How a software update brought down thousands of computers, make that millions of computers worldwide, The return of the iPod kinda sorta A major retailer stops accepting checks? Are you still writing them? Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on? I'm Richdmiro and this is Rich on Tech. This is the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology. I believe that tech
should be interesting, useful, and fun. Let's open up those phone lines at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question or comment about technology. Got a hot take on something, Give me a call. Email also open. Just go to rich on tech dot tv hit contact. Great guests this week John Hammond, principal security researcher at Huntress, is going
to join to talk about the major IT outage. We've got Zach Hall, editor at large at nine to five MAC. He's going to join to talk about iOS eighteen public beta. And Jared Newman of Advisorator friend of the show, will join to talk about his latest cord Cutting Guide. What a week it was with the global it meltdown all because of a company named CrowdStrike. Their update caused a wide spread outage heard across the world. Now, CrowdStrike is
a cyber security company. They released this flawed software update on July nineteenth. The impact was pretty immediate. The update affected and estimated eight point five million Windows devices. Now, that is less than one percent of all Windows machines. But but the impact was so significant because CrowdStrike has a lot of heavy hitters as their customers, critical enterprises, companies big and small.
Who was affected?
Major airlines, hospitals, banks, retailers, emergency services all impacted. Even Starbucks people had trouble ordering their Ventae triple lattes from their phones. It was pure chaos. When the caffeine stops flowing, that's when America has a problem. So my takeaway from this incident it really highlights the interconnected nature of our
global tech ecosystem, our global tech economy. It used to be things were not as interconnected, Companies were not as wide ranging, They didn't span the globe.
It might have been a local impact.
Now everything it seems has these It just seems like every incident we have continues to get bigger and more global.
Now.
Microsoft talked about the importance of safe deployment of resources like this and of course disaster recovery for us the average person. I think the big takeaway here is back up your system, Back up your system, back up your system.
Now.
CrowdStrike did issue a pretty quick fix, but the problem is the fix wasn't as simple to deploy as the original software updates. The original software update went out quickly and was installed on a lot of these systems. The fix in many cases required manual repairs by IT staff. Yes, they are still dealing with this. In many cases, some of them had to manually bring the computer back to
life from a backup. Otherwise you had to safe boot the computer, which, if you're doing a lot of remote access into your systems, a lot of times you weren't able to rete access in to do the fix that was necessary. And of course, the incident raises a lot of questions about software testing processes, like how did this software update go out that was flawed without someone figuring that out? Don't they test this stuff before it goes out?
And also, who's liable is it? CrowdStrike are they are they gonna have to pay up for all these issues. I mean all these airlines, just the airlines alone, so many people had delayed flights or canceled flights. The airline's got to pay out or get those people on a new flight. Who's liable for all that? CrowdStrike stock fell eleven percent following the incident. Now things are coming back up online, but this was not an easy one to
recover from. I got lots of comments on my Facebook, on my Twitter, on my Instagram, and of course this is just the high level stuff. We're gonna have our guest later in this hour, who is an expert over a million followers.
On social media on YouTube.
He is going to break it down and explain what went wrong here, what we can learn from this, and really just kind of break down how this even happened and what his take is on it. So that will be later this hour. I just wanted to give you the high level stuff. But here's some of the responses I got on my social media. Eric wrote, oh, he
posted a jiff. When you're an IT director and your company doesn't use CrowdStrike, you're sitting easy because you're like, WHOA, Okay, Michelle says, it was a fun day today and the day's not over. Only one co worker is able to log on. Our IT department is working diligently to fix a lot of these computers. Crazy Bill says, this morning, I tried to buy a product from my local farm supply store. The clerk said their PC based register was down and not usable at all. He said, without their
business system, he couldn't sell me anything, even with cash. Yeah, a lot of people were saying, oh, got to carry cash. Sometimes these systems can't even accept cash because they're so dependent on these point of sale systems that they may
not know how to accept cash. I know when I worked at office depot back in the day, we had those old school you know, those like bills, they those like little check systems they have at the this you know, like if you went to like a local diner, says like check it's like printed with red ink at the top and it has all the you know, you tear it off the book like we had that and pens underneath the registers. So in case the POS system ever went down, that's point of sale, by the way, we
would we would go to pen and paper. I don't know if they still do that, but that's what we did. Lisa says, my daughter works at Starbucks. This morning, she said, this morning has been chaos. David said, what a day. More reason why I'm glad my work Mac is my primary machine. Blue screen free. Yeah, the main thing that people woke up to is this blue screen of death. You know that that screen you see on Windows that and by the way, it was mostly it was all Windows computers that were affected.
Max, no Linux. But it's a blue screen of.
Death that people saw, that screen that says there's been a problem with your computer. Let's try to recover from it. It's a screen nobody wants to see. Scott said, and that, my friend, is part of the reason one digital currency is a very bad idea. And to that, I say, wait, was bitcoin really affected? I don't think so. I think bitcoin it's like Titanic goes on. What's that song? My heart will go on? It's like bitcoin. It just I don't think bitcoin. Bitcoin's like the Internet, right, It's.
Got a lot of redundancy there.
Debbie says, I got stuck in an airplane on the last leg of a thirty hour trip and the final flight ended up getting canceled six hundred miles away from home, ended up renting a car and driving home the next morning.
So there you go.
That's a real life example of the impact of something like this on actual people. Scott joked, just sky net's first strike. Barbara said, we're feeling it in my law firm. In the OC, John says Kaiser was hit for several hours. Doug says, Now, just imagine a cash list society and all it takes is a glitch and millions go without. Yeah, I mean, I do understand that. And there are places that don't accept cash, so I see how that could be. Yeah, I see how that could be concerning if we did
go completely cashless. But a lot of places do and a lot of people do already. And you know, like yesterday, I was at Target and I was coming back from the gym and I need to stop at Target for something. I didn't have my wallet with me and I only had my phone with tap to pay, and so I said, I hope this works, and it did, thankfully. Frank said, so is CrowdStrike a national slash international security risk? Seems so h that's an interesting take. Brian says, this is
why backups are important. Imagine if your drive daily image or drive daily if not weekly. Yeah, that's how a lot of people did get through. This was an image of their drives and they just kind of back to or reloaded the computer from that. And then Kevin cautions, please clarify why they might need physical access. I think you should tell people not to trust or allow people to access your computer. I understand understand scammers already phishing with this outage.
Oh, that is true.
I did say in my posts that a lot of times the IT folks might need physical access to the computers. Now, I don't mean they need to pop open the hood and open it up like a car and replace the spark plugs. But yes, they did need to get hands on with a lot of these machines because if they're in that boot loop, which they were, it might have been tough to actually get access to them from a remote standpoint and do something. But yeah, that don't That's
the thing. Anytime something like this happens, the scammers are immediately ready to make sure that they can capitalize on this issue. And so what's the issue, Oh, did your computer have the the great crowd strike outage of twenty twenty four. We can help. Let's protect your computer. Let's get your computer back up and running. So you do need to be aware of the fact that these scam artists do capitalize on anything. And yeah, I'm sure the scams involving this are already out there.
Uh.
Definitely an interesting day, that's for sure. Yeah, let's hope that doesn't happen again. Coming up later in the hour, we're gonna have John Hammond, an actual security researcher, talk about the IT outage in detail, explain what his takeaway is and what we should all take away from it. Eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. You are listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to Rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two.
Four one zero one. Let's go to.
Cameron in Huntington Beach. Cameron, you're on with Rich.
Hi.
Rich, I hope you're having a great Saturday. So I had a question about.
The YouTube app on both Android and iPhone, but particularly iPhone. So I had an iPhone twelve since twenty twenty and I had the app on there for many years in paying premium and all of that, and then around twenty twenty four because this was the year, I got recently upgraded to an iPhone fifteen because I had credits and all that.
But besides that, what I've recently.
Noticed is that after a couple of YouTube updates, I've noticed that the app has started to really melt the phone down. And what I mean by that is is what happens is when I'm watching videos, maybe like for two minutes, maybe maybe ten minutes, not even an hour, the phone starts to really drain down the battery, even when I'm on Wi Fi. I do have cellular, but I mostly use it when I'm on Wi Fi sometimes, and I just it's weird because it's never done that before.
Whenever it was on Wi Fi before, it would not be at these high temperatures. I know it does this when you're on sailor because it's using data, but I was just wondering if it could be an Apple thing. I don't think so, because I took it to Apple and they said, you know, they noticed that eighty eight percent of the battery is taken by YouTube, and they said that's a little abnormal. And so when I got the iPhone fifteen, I was thinking maybe it was the
twelve because I've had it for so long. But from what I read online, it says some people were having problems with YouTube updates. So I don't know if that's an app issue or if that's a phone battery.
Well that okay, that's that was your first mistake, cameraon looking at what people say online, because because I'm not kidding, you can support whatever you want by looking at comments online. So yes, if you google YouTube app heating up on iPhone, of course you're gonna see reports about people saying that this thing is heating up on the iPhone because guess what's happening. Everyone else is googling that, and then they
are adding to the conversation. Now, YouTube has millions upon millions upon millions of people that are using this app on iPhone. I have not heard of a widespread issue. I pay for premium on YouTube as well. I watch videos on YouTube on my phone. I've yet to see any significant issue whatsoever with YouTube on my phone. So I'm not saying that you don't have a problem with this or you're not noticing something now I think you
were right about something. The cellular streaming, of course, is going to use more battery, it's going to heat up your phone more. But in general, just the architecture of apps on the iPhone and the fact that they're updated so often, typically they do not have a lot of issues for very long. Now, yes, are there issues, absolutely, and they happen, and they come and they go. But I find and this is my general advice to people, when you're having an issue with an app, basically it's
because of an update. Something in that app is causing an issue. Now with YouTube, I do not know of a widespread issue with this app. So here's what I would say to get what's happening fixed on your phone. So number one, I would delete the YouTube app, because on iPhone, when you delete the app, that'll really clear things out. That'll get it back to the start. Once you clear out that app, I would make sure you have all of your software updates completed on the phone.
So do the main software updates, which is like the iOS updates, and then of course do any of the updates for the other apps. And then I would restart your phone. So once you restart your phone, then I would go in, I would reinstall YouTube, and then I would see if it's still happening. The other thing I can think of is that perhaps you have something like smart downloads turned on on YouTube, or you're downloading stuff in the background for offline. They've got a new feature
that downloads shorts automatically. That would use more battery, and that would also be doing things in the background, which could be kind of slowing things down and using up more of the battery and causing the phone to heat up. But once you reinstall everything and use it again, if it's still happening, I don't really have a good solution. I would say, you know, just wait for an update for the app, because you know, again there are many
people using YouTube. I've not heard of a widespread heat issue with the YouTube app on the iPhone, but if you are using it a lot, yes, especially in the summer, it would cause your phone to heat up. The eighty eight battery percentage is a little concerning. That is a lot, but it depends on what you're doing on your phone. If you're using YouTube a lot of the time. Thanks for the call, camera and appreciate it. Eighty to eight Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Uh Amazon Prime Day. It's the hangover right Amazon Prime Day?
This week?
Amazon says record breaking sales. Yes, they say that every time. Let me just give you some of the numbers. Number one, more items sold than any previous Prime Day. Adobe Analytics says fourteen point two billion dollars was spent across US retailers during Prime Day. That includes other retailers as well. That's up eleven percent year over year. So yes, people are shopping. Average order size according to Numerator fifty seven dollars ninety seven cents. Average households spent just about one
hundred and fifty dollars in place two orders. Top selling items Amazon, fireTV sticks, Premiere Protein shakes, what Bobo?
Were you ordering stuff? Liquid IV?
People want to get fit, and they want to get hydrated, and they want to watch stuff on TV. Back to school shopping obviously a big growth, a big driver for all the sales. People shopped at Target, they shopped at Walmart as well. Discounts were deeper this year. I don't know about you, but I definitely thought Prime Day was a success. I found a lot of stuff I needed was on sale, and to me, that means it was
a success. Eighty to eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Coming up, we're going to talk to a security researcher about this week's major IT meltdown. This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. We'll get back to the phone lines in just a moment. But joining me now is John Hammond,
principal security researcher at Huntress. He's going to talk about this major IT outage we experienced this week.
John, thanks for joining me.
Hey, they're rich Thanks so much for having me.
So, uh, let's see, John, you've got one point seven million subscribers on YouTube as a offering free cybersecurity education and ethical hacking. So what do you talk about that's so interesting that people want to follow you because that's an incredible number.
Well, goodness, I'm flattered, Thank you so much. Well, it really runs the gamut on hey, cybersecurity, whether it's looking at nowwhere trying to see what hackers are up to in their tradecraft or seeing all that shady stuff on the dark web, but hey, trying to bring that education and that awareness to the masses.
What do you think the average person is up against the most right now? When it comes to all the stuff you talk about.
Oh goodness, well, you know you see all the news and headlines about this thing ransomware, but often that's hey, maybe targeting a business or a company organization, but for the end user, the individual and the person, oftentimes you see infost dealer malware. Hey, some things that will try to, hey, grab your passwords, see what sensitive information you might have saved or cash in your computer, like credit cards or addresses.
All those things certainly make for juicy details they could then sell or turn into some more lets later on.
So a question I get, and we'll get to the CrowdStrike stuff in a second, but the question I get all the time is the Windows defender on your computer good enough for it to protect you? Or do you need something like additional I know it's.
A hot topic, but I will say I am a big, big fan of a Windows defender. I know thinks say, oh, you get what you pay for, it's free, it's everywhere, But genuinely you know. That means it's got a lot of telemetry, a lot of hey, insight into what the average users might be up to, and a better way to defence with that data pool.
Okay, all right, there you have it.
So initial thoughts on this crowd strike meltdown what happened here?
Well, well, I don't know if we need to dig into a whole long story. I know folks are already feeling the effects. But around I guess ten pm Pacific what would have been Thursday nights, there was a post online on reddits where folks are saying, hey, is anyone else seeing this blue screen of death outage presumably from the CrowdStrike agent their software, And then the floodgates kind
of open. See it spread like wow, to fire individuals chiming in saying yeah, I've got an organization with However, many thousands of computers, servers and workstations all down, stuck in a boot loop, and that's gone on to effect as you know, airlines, banks, schools, really I've seen hospitals in the mix. It's been quite a mess.
So what is CrowdStrike supposed to do?
They do what's called like endpoint security software, right, Like, can you explain what that means?
Correct?
Absolutely, so, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity provider. There, a vendor that's really trying to work hard to protect you from malware and hackers.
And all those threats on the landscape.
What that means is they have a certain amount of sensitive access because you want to be able to protect your computer at all the different levels and layers there. So they've got what a lot of nerds and geeks call sort of root access. Working in the kernel is kind of the topic and word there, but that is a little bit sensitive, a little bit fragile. You want to make sure that that's all correct and buttoned up
to the best that it can be. Is if there's any of these mistakes, any unfortunate misconfigurations, well the machine can very well crash. As we've seen widespread.
And what do you make of this? Have we seen something like this happen before on this scale with an update like this?
Short answer is no, I don't think I'm going too far out in a limb to say, yeah, this mass outage and seeing this as widespread as it is, I don't think we've ever seen anything of this scale and severity.
You know, you've got your run of the mill Windows.
Updates and maybe patches that put it in maybe an unstable state, and some computers have their own trouble in some cases, but nothing quite like this.
So now, obviously the conspiracy theories have been flying around, and you know, there's you think about what this could impact in the future, Like, this was pretty bad. So what if a company like someone got in at a company that has all this access to the kernel and did something maliciously Like this was a mistake. Clearly I hope it was, But what if there was malicious intent? Could that potentially happen?
Yes?
Well, if I may say, to dispel the myst by no means this is not a vulnerability, This is not an exploit, this was not a hack. It is really just an unfortunate accident and a mistake, as you mentioned. But I will say, yeah, when we've seen this effect, it's not too far of a stretch to say, Wow, is this what a digital war might.
Look like in the future. I don't know.
I really can't say that with any certainty, but it is that doomsday or nightmare scenario when yes, all the technology that we lean on, we have such reliance on, and we want to keep that secure.
We are trying to lock all the doors and windows here.
Well, when that's abused and taking advantage of it's quite a scary situation.
So the interesting part to me is how this got out.
So I assume that they tested this on computers before it went out, So what do you think went wrong in that process? I know they're still in investigating with their internals and all that stuff, and they may know more than they've let on, but like, how do you think this got out there when it was messing with computers?
This is, truthfully, I think the harshest critique, and rightfully so is well, we have to wonder about that QA process or the workflow of hey rolling things out?
Really did it start as a small sample pool? Hey?
Was it one hundred hosts that went to first and then grew to a thousand and expanded and more of that testing QA process? But unfortunately it sounded like everything really just had this incident occur at the same time. So I think there are some lessons learned, room for improvement, and all of.
Us could take that lesson just as well.
But as to how it happened, unfortunately, again I mentioned that sensitive kind of fragile portion layer of the computer. Well, there might have just been a mistake and a flop and some of those configuration files what they call channel files. Not to get too far in the weeds, but it has made quite a booboo.
So how are people recovering?
Like?
How are it? Folks?
Like?
Just I mean, I know that a lot of these computers have are back up and running, but I am sure it's still a long process for some organizations. So is the process to get to recover from this pretty rough?
Absolutely, And this is the crux of the issue. On Friday, you can imagine, Hey, a lot of technicians and engineers running around to each computer individually and really having to roll out a workaround or some mitigation manually because this problem left all the computers in kind of an unstable state. You've seen the blue screen of death, that blue picture
with the sad frownie face. Well, that means the computer hasn't fully started up, and you won't be able to roll out any automatic changes or a push a solution at scale. So unfortunately, and I don't know how long this might take. Whether it's the weekend, whether it's a week time will tell but it's one by one manual efforts and that's why, Hey, all the nerds and geeks are having a rough week.
Something like this happened with our iPhones or androids or Mac or Linux computers.
I I hm, yes, is again the short answer, but let me add the little disclaimer and an asterisk because it does depend. It varies us using the technology that's provided by a vendor or company and the folks maybe making that hardware and software. There is trust, there is a certain layer of hey, understanding and hope that that will be done the right way, but accidents like this
can happen, and it's funny. You normally have the conversations of our the business owners or system administrators actually using automatic updates and applying patches as they're released, and normally you have the conversation is the onus of the responsibility on them the end user, But in this case it was truly the provider and that is what made this quite a disaster.
Okay, so for the average person, we've got to wrap this up. I know, people get scared to do updates in general because it changes the way their computer works or it changes the way their phone works, and you know, but they do contain software or security updates.
So what's your advice to people?
Should they be hesitant to do these updates like the day they come out?
Or are we still okay? And this was kind of a fluke.
Oh, let me be bold and confident here without a doubt, you still absolutely should be applying those automatic updates and getting the hey, new patches as they're released. I think the best that we can because look, that is going to improve your security posture and have a better defense. But we CRIB should do some strategic planning, some thinking and oh can we get ahead of this if we were ever prepared for a situation like this, do we know who to call? Do we have our checklists and
documentation outlined? What's a operating procedure that we can roll with. That's the best we can do to try to prepare for what we might not realize we have to prepare for, all.
Right, John, I see why you've got nearly two million folks following you on YouTube. You explain stuff in a very clear and easy to understand method. How can folks follow you online?
Thank you so much? Hey, you can track me down. I am on YouTube?
Just my name John Hammond and you'll track me on LinkedIn Twitter on Hey I'm out there, don't hesitate, Happy to be a friend.
All right, There you have it, Thanks for joining me. John Hammond, h A M M O N D. Principal Security researcher at Huntress. Coming up, more of your calls at Triple A Rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Plus it's the end of an era for a technology I'll tell you which one coming up. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking
technology at Triple eight rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. I hope you're having a fantastic day. I know I am. The website for the show is rich on Tech dot tv. While you're there, you can sign up for my newsletter.
It is free.
You can get it to your inbox basically every Friday or Saturday. Paid subscribers actually get it a little bit earlier. Paying is just supporting it. But it is completely free. So I do that to keep you posted. It's fun. Today's is all about the global software update or the glitch and all. But I just it's basically like this show, but in a newsletter form, so it's kind of fun. Rich on tech dot TV. Let's go to Dawn in Tucson, Arizona. Down you're on with Rich oh Rich.
I have a conundrum. I have an older computer. It's an Apple computer. It is a Nassbook Pro fifteen inch of belief from twenty sixteen. I recently received a thumb drive and there are some data on there that I'd like to get onto my computer. And I don't know, I must need some sort of an adapter or dongle or something because the ports on my computer are of a mini type size. I don't know if they're USB three or or what not all that familiar with the USB stuff.
So you have your your your flash drive is I'm guessing your flash drive has like the older style bigger connector Yeah, okay, so that is that is likely USB A, and so A is like the big it's kind of like the USB we all know. It's like that big kind of USB connector. There's actually a whole bunch. There's USB A, there's B there's three point zero, there's Mini, there's micro, there's C, there's b U. Don there will be a quiz when we're done. Okay, So what you
need is an adapter, and you need a USB. Let's see, you need a type C to type A adapter. So if you go on Amazon and let me confirm. Now, I've I've got a bunch of these at home, because I am you know, I've got like a whole bunch of these little phones that they send me to test, and a lot of them contain this little adapter.
So let me just make sure that's the right one.
Could I just send me one and I can be done with it?
Sure?
Absolutely, But I think you'll get it faster on Amazon. Honestly, it's so easy. So what you want, yep, it's right here. Okay, So Anchors got one. It is USB C high Speed Data, USB C two USB three point zero female adapter for MacBook Pro twenty twenty.
That'll work. That is ten bucks.
They also have other ones on there that are there's one for five ninety nine.
But what you need?
What did you what did you put in the search bar? Because that was a whole lot of numbers and letters.
But I didn't get very very easy USB C two to the word to t o a adapter, and that will bring it up, okay, and you'll see it's a little tiny adapter. You should be able to identify the fact that it looks like it would plug in the flash drive on one side and USB C on the other side. Anywhere from six to ten dollars solves all of your problems. I think you said you had a conundrum. Your conundrum is solved quite easily. Actually, so thanks for the call. There in Tucson, Arizona. I've never been, but
one of these days I will, hopefully. I love Soedona. Which is road drip, Yeah, road drip, I yeah, I'd saw my list. College town. I think TUCSONA is sor right. I think they've got a college there. Let's see here. Do we have time for another call?
I think so? Why not?
Let's go to Let's go to Chris in Rancho, Cucamonga. Chris dround with Rich.
Hey, Rich. I have a Galaxy S twenty one that I use Wi Fi calling everywhere except at work. When I get to work, it will not accept a call, make a call, or accept a text, or make a text. And everybody else seems to be okay. I asked our IT department about it, and they said, we don't use Wi Fi calling, so I don't know what you're talking about, and they use iPhones as well. I'm wondering, what do you think I can do to make it work.
Hmm, that's a good question.
Well, I don't connect to the Wi Fi at my work for this reason because A I don't like to be tracked, and B I don't want to deal with It's funny that they said we use iPhones. They just shrugged their shoulders when it's an Android, because it's funny. At my work, it's the same thing. The androids are like impossible to connect to the corporate WiFi, and the
iPhones connect really easily. So the only thing I can think of is they may have this type of communication blocked at a network level and they may not know it, like they're whoever their provider is may just block that sort of track thick because I don't know, maybe it's insecure, maybe it's just not what they want on their traffic. Why do you need the Wi Fi calling? Is your Does your phone not work well in the in the area.
Yeah, there's a few dead spots in the building. You know, we're in a four five story building. And then we're on the fourth floor. A few dead spots, and uh, I can use it. But the the thing is is I have to remember every time we come to work to you know, switch it off of Wi Fi and you know, because I use Wi Fi at home because we have terrible sale service at home, you know, so I use Wi Fi calling there, but occasionally it does get spotty in.
The building with the cellular connection.
You're saying, with the cellular connection, yeah, because I was gonna say, but on the Samsung there is a routine yeah. Sorry, there is a routines functionality on the Samsung where you can actually have your device disconnect from the Wi Fi at work and you can manually connect and.
You want it when you want to use that. So that's one option.
I don't know what your data plan is like, but the fact so the only thing I would do is maybe troubleshoot the connection. Can you make any voiceover IP calls? Like can you try like a like a Google Voice call or something like that. You have Google Voice?
I don't, but I don't have. Like I said, I don't have a problem with Wi Fi anywhere else except in the building. They had a problem with the Wi Fi they upgraded it and then this happened.
Oh okay, well that see. I think that gives me a little hint here. I think I think it's something that whoever their service provider is, it may be blocking this sort of traffic. And that's that's my hunch. And that's the only thing I could really think of. The Other thing I would do is maybe talk to some of your colleagues if they have, you know, an iPhone,
and say, hey, do you use Wi Fi calling? As it turned on, a lot of people don't even know, you know, you ask them this stuff and they're like, I don't know. It's just however it's set up, but it's it sounds like it's something that's being blocked at the network level, because there really shouldn't be a reason why it wouldn't work on that Wi Fi network. The other thing you can try is I'm trying to think if you can use like a hotspot or something. Yeah,
I mean, if it's that Wi Fi. The only other thing I can think of is sometimes in the Wi Fi settings there are a couple of things where it uses like a private IP address or something. You may try to turn off some of that cloaking in the Wi Fi settings and see if that helps.
But that's that's an interesting one.
But I know that these corporate networks, you know, they block what they want, and it's it's sometimes a mystery what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. Eight eight eight rich one o one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
More rich on Tech coming up right after this.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple A rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Well, it's the end of an era for a couple of different technologies. First off, red box, red box is shutting down. You know what red boxes DVD rentals, that little kiosk outside the grocery store or the Walgreens or the cvs.
You would rent a DVD.
And then later Blu Ray it started, I think it was ninety nine cents and then it got to like a dollar fifty or something, and it was great because you could rent like a new movie for pretty cheap, cheaper than like Blockbuster back in the day.
Wait was Blockbuster around? Let me see these?
I guess red Box was like no Blockbuster was gone. So red Box has been around for twenty years. I guess they were bought by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. So those are those books. Remember everyone was reading them back in the day. The Chicken Soup for the Soul. They have one for like everything. It was like Chicken Soup for the Soul. For cats, You're like, what, I don't even know cat's red, but I think kats would probably enjoy Chicken soup. So that company, I guess bought it.
But then they went from chapter eleven to chapter seven bankruptcy, which is bad. They had a thousand employees. Let's see they Oh they operated twenty four thousand DVD KIOSK rentals.
Wow, that's wild. Twenty four thousand of those. What are they going to do with them?
Now?
The business has been in decline since twenty twenty, and yeah, this is just end of an era. So DVDs were already kind of you know, nobody really used them anymore, but now that you can't rent them through red Box,
it's even less now. The thing I liked about red Box is that I know we're all about streaming and all this stuff, but you know, if you if you rent a movie online like a you know, a new release, it's like at least six bucks, And theoretically the red box would be like a dollar fifty if you could return it like the next day, so it was still cheaper than like paying for a movie online. But now I again I've said this before on the show, I refuse to pay for a movie online, so I will
only watch what's on my streaming services. So last night again took us like an hour to find something to watch. Because I'm not kidding Netflix, I love you, but like where are the good movies? Where is the stuff you actually want to watch? I don't know, maybe you know where it is. I can't find it. And it's all the problem with Netflix is that everything is like it's all like no name, Like okay, the actors might have a name, but they're just making money.
That's why they're in these things.
But like the.
Actual movies, you're just like, oh, I didn't know that this person had a new movie because nobody did, because it's terrible. They just did it for the paycheck. And so next thing you know, you're watching this movie that you would never ever watch in your life unless it was free because you're subscribed to the service and you feel bad. No, I want to watch all Every single movie I want to watch is one that you have
to pay for. Like I'm like, Oh, I want to watch Civil War, Nope, we got to pay five to ninety nine four. Oh I want to watch this, Nope, we got to pay six bucks for that. So there's a million movies I want to watch. They're just never on my streaming services. Anyway, I digress another another technology I guess was I guess technology is displacing this other thing. But this week Target said no more checks, no more
payper checks. Target stopped accepting paper checks on July fifteenth. Oh, come on, boom, what was the last time you wrote a check? Citing extremely low volumes. Forty percent of Americans have used to check in the past thirty days in twenty twenty three. I think that's high, down from fifty percent in twenty twenty. Checks are used mostly for specific scenarios like rent payments, tax payments, and payments to contractors or professional services. Older consumers sixty nine plus prefer checks
more than younger generations for bill payments. I get that my parents still like to write checks. Bobo, you want to.
Chime in January. The last time I wrote a check was January, So there you go.
See it's been six months now that you mentioned it. Yeah, I actively try not to write a check. I will literally go out of my way to not write a check. If I have to go to the ATM and grab money, I will do it to not write a check.
I'm zelling more.
Yes, Zelle is kind of like the new check. But see, Zell is like the most dangerous to me because the money, it's like it's gone and in their account instantly and there's no getting it back.
But I like that at the same time because I don't have to budget because the moment is gone.
Yeah, and it's already there. I agree with that. I like that. I use Venmo a lot.
I was actually against if I was doing this show three years ago. If you would have heard me on my podcast before the show, I was a Venmo hater. I told people actively do not use Venmo because I'll tell you what I think is shady about Venmo. Okay, when you have a balance on Venmo, of like, let's say you have a balance of eighty dollars and you pay a bill for ninety.
I know where you're going.
Don't you think that the charge on your car would be ten dollars because they're like, oh, well, let's use the eighty dollars you have, plus we'll take the ten dollars from your card. No, no, they take the full ninety and leave that eighty in your account. Why do they do that? Why do you think profit for them? They're making interest on the money that's floating in these
accounts month after months. So yes, if you let's say you get a haircut and it's forty bucks and you pay Venmo, they'll take it out of that eighty because the balance covers it. But my point is, I think that's a it's kind of like a it's a decision that benefits them, not me.
For me Venmo. The issue was.
When you had the money in your account and you wanted to take it to your main account, they charged you for it, and if they if you didn't want it to be charged, it took them longer, Yes, and it was harder to do but to just transfer an instantly as long as the card is on there, Oh, we do it right away.
Oh yeah, but if not, like, it's okay, we'll give it to you.
In my four or five days.
Yeah, and we won't charge you, but you have.
To wait that time. And people, of course aren't you know, we're in America. We're impatient, you know, drive through restaurant. I mean, come on, you get your food in like ten seconds. So I understand. But they do have to make money, so I understand that. But you know, and also some people don't like cause if you like, I know some people that just pay on their credit card with Venmo, which they charge you like three percent.
So don't do that. That's very expensive.
Several major retailers, including Walmart, CVS, Cohle's Home Depot, and TJ Max apparently still accept personal checks. I like, I said, I have one, like a couple of checks.
Now.
This this was a little got a lot of response on my Facebook page, Facebook dot com slash rich on tech. I asked people, do you still write a check? And of course I didn't know. You know, you know, you post something on Facebook, you never know if people care. Not this, oh, people cared hundreds of comments and like
a second and so I'll read a couple. Carolyn says, I think that this electronic age has overlooked a huge population, our seniors, they have troubles with site and memory issues, slight or advanced.
Leave them out.
I think she's referring to the fact that we assume that everyone cannot write a check, but a lot of people still do that. Dana asks, your young adult children have checks. My sons are twenty four and twenty five, and I know neither has a checkbook, nor would they know how to write one if required. Yeah, in fact, they actually came out with a card because the main thing when I was, you know, a renter, is that
you had to pay your rent by check. There was no real way to pay rent any other way, and so I think that's still a very popular way that people use a check is to pay like rent. But pretty much everything else you can do now ach like through your bank account, which, by the way, be very very selective on who you give access to your bank account too.
With all these bills.
You know, the reason why these companies want you to switch to your bank account is because they get their money very easily, right, there's no like buffer between you and them. It's like they just say, oh, your bill is eighty dollars and by the way, we just took it out of your checking account.
Thank you for that.
Oh, I even do anything because I give you access to my account. Greg says, I still use them to pay people who do work on the house. If you use a card, they often add a percentage to the bill, which you can get pricey on home improvements. Oh, Greg, okay, you set me off. This is my biggest pet peeve in the world. When I say, oh, I'd like to use my card and they say, oh, look's an extra three percent or four percent or whatever. And this happened to me the other day, and I said, why, why
are you charging me four percent? Three percent? Oh, that's that's how much they charge us. We're only charging well, excuse me, you're running the business. That's part of your costs of running a business. When I wrote my book one hundred and one hand Tech Tips for the iPhone, you know how much Amazon took from every single book I sold about forty percent.
Books sold for every book from almost.
Every well, I mean it was about when you add everything up, it was the processing fees that all the stuff you basically get about. You know, you basically just write forty percent off of the price of that book. So you sell a book for ten bucks, you're only making six dollars on it.
Yeah, at the most, I mean.
And by the way, that's just like you know, so I also sold some of them, like like a signed copy through like another service and like they would take a percentage. But my point is to me, I was happy because I was making money. And the same thing with your business. If you're like, I'm sorry. If you run a small business and you and you are accepting credit cards, you got to pay those fees, Like that's part of doing business.
I get it.
Nobody wants to pay fees, but then don't accept credit cards. You go to these places and you're like, oh, here's my card, and they look at you like you got anything else. You're like, why do you accept it? Why do you accept a card if you don't want to
accept the fees. That is my biggest pet peeve because I and I, you know, sometimes people want to pay with their credit card because it gives a little buffer between you and them, right, you know, maybe they're doing it for their budget reasons, maybe they're doing it for they want you know, they don't trust you and they just want to make sure if they want to return something or whatever.
You know, they can do it easily.
But my my reality is, just please, if you're going to accept the form of payment, why are you actively trying to make people not use that form of payment and the Venmo stuff and all like.
So I went.
Actually where I get my haircut, and I love them, so no, no, you know, I'm not being mean to them. But they switched from like used to be able to pay them with ZEL to now they put an ATM in there and they said, no more Zel, So you have to go to this ATM and it now costs you three point fifty to use the ATM if you don't have cash. And so my point is it's like we're driving into the future in so many ways, but yet so many small businesses are keeping themselves in the past.
And I say, just I hate to say this, but just raise your prices by a couple bucks if you need to, if it's if that's what it costs. And I know, okay, you know what, I'm not going to win in this argument no matter what. Anyway, if you want to chime in on the paper checks thing, Facebook dot com, slash rich on tech, can we go to break?
I said enough.
Eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. You know, there's not a lot that sets me off, but when it does, Yeah, I go there. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. The website for the show rich on
tech dot tv. If you want to link to anything I mentioned, just go to rich on tech dot tv and hit the light bulb at the top of the page. You can get show notes in real time. This is show number eighty one. If you can believe it, you're and a half of this by the way. Uh and if you want to contact the show, just hey, contact up at the top and you can send a message right to me. Let's go to Leslie in La Laguna Beach. Leslie, you're on with Rich Hello, Leslie?
Are you there?
I tapped the right one? No, maybe I didn't.
Uh yeah, I think I did, Leslie. Are you there? Nope? Okay, oh oh there you are.
Hi.
Hi, Hi, Rich Hello, Hi. I'm having t of logging onto my banking Bank of America on my phone. I can do it on my iPad, I can do it on my computer. I can. I have installed an uninstalled the app on my phone. I've gone into the website. I checked my password managers to see if I have anything old in there. But and I know for sure what my you know, use their name, the password is. But it's just not working. It's showing they can't find my account.
Okay, so every time, okay, that's interesting. So you're you're on an iPhone or Android.
iPhone.
Okay, so iPhone you've got you've got your user name, you've got your password, and every time you try to log in, Now, is it auto filling from the password manager when this happens.
No, I don't save my banking passwords on even a password manager. So I'm very careful that I know exactly what it is. I get this. The information you entered doesn't match our records. You have a few more times charge remaining.
And this is just a Bank of America app.
Just the Bank America app. And in the past I had no problem with it. In fact, I would use the phone most of the time, you know, gone, just fine. I would use the face thing too. That would look and then one day I decided to use my computer because I was going to do more stuff and I couldn't log on there. So I went ahead and changed my password, thinking, okay, I'll just go along with the thing. Dre's the password. And now I've been on my computer, but I can't get it on my phone.
Okay, So what I think, okay, what I think is happening. I think there is like an extra character something that that's somehow being entered on the phone that's not being entered on the desktops. You're able to log into your account, just not on your phone, just.
Not on my phone.
Okay.
Yeah, So if you go to Bankfoamerica dot com, you type in your user name and password, you get in no problem.
If I do that on my computer I do put on my phone, I can't get in through my app or my or the website.
Are you running any sort of AD blocker on your phone or a VPN?
Only thing I can think of? I mean, I I'm not playing no of I mean, what can how can I check that?
Uh?
Well, I mean, so what type of network do you have at home? Like for your WiFi, but your computer's on the same network at home? Yeah, okay, have you tried, okay, So I would also try maybe toggling your Wi Fi off and then logging in on cellular and seeing if that if it gets the same error. But what I would do is, you know, it sounds like there's like I would say, if you're copying and pasting this password.
Is that what you're doing? I know you're typing it? Okay? Yeah, I mean this.
It's it's interesting because these kind of these kind of things happen, and I've seen them happen even with myself on my phone. But typically there's something running on my phone that is interfering.
But I'm thinking and I can't figure out what it is that's reading. It's got to be some blocker.
Saying are you okay? So can you go into on Safari on your phone? Can you log into Bank of America through there? Like if you just go to the website.
I've tried that.
I tried it, okay, and it won't let you do it anywhere on your phone.
No, okay, sounds like you've got some sort of ad blocker or VPN running on your phone. So v wise, have you installed a VPN there?
No, I'm I'm not that savvy okay.
And no ad blocker either, not that.
I know of, no, but you know, strangers interesting, I don't know what I'm doing.
And then the other question is this just does this happen everywhere or just on Wi Fi or just on cellular, because that could be it is.
Everywhere, because when you said that, that's kind of interesting because I do use Wi Fi calling it home just because of where we are, but everywhere it's the same. So even when I'm just on cellular too.
And have you asked Bank of America? Have you asked like their tech support department and what have they said?
Yeah?
And what do they say?
Yeah, I've asked them and they don't know. I've even gone to the right store to see if they can troubleshoot something they can't.
Well, I think you stumped me.
I think we're gonna we're gonna leave this one to the wisdom of the crowds and maybe I'll get some info on this from an email or something like that. Eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Coming up, We're gonna talk iOS eighteen public Beta. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro here, hanging out talking technology. We'll get back to those phone lines in just a bit. Eighty eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. Still got a lot of news to get through as well. Want to Welcome to the show. Zach Hall, editor at large at nine to five MAC. He is here to join us to talk about iOS eighteen Public Beta. This was released this week by Apple. You can install it on your iPhone, but before you do, we should talk about it.
Zach. Welcome to the show. Hey Rich, thanks for having me.
So iOS eighteen public Beta, what does that mean exactly?
So?
iOS eighteen is the next big software update for the iPhone without buying a new iPhone. It's it's when you know, usually it comes up in the fall, in September, and you download the new update and maybe things look a little bit different, but your phone can do some new things. And this is iOS eighteen public Beta. So the beta version was announced a few weeks ago, back in the beginning of June for developers only, and as of the beginning of this past week, you can download the public
beta without being a developer. And this is more for early adopters, people who want to test out some of the new features before they get pushed to out all the new phones in September. So this is really just a preview of some of the new things coming to the iPhone later this fall.
But for free.
You can install on your iPhone now if you're willing to maybe deal with some bugs and try things out early before they're really polished and ready for everybody to use.
Yeah.
So Apple has made it much easier in recent years for the average person to install this the beta. It's very very simple. So what is the caution here? Like that you can't just go back if there's a problem, right.
Right, there's ways like you can back up your old data and you can kind of you know, use a computer and do a bunch of heavy lifting. Maybe you maybe you support to get back to the old version of things go pretty bad for you, But there is a risk of data loss. The big thing is is, you know, you don't want to put this on your main device if you're worried about losing information or you're worried about maybe some of your app's not working.
The right way.
Because it is a beta, you're not going to be able to say, you know, to your favorite app that you rely on to the developer, Hey, this isn't working.
What's wrong.
They're going to say, it's a beta version of the software of the of the iPhone software, so we can't do anything about it yet. So it really is just to try out some new features on the phone from Apple, and you know, at the risk of maybe not getting to have the same level of stability and everything that.
You get from just using your phone.
Order narrowly, right, like, basically, if you put this on your device and you have a problem with your work email, your IT departments can be like, ah, you're running a beta. We can't help with that, or pretty much anything that goes wrong, it's like, well, you're running a beta. That's kind of like the part that's part of it is that there's no guarantees with this software because Apple's still working on it to finalize it.
That's the big disclaimer, right, even if it you know it is an issue with your IT work email, the you know, the disclaimer there is it is a beta, so they're not even gonna try to resolve it. And part of that is because it's a beta, it's it's not finished yet, and Apple pushes out new versions about
every other week. The developer version of IOSA Team Beta usually has been out for they pushed it out to developers first developers to try it out, and then the public beta tends to be what's been out in the wild for developers for about a week, and then the public beta that's kind of a less risky version of you know, the previous software, but it's still unfinished and you're going to see updates to it every other week or so when you get closer to September, maybe every
week we'll see a new update to it. So things change, and even if you have a good version this week where you're running IOSA Team Beata and you say everything's fine, things could break in the next couple of weeks. You know, if they've changed something they try to, you know, optimize one feature here or there.
It can affect how your apps work.
So it really is sort of you know, if you're an early adopter and you're trying to just you want to test this stuff out before it's available.
The developer beta.
Is for app makers to make sure that their apps are compatible. But what's happened over the past several years is because Apple is starting off new features, people want to people like me, you know, people like you. I'm sure I want to try these out early and get their hands on them. So it's also a way for the public, you know, without being an app maker, to try it out early at the risk of you're not going to have the same level of support you know, from your IT or even from.
Apple for that matter.
So before we get into some of these features, because I've been playing with this this this week, and I'm sure you've been probably since the developer beta, you know, just to be clear, let's say you install this on your phone, you need a backup of your iPhone and if you want to go back, like let's say you try this out for a day or two and it's like, oh my gosh, my battery is bad, my apps don't work,
I can't log in on my banking app. The only way to go back is to erase your phone as far as I know, and then reinstall the backup from that erase on that erase iPhone.
Does that sound about right?
That's that's about right, and a lot of I'd say that the biggest risk there is that if you do a backup on a Monday and you decide on Friday, that the battery life is too big of a hit for you, or some apps aren't working the way that you want them to. Information from Monday to Friday. You know, between you doing that backup and you decide you want to go back, you might not have that last week of information. So it just depends on you know, what
information is and how it's stored and everything. But that's the big thing though. You know, you can do it backup. You can, there's ways to get back to it. But it really is just say, I want to try this out, and I'm willing to have you know, worse battery life and slower performance at the cost of maybe trying out some cool new features you know, you know, a month earlier.
So and with that said, the features are great, they are cool, they're a lot of fun. I put this on a secondary device that did not put it on my primary. But the number one thing is really customization. There's a lot more options for customization both on the home screen. You can place your icons anywhere you want.
The control center is totally revamped, which I love because it's a lot more useful, so you can, you know, put a lot of different control center I guess shortcuts there more so than before because you can use third parties apps as well, and the lock screen you can customize those two little shortcuts as well. So what has been kind of like the notable features to U Zach.
I mean, the home screens something you see every day, you know, you unlock your iPhone and you go to
your apps. And a few years ago there was this big trend of kind of like insecure but really hard to do workarounds of making your home screen look the way you want it, to change all of your app icons to be one color, and that's baked into the phone now that I was eighteen in beta now and you know about this fall where you can just you know, long person your home screen, tap and edit and customize button and then take what color you want your icons to be and like what shade and you can change
it on the fly. So Apple's taking a lot of what people have been doing with their devices anyway, and like finding really incredible workarounds that they've been doing and just making it part of the system itself, which is wonderful. And even things like if you're used to running your phone in dark mode or you like to go between light and dark mode, Apple's doing official icons for their apps for dark mode for the first time, and you can make those switch from light to dark like you
do with the rest of the phone. Some really great stuff there. And you mentioned those lockscreen shortcuts. So from the iPhone ten and twenty seventeen, apples put the flashlight and the camera on the lock screen on the bottom right and left corners, and that's been what it is, those buttons for those two functions. And this past year with the iPhone fifteen Pro, they added a button, the Action button, that can be a launcher for the camera and you could even swipe in from the right side
of the lock screen open the camera. So there's lots of ways to open your camera. Finally said, hey, if you want to make that button open your favorite app, you know, whatever you want it to be, you can do that instead or a third party camera app. So lots of ways to customize kind of what's already there.
Just make it work the way you wanted to make it look the way you wanted to and just in using it from the beginning of June, like you kind of mentioned, I'm finding that I'm changing it, you know, every couple of weeks, learning especially with Control Center, which is super customizable. Now, like, what are the ways it's going to be different? How how does this work now that I've got control over it? You know, what are
some ways that work better for my use cases? And that's kind of what I've been finding.
The interesting note to me is that you know, a lot of the people that like Android, they like it because it's customizable. But Apple is slowly but surely made their system very customizable as well. So I think that's a big side of this is that, you know, if people had a problem with like, oh, I can't really customize this, it's like, no, it's actually pretty good at this point. One of the things I noticed too is the the locked full You can lock apps down.
You can also put them in a hidden folder.
There's a new passwords app, which I think is probably going to be the most popular passwords app in the world after like the day one launch.
Uh.
The messaging between iPhone and Android, that's a that's a big one. Can you talk about that for a moment? We only have like a less than a minute here, sure so quickly.
Our CS is this way to communicate between Android phones that iPhone hasn't supported and on the iPhone, you've got your blue messages I message where you've got like typing indicators and read receipts for whenever you send something and somebody reads it. You's a popular on all chat platforms now.
RCS is kind of an upgrade to the old text message system where now you get typing indicators and read RECEI things like that just between green messages would agree on your iPhone and so now for the first time, you'll be able to text people on Android and they'll see when you're typing or when you've read it if their phone and their carrier supports RCS. So that's something that people are already seeing in the wild, like, oh,
you switched to Android. No not, my iPhone has rcs NOW, So that's kind of a insider you know, uh set of letters.
But once you see it in the wild, you kind of get used to it.
And importantly you'll be able to send videos and photos full or maybe not full. They haven't said full, but like high resolution, let's put it that way, so it won't look like a postage stamp, you know, on either side.
Yeah, which has gone from like two thousand and five technology to twenty twenty and beyond technology.
With that, it's good, way better, way better. All right, There's a lot more in iOS eighteen the public beta. You can check out nine to five Mac to learn about it all. Zach Call, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks having rich all right, eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Coming up, I'll tell you why Samsung is suspending shipments of their new Galaxy Buds Pro. And Apple has a new home pod. I'll tell you what that's
all about. Coming up right here. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here chatting about technology at eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. The website for the show rich on Tech dot tv. There you can watch my TV segments to see what I cover.
There.
You can also sign up for my free newsletter, and you can follow me on social media as well at rich on Tech. Apple has introduced a new HomePod Mini. How exciting. Oh, it's just in a new color Midnight. The last one I think was I don't know what what was the last color. I think they was like going around online like I think it was just black. And now it's called Midnight, but anyway, HomePod Mini and a new color. HomePod Mini, if you're not familiar, is
a small speaker. This thing is great. It's a powerhouse. It's only a couple inches tall, but sounds great. Comes in a bunch of different colors yellow, orange, blue, and white. It's available now. It's ninety nine bucks. I was giving these out like candy for holidays a couple of years ago when they came out, because they're just such an easy gift. If someone has an iPhone, this is like a no brainer. HomePod Mini now in Midnight. Meanwhile, Samsung
is suspending shipments of its Galaxy Buds three Pro. I've been using these, got a pair in Paris and they sound great. They're amazing. I have had zero issues with them. They don't even launch. They don't even launch until July twenty fourth, but now that's being pushed until August twenty eighth.
I guess.
Early users reported quality issues, including easily torn eartips.
I don't know.
I've had no problems with that. I wore them for a long time, like a week, no problems whatsoever. Amazon removed the listing from its site. Samsung's conducting an evaluation to see what's happening here. They apologize to customers. I don't know who would have these yet because obviously most people didn't get them yet. But yeah, if you were hoping to get your Galaxy Buds three pro, can't get them just yet. And my favorite AI assistant is now
available for Android. Yes, Claude. Claude is my preferred AI assistant. It is now available as an Android app. It was available as an iOS app a couple of weeks ago, and now they've caught up and Claude is just fantastic if you're working with anything text based documents, summarizing notes, all that stuff.
It is really good at that.
Chat GBT is sort of a jack of all trades, like a Swiss army knife. Claude is much more focused, i would say, on language, and it's really good at thinking and processing and all that stuff. So if you have an Android, definitely download the Claude Android app. You can use it for free. Obviously there's paid plans as well, but bulk of it's free. You can also get it for iOS.
Two.
Let's go to Tim and Moore Park. Tim, you're on with Rich, Welcome to the show.
I'm Tim Callum Carrion, how do I for free print labels for honey for different ounced jars? And what name was the program that you use on an old Windows computer to replace the Windows? And number three? The reason why I can only call you on a station, the radio station on a corded phone is because somebody is black my portable house phone because they don't want me to talk on the radio, probably because I'm running for president.
Oh my gosh. Well that's interesting. Well, good luck with that.
I think we've got two pretty good candidates.
Well, okay, I take that back.
Don't.
I am not endorsing any candidate here. I'm saying we have two We we have two candidates for president. That's I'll leave it at that. Wow, I don't know how to break down your questions. Yes, something about different sized jars of honey, And you need labels. I think I think that you're gonna use something like Canva for that. Are you printing like nutrition facts labels? I'm guessing Let's see there is a website. Let's see if they can
do custom labels. Hmm, you might be able to do something like I mean, look, there's so many websites available nowadays. To print things like a Vista print. There's a website called online Labels dot com. If you're just trying to print labels for stuff, you can do that now. If you're trying to convert, I'm reading the notes here from Kim. If you're trying to convert stuff, I would say AI
might be your best bet. So if you're trying to convert things, you know, just like different sized jars, maybe that's the way to do it.
I don't know what to say. Oh, what is happening here?
Bobo?
What is that is the moon? What is the phase of the moon today? This is the most fun I've had in a long time. I just want to say thank you. Yeah, me too? What is the moon phase? And it's got okay? See I knew it.
I knew the moon was weird today because and I'm not one of these like astrology guys.
You just looked it up, so that makes you an astrology guy.
No, I'm not.
I think the moon can be separated from astrology. I'm just saying people get weird when the moon is doing weird things. And right now it's a ninety nine percent waxing gibbus illumination ninety nine percent. That means it's it's almost a full moon. Tomorrow's a full moon. See where's my bell?
I knew it.
I knew there was a weird moon because we're getting some weird stuff.
I am not I.
When my mom starts talking astrology, you could see the eyes rolling into the back of my head.
You know.
People are describing me.
They're like, oh, you're this, You're you're the strong, sensitive type.
I'm like, what what you're talking about? Here?
Let's go to James and Los Angeles. James, can you bring some sanity to the show today? James?
Are you there?
See?
This is what I'm talking about?
What? Okay, that's it. We're done. I just turned off the phone lines.
We're done. Clear off the lines.
No more.
Don't even call eighty eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four.
One zero one. But he's running for president, funny. I haven't heard uh, I haven't heard that candidate. I mean, you know what, I don't know. I just so, what's the problem with the airport? I'm sorry at the Samsung.
Ear Apparently the tips the tips had a problem, the torn ear tips.
But they're not There's.
Nothing I'm excited for them, like when you showed me the other day.
I want to get a pair.
Yeah, I mean obviously now you can't until you until they ship them again. But no problems, I you know, maybe this is what Samsung is. What I like about Samsung is that they try a lot of stuff, you know, and sometimes they have you know, there's an issue, and they and they admit when there's a problem. So you know that was a problem. All right, let me tell you about something real quick before we go to break here. Tiny pod. This is a device that got some buzz
this week. This is a case that you put your Apple Watch into and it turns your Apple Watch into kind of like a tiny iPod. So it's it makes your Apple Watch kind of a companion for your phone, but that you can hold in your hand. And the idea is, you know this whole We've talked about this before, this minimalist movement. People want less distractions. So the idea is that you can leave your phone at home, but you've got your Apple Watch inside this little tiny iPod
like device. Remember, you'll need you know, cellular if you want to get your calls and messaging. But if you think about it, the apple Watch has pretty much everything you need.
Eighty bucks shipping this summer. I don't know.
Apple Watch has an iPod. Everything old is new again. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple A Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one. Kim has cleared the phone lines. We have what's that that incense that you you spray around the place. Yeah,
we saved the whole studio. So we are ready for a fresh hour here where we're gonna get real and we're gonna we're gonna actually have some Oh man, we're gonna have some fun. Eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Website for the show rich on Tech dot TV. You can find me on social media at rich on Tech. I'll tell you about the new app from Microsoft that's
kind of like their answer to Canva. Google is already putting details out about the Pixel nine and we've got calls. Let's go to uh, let's go to where is James in Los Angeles?
James? You're on with Rich. Oh I'm doing great? How are you for.
Your information regarding the moon. It's not a full moon. I'm a nostrophysicist. There's an alignment between Jupiter and seven. You'll be going on for maybe three days, and it's very unusual.
Okay, see there you go. I knew, I knew there was something unusual though. That's okay, so you can confirm that.
What did you say? You are an electra?
What physis public?
Okay? Very cool sound.
That you can look. You can look at it to night in the sky right a man, about nine o'clock you can see the moon lining up with two pilots.
Okay. I love when that happens.
I actually saw there was one a couple of I don't know, months ago where it was like I think it was like three or four planets in a row.
Yeah, yeah, anyway, anyway, how can I help?
I'm doing your website with my photography. I've been doing photography for twelve years. I have slide shows and I have date eggs. I mean, besides the copyright protection in Washington, DC, with all that stuff complicated, it takes a while. What do you suggest before I post anything on the website that I want to, you know, tell the public about my photography.
Are you taking pictures of like, is this planetary stuff or is this just general?
Well it's mixed. I have, That's that's a good question. I have some planetary stuff which requires like a very precise equipment to get like, you know, some pictures. So I'm reluctant to, uh to put them on the you know, on the web, because they can crop them into a kind of now you know, you know how it goes.
Yeah, I totally understand.
So, James, my advice is number one, if you're going to start putting this stuff out there, you know, yes, there will be people taking it, reusing it, resharing, no matter what you do. So you have to be prepared for that reality. And you just have to understand that that is kind of what happens these days.
Now.
I'm not saying people should not be paid for their work. Of course you should. And if you're selling these things, that's kind of a whole nother thing. But if you're just putting your stuff out there, you want people to enjoy it.
You want them to see it.
Ninety nine point nine percent of people will come to your website, they'll see it, They'll see it on social media.
Whatever you're doing.
But there will be some people that will download it, they'll share it, they'll redo it. AI systems will take it and regurg it to their own. This is just the reality we live in. But with that said, I think that number one you should follow my friend Jefferson Graham. He does photo walks TV. He is all things photography. So go to photowalks. Let's see what is the website photowalks dot tv and follow him. He's got a great newsletter. He does everything with photography, So photo walks dot TV.
Photo walks dot TV. His name's Jefferson Graham. Columns for the USA Today for a long time now. He travels around just showing people how to take great pictures with their phones and also some professional equipment. But it's actually I think all phones nowadays.
Anyway.
What I would do your your basic thing to do is just watermark your photos. So you can go to something like Canva dot com. They give you free watermarking on your photos, so you can upload a picture and you can put your watermark on there. You can make it your logo whatever you want. That's probably the simplest, easy way that's going to be the best thing you can do now. I know YouTubers and people that you know, they have hands on with products before everyone else, and
they they put watermarks on their pictures. People still use it, they still share it. It's gonna happen. But for you, I think the main thing is just you know, water market. You can also do it on a website like smug mug. This is the one that Jefferson recommends. That's where he puts all of his photos. Now, this is a more professional website, so they have things like watermarking built in. So if you upload your pictures to that website, it
will water mark them automatically for you. And so you may want to look for a website that lets you do that. Otherwise, if you're just looking for like an iPhone app or an Android app, there are thousands of them out there. I would just search watermark photos and you can watermark your photos one by one. That's going to be a little bit more of a manual process, but it's going to be something that's it's your first line of defense.
Let's put it that way.
So thanks for the call, thanks for the clarification. And I knew something was up today.
I knew it.
Eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Actually, while I'm talking about Canva, let me just tell you about Microsoft Designer. This is Microsoft's answer to Canva. It's an AI powered creativity tool, so you can use it to generate all kinds of great stuff.
I've got it on my phone.
It just came out this week as an iPhone and Android app, so it's called Microsoft Designer. You can download it for free. You can use AI to make images, stickers, social media posts, wallpapers for your phone, avatars that's kind of a fun one, and coloring book pages. You can also do a couple of simple things like remove the background from a picture. You can blur the background on a picture. You can start with a blank design. You can describe what you want and it will help you
make what you want using AI. So again it is called Microsoft Designer, and it's pretty much Microsoft's answer to Canva. I love Canva, but this is just another alternative. It's not as full featured as Canva. I pay the fifteen bucks a month for Canva.
I love it.
Even if I use it once a month to create something, I feel like it's worth it because just having that tool at my disposal is incredible. By the way, the Microsoft Designer gives you fifteen free uses per day. You can pay for more, so download it iOS Android Microsoft Designer. Okay, now let's go to Debra. Are you still there in Carson? I am all right here, welcome to the show. What can I help you with?
Okay?
I currently have a bundle package for my home phone that's part of my you know, goes with my internet and cable.
And I want to.
Disconnect using the bundle package for my home phone and go with another device. And I saw something the company Oma. Yes, oh om A, And I'm I'm trying to understand how that works and how reliable you might think it might be.
Yeah, and why do why do you want to separate from your cable company because you're going to get the best deal going through them.
Actually, for my for my through my cable company, they're charging me forty dollars a month for my home phone.
Oh dump them? Yeah, this is this is much fun.
I kind of dumped the whole lot. Okay, I'm kind of taking it in bits and pieces.
Yeah, okay, for sure. So if it's forty bucks a month and you could still keep your high speed Internet. And that's really all you need to get something like UMA. UMA's been around forever. It's it's reliable, it works. You pay one time for the device, and the device will connect to your internet, your high speed internet. They have two versions. One is wired, so you plug it in
with an Ethernet cable to your modem. The other one is Wi Fi, which you would just connect like any other Wi Fi device, and then you would plug a phone into the UMA, like an old school phone, and now you can use that phone just like you would dial a phone number, call someone, they can call you. The only thing is the service is free monthly, like you pay one time for the actual phone device. Yeah, so the device is anywhere between sixty and ninety, you know,
sixty one hundred dollars. But then after that the service every month is free. So you do have to pay taxes though, that's the main thing to know. So, but otherwise, yeah, and then now do I have to.
I don't have to use a special phone with their device.
Nope.
You can just buy a phone at Walmart anywhere, best buy it just you know, this standard phone will plug into this that has like a standard phone jack on it.
Uh, huh. And what about a wireless phone hands.
Yeah, absolutely, yea anything anything, any phone that you could plug into like an old school I feel like you remember the days when we used to have like a phone jack in the house, right, Like any phone, any phone that you can plug into there, you'll be able to plug into the back of the UMA uses that same technology. So the only difference is back in the day there would be a copper cable that went from your house to the phone company. Nowadays it's all being
converted into ones and zeros. It's all digital, and it's it's arriving over the internet. It's it's traveling over the internet. That's basically the only issue. So yeah, UMA's been around forever. I had it in my house for a long time and it works as advertised, and it's a good thing to a good.
Thing to have.
Okay, okay, all right, that steals the deal for me.
All right, Thank you, rich Debor.
You get the gold star today for for actually having a question that we can answer and your succinct and you are fantastic.
So I'm okay, I'm bless you with pride.
Thank you all right, take care bye eighty to eight. Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple eight rich one O one. Email also an option. Just go to rich on Tech dot tv. Get a lot of emails there, hit contact you can send them in. Randolph from Florida writes in love your show and how responsive you are?
Articles for help.
I'm going on my first cruise and reading article articles has confused me about how to handle Internet. They say to turn on airplane mode whenever on the ship. But if I buy the AT and T Cruise Internet Package add on, do I still need to do that? Or does phone Internet add on make airplane mode unnecessary? So if you're buying from AT and T, which is like available through your cruise ship, you would use your phone as you typically would, but there's going to be data limits.
So if you look up what the plans are, they've got a cup love them. You've got AT and T Cruise Plus that gives you one gigabyte of data which you're going to burn through in about two seconds, or AT and T Cruise Basic even worse. You get a one hundred megabytes. After that you're going to be charged overage fees of ten dollars per one hundred megabytes, which adds up quickly. So personally, Randolph, I would just turn your phone off just enjoy the cruise Internet on cruise ships.
I have never been on a cruise, so I need to. I probably need to go on a cruise to see what the deal is with this, because I get so many questions about it, and I really just I've never been on a cruise. I was actually invited on one this week and I said no. I should have said yes, because I would I would understand this more. And it turns out, what Bobo, you like the cruises? Yeah, I just went on a cruise in May.
And did you connect to the internet. No, yes, the ship's internet and just to pay for that, yeah, you do.
You do pay for the ship's internet, and everything on your phone is Wi Fi, so you're just connected to it, okay. And then if you get an international plan, when you dock and where you go, you're on your international plan, so it doesn't affect anything, right, Okay, But the cruise ship had its own The cruise ship does have its own Wi Fi you just have to pay for it's a little maybe about things like twenty bucks a day or yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot.
It's a lot.
But if you're on a cruise for like a week or something like that, you know it's part of you know, it's part of traveling. It's like when you're on the plane. But to be honest, even when I'm on the airplane, like, unless I have a reason to connect to the Internet, I usually don't. Like my last flight from Paris to lax I did not connect. I specifically said I'm not connecting to the internet. It was expensive and I just didn't want to pay for it, and why not. Let's
see here. Joanne, a travel writer and photographer, writes, and I've been a follower of years, for years, I appreciate all you do for your listeners. As a travel writer and photographer, having an Instagram account is key to my outreach. You can imagine how devastated I was after waking up yesterday's see I had been locked out of my site. To make matters worse, the hacker cloned my site and
my original site is nowhere to be found. It contained nearly a thousand original photos, which I stupidly thought were safe and will be a nightmare to restore. I immediately contacted what I thought was Instagram help, and I got a message back asking for a fee to attach more securities to my account. How is it possible that Instagram can send me such an obvious new hack even though I went through their reporting process. I'm devastated, beyond belief.
My original Instagram is gone without a trace. Uh yeah, Joanne, I hear this all the time. And the problem is there's two ways that people hacked. Number One, they're not really hacking in they are, but they aren't. So when people say their Facebook was hacked or their Instagram was hacked, tip, people are being tricked into sharing their password and they
don't have two factor authentication enabled. So if you have two factor authentication enabled, which I'm guessing you didn't on this account, that is what's going to protect you from even if you gave up your password by accident. Like what happens is you get a notification that says, hey, there's something wrong with your Facebook account, there's something wrong with your Instagram account, and you go what, no, no, no,
what do you mean? And you click that URL you log in without thinking and that URL is actually phony, and so immediately what they do is they take your information that you just gave them and they run with it and they take over your account and you're never going to get it back. So if you have two factor authentication enabled, the trick would be that as soon as you log into that account number one, you know,
you'd realize that. But then when they try to log into your account, they're gonna get that message that says to get that two factor code texted to them. Now you're probably going to get that texted you and you'd say, wait a second, I didn't what And so that would keep them from getting in, but also it would be a clue to you that something went wrong. So please have two factor authentication enabled on any account that is
vital to you. And Facebook dot com slash hacked or Instagram dot com slash hacked is the only way to try to get your account back. And I've done many stories with folks. It takes a very long time. It is a long process.
It's not easy.
It takes a lot of going through hoops, but you stay on it and you might get your account back. It just could take a long time. Sorry that happened to you. Let's say so many questions that we get. Marcia writes in I have a Samsung Galaxy S twenty one ultra cell phone. What would be the best luggage tracking tags? My husband and I do a lot of international traveling for pleasure. I was looking at the Samsung tags and the tile. I'm confused by all of them.
What is the range?
How many months do they last? Also, what's a good tag for my dog? If you have a Samsung phone, it depends with Android. You can go two ways. Google has their own called find my Device. You can go with a tag that works with that and that will work with any Android phone. Or if you want to go just Samsung specific, they have their own tags called the smart tag too. That might be a better bet because you have a Samsung phone, but it only uses
other Samsung phones to find them. I'd say the Android ones are probably better, but those tags are more limited and they work anywhere there's phones. All right, Coming up, We're going to talk to Jared Newman about streaming services. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology. The website for the show rich on Tech dot TV. What a show it's been today.
Jared Newman writes a great newsletter called Advisorator, and recently he came out with an entire guide on cord cutting. Jared friend of the show, So welcome back.
Hey Rich, thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, always enjoy getting your newsletter. I think you're one of the first guests on this show. This is your cord cutterweekly dot com newsletter. So one of the cool things you do is you have an entire list of, like all the streaming deals that you keep track of. So that's one cool aspect. But tell me about this complete guide to chord cutting. What was the reason why you wrote this.
It's just something I've wanted to do for a really long time, basically assembling all this knowledge that I've put together. I mean, I've been writing a weekly column for tech Hive about We're Cutting for almost a decade now, so I helped a lot of people get rid of cable, get read of satellite TV, save money on streaming, and I just kind of wanted to put together like a big collection of things on like where to start answering all the common questions that I've gotten over the years.
Just walking through every step of the process of like you're starting at square one. You know you need to get rid of Spectrum TV or Comcast or whatever it is. And you know where do you go from just that wanting to do it to actually doing it?
So I put together a.
Set of online guides and then I made a PDF version because there was a lot of people that wanted that document and that I launched that maybe a month or a month and a half ago, and it's been a great, great response.
Really glad that I finally put that all together.
So I guess to start, the number one question is should you cut the cord? I mean, it used to be it was a lot cheaper to cut the cord. Now that has changed depending on what you subscribe to. Do you still think it's a better way to go?
Yeah, of course.
I mean I think one thing that often gets lost sight of is cable got more expensive too, right, and satellite got more expensive.
Every time there's a price site for Netflix or what have you.
There's a lot of grousing about that, obviously, but you look at your cable bill and those are going up by the same or more on a yearly basis. And that's why a lot of people are still looking at this and figuring that they have to do it. And yeah, there's a lot of different ways to.
Cut the cord. In some ways, it's easier now because you.
Can get a lot of the stuff that you couldn't get at all when I dropped cable in two thousand and eight, and you know, it was kind of like if you wanted to watch something on HBO, you were just out of luck. And so now you can just subscribe to Max by itself and get that content.
So, yeah, there's talk to them. I talk a lot in the guide about is just sort of this path.
You go down of do you subscribe to one of these big TV packages that's kind of like cable or do you kind of go your own way with things like Netflix and Max and Hulu.
Yeah.
I remember when I finally convinced my wife to cut the cord. This was a couple of years ago. It was kind of like a big deal in our house, Like she was very concerned and with some reasoning. You know, it was kind of validated over the years because, yeah, sometimes it's tricky to figure out like where's this streaming? How do we watch this game? Like I remember watching like specifically like award shows. You know, she wanted to
watch like a certain award show. I'm like, I don't really have a good way of doing that, because you know, we have all the Netflix and stuff, but we didn't have at that time, like a good you know, you just need like over the air or like maybe something was on like E back in the day, you know, like I remember that Channel E. You know. It's like I was like, I don't really have a way of accessing that because there was no service to get it on.
But now that's all changed because so many people are getting cable streaming packages, like on their streaming service, which is kind of like the same price.
So my parents cut the cord. I think it was maybe like a year ago. I'd been trying to get them to do it for forever. You know, they had Verizon FiOS on Maryland, and you know I got them on YouTube TV, which is seventy three dollars a month. It's not super cheap, but compared to what they were getting with Verizon, you know, I think it would end up saying like hundred dollars a months when you.
Take out all the boxes and DVR and all that stuff.
And of course once they did it, they were like, man, we really should have done this years ago, and they're very happy.
So I think, and I think what I always tell people is that it's really about the flexibility that the cord cutting gives you. You know, if you want to pause, if you know, budgets tight whatever, or maybe you just want to watch free stuff on like what's the one to be I think it's called it's like the you know, they have like a lot of Pluto. You know, there's like so many like free ad supported services. But the number one thing I always tell people is you have
to figure out what do you want to watch? Like is there a particular sports team? Is there a particular channel? Like for some people it's like I just want to watch Bravo. It's like, okay, well let's find the streaming service that's the cheapest that offers that channel. Is there is there ways of doing that?
It depends on the content.
So, like like I was kind of saying before, I always start from the perspective of like, are you just wanting to drop in these very specific cable channels, in which case you're going to need something like YouTube TV or Sling TV. You know, live TV streaming services what I kind of kind of call them, but you can. It's like, all right, well am I willing to be? Think of it on the spectrum of like how flexible am I willing to be? Because I want to save money?
Because if you are more flexible, then you go down that path like you said of oh, well, you know, if I look at Peacock, it turns out they have a lot of Bravo content. I don't think they offer like a direct one to one equivalent of like the Bravo live stream, but they have the same shows. So are you willing to have that versus like I want a DVR and I want this like very specific DVR
concept of recording shows. You know, the more rigid you are, maybe maybe the more you end up having to pay or maybe it just doesn't end up working out for you. But if you're very flexible, you can save a ton of money.
So what is your guidance? What did you learn in the in the creating of this guide?
Well, you know, one thing I've learned, maybe not in the creation this guide, but just like over the years, Like the number one question that I get is like I want DVR, So it really like that is like a big thing I put in the guy's like, yes, you can have DVR if you sign up for one of these live TV streaming services. They all include DVR.
I do like to there's kind of these other workarounds you can go down where you can record from services like Netflix or skip commercials and services like Netflix if you use the right tools. They're kind of hacky, nerdy workarounds, but I like to highlight those two for people who have a little bit more technical wherewithal and maybe want to have a little bit more control over that.
So that's the number one question, the DVR. What's number two? Is sports always kind of like the big driver of all of this, Not.
Necessarily, I mean, I guess I would say like the number two.
It's just kind of that, like you said, the catch all of like I want X, Y or Z specific program, specific show. Sometimes it is like I want to watch this specific team, And of course the answer is always going to vary depending on where you are and what show or channel it is, but usually there's a way.
This is like the most thorough guide I've ever seen in my life on streaming, Like I'm reading through some of these things like you know, you you go into like how to watch CBS, how to watch ABC, how to watch NBC, how to watch Fox, how to watch PBS, how to watch your local news, how to watch national and international news. Also you've got a great uh you linked up to the streamable which has like a matchmaker. That's a that's a pretty useful tool as well. Can you tell me about that.
Yeah, there's a few tools like that.
I think I'll linked to at least two or three of them, where you basically you plug in the channels that you want and they will tell you the live TV streaming services that match.
So if you are like, you know, I want to watch ABC, CNN.
And PBS, okay, you put those in and it will tell you which services have those those particular channels. I think I may have linked to a service called my Bundle dot tv, which is a little a little more interesting because they do have that kind of thing. But then they also will recommend some of those standalone services
that may be cheaper. So if you say, you know, I want to watch NBC, they might say, well, have you considered just subscribing to peacock where some of these other services don't They don't recommend those smaller, uh cheaper streaming services like that. So yeah, I mean it's just a it's just a matter of kind of helping people figure out exactly what they need. Like you said, there's so many different paths you can go down, and it's just a matter of choosing the right one.
Yeah, it's almost like I choose your own adventure book.
But in a uh in a guide, what do you what do you like for uh, you know, streaming versus you know, people get these smart TVs.
What's your guidance on that?
Do you think people should get like separate device to stream or just use what's included on their TV?
And what device do you like?
People have strong opinions on that. I tend to say, like, if you have a smart TV and it's fairly recent, there's really no harm in like using it, And if it has the apps that you want and you're fine with the interface and it's fast enough, then that's fine.
Right.
You can always add a streaming device later. You already bought this TV. You may not need to like throw more money at more hardware if it's not necessary, So at least give it a try, you know, in my case, I have a.
High Sense TV that runs Android Google TV, I should say, and it's okay, but I prefer Apple TV.
I just like the interface. It's faster and cleaner.
There's no annoying like banner ads or things that kind of glutter up the UI, and I like what they generally do around surfacing shows that you're already watching and making it easier to pick up where you left off. So that's our default in the living room is Apple TV four K connected to that TV, and I just had it set up to like bypass the default smart TV interface and it just skips directly to the Apple TV input when I turn it on.
I also have a High Sense TV, and I just realized that I can press the Google Assistant button and it overlays on my Apple TV.
That I'm using.
So I was like, wait a second, what I thought I had to be on their home screen? But Apple TV is the last holdout that does not have ads on the home screen. Fire TV is littered with them, and so is Roku, and they're now they're like auto playing, and so it's really gotten like where the Apple TV is pretty calm compared to everything else that's going on these other ones, Jared, how can folks find this cord cutting guide?
So if you want to just type in chordcutterweekly dot com slash guide that will take you to it. Yeah, I appreciate if you sign up for my news life Atcordcutter Weekly dot com as well. I usually link to the guide somewhere in the newsletter so you can find it that way.
And the definitely check out the big list of streaming deals that's regularly updated by you on cord Cutter Weekly dot com.
Jared Newman, thanks so much for joining me today.
Thanks Rich as always.
All right, coming up, we'll do the feedback. Plus, I've got a handy website for you that helps you use Siri to do all kinds of stuff with your voice. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. The website for the show rich on Tech dot tv. If you want to link to anything that I mentioned here, just go there and look for the
light bulb at the top of the page. You tap the light bulb, it will bring you to the show notes. We keep great notes for every single show, so if I mentioned something a link website. Whatever it is all there. Rich on tech dot TV hit the light bulb. A couple of more items of note. This week, Google unveiled the Pixel nine Pro and Pixel nine Pro Fold ahead of their official event. This is a weird thing that
Google does. Not only are they holding their event earlier than ever this year for these new phones, now they're showing them off online, so you can just go online and like see what they look like. Now, it's not everything, not all the details, but still AI is a huge part of these phones. You can see what the design of the Pixel nine Pro fold. It's flatter, kind of a rounder footprint Pixel nine Apparently they're going to come out with the Pixel nine Pro in two sizes, which
is kind of nice. You can you can choose, do you on a smaller phone, bigger phone, but it's still gonna have the same features. The official event is scheduled for August thirteenth. I'm looking forward to it. I will be there and if you want to check these out, you can go to the Google Store and see what that's all about. Came across a handy website this week. If you like to use Siri siriuserguide dot com. This is a website that it helps you understand what Siri
is capable of. Now, there's lots of user guides on Apple's website, but this one kind of shows you a lot of cool different things you can do with Siri. So if you're just looking to expand your knowledge of Siri, it'll tell you you know how to use Siri to listen to music, how to use it to send audio messages, how to all kinds of stuff, read text to you, WhatsApp, whatever you want, siriuserguide dot com. And it keeps activating
my phone, so I apologize if it's activating yours. And if you're a college student or if you have a college student there max is offering fifty percent off the streaming service. Now, when I was in college, I couldn't afford any streaming service, so I don't know. You may have to put the bill on this one for your kids. But it's five dollars per month instead of the usual ten, So you can look for this promotion. HBO Max is fifty percent off for US college students. I'll put the
link on the website time for feedback. These are the emails, the comments, and the questions I get from you. Guermo from Los Angeles writes in regarding the caller about Spectrum Wi Fi, I had a similar problem.
I was getting slow internet speed. I called Spectrum.
They ran the test from their end, saying I was getting the proper speed, but I set up an appointment for a tech to come out. Anyway, the tech came out and found one of my cables to the modem was loose. Why didn't I think of that? No problems now, and I was not charged for the visit. Also, Spectrum will supply you with Wi Fi extenders for three dollars a month.
Thanks.
I got some feedback on the crazy callers earlier. Catherine from Upland rights in rich being a labor and delivery nurse, we are all aware of what the quote full moon can mean craziness. Also, on this day in nineteen sixty nine, we walked on the moon. I'm assuming she means like people walked on the moon, not her.
As care about it. I'm not an astrologist. That's not even a word, is it.
Marie from Los Angeles writes in maybe the person with the Bank of America issue should reset their password again yesterday.
That's a good idea. Always try the password reset.
Mark writes in, you suggested that the best one can hope for for speed over Wi Fi is about half compared to connecting via Ethernet. Actually, I have a supplied cable modem SLASH router on a three hundred megabits per second plan. I get about three hundred and thirty megabits per second. I'm in the office where the router is located. I get the full speed over the five gigahertz Wi Fi. The two point four gigaherts is slower, but doesn't everyone have a router with five gigaherts these days?
Even down the hall, I still.
Get about two fifty All right, Well, Mark, Yes, I was just giving people kind of an idea that you may not get the full speed over Wi Fi that you would get via wired.
But I'm glad it's working out for you.
Peter from San Pedro writes in, my wife ran across a TikTok video recently warning to check your Amazon Prime Day Deals receipt as some deals were less expensive. The next day, after Prime Day Deals ended, she tallied up her receipts and did find a seven dollars difference. Might seem like not like a lot, but I'm sure it makes you question Prime Day. Is that really their best deals of the year.
Now?
My wife feels kind of cheated and questions Amazon's motives. She did contact customer service and they offered a refund of ten dollars. Here's the deal with Prime Day.
You got it.
If it's a deal to you, it's a deal. So the stuff I bought, it was definitely cheaper on Prime Day than it was on other days. All the random stuff they're selling, I can't vouch for it, but yes it is. Some of it's better, some of it's not. That's why you got to check those prices. Let's get some other stuff here. We got more about Prime Day. Gheramo writes in is this Garmo? Do we have two Gharamos this time? He said, you can get Vic's Premium with ads if you're a Spectrum customer. It's a Spanish
language streaming service similar to Peacock. Good service. I'm not able to listen to your show live. I listened via podcast in parts. I'm glad you make it available this way.
Thank you.
Joanne and Tony from San Diego write in, my husband and I listen to your podcast religiously and are so grateful for the knowledge you impart to your listeners. Many of us, many of them like us, really need to know what's going on in the tech world out there. Warmest regards and thanks, thank you, Joanne and Patricia. Finally, with so many apps and items to subscribe to, I'm deeming this the year two power back for our family.
I could never delete your newsletter. Your information is way too valuable in our techy world and most of us I trust your and most of all, I trust your reporting wholeheartedly.
Smile.
You're the best out there, Patricia. Thank you, Patricia. That's going to do it for this episode of the show. You can find links to everything I mentioned on my website. Just go to rich on tech dot tv. You can find me on social media. I am at rich on tech. Coming up next week, I've got some tips and tricks for traveling internationally with your smartphone.
I learned a lot when I was over in Paris.
I've got a whole list of the things you can do to make sure your prep to avoid those roaming charges, get around like a local, stay connected, watch your stuff on the go. I'll have that all next week. Thanks so much, for listening. There are so many ways you can spend your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here with me. Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible. I'm rich Tomiro.
Talk to you real soon.