling is not just for teenagers anymore.
It's not because you really think.
Of journaling for teenagers, but when you talk about mindfulness and all this. You know, people are trying to get this heightened sense of awareness of themselves.
Journaling is a big part of that.
And you know, it's different than social media because on social media you're just putting your highs.
You're not really putting your real thoughts or your real you know, just everything not as vulnerable exactly.
And so that's and some people that pretend they are, Like there's some people I follow that you know, they'll post these things, but like even the vulnerable picture or the vulnerable thoughts are really crafted to be.
You know, yeah whatever it is, right right. So Reflectively is a guided journaling app.
This one asks you just asks you a series of questions like how is your day, what did you do? How did you feel? The entries are called stories. They're really easy to complete, and it's free for seven days. It's forty eight dollars a year after that. So that's Reflectively. I wasn't I thought it was fine. It wasn't like you know, it was like it was okay. Daily oh daylo helps you keep a personal diary without actually writing.
You pick your moods and activities, so it's like happy, sad, whatever, and then what activities you did, so you know, Jim this that. I thought the funny thing was it didn't say work, so I actually had to add work as an activity, which I thought was like kind of weird that they left that out. But maybe they don't want you to talk about work because I don't know. Yeah, wait, what if you want to add more context or context?
You can also include some notes in your entries. The app also helps you create goals, like if you want to watch more movies, read more, or eat healthy. It kind of tracks those achievements, so every time you mark that you watched a movie that day, you can see at the end of the month, did I watch more
movies than last month? So that's kind of cool. I like that there's a daily calendar tool so you can see your daily mood, so if you put your mood in, you can see like all green days, all red days, all yellow days, all at a glance.
So that's kind of neat.
And you can pay twenty four dollars for the yearly premium plan with the ability to lock the app with a pin, so I think that's kind of funny as they hold you hostage with that, which you know that's kind of funny. Yeah, Journey is. They do let you set a pass code for free. They even let you store your entries in Google Drive for safekeeping, and they have apps for lots of different platforms, so some of these are only iOS or some of them are only Android.
This one is pretty much very close to a digital diary. You know, you start an entry, it's all time stamped, and then at the bottom there's these little buttons that lets you.
Add where you are, who you're with, how you feel.
And also attachments like photos, So it's kind of like a digital journal that kind of helps you along but doesn't necessarily ask you stuff. Plans on this one are confusing. I cannot figure out for the life of me what the difference is between the monthly membership plan or the lifetime premium plan, because the lifetime premium is like eight dollars, but then the monthly like three dollars, So why would
you not just go with the lifetime. I don't think the lifetime includes all the membership option.
It's very strange.
But anyway, now, if you just want a standard digital diary, the one I recommend is called Day one.
Super straightforward. You kind of open it up.
You get a time stamped entry that just starts with an entry, and then you can add what you like, including video, so there's like video, audio, photos, drawings, or a scan. So let's say you go to a concert, you can scan your ticket, put it in there, and you still have a paper ticket, which you probably a screenshot at this point, and it's thirty.
Five dollars a year.
It gives you all the features, so a lot of things Like I started writing a text entry and that was fine. As soon as I want to add a photo, it was like, you gotta pony up to thirty five bucks, which I think is fine. The other thing that's kind of cool, depending on how you use this is you can turn your entries into a printed book at the end of the year. Oh just kind of neat, so you can print out. This was my second favorite Day one, Yeah, so I thought that was really cool.
My favorite is jore.
I think that's how you say it, jou want okay. And you can tell this is a very slick, very high end app that was designed with kind of today's users in mind. It nudges you with questions like how do you feel right now? And it kind of guides you through, like like when I set it up, it was like three different questions and you just type the answers.
It even has like some of the answers started, so it can be like I feel dot dot dot and you tap that and it starts to write that, and then you just have to type the rest or I've been doing dot dot dot and then you type that. So it like kind of nudges you to like think, which I thought was really great. They also have motivational quotes to help you along, and you're always free to start a fresh new entry without all the other stuff as well. Premium Undure it's kind of expensive. It's sixty
dollars a year. That gives you the ability to add photos to your entry. So again, all these all these diary apps, if you really want to get the most out of them, you're gonna have to pay. Yeah, I mean it makes sense and it's fine. Otherwise, just use the notes app on your phone and that's free.
You know, if you want.
Free or Google doc you could like start, Yeah, you can do that, so Google doc for twenty twenty of all your.
But what I like about these apps is I think they nudge you to think in different ways, like with the day one, the way that it showed like scans or a picture, like you just draw a little picture of like a little sketch one day.
You know, it's kind of fun, like yeah or whatever.
I think that's kind of neat versus just like a Google doc, which is free, but it's just different. It's a different These apps are kind of there to nudge you into doing this right kind of therapy.
Yeah, pretty much, really ask you questions.
Premium is sixty dollars a year and let's see I said, it gives you the ability to have a photos. It also gives you access to a library of lessons on gratitude, self confidence, and more. The Juror app reminds me of Headspace a lot, and it actually made me wonder why Headspace doesn't have or maybe it does a journaling function built in or this might be a very good target for Headspace to acquire to build that into their app.
And once you have those two together, meditation and the journal app, it's like game over.
I'm googling it. So journaling in.
Headspace I don't think they do, but yeah, anyway, that is going to do it for the show.
If you can believe it. I feel like these shows just get shorter and shorter, but they don't. That's just the way it is.
Thanks so much for listening, Thanks for watching in the new year on KTLA five. You also got me on social media at rich on Tech on Instagram. Coming up upon cees in the next week, so I will be doing a lot there with social media and the little videos and showing you all the cool stuff that I see there.
Let's see what else? Oh, something that's new.
If you go to rate my podcast dot com slash rich on tech, it will help you rate this podcast. So h oh sorry, it's rate this podcast dot com slash rich on tech. What I say, rate my podcast, Rate this podcast dot com slash rich on tech, and you go in there and it basically helps you leave a rating in Apple podcast or whatever your favorite podcasting app is.
Keep in mind you can listen to this.
Podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, basically wherever you listen to audio, they have all become podcasting apps as well, so don't forget about that. You don't need two separate apps now to listen to your podcast. It's basically all in one for a lot of people.
Let's see I think that's gonna do it. Producer Megan. Where can people find you?
I'm on Twitter, Producer Megan.
Producer Megan on Twitter, and the website is rich on tech dot tv. If you want to leave a question, just hit the contact button up at the top. That is the easiest way to get in touch with the podcast.
Thanks so much for listening. Have a fantastic day. We'll talk to you real soon.