Google's incredible new cheap airfare tool

the show. Welcome if you're listening on Twitter spaces. Still a lot going on in the tech world just never never ends, huh. But kind of fun stuff, a lot of cool stuff to talk about, like a lot of like a lot of like new tools that I want to talk about this week, like just handy, handy stuff. So let me just give you a background on me and kind of my philosophy on what I like to talk about both on TV and on this podcast. There are so many people out there that love to talk rumors, speculation,

hot takes. You know, you can find opinions all over the web. But personally, I don't care. I want good information, I want news I can use. I want tools, I want tips. I want things that I sit there and I'm like, Rich, stop talking, because I need to write this down. I need to like, hold on, wait what

was that app? Hold on? What was that? So ninety nine percent of the people that meet me in real life IRL, they they literally, without fail, say hey, Rich, I loved your tip on this, or Rich, I downloaded that app you mentioned, or Rich, I got this phone because of your review. That's the kind of stuff that I want to do. So when you look at technology news on TV, on the web, pretty much anywhere unless you're on these real enthusiast sites, a lot of it is just like you know, it's a lot of like

what what did Elon say today? What is Elon going to do? To Twitter? And everyone has an opinion on this stuff, and personally, I think it's fun, and of course you want to look at some of that stuff. Most of the time, I don't, to be honest, you know, even with the Apple roomor stuff. It's like for years on TV, I just didn't cover Apple rumors. I mean, anyone can write up an Apple rumor, and now you know, I'll report on some of them and some of the

more I guess the more reputable sources. But the reality is, like I want to know what new products are out whether I should buy them, what new apps are useful, what new features are out there. Those are the kind of things that I think are the most useful. So I am in a constant battle with kind of the hype, the clickbait, the you know, just anyone and everyone that wants to lead me into this direction of you know, stuff that it's like almost like uh, popcorn. You know.

It's like it's like you're sitting there with your popcorn just eating and like, oh yeah, that's you know, the stuff that makes you angry, the stuff that makes you happy, the stuff that makes you sad. I I've always tried, and I'm not saying look, I mean I try to hold this stuff to a higher standard. It doesn't always happen, but in general, Like if you're wondering why I'm not super controversial or why I'm not super edgy, that's the reason.

I just want this to be a show and my reports to be a place where you learn cool stuff about technology, you see cool stuff, and you can use the stuff that I talk about. So I could scare you every day with privacy stuff. I could make you fear for your you know, security of your phone. I can make you tell you that you need to update

Chrome every day. That's just not how I roll. I will tell you when I think there's something that you need to know about security, about you know, your privacy, of course I will tell you that stuff, but just kind of making these large giant statements about you know, you should be scared or your location or you know. One of my favorites is like, you know, there's always these roundups of like you know, Android apps that are

stealing information on your phone. Nine times out of ten, those apps are sideloaded by a tiny percentage of people in a different country, and they have no bearing on the average person here in the US, which is my primary audience. And so it's like, yeah, I'll tell you, like what steps you should take to protect your phone.

Like if you're sideloading apps and you even know what that is, you're probably a little tech savva the most people anyway, so you already know what the dangers are of sideloading an app, Especially when it comes to the iPhone. You know, there's always you know, is it spying on you?

Is that this is that like I'll talk about that stuff, but just to put these blanket statements, like the fact that you know, you download an app and it's just literally taking over your iPhone and suddenly spying on your every move and using your cameras and this and that, like it generally does not happen. So I'll talk about this stuff, but in general, that's where I'm coming from.

I just kind of wanted to get that out there so that you understand, if you know, if there's a certain story I don't mention, or like a rumor in the news that I'm just avoiding, there's a reason behind my madness. There's a reason why I cover this stuff that I do. All right, without further ado, let's get into the first story of the week. Twitter, everyone's favorite topic right now, is testing a new Twitter circle feature.

So this is so you can share your tweets with a smaller group of people, and this makes a lot

of sense. Instagram has this close Friends feature, which I really like because I've got a lot of followers on Instagram and I love them, but they're not all my family members and close friends, and sometimes I'm just sharing stuff that's a little bit more family oriented or it's not secret, but it's just like you know, maybe it's just more Yeah, it's mostly just family oriented or where I am at a certain place or time that might not need to be public information. So I'll use that

close friends feature a lot. You can tell when someone is showing you something on your close friends list because I think there's a little green circle around the story or around the person that's sharing the story, and so you can tell that that's meant for just your eyes and not everyone's eyes. And Twitter kind of testing the same thing. You'll be able to share tweets with up two one hundred and fifty people in this inner circle, and you can change those people at any time. It

doesn't I don't. Let's see, does it tell you when you're added or deleted from this circle? I don't think so. Uh yeah, you can edit your participants at any time. So anyway, I mean, look, there's gonna be there's going to be some changes at Twitter over the next six months to a year. Obviously it's got new ownership, so or it's going to have new ownership, so we're gonna see a lot of changes. I hope they make it better. I love Twitter, I really do. I've said this on

this show before. I think it's a great social network. I think that I mentioned this on Twitter. Actually, how Instagram to me has just become a complete mess with all the changes and things that they're doing there trying to really I mean, look, everyone is scared of reals, sorry, of TikTok, and so you have the TikTok influence is so apparent on Facebook and Instagram it's not even funny.

I mean they literally if they could just switch out everything in Facebook and Instagram to become reels when you open up the app, they would, But they want to tread carefully because they know that people didn't sign up for that necessarily, and so they they want to make sure that they're not missing out on the bandwagon when it comes to the TikTok style videos. But they also don't want to alienate every single person that's already using

the app. So, but if you've noticed, you know, there's a bunch maybe not so much on Instagram, on a Facebook, but on Instagram, the TikTok influence is just so apparent, and they're doing such a bad job compared to TikTok. When you open up TikTok it opens up full screen into the videos. You flip up and you switch through

the videos. It's a very simple experience. Instagram has like one thousand and one ways you can browse Instagram at this point, and it's just getting very crowded, very confusing, and I feel like they've lost direction on what they want to be and we'll just see what happens with that whole situation. I mean, they really I think that the uh, the one minute short is like literally my favorite storytelling method right now. I used to be a

guy who literally hated vertical video. I thought it was evil, and now I'm not kidding. I stay up at awake at night just thinking about making reels and one minute really impactful videos for this for these platforms, because it's such a powerful way to reach people. You have one minute. You have to be succinct. I mean, it's all of my training in journalism because it combines video, pictures and audio, and I like actually narrating them because that's my world.

I mean, I write packages for a living. That's what we call our stories on TV. They're called a package, and they're short. They're only a minute thirty and so real is a minute but it's vertical, so it's a little bit tougher to squeeze in your video in that way, but also you have to be really succinct, tell a story, capture their attention. I personally am obsessed with it. I think it's such a cool genre of video at this point, and I'd bet everything it's going to become the only

thing on mobile after a couple of years. All right, you heard those clacking sounds. That means time for our first question. Hello, Rich, I have poor vision. It's very difficult for me to read letters and documents. I only use an iPad for the Internet and communicating. What would be the best way for me to import a document to my iPad and have the screen reader read it to me. I try a scanner called doxy Go, but

the iPad would not read the file. I have a first generation ten inch iPad which is running iOS fifteen. Do you have any suggestions? Keep up the good work, Thanks, Bob Bob. I think that you just use the scanning, the tech scanning feature that's built into iOS. So if you notice on the notes app, they've actually made it a little bit easier to access. So if you go

you open notes and you compose a new note. There's a little camera icon and when you tap that above the keyboard, there's an option for tech scanning, And so you just tap that thing, you know, it opens up the camera on your phone. You hold it over some text and literally it doesn't even miss a beat. It will scan the text, convert it, you know, from text ocr whatever you call it, and insert that text into

a document on your phone. And then after you do that, you can use the built in screen reader on iOS. It's under accessibility to speak what you're listen what you're seeing on your screen, so super super easy. All of the tools are built into the iPad. Apple has done some really nice things with accessibility and helping you take advantage of the things that you know, we take for granted, and that's vision. So I think that they've done a

really good job with the importing of text. I think they've done a really good job with the speaking of text. And this is the beauty of the iPhone in general, is that there are just so many little features built in. It's kind of like an onion. You don't know. If you don't need them, you don't even think about them, But when you need them, you can use them, and Apple has them there for you. So that would be

my recommendation that one two punch. So again, you take the document, you scan it with the text scan feature, and then use the screen reader to actually have the iPad read it out to you. Great question, Bob, and thanks for emailing me. All right, let's get to the next story of the day. Apple, Google and Microsoft are looking to we're going to figure out how to get rid of passwords, and we've seen a little progress in this area, but ninety nine percent of the time you

still got to use a password to log in. We're seeing more use of those what's called magic links, which you put your email address into a website and they email you a link and that link takes you to log in. It could be a little complicated on the iPhone because of the architecture of the operating system depending on what app you're using for your email, but I won't get into that. But this is a good thing. So Microsoft, Google, and Apple have joined the FIDO Alliance.

That has nothing to do with all fight out is short for Fast Identity Online, and so what they want to do is help you log into apps and websites with things like fingerprint readers, face scanners, or your phone.

Now we already see a level of this on Google and some other apps as well, but a lot of these apps are getting away from the SMS confirmation codes to say are you who you say you are, and they're switching to at least for Google, when you log into a Google property, it will say okay, now open up your iPhone and open up Gmail and tell us you know and click the yes you know confirmation code.

So the idea is that if a hacker was trying to log into your Google account on a computer somewhere, they probably don't have your smartphone, and so by saying okay, we'll open up the Google app on your smartphone and confirm that it's you, the hacker would be like, ohh foiled again. But you, as a as a person that actually owns that account, could say, oh, yeah, my phone's here. Let me open up Gmail and you say, yeah, that's me. You click the confirmation code or the screen or whatever

it is. Sometimes it's a button, sometimes it's a number, and you know it confirms it it's you, because it's trying two different ways of making sure it's you. You've got your log in and then also that secondary authentication sometimes we call that two factor authentication, but this is just a different way. It's not texted to you. It is actually a confirmation screen, so we can see more

things like that. Like next time you go to Amazon on your computer, it might say, hey, open up the Amazon app on your phone and boom, is this you trying to log in? You say yes, and it just logs you in without having to use a password. Now does this mean that all passwords are going away forever? Probably not. We're still going to need sort of a master password for things, or you know, a password to

get in the first time. I think this is more geared towards relogging in or accessing websites on different things. But I don't know. I mean it could be you know, maybe maybe they'll figure out a way to get rid

of the password altogether. I don't know. But the other thing that they're doing is they said, according to the cenet article, that they are working on something as soon as the end of this year, So we might have devices powered by software from Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the next year that take advantage of this Fido technology. So kind of cool, very exciting. I did an interview. I'll have this on KTLA soon. But I did an

interview with a security expert, really really great interview. You know, I'll be honest. Sometimes I do interviews and they're just not that good. Other times I do interviews and I just wish I had kind of a live interview show because I want every single thing that person says on TV because it's just so good. And this was an

example of that. This guy's name was Roger Grimes. He's a security expert with oh gosh, what's it NOB four or something like that, but he just the things he was saying were just so great about our passwords and how hackers are hacking us. And all I have I have to say is if you are not using strong passwords, strong unique passwords, if you think you're able to make up passwords that you know you have the upper hand, you don't. These hackers are relentless and they are working

twenty four to seven to hack our stuff. And if you think you're coming up with these little c passwords, I use my dog's name plus twenty plus an explanation point.

Now not gonna happen. These guys are cracking. Guys in Galas are cracking I think, he said, eighteen digit codes at this point, if they are made by humans, if they're randomly generated by a password service like a you know, a last pass or a dash lane or any sort of password generator, he said, eleven characters is kind of the magic spot where they still can't crack that easily or even at all. He said, So the last person I interviewed from Bitwarden, he said, I think sixteen was

his magic number. That he said that was overkill, but it kind of preps you for the future of how these hackers are getting even more sophisticated. So sixteen, So anywhere between eleven and sixteen randomly generated characters are going to protect you at this point, plus of course two factor authentication. But do it. I'm not kidding. The other thing he mentioned that I thought was kind of cool and I had not really thought of this, But something you can do is if you can't use a password

generator like let's say, for instance, typing logging into your laptop. Now, on my laptop, I've got a fingerprint scanner, but there are times that I still need to use my password, and so I'll be honest, it's I shouldn't say this, but it's a simpler password because I know I have to type it all the time. But he did say that if you want to, you know, have to type something in all the time, use what's called a pass phrase.

And so you can say something like I always eat watermelon in the summer with salt exclamation point, you know, something like that, where that's you know, that's really tough for someone to figure out. That's still pretty long and random. And so you can try something like a pass phrase if you must use a password that you are creating. All right, moving right along here, let's get to the next question of the show. Barry says, hey, Rich, what was the app you talked about for sports card values?

I may be sitting on a small fortune, thanks Barry. Barry. The app is called collects coll X. We featured this on KTLA and ooh do we get a response? So, if you're like me, you collected baseball cards when you were a kid, and what was the biggest challenge of those cards finding the good ones? Right? You always wondered if you had a really good card in your collection. Now, I grew up at a time before the internet was huge, and so there wasn't like an eBay you could just

search on. There were actually guides. I think he called it the Beckett Guide. I kind of remember this. I had, like the pink pages with the little tiny writing and the card values in there. But again you had to buy that book. And as a broke kid, I wasn't buying that book. So what did you do? You just talked to your friends, Hey, Adam, do you know if

this card is worth anything? And you'd always have that one friend that could go through your collection and kind of size it up and see if you had any good cards in there. Well, now kids today don't need to do any of that. Father and son team out of New Jersey came up with this app called collect Colx. You installed on your phone and basically you scan the

baseball card. It kind of looks for prices on various sites, including eBay and the Beckett Guide and all these different places, aggregates those into an average price, and it tells you how much the card is approximately worth. Brilliant IDEA kid is ten years old going to do very good things in this life. The dad, I guess, had some background in image recognition, so that's the app. Brilliant and I can't wait to go home and scan all my cards

in my old binder. I'm also going to do a reels about this because I've got to get the SAP out there. It's so cool. Now. On this note, I got an email. Hey, Rich I've been collecting baseball cards my entire life. I saw your segment this morning about collects. Have you received any input from the app. I've had a chance to use it, and I'd like to know what I'd like you to know what I think of it. It's easy to use. Just take a picture of the front and back of your card. So far, I've done

twelve and they are all graded. After scanning the third card, the app slows down and freezes. I think that once kinks are worked out, it will not do that. Some of the cards are mislabeled, especially the ones with multiple players. This is easily fixed by editing the picture. The prices seem to be about right, although slightly off, meaning they are displaying a lower value than other sites which price cards,

but for the most part they are good. Could rather me not use his full name, which I typically don't do on the show, but he said he would give this site a B plus. I'll share this app with my friends and family. Thanks for talking about this product. So anyway, yeah, there you go. It sounds like a pretty glowing review. And again, you know, I'm pretty early

on this app. It's a pretty brand new app. But again, this will continue to be evolved and tweak, and I think that it's just one of these things that as a kid like, can you I can't imagine having this as a kid like with all the work I had to do to figure out the price of one baseball card, the fact that you can just scan them and get

and look, these prices are not gonna be exact. It's not gonna be the exact amount you're gonna sell it for, but it's gonna give you a ballpark figure, no pun intended, right, So I think that that's a cool app. C l l x iOS Android download it. They work with all sports cards right now, and then Pokemon cards are coming soon. All right, on to the next story. Let's talk about summer travel with Google. So, if you've listened to this podcast a lot, which sorry if you have, just kidding,

Why why am I so self deprecating? People love this show? I get emails every day. I mean, you know, here's the deal. I'm on TV, I'm on social media, and I'm on this podcast, and I'm on the radio. And so among those four things, I will tell you it's a pretty equal number of people that come up to me and say in real life, like where they like hearing me. Like a lot of people like the radio.

A lot of people email me about the podcast, or even in real life like I was at the gym the other day and this guy comes up to me and he's like, I'm a big fan of the podcast. I'm like, wow, podcast, That's that's hardcore. Like that's like a super fan. Social media, you know, when I meet kind of like people at the schools and stuff, like a lot of it social media, and then of course TV. You know people just kind of baseline when you just

you know, see it rich. But you know, so there's there's something to be said for all the mediums that I go to. And so anyway, if you've listened to this podcast, I don't know why I mentioned that, it's just you know, look, you're listening to my show. So I just sometimes I go off on tangents, but if you listen to this show, you know, I love Google Flights or Google Travel in general. I always I'm on Google Flights every single day. Every single day I search

for something on Google Flights. I might be eyeing a trip, I might be just tracking a price, I might be just dreaming whatever. But starting today, Google Google Flights has always been able to track prices. I've got three or four airfares being tracked at any given time for future trips I want to take. But now they have a really cool feature. And this makes so much sense because Google has so much information. They are the They are just so smart about slicing and dicing data that this

just makes so much sense. Because Google knows when flights are unusually cheap, well, now they can tell you when that happens. So beginning now, you can start tracking prices to find deals for any dates, not just specific dates. So if you want to go to Rome or Tokyo or anywhere, just pop that into the calendar, press search, and then when you press search, let me do this. I can actually show you. So when you search the

dates flights, okay, where to let's just say Tokyo to you. Okay, oh okay, You press search and there's a new little button button that's called any dates. It's actually a toggle. You toggle that on and now you'll get emails when prices are unusually low for those trips. So yeah, there's always gonna be days that are cheap. But when Google notices, huh, this flight typically goes for six hundred dollars right now, it's three hundred. Let's email Rich. That's what you're gonna get.

It's totally brilliant. It's for any dates, so you have to be flexible, obviously, but if you are, you can nab some really good prices. Do I have any of these tracked yet? I don't think I do. I should do one right now, because I don't have anything tracked at this point. Oh I do. I want to go to a Raleigh, North Carolina, and I've got that. I've got a little alert for that area, EXU. I've always wanted to visit, so it's been a long time. Last time I was there see some family down there, was

like in the nineties. So I want to see that place anyway, So I've got that on my little tracker. I know it's not the most glamorous place in the world, but that's that's where I'm tracking now. I didn't notice this is the first time around. But there's also this new tool which is super super cool if you want to drive. And during the pandemic we were driving a lot.

We still are. When we went on vacation recently, we drove to Scottsdale because I just didn't feel like flying, you know, with a pandemic and you know, it's just everything being so kind of all over the place. I was like, ah, it's just easier to drive right now. It's more, you know, more guaranteed. So we drove to Scottsdale. But this is a really cool feature that if you go to Google dot com slash travel, slash explore. Now when you look, there's a new kind of icon that

says explore nearby. You'll see it on the map. You tap that and whatever city you are looking from, like here in my case it's Los Angeles. It now shows me all the cool places I can drive to Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, Calico, Big Bear, Joshua Tree, San Diego, Laguna Beach, Malibu, Passo Robles and so these are driving places and it tells you how far it is to drive three hours uh in the case of Passo Robles. So this is another

way to just explore the world around you. Of course, all those places I mentioned you've probably heard of if you live in Los Angeles, but you know, it's kind of neat. Maybe you're in you know, maybe you're in a new city like Dallas, Texas for a while. And let's see. So if I go Dallas and now I'm in Dallas, Texas, Okay, what's going on? Why are you not showing me Dallas. Shouldn't you snap to Dallas? There?

It is explore Nearby, So places I can go from there are Wichita Falls, Lake Texoma, Paris, Broken Broken Bow, Jefferson, Lake Fork, Tyler, Waco, brown Wood, Fort Worth, Possum Kingdom. Whatever that is Nackotish. I know how to pronounce that because I lived in uh in that area. It looks like naa, naaa, naka, goat Godoci's but it's Nacotish. I think it's. Oh, maybe it is Nacagosties. Maybe Nacodish was in Louisiana. Anyway, uh No, I think Nacodish was in

text I don't know. It's been a while since I lived there. But anyway, really really cool feature. Check it out. It's called Explore near by moving right along, let's get to the next question. On the podcast, GLORIOA says, Hey, Rich. First of all, I appreciate all the new technology you provide, always interesting and informative. Here's an issue. My iPhone became disabled. I got locked out. My password wouldn't work because I tried too many times. I know you're busy. Long story.

I didn't have iclouds I don't have my pictures backed up. I know it's my fault. Can't blame anyone but myself. Went to the Apple store. All they can do is give me the answer. They couldn't get my pictures because I don't have iCloud. I'm reaching out. I'm begging you if you have a solution or know some options. How do I get access to my pictures. I still have the phone, of course, I had to get a new

phone to start all over. Ugh. I've heard of websites that offer to retrieve your pictures, but I haven't done so I'm hesitant that it could be a scam. Any information could be helpful. I know it's a long shot, so you can be straight with me, even though it might hurt. Thank you, Gloria. Well, Gloria I'm going to be straight with you. You can't. There's just no way to get these pictures off this phone. As far as I know, these phones are encrypted. If you don't have

the pass code. I don't think any software that's that's for the mere mortal that's not you know, ten thousand dollars is going to be able to retrieve pictures off this phone and unencrypt them. So I don't know how you forgot the password on your phone. I mean, if you use your phone every day, I'm kind of how do you forget that? I don't know. I mean, look, there's they're okay, I'll tell you a story. So long story short. You know, these companies send me phones to

test out, and Samsung sent me a phone once. I guess I set up the phone in my sleep because I set it up and I totally forgot Well then a week later I was using it for a shoot and I'm like literally emailing the Samsung person because I turned on the phone in the morning and I can't you know, early in the morning, we're about to shoot this segment and I needed it and I I'm like, wait, why is this phone of a passcode on it? I didn't set this phone up. I forgot that I set

the phone up. And so I'm sitting there like typing in a million random pass codes, but I know at a certain point's gonna lock me out, so I don't really want to keep typing them in. So I called the Samsung people. I say, hey, why'd you send me a phone that's already activated with all of someone's stuff on it and passcode and this. And I said, no, we didn't, and let me check, let me check, let me check. And they come back. They said, now that phone was not activated when we sent it to you.

And I said, ah, long story short, I totally forgot that I had set up this phone, and so I tried a passcode that I typically used for my tester phones. That wasn't it. Then finally, after all these thoughts and like just going over it in my head, I said, all right, let me try this. Try to passcode. It worked.

It was a pass code that I never used. I don't know why I used it, if I was trying to be different whatever, So anyway, it could have been really bad because if I would have locked out everyone on that phone. Now, yeah, there's you can format the phone to factory conditions and get it back to start. But you're going to lose everything on that phone. And my case didn't matter in this case, Yeah, it matters. Your phone is now. I'm confused why you had to

get a new phone. I thought you could actually just if the phone is linked to your account. Yeah, these iPhones, you know, I don't know the ins and outs. I know that it once the phone is activated to your account, it's extremely tough, if not impossible, for someone else to activate that phone, which is why I always say, why do people steal iPhones? You can't do anything with it

if it's already been activated. Now, if they figure out your iCloud passwords, sure, but if you don't have the pass code and you don't have the iCloud, I don't know a way of getting these pictures off the phone. I really don't, But this is why. And I don't want to harp on this, but I'm not kidding. I get these emails every day, at least a couple times a week, and it's just someone who's lost their pictures

because they didn't back them up. And I really I know, Gloria, you said that, you know I could be straight with you. And just you know, I know it's my fault and this and that, but like, why are these pictures not backed up? There are just too many options to back up pictures that they need to be backed up. Every single picture should be backed up. Use Google Photos, use iCloud. If you don't want to pay for iCloud, maybe you're an Amazon Prime member, use the Amazon Photos app. It's

free unlimited storage for Prime members. If you don't want any of that stuff, you want a third party app, use Iedrive Photos ninety nine cents for the first year unlimited backups, ten bucks every year after that, ten dollars a year for peace of mind of all those precious photos. This happened to my father. He you know, I set up Google Photos on his phone, but on the iPhone, you do have to open up Google Photos every once in a while for it to be useful, for it

to actually trigger and back up. Maybe that's changed now. I think maybe it activates in the background once in a while, But this was at a time when it didn't. And I'm telling you it was really sad because my dad lost his phone and there goes all the pictures. They were all gone and there's nothing I can do about it. This is the reason why my mom has an Android is because she had an iPhone and she was really frustrated that her pictures were not showing up

in Google Photos on her desktop. And I said, Mom, you gotta open up Google Photos every once in a while for it to start kind of for it to trigger and for it to start sinking. Yes, I know iCloud has been blessed with background activity on the iPhone. I wonder how that works, but yes, iCloud will do it all the time. So if you have iCloud, yes, your pictures will be backed up. Unless you're not in Wi Fi, unless you're you know, not charging whatever's there's

reasons that you know it won't back up. But most of the time you're plugging in your phone every night, your pictures will be backed up. So I've talked about this on the show before. But when I'm on vacation, I know it uses a ton of cellular data, but I actually switch on my cellular backup for Google Photos when I go on vacation because I'm taking so many pictures throughout the day that I can't wait until I get back into my hotel room to upload those pictures.

I lost my phone at some point in my trip, if it fell off over the side of the boat, or if it dropped off the side of a building, or if I just you know, lost it down the elevator shaft or a grate. There goes all my pictures. They're gone, because all those pictures I took in the last couple hours would be gone. So for that reason, every time I go on vacation, I go into Google Photos, I toggle on cellular backup, and I let it use

all that cellular data. Yes, it uses a lot more battery, but at the same time, my photos and videos are safe and secure throughout the day, versus waiting until I get back to my hotel room, getting back on Wi Fi, getting back on charging, and having Google Photos flip into action. So, Gloria, I'm sorry. You know, take it to a data recovery specialist. See what they say. You know, go on YELP search data recovery, and someone local in your areas. See if

they can do it. Maybe they know better than I do. If they do, let me know. And if you're listening to the podcast, you know, a way of getting this these photos off this phone that is that is locked and encrypted, let me know, because I don't think that's possible. If it was, every law enforcement in America would be doing this with phones that they recover. And I know that there's things like a great key which can do it, but that's like a ten thousand dollars a month device.

That's not something that the mere mortal can afford to have access to or even have access to. So sorry about that, but you know, I am. I think the takeaway for everyone is that you got to have your pictures backed up. That's just the bottom line, all right. I gotta say, sorry to say this, but this Facebook or sorry this Facebook. Sorry to say, but this podcast is going away. Yep, that's what's happening. Going away. Oh sorry, just on Facebook. I should probably clarify that no more

podcasts on Facebook as of June third. This is kind of bittersweet for me because quite honestly, I was getting really used to a lot of downloads of this podcast. Once Facebook invited me to the podcast platform on Facebook, I immediately put my RSS feed in there, and so every time I did a show, it would import into the native player on Facebook automatically. And I was telling I was getting I was getting thousand I mean tens of thousands of listens from this or I should say in

the tens of thousands. So it was a lot, and it was like, Wow, I'm now tapping into all these people on my Facebook page and they're actually getting a little taste in my podcast. Now, not a lot of them's took not everyone stuck around, because I clearly noticed in the past couple of months that Facebook gave up on this because they just stopped pushing that podcast to people. So let me just quickly explain how Facebook works. Facebook

is only interested in what Facebook is interested in. So when you post something like a picture or a video or a link or a podcast or a reels, whatever Facebook is interested in promoting at that time, that's what gets sent out to your followers. I have eight hundred and fifty thousand followers on Facebook. I post a link from my KTLA website and guess what, A thousand people see it. Now do you really think only a thousand people that I'm that follow me are interested in my

links from ktla? Probably not, but Facebook is not interested in propagating that link. I can post a video that I shot on my iPhone of me getting an ice cream cone and putting a you know, taking a scoop out of that ice cream cone, and it will get three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand views. Do you think more people are interested in that than the

article that I crafted on the KTLA website. No. But Facebook wants to become a destination for video, and so that's why when you natively upload a video to Facebook, they show it to more people. For a while, podcasts was the hot thing. That's what Facebook was all interested in. So what were they doing. They were over serving my podcast to my followers, and so more people were hearing it, more people were seeing it presented on their feed, and if they stopped for five seconds to listen to it,

that counted as a listen. Now that's a whole nother thing. Is that really a listen? I don't think so, but that's how they were counting it, which boosted my podcast listenership. Then when Facebook got bored and tired and realized that TikTok is eating their lunch, they said, oh, never mind, we'll leave the podcast to everyone else. We'll do reels. And now what they're doing is they are over correcting on reels. So I've now had two reels that are

in the million views club. One of my reels has done over three million views, one is on track to doing a million views. Are those reels any better than this long form podcast where I give a lot of information and talk to people about stuff. No, but it's what Facebook wants to promote. So after a year, Facebook says no more podcasts were done, removing them all together. Starting June third, gonna stop its short form audio product called soundbites, which I don't even know what that was,

and it's Central Audio Hub. This is all according to Bloomberg. And of course what are they pushing now short form videos called reels to compete with TikTok. So anyway, if you were one of the few dedicated listeners on Facebook, don't be surprised if you no longer see my podcast there. The good news is you can use any audio app you want to listen to my podcast. It is still available on all of those apps. All right, let's get

to the next question of the show. Debbie says, I have an iPhone eleven with the latest update, I'm no longer able to use face ID with a face mask, and my Apple Watch it is only available with an iPhone twelve. I've been using this feature for the past one and a half years, and all of a sudden, I cannot use it. I would love for you to look into this and why Apple decided to make this change. Thank you very much. Debbie in Temecula, Debbie, Debbie, Debbie.

They didn't change this, So you're actually confusing two things. There are two features that allow you to unlock the iPhone with face with a face mask. Now. The first is the one you're referring to, which has been around for a year and a half, and that is the ability to unlock the iPhone with an Apple Watch. And so they added this feature, which makes a whole lot

of sense. In fact, I think I talked about it on the show before they added it, or mentioned it in a tweet or something, and I said, you know, Android has been doing this forever where if you're wearing a Bluetooth device, you can unlock your phone because it knows that Bluetooth device is nearby. And Apple took a little different approach. It took a little smarter approach. Once the watch is put on your wrist and then unlocked

as long as it stays on your wrist. It will continue to unlock your phone, and if you're wearing a face mask, it will still unlock your phone. And so that is a feature that's been around for a year and a half. You need the iPhone ten and up because it uses face ID to authenticate the fact that you are wearing a mask and wearing an Apple Watch, and it says, all right, we're gonna trust that this

is you and here we go. Now. The other feature, and the new one that you cannot use, is the ability to not have an Apple Watch and use face ID with a face mask. That's different. So what Apple is doing there is all the people that don't have an Apple Watch if they have face ID on a newer iPhone. You're right, it is the iPhone twelve and up. You can still unlock your iPhone with face ID, even if you're wearing a face mask. And the way they do this is they look at the nuances in your eyes.

So something about your eyes, whether it's the wrinkles around your eyes or whether it's just the shape of the eyes. I don't know what they're doing, but that's what they're doing to verify it is who you say you are. You're right, that feature is not available to you. The Apple Watch unlocked feature is available to you as long as you have an Apple Watch and as long as

you have an iPhone ten and up. So what I suspect happened is with this latest software update, it just got toggled off and you just have to go back into settings and toggle it back on. So what my advice would be is to go into Settings, go into face unlock or face ID whatever they call it on there, and just look for the unlock with Apple Watch, toggle, turn it back on. It'll probably verify your face ID and then it'll work again. So there you go, super

super easy. All right. So nos one of my favorite gadgets, but I feel like Sonos is in a very precarious position because it's, let's be honest, it's a speaker for the well to do. It's not a speaker for the average person because people are just not buying these things. They're too expensive. So I love Sonos and I've had it for a long time. I'm quite invested in the ecosystem. I think it's the best whole home audio system, and so for that reason, I've taken, you know, ten years

to build a speaker in every room. Not build I mean put a speaker in every room. I didn't do it overnight. It took a long time, but I do have one in every room, and I absolutely love it because I can have the same music in every room. I can have different music in every room. I can you know, I can do basically, It's just an amazing synced up audio system. And it also works with my TV. So let's say I'm listening to a football game on my TV or watching a football game, I can have

that audio pipe throughout the entire house. So there's just so much flexibility. The one thing that Sonos is severely lacking in, and this is what tempted me to switch to like either the Apple speakers in every room or the Google speakers in every room, or the Echo speakers in every room, which by the way, are a heck of a lot cheaper than Sonos and they have voice built in, and so it'd be a lot easier to command your music. But the thing that's not not that

easy is to group your music. Now, it's gotten better, but sons is still kind of the best when it comes to grouping and un grouping and having groups. The one thing, like I said, they were very bad at is voice control. And there's there's voice support built into one of my speakers. I can use, you know, the Google Assistant or I think maybe the alex A, but it's just it's not good and so I've never used it. Well. Now, according to The Verge, Sonos is prepping to introduce its

own voice assistant in the next few weeks. It's gonna let customers control music on all of their speakers. So this is gonna run on the S two software and let's see, it's going to serve as an alternative to Amazon alex A and Google Assistant. It's going to work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Sonos Radio. If you noticed I did not mention the two most popular music services out there are sorry at least one,

Spotify and YouTube Music. So for me this isda because I use Spotify and to not be able to do that is going to be a problem. But you're going to be able to say hey, Sons and it will wake up your speaker and play audio. I think that's really cool and I can't wait to have this because I need it and every day I come home and I play one of you know, three or four playlists, and they are on different services. Sometimes a're on iHeart, sometimes are on Spotify, sometimes they're on YouTube Music, and

so sometimes you're on Serious XM. So to be able to say, hey, hey, sons, play the Highway on Serious XM, that'd be amazing. Now I probably will be able to say, play the Highway on Serious XM in all my rooms and change the volume to twenty percent. You know, That's basically what I do every day. So I have to

kind of like it's just this. It's it's such a routine that I can't believe Sonos has not built in shortcuts that say this Highway on Series XM on all these rooms or just these two rooms, and at thirty percent volume. Like every day when I come home, I want to do the same thing. I want to play music throughout my house and it's one playlist and it's just you know, at a certain music volume, not too loud,

not too soft. And I just have never been able to do that, and I would love to be able to do that easily, and it sounds like this audio service will be able to do that. I'm telling you this all. And I started out by saying Sonos is not a speaker system for the average person because this is great, But quite honestly, the speakers from Echo or Amazon and Google and even Apple at this point with their home Pod Mini are just much more affordable, much easier.

They may not give you the same flexibility, and they may not be as robust as a Sonos system, but for for ninety nine percent of setups, they're probably going to be just fine. With that said, if you want the best setup, definitely go Sonos. Bill says, hey, Rich, Verizon five G Home Internet has become available in my area. I currently have cable modem with Vonage connected to my router.

I'm trying to find out if I can do the same with the Verizon five G router they supply I can't seem to get an answer from Verizon customer service for sell support is decent, but not for five G home Internet. Do you know if vontage would work if I plug the Vantage box into this five G router? Can't find a thing when searching for this answer. That's probably because it's so new. I said that another question, I currently have a TP link Mesh system in my

house with great coverage. While I get the same coverage with what Verizon sends me, I wouldn't be able to use the mesh anymore. Well, a couple of things. I don't see why vonage would not work unless Verizon specifically blocks it. So they may block vontage from working with this system. I don't think they do, because it's basically just like a regular you know, it's like regular Internet, except it comes through through five G. So with this five G home Internet is is a box. You've probably

seen them advertised heavily on TV. T Mobile and Verizon have them. What it is is imagine the router that you are, the modem and router that you get from your cable company. Cable guy comes to your house, He runs the wires, he plugs it in, the Wi Fi lights up, it sends a signal throughout your house. Everyone's good, but you got to wait at home for a couple hours for the cable person to come to your house to install it. This is fully through the cellular signals,

so you will get the box. You sign up Verizon or T Mobile, they send you the box to your house. You unbox it, you plug it in near a window. It grabs a cellular signal from the five G super speedy, five G high bandwidth networks that these companies have, and it takes that signal, it transforms it into a Wi Fi signal and sends that Wi Fi signal throughout your house. So think of this as basically a giant hotspot for your entire house. And it works great. I've tested the

Verizon one. It was fantastic. Not available at my home. Unfortunately, I don't get a five G signal here sadly, but when it does, I probably we'll switch because it's just so I love the efficiency of it, the fact that you put this thing near a window, it's pulling in a signal, nice and clean, no wires, and it then boomerangs that signal throughout your house. So I think vontage would work. I would say, you know, post it, sorry, post it, try it, subscribe, try it, don't cancel your

other one. Subscribe. I'm sure there's like a thirty day window where you can try this thing out, or fifteen days, plug it in, set it all up. If it doesn't work, send it back. The other thing is, I don't see why you would not be able to use your TP link system. There are two Ethernet ports on the back of this thing, so you can plug in your Mesh Wi Fi system there and then disable the internal Wi

Fi on the five G box. I did go into the box and look at the settings, and it seemed like you had all the pretty standard settings that you would get on any router from your cable company. You just got to go in type in that like one nine to two dot one six eight dot one dot one or whatever it's called, and that will bring you to all the settings. But I was thoroughly, thoroughly impressed

with this five G home Internet. Verizon also allows you to take it wherever you want, so if you have an RV and you need an address, you got to link it up to an address where it's available. But if you have an RV and you want internet in your RV, you can subscribe to this. It's only fifty bucks a month. I think it starts as cheap as twenty five dollars a month. It's very competitive, but highly

highly recommend it. If your cable company is not very good, If you're paying a lot, you're unhappy, don't switch from cable just because I'm telling you this is cool. If you're paying a decent price with your cable Your service is good, your speed is fine, just stick with it. But once they stick it to you with the higher price, then you can say, well, I've got this other option that's only fifty or twenty five dollars a month. I think I'm gonna switch. And that is the way that

you get a better deal with your cable company. Then you can still stick with them. But if they play hardball, you say, all right, fine, let me switch and you can order this, make sure it all works, and then go ahead and cancel. But these cable companies know they kind of have a lock on things right now, so they're not really negotiating very much. But with these new systems coming on board, like the T Mobile five G and the Verizon five G when you mentioned that, they

do know that that competition is there. They also know that the speed is probably not as fast as what you're getting. But what I can tell you is that the speed you're gonna get from these five G services, as long as they're like, you know, pretty decent fifty sixty, that's gonna be like perfectly fine for anything that you're trying to do like watch you know, Netflix, or you know,

upload download. As long as you're not doing like wild wild, you know, video editing from home or things like that where you need to exchange big files up and down, you're gonna be just fine. All right, Bill, let me know what happens with that. All right? Two stories, aren't no? I guess one story. This is a really quick story. So maybe let's do a couple in a row here Amazon Apple Music is hitting Amazon fireTV. Oh sorry, let me just restart there. Apple Music is arriving on Roku devices.

So if you're an Apple Music subscriber and you had Roku, that combination was not very good because you weren't able to access what you pay for on the Roku. Well now you can so Apple Music the app is available on Roku devices. All your ninety million songs, all your thirty thousand playlists, add free experience if you're a subscriber, is all on their Apple Music Radio. It's all there, So it's there. Not much to say if you want to subscribe for a free trial ten dollars a month.

But what's really cool about this? If you had Roku and you were frustrated because you weren't able to access your paid Apple Music subscription. It is now there. Why wasn't it there yesterday or the day before, the day before. Well, let's say it's all about the money. And Roku is

this platform that is pretty smart. They realized early on that they are just a conduit to these apps, and so they do negotiate with these apps to get them on their platform, and they say, hey, look, you know, if someone signs up through our platform for that ten dollars a month, we want a little cut of that. And so they do get a cut of that money. I'm not saying from specific knowledge. I'm just saying from the information that I've learned about Roku over the years.

This is why Roku kind of when you see it, it almost feels like a cable company. Every once in a while, they have these big spats with like YouTube TV or YouTube or any of these apps that are on there. All of a sudden, they'll be like, well, there's no more YouTube on Roku and they're like, what I thought YouTube could just submit an app to the Roku app Store. Not so fast, you know, they want

to or YouTube TV whatever. They want to negotiate because they know that people are spending money to sign up and so they want a little kickback on that. They want a little cut of that little cut of that action. They also do ad sales. So if you are let's say Filo, and you are on Roku, and this is all just kind of extrapolating the knowledge that as I understand it with Roku. But let's say your Filo. You say, all right, Filo, we know that you serve up ads

on your shows. We want a thirty second AD as part of keeping your service on our platform. We want a third second ad every for every one hour watched of Filo on Roku. We want thirty seconds given to us. And we could do whatever we want that we can sell it, we can use it to promote our products, whatever we want. We get a thirty second ad inventory

and they say all right. And so that way Roku is sort of quote unquote getting paid or they can sell that ad time through their own service and make money on this the apps that are that are streaming through them. So it's pretty smart. It makes a lot

of sense. It's not as like Switzerland as you may think or as it may be presented, but you know, it's a pretty thorough service and they're just kind of planning for the future where you know, people buy these boxes once and then they continue to stream on them for you know, three five years or you know, something like that. All right, we'll get to another question, and this is from Kathy. She says, hey, Rich, have any have you had any luck with apps that help you

get rid of duplicate photos on your phone? And she sent through a link of a random app I've not heard of, But the app that I like is called Gemini gem I Ni Gemini Photos. It is. I think it costs a couple of bucks, but it's made by mac Paul, which I really like. They're actually based over in Ukraine, So thoughts and prayers going out to all

of their employees over there. You're the access twenty dollars, monthly access five dollars, unlimited access sixteen dollars, so they've got a couple of different pricing plans to choose from. But yeah, it can remove blurry photos, it can remove duplicate photos. Just remember that whenever you are going through your photos, make sure they are backed up first. Again, make sure they are backed up. All right, we'll probably end on this how to check your air tags battery

level one year after launch. This is an article from Apple Insider very timely, if you can believe it. Air tags have been out for about a year and the batteries last about a year, which means your air tags may be going dead. So if you have these things set up, which are just amazing, your iPhone will notify you when the battery is going dead and you can replace that battery. It takes the standard. I think it's like a COO thirty two or whatever it's called. I

don't what is it. Air tag battery type CR twenty thirty two, CR twenty thirty two. So maybe buy a couple of those on Amazon right now or at the local store, just to anticipate some of these going dead. So the air tags last for about a year, depending

on how much you're using them. The one year battery life is based on an everyday use of four play sound events and one precision finding event per day, so if you're not trying to find it on a daily basis, these batteries are gonna last longer than a year, probably a year and a half. I've got a bunch of these things. I checked all the batteries on mine and they are all going strong. They look like they're about seventy five percent still full. So how do you do it?

Open your on your iPhone, open up the find my app type items in the bottom row, and then tap on one of the air tags and when you when that pops up, look for the battery icon in the top header. It does not show you a percentage, which is kind of annoying. I wish it did, but it does show you kind of just a battery icon and how much it's filled up. So it could be a range of like, you know, it could be twenty percent

taken down, it could be fifty percent. You know, you just have to use your just use your judgment on how much that's actually what it's showing you. But again, maybe have some of these extra batteries on hand now knowing that some of these things are going to go dead. All right, One more story this I thought was pretty interesting.

Amazon is going to introduce virtual product placement. So the Amazon's got this free v This is their new IMDbTV and it's kind of like competing with two B and Pluto, but they've got a bunch of free content on this free V. Fr ee v E used to be called IMDb TV. So if you're watching Reacher or Jack Ryan or Bosh or Making the Cut or Leverage Redemption, you may see products and those shows that have been virtually added later. How wild is that now? I think this

has been talked about in Hollywood. It's kind of like the holy Grail of advertising because think about it. If you are on Let's say you're Seinfeld, you shot this show thirty years ago. Whatever billboards are in that show are highly irrelevant. The products don't look the same. You know, they pull out of Coca Cola. It doesn't, you know,

look the same at all. But imagine that you shot this show in a way that that product was a green screen or I don't know how they're doing this exactly, but they maybe they have billboards in the show that are green screens. Maybe they're using products that are coated in green. Whatever it is, you know, they pick up a can of soda, it could be whatever the advertisers want to advertise at that very moment. So these things could be inserted on the fly as you're watching the show.

And also, by the way, based on who you are, So for me, Rich Demiro, when I'm watching, they may advertise a Coke zero because they know that my profile shows and I don't drink sugary sodas. But for you, they may advertise the latest Mountain Dew with extra caffeine because your your profile says that you love that. So I think this is fascinating. I think it's amazing. I know it's totally scary, oh my gosh, but it's really cool.

And for brands and for you know, making money, these shows are free, this is another way to monetize those shows. So pretty, pretty fascinating stuff. I thought that was awesome. I can't wait. I'm gonna go scan through some of these shows now and see if I can spot the product placements that are put in there virtually, because that is just such a cool concept I am. I am just so like just amazed at stuff like that and leave it up to a smart company like Amazon to

do that. Oh wow, that sound means that's gonna do it for this episode of the show. If you would like to submit a question for me to answer, just go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or go to rich on Tech dot tv and hit the email icon. If you have not checked out my YouTube lately, I'm putting a lot of my shorts there as well, So I don't know how you find me on YouTube. Just search rich on Tech, I guess, and check out

some of the shorts. You can find me on all social media at rich on Tech. 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. And no matter where you live in the US, you can download the free KTLA plus app on Apple, TV, fireTV, and Roku. Once you do, 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 right here with me. I'll talk to you real soon.