Office Depot Tricks Customers into Computer Repairs; Verizon Offers Robocall Killer; New Password Manager; Thoughts on Apple TV+, News+ & Cr

and of course Twitter. But this was a big week in technology. This is where I kind of talk about all the stuff that I think you should know about. I know I have not done questions in a while. The reason for that is I'm waiting for some new equipment that I'm going to be testing out that will enable me to take calls in a much better way. So in the past, I've taken calls very I mean, if you've been following me for a while, you know I've tried taking calls like in a thousand different ways

on this show. None of them have been very good. It works, but my latest method took a lot of editing at the end to kind of make sure the audio levels were okay. I'm hoping that this next thing that I'm trying is going to be the best case scenario and I will be able to do calls every single week without fail, and it will be so much better for everyone. Let me start with a couple of

things happening this week. So I know, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple Apple, but I'm actually going to start with Office Depot, a place where I used to work. By the way, so I'm a nerd obviously, and you know my jobs. I worked at Office Depot back in the day because I thought would be a fun job, and I did. I actually had a great time working there, and I sold cell phones and I was kind of what was I called, like a tech associate or something, but I

sold technology as well. I can't remember if I was commissioned. I know some people were commissioned. I don't think I was. Let me talk about why Office Depot was a little bit naughty in the past couple of years. So and this involves uh, let's see Office Max as well. It looks like it's mostly Office Depot, but Office Max of late.

But here's the deal. They settled with the FTC Office Depot and tech support firm Support dot Com paying thirty five million dollars to the FTC to settle allegations that they tricked consumers into buying costly computer repair services. So you know, you always see those signs and they still have one outside my local office depot that says, hey,

come on in for a free check of your computer. Right, Well, apparently you would go in there and they would check your computer using this app called PC health Check, but it was basically just a sales tool to convince you to buy tech repair services from Office Depot and OfficeMax, which merged by the way back in twenty thirteen. Okay, so the free PC checkup was supposed to, you know, check your computer for all kinds of stuff, viruses, other

security threats. And what would happen is you would get your computer checked and then they'd refer you to Support dot Com to pay for these services. And they got tens of million dollars tens of millions of dollars of revenue from Office Depot. They remotely performed the tech repair services once consumers made the purchase in store. But here's the deal, and this is why this is so darn evil. I can't even believe it. The little software was actually

not scanning your computer for anything. All the results that you saw were based entirely on how you answered four questions before the scan started. And these questions asked you whether your computer ran slow, yeah, everyone thinks their computer runs slow. Whether you've received virus warnings yeah who hasn't, whether it crashed, of course it crashed, or whether it displayed pop up ads or other problems that kept you from browsing the internet. So I mean, are you serious?

This is just downright malicious on consumers. And ah, man, this is not the Office Depot that I worked for. And so here's what's happened in our world nowadays, with these giant companies and these big corporations that just keep merging. When I worked for Office Depot, I remember them being so focused on the customer, so focused on customer service, and this kind of stuff would have never flown. Okay, Now it's like, how can we deceive customers and you know,

get money out of them? Because here's the thing. When you're getting your computer looked at by a company like Office Depot or you know, anywhere that you bring your computer you're putting your trust in that person. It's kind of like having a plumber come to your house. I know nothing about plumbing. If the guy tells me my toilet's gonna take one hundred and fifty dollars to repair it, I'm gonna believe him and believe me. I was taken. One time they replaced a flapper on my toilet and

they charged me like eighty five bucks. And I was so angry when I asked the guy, so what'd you do? And he said, oh, I replaced a flapper. And then I realized, okay, I got to get smarter about these things. And next time I replace the flapper myself, by the way, and it cost me. I think it was seven dollars at Home Depot. But guess what, I will never call that plumber ever again to fix my toilet because I don't trust him. Same thing with Office Depot and Office Max.

They lost a lot of trust here. This is gonna be tough, and I hope most people hear about this. I hope most people understand this because this is just downright wrong. So Support dot Com, Shame on you, Office Depot dot Com, shame on you. This is just not nice, and of course they are not. Again, they are just settling. These are allegations, they are not proven guilty. There's no guilt here. It's just an allegation. So it is a settlement. But here's the good news out of all this for you.

As part of the proposed settlement, support dot Com cannot make or provide others with the means to make misrepresentations about the performance or detection of security issues on consumer electronic devices. So hopefully that'll do that. But let's see here, by the way, the whistleblower one Office Max employee complained to corporate in twenty twelve saying I cannot justify lying to a customer or being tricked into lying to them for our store to make a few extra dollars. But

this continued until late twenty sixteen. Wow, unbelievable. Now our consumers getting some of this money. Yes, FTC intends to use ten million dollars and twenty five million dollars okay, so thirty five million dollars to provide refunds to consumers. So the good news is, if you did get your computer fixed, and I put air quotes here, if you got it fixed at office depot or Office Max in the past couple of years, you might have some money coming your way. It's probably gonna take a while though,

all right. So now on the better side of things, Verizon offering new ways to battle robo calls. So they launched a new app called call Filter. Now, this is actually an app that they had but they renamed. It used to be called like caller Name ID or something like that, but now it's called call Filter. And before Verizon would have this app, it was like three bucks a month. It would give you caller ID on all

your phone calls. Now this is called call Filter. It's available for iOS and you download it and it will help identify and stop robo calls. So pretty much all wireless customers with a compatible device can enroll. But it says that certain features will vary based on the type of phone that a customer has. You can now get this. I would go ahead and download it, try it out, see how it works. The thing to know about this is that Verizon is still trying to sell you on

a three dollars enhanced service. So Verizon's call Filter full service set for three dollars a month, so everyone with the free version gets spam detection, blocking, and reporting, but you will get the ability to identify unknown callers by name, more control over calls, with the ability to create a personal robo call blocklist, which you can do in iOS anyway for free. So I don't think you need to do that. And there's also additional insights with the robocall

risk meter and spam number look up. I don't think you need any of that stuff, So I say, if it's up to me, I would just download the free app. Again, it's called call Filter. If you have an Android phone, it's usually pre installed on your phone. So again I would just go ahead and update your apps, whether you have iPhone or Android, and it should work. So the other thing that Verizon's gonna do is they're going to

start implementing this ster shaken technology. So st Shaken technology will actually kind of act as an authentication technology for caller ID, So if I call you on caller ID using caller ID, it's going to make sure that I

am who I say I am. Big event for Apple this week, although I kind of I thought it was a little bit of a letdown because it was light on the tech and very heavy on the celebrities, and yeah, They had a lot of great celebrities there, big time names like Oprah, Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, so many more. To me, it was cool that Apple had all these celebrities on stage. But let's be honest.

I mean, celebrities like money, and they're there because Apple is putting out a lot of cash so that they can do their new shows. And I think it's cool. As a creative type, I think it's amazing that there's someone there that's giving them a lot of money to be creative, and so I think that's a really nice aspect of it. But let's talk about some of these things that Apple launched. I'll just go through them. Apple Newsplus.

This is their new paid news service, and so this gives you access to over three hundred magazines and also some newspapers and also some digital premium publications. So this is kind of from Apple's purchase of a company called Texture a couple of years ago, maybe it was last year, and I used to be a subscriber to Texture for a long time. And what they do is they put a whole bunch of these magazines into one app. You pay ten dollars a month and you get all these magazines.

And I loved it. But here was the problem with Texture. All I did in my entire life was read magazines. When you're getting three hundred When you're getting access to three hundred magazines, I mean, that's pretty insane. So to me, literally, I would sit on the couch, I would pop out the iPad and I would just flip and flip and flip and flip and flip. And I loved it because magazines are amazing. But what are magazines trying to do?

They're trying to sell you stuff, right, I mean, yeah, there's some great journalism in them, but for the most part, you're flipping through the glossies. I'm looking at HG what was it like, HGTV magazine? Who thought HGTV had a magazine? Yeah, I was flipping through it, and of course I was getting a million ideas for the house and buying stuff. I got rid of it, so I didn't subscribe to Texture, or I canceled my subscription. Then they said, oh, well,

for five bucks a month, will you keep us? And I said okay, So I kept them for six more months until I finally said you know what, I don't need all these magazines in my life, so your experience may be different. And I don't know. I think it's cool that you're getting a whole bunch of stuff mixed into one. And I see where Apple's going with this.

Ideally they would have like every newspaper in America on board, so that no matter which city you live in, you get access to your local newspaper plus a whole bunch of other stuff. It seems like a fantastic deal for ten dollars a month. I don't know how they're splitting up the payment. You know, if you read five pages of Vogue, does Vogue get you know, five divided by ten two dollars a page? I don't know, So you

got Vogue National Geographic People. Now. One thing, I will say, the price did get a little better because when I was a subscriber to Texture People magazine, if you wanted those weeklies, that was fifteen dollars a month. So the fact that they are charging ten dollars and you're still

getting all this other stuff, that's pretty good. You also get access to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, although and I haven't subscribed yet to this News Plus to try it out, although a lot of people are saying it's not just like full on Wall Street Journal New York Times. If you look at a Wall Street

Journal subscription, it's expensive. So I find it hard to believe that you'd get all of that for nine ninety nine a month, because I've looked into getting that subscription and you're talking it's closer to like, you know, twenty to forty dollars a month, so after your little promo deal runs out. So I think this sounds cool. I think it's great for journalism, but personally it's probably not something I'm going to be doing. But you do get

a lot for your money. So if you don't mind paying ten dollars a month and you've got a bunch of time to look at all these magazines, it's pretty cool. If you're traveling a lot on an airplane, I think it's pretty cool. But to be honest, what I'm doing, I'm trying to read books, and that's where i'd rather spend my money. So that's that's that's where I am. All right. So Apple credit Card this got this got a lot of publicity because it's kind of unique that

Apple's doing a credit card now. I have my thoughts on credit cards in general, so I'll try not to like mix those in. But I'm not a big believer in credit cards. I do have one. Full disclosure, I am a Dave Ramsey fan. I've talked about him before. He says no credit cards. Personally. I travel a lot. I've tried the no credit card thing. It's really complicated, especially when you're booking hotel rooms and you know all

this stuff for business travel. So I do have a credit card, so I'm not gonna say that you shouldn't have one at all. But to have an Apple card, oh man, I don't know. That's like next level Apple fanboy, you know. And I think the iPhone's amazing. I love the iPhone. I wrote a book about the iPhone. But to have an Apple credit card is like, I mean, how far down the Apple path do you want to go? You've already got the AirPods, You've already got the Apple TV,

You've got the iPad, I've got the MacBook. Now you're gonna get a credit card that primarily works through your iPhone. That seems to me a little bit crazy. Okay, So with that said, I like what they're doing with the credit card, and it's not like they're doing things that nobody else has done. I mean it works with the iPhone. You sign up right through the iPhone. I do like how they're labeling stuff nice and clearly, and I think that's a trend we're going to see with the other

credit cards. So they're using machine learning and Apple maps that when you look at your transactions, instead of seeing some weird thing that you have to like Google, you'll just see that like, here's the place that you spent money at. Here it is on a map, and here's the name of it. So my wife goes to this one gas station that has some random name, and every time I see it in our debit card, I'm like, where, what the heck is this charge for like thirty four bucks?

And sure enough, it's always this weird gas station. So I think that will actually help when people have that information at the ready. I also like the other aspect of if you don't decide to pay off your card every month, there's this little circular slider that will show you how much you're paying and how much interest it's going to cost you to just make that portion of a payment and you can turn the slider to make a bigger payment and see how that impacts your interest.

I think that's really smart and I think it's nice. I think you should pay off your balance in full if you can. So the Apple Card is going to be available this summer. I don't know. I don't like a card that is so down the Apple line, Like I just think this seems a little bit crazy to get. I know a lot of people will get it. There are no fees, and the cool thing they're doing with the rewards, which I know people are obsessed with rewards.

They're kind of playing into that because they're crediting you the rewards every single day. And the way they're doing rewards is you get three percent back on Apple purchases, So anything Apple three percent back for those charges. Any other things that you tap to pay, you'll get two percent. That means using your iPhone to tap to pay like you would to check out or whatever. And then anytime you use the physical card you're only going to get

one percent back. And so for a free credit card, those percentages are not that bad, especially the two percent for the tap to pay, but I think you could do better and overall since I don't actively recommend credit cards, I'm kind of torn on it in general. All Right, final thing that Apple talked about is Apple TV Plus. This is their subscription service that is kind of a

new home for Apple TV app. So the Apple TV or I guess I should say the TV app, has evolved over the years and I kind of see where they're going with this, and I get it, and I think it's actually pretty smart. So there's two things going on here. Number one, Well, there's actually three things. So number one, the TV app is going to be revamped,

and it's also going to be available in other places. Right, So the TV app is going to be available on Apple TV like it always has, plus the iPhone and all that stuff, but they're gonna make this available in other places as well, like Roku, Fire TV, smart TVs from Sony, Visio and some others. And so what they're gonna do is allow you to kind of subscribe to all your services but then bring them all into this app.

So let's say your minus Netflix, of course, so let's say you have you know, HBO, Let's say you have Showtime Stars all those. Instead of going to those individual apps to watch stuff, you're literally gonna be able to watch this stuff inside the TV app, which I think is kind of cool. Plus you can search for stuff and it'll tell you, you know, if it's available. Plus it's

going to most importantly suggest things for you. Right, so, out of all the shows that are free to you, it will say, here's the dramas, here's the cool comedies, here's the stuff that we think you like. Right, So that's one side of it. Second thing is they're gonna let you subscribe to a lot of these subscription services like HBO, Stars, Showtime, CBS, Taste, Made, Noggin, MTV, Hits, Epics,

a whole bunch of them. Now, when I saw the listing on the screen at the event of what they're gonna let you subscribe to, kind of a yawner to me because I don't really care about any of these channels. I mean, HBO is cool, but the rest of them I don't really care for. So the reality is this will be good based on whether these channels are good for you. So Netflix is clearly the outsider here. They are not included, so you're always gonna have to go

outside of this app for Netflix. Who knows if that will hurt them or help them. Now, the other thing is the TV shows and movies and documentaries, and that's where all these celebrities come in, and also the original programming. So Apple is making their own programming and that's where the TV plus comes in. So you will be able

to subscribe to some sort of Apple service. We don't know if it's going to be a monthly fee or it's going to be a you know, per show, but it says video subscription service will be announced later this fall for pricing and availability. So I don't know how much would you pay for Apple TV content? For me, that's like maybe four ninety nine a month if the

shows are absolutely amazing. And the only show I saw out there that looked good to me was the one that was kind of a parody of morning shows, so it was with Reese Rytherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell. But I just don't know if if I need that right, So for five bucks a month, I mean really, it's like, how much is this show worth to me? We'll see you guys. Know. I like password managers and you should

be using one by now. If you're not highly recommend that you try a password manager, Like I say, I don't care if you use the one that's built into iPhone, if you're only using iOS devices, it's free. It works. But this is another one to consider. This is from Firefox. They launched their own password manager and it's now available across pretty much every platform, which is nice, which is

why I'm mentioning it. So Firefox lock Box. This is for Android now, which I guess was the final missing piece of the puzzle, so they had it for iOS. They also have it built into their Firefox browser. And so if you haven't used one of these password managers before, here's how it works. Right. You come up to a website where it wants you to create a password, right, and a little thing pops up on the website from Firefox that says, hey, do you want us to create

a password for you? You say yes. It creates this crazy implicated password and you're like, oh, I'm never gonna remember that, and it goes, well, we're gonna remember it for you too, and you're like, okay, cool. So you press save and you never have to think about that password ever again. Next thing you know, you go to you know, flowersamazingflowers dot com and all of a sudden, Firefox pops up and it says, hey, we see you. We saved your

password from this website the last time. Remember that And you're like, oh, yeah, do you want us to fill it in for you? And you say yes, and next thing you know, it fills it in. Then you have one main password that protects all these little passwords. And ideally, and I don't know if Firefox Lockbox has this, the two factor authentication, but your password manager should have that

as well. So if your password manager does not have the two factor authentication, it's not as secure because think about it, you got one password and then it unlocks all your other passwords. But anyway, so Firefox Lockbox is on Android now, it's also on the desktop app, and it's also on iOS, so that's pretty good. And it's free. So the other two I like are called last Pass and then dash Lane. Dash Lane is about five dollars a month. Last Pass is about three dollars a month.

So no matter which one you go with, go with it, stick with it, and keep your password safe and stop using the same password over and over and over. So this is like a trend on every app, every smartphone, and what's really happening is iPhone users can't wait, cannot wait for dark mode to be system wide on iOS. Now I will tell you. On the Samsung Galaxy S ten, I was testing that one does have a system wide

dark mode and it was pretty cool. So at night my phone would be pretty much all dark mode, and then during the day it would automatically switch to the light mode and it was pretty fun. Like it took me a while to figure it out. As I do this right now, I'm looking at my Chrome web browser and they must have just done a dark mode because now it's matching the dark mode that my Mac operating system just implemented. So apparently dark mode is just everywhere.

All these apps are getting on board, and now Twitter is the latest. So if you go into your Twitter options, you now have three options. Dim Dim is the current dark mode theme that they introduced in twenty sixteen, which is blue gray but still gives people a more comfortable way to enjoy Twitter. Lights Out is the dark mode, which is basically pure black pellette that emits no light since pixels are turned off, So this is like the darkest theme you can get. Then you can do automatic

dark mode. And right now this is only for iOS, but basically, if you're using Twitter all day long, during the day, it will be light and then at night it will go dark. So these changes are rolling out rolling out to iOS, so you might not see it in the app immediately, but it's also coming to Android and the web in the future. And I don't know, I mean, I kind of like dark mode. It's kind of fun. It's kind of different. I think on the Chrome web browser it's been thrown me off because I'm

so not used to it. But my whole computer now is sort of in dark mode and I'm digging it. Google Podcasts is doing something fun. Since this is a podcast, I really kind of keep up with what's going on in the podcast world. And I love what Google's doing because leave it to Google to make podcasts even easier, and this is just brilliant. Okay, I'll tell you why in a second. Google Podcasts is now pretty much transcribing the audio inside every podcast, So whatever I'm saying right

now is being transcribed in Google. Now. They're not letting you search it specifically just yet, but they are using it to kind of help their searches. So when you search on Google podcasts. It will unearth things that you said inside your show. So a lot of times, you know, shows do show notes, but they don't get every single thing that they say. Let's say they mentioned something in

passing right, Now you can search for those things. So let's say I went to Italy and I visited some random restaurant in Italy and I mentioned the name of it. And you know, let's say that you run that restaurant. You want to hear every time someone mentions that restaurant. Now you can search for that and there you go. So that's really cool. So there's a lot of different uses. Let's say you're obsessed with a very obscure actor, right and you want to see every time that actor appears

in a podcast or someone talks about that actor. Well, now you can search for that actor's name, and even though it wasn't necessarily in the show notes, it will still show up when for results of Google podcasts. Now, there is a service that you can go to online that's very similar, and this one is called listennotes dot com and so listen notes will also do something similar, but I think it's just searching the actual notes of

the podcast. So I don't think that it's necessarily searching inside the podcast, but it is searching the notes of the podcast, which is still pretty useful. So if you're looking for someone or something or anything, you can go to listen notoes dot com and that will help you find what you're looking at for. But Google Podcasts always taking it, or Google in general, always taking things a

step further, and I love how they're doing this. Android Police explains how you can find the actual transcript inside. You have to go into like the source of the actual web page of the podcast, so it's not like easily findable right now, but you can do it, and it's cool, and I love the fact that you can just search for things and find them a lot easier

because of this effort that Google is putting in. Sony has a new action camera that looks pretty darn cool, except for the fact that it has a very high price tag. It's called the RXO or RX zero two

Action camera. And what's cool about this it's kind of like a GoPro, but it has a flip up screen and that means that you can hold this camera in front of you, flip up the screen, and now you can see yourself, and why do you need that while you can frame up your shot if you're a regular person just kind of on vacation with your family and you're taking some of these videos. But for vloggers, this is really going to come in handy because it's a

pocket sized camera that shoots really high quality stuff. But now you can see yourself and frame up the shot properly. So this is kind of a dream for vloggers. I have not tested this, so I don't know the quality of it, but I remember when I first got my GoPro, this is what I want to do with it. My plan was to do some vlogging, and it just became too tough because you can't see yourself, and I was like, well, how do I do that? Maybe I hook it up like on a tripod and I put like a monitor

in front of it. It just became too complicated, and so what do you end up doing? You end up using your cell phone, which just the quality is not there sometimes. I mean, it's getting better, but this also has a microphone jacket, could shoot four K video at thirty frames per second, it's got stabilization, slow motion, it's got four K HDMI output, and here's the craziest part. You can actually operate up to fifty, okay, five of these cameras at once if you have the mobile app.

Fifty cameras with a special access point, and then one hundred cameras with a special troll box. So I guess Sony is really planning ahead. If you want to use one hundred of these cameras at some sort of concert or live event, you can. But I just like the idea that you know, a lot of the if you're trying to get into vlogging or do anything with like, you know that kind of stuff, you're kind of limited to either one of these expensive bulky DSLR cameras or

kind of like the point and shoot cameras. Sony has a good one that a lot of the vloggers like as well. But this is really nice. Seven hundred bucks for the Sony RX. I think it's RX zero two. And Spotify is testing a new subscription plan that I think can come in handy for a lot of people. So if you're you know, a solo person and you have Spotify, you're going to pay ten bucks a month, right then if you want to bump up to that family plan, because you've got a couple people in your family,

you're at fifteen dollars a month. But what if it's just you and your partner and you don't want to pay fifteen dollars a month because that seems kind of stupid, because you can get up to six accounts with that price, or you can just get two, like, well, I'm kind of being short changed here. Well, now they have this new service called Premium Duo, and this is a discounted subscription just for two people, and as you might expect, it lands right in the middle. Right around now in Europe,

it's twelve dollars and fifty euros a month. I think this is a great idea, and I think it's nice for just two people that want to share Spotify. And what Spotify is trying to do is probably what happens in a lot of houses is the couples just share one Premium account and they just log in on various phones and they just you know, everything gets mixed up that way though. All your podcast all your playlists and what you listen to, all that personalized experience is getting

totally mixed up. And so I personally like the idea of having my own account because what I listened to might be slightly different from what my wife listens to, although we kind of like the same music, but I probably do more indie stuff than she does. So I like this idea. I think it's smart. I think it makes more people subscribe, so you're actually getting you know, three dollars more a month from some of these couples, so that's a good thing. Plus you're helping them out by,

you know, making this the experience better for them. Now here's the best part. You get this new playlist called duo Mix, and this is an auto generated playlist that is a mix of both of your favorite musical tastes and the songs you like. So I think that's kind of cool. You can be like, oh, I heard you listen to this new country song to your wife or whatever, and she's like, oh, I heard you listen to that

new you know, five for fighting song or whatever. I'm really dating myself that I don't think they've come out with a new song in a long time, but I was listening to my nineties playlist the other day, so they came up. So I like this idea. Right now, it's not available in the US, but maybe it will be in the future. It's in Colombia, Chile, Denmark, Ireland, and Poland, and hopefully this will make it to the

US soon. And finally, Ford Explorer is introducing a new Mindful mode in their twenty twenty Ford Explore and this is a feature that strips away all the information on your instrument cluster. So you know the part right now front of you where you normally see this speedometer and all that stuff, well, now that's digital, So they can strip all of that away digitally when you turn on this mode, and all you will see is your speed and how much fuel you have left. So I think

that's kind of fun. So Ford has a bunch of stuff, they say. They a study they did found that Americans spend half their day processing information from staring at a screen. Mindful Mode employs theories of meditation and mindfulness, therapeutic techniques used to maintain mental wellness by focusing on just one element or moment in time, by eliminating data the driver

may not need to see. So you know, you normally have your RPMs, you have your gas, you have your your little battery level, which I'm convinced on my car is broken because it's never changed since I got my car, so it's always been like just slightly lower than like the middle part. So I'm like, if my battery goes out or maybe it's the overheating one. Yeah, I'm never gonna know if my car overheats until it's too late, I should probably get that looked at. What else do

you have on there? How many miles you've gone? So yeah, this mindful mode will just put it put just the information you need, which is your speed limit or I guess your speed, your current speed, and also how much gas you have left. It's actually called the Calm Screen Display, but they've nicknamed it the Mindful Mode. And by the way, that new digital instrument cluster is twelve point three inches, so it's basically we've seen this in a lot of

the high end car especially the Audi's. They kind of did it first, I think, but you know, they made the screen it's all digital instead of having actual physical you know, speedometers and stuff. It's all digital, so they can put whatever they want on that screen and it's

kind of cool. I mean, I guess, I guess it's gotten to a point where it's reliable enough where they can you know, they convince the you know whoever they have to convince in the government to say, yeah, we can, we can replace this stuff and people will be just fine. But again that's in the Ford Explorer, which apparently is all new and it comes out later this summer, the twenty twenty Ford Explorer. Well that's going to do it. That's gonna bring us to the end of the podcast.

Thanks so much, thanks for listening. My name's rich Demiro. My book is one hundred and one Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone. It's available on Amazon thanks to everyone who's purchased it, and if you need a good gift, definitely check it out. If you've got someone in your life that struggles with their iPhone or you just want to know more. Pretty much every person that has written me about this book or has I've given it to, has said that they found some good stuff in there.

So I'm pretty confident in recommending it because you know, I love it since I wrote it, but I also think that it actually does help people, and it's got you know, four and a half stars on Amazon, so people are definitely liking it. So check it out. One hundred and one Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone is the name of the book, and you can find it on Amazon. If you want a signed copy of it, you can go to my website rich on tech dot tv and look at the top and I've got a

place where you can order a signed copy. I'll personalize it, you know, write whatever you want in there within reason. So far, nobody's asked me to write anything silly, but usually they just say, hey, Rich, come up with something, and I try to come up with something witty if I know you. If I don't know you, then I'll just write something fun. But either way, it's kind of nice to have that signed. The other thing I'm doing

that's kind of fun and new is a newsletter. So I found this service thanks to my friend Jefferson Graham at USA Today called substack, and it allows me to email you guys for free. And so I had this list of like almost nine thousand people that were just you know, they signed up on my website for updates, but I never had a way to email them in a big way because these companies like Mailchimp and constant Contact.

You know, it's free for like two thousand people, but as soon as you get over that mark they want to charge you, like I think it was like one hundred, one hundred and fifty bucks a month. Maybe Mailchimp was like eighty bucks. I don't know. It was too much. I can't. I can't pay eighty dollars when I'm sending out a free newsletter. Right. So Jefferson found substack and I signed up for it, and it's amazing. They let

me email you for free. Now here's the thing. So Substack's business model is that I can turn on paid newsletters at any time, right, so I can say, hey, do you guys mind paying me like a buck a month for my newsletter? And you know, that's how how they make revenue is that they hope that you amass all these people and then those people end up wanting to pay you. So I'm not doing that right now

in the future, who knows. I mean, I'm you know, right now, I give away pretty much everything for free, so except the book, but that's because you have to buy a printed copy. But anyway, go to rich on tech dot substack dot com if you want to subscribe to that. If you you know, you can just go to my website rich on tech dot TV and look for the newsletter at the top. There's like a little little heading that says newsletter you pop in your email address.

You don't get spammed. We don't sell it all that good stuff. You Literally, on Fridays you will just get a letter from me, and in that letter, I will just talk about all the things that I think are interesting, important, newsworthy, whatever I think you should know. Kind of like the podcast, but like literally it's a letter. It's kind of fun because I wrote my first one last week and it was so much fun to just sit down at the typewriter. Oh wait, did I say that. I'm sorry. I meant computer.

Just sit down at the computer and like write an email like I was writing my friend, you guys, what is going on in the tech world. And it's just super casual, super fun, and you know, I just have fun with it. So if you want to subscribe to that again, go to rich on tech dot tv look for newsletter at the top, or go to rich on tech dot substack dot com. So that's it, rich on tech dot TV, look for newsletter at the top of my website. That's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks

so much for watching. To everyone on Facebook's thanks so much for listening. I do appreciate it. Watch me on KTLA every morning in the five am hour, seven am hour, and nine am hour, or wherever you watch TV. Also on Instagram, I've been posting an Instagram version of my story there, so Rich on tech on Instagram. And I know I'm talking a lot of you that know this stuff, but you know there might be some new folks that are hopping on board here, so I tell you that

stuff as well. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Jumiro Rich on tech dot TV. Have a fantastic day wherever you're listening from. I will talk to you real soon.