Microsoft puts Windows in the Cloud

friends listening on Facebook from all over the world. I've been loving this Facebook spaces thing, and right now I'm just using it to sort of broadcast my podcast as I do it. But believe me, my plan and I just realized you can actually schedule a spaces is to schedule a space each week where you know what time it's gonna happen, when to tune in, and you can come with your questions and I will answer them live. But for right now, thanks for tuning in, Thanks for

sending those stars. I do appreciate it. And this is where I talk about all the good stuff of the week. I was off last week, so thanks for tuned in. This week. I went to Las Vegas over the weekend and wow, Wow, Wow, what a fun trip. It was really really amazing. We ate, we drank, we played. I mean, it was just so great. We went to this place called a Megamart, which I had no idea what it was, but I knew I was going to Las Vegas, and I happen to get a pitch for this like interactive exhibit.

I don't know what you want to call it, but I didn't really know what it was all about, but I you know, they sent me the two tickets and I said, all right, let me check it out, and so we went there. Just thankfully I scheduled it for early in the day because this thing you can spend a lot of time here and I won't go into all of it, but it's kind of like an immersive

interactive art experience. And thankfully we had a pr person to sort of lead us around, because if they would have just set me out in there, I would would not have known what to do. So on the surface, it's this really interesting grocery store where everything is just not exactly right, like all the names of the products and stuff, Like one of the names of the the cereals is like simply not spiders or something like that. And there's just all this stuff and the products are real,

by the way, a lot of them. In fact, you can buy them apparently, so but once you go into this place, you realize there's like hidden passageways that bring you into the depths of the actual immersive exhibit and you could just sit there and explore It's there's like a whole storyline. There's lights, there's songs, there's like these immersive like sound rooms. There's slides. I went down the slide and it was a little rough on my back, pretty fast slide. There's like three of them, so be

ready for that. It was just really really fun and interesting and they actually it took me a while to figure out because I didn't do the whole storyline thing, like, I didn't investigate it for myself. But when I interviewed the folks from Miao Wolf who makes Omegomart, I know these names are just wild. They explain the whole thing.

So spoiler alert, I'm not going to tell you what it's all about, but I might do a YouTube video to like explain, because I feel like if I went through that whole thing and didn't know what it was all about, I'd want to know what it actually was, Like, what did I just experience? So it's at a place called Area fifteen in Las Vegas, off the strip that's kind of like a big adult playground. I say adult playground,

but it's really kids are in there. There's ziplining, it's all black light, there's like a cool restaurant in there. So I was just unprepared for this whole experience, but it was it was amazing. And I also visited Resorts World, which is a new casino in Las Vegas, which has this giant like the whole building itself outside is like one giant billboard. It's like one of the biggest in the world. So that was really cool and it's funny. I came back. I didn't you know, it was just

on vacation in Las Vegas. And when I came back, I had so much video that I had shot that I said, Oh, I'm doing a story for KTLA about all this stuff. So today on KTLA, I ended up putting all these little things together that I saw in Las Vegas, including Omega mart and it was a very popular story. People were emailing me saying, Oh, I heard about this place. That's so cool. Ah, So anyway, lots of fun there. Definitely crowded there, but it was fun.

We had we ate, Oh my gosh, we ate. I listened to I've talked about it before Bobby Flay's podcast Always Hungry with his daughter Sophie, and so we ended up going to Bobby Flay's new restaurant, Amalfie. So thanks Sophie for getting us in there, by the way, and we got the best treatment. Oh my gosh. We had such a great dinner at a Malfie. If you go to Las Vegas, you have to go. It was just phenomenal.

They gave us the best table in the house. I'll just be honest, because they just did, and it was phenomenal. The people were coming up to us. We ordered like such great things. You know, my wife and I like to split everything, so you know, we just it was so great. Such a The restaurant basically has like a

what amounts to like an Italian fish market. Inside. You walk over, you take a look at all the fresh fish, and then you end up ordering one of those fish and they make it to your suiting and we're sort of whimps. So we didn't get it like fully, you know, like a fish on your plate like we got it

fill aid, but it was it was so good. We also went to Giada's restaurant, which was awesome, and then we also went to this place called Bavetts, which is a really cool, like nineteen twenties French style speakeasy steakhouse. Oh my god, it was just ah, it was so fun. Anyway, that's enough about my talk about Las Vegas. You want to know more, just tweet me or social media me. But let's start with the first story of the week.

This is a big, big shift in the way that we use computers, and I think Microsoft is probably kicking itself for not having launched this a year ago, but nonetheless it will forever change the way we compute. It's it's Windows three sixty five Cloud PC. So it's kind of like the dream of being able to run a computer in the cloud on any platform is now available. Well,

it's going to be available August second. And it's the idea of this cloud PC, which we've heard about for so long, but it's never really happened, and it's probably happened in different ways. In fact, you know, if you think about it for my entire year and a half at home, I was remoting in from my Mac computer to my Windows computer at work, and for all intents and purposes, I was using a cloud PC. Everything I was doing on there was happening at my workstation at work.

But I was using my Mac and I was using not a web browser. I was using you know, Microsoft, what do they call it? Remote Remote Access? I think it's called I don't even know where it is. Where is it? It's called Microsoft Remote Desktop. And that's a program that I have to install. But with this, you'll actually be able to just open up a web browser and log into a virtual PC that doesn't exist anywhere.

It only exists on the cloud. And what's really neat about this is that you can use any computer you want. You can use a smartphone, you can use a web browser on your Mac, you can use a web browser on a PC. You can use a web browser at the hotel computer if you ever decided to do that, which I would never ever do, because the one thing that the hotel or the security expert at Chrome at Google told me when I interviewed her is she said she would never ever use a public shared computer at

a hotel. Now, this is actually an example of why this could change that because think about it, if you just logged into a PC in the cloud, you wouldn't really have to worry about security because all the security is handled on the cloud. I mean, it's really really phenomenal. So Windows ten, Windows eleven will be on this instant boot up. All your applications, all your tools, all your settings are consistent no matter what, and so you can get your work done on an iPad, you can do

it on a computer. You just move through any computer that you have access to with a keyboard and a mouse or not. Even you can sit down to the same exact desktop. If I feel like I'm under selling this, I think i am. Because this is such a huge shift in the way that we use computers. You no longer need to update your computer with all these software things and all this like Microsoft's gonna handle all that

for you. On the back end. You don't have to worry about the amount of RAM on your computer because your computer is going to be so fast because it's actually just streaming the computer experience. I mean it's like basically how Netflix works the same no matter what device you access it on. Now we can think about Windows being the same. You don't really, it doesn't matter like Netflix works the same whether you use it on a Roku or on an iPad or anywhere you use it.

Part of the magic is how or Amazon are sorry getting ahead of myself, how Netflix has optimized that to work so well everywhere. So August second, twenty twenty one, that's when this is going to be available. It's mainly based at organizations, but you know, anyone can use this, and I think that we are in for a real treat when it comes to the future of computing. And I cannot wait to try this out. All right, let's

get to the first question. Uh, Zora Aida Da Zora Aida says, Hey, Rich, glad to see you back on the set at KTLA. Yes, that was exciting. Thank you for always enlightening us with your tech wisdom. Question for you. We have older cars with no Bluetooth, but it has an oxport. I just noticed some ox to Bluetooth adapters on the market and was wondering if you can recommend one. Again, I appreciate your insight and thanks for answering my question. Zor Aida. Uh, well, I'm actually gonna defer to my

pal Brian Tongue on this one. When we did a segment with him over the holidays, he recommended a ox Bluetooth adapter that he uses on the plane by twelve South. It's called Airfly, and that is the one that I'd recommend because that's a great you know, if he's recommending it, it's got to be good. And since he recommended it, I have seen this at places like Amazon Store. I've seen other people recommend it, and it's just kind of like a standard, like a gold standard of like this

what you what you're talking about? So you can connect. You can use it as an ox in adapter for your car, your boat, or your non Bluetooth speaker. It's got sixteen hours of battery life, which is really nice, and it's forty five dollars, so I think that's gonna be a great way to do it. You could also connect two pairs of headphones if you want to use it the other way, like if you wanted to transmit from a device, But Airfly duo I think is the

way to do it. They have one, two, three, four different, four different ones of these ones of these four different, so the classic might be the best one to go. It's only thirty so just see what you need, see which one suit you. But that's what i'd recommend. And the other thing is if you if your phone, and I'm guessing you have a newer phone that does not have a headphone jack, but if you have a headphone jack on your phone, that's the easiest way to connect

it to your car. I know it's not wireless, but you're gonna get the best sound quality if you just connected that way. So good question and a good question to start things off with. All right, let's talk about fleets. This is something that Twitter introduced just about eight months ago and guess what it's going away? So Twitter Fleets is was Twitter's answer to stories that everyone else has, and stories are, you know, these little things that have

become very popular. It's kind of like if you think about Snapchat back in the day, like they invented it, Instagram took it, ran with it, and now everyone has a version of stories, you know, like all these apps.

Facebook has it, Instagram has it, Snapchat has it. It's just it's kind of like an ephemeral expiring post usually sixteen by nine vertical, and Twitter introduced it, but I was always kind of it was kind of a head scratcher to me because to me, Twitter at its core is already ephemeral and even though tweets don't expire like stories do, to me, when you tweet something, there's a life,

there's a there's a shelf life on it. It doesn't last forever, and it does, and yes, they can come back to haunt you, but and so could a story. But to me, Twitter was always kind of like a in the moment kind of thing where you tweet and it goes, and you know, people forget about it until they need to until they need to remember about it. So fleets are going away on August third. Fleets were meant to be a lower barrier of entry for conversations.

Twitter thought that more people would use them because they did expire and it might feel like it wasn't as much pressure as like a well crafted tweet. But guess what, that didn't happen. But here is what is going to happen. Twitter is not going to get rid of the fleet composer, so they will continue to build that into the Twitter composer, so there'll be the text formatting options and stickers. So I think what they realize is that just build this

into Twitter, and it's the same thing. People are gonna use these cool ways of making tweets. That's the thing that the Twitter composer doesn't have right now, a way to like, you know, type in you know, fun text or affect pictures and this and that. They're small ways. But now they're gonna make it basically the idea of a story into a tweet. Now what's gonna happen to the top of the timeline. They're gonna put their spaces product there. And you might be saying, rich, aren't you

using a spaces like product right now? Yes, I am, but I'm using it on Facebook. And I'll be honest, the reason why I like it on Facebook versus Twitter is because my audience is on Facebook. Yes, I've got a small audience on Twitter, but my Facebook audience is

much larger and I can reach many more people. And honestly, the type of people that I reach the most, which is your average everyday person and is on Facebook and Twitter is a little bit more of a little bit more of a techie because to be on Twitter you have to be a little bit more involved in kind of I don't know, like you have to be a little bit more technical, like Facebook is kind of for

the every person. And Twitter. If you're on there and you're especially using it a lot, you're either in media, you're in tech. You're definitely it's a little bit different than the Facebook audience, and for me, my audience is much more on Facebook. So that's why I'm using the Facebook Audio Rooms thing, which is very similar. Anyway, fleets did not last very long. There's a million and one jokes there about them not lasting long, but I'm not going to make them. I'm just going to go into

my next question. All right, Carrie says need some advice. What would be the best hot spot to buy when working on the road or traveling? Can you buy a hot spot that you can hardwire to your laptop. I want to do some traveling, but need to make sure I have a good connection. Thanks in advance for all your help To answer your question, Carrie, I don't think that you need a hardwired hot spot. I've traveled around the world with my wireless hotspots and somehow I've been

able to manage just fine. So and I do a lot of video stuff, I do a lot of social media, and the types of stuff that I'm doing does require big files, usually streaming. So I don't think that you need to hard wire now if you want to, you can, And I think that number one, you don't necessarily need a dedicated hot spot. Now, there are reasons to have those, and the reasons for those, and the reasons why I like a dedicated hot spot is you plug it in and it is a nice dedicated Wi Fi network wherever

you are. So whether you're in the car, or whether you're in a hotel room or at an event, it's just kind of a nice solid connection that is different from your smartphone. And so for that reason, it's nice to just get into a hotel room, plug in your hotspot, your computer and your device is recognize it and it just sits there the whole weekend or you know whatever,

however long you're in that hotel room. Same thing. If you're in a car, you're on a you know, let's say you're on a road trip, you plug in the hot spot using you know, the auxport whatever, you know, the power adapter, and now you have just a hot spot that's always powered, it's always ready to go, and a bunch of people in your car can connect to it, and if someone else is driving like my wife and I will sometimes you know, she'll drive for an hour

so I can catch up on social media. I mean, that's that's the reality of our road trips at this point. But when I'm on my road trips, I get a lot of good stuff for social media. So if you want to do a hardwired thing, you can actually connect the iPhone to your computer via a hardwired connection. I believe it's been a while, but I think it's just a tethered connection to your iPhone. I have not done that in a long time, but I think there's an

option to do that in your personal hotspot. But I would just use the personal hotspot feature on your iPhone or your your smartphone. If it gets to be where it just doesn't work, then I would look into something else. But uh, and then if you're going to get a dedicated hot spot, I would just get one from your carrier. That's gonna be the easiest to do because you know,

you'll just it'll just be the same connection. If you really want to take things to the next level, if you really need a good connection, I would go with the carrier that's opposite of your cell phone carrier. So that way Let's just say, for example, you have AT and T as your cell phone, maybe get a Verizon hot spot and that way you are covered in a much bigger way when you're traveling versus just being narrowed down to one network. So take your pick. You know,

you can go tea Mobile. There's also a hot spot that's unlocked. If you search ZT hotspot. You can buy an unlocked hot spot and just pop in a SIM card and use it that way. So it really just depends. There's so many ways of doing this that you know, there's not not one size fits all, but those are those are sort of the big options that I think would work for most people. All right, let's get to the next story. This is a story I did on KTLA that of course blew up. I got so many

messages about this. This is a startup called Villo and they came out with a sixty dollars whole house mesh Wi Fi system. And I hope I didn't do this already in the podcast, but this is you know, if you look at one of these mesh networking systems, they're expensive. You know, I have one from Ero, Google Wi Fi is another one Neckgear Orb there's a whole bunch of them.

But the bottom line is they are very expensive, especially if you want to get the Wi Fi six like the newer versions like the one I bought retails for six hundred bucks. I got it for cheaper since I bought it on Prime Day, but it or maybe was it near Prime Day whatever, I didn't pay that much for it, but it was definitely expensive. So Villo, When you know they pitched me on this sixty dollars system, I was like, okay, well you got my interest, but I wanted to make sure that it worked, and I

have to say I was very impressed with it. Sixty bucks. You plug it into your router and you set it up the first one using the app, and then you set up the second one and the third one by putting them in different places around your house. But they just find each other, which I thought was really cool. So that was a nice spin on the whole mesh network, which usually takes a little setting up. This one. You just plug them in and boom, it's all set up.

The signal was great. I found the signal throughout the house. I set it up at the same time as my ero, so I didn't want to interrupt my ero. But if you want to switch to a new Wi Fi network, you know, just use the same network and password name, network name and password and all your gadgets will follow over. They will find the new network, and so you know, the reality is is this as good as the super

expensive systems? I thought it's I think for ninety nine percent of people, this is going to be just fine. Was my euro a little bit faster? Probably? But is it, you know, ten times the price faster? I don't think so. I thought that the app was really nice. There was like three software updates, well I should say, I would say firmware updates for the system in the time I had. I was using it for a couple of weeks, so that goes to show me that the company's always trying

to make this thing better. The speeds were great, and I think that if you're looking to upgrade the system or the Wi Fi signal that typically is included with your cable modem, then yes, this is a great way to do that. Now, I got a lot of questions and it made me realize that people don't really understand these systems. So a mesh network does not replace your Internet connection. You still need to subscribe to a spectrum or a FiOS or an AT and T fiber or

a Comcast. What this does is it plugs into the modem or the box that your cable company or your internet service brider gives you, and then this controls the Wi Fi signal. And so what you would do is you would disable the Wi Fi signal that's emanated from the box that your company provides you, and you would use this as your Wi Fi signal. So that's the big thing that a lot of people did not understand.

And another thing I like about this Villo system is that not only is it inexpensive, but there are Ethernet ports on the back, which a lot of these systems don't have. So you get it looks like up to three Ethernet ports on the back, which is really cool. I don't know if all three of them are usable on all of them, but at least two are I know that for a fact, so that's also kind of cool. A sixty dollars three pack covers a forty five hundred square foot home. I think those numbers are always a

bit inflated. I think if you have a forty five hundred square foot home. Well, number one, good for you. Number two I'd probably get another one of these, depending on the coverage. But it all depends on the coverage you get. In my place, it's not that big, but it's you know, it's an older place, so the walls are thick whatever, and it's just like Internet does not

like to go through the walls here. So for me, I use a three system and I do not have a forty five square foot home full disclosure, and the three seems to work for me. That's it. I mean, I would take a look at this review. I'm gonna put show notes in the shows. I got an email from a viewer or a listener rather and they said, Rich, you know, I love the show, but you're killing me. Smalls said, you're killing me by not having the show

notes anymore. And I said, all right, I agree. Like I'm doing a show that's purportedly for the average tech person and I don't include links in my show notes. Like that's that's a big. Uh, that's a big on my part. So I'm going to bring back the show notes. If you've been missing them, look in the show notes, because I do talk about a lot of stuff that's that's quite useful and interesting, and I definitely need the show notes to go along with them. So anyway, that's

the Villo router. I'll put it in the show notes, So look for it, and if you have any questions about it, let me know. All right, D says or Denise says. Thanks for all your good tips. You've helped me out a lot. Right now, I'm trying to guess when Apple will release the iPad twenty twenty one, not the pro. I want a Wi Fi plus cellular. I'll probably get an eighth generation if it's too long for the twenty twenty one. I can't find any links or any leaks. I trust to see when it will happen.

Do you have a good guess? Also, what do you think of the mini versus the regular? I'd probably use the device on cellular when I go out of the house. I don't trust public Wi Fi. The size is tempting. I trust you. Can you please advise? Thank you Denise for trusting me. Number one, the regular iPad typically comes out in October, so that's when historically comes out. But

don't take my word for it. There's a place that I look and it's called Buyer's Guide dot MacRumors dot com, and what they do is they have every single iPad cataloged and it will tell you exactly when the last one came out. So to answer your question about the standard iPad, if you tup, if you look at the

iPad right now, it's neutral. It's been three hundred and four days since they last released one, and the typical release cycle is five hundred and seventy nine days, which leads me to believe that we're not going to see another one for another three hundred days. So now it just sort of depends with the iPad. So I would say, right now they're recommending a neutral, which means you could buy it and take a chance, or you can just wait.

So I personally would just I'd probably just get it because I feel like it's been I feel like the one that they have right now is just fine, or you can wait, you know, you can wait for a little bit longer. Now. With respect to the Mini, that is a whole different beast. The Mini they always seem to give up on, and the average for the Mini is about five hundred days. Right now, it's been eight hundred and fifty one day since the last release, so

it has been a long time. I believe I bought my kids the last iPad Mini and it was a long time ago, so actually it might have been the one before this. So with the mini, definitely don't buy, and you can wait for a new one. I would hope that they would come out with a new one because I think that is a perfect size. But again it's it's really I would not get the current one, and you can wait for a new one, but there's no guarantee that the new one's going to be there.

So bottom line, check out buyers Guide dot MacRumors dot com for your true insight. But you have to decide with respect to the whole cellular situation. I think you're right in not trusting public Wi Fi, But to be totally honest, I think it's fine. I mean, you're unless you're connecting to really sketchy Wi Fi networks. Most of the Wi Fi these days is pretty well locked down. I think you'll be just fine on it if you're you know, using Hotel Wi Fi, Starbucks WiFi, whatever, Especially

on an iPad. I mean, iPad is not a computer. Even if someone were to get into your iPad, there's almost nothing they can do. And yes they can deliver malware, but it would be it would have to be a pretty big hack for them to ruin your iPad if you're just like a casual person connecting to you know, trusted public networks, And yes, there's always a chance. And I think it's good that you're you're being critical of these networks, and I think that's very smart. But I

think you'll be okay for the most part. But with that said, if you have the money to go cellular and you like the this security of cellular, yeah go cellular for sure. I always prefer cellular over Wi Fi when possible, and so that is definitely something I'm not going to not recommend. But I think if in general, you're probably going to be safe a majority of the time. All Right, speaking of security and encryption, RING is now

giving end to end encryption to everyone. I believe this was something they had a while ago, but I guess maybe I never really covered it. But the reason I would look the end to end encryption thing is great. So what Ring, What that means is that no one can see your video, not even RING, not even anyone like It's it's really once you set this up. Your your video is pretty safe from your camera, like someone's not gonna be able to get in and hack it

and view your videos now. By default, Ring says that they encrypt customer videos when they're uploaded to the cloud, which means in transit and when they're stored, and that's at rest. But you can now have opt into end to end encryption, which means only you can view the videos on your enrolled mobile device. And so you go into the control center in the Ring app and you can turn this on. Now. Once you turn this on, because it is such high security, you do lose a

whole bunch of features. And some of those features include viewing it on an Echo device. So if you're used to viewing your your doorbell when someone rings it on your Echo device, that is not possible. There's a whole bunch of other things that you lose as well. There is a web page that explains it all. This is a big deal, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna enable this, there's definitely some drawbacks. Now, if you have a battery powered video doorbell, it's a non starter.

Those don't even support end to end encryption, and I believe the reason for that is probably because the battery this thing, it probably probably requires more power to do this, And so it looks like only the wired video doorbells and security cameras support this. So if you're doing strictly, you know, anything that is not wired, it's not going to work. So the any or sorry, anything battery powered

is just not going to work. So if you go into your Ring app, you go into control center and you tab video Management, Advanced settings and to end encryption and got it, and that's it, and you have to enroll your mobile device. It's a whole big thing. So I don't know, I mean, this is it's you know, for some people it might be overkilled. For others, you might think it's the most secure way of using your camera.

But if you're only using a wired device and maybe one smartphone, I'm unclear if you can use it with multiple smartphones, but if you're only using one, I would probably enable it, you know, for the most security, Like why not, there's no downside, doesn't cost you any extra, so I'd probably do it and you know, enjoy those benefits of feeling and had encryption is always going to be the most secure, No matter what you're using, whether

it's messaging, whether it's a video product, whether it's you know anything, all right, Next question from Kim. She says, quick tech question. We live on a very social street and we've had a group text going over the past couple of years. COVID pushed a lot of people here working from home. More new homes are being built and more people are moving to our street. Needless to say, our text group has maxed out, so we consider going to WhatsApp. Are there any other user friendly group text

apps that we should consider having everyone use? Let me know your thoughts. We have one person who acts as our admit I Straighter and they add and delete names and phone numbers as needed. Thanks in advance, Kim. Uh. Kim, Well, I would WhatsApp is a good option. I mean, so what you're saying is you have a bunch of people in your in your neighborhood on a private group text chat. So that's good and I think that's a great thing

to do. Uh. The app that I'd recommend, WhatsApp is fine, but some here's the problem when you start like shopping apps. Everyone has a problem with every app. If if you talk about signal way too secure. It's like overkill. It's yeah, it's end to end encrypted and it's like super secure, but like getting everyone on that is gonna be kind of tough, and basically it would be a lesson in just convincing people to do it. So that's that's out.

Facebook Messenger. Yeah, everyone has Facebook, but a lot of people don't and they feel like Facebook is you know, for some reason or not, they don't like it. So Facebook messengers out. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and of course they had that big thing with all the chain in their privacy policy, so people got a little skittish around Facebook or WhatsApp Messenger, so they don't want to use that. So the one that I would recommend is is Telegram, and that's what I use for my big

group text chatting, and it has been great. I got my entire family on board and we've been using it for a couple of years now and it's fantastic. Now the rest of the world has seemed in the meantime to discover Telegram, and so I see every single day people signing up for it and I get a new a message, Oh you you know your friend, this person, this person, anyone in my address book has signed up for Telegram, and so clearly people like it. It's easy. I think it has all the features that you need.

You can add people, you can delete people. It's kind of like and if you're asking me, Rich, why not just recommend I Message? Well, I Message doesn't work across platforms, so there's gonna be a lot of people left out if you use something like I Message. And that's why I always always prefer using a third party app over something like I Message, because I Message is easy, it's slick.

I know you've got all your ie message groups going on, but personally, when I get into those groups, it makes me feel sad because I do not like things that are not cross platform because technology should work across everything, and in this world that we're building, a lot of the stuff is starting to work and only, uh, only this works with this, and only that works with that, and only That's not the way tech was supposed to be.

Tech was supposed to be universal. And the more silos that you go down, the more one way streets that you go down. Yeah, everything works so nicely, but there's a price to be paid for that, and the price is that people are left out. And so just for example, I've got one group that's a group text on I message that you know, everyone is on iPhone and it works so beautifully. And then I've got another one where we've got a couple people that are on Android and

it just doesn't work as nicely. When people like the message, it says Ranch liked your you know, whatever the message was, you know, like spell it out. And so that's why I like I love Telegram because it works the same no matter what device you're using. I don't have to ask my friends, oh, are you on Android or iPhone because it determines how this group is gonna work. No, you're on Telegram, You're on Telegram. Everything works the same. So long answer short, That's what I would recommend, Kim.

I think that's the best way to do it. Oh, speaking of neighborhoods, Verizon has a new feature in their call filter app. If you're not using a call filter app, I highly recommend that you install it on your device. If you're on AT and T, there's this called call Protect. If you're on T Mobile, it's called scam Shield, and if you're on Verizon, it's called call Filter. Now, all three of these apps are free, but like any good carrier would do, they are gonna try to upsell you.

They're gonna try to upsell you on a subscription, and I don't think you need it. It just adds more features that it's it's like, you just don't need to just go with the free app. You'll be fine. It'll help block calls, but once you install these apps, they will cut down on some of the spam calls. Now, with that said, there is one thing that's very very frustrating with spammers right or scam calls, whatever you want

to call them, and that is the neighborhood call. And the way that Verizon describes this is it's called called neighbor or neighborhood spoofing. They trick you into answering the call because these calls have the same area code and prefix as yours. Now, it's not coming from your neighbor's house. It's coming from some computer where they've just programmed it

to say. Oh, if you're dialing Rich's number and he is three one oh five fivey five, make sure that when you dial, the outgoing number looks like three wine oh five fixy five one two one two, Because Rich is one, two, one three or whatever, right, so it makes you think. It just plays a trick on your mind. You're saying, oh, wow, this looks a lot like my phone number. I should probably answer it. And you answer it in nine times out of ten, it's nothing. It's bogus,

it's a scammer, it's a call it's a scam artist. Whatever. So now Verizon, inside this app, there's a little toggle if you go to call management and other filters, all you have to do, okay, So you go to management section and then under the block filters app, just look for neighborhood filter. You turn it on and it will

block the numbers that are similar to yours. And yes, if you have a significant other or a friend that lives nearby that you both have the same similar number, you want to make sure they're in your contacts to make sure that their phone number does ring your phone and they come through. But otherwise, this is a great feature. I turned it on on my phone, and you know,

we'll say it seems to work. Just know that the more of these filters that you turn on, the more of these spam filters, the more of these unknown caller filters, the more of these apps that you install, the more calls that are going to go straight to voicemail. And so if you're like me and you like to answer a lot of random numbers, because I've got a lot of random people call me all the time because my phone number is sort of out there, got a lot of peer there are people that call me a lot.

I mean, I'm in the news business. People call me, you know, And so I do want to keep my number out there as much as possible because I don't I don't want to be unreachable. I mean, yes, I will not answer a lot of calls if I think the number's bogus, or I'll wait for it to you know, go to voicemail and then they'll text me whatever. But anyway, the more lines of defense you have, the more it's going to be tough for people to get a hold of you if there was ever sort of an emergency

or a random number. Like I'll give you an example. So because I had this feature enabled the just the spam filters, I was getting an Uber the other day and the Uber driver kept trying to call and I think I told this story on the podcast last week, but whatever, but I couldn't the call didn't come through because it kept going right to voicemail because I was somehow that number was identified as a spam number and it just you know, kept getting blocked, so the driver

was not able to get a hold of me. And you can't call back some of these numbers, like if an uber calls you, it's basically a one way number that they use to like call out, but you can't call that number back in. So just be aware of these limitations, and you know, make sure that your important contacts are in your address book and that should help with a lot, including things like doctors, dentists, all that good stuff. All right, let's get to the next question.

Paula says, I recently saw a segment on selling back electronics and I can't find it. I was wondering if you could give me the name of that company. I have a lot of old iPads to sell back. Thank you, Paula. Well, the company is Gizmo Go. And I just had someone at work actually ask me about this company, local company in California. Where were they Chino, I believe, And I went. I visited them and I'd never heard of them before I did the story. So I wanted to check them out.

Actually sent in my kids old iPad mini. I got eighty bucks for it. Went through the whole thing, and the cool thing is that this company pays you money even if your product is damaged. So for my kids iPad, for example, Apple was offering me thirty dollars and when I did gizmo gos estimate, it was eighty and I was like, oh, that's really good. Fifty dollars more. Sure enough, I sent it in. They give you a one of

these prepaid shipping labels. I had a box, you know, I get all this Amazon stuff, so I just put it, you know, in an old Amazon box, sent it off and a week later I had my eighty dollars via PayPal. So it worked really well. It's called gizmogo dot com. I'll put a link in the show notes, but I highly recommend them. Even if you don't get a lot for your stuff, you should definitely. You know, you can send them a box of like your old electronics that

you no longer need, and they'll recycle them properly. Because you don't want to throw this stuff out, that's for sure. But gizmo go is the website, and you know, just give them a try. I mean, there's no you know, you don't have to just because if you if you get an estimate, doesn't mean you actually have to sell it to them. But definitely check it out if you need a box to leave and send you a box, which is also really really cool. So all right, let's

move on to the next story. Amazon, you know what do you what do you call the A word? I don't even know because I don't want to say it on here because it activates way too many things. But do you now have two new voices that you can use instead of the standard Chalmolexa voice. So they have Samuel L. Jackson. I guess was on there at one point. I guess he's a top selling digital purchase on Amazon the day it launched. Wow, Well now they have two

new celebrities, Melissa McCarthy and Shaquille O'Neal. And so now there's three. So you have Samuel L. Jackson, Melissa McCarthy, and Shaquille O'Neal. So if you want to switch your voice to these personalities, you have to pay five dollars, which you know that's kind of a lot, but maybe not. I mean, it's it's kind of cool. If you're a fan of these two folks, which why would you not be? You can pay five dollars and now they could be your your voice. This is happening right now, it's available.

You can ask for the new voice several ways. You can say a word change your voice, and they'll give you the new options. But there's also a new wake word for you know who. And I thought this was kind of interesting. So I'm not sure if you know this, but you can change your They call it the wake word, you know the word that you say to trigger you know who. You can change that to computer, Echo, Amazon and as well as a Lexa. Oh is that going to activate it? But you can now select ziggy as well.

So ziggy is a new word. So I was on Twitter kind of talking with a couple of folks and saying, well, what's the deal with ziggy? Like is there some pop culture reference that I don't know about? Like why is it ziggy? And I was talking with tech with Bratt. He runs a YouTube channel and he's cool. He does a lot of smart home stuff, and he was saying, I think it's just a word that a lot of

people don't use. But then my pal Dave Malcoff, another reporter, was saying that it might be some reference to something, so I don't know, But anyway, ziggy, you probably don't say ziggy very much right in your house, so I guess that's a good wake word. The other words too, you don't really well. Amazon were always saying did you order that on Amazon? So anyway, it's all available and it's just you know, the other options for the things. I will say, I've been testing out an Echo device

Echo Show five. I am very impressed. I am still very very impressed. I really wrote off the Amazon service like for all this smart home stuff for a long long time, and I'm eating my words because I feel like they are doing a great job. They have a great ecosystem, they have so many products, their stuff does

really well. I think that the voice capabilities have come a long way, and I've just been very very impressed with what I've seen and I continue to test it, and so I don't know, I think it's pretty cool. Next question comes from Chris. He says, when I'm working mobile detailing, I'm using my iPhone too to listen to Pandora Bluetooth to my headphones. When I get a call or message. I have to stop everything. Oh maybe it's an iPhone eleven. I have to stop everything to tend

to the phone. It even messes up my bluetooth. Is there a setting I can use? I do not like to use, like do not disturb or something, because if I don't check my phone, it keeps beeping in my ears until I do. It's a pain in the rear. Rich sent for my iPhone, So I'm guessing iPhone eleven maybe, But no matter which iPhone you have this, I've never really had this problem. Number one, my iPhone is on do not Disturb the entire day twenty four to seven.

I actually never take it off do not disturb. Now. I work in television. I'm always recording something and I'm always in a studio, and so I can't have my phone ringing or binging at any time. So I've never I've never experienced this. Now. I also don't wear headphones

for a long period of time. But when I do, I'm wearing them when I'm running and my phone goes into automatic do not just st mode as soon as I start a workout, so and I do get messages along the way, And I've never had my phone bing Now. The only exception to this is when you have a pair of air pods in and you get a text message and Siri will read you the text message. So, Chris, my advice to you is to turn on do not disturb. I would turn on do not disturb. You can also

flip the side switch on your phone. I don't know what it's called. There's a little rocker on the side that basically turns it from audio to silent, and so I would flip that as well when you're detailing, and that way that should take care of it. But I think that should do it. I mean, like I said, I've never had this problem with these things binging in my ears, and so I think that that has to do with the fact that I always have my phone

on do not Disturb. So what I'd recommend is just keep it on do not disturb and hopefully that will take care of it. ESPN Plus, speaking of price, ESPN Plus is going up. It's going up by a buck a month, which you know, like like I always say in this podcast, not gonna make or break you. But now ESPN Plus is gonna rise to six ninety nine a month, up from five ninety nine, this according to Variety. And apparently according to Variety, they raised the subscription last

year from four ninety nine to five ninety nine. So this just keeps going up. And this is something that I've talked about in the podcast over and over. We did not switch to streaming services to save money. Maybe back in the day, day one, we saved a couple of bucks by save by switching, But now there is no money to be saved. In fact, you may be approaching what you paid for cable. You may eclipse it. Like in my case. The big difference is that you

are in control. You can turn this on, you can turn this off, you can start it, you can stop it, unlike cable. Let's say, how to subscription to HBO. Back in the day, Yes you could subscribe for six months and then call your cable operator and cancel, but realistically, who did that? Not many people. So what happened was you would always you know, I call it the rounding effect. You know, you'd have your cable for a little bit or your subscription for a little bit more than you

needed it. And that's just the way the game that they played. And so now you can't play games now if you want to cancel ESPN because they raised it a dollar, you can. If you want to start it up again when they bring the cricket match that you like to streaming, then you can. And so all we have now at this point is a choice. And these things just keep getting more and more expensive. I mean, all the prices just keep going up. There's price creep

on these streaming services. Is it causing me to cancel them? No, although I will say I am not currently subscribed to Apple tv Plus. They did not raise their price. It's still the launch price of four to ninety nine a month. But on July first, when they were going to start charging me, I said, I just don't need this. There's no there's nothing I'm watching on Apple tv Plus right now. Now. That will change when the second season of the Morning Show comes out. And I know everyone loves ted Lasso.

I have not watched that, but I know people love it, and so if I was a Ted Lasso fan, which I think that new season is starting. You know, they time these things where they're you know, if there's one show at any given time, that's all they need, that's all they need to keep you hooked on these things. And it's just the way it is. So again, the best way to get Disney Plus or the ESPN Plus service is realistically to subscribe to Disney this what do

they call it, the Disney Plus. It's like the bundle, so it's Disney Plus Hulu and also ESPN Plus. That trio is staying firm at thirteen ninety nine a month, so according to Variety, that's thirty percent less than the cost of buying all three services individually. Let's get to another question here. Joanne says, hey, Rich, I received a notice from YouTube announcing many of my family videos that are currently unlisted will be set to private, thus changing

the URL. I provided my family a copy of the URLs of these videos. Now I need to change It's a huge amount of work. I wish I had another option back then, but YouTube is it? An easier solution to preserving these precious memories would be to take off all my family videos and put them on hard drives from my family members to copy to their computers with a drive to keep as a backup. Well, that doesn't

sound easier, but anyway, to each his own. My question is is there a bulk way to download three hundred family videos I've uploaded on YouTube, collected over the years to preserve on an external hard drive. It did some research. It looks like you need some special software. There are so many options, many of which I'm sure not safe. I've read about a product called m m MM, which looks to be legit, but who knows. Uh, Okay, Joe Ane,

couple things Number one, I don't think that. I mean, it sounds like you got a big collection here, so that's definitely an issue. Now. I wonder if once they change these unlisted URLs to private, if you can just make a private playlist and then just share that playlist with the family members, and then they'd have to log in to see those videos. I don't know. I didn't put a lot of I got this same email that

you got. But to me, when I share an unlisted video, like, I don't really I'm not expecting it to last very long. Like that's basically for people to watch for a little bit, they're not really going back to whatever. So I don't have the same issue. Even though a lot of my unlisted videos are family videos, but when they go private, it's not like my family members are watching them over and over, so the solution about downloading them to your

hard drive, you can absolutely do that. That's well within your rights on YouTube, these are your videos. The number one way to do that is Google Takeout, And if you just go to Google Takeout, you can select your YouTube videos and they will zip them up and they will send them to you in an email and you can download all of them and put them on a hard drive. That is one way of doing it. The other way you can do it is with a video downloader program, and the one that I like is called

soft O Reno YouTube Converter too. And You're right, there is a lot of sketchy software out there that purports to do this. I'm sure some of it works, but the one that I found, soft Reno YouTube Converter two, works the absolute best. It is dropped it easy, pop in a URL. All you have to do is copy and paste it and are actually just copy it and the app, as long as it's running on your computer will notice the clipboard and it will say, okay, what format do you want this video in? And you can

convert it to video audio a ring tone. You can go as high as I think twenty one sixty P. You can do ten ADP seven to twenty P four eighty or three sixty and you could save it to your computer, your phone, your iPod, Apple Music. It's very, very full featured. It is really fantastic. So that would be my recommendation after takeout. If takeout doesn't work for you, then I would just do it annually with the YouTube converter.

So good question. Hope that helps all right. Speaking of Apple, they came out with a mag Safe battery pack for the iPhone twelve, available now for ninety nine dollars. And if you've seen these smart battery cases from Apple before, this one's a little bit different because it is not a case. It is literally just a like a little bump that magnetically attaches to back to the back of your phone if you have a mag Safe phone. Now, there's been some unofficial mag Safe battery packs for a while.

I have not tested any of these. In fact, I I mean I probably should get one, but to be quite honest, I'm typically in a place where I can charge my phone at some point during the day, and if I'm not, like you know, I mean, if I'm the only time I really need to recharge my phone out and about is when like if I happen to be at like a conference like a CS or something, or you know, maybe an maybe maybe an Apple event.

But realistically, ninety nine point nine percent of the time, I am a power user of my smartphone, and I don't run out of battery because I make sure that I am fully charged before I'm getting into that situation where I'm going to be away from a plug for a long period of time. And I mean basically I can only imagine. I mean, you have to eat at

some point. So if you're even if your worst case scenario you get at somewhere at seven am and you go through one pm, I mean that's you know, six hours, and your phone maybe would die during that time or it's really close to death. But for me, you know, most of the time, I will bring like a portable battery pack. I'll plug it in at some point, or I'll plug it into a plug in the wall. But anyway, if you need one of these things, you just like

to have a lot of extra juice. Ninety nine bucks is it's expensive, it's on the high end of things, but it's kind of like, you know, it's from Apple, so it's gonna work. Really well. The battery itself charges with a lightning cable, which is nice, which means if you just carry around an iPhone, you've already got the cable to charge this thing. You can also pass through charge your iPhone. This is all according to nine to five mac Apple recommends using a twenty watt USBC charger

to charge this for the fastest charging time. What else, The battery pack is really really slow. It's a five watt charge, which is I think just about a quarter It's about twenty five percent of what you could get if you plugged in your phone. So this is another reason why don't like these wireless battery packs. They're just

too slow. I mean, they're really like there's such a trickle that like, it's fine if you have a long runway to charge your phone, but you'd you'd probably be better just plugging your phone in for twenty minutes and just getting the amount of juice that you get during

that time. The other thing that's kind of cool is that the battery percentage for the case will appear in the battery widget and on the lock screen, which is probably something that gives it a little of a step ahead of some of the other battery packs out there. That's about it. I don't know. I'm actually tempted to buy this, to be honest, because I've been very lax on the mag Safe accessories. I haven't even gotten the wallet.

My wife and I joke every time all I've been wanting is one of these mag Safe wallets, and I keep not buying it, and I just I should just buy one, because every time I'm going out, like tonight, I'm going out to my friend's house, and of course it's a perfect example. All I need is my ID and a credit card. That's it. You know, I'm going to a poker game, and it's like my friend is not accepting cash anymore, so I have to use Venmo.

So I don't need any things at my phone and my credit card and my or my debit card rather and my my ID and so all I need is a little mag Safe wallet and that's it, and I'd be perfectly fine, but I've yet to purchase one, even though I've wanted one for six months. Anyway, all right, well, that sound means that's gonna do it for this show.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have a question for me, you'd like me to answer, Just go to my Facebook Creatsfacebook dot com slash rich on Tech, hit the big blue send email button and that will get your message directly to my eyeballs. I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Apple podcasts probably

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that would be ideal. You can find me on social media. I'm at Rich on Tech on all social media platforms, and no matter where you live in the US, it's fun to listen to me. But you can also watch me on TV on your big screen. Download the free ktla plus app on Apple TV, Fire Tv, and Roku, then scroll down to the tech section and you can watch all of my TV segments on demand. They are pulled directly from KTLA. You can see what I look at and sound like on live TV, but of course

record it and play later. I'm Rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. Stay safe, I will talk to you real soon