Coronavirus tracking feature on smartphones

to producer Megan. What's up?

out too early. But when I was on vacation, my main thing was just not being on social media as much as possible, and it really does change, because the thing about social media is it never ends. It never ever ends, and you can go down down a wormhole so quickly and just start researching something like someone says

something like, oh wait, what is that? And you just start researching and you follow it on Instagram, then you go to Twitter, and then next thing you know, you're looking on Amazon see if you should buy this thing. And it's like a whole big thing, and if you're just off of it, you kind of forget about it. And yes, it just keeps going, but you're not part of it.

generally true. But from time to time things do spring up. And this one is called thief Quest Thief Quest or a written I think it was called Evil Quest. Yeah, so researchers are calling it both. But this software has the ability to search your system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallets, log which you type. And the way people are getting it is from downloading pirated software from a torrent website, and I don't think many of you are doing that.

Maybe you are, I don't know. But the other thing is that it also has to break through all of these warnings on your Mac computer. So with the recent Max I think it was the last operating system, they started doing this thing where any software you install that's not from a trusted developer, you get a lot of Windows that basically prohibit you from installing that software unless you go into your settings and specifically say I want

to allow this installation. It's under security setting, Security and Privacy, and then you go to general and it says allow apps downloaded from and I app Store and identified developers is what I have as my default. But if it's not one of those identified developers, it basically just stops the installation, and you have to know how to go in there to actually allow it. And so this stops

a lot of stuff from getting on your computer. But if you ignore all those warnings, which I do because I do install software from unidentified developers because I'm testing a lot of stuff and just because they're unidentified doesn't mean they're bad. It just means that Apple they haven't

entered into like Apple's software program or whatever. Anyway, the point of this article in malware bytes is that malware bites will detect this malware and remove it, but if your files get encrypted, they're not sure how bad because this system also locks up your software and demands ransom, so it locks up all your files and then says, hey, if you don't pay us, we just you know, will delete all your files. And that happens pretty often on

Windows computers, by the way. So the bottom line to this whole thing is that this malware bytes blog post says you always want to have two backups of all of your important data and one should not be attached to your Mac at all times because if you just have like a you know, on a Mac, you can do that time machine thing. If you just have a hard drive connected to your Mac, guess what, the ransomware or the malware will also find its way onto that hard drive and ruin your backup. So you don't want

to do that. So this guy from malware Byte says he use his time machine to maintain a couple copies, then a carbon copy cloner to maintain a couple more, and one of the backups is always in a safe deposit box at the bank and he swaps them periodically. Okay, that seems like a bit much. You could probably just keep your hard drive. Like how much I go to my bank for my safe deposit box and I also count my one hundred dollars bills in there, and then

I have my hard drive right under them. I don't think you need to do that, but I do see what he's saying. Keep keep an off site drive, so a drive that you back up to and keep it on a shelf in your office, and ideally you would keep Ideally, what you would do is you'd have an online backup and a hard drive and just keep them in different places. That's the main thing. And he says, if you have a good backup, ransomware is no threat because the bottom line is if you're regularly backing up

your computer. By the way, I said bottom line about seventy five times, just now a little rusty. I love the bottom line. It's always such a great It's like, bottom line, what are we looking at here? You know, if you ever go to negotiate a car, it's like you go back and forth and back and forth. I was like, just give me the bottom line, like what is the deal here? How much do you have to pay for this thing? They got to go into the

manager's office and you sit there. Buying a car is the worst experience a human adult has to go through. I think, yeah, one of the worst. So I really, well, I have a person that I go to and so basically I only buy cars from like one place now because I've got a person, And I think people do find their guy. You know, I got a guy. But once you find them, like this this woman, I know, she literally gives me the bottom line price, like out the door, what is the price? What am I paying?

I don't want to have to deal with.

And you know, they said when iOS thirteen came out, they said they were on like kind of a TikTok schedule. Where iOS twelve would be a big update, iOS thirteen would not. Now iOS fourteen is a big, big update. So not only do we get the widgets on the home screen, but we also get the app library, which

is basically an organized list of all your apps. But it's amazing and it's very it's been solid, solid, rock solid on by the way, my primary phone, which you're not supposed to do and I do not recommend doing even with the public beta. Don't install it on your public on your main device because it could just go wrong. Like my phone last night, I had my first crash where it's just the whole thing just like it didn't erase anything, but you know, and there's little things here

and there, and the battery life is really bad. So I used to never care about battery life. My phone is going dead, you know, three quarters of the way through the day or towards the end of the day. So it's definitely not something you want to install on your main device. I'm a tech guy for a living, so I will take that risk for you. But to answer John's question, I would say probably any day now

because the developer beta is so solid. I think Apple, after a couple of weeks of getting the feedback, is going to be like, all right, we can launch this to the public as a beta. Don't forget, this is not the final software. Final iOS fourteen will come out in September. That's when you should download it. But if you're tech in client, that's the safest. It's just here's

the main thing you don't want to happen. You don't want to be in an emergency situation where you need to call nine one one and your phone crashes and it does not work. That's kind of like the worst case scenario. Yeah, Instagram not working or you know. But there's little things like Instagram may come up with an app update during the beta and it breaks the functionality

of Instagram because they're not thinking about the beta. They're thinking about the average person and that's running the final software. So these are the things you have to think about what I did was I did a encrypted backup through iTunes on my computer, and so I have that so if my phone totally goes could put then I can just restore it. But that's still a pain. Believe me, you don't. You don't want to do this.

have to say. And these computer companies, computer these tech companies have designed these keywords in a certain way so that we don't say a variation of them very often, and so that way, these little assistants can click into you know, functionality when they need to, only when they need to. But it doesn't always work that way. And researchers now say they found over one thousand phrases that in correctly trigger these virtual assistants, and they did it

through TV shows. They they their whole research papers about TV shows saying stuff in dialogue that's activating these little devices in the background. And here's the interesting part about this. These are local triggers. So how these devices work. There's it's locally listening for the hot word, right, if you have SI r I, it's h SII, or if you have Google, it's I can't even say it because if I spell it, it's saying it, so it'll it'll trigger it. And you know, the A word I can't even say

because it's just the A word. So if you say any of those things, it locally listens and it goes, okay, I think I heard that, and then it will send that information to the server if it thinks it hurt it, and the server will analyze it and say, oh no, actually Rich said something else, and then it will just it will just die down, but in many cases it will still activate. So here's some of the words. For the A word, you can say unacceptable, election and a

letter and it might trigger her. For Google Home, you might say okay, cool and okay, who is reading and it might trigger that one. For Siri, it's a city, and hey Jerry, and for Cortana Montana. So now you may try these at home, and they may not work. Because here's what the researchers are saying. That these things are so smart that they're updated in near real time

by these tech companies. So once they saw this, they probably went in and manually tweaked these things just a little bit so they don't respond to these these phrases anymore. But they found a lot of phrases, and they haven't published their full paper, but the bottom line is they say that these voice assistants can intrude on users' privacy

even when they think their devices are not listening. And if you're concerned about this, you might want to keep these things unplugged, turned off, or blocked from listening except when you actually want to use them, which kind of defeats the purpose of how the wakeword because you want them listening so that you can use them. Amazon said to Ours Technica, which is the writers of this article,

not the paper, just the article. They said, by design, our weakeword detection and speech recognition get better every day as customers use their devices, we optimize performance. We continue to invest in improving our wakeword detection technology and encourage the researchers of this paper to share their methodology so we can respond in further detail. So what Amazon's saying is like, look, we know this happens, but we are constantly It's like a cat and mouse game. They're constantly

making these things respond in a better way. But it does happen, and it happens a lot.

eyes and ears in the entire world. So even if I'm not experiencing something, they are emailing me because they are. So if they see something on social media that suspect or weird or interesting, they email me. And when I get a bunch of these emails, I know something's something's up. So with this coronavirus tracking, we had done a story on it a while back, and I thought nobody really cared.

But then during this whole outage with T Mobile a couple weeks ago, I guess people timed a social media post to say, oh, you know when that outage happened on your cell phone, Well, guess what the company secretly installed coronavirus tracking software. And of course this goes on fire on social media and it spreads and people ask me like is this true? And sure enough, it is true. The software is on your phone if you have an

Android or an iPhone, check it out. You can go on iPhone to Settings, Privacy, Health and you'll see COVID nineteen exposure logging. If you go to Android, it's Settings Google COVID nineteen exposure notifications. This is the fastest I've ever seen a new feature hit almost every iPhone and Android in the world in a matter of months. And what it's doing is it's not tracking you, but it's framework for tracking systems that states and health authorities are building. Now.

Have they built any frameworks that actually take advantage of Google and Apple system not really so far. The only states that have said they are is North Dakota, Alabama, and South Carolina. Twenty two countries have also expressed interest.

But and according to the person I interviewed as well, he says that the problem with this system is that people don't trust big tech anymore, and it all started to unravel with Facebook's Cambridge Analytical Analytica scandal, And so the reality is this framework is on your phone, but it's not activated, and the only way you can activate it is with an app, and right now there are

no real apps to download. So I know that sounds very complicated and people are annoyed that this thing is on their phone, which, by the way, I don't think you should be, because if we actually had this active, it would really help in slowing the spread of coronavirus. Because right now, Megan, do you know how this thing is spreading.

If I got a notification that said, oh, by the way, you were exposed, I'm like, oh what, oh my gosh, I need to go get tested, right now, so now I get tested way earlier than I would have until, you know, waiting for symptoms to happen or whatever. And now I can stay inside my house for fourteen days to let it pass and not pass it on to anyone in that time. That's why this system slows the spread.

So we shouldn't really be against it. I get it people don't like to be tracked, but every single expert that I've spoken to agrees that the system that Google and Apple came up with does protech individual privacies. They're not using location, they're not using identities. They're simply using Bluetooth to measure how close you are to other smartphones.

And that's it. And when one of those smartphones says one of their owners says, oh I got coronavirus, it emails or notifies the other phones that you know that came into contact with it. I mean, it's really a brilliant system. And anyway, it's not active, it's not really there. It's not doing anything. But if you want to check and see what it's doing on your phone, go ahead, take a look. You can't uninstall it, so it's there. And I hope that a big state like California or

New York pledges support for this thing. I don't know why they're not. California should have been on board from day one. Apple and Google, I'm sure lobbied them, and they just I don't know why they didn't want to do it. Maybe they just thought privacy. They didn't they didn't think it would be a good enough sell to citizens, And that could be a very valid thing. But it's unfortunate because I do think as a tech person this could slow the spread. So okay, yeah, I'll get off

my soapbox. Let's see. Let's talk about YouTube TV. I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time on this, but YouTube TV, which is their cable TV offering live TV all these channels. They are raising the price again, and the price has gone up from when I first covered this thing, from thirty five bucks a month now it is up to sixty five dollars a month. And what do you get, Well, you get eighty five channels, which is awesome. They just added all the Viacom channels

be ET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon. And in fact, when I first covered this, the reason I did not sign up for YouTube TV other than a free trial was because they did not have Nick Junior. And what was the other one? What's the other kid's channel, Disney Junior. I think they might have had one of those. I know they didn't have Nick Junior, so I said nah. But the problem is everyone's going crazy about the fact that this is so expensive, but the reality is this

is just cable TV, and what do you expect. You're not gonna get a you know, Spectrum for you know, Spectrum charging ninety dollars a month and then YouTube charging twenty and it's the same exact service. It just doesn't work that way. These companies that own these channels make money based on charging these cable companies a certain amount for each channel. So it's just not happening. And as YouTube tv continues to add channels, they just hike up

the price, just like regular cable. So if you're looking for an alternative to regular cable, you gotta find an alternative. And it's what I've done, which I don't have standard cable. I have a bunch of streaming services and I have a lot of them, so they all add up to about what I was paying for cable. But I like the ability to get rid of them when I want to sign up when I want to same thing with YouTube.

With YouTube TV, you can pause it if you don't want it, So maybe what you do you pause it for six months and then you come back to it. But I don't see a big need for a cable package in my life anymore because I like to watch shows on demand and for my local streaming, I use an antenna for KTLA and that's all I need. And

so it was funny though. Actually on our vacation when we went on a road trip, when we were staying at the hotel, the kids are not aware of regular TV like channels, so the hotel room had direct TV. And so I'm not kidding you, Megan. My kids were so enthralled with the idea of like Nick Junior. They watched it NonStop because they couldn't believe that like shows just ran at a certain time. And then the commercials they were going nuts over because they had never seen

commercials before. And so they're sitting there, Well, they don't watch TV, they don't watch regular TV, so.

just for a little portion. But it was just the funniest thing because it just it really just made me realize how out of the loop they are from like the way I grew up watching cartoons on like a Saturday morning or after school, where you just tune into the channel and you see what's on, and nowadays everything is so kind of figured out. But great question about coronavirus.

I think I answered most of it. So if I didn't. Well, look at the story at Katila dot com, slash tech, or just go to rich on Tech dot tv and look for coronavirus tracking. All right, this was really cool. I'm always on the lookout for a new poker app, and easy Poker seems like a real promising app. And I know I've mentioned other poker apps in the past to help you host a virtual game because of the whole stay at home situation, but easy Poker works for that.

But the reality is the guys are the team behind this devised this as an actual replacement for cards and chips. So even if you were having a game in your home, which right now we're not really doing, but if you could this, you would still use this because everyone's got a smartphone and it just kind of takes care of all the I guess, let's it inefficiencies in a standard game, which is cards, counting, chips whatever. Now, personally, I don't really want to replace my poker games with my friends

with the chips and everything. I don't want to replace that experience. I like that, and so I don't think it's going to replace it. But I think it is a fun concept, and the concept is you can play poker at any time with your friends and you can all be anywhere. So Easy Poker a couple of things that they did to make it cool. Number one, you don't have to install like a credit card. You don't have to register with like a credit card, because all these like poker apps they want you like a credit

card immediately. Most of them are played horizontally, but you hold your cards vertically, so you hold your phone vertically, which is a small thing but it's actually quite important. And then also you can hide your cards, so you tap to kind of look at your cards, and then you can just put your phone down and your cards you're hidden. It automatically hides those. So again, this was created by real poker players to emulate what a real

game would be like. It just so happens they launched it at the perfect time where it also works for a virtual game. And I kind of tested this out just a little bit, where you sign up for a game and then you just text the link to your friends. They have to download the app and sign up, but that's it. It doesn't ask them for a credit card or anything, which I'm wondering what it means for the money, Like how you would settle out if you're actually trying to

play with real money. Anyway, the website is easy dot Poker, so I think it's really cool. I want to check it out with my friends. So far, my friends have hosted a bunch of these virtual poker games. I have not played any of them, but I am gonna do one with this, and I think they're all gonna be blown away at just how easy and fun this is.

I think it looks really cool anyway. If you want the real experience, by the way, which gives you the most out of the app, you're gonna the host is gonna have to pay forty bucks a year for the membership, or you can pay six dollars a month, but forty dollars a year is a way better deal. Pay for it once, and then you get up to twelve players and you can customize your game. If you just do the four players free game, you don't get to really customize stuff. And there's no video chat on this one.

There's only audio chat, which is probably just fine, so you can audio chat with your friends while you do this, or you just fire up Zoom on a separate computer. You're all on Zoom and you're just playing together. I mean, it's I think it's such a cool little app I can't wait to play.

month or thirty dollars a year. I would always pay for the thirty dollars a year because you're gonna save and believe me, you're doing this thing over and over. You're in, you're out. So I know it doesn't seem like a lot to save six dollars a year, but if you do it for five years, that's now an extra year that you've saved. So I would do that. And here's the thing about ring doorbells that people don't realize.

If you don't pay for a subscription, they will still work and you can still look in on your doorbell or your camera. The difference is that it will not re cord the clips for you and save them. So that's the big difference is that you don't get the history.

So what does that mean. It means that if you were not looking through your door at the moment that someone walked by, Well, you're not going to capture them, You're not going to see them, so you definitely It's kind of one of these things where you kind of have to pay for it for it to actually work. And nest cameras are the same way. Now, whyse cameras are not that way? Why's the little cheap twenty dollars

security cameras? They will record clips for fourteen days on a rolling basis, So if someone came up to your camera in within fourteen days, that clip will be saved to your account for free. So you know, but you have to know these little delineations. The Pepole camera is one that they specifically created for people that live in apartments or condos. It's on sale right now eighty bucks.

That's a fantastic deal. It's very simple to install. I have not dead up myself, but all you have to do is remove the existing people, which I imagine you just unscrew it and then put this in at it's in the same hole, and then you just screw it back on and boom. I don't think there's any damage to the door. There's no drilling of new holes, so I don't think personally that you need to get permission

from your apartment manager. Of course I'm not your leasing manager, but I would think that as long as you're not damaging your building, it should be fine. By the way, this is a fourth of July sale. This is a great deal. Fifty bucks off. Wow, that's really good. Wow, so wow, that's oh wow. It ends on well by the time a lot of people listen to this, it might be ended. It's July sixth, But that's a great deal eighty bucks

for this thing. So I would jump on it. And I think that's going to be a fantastic solution for a home. When I lived in an apartment, this would have been a great little solution for my door because you know, if someone tone up to your door, that's that's the point of entry for an apartment is your door. So if you've got a little ring thing on there, and yes, someone can pull it off or break it, but I mean, what are you gonna do? That's the risk you take. So I would say, go for it.

Good question. Do I answer everything in the question she wanted to know? Yeah? He did. This was really fun this week, and I love dinosaurs. Jurassic Park is one of my all time favorite movies, if not my favorite movie. I have not watched it with my kids just yet, but I love that movie. I've watched it many times, and it's just something about the idea of bringing back dinosaurs and the way they presented it in that movie was so realistic of like, wow, we might like the

idea of just extracting DNA and kind of rebuilding. It was to me like very feasible as a kid. So I loved it, and I was so sad to see the whole thing kind of come tumbling down. Spoiler alert. But you can now bring to life ten dinosaurs from Jurassic World on Google. All you have to do is search for a dinosaur name on Google on your phone and just you'll see a little box that says view in three D and then it will bring up the

dinosaur and you can put it in your backyard. It kind of so what it does is it uses a camera on your phone so you can see your surroundings, but it places the dinosaur in augmented reality in those surroundings. It's so cool, it's so much fun. I did a little video about this on my Instagram at rich on Tech and people went nuts. People went nuts on Facebook. I always love when I think something's really cool and then I post it and people think it's really cool.

I'm like, yes, I was justified in spending an hour doing this video. And then sometimes I post stuff and it's like, uh, crickets, which is fine too. And you know, I'm not always right with what I think people would find interesting, but a lot of times I am. You were right about the what was the thing we did that went viral? The uh the pizza of the pizza oven went viral? The uh Megan Meghan's actually a secret

viral sense sense What is it? Sensei? Sensey? You you have a knack for for figuring out things that would go viral. Because we've done that other thing.

going to go viral. But in my history of being a KTLA, and you know, really I didn't, I've had a couple of these hits. But like the thing is, there's always like some sort of surprise or some sort of payoff that's like really interesting that you want to share with your friends. That's kind of what I've noticed. So anyway, the dinosaur thing didn't go viral, but it definitely did well. And all you have to do is,

like I said, search for one of these names. It works with Tyrannosaurus, Rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Spinosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Cleosaurus die oh my gosh, Dihosaurus, petrodon and parasse I stopped at like tyranne.

the dinosaur, only work on Android. So a lot of these people are emailing me and saying, Rich, I can't hear the sounds on my iPhone. I'm telling them how to turn up the volume and change the settings, and it turns out after further reading that they only enable the sounds in Google on Android. I'm guessing that's for some technical reason that the iPhone doesn't offer. I don't know. It seems like they just did that as a you know, we gotcha, Yeah, iPhone, ain't that great?

best for themselves. But it's also really weird when you travel a lot, because it's just like one big law, Like okay, in Los Angeles, like you can't drink walking down the street, but in Las Vegas, like bh whatever, just go ahead, have a giant you know, margarita and one of those like giant Margarita things like down the street. It's like what or like New Jersey. It's like I got out of my car to start pumping gas and I was like getting yelled at from the guy and

he's like, no pumping gas. And I should have remembered because I grew up in Jersey, where you can't pump your own gas. But I'm so used to it in California that would just go home. I just forget. Yeah. Or when I moved up to Washington State and I went to buy we were making Oh my gosh, this is how this is how dated this is. I was making apple teenis, remember those when those were like hot? No you don't because you're so young, but apple teenis were like the hottest drink going for a little bit.

And so I was trying to find the stuff to make an apple teeny and I go to like a liquor store on it. By the way, in California they sell wine and everything inside like a Ralph's in other states not the case. Uh, Like you go to these states and you have to go to like a state they call it like a package store in some states, or like a you know a state, like what was the state? I think it was Washington State. You had to go to a state liquor store, which, by the way,

we're closed on certain days like a Sunday. So I mean it's really interesting, just the difference. A lot of it has to do with booze. Megan. Okay, I know you know so much. I'm sort of an expert. So my recommendation for the clip for your car. Oh my gosh. When I lived in Louisiana, you could drive through and get a daker through a drive through Daquerri store. Now, yes, yes, and by the way, before I got there, right before they they shut down the fact that the passenger could

drink the dakri while you were driving them. But they shut that down because they said, you know what, it's probably safer if nobody in the car is drinking. But what they would do when you got your dakriy is they would tape down the straw. And that was a universal sign to an officer that pulled you over there, like I've not been drinking this. It's the straw is taped. Do you see the tape? Yeah? I mean is insane, so wild. All right, let me just tell you about

this what my recommendations are for the clips. If you want, since it's new to you and you probably want to spend a little bit of money on a nice clip for your car, My absolute favorite is called PROCLIPUSA dot com and you will find a custom solution for your car. So if you have a you know, whatever car you have, they've gone into it and they have looked and seen where the best placement is for a holder for your phone, and it's all custom. It fits perfectly, your phone snaps in.

They even have great things where like if you have an iPhone, it just snaps right into the charging cradle so that your phone is always charging. It's really slick. It's a little bit more expensive, probably about ninety dollars for that solution, but I'm telling you it is the best, and that's what I'd recommend if you want a cheap solution. I like what's called the key New Airframe and so just look up the airframe. That's really good, but it's

super easy, super cheap. And then the other one I like that I've not tested, but I see commercials for it and it looks really cool is the weather Tech cup phone. And it's like a you put it in your cup holder and it holds your phone, and I like that. It looks really cool. To me. I would not want to use up one of my cup holders because I value my cup holders. But if you don't mind, then go ahead.

I'm not as hot on as the wireless earbuds. The wireless earbuds for twenty eight dollars I was very impressed with. In fact, I saw them go down to as cheap as twenty dollars on Amazon. But even at twenty eight dollars, I thought they were fine. They have a USBC charging cable, which I thought was great. They come in a little charging case, you get six hours of playback. I tried them on my spin bike. I try them with some runs and they stay in my ears for the most part.

As you know some of these things. They kind of My wife and I were discussing this last night, and if you ever use even with your AirPods, Megan, when you're working out, don't you feel like you have to push them back in once in a while. Yes, okay, that's it's just with everything that's like just hanging on your ear, you just have to push them back in for more secure. So yes, I had to push them back in a little bit. But did they fall out.

don't like them that much. But it's like twenty eight bucks. I mean, you're not out that much, you know. So this is a company called Let's Fit. I'll put the link if you want to buy them. I'm not trying to sell them.

watch thirty six dollars I thought was fine. I would not recommend this as my smart watch, but if you want just basic smart watch functionality, I like the fact that this thing kind of looks like an Apple Watch, but it doesn't look cheap. The software is just fine. It's nothing special. But again, for thirty six dollars, if you just want a basic watch, that you're saying, hey, rich, I don't really want an Apple Watch. I just want something simple and cheap. Boom, there you go. All right, Wow,

we're actually out of time, which I can't believe. But yeah, this podcast went really fast. Do you want to do? Do you have a quick question.

Number one. But number two. The way you do this is just go to your library and then go to episodes and swipe from the right to the left on a particular episode, and that will delete it off your phone, but it will not unsubscribe you. She's saying she doesn't

want to unsubscribe to the right podcast. Now. Alternatively, you can go to library and then shows, and then once you're on a show, hit the menu button and then delete from library and that will delete all of the shows down the episodes at once, but it will keep your subscription, so new shows will still come through, and I agree with who is It Georgan George Georgia georgane.

I agree these things can gobble up a lot of memory, but it's very The podcast app on iPhone is not very intuitive for figuring out what you want to do, and so I think that this is something that I've run into where I'm like, wait, I just deleted the whole show because you think, oh, swipe left to right on a show and it's like the whole thing is gone. So again, this is the way to do it for individual episodes or all of them that you've downloaded real quick.

I mentioned last week that I talked to a travel vlogger, Josh McNair. He runs a website and a YouTube channel called California through My Lens. Really nice guy. I just wanted to share the secrets he has to planning the perfect road trip, which I concur with number one Roadside America app. I hope I didn't mention this last week, but Roadside America app is fantastic for finding all those unique attractions. You know. I feel like I did mention

this last week, but maybe I didn't. I can't remember. You weren't here, so you didn't even know. Atlas Obscura is a website that focuses on bigger cities, so it helps you find kind of hidden gems in those cities. Road Trippers is really cool. It's kind of like Google Maps, but it helps you plot out your stops and the distance, and not only the distance, but the time between those stops because most of the time you say, Okay, I want to drive for four hours at a clip, and

then you know you can plan that out. It will even tell you your gas estimates yelp. Now I know you know yelp. But he has a really unique way of searching it, which is my favorite way of searching when you're in a city that you haven't been into. Sort by most reviewed, and this will reveal the places that people are talking about the most because it has the most reviews. And then All Trails app is fantastic. Sort by most popular again to find the best hikes.

I love All Trails Instagram. This is why I said Josh and I were travel soulmates, because he searches Instagram

the same way I do. I always use it as a way to kind of peek into the place that I'm going before I go, whether that's a restaurant and you go to the recent pictures or the stories because there's the people that were just there and they're posting these things, you know, twenty four hours, forty eight hours ago or even that day, and it's like, oh, that restaurant is you know, people are wearing masks or not whatever.

You can see exactly what's happening. His example was, if you're looking for waterfalls on your trip, you know that the waterfall is running or not. In California, that's kind of a big thing because they're not always running. And then YouTube. His method for searching YouTube is don't just search a city name. Search that city name plus things to do or city name plus best restaurants or city name plus best hikes, and that kind of gives you a visual guide to where you're going. I think those

are all fantastic little Those are awesome little tips. Can you believe it? That's gonna do it for this episode of the show. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, just go to richon tech dot tv and hit the email button at the bottom of the page. Also, we would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. It helps other people discover it and plus, you know, just for vanity reasons, we like having a lot of good reviews. Just go to

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