Galaxy Z Fold2, unique wireless charger and a handy chrome extension

In case you don't know, my name is Rich Dmiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome to the podcast. If you're listening for the first time, thank you for finding me. If you're listening for the one hundredth time, thank you for putting up with me.

I get a lot of emails from people about the podcast now, which is pretty cool because when I first started this, it was kind of like a little side project, and now you know it is produced out of KTLA or part of KTLA, but it's kept the same kind of I don't know, like it just feels like it nothing's changed, and that's what I like about it. I was on vacation over the weekend. I'm a little bit older now that I talk to you, because it was my birthday, you know, recently, and so that was fun.

We went down to San Diego to this place called Paradise Point, which my friend has been talking about this place forever, and I never went. And finally, you know, because you can't really go in many places right now, San Diego seemed great, had great weather, great sun. Paradise Point was there. My friend, my other friend told me about it. He said, dude, we just went. We loved it, So okay, that's where we went. We had a great time.

This resort reminds me of a place that sort of transports you to a family place back in the day's. It reminds me of Hawaii. It felt like Hawaii. It was just really fun. The water was beautiful. We had a nice beach front kind of view. It was just great. And we stayed there for a couple nights and just

had such a nice time. And I just every morning tried to just go out on the beach and just kind of sit there for a couple minutes and kind of reflect, because I'm trying to do that more often these days, and It's not that easy all the time. But anyway, let's get into the podcast. Let's get into the first story of the week, which is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold two five G. This is the latest

smartphone that I've been playing with. It's also one of the most expensive smartphones I think I've ever tested, certainly ever sent to me as a review unit. So what is unique about this device? You might remember this was the device that Samsung had a little trouble with back

in the day when it first launched. They sent it to a bunch of reviewers and next thing you know, those reviewers had problems with the screen, and specifically, Samsung figured out that there was some debris getting in behind this and that was causing it to fail. And so they went back to the drawing board. They came up with some sort of little way to protect the back of the or I guess the opening near the hinge,

and that fixed it for the most part. I'm not sure how many of these phones they sold the first time around. But now this is the new version, and this new version is kind of revamped in some really nice ways. Number One, the front screen is way bigger, way more useful. Six point two inch screen on the front, and the phone is kind of thin, so it's a really thin phone, but it's thick because it's almost imagined two phones stacked on top of each other with a hinge.

Then you've got this giant seven point six inch screen when you open the thing up, and that's a foldable ultra glass or ultra thin glass screen. Used to be plastic. Now it's glass, and that's a miracle in engineering in itself. It's got one hundred and twenty hrtz adaptable refresh rate. It's got great sound. The hinge is now called the Hideaway hinge, which means it's smaller than before. And it also has sweeper technology, which they first introduced on their

other flip phone, which is the Galaxy Z Flip. And it's kind of like it looks like a little kind of sweeper brush, like a little broom inside the hinge that theoretically just kind of brushes out any debris that gets in there, and so that should take care of that. It's also fully close, you don't really see it. Cool things about this phone is that it's really luxurious. It's kind of cool to have both a smartphone and a tablet in your pocket at all times. You've got a

cool new feature. Where the old one only opened up to one you can only open it up and that was it, so it was either closed or opened. There was no degrees of open, so you couldn't kind of make the phone into its own little self standing tripod, like put it in an L shape and just sit it there and watch a show. Well now you can do that. They call flex mode, So now you can just bend the screen at any angle you want, in a half fold, a quarterfold, and open fold, and you

can watch stuff. And you can also record videos hands free. So that's kind of neat. But the camera is is good. I mean it, you know, I haven't. I'm not doing a full review on this device because it's not something I think a lot of people are gonna purchase. To me, I'm sort of just taking a look at it, understanding what it's all about, so that I can talk about it in the future before it goes back to Samsung.

So this is not a review. I think that if I'm reviewing this device, I'm not sure I would recommend someone purchasing this device unless you have money to burn, because it's sort of a it's still almost in beta. This is the second version. It's really expensive. It's two

thousand dollars. But again, I think they did a really nice job and I love seeing this, and I actually think that I will buy a foldable phone in the future when it gets to a point where I feel like it's a little bit more manageable, a little thinner, and just kind of more what I need. But so far, I mean, I could think of a lot of reasons

why this is cool, and I am tempted. Don't get me wrong, I am tempted because it's so unique that nobody else has anything like it, and how cool is it as a tech person to have something that nobody else has. I kind of like doing that kind of stuff. Two colors, Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, two fifty six gigs of storage, twelve gigabytes of RAM and that's your only option there. And the phone, again, like I said, is

two thousand dollars. If you go on Samsung's website to buy it, they're really really trying to get you to trade in another device to bring that price down. And one other thing to know is that because the screen is still pretty fragile, I think or I guess. Two other things to know. Number one, it's not dust or water resistant. They make that very clear. And you also get a one time device protection against accidental display damage

within one year. So if you mess up the screen within one year, send it back to Samsung, they will send you a either a new one with a new screen, or refurbish it or whatever they do. So there you have it. Samsung Galaxy z Fold two pretty cool goes on sale September eighteenth. All right, let's get to the first question. Let's see here. Hmmm, let's see. Jesse from Glendora, Cali.

Let's see. Let's yeah. Jesse from Glendora, California, wanted your thoughts about the Western Digital my cloud duo hard drive backup system. I still perform backups on Google and iCloud. I wanted something local at my house and not to keep everything stored on my iMac. It fills up quickly. I'm a little scared to have everything in the cloud, photos and music. Your thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated. Jesse from Glendora, you get a because this is a

fantastic idea. We should not have everything just in the cloud, and you should have your things in a couple of different places, some were physical in your home and then somewhere in the cloud. And if you have them in those two places, the good news is if one of them fails, you've got him in the other place. So I think the Western Digital MyCloud duo is great. I'm not even sure you need the MYC Cloud duo because the Cloud duo is I think that's the one that

has software that backs it up to the cloud. Oh no, it just plugs directly into your WiFi router so that way it's kind of like your own little cloud exactly. So that's perfect. I love it. I think that that's a fantastic idea. You should definitely do that. It's expensive. I'm not sure that you need that big of a solution unless you have a lot of stuff, Jesse with your photos and videos I think are your photos and music. I think what you can do is depending on the

kind of Oh you have an iMac. I think with an iMac, what you should do is just buy a two or four gigabyte hard drive and just plug it into your iMac and just plug it in, turn on time capsule, and just plug it in every once in a while every week, every month and boom, just let it back up everything on your iMac. Now that's given that all of your photos are on your iMac, I'm not sure if they are or not. And your music,

I'm sure it is. But no matter what you do, I'm trying to give you a cheaper solution because just a standard USB hard drive, it's gonna be a lot cheaper. So I would say, just plug that in, let Time Capsule do its thing. Do that every couple of weeks or every week, whatever, however often you need. You think you need to do that, But I think that's a

cheaper solution that would totally work for you. But yeah, but if you can, if you're ready to spring for the my cloud duo, sure, I mean I love having a network drive. It's great. I don't have mine hooked up right now because I've gotten sow into the cloud and I actually get a because I've gotten really bad about backing up my stuff in a second place. I

know it's on my drive, it's on my phone. I also have a whole bunch of assorted hard drives around my house with all kinds of backups on them that one day, one of these days, I will go through and finally back up and organize everything on those drives. I don't want to delete anything because I don't know if I've got the pictures in Google Photos, and I just want to go off on one little tangent here

and this. I love, love, love Google Photos, but there is one feature I just cannot stand about it anymore, and that is there is no way to sync my Google Photos collection with a backup drive. And yes, I know you can do Google take out and download the entire photo collection, but that is so unreasonable. All I want,

here's what I want. Google, Please just make a deal with a hard drive manufacturer and make that deal so that when I plug this drive into my computer or just connect it to my WiFi, it is constantly downloading and syncing my Google Photos library to that drive. That's all I want. I don't think Google's going away anytime soon. I don't think their system is gonna crash. But at the same time, I just want a nice local backup of my photos in my home, just because it just

makes me feel better. I mean, if something ever happened to me, you think someone else is gonna figure out how to download all my pictures? From good Google. One of my family members. No, and I don't want to get that dark. But the reality is it would just

be nice to have a local copy. And I think that other platforms do offer that, some of the other photo saving platforms, but I like Google Photos and they used to have it and it's gone away, and I just wish you would bring it back, Google, because it would just be nice. I know you're trying to make things simple, and also I think you're trying to make them complicated because when someone wants to download their stuff,

think about it. If you have it on a drive at your house at all times, how much easier is it to just bring that somewhere else and you move your business elsewhere. Let's move on to a new wireless charging pad. This is from Nomad and it's called the base Station Pro. I went up to Nomad and Santa Barbara. I hope I didn't talk about this before on the podcast, but I talked to the folks at Nomad who they make really cool kind of I don't know, artisanal almost

products for iPhone and smartphones in general. My phone is a big one. But they make cases, they make charging cables, all kinds of stuff. But this new one is called the base Station Pro and it is a wireless charging pad. Now, rich, what's so new about a wireless charging pad. Well, let me tell you. The neat thing about this wireless charging pad is that it is positionless, which means you can

put three devices on here anywhere you want. Now, I have a three device charger from Mophi, and you have to place them exactly right. You've got to put stuff on what's called a sweet spot. And if you don't, your phone doesn't charge. And I've woken up many a morning's where my phone has not charged overnight because it either moved or stopped charging for some reason, or I hit the nightstand whatever. So this you really don't have that problem, and it works. It works great. There are

some caveats. I'll tell you about those, but let me tell you how they did it. So instead of one coil that charges your phone, they have eighteen coils underneath, along with little software called free Power that detects where you place your device and then it directs the power to that device. Pretty cool, huh. I thought it was pretty neat. Now I will tell you this, I think hang on. I just took a sip of my tea, my Green tea. I think that the free power actually

works better with Apple products than any other products. So I don't know if it's an Android thing or some weird stuff, but I just feel like when you put your iPhone on there, it works. Now, I will say with the Galaxy Z Fold two that's been working really well as well. And there are three little there are three little status lights on this thing too, which is really cool. That will let you know if it's charging, like if the power is going to the three little gadgets,

which is also kind of cool. And I found that the Pixel did not work at all. The Samsung Galaxy Note twenty Ultra did not work. It just it does this really weird thing. Maybe I have a bad review unit, but it does this really weird thing where it just goes crazy. It's like selecting on screen. It's really strange. It looks I got to get a video of it and post it to Twitter because it's very strange. And I asked no Mad about this and they said yes,

there are some issues. Officially, older Samsung devices S nine and blow and all Pixel devices don't work. They're working on a firmware slash software update. And also, oh yeah, there is one more thing that does not work, the Apple Watch. So when you really think about it, this is for someone who has, you know, maybe two iPhones, a work phone and a personal phone, plus a pair

of AirPods. It will work with the Samsung Buds and other wireless It does work with things that are on the Cheese standard, but it's not officially on the Cheese standard. There must be something they did weird about it that they can't officially say it's chea so I don't know. But if you have Apple stuff, it works great. Otherwise, if you could get into a store, like if they had one of these in an Apple store, that would be ideal because then you can test your your products

on it and see if it works. But it's really cool. Two hundred and thirty dollar, I know, very expensive, but the neat thing is really it feels like what the future will bring with wireless charging, where you just throw your device on there and you don't have to think about how you placed it and it just sort of charges, which is really neat all right, Angela writes in we all watch you and love your suggestions with little heart. Oh thank you. We were hoping you could offer a

solution to our problem. We have paper thin walls and don't have a PA system and need some soft music to play in our exam rooms. But I'm not even sure what device we could use for this function. Suggestions are appreciated. Thank you so much the staff at Family Member Veterinary. Is it veterinary veterinary veterinary hospital, Veterinary, I don't know veterinary. You know it's a hospital for dogs

and cats, animals, Angela. I think your best solution is something that is so simple it might have evaded you. I think a Google Nest Mini would be perfect in every room, And now I think, yeah, so here's what I would do. I would do a Google Nest Mini. You can get those for I think they're like forty bucks. Put them in every room. You can group them up on the Google Home mapp and you can play music to all of the rooms at the same time and boom,

now you have music in every room. You can also use it as a PA system, so if you want to like send messages throughout the whole office, you can broadcast. I think the the syntax let's see broadcast Google Home. So I think what you say is you can use a little mic on your on your thing, or let's see broadcasts from one speaker to others. You just say okay, it doesn't tell you how to do it. Come on what you need? Oh, here you go, You say h Google broadcast there you go. You can also use the

commands shout tell everyone announce instead of broadcast. You can say eah, Google, tell everyone one doctor needed in room seven. Doctor needed in room seven. So you can do that. And now the other thing is your guests will also be able to say h Google. So what I would do is probably turn off the microphone functionality. So there's a little toggle on there to turn off the microphone

and then you can just have your music playing. And yes, some of your smarter, more savvy guests might toggle the microphone switch and mess with it, but I think that's probably a small portion of people. The other thing I'd recommend is they've got these great Google mounts on Amazon. So if you look on Amazon Google Nest Mini mount, you go on there and they've got so many great mounts and you can just plug it into a plug on the wall and it kind of keeps all the

chords great. I mean, you can really I think This is such a simple solution. You're talking you know, a couple bucks for the mount and you know forty bucks for the minis. You can get them a two pack, three pack or whatever you can find them on sale. I think that's gonna do it just fine. All right, let's move on to another tech topic of the week, and this is Facebook. Remember I was just talking about photos and videos. This perfectly talk. This kind of goes

to what I'm talking about. And Facebook is now expanding what's called their Data Portability Tool, and now you can send your photos and videos to Dropbox and also another service called Koofer Koofr, which is something in Europe. We don't I guess we don't really have it here in the US. Maybe we do, we just don't really use it.

But so this is pretty simple. If you've got photos on Facebook, remember there was a time when you were uploading a ton of photos to Facebook, or even maybe you even use that Facebook sink feature they used to have back in the day, which I don't know why they got rid of that, but people used to be able to sync all the photos from your camera roll and your phone to Facebook. They got rid of that. But maybe you still have a bunch of photos lingering

in Facebook. Maybe you've been using it for fifteen years now or whatever. However many years Facebook has been around, and you've got a bunch of photos in there, and you want to store them somewhere else. Well, now you can do a direct transfer right from Facebook to Dropbox. And also Google Photos is supported, and so all you do is you go on your Facebook, you log in to your other account. It'll like connect the two accounts, you know, your drop Box or your Google Photos, and

it will start moving your pictures over. Now it's not going to transfer them, it's going to copy them, so they will still be on Facebook. And now you have a copy of your pictures on Dropbox. And let's say you want to get rid of Facebook. Boom, you can get rid of Facebook. So that's pretty easy. So there you go. That's kind of like that's it. There's not much more to know about that. Everything is encrypted as it moves between services. Facebook is quick to point out.

So it's just good. I love this is fantastic, and in fact, I wish that Google would do something like this for other services. And I think that that's the goal of these services, to make it easy to move things back and forth, especially as we are moving towards the cloud, folks, so everything is going to the cloud, and so when you have things in the cloud, what happens Everyone wants it's easy to get your stuff into

the cloud. But if it becomes a thing where it's really tough to get your stuff out of the cloud, that is what scares me. Because it used to be back in the day, all the services would sink so easily to some sort of you know, network attached storage or whatever, and then all of a sudden they started backing out of those things, and it gets tougher and tougher to get your stuff out of these services. And yes, again, I know you can do Google takeout, and I'm sure

Microsoft has the equivalent and all these other services. I know Facebook even has that equivalent where you can download your entire Facebook. But it's kind of a pain. And these files are giant, especially the longer that you've been with these services. So who's gonna sit there and download terabytes or you know, gigabytes and gigabytes of data. It's gonna be tough. Let's hear from Bill. Bill says, I just upgraded my internet speed to one hundred megabits per second.

I have a Netgear Nighthawk AC nineteen hundred router. I wonder if you heard about that on wirecutter, because that's I think the one they recommend, which works perfectly for our three story home. Wow, that's surprising. I noticed my speed is only about forty five megabits per second download when connected to two point four gigaherts and one hundred and two at five gigaherts. I've tried different channels and currently found Channel three as the best out of the

eleven channels. I wanted to know if this is normal for two point four gigaherts to have such a slower speed. It's not really a problem because most of the streaming devices are on five gigaherts. Anyway, any ideas, I don't want to call Netgear because they charge for support. Oh wow, that's interesting. Am I missing something? No? So Number one when it comes to Wi Fi, if you're generally speaking, you are not gonna get the speed that you get coming into your house at the hub across all your

devices from the Wi Fi network. It's just a matter of there's interference. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of devices it's just generally going to be for a lot of people, it's about half. If you can get it more than half, that's fantastic. So if you're getting two hundred, I used to get two hundred across all my devices, I don't quite get that anymore. I upgraded to a gigabyte or gigabit, and I don't quite

get it across all my devices. I'm still working on getting it to there because it has to do with all the routers and the way they talk to each other. But the reality is, if you're getting one hundred at five gigaherts, that's great. And I know you. You seem like a technical guy because you've done all these tests. You found much channel is the best. You've figured out the two point four versus five. So most of today's

Wi Fi networks put out two signals. One that's two point four gigaherts, which goes further but it's not as fast. And then you have five gigaherts, which doesn't go far, but it creates it carries data at a I guess a higher through put if you want to say it that way. So you figured that out on your own. I don't think this is a problem. I think you're fine. I'm surprised that the router is getting stuff to all corners of your home for a three story house, so

I think you're winning there. And yeah, the two point four giga hurts thing at forty five, it's still going to be fine. And like you said, most of your streaming stuff, most of the new stuff is on five giga hurts. Anyway, two point four was kind of the standard, that is the older standard that everything uses, and some inexpensive devices used, like if they're trying to save money by not doing a dual band, but most of the new devices do five. So if you're getting one hundred

and two on five, I think you're okay. I think eventually you may want to look into a mesh network, but I don't think you need it right now if your Nighthawk is working for you. All right, let's talk about GDPR. Do you know what that is? That is the the thing over in Europe, the oh my gosh, what's it called? What does GDPR stand for? I remember when I first did this, I remembered what it meant.

But it's called General Data Protection Regulation. And what this is is the really intense privacy laws that they have over in Europe. And so when you had this happen, every website in the world had to adapt, they had to adapt their privacy policy. And in fact, I think part of this was that you you have the right to be erased from the systems, and you also have

a right to the data in the systems. And if you live in the EU, you can write an email or a letter to any company that does business in the EU, like Yahoo or Google, and say, hey, I want to see all the data that you've collected on me, and they have to send it to you, which, as you can imagine, that's probably a big pain for these companies, but you know, that's the cost of doing business, I guess. And these regulations and it's really meant to protect people's privacy.

I'm not commenting on whether it goes too far or whether it's annoying. But you know, the one thing that we have seen because of this is everywhere in the world, every website that you go to, there is a little pop up that you've seen that says, what do you like to accept cookies? Would you like to have your privacy? Would you want to opt out of the privacy policy or opt in or whatever. There's so many little things that they ask every single website. It is pretty annoying.

I will tell you that. Now. I love the fact that we have access to privacy controls and all this good stuff, but it's a little bit much. And ninety nine percent of the time I feel like I say yes to these things or whatever. I just clicked the box. I don't even know if I'm saying yes or no or somewhere in between. And next time I go to that website, I feel like it's there again. And I

feel like I'm always clicking in every website. By the time you get to a website, number one, you gotta click the GDPR, then you got to click the newsletter, Then you got to click about you know, if you're using an ad blocker, they they you know, talk about that, which I get, you know. Then they talk about, you know, do you want to allow pop ups or notifications or what it's like, can we track your location? There's so many things. All I want to do is read the article.

I just want to see what you said about this. But I'm sitting there, like navigating this website. And so anyway, I say all of this because there is a tracker, a chrome extension. I just discovered that so far, I think is really cool and I hope it's legit. But it's called consent omatic, And according to the information here, the consent to omatic was built and maintained by workers

at a university in Denmark. And these privacy researchers got tired of seeing how companies violate the EUS General Data Protection Regulation. Because organizations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add on to help them out. They looked at six hundred and eighty different pop ups and combine their data processing purposes into five categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes their categories don't match perfectly, but we will choose the one

that provides the most privacy preserving option. So here's what's so great. Here is what's so great. So now they say that these pop up cookie pop ups are designed to be confusing. Oh okay, good, that's true. They want to make you agree to be tracked. So this add on automatically answers those consent pop ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. You set your preference preferences once and you let the technology do the rest. And so far. I went to a couple websites with this Chrome extension

installed and it worked. I saw a little check mark pop up on the Chrome extension when it kind of went through the little box that popped up. I think this is so cool. It's called the consent omatic. I will link it in the show notes, so you make sure you get the right one and you're not getting some scammy one. The only thing is I've gotten really cautious about installing Chrome extensions, especially the ones that say we can read and write data on all of the

websites that you visit. And some of these things like a Honey extension or a Wiki buy, they need that because that's how they see what website you're on. And I've toggled that feature off, and like you know, you can enable it every time you want manually, but it is a pain, and so you don't want, Like I find this, it's easier to let them read it, right, but you have to imagine you are giving them a lot of data, and this is one of them. So this says this can read and change site data on

all sites. So every website that you go to, this little concent omatic is getting a record of that, as I understand, so you have to weigh your options. Do you want your privacy or do you want your annoyances gone? And what I like about this little consent omatic is that you have options, so you can go in and your choice is they give one two three, one, two

three four. There's about five six categories information and storage access and I have that off preferences and functionality off, performance and analytics off, content selection, delivery and reporting off, ad selection, off other purposes off. How great is that all tracking is rejected by default, which is something I don't think I would have done if I was doing

this manually. So I think this is a major two thumbs up for not only the convenience, but also the fact that it is blocking a lot of these trackers that by default, a lot of us are just saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go away, go away, go away, and we don't really know what we're doing. So kudos to them, and I will again put that link in the show notes. All right, next question comes from Karen. Hey, Rich, you helped me before, and I appreciate your wisdom. I have the same Samsung

four phone. Soon I hope it will be replaced by a seven for my brother. But I'm struggling a little. Number one. The phone will not hold a charge to take a few pictures Google's something. Oh my god, it shuts off. The short time frame is amazing. Do you think it's just because the phone is old? Could it be the charger or would a new battery help until I get the next hand me down. I've also lost the microphone feature for texting. It just disappeared. I've checked

YouTube videos, followed the path little microphone should appear. It never does. Is it lost forever? Thanks so much for your time, Thank you, Karen. All right, let's break this down. Samsung four. Wow, number one, kudos to you for having a Samsung S four. That phone was released in Let's see what date that was. That was twenty thirteen, seven years ago. Whoa, that is a long time. I think most people are keeping their phones for about an average of two to three years at this point. So you're

going seven's. That's amazing, So good for you. Number one. The battery I think that, yes, the battery is probably fried. Batteries have a certain lifespan what's called cycles. They only get so many cycles, no matter how good you are charging them, they do not last forever. So that's the main thing. That battery is fried. Now the good news is this is I believe a removable battery because it's such an old phone that this was back in the

day when you could remove batteries. So I would go on Amazon and see if you can buy a new battery, see if you can replace that battery, and that would be my first choice. If you're getting the S seven from your brother, I would convince your brother to give you that sooner than later and save the money on the battery because it's still an old phone and the seven is going to be a lot better for you.

Number two, the microphone for texting, I think that you just it either got toggled off somehow or a software update turned it off because of privacy reasons, and all you need to do is turn it back on. So I would go into your settings and let's see. Usually it's under language and input. Let's see so settings General Management, Language and input, and it should say physical keyboard or no on screen keyboard, and then there should be Google

Voice typing, Samsung Voice input, and your keyboards. And I would just go in and make sure that your voice is on for the keyboard that you have selected, So I like to use gboard depending on the keyboard you're using. Just going there and check all those settings under on screen keyboard and you should find it and it should be there. So I don't think that that's gone forever unless they somehow got rid of it. If you like

cool new apps like I do, here's another one. It's called here here h E A R H E R E. And what's cool about this is it is kind of like an audio tour guide app for the places you go. And what's unique about it is that it's just a

little snippets. So I just think this is such a good idea because when I'm traveling, I am the kind of person that likes to know what is going on around me and what's the significance of that mountain or that old you know, mission, or that church or that giant rock, whatever it is, and you know, you can go on. I don't know if there must be apps that do that. I'm sure there are, But this is cool because it's audio and it's an app out of

Santa Barbara. It's backed by Kevin Costner, the actor and also one of the guys who founded the North Face, which is like the outdoor Powall Company, or maybe they do more than that, but they professionally edit and narrate these little audio vignettes, and so it's kind of like a little history book or a you know, visitor's guide, but it's on your phone, and so it's also GPS tagged, which means you can drive like I recently drove to know Zion, Utah, and you can just fire up your

phone on the app and when you're in a little small town and see if there's anything of note around you and learn about it, which is really neat. Now. To be fair, it doesn't work in Zion right now because right now it supports the West Coast, which is California, Oregon, and Washington. There's fifteen hundred stories. They hope to have about ten thousand of them by next summer. And it's only on iOS right now, and they hope to have it on Android soon. But it's neat. I looked it

up for the stories around me. It's kind of cool. It's professionally produced, and I think it's a nice alternative to the tour guide. Now there's some audio tour guide apps, or there used to be there was one that I used up in San Francisco called Detour and it was started by I think it was the guy who did groupon and it was really cool. My wife and I took the tour. It was fun, and they do like audio and they play little you know, it's like it's

kind of like an audio tour of wherever you're going. Now, this one was very involved, you know, cross the street, look at this stand there. It was great and it didn't last because it went away. This one also is they do charge you, so it's five stories for free, and then it's like fifty bucks for the year, which you know is a little high. But they were doing a twenty five dollars deal. I don't know if that's still available. They're also doing seven dollars for the week.

So I think that look, if you're going on a trip, a road trip, you're spending a lot of money. Anyway, you're seven dollars for this app for access for the week to learn about a couple of things on your way. It's not that bad if you think about it that way. You know, you have to figure you know, you're gonna stop for fast food, that's gonna be a couple bucks, So seven dollars for kind of like a tour is

really not bad. And again it's not a tour. It's just a little audio snippets, so you can come and go as you please, do as many as you want, as little as you want. And I think this is a great idea and I hope that it lasts. I hope they expand it like they say they want to. And I think that it's one of those things that if you're traveling, I love just getting Even if I travel to a place and I learn one thing about that place and it sticks with me, I love it and I feel like my job is done and I

feel like it's been beneficial to me to travel. And right now we're all doing road trips because you don't really want to fly places, so or we're not doing a lot of big trips places, so this is perfect. If you live on the West coast, check it out here here h e ar h e r E. Try it. It's free for the first five stories and I'll just continue to follow that and see the GPS tagging, I think is the really smart part about that app. I also did a one of the tours in New Orleans.

I was there and I just downloaded some random MP three and this was this was way back in the day, and I just walked around that city doing a tour. So I think also, if you're in a city and you can find an audio tour and download it and take it, it's great. I mean, why not. I mean you could do a real tour that's even better. But you know, if you're DIY, that works too. All right, let's see what do we want to talk about next, Donnetta,

says mister Demiro. I need some advice. I recently read an article about not purchasing a MacBook Pro because eventually Apple will not support them. I have one that I purchased a couple of months ago. My question is should I keep it or should I sell it? Thank you, don Netta, Uh no, you should definitely keep the MacBook Pro that you purchased. Apple is going to support them for a long long time. Yes, there's a lot of

confusion because they're switching. They're not even I mean, eventually they're switching to their own processors, and it's not going to be Intel. I guess I think they're switching to their own like fully, but right now it's going to be a slow, slow march to their own what they call their own silicon or their own silicon silicon, and so they are going to use their own processors inside their devices. And that's gonna happen. And yes, it's gonna happen, I think they said by the end of was It

twenty twenty twenty one. But don't worry about it. Your your computer is going to be just fine. So let me look up macOS Catalina, which is the newest operating system, and let's see which Mac computers it supports. Usually if you scroll all the way down, it will say which

ones they support. Okay, all right, let's let's take a look see if your Mac can run mac OS Catalina MacBook twenty fifteen and later MacBook Air twenty twelve and later MacBook Pro twenty twelve and later MacBook Mini twenty twelve and later iMac twenty twelve and later i'mc Pro twenty seventeen and later mac Pro twenty thirteen. You're talking this operating system that Apple just came out with, and you know, in the past year supports computers from eight

years ago. You have a brand new MacBook Pro. You are going to be just fine. When you say eventually Apple will not support them, you're talking eight to nine years. Because I now the new what's the new one? What's it called mac Os? Is it big, sir? Mac Os? Big sir, so big sir. Let's see what that one supports. That's the one that's coming out next, and that's coming out any any day. Now, really, let's see what that supports.

That supports. Okay, so we lost about a year. It looks like so MacBook Air twenty thirteen, MacBook twenty fifteen, MacBook Pro twenty thirteen. So they dropped the twenty twelves. So again you're talking. Let's say, if we go from today seven years, I think you are going to be just fine. Doneta enjoy the MacBook Pro. Don't worry about these articles you read online. No big deal. Okay, Oh my gosh, we're already out of time. I can't believe this show goes so fast. Let me talk about a

feature in Google that I just love. I've been using it all summer to plan my trips, especially road trips, and apparently Google updated it. And I kind of knew when I looked at it that it looked a little different, but they had a blog post about it, and this is the feature called saved tab. All right, I guess

it's the saved tab. So if you go on to Google and there's a couple of ways that you can access this, but the easiest way is to go and open Google Maps, and if you look at the bottom, there is Explore, commute, and then something called saved And this is a whole bunch of lists. And so the default lists are favorites, want to go, start places and labeled. But the cool thing is they have done a couple

of things to improve this. I love making lists, Like for instance, when I went to Zion, I made a Zion list and when I was cruising through, you know, different recommendations you have to It's it's a little weird because the easiest way to do it is to check. Like let's say you want to go to a restaurant, right you find out about a restaurant, search for that restaurant, then in Google Maps, and once you search for that restaurant in Google Maps, bring it up big. There should

be directions call and then something called save. You tap save and then you can save it to one of your lists. And what they've done with these lists is they've made them really easy to find number one, and then when you tap it to find it later, they are showing you stuff based on how you know how close you are to those things. So in Zion, what I did is I just went to my list and

I saw what was closest. You can also see your list on a map, so everything that you want to do in that area is plotted out and you can see kind of how far things are from each other. It's really cool and I used to use Yelp for this, which Yelp has a similar feature you can save collections, but I just felt like this was easier and more universal because it just seemed like it was a better solution because you can save all kinds of stuff in

these lists. You can save recipes, whatever. Now the other cool thing, and I think some people might think this is scary, is that if you have location history turned on, and a lot of people do, you can see all the places that you've been to in your past. And I've talked about this before, but they've made it a little bit easier to find now. So if you go

into saved, then at the bottom you'll see timeline. You can say, let's go and you can now see all the places that you've been organized by category shopping, food and drinks, hotels, attractions, airports. So if I want to see all the airports that I've been to carrying a phone in the world, I can see them, and they're all sorted by how far they are. Well, they're not sorted by how far they are from me, because San Francisco is coming up. They're actually sorted by it looks

like time. But you can go to food and drink. So maybe you went to this little little coffee house in Tokyo and you can't remember the name because it was written in Japanese. And now you can just go on here and go to Tokyo because it's also done by cities. Tap let's see. So let's go to let's see, where was I Carlsbad a year ago? I went to the well that was Lego Land. Okay, that wasn't very good.

But oh, Shanghai. Here's Shanghai. So I went to well, I can't read the name of it, but it was a shopping mall, and it's just you know, maybe I couldn't remember the name of that shopping mall, but now I can see it so I think this is a really cool underutilized feature. Yes, is it that Google is keeping track of everywhere you go? Yes, we get it. It's creepy. Oh guess what. It's the world we live in.

And to me, it's really useful. And as long as you know that it's happening and you're not surprised by it, and nobody else has access to this information, why not. It's just to me. It's to me there is a I love privacy, but there is a fine line between privacy and usefulness, And to me, I love the idea that I can have a list of everywhere I've ever went in the world without having to keep that list, and in seconds I can look at my phone and see all the different places I've went. So check it out.

It's called saved. There's other ways to access it through the Google app and various things. But that's that's, uh, you know, just one of the things that I think is cool. All right, we'll get one more question before the show ends. Lydia says, mister DeMuro. A lot of people calling me mister DeMuro. Am I really that formal, mister DeMuro? Mister DeMuro, I just called me rich, Rich on tech. I apologize. I do not have Facebook nor Instagram. I have a question. Do you know why Verizon is

discontinuing ring back tones as of October thirty first? Is there any apps that you know that will provide ring back tones? Please advise? Thank you? Ringback tones, Wow, I haven't heard of those in a long time. All I know is that when you search ringback tones, they are discontinued. Effective let's see October thirty first, twenty twenty and effective August twenty sixth, customers will no longer be able to

subscribe or purchase ringback tones. That's it doesn't give a reason, but I'm guessing if I had to guess the reason, it's because people stopped using them. They were costly, and I don't know if any other Let's see, it looks like does AT and T. My AT and T might still offer them, but I I don't know. It's still on their website, but it could be an old page. Let's see if T mobile has some T Mobile has caller tunes. It looks like that two thousand and four

rileys are old. I don't know if they have it anymore, so I think you are out of lock. I should I should get that thing all right? Well, that is uh, that's gonna do it for this week's show. Can you believe it? I say that every week. I can't believe. It goes very fast. Let's see what do I say at this point. That's gonna do it for this episode of the show. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, you can do it in several ways.

You can go to rich on tech dot tv, hit the email button at the bottom of the page, or you can send me an email Hello at richontech dot tv. I think that's the email address. Also, we would love it if you would rate and review this podcast to help other people discover it. Techy one two four says five stars rate podcast great content and very useful technical information. Looking forward to it every week. Keep up the good work. Well,

thank you, techy one two four. If you want to rate this podcast, go to rate this podcast dot com slash rich on tech. I know you are rating and reviewing it because I get a little email from ratethipodcast dot com that says, rich you've gone over your quota for the month. We're not giving any more reviews for you. We're not gonna I guess they redirect people to the proper place whatever. I don't know. Anyway, if you get that, if you if you hit a barrier, just go to

iTunes and just rate it that way. But we've got one hundred and ninety reviews and we stand at five stars, five out of five. That is no small fee. Thank you so much. I do love doing this podcast. I hope you know that it's one of my favorite things of the week, and honestly, I'd probably go many more hours if I could, but I only have so many hours in the day and I have other things I need to do for my job. I'm rich samiro On behalf of everyone that gets this show to your ears.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you real soon.