Duck Duck, don't pass Go, Google lets you go back in time. Walmart expands drone delivery. 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 a tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Usually I open the show by saying, I hope you are having a fantastic day.
But honestly, with everything that's been going on in the.
News lately, I try not to let that seep into my show, but you know, with what's happening in Texas, it's just inevitable. I can't. I am a human being. I cannot just ignore what's going on. And so with that said, I have had a very very very heavy heart for the past couple of days. Just learned about that story when I was hopping on a plane back from Las Vegas and I just, you know, quickly was going to turn off my phone and I saw a headline.
I'm like, wait a second, that can't be right.
That number can't be right, and that number just continue to grow and it just you know, I've got two kids. Obviously this effects or I guess it touches everyone, but when you have.
Kids, especially in school at that.
Age, it's really really just I mean, basically, it's just really tough. So anyway, I've been on the news for the past couple of days. I haven't really said anything, but it's just one of those things where anything and everything I talk about at this point just seems so insignificant compared to what those families are going through, what
those children went through, what those teachers went through. And so I do want to let you know that I am thinking about all of those families, and you know, we've got to have something change here in America because I can't. I just can't keep watching this stuff happen. And I don't know what the solution is. I think I have an idea, but it's just definitely seems like it's it's really tough to find.
Some sort of solution that people can agree on.
Anyway, With that said, let's get to the first sort of topic of the day.
So I have been using this.
I did a story on this probably a year ago, and it's a story on this website called Privacy dot com and it was part of a bigger story. But what this website allows you to do is pretty much use your debit card or your bank account online and it creates one time disposable use credit cards. And so you might be thinking, well, why would I need this,
I already have a credit card. Well, when you've had your credit card taken twice in the past three months like I have now, to be fair, the first time my credit card number was stolen, I don't know how. The second time, I left my credit card at a restaurant, And so I don't know if I told you this, but I went to Disneyland and I did not use my credit card at all the entire day. I used Tap to Pay for every single transaction except when I was in the restaurant. And when I went to the restaurant,
you could not use tap to pay. You have to use your card. And so if you listen to my podcast, you know I have a rule. If my card leaves my hand, I'm always default. Okay, let me just go through my rules. I default to Tap to pay and
my debit card. So default is if I'm paying for something, I use tap to pay, which is you know, Apple pay or Android pay, and I will tap to pay using my debit card unless it's a huge purchase, and then I'll use my credit card usually, but anyway, so that's the number one.
If they don't accept tap to pay.
I will use my debit card card as long as I can insert it into you know, the chip reader. If they don't have a chip reader, or if my card leaves my hand, So if it physically leaves my hand, I will use my credit card because it's a little bit safer. If my number gets out there, I don't care as much. But anyway, so at the restaurant, I use my credit card, and of course I forget it. The one time that I use my card in the
entire day, I leave it at the restaurant. Now maybe it had to do with the glass of wine I had, I don't know, but I left it there. And this was the Lamplighter Lounge, by the way. So the funny thing is the I won't even go into that anyway. It's just someone at the someone at the Lamplighter Lounge at Disneyland got my got a nice souvenir from me. But the point is I just got that card because a couple months earlier, back in February, I use my
card at another place and it was instantly stolen. Now I'm not accusing the restaurant of stealing it, but seems like a coincidence. I pull out my card and within five minutes I get a text to my phone saying that your card number has been used at a gas station in Iowa or something like that. And I was like, what,
So this time my card was not actually used. I locked it from the app as soon as I realized I left it there, ordered a new one, got it, and you know, it's just of course, I just updated all the automatic payments on that card, and now I've got to do it all again.
So it's not very fun. Anyway.
I tell you all of that because I do have rules for using my card, but I'm now trying to protect my card number even more than I have in the past, and so I've started to use PayPal when possible, and I've also started to use Apple pay when possible online like on the web when you're buying stuff. And then this privacy dot com kind of pulls up the rear because you can use your debit card anywhere with this privacy dot com because it will.
Generate a one time credit card number for you.
And what's really cool about that is it has a secondary thing that you can do is as soon as that card is used one time, it burns out, so it can't be used again, which is even safer. So, for instance, I ordered these I'm sure it's snake oil, but I ordered these like probiotic pills that I saw someone advertising on Instagram and I said, oh, that's interesting,
and so I ordered them. And I was like, oh, of course, it's a monthly thing where they want you to buy it every month, and I said, I'm not ready for another subscription, so I use the one time card they charged it. It will not work again. So now when I forget inevitably to renew that or you know, to cancel or whatever, I will, it will tell me like, hey, your credit card didn't go through, and I'll go, oh, yeah,
that's why I use that Privacy dot Com card. So anyway, I tell you all this because I think it's a useful tool.
It's totally free.
They make money based on the you like how many times you use it. So I think with the free program, you get like twelve one time cards a month, which is more than enough for me. They've got an iOS app. You can use it on the web, you know, you basically just go to the website, generate a card number, copy and paste it into the merchant and boom. So it's a really handy little way to just kind of put one more barrier between you and your information. And what I like about it is that it enables me
to use my debit card on the web. So typically I do not use my debit card on the web because obviously and I want my debit card number out there. And PayPal has definitely helped me get around that because now I'll use PayPal when that's available. But it's it's just nice to have options. And the cool thing about privacy dot com is that it is used anywhere a credit card is used, like the system doesn't know anything different. And by the way, you can make up different rules.
You can say, I only want this card to work for up to twenty five dollars a month, I only want this card to work for a total of one thousand dollars. I only want this card to work one time. So there's a lot of different things you can do to it. Pretty cool website. I think they're in the process of rebranding to a different name perhaps, but it's just one more thing to have.
I'll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out.
But I've been using it a lot because, like I said, when you lose your credit card, you realize just how annoying it is to have to change your number on all those different things.
So, by the way, if.
You are listening on Instagram, yes, there is no video. There is no video on Instagram. I just didn't feel like going on camera. You know, I go on camera for eight hours every morning, and so sometimes I just don't feel like being on camera when I'm doing a podcast, and sometimes it's a little distracting because I end up looking at myself in the video and not what I'm.
Supposed to be doing, which is audio.
So that's why you're not seeing any video if you are watching on Instagram. All right, let's get to the first question of the show. Let's see Kathy says, hey, Rich, do you know a good way to sync my social media and contacts? Ooh, Kathy, this is a great question if you would have asked me five or ten years ago. And the reason is that no these social Okay, so
I hear you. I absolutely loved the days when I could sync my address book on the iPhone with Facebook and or Instagram and or Twitter and or all.
These other services.
There was always these third party apps that you could use to do it. But the problem is, do you remember that whole Cambridge Analytica thing. So even before that, these social networks really started clamping down on how you can export information in a bulk way, especially contact information.
So it used to be really easy.
I used to use a service, I think it was called sink me where you could go in and just say, hey, I want to sink all my contact pictures. Ares there's a million, i'man there's so many services. My address book is actually so disorganized because I tried so much any of these sync services over the years. My favorite to this day was something called Plaxo. And this was started way back when, and what was so brilliant about Plaxo
is that you didn't have to update someone's information. You would send them a link it's probably back then over email, and it would say, hey, can is all your information look correct? Can you just update whatever information is wrong? And they can go in and change their phone number, they could change their website, their address, whatever, and it would automatically sync to your address book. And I thought
that was so brilliant. It crashed and burned. I mean, someone bought them, but you know, for pennies on the dollar. And the reality is, at this point I couldn't even recommend a service like that because most people, due to privacy concerns, would not feel comfortable filling in their information on a web form like that. They would think it's some sort of spam. So it's a great question. I wish it was still available.
It's not. Now. There is one app that I.
Really like that that I think is really a good one, and it is called contact Picks. And so what this contact pix does. It's called contact Picks. It's for iOS, and it's a great little simple app. And what it does is it just goes through your address book and it helps you add images to your address book and that's it.
It's very simple.
So the idea is that most people are on Google in some fashion with their profile picture right, whether it's from LinkedIn, whether it's from Facebook, whether it's you know, there's some scrubbed picture of you somewhere on Google, and So what it does is it just easily helps you search the person in your co or all the people in your contacts for a picture, and it helps you easily format that picture and put it into your contacts.
It's such a great app. Often I'll go through my address book and just pick a bunch of random people to add their photo to their contact list, but for their contact card, I should say, but it's really a great app. And I know there's a if you just search contact picks iOS app.
Let's see if it comes up. I don't know, I have to. I'm gonna have to.
Put like, oh, yeah, the first the first result does come up. But if you want to look at the app, oh interesting, now they've got the wrong wrong link there, So definitely don't do that.
Okay, I have to.
I'll put the link in the in the show notes because that's definitely something that needs to be added there. All right, let's talk about a kind of a big story of the week.
Duck Duck Go.
You know duck duck Go as a privacy centric web page, right or search engine. I should say, So people like duck duck Go because you can search privately, it doesn't track you and that's mostly true, except it just so happens that a security re searcher named Zach Edwards discovered a little something. He discovered that while duck duck go does indeed block third party tracking cookies from the likes of Google and Facebook and other companies, it somehow gives
Microsoft a pass. Why does it give Microsoft a pass? Well, it turns out duck duck go has a deal with Microsoft, and so they let their trackers slip through and track you. Now do they track you as big as some of the other trackers have the potential to do.
Maybe not, but we don't really know.
And the fact that the fact that duck duck Go didn't really disclose this in a simple, straightforward manner is very concerning for a company that prides itself on privacy. And so I'll give them a big not very good.
So what do we do? Where do we go from here?
Number one, duck says, And the CEO of duc dot go is really defending this tactic.
Obviously, duck dot go is.
Getting a lot of money from Microsoft to do this and to let their trackers slide and third party cookies. If you didn't see my report on KTLA third party cookies are basically the tracking cookies that follow you all around the web. They're the reason why you search for new bedding on overstock dot com, and it follows you around to every other website in the world. Now, there is a couple of ways to block those third party tracking cookies. You can install one of these privacy extensions
on Chrome. Chrome actually has the ability to do it built in. If you go to settings, which are the three little dots in the upper right hand corner, and then click settings and then you go to let's see Privacy and Security, and then you go to cookies and other site data, and then there is an option to blurt block third party cookies, and so when you do that, it will block third party cookies. What's a third partycookie? Well, again, it's all of these ad networks basically they tell these
I mean, it's a win win situation. So if you run a website, let's say you run overstock dot com, Well, you want to have the most third party cookies you can on there because you're getting data fed to you so that the ads on your website are more relevant and you're making more money when someone clicks on them, or they may even click to your own website.
So let's say I go to Let's just say I go to two websites.
Let's say let's say first I go to best Buy dot com and I search for toaster ovens, right, and I kind of look at toaster ovens and I spend a little bit of time kind of narrowing it down to two that I keep kind of looking at. Well, those little tracking cookies kind of monitor not only what I'm looking at, but how long I spent on the page, who I am, all the information that they can possibly
gather about me. And now I leave best Buy and I go to let's say, Bloomingdale's dot com, and all of a sudden, on Bloomingdale's homepage, I see an ad for the toaster I want, and it's a little bit cheaper than it was at best Buy. Or let's say I go to Target dot com and they have a banner on the homepage and it's like, hey, here's this toaster that you might be interested in, and it's five bucks cheaper, and I go, Wow, that's pretty cool.
And so now Target gets the sale.
The little you know, marketing cookie got some money because they helped make a sale. And you know it all kind of works out and then best Buy.
You say, well what about best Buy? They didn't you know what, how do they get it? Well, they get you know.
On the on the other end, they'll get some money when someone else comes to their website and does something similar, or there's just an AD that's served up on their website that they make some money on.
That's targeted to you.
So there's a lot of reasons why websites want to put these things on there. It helps them track their customers, helps them, you know, serve up better ads, helps them get better lead. All this good stuff, which is good for marketers, not so good for the average person.
You know.
Look, I block a lot of these things, so I don't see a lot of this stuff, and you could too, But I do block them on Chrome because why have your data out there if you don't need to. Yeah, it makes things a little bit more complicated. Yes, you may be missing out on a couple of special offers that websites may offer up to you, but now websites are leaning on email and sort of direct messaging to
get those things to you. Or when you do go to a website that does have these ads, still still serve something up to you that maybe has a little better deal or a promo code or something.
So, but again is stuff. A lot of this stuff just clutters the web. Okay, where was I?
So you can block these things if you'd like. Duck Ducco is very quick to point out that the tracking only happens on their iOS and android apps, their browsers that they that they deliver to those platforms that are privacy centric browsers. It does not this this behavior does not happen on the website, and so they wanted to make sure that was very clear. Now, personally, I think that Duck Duck goes a little blemished because of this whole thing. And I think that that's, you know, something
that you've taken into consideration. That there wasn't a big pop up that said, hey, when we're blocking stuff, we are going to be blocking most except not Microsoft. And maybe that does happen on the on the browser, I'm not sure. I don't really use that browser. Now what
do I recommend? So a couple things. Number One, if you want a mobile browser that does block a lot of stuff, you've got an option called Brave which is on desktop, and I think they have a mobile browser also, Firefox Focus, and I like Firefox because it's Mozilla, which is, you know, an organization that's really trying to bring privacy to the web, and so I think I kind of
trust them. And then the other thing you can do is, uh, there's a website called startpage dot com, which I also recommended recently, and they try to really block a lot of this stuff as well. So a couple of options there. But you know, the reality is I still use Google, I still use Chrome, and you know, look, I understand that a lot of this stuff is being tracked, and probably more so than you can ever imagine. But at the same time, I do like the functionality I get
out of it. And that's what it really comes down to, is that do you like the functionality? Do you like like I love Google web search results, and I'm not ready to give those up for either start page or duc duck goes, even though I did look at start Page's results and they did seem to be pretty good. Duck Duck Go I haven't tested in a while, but the last time I tested, I was not impressed. So just take it with a grain of salt and just something to keep in mind as you look for a more privacy.
Centric search engine.
All right, let's get to the next question of the podcast. Scott says, do you have any information on how services like Spectrum work compared to Verizon and whose network they use. Spectrum is cheaper than Verizon, but is it as good? All right, So, Scott, I think I kind of talked about this in the last show, but I'll just go over it again. But I'm not switching to Spectrum Mobile.
Now. I know they're heavily advertising.
I know that they are cheaper than Verizon, but you have to realize switching to them comes with a lot of caveats. Now, I know, because I hear from a lot of you that you have Spectrum Mobile and you have it and you love it, and it's fine and it works and you're saving money and that's fantastic.
And I always say this on the show. If it works for you, that's great.
I'm just giving you kind of my reasoning as to why I wouldn't do this and why you just need to kind of be careful about switching because there are some caveats. Number one, let's take a look at how much they charge. So, yes, it is cheaper The big price they advertise is twenty nine to ninety nine per month for unlimited five G unlimited talk, text and data.
That's amazing thirty bucks a month, but when you do it you look a little bit closer, it's actually that's for you have to have two lines to get that price, so you're actually paying sixty dollars a month. Now, sixty dollars a month for two lines of unlimited service is still really really good, but there's another caveat. You have to have Spectrum Internet, So if you don't have Spectrum Internet,
it's an extra twenty dollars. Now we're up to eighty dollars for two lines, which again is still pretty good forty dollars a line, but you can do better. This works on Verizon and SODA's Visible, and Visible is as cheap as twenty five dollars a month unlimited, with really no caveats, as long as you join one of their party pay plans, which pretty much anyone can join as long as you find one online, or you can join
a friends whatever. There's like groups dedicated to party play party pay plans, so again that's a lot cheaper with less caveats. This is also ten dollars for an Apple Watch fee that I leave visible as five dollars. And then if you don't have Spectrum, I mentioned that it's an additional twenty dollars. So if you are thinking of leaving Spectrum for your internet service, now you're paying twenty dollars extra, and now the savings are really starting to dwindle. Also,
there's a lot of little gotcha's with their plans. So with this really inexpensive plan, you don't get HD streaming, and when you go to their pricing info, it's really annoying. It's like almost impossible to see the pricing info. But you basically get twenty gigs of full speed data and then after that it's reduced down to one megabit per second, which is like, oh my gosh, that's like crawling. You
are going to have so much trouble using this. If you use more than twenty gigs of data on this line videos DVD quality, you can pay an extra ten dollars a month twenty dollars a month for those two lines to get the thirty gigs of data usage plus HD video. Now, by the way, if you don't have if you don't have the Spectrum Internet. It's forty five dollars aligned per month. So when you look at forty
five a month, Visible is a much better deal. It's going to give you similar kind of service, and personally, it's not going to be linked to any other thing that you have to keep going.
And so you know, I.
Just it's really tough because I just don't like some of these business practices, and that's why I would not do this.
But again, if.
You're sticking with it, if you like it, if you have it, if it works for you, it's fine. They also have this data plan that's really inexpensive that is fourteen dollars per gig So if you just want a really cheap phone that you can just use for mostly calls and text, fourteen bucks a month gets you one gigabyte of data if you're mostly on Wi Fi. So good question. But yeah, this is the thing, this is the stuff. You have to just be on the lookout
for those gotchas. That's really what's important. All right, let's get to the next story of the day. Apple has a new deadline for in app account deletion, so this is from nine to five mac. They spotted a little provision in the app Store terms for developers. So a couple of years ago, Apple announced a change in the guidelines.
If you want to publish an.
App through Apple, you have to if you let people create an account through your app, you also have to let them delete their entire account through your app. Now, according to nine to five Mac, this requirement has been delayed a couple of times, but now there's a new deadline of June thirtieth, twenty twenty two. So what that deadline says If you let someone sign up for an app, which a lot of apps do, you have to let them delete not just the app, but their entire account
from that app. So you have to say, oh, I signed up for this app. I'm not just deleting this app. I want to delete my entire account. And not just your account, but all the data associated with that count Now.
I think this is a very smart move on Apple's part, because, let's face it, it's very easy to download an app, sign up in a couple of clicks, and then never use it again, and now your data is floating around forever and if you want to go delete your account, most of these apps have no provisions for deleting your account unless it's a very big app. There's a website that I like. I don't know if it's still around. Let's see,
it's just delete dot me. Just delete dot me, and that will help you find out how to close out some of these accounts. Like let's Blue Apron. Very easy to delete your account. It's one link, one click, and it will help you get right to the page to delete your account. Bitley very easy. Select why it gives you like a little kind of Barnes and Noble impossible. Oh, it's not possible to delete your Barnes and Noble account. The best you can do is delete any personal information
you have stored in their website. So again, it just gives you all these kind of different things. The website is just delete me. But anyway, this is a great thing. Apple is really really on this hardcore mission of kind of empowering the consumer, especially when it comes to privacy.
I think they've really hung their hat on this. We're seeing so many of these companies, like these social media networks like Facebook and Snapchat, they are really having some trouble, even Twitter, because you know, Apple introduced this no cross party app tracking. So what that means is that you
know you have that little option. We download an app that says, hey, don't track me across the web and across other apps, and most people are gonna say no yes to that, like don't track me, And that's really affecting the bottom line. Remember all that stuff I just mentioned about, you know how if you look for the toaster in one place and you look for the toaster and the other that's basically the equivalent of Apple saying we're not allowing third party cookies across our whole phone.
And we're kind of doing that at the phone level. And so it's a pretty big deal for these companies. They're losing tens of millions, if not potentially billions of dollars of lost revenue because they just can't track users as easily as.
They used to. It used to be free for all on the web.
You signed up for something, and your information floated all around, followed you everywhere you possibly went on the web until they converted you. And now it's just a lot tougher for them to do that. When you go to Twitter, you go to Facebook, you go to Instagram, you go to Snapchat, you're just not bringing that whole luggage set, whole suitcase of information about you, saying, hey, here's all
my searches, here's everything I looked up. Here's my demographics, Here's who I am, Here's how much money I make, here's my job. Here take it, okay, now, market me everything you possibly can. And so it's just a lot tougher for them to sell ads against that, because the
ads have to be much more general. Anyway, all that to say that this will be happening inside apps, and what's going to happen, and I already see this happening, is that a lot of apps are just going to give up on account creation and just make it so you have to create your account on the website or on the desktop. Oh and then once you create your account on the website or the desktop, then you can go log into the app. So they're going to get around it, of course, any way they can.
That's just one.
Way that they will get around it. But I do like that apples doing this because I do think it gives consumers just a little bit more empowerment over their personal data. All Right, Jane says, I've purchased a new Mac computer and I want to back up the old one as a precaution. Can you recommend a device to do that. Thanks, Jane, Jane, very very easy. In fact, I just purchased one of these myself. I got quite the deal on every day Slick Deals their front page.
And it's funny, I was shopping for a hard drive. Oh my gosh, did I get third party cookieat and that's why I saw this? Now, probably not, But every day on slickdeals dot net, I go there and they've got a list of like kind of the top deals on the web at any given time, and so I kind of just checked that every single day.
Anyway.
So I was looking for a hard drive on Amazon, a five terabyte hard drive. It's about one hundred and ten dollars on Amazon. And then I saw one on slick Deals, a refurbished one, which is fine for my uses, and it was only sixty bucks, and so I ordered it off eBay refurbished, got it like basically the next day. And now I need to download my entire Google Photos account to that hard drive as a backup. And so that's not what you want to do, Jane. What you
want to do is back up your Mac computer. And the Max have this great feature built into them called time Machine.
And it's very very easy.
If you want to find it, just go ahead and type do command space bar on your machine and type in time machine and that should bring you into your applications or system preferences for time machine.
And what time machine does once.
You do it is all you have to do is set a hard drive and external hard drive as your time machine, and when that's plugged in, your computer will just back up to that hard drive every minute it can. So it'll do backups by I think it's by the minute, and then by the hour, and then by the day, and then by the year, and so or by the month and then by the year. So at any given time you have these snapshots of your system that you
can really hone in on. And so if you lost something, you know, a year ago, you can go back and kind of retrieve it, and if you lost something a day ago, you can retrieve it. And so I personally don't use that anymore because I don't back up my computer in a big way anymore. I back up just the stuff to the cloud, So I don't use that, but it is a fantastic method for backing up a macimmuter very easily. And by the way, if you have a Windows computer, this same exact thing is built into
it as well. I think it's just called Windows backup. And so if you go into Windows ten, I think, oh, here it is file history. It's called and so you know, if you go in there and just just set a hard drive, it's in the start menu settings, Update and Security, backup at a drive and just just plug in an external drive, set that as your location for your backup,
and just do it. And so you should definitely be doing this if if if you are not backing up things to the cloud, like I am so personally, the only things I don't have anything local on my computer that I that I can't lose, So everything I use is all from the cloud. So I use Google Docs for my docs, I use Google Photos for my photos. If I'm storing any documents in my computer, I will just use the iCloud drive finder and so that way I can have those anywhere I need them. Or I
use Dropbox for any of my work stuff. So I use a lot of different things, but they're all in the cloud. Of course, gmails in the cloud. So if you don't do that, if you have a lot of stuff that you kind of just keep on your hard drive. Definitely, definitely back it up, and that's the easiest way to do it, Jane. And once you back up your computer, then you can erase that computer and you can donate it or give it to someone, or you know, just
take it to a recycling center or whatever. But definitely don't get rid of that old one without deleting everything off of it.
Great, great question, Jane. All right, let's get to the next story of the day.
Google is testing this smaller street View camera system, which is kind of cool. So can you believe that StreetView launched fifteen years ago this week?
I just can't. Like, I remember when.
StreetView started and I thought it was that's the coolest thing I had ever experienced in my life. And I think about this on a daily basis. Google has taken a picture of every corner of the world, and we take for granted that when you're visiting another city, you can see exactly.
What the exterior of your hotel looks like.
You can walk down the street a little bit and see if there's a Starbucks or seven to eleven or something else that you might need.
Once you get there.
You can walk down your childhood's street and see what your house looks like. Now these are things that just weren't possible back in the day, and now they are and so this is just amazing and the fact that we have this is just truly remarkable. We take it for granted. And I know, Google this big evil corporation that does all this stuff, but you know, they do a lot of cool stuff and StreetView is one of
those cool things. So anyway, they now have a smaller, modular street view camera system, which is going to allow them to get street view imagery from even more places around the world that they couldn't get it before, or maybe take those pictures more often, because you know, the whole thing about street view is as soon as they take those pictures, it's like, now what you got to take them again because things change so quickly. So StreetView, by the way, a little bit of trivia in case
you're ever on Jeopardy. StreetView first launched in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. But what they're doing that's now cool is a feature that's been available on the desktop for a while, but now they're giving it to you on mobile. And this is a feature that allows you to go back in time and kind
of access the historical pictures for that location. So if you have a house on a street or a business, you can go back and see all the different times they took StreetView pictures to see how that business or house or whatever has evolved over the years.
And it's kind of cool.
Now, Look, they're not gonna have a ton it's not going to be like you can flip through like a you know, like you can do a hyper lapse of this thing. Like, No, they might have two or three years represented because they don't take these pictures very very often. For bigger places, they may, But I think that's a really cool feature. In fact, this kind of parlays and it kind of makes this app idea I've had forever
kind of move. But I thought it'd be really cool to have an app that would let you go and see what a place looked like in the past. So let's say there was a restaurant that you loved as a kid on your street or down down your block. You could go in there and see what that restaurant is now, or you can see how a restaurant looked
twenty years ago or thirty years ago or forty years ago. Now, obviously there's no street View thirty forty years ago, so someone could kind of build this in to this to a street View style app, or even maybe if StreetView has an API that allows you to use it, maybe someone could use that and just build in the.
Old historical pictures.
And I think there were a couple of apps like this out there, but nothing that was like perfect.
But I thought that was a pretty cool idea.
So I just love the idea of being able to see all this stuff and it's just kind of fun. All right, let's get to the next question of the podcast. Rick Hope, Paul as well, love your segments on Channel five. I follow you on Instagram. I'm looking for a recommendation to help organize my calendars.
I fit golf clubs.
I'm a great club fitter, trying to get better at my administration duties. My territory is a bunch of California, includes Arizona, New Mexico. I've got club fitters in all those regions. My goal is to have a common calendar for all. I know Google has one, but I thought i'd check with you first. The one device we have in common is an iPad. But we all have computers as well. Appreciate any input. Thank you, Jim, So Jim,
great question. I do this with my family. I do this with Oh did I already do this question?
Maybe I did? But use it.
I just use Google Calendar, and you know, it's it's very very simple, and it's very easily shared. It works across a wide variety of devices, whether you have iPhone, whether you have iPad, whether you have whatever you got, it's going to work Android. So Google, and you mentioned
that in your email is definitely a good option. Now, the other option I would look into is if your company uses sort of a suite like whether they use Google, whether they use Microsoft, whether they use another third party. If they do, you might want to use the one that's linked to your corporate email. And so, for instance, for my work, we use Microsoft and we use three sixty five. And so if I was starting a work calendar with people that I only interfaced with work.
I would probably use that because.
It would interface with my work email client. But I use Google, and I share it with a whole bunch of people. I've got shared calendars with my wife, I've got them shared with my some of my employee or my photographer at work. I've got it shared with my
family members back home and so it works very well. Now, the other thing, since you do have an iPad you might want to look into is iCloud, and so you can do a shared iCloud calendar and that's going to integrate really nicely into the calendar app on the iPad. If you want to just use that, it's simple, but that would require someone to set up the iCloud account with the calendar and then share it out and of obviously someone kind of being the administrator of that.
But that's going to be true of any of these. So those are the things I'd recommend, you know.
The big ones are Google, Microsoft Outlook, and then the iCloud, and there's probably some others out there that I'm not thinking about right now. I'm sure there's many many corporate solutions, but I would say those calendar options are probably the best. So have fun on the golf course. I'm sure you play a lot. I never really took up golf. I did for a little bit. My father in law and
my brother in law are obsessed about golf. I mean to the point of, you know, when I'm hanging out with them, I'm almost edged out of the conversation because I just don't talk golf. I don't know anything about it. I tried playing golf when it was worst timing ever. I said, you know what, I've got to take up golf. My father in law plays it, my brother in law
plays it. I've got to play golf. And so you have never seen a more excited father in law in your entire life than me saying, Hey, I'm going to take up golf. And it was like the eyes just lit up, like finally I've gotten my goal of having a son in law that plays golf. And so we started playing and I, you know, got the clubs. I got the shoes, hand me down clubs. I got the golf bag, hand me down golf bag. You know, I'm on the golf course on the weekends on Saturday. I'm
going to hit balls after work. And then we were going to have our first kid, and that was all derailed because six months to before you have a kid is not the time to pick up golf.
Because once I had my kid, there was just no time for golf at all.
And now it's it's funny because that my kid is ten years old, my oldest, and it seems like, you know, it seems like just yesterday I was I was trying to pick up this sport and it's been a decade.
Wow, that's wow.
I got to think about that for a moment. Is he really ten? Oh that's unbelievable. And so I think he's turning ten this year. Actually, Oh my gosh, what a major fail. Anyway, Yeah, so the point is, don't try to pick up golf right before you're having a kid.
And it's really fun.
I just you know, I didn't really get good at it in a quick way, but I did think it was fun. Also, to me, it was really tough to justify spending you know, five hours with you know, on a golf course on a Saturday morning, you know, with the kid and you know, the first kid, and all the things I had to do, and it was just a lot.
So I do see the appeal of it though, for sure.
I mean, the beauty of these golf courses, hanging out with the guys or your friends. It's just so fun and it's just it's a I mean, it's a frustrating game, but it's also a very fun game. And really it's a lot of kind of quality time with your friends. So I get it. I have nothing against golf, believe me. If I could, if someone can magically impart the golf skills to me, I would definitely take it. And uh yeah, anyway, all right, let's get to the next Uh what are we gonna do?
Should I do another question? Let me do another question, Let's do another question? Why not?
Margie says, I watched your segment on creating space on an iPhone.
I'm confused.
Uh oh, that's never good. If I follow the instruction to turn on optimize iPhone storage, does that stop photos from being deleted from my iCloud. I couldn't tell if that was an alternative for them being deleted or just going to a different subject. In other words, is it always the case that if I delete a photo from my iPhone, it will be deleted from the iCloud? I wanted to clarify before I delete any Thank you for the important information you give us. The answer is yes,
they will be deleted. The iPhone is a mirror of iCloud, and.
That's just the way it is.
So if you have what I recommended in my segment, if you're trying to free up space on the iPhone is to make sure in your iCloud Iphotos storage options on your phone is to have something called Optimize iPhone Storage turned on. And what that does is it keeps a low res version of the photos on your phone, so you can still scroll through them, but then it keeps the full res version in the cloud, and so it can it can really free up a lot of space on your phone by not holding that high resolution
picture on your device. It's still there, it's just in the cloud and when you need it, when you tap, it just comes back magically.
So what happens when you delete something from your phone.
You might be thinking, well, I can delete it from my iPhone and it's safe and sound in the cloud.
No it's not.
It is absolutely not safe. Anything that you delete from your iPhone is going to be deleted from iCloud.
That's just the way it works. Now.
This is why I recommend third party apps like Google Photos.
I like Iedrive Photos as well.
If you want something that's really inexpensive, Amazon Photos is good. If you have Amazon Prime, you can use drop Box, you can use one box, one Box, you can use one drive. I mean there's a million photo storage apps out there, and the reason I like those apps slightly better than iCloud is that it's a little bit more straightforward.
It's kind of a one way sync.
So you know when you're deleting a picture in Google Photos that it is deleting off your phone and from Google Photos. But it's not as clear when you're deleting a picture off of iCloud or off of your photos app on your iPhone that it's deleting out of your iCloud.
So that's why I use Google Photos. I just feel like it's.
Much easier because it's a one way sync. The pictures go up, they don't come back down, and they just stay up there on less. I go into Google Photos and kind of just kind of pare down things, which I mentioned in my last podcast. I'll just take some time, you know, I'll just take some time at the end of the day and just go through my Google Photos and just kind of like pare down a couple of big videos. I'll just look through and be like, do I really need this stuff anymore?
You know.
I've been editing a lot of those reels lately, and a lot of the video that I shoot for that I don't need.
After I make the reel, because it's.
Just kind of nonsense, not nonsense video, but it's just b roll that we just don't need anymore. And so you know that's that's something I can just go through and delete. But good question, and just you know, back up, back up, back up, back up, back up, that's what you need to do.
Back up your stuff, back that phone up. All right.
Next story here, Walmart is expanding drone delivery. And this is really this is kind of tough to believe. And the reason why I don't fully believe all this stuff is because I've reached out to so many of these companies that are doing stuff like this, and they always tell me no, no, no, no, no no, we don't want you to cover this. We're not ready, We're not ready, We're not ready. So I see this headline from CNBC that says Walmart is expanding its drone delivery to reach
four million households. Yet, I can guarantee you if I emailed Walmart and said, hey, can I come out to Arizona or Texas or Utah and check this out in person, they'd say, no, not right now, We're not ready for primetime. When companies tell me they're not ready to have me cover something. I'm always a little bit suspect to the technology. So now I'm not saying I have not asked Walmart to do this, and I'm I'm just saying in general, this happens a lot. But this is really hard to believe.
So Walmart is expanding drone delivery across six states with this operator called drone Up. So they've got thirty seven sites that they are delivering from across six states. Now that sounds like a lot, but when you do the math, it's four million people. And the whole point of this idea of these brick and mortar stores is that Walmart, like this article says, ninety percent of Americans live within ten minutes of a Walmart. That's amazing, right until you
read the fine print. So the deliveries by air are being fulfilled from a total of thirty seven stores, but thirty four of those are run by drone Up, which means these are probably what's called a dark store, which.
Means no one can actually go in those stores.
So it's a warehouse that is like a Walmart, but there's no public facing part of that Walmart. So really only three of their stores are actually delivering these drones from So how do these drones work? This is quite unbelievable. Customers who live within the range of a Walmart Delivery drone site and order thousands of items between eight am and eight pm. Drone Delivery has a four dollars fee.
You can order up to ten pounds. The order is picked and packaged and loaded onto a drone and then it's flown remotely by a certified pilot to your driveway or yard, and a cable on the drone slowly lowers the package. Now, I don't know about you, but I've got kids, and if I get a drone delivery, I can guarantee you my kids are running out into the backyard or the driveway, and what's the first thing they're gonna do. They're gonna yank on that drone cable And
what does that mean? Number one is very dangerous? What if that drone falls on them? Number two? What if they get tangled up in this cable? Number three?
That's gonna mess things up in general.
Number four. This sounds amazing, but the reality of a drone landing in your driveway or backyard, it just seems a little bit unrealistic, especially in urban areas. Now, maybe they're testing this in more suburban or remote areas where it's a little wider uh swath that these things can land on, but it seems pretty pretty wild. I mean, I love that they're doing this, Believe, don't get me wrong. I think this it's amazing. I mean, what people are ordering this is just so so ironic. At one store,
the top seller for drone delivery is get this Hamburger helper. Now, how bad do you need Hamburger helper that you are paying three ninety nine on top of your your Walmart price for a by the way, hamburger helper at Walmart? What is it a dollar ninety eight? So you're paying three ninety nine to get Hamburger helper delivered to your house by drone. That just doesn't sound right. Other frequent items delivered by drone are batteries, trash bags, laundry, detergent,
Welch's fruit snacks. I mean, come on, what I mean, I get it where it's just you know, the things that people get delivered that you just, you know, don't really feel like going out for. But that's just really really I mean here's all this amazing technology.
I could I don't.
I mean, I was gonna say I would see getting baby formula or something like that, but it's like, oh my gosh, you can't even get that right now, When has that ever happened in the history of America. Walmart's going to use the drones to make money in another way. According to this article from CNBC, it's going to sell photographs taken by the drones to municipalities and local businesses like construction or real estate companies. So what does that mean?
They're going to be taking pictures as they go along of all these neighborhoods, kind of like a street view camera. I mean, it makes sense because they're flying low and they can get really clear pictures of things, and it's probably just automatic as they're sailing away. But what an
interesting Oh my gosh. All right, since I do have a couple of you on Instagram, I will take a few questions from Instagram, So get those questions in while I read the final story, and then I'll do a couple questions off Instagram before I go.
All right, let's see here.
This is Microsoft had their big the Old conference this week, and you know, This is kind of a little bit more you know, I try to keep this show consumer focused. Build is a little bit more developer focused, or I guess a lot developer focused. But one of the things that they introduced is called power platform, and they introduced something called power pages. And what I like about this is it's a simple way for businesses to create modern and secure websites without a lot of code. So you
can start designing a website from the ground up. You can add text, video, images, forms, and you can use one of the templates to get started. So again, this is called power Pages. I just feel like there's a lot of kind of website builders out there that are not very good or cost a lot of money, and so there are you know, I haven't done this in a while, built a business website, but you know, try to use these tools that like this is probably a
decent one. I know Google has one, but you know there's I just wanted to mention.
It because it's called power pages.
And it's something just to help you make easy website sites. All right, let's see if we've got any questions now on the chat. Let's see here, someone, let's see s more stup to get the names on here. Hey, Rich, can you download iCloud photos? And if so, how will it take the pictures off my phone?
If I do that?
Someone told me, and I've not tested this in a while, but someone said, you can go to iCloud dot com and download the photos. The other way to download them is to go to the photos app on a Mac and you can download them from there. But once you download them, you'd still have to delete them off your phone, so it wouldn't really it wouldn't delete them if you downloaded them from a different way.
They used to have a.
Way that you could do it third party, but of course, you know, Google Photos, iCloud, they've all kind of cut off third party access to their websites and so you can't really download these things easily now. They do that mostly for security reasons and mostly so you don't mess things up, but it's also, you know, they're just trying to control the entire situation.
Here.
Mama Laura says, what's the best smartphone for older people? My mom has an iPhone, but I'm thinking of getting her a Jitterbug. I have no problem with the jitterbug if it's a you know what, I don't like about the Jitterbug is that you have to go with their service, and obviously Jitterbug is going to be just a little bit more expensive maybe than going with your own thing. But I do like how these phones are kind of simple. I don't think they're the most powerful phones in the world.
I think that there might be some contracts with these phones, but they do offer a flip phone, which I think is really nice. The other alternative to the flip phone is look up Alcatl Alca t E L and they've got Alcatl still makes some flip phones and you've got it from T Mobile, maybe a couple other but I would go on Amazon personally, I would just go on Amazon and look up unlocked flip phone and let's.
Just see what they've got here.
So they've got a three G flip phone that'll work on AT and T or T Mobile. And they've got a zte flip phone that'll work on T Mobile. They've got another flip phone that will work on T Mobile. Most of them are T Mobile, but you can go with the Samsung z flip Now just kidding, that's like a nine hundred dollars phone.
But yeah, you've got oh here we go. This is really good.
Alcatel Go Flip forty forty four four g LT unlocked for all carriers. That is going to be fantastic. That means you can use it on AT and T, you can use it on T Mobile, you can use it on Mint, you can use it on straight Talk. So what I would do is get one of these phones for a hundred bucks, and then I would just go to Target. I would go to best Buy, maybe just Target or Walmart, and I would go get one of these prepaid plans and just go for the cheapest plan.
Like if you're if your senior in does not need a lot of minutes, just literally go with like the cheapest plan that you can get monthly for ten dollars for just like.
Mostly calls and text.
So that's what I would recommend doing because that's gonna be the cheapest and the easiest overall.
Let's see here.
Oh my gosh, so many questions here, thoughts on radiation from wireless earbuds versus wired I've seen some people sharing concerns. You know, look, I think there's always concern I just don't I don't personally think there's a lot of concern with the wireless. The thing I'm most concerned about, honestly is the fact that I wear an Apple watch that has a lte A cellular and a Wi Fi connection that is bearing down into my wrist all day long.
And I don't know.
I mean, there's been a lot of studies about you know, cancer and wireless radiation. None of them have been truly conclusive in a huge way, and so most of the people have been going under the guise of these things are generally safe. But it's also only been you know what, thirty years that we've had these things forty years perhaps maybe, Yeah, So I do think that it's something to be concerned about.
I think it's.
It's something that you know, I definitely think about, But I just I just don't know what I can you know, what you can do about it? All right, Let's see another question here, financed with Jessica says, do you know any good websites for kids to learn how to code?
I would definitely check out Swift Playgrounds. I mean that's really like Apple's Swift Playgrounds is like fantastic and you can code like it kind of teach you the basics of coding Apple apps, and we know that Apple is kind of king of apps, so I would definitely start there. My kids played with it last summer during the pandemic and it was pretty cool. They it's like a little game that you play that you learn how to code and then code dot org. I would definitely try checking
out code dot org as well. And that's that's another one where you can go and that's totally free. L pexso says Amazon Photos or Google which one's better?
Personally?
Like Google Photos, but if you just want a simple way that's free. If you have Amazon Prime membership, definitely go with Amazon Photos.
They've got a lot of the same features.
It's not as fully featured as Google Photos, but Amazon Photos is actually still pretty good, So I would do that. How do I get Google Authenticator app to work on my iPhone? I used to have an Android but lost it and now have iPhone. I can't use it on my iPhone frustrating.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I think Google Authenticator. The way it works is that you have to transfer it to another device while you have it active on the other device. Now that may have changed. It's been a while since I used Authenticator. A couple alternatives is Microsoft Authenticator and then also something called auth the au thy and so I think that
those are slightly better than Google Authenticator. But I also think that you if you reset up Google Authenticator, they now have an option that makes it work a little bit better across multiple devices. Oh my gosh, what how did that happen so fast? I feel like I just sat down to do this podcast. That sound means that's gonna.
Do it for this episode of the show.
If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or go to rich on Tech dot tv hit the email icon. Also, I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Just go to the listening app of your choice write a quick line about what you like about this show to help other people understand why they should listen.
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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, fireTV, and Roku. Not only can you watch the live stream of KTLA, but you can also scroll to the tech section and watch all of my TV segments on demand. My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. Stay safe, I'll talk to you real soon