Plastic hotel keys are definitely going away

the span of thirty seconds. Welcome back to the show. I know last week I was off. I was out sick because of you know what. And the funny thing is I didn't even have it. So, you know, everyone thought that I would get sick at CEF in Las Vegas and I would get you know, COVID, and I didn't. I made it through just fine, and I come home to my kid who has it and proceeds to infect fifty percent of the house, not including myself or my other kid. So my wife and one of my kids

had it and she got it pretty bad. So it is a serious thing. I somehow escaped it. I'm not sure how, but I'll take that for now. But that's why I wasn't here last week. And let me tell you a scrambling for those COVID tests when you need them the most. Oh my gosh, that was like the trickiest thing. I'm going to talk about later in the show my experience with that and the whole new website that the government has, and we'll talk about that a

little bit. I know, I don't want to get too much into that because I know it's a topic that a we're kind of sick of hearing about and be you know, everyone has their own thoughts on it, and I don't want to get into that whole section. All I'm saying is that for us here it was real. I mean, it was a solid week of realness and the Demro house, so you know, it can happen to anyone, Okay. So I asked on my Facebook page, let's see what was the question that I asked here? I said, what

is your current favorite tech gadget besides your phone? And the comments just coming in fast, all kinds. I'm getting so many great ideas. Chair speaker, voice enhancing TV soundbar my fitbit Amberly says, I'm not sure if this is considered a gadget. But I love the Apple Watch I got for Christmas. Jerry says, probably my Amazon Fire TV Box. It's kept me sane while working from home the past twenty one months. Alejandro says my Sony walkman. Oh wow,

I don't know, Maybe he's kidding. Let's see, Louis says, my iPad, since it's faster than my Windows PC. Jordan says his m one Mac Pro sixteen with monitor and iPad sidecar. Wow, that's a pretty good setup. James says his Bosh electric drill. Yeah. I hear the tim the tool man Taylor in that one. Let's see what else. Lynnette says, or kindle paper white signature reader. I've got to start reading. I really fell off. I really fell off the train. What do you call it? Fell off

the bus? I don't know, whatever you call it, but I really fell off whatever you fall off these days, I fell off. I was reading so well up until about the holidays, and then it just kind of took a nose dive. And I don't know why. I just I was just like glued to my phone for some reason. And so some of that comes with not having a good book to read. I feel like if you're like I finished a really good book and then I was trying other books and they just weren't doing it for me.

So I just downloaded another book today I will see. I think I'm gonna like that one more. But it's all about the good book, right, Like, if you are starting to read a book and you get into it, it should just be automatic. You shouldn't really have to even think much about it. It should just work. And so you know a good book when that happens, and so it's kind of a natural thing. So if you're really forcing yourself to read a book, I used to do that and finish it. Now I'm just like, no,

I'm not gonna do that. Like why you know, reading is tough enough. I feel like in this day and age, like we just were so like screen centric and everything is like fast, and I mean you Instagram reels and TikTok and it's like it's like stimulation overload. And then we go to this book that's like kind of boring and you fall asleep and you start reading it. That

should not be happening. It should be like a really great experience where you can't put the book down, and I'm trying to remember with the last book I read that was like that. Oh, I think it was The Silent Patient, and it was it was really good. You know, it's like a it's just an easy read, you know, it's one of those like kind of beach reads. All right, let's see what Tommy said his fitbit or his eight k TV. Wow. Let's see what else do we have.

Karen says the Volkswagen ID four electric car. Yeah, that's a good one. Kelly says, my tile for my tortoise. You gotta tile on your tortoise to keep track of your tortoise. Huh. Stephanie, another vote for the Kindle, heather, vote for the Amazon fire tablet. Let's see, Joshua the Cardo motorcycle helmet, Bluetooth. Okay, that's cool. Richard says the heated steering wheel. Oh wow. Chris says my kindle. I read at least twelve to fourteen hours a week. Ps.

I am a ninety year old. Wow, that's awesome. So a lot of people with their kindles. I gotta say, look at this. Irwin says my super fast iPad on wheels. He's got a video of the self driving mode on his Tesla. Anyway, if you want to get in on the question what's your current favorite tech gadget besides your phone? You can go to my Facebook page Facebook dot com slash Rich on tech. All right, let's talk about the

first big story of the week. It's not that big of a story because I mean, what are you gonna do? I feel like we've talked about this before with the other streaming services when they raise prices. But Netflix is raising prices once again a dollar to two dollars per month depending on the plan. So this is the first rate increase since it was about four hundred and forty days since they announce the one before this, so just

over a year. And you know, it comes at a hard time because with the pandemic, you know, people have been trying to cut back and people have been you know, just I mean, this is like their lifeline for a lot of people. Is your is your Netflix? You know, it's like this is the connection to the entertainment that they need. And so Netflix, it's like one of these things are at this point. Okay, so let's go over

the plans. I mean, at this point, you know you're talking plans, so the Standard plan, which does not include any sort of like HD streaming, is like nine to ninety nine a month, and then the the okay, the standard plan which has you know, which is the one that most people have. That's the middle plan that includes just HD. Sorry scratch what I said about the nine and nine. I'm not sure if that's right. But the Standard plan, which is like the middle plan, that's fifteen

forty nine a month. That's up from thirteen ninety nine a month, okay, And that includes HD and two simultaneous streams. Then you go up to the Ultra HD, which is the plan that I have, which gives you four K and I think four streams at a time because I need those because the one time I logged in when someone was maybe how do we call it sharing my account? They you know, I couldn't watch the show that I

wanted to watch. So I had to upgrade my plan so that I can make sure that doesn't happen again. And so that's going up by two dollars a month. So if you look at that, that was seventeen ninety nine. Now it's nineteen ninety nine a month. And I guess the basic plan is nine ninety nine. It used to be eight ninety nine. So here's the thing. This makes Netflix really expensive when it comes to streaming services. Twenty dollars a month. Now, for some of you listening, you

may say, Rich, that's fine. I mean, I watch so much Netflix, it's not a big deal. Twenty dollars a month is still a pretty good value for what I get, and I would agree with that. A one movie ticket, you know, in LA, could be seventeen ninety nine eighteen. I haven't been in a while, but that's how much they used to be. So the reality is it's not all on her. I mean, twenty dollars for a full

month of entertainment. But the problem is when you layer on the other services that you have, and you've got Disney Plus, you've got Amazon Prime, which is you know, it's mixed in with the Prime membership. You've got Hulu, You've got all these other little services as well, Disney Plus, Hbo Max. So I mean I'm paying for all those including and YouTube as well. So I've got a whole

bunch of these services. Now when I add them up, I think I added them up one time, even on this podcast, and I think it came out to like one hundred and twenty bucks a month, maybe even less than that, And so when you look at it that way, it's still a pretty good value. I mean, it's kind of like what you paid for cable back in the day, except this you can come and go as you please. So even though the prices are definitely in line with what we were paying, there's much more flexibility and you

don't need to subscribe to everything all at once. So if you just have a young kid, maybe you've got Netflix for the parents and Disney for the kids and you're done. Maybe you're an adult, you just have HBO and Netflix and nothing else. So I mean, it just

really depends. You can pick and choose, and I think that's the biggest benefit we're seeing over these over the standard cable and I you know, from what I saw on my Facebook page when people are commenting about this, Yeah, some people are complaining, but a majority of the people said, look, you know what, it's a dollar or two a month, it's really not that big of a deal. I think the bigger deal is really the fact that we're just seeing Netflix raise prices very in a similar fashion to

the way that cable raise prices like clockwork. Every year you get that little bill insert that said, oh, your rates are going up, And now I feel like that's kind of what Netflix is doing, because they want a long time without raising rates, and now it just seems like that's the new thing where they just go ahead and raise rates. All right, let's get to the first question of the show. Valerie says, which are the best ad blockers? I keep getting pop ups about them? Are

they a scam? No, they're not a scam. You can definitely use an ad blocker on your computer and on your phone, so on iOS and Android. It works a little bit differently. On Android. There's much more flexibility, of course, so you can install pretty much whatever you want. I like the one called ad Guard, and so there's a

couple of ways you can install it. The easiest way is to go into your connections under your Wi Fi and it says like more and it's like your DNS and you literally can just pop in I think it's DNS dot adguard dot com and it will literally just block all the ads on your phone, like at the network level. It's pretty pretty simple. It's very clean. The only thing I don't like about it is when you come across an AD on your phone, it's a whole

bunch of gibberish. Like there's just a whole bunch of stuff there, like all the coding that it takes to like put that AD there. It's like the link or whatever, and so it's just annoying to like scroll through and see that. Now on the iPhone, it's a little bit cleaner. What it does is it just eradicates the AD completely so you don't even see it. But it's not system wide the Android. It can be system wide on the iPhone,

it's really only inside Safari. And inside Safari you have to install what's like basically what's called an AD blocker, And so if you go into you basically enable it. Once you install it, you install it from the app Store, and then you enable it inside Safari and it just kind of blocks the ads inside Safari. And so you know, there's a benefit. It's not just the ads, it's really

privacy protection as well that you're getting. And a lot of the times these ads can sometimes they can be in you know, or try to install malware on your phone. A lot of those pop ups that you see that says the FBI, is looking at your phone, or FBI

warning or virus warning. Those are being served up by malicious ads and they're not meant to be doing that, but sometimes they just slip through because a lot of the ADS systems are automated, and so the bad actors can put these ads in and sure they're approved automatically, but then of course an hour or so later, they're not a proved and in that time they've already done enough damage. So I would definitely recommend the ad guard

for iOS and also for Android. There's also I mean, there's a bunch of them on on iOS, like Crystal I think is another one, but there's a whole bunch. You can also install the Firefox what's it called Firefox Focus web browser and you can you can toggle on that. It has its own Safari ad blocker as well built

in there, so it's a little different. Let me, I've it's been a long time since I enabled this, so let me go into my settings and see what the deal is that you go into settings and then Safari and let's see does it have okay here it is? So you go all the way down under the settings and Safari and it says content blockers and then you can do use content blockers on all websites, and so that's the way you do it there. But you can

do it that way. You can also download the Brave browser for either phone and that will block the ads on there as well. Or you can download that for your desktop too. Now on desktop for Chrome, I like the u Block Origin ad blocker, and that's a good one because it's nice and lightweight. I mean it's used by ten million people and it's a very like simple ad blocking software for that, so good question. And you

know it's they have their place. Like sometimes it's annoying because if you're trying to click on an AD and you can't. It's like, especially with Google Results, like a lot of times I want to click an AD because it's like the most direct link that I want, and it's like sometimes it's broken. So there is a downside to doing it. You just have to weigh the pros and the cons of whether it works for you. All right, So let's talk about you probably saw this in the news.

It was everywhere, but the whole deal with the airlines and the five G networks around the airports. So of course, in typical fashion, with anything that's tech related. There's there's just a lot of like, you know, bad narratives out there, misleading narratives, or just a lot of stuff that you know, you're like, okay, is this real, Like what's the deal?

So I looked into some of the things that is going on with this whole you know, with the whole five G. So the main thing is that AT and T and Verizon this week they both activated their five G networks in the C band, which is a super fast spectrum. And so the reality is that the five G networks nationwide or at least wherever they put these are going to be a lot faster. And so they

really really are. And I can tell you just in my experience just driving around town in the past twenty four hours, I can't believe how many places now have this ultra wide band. And so with AT and T, they opened it up in let's see, eight metro areas, and those metro areas include Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville, Orlando, and South Florida. And so that's where they did it.

Now Verizon went a little wider with this and they are doing one hundred million people in the in the US this month, so five G ultra, So that's seventeen hundred cities across the nation that they're opening up this ultra wideband network, and that means that you know what I've seen in LA, it's it's pretty expansive. I mean, I'm catching this signal in a lot more places now in just the past forty eight hours. And it's it's pretty awesome because once you have this signal, it is fast.

I mean I'm talking really fast, like I'm talking faster than your Internet at home. Fast, like a gig down in a perfect world. And so you might notice on your phone if you look in the upper you know, upper corner of your phone where your your five G signal typically lives. On AT and T, if you're on that newer network, it'll say five G plus, it'll have a little plus. And on Verizon if you're on the five G the super fast one, it'll say five G UW.

And when you see UW, you immediately go to Netflix and you download a movie or download something or do anything that involves a lot of horsepower with downloading stuff from the internet. Because it is really really fast, you'll burn through whatever data plan you have, you don't have unlimited in about one second. Okay, So that is what's happening with these with the five g Okay. Now when it comes to the airport, Oh and by the way, you have to have a certain device to take advantage.

Now it's typically the newer devices. So we're talking the Galaxy S twenty one lineup, the Z fold, the z Flip, the Pixel six and Pixel six Pro which are coming soon with support who knows what that means when it comes to Google, and then all the iPhone twelves and

iPhone thirteen's. So if you have one of those phones, those are the phones that will take advantage of the new five networks there and on AT and T. I don't have a list of the phones, but you can imagine it's pretty much the same same kind of thing. The newer phones will take advantage of that. Now, what happened with the planes? Okay, So around the airports, there's a concern that this new network is very close to

the frequency that the altimeters on the airplanes use. Now we are talking just the last twenty seconds of a flight, and it's very important in those last twenty seconds because the plane is touching down, and it needs to know or the pilot needs to know exactly how far that plane is from the ground. I don't know if you've ever been on a plane when it lands and it kind of does that not a hard landing, because that's like, I think that's a term for like a you know,

really hard landing. But I'm saying just one of those landings where you know, the plane hits the ground just a little bit harder than you thought it would. And that's all because it is very precise when these airlines

are bringing the plane down. It's it's like, you know, it starts with a than feet and a five hundred, you know whatever, two hundred one, and it's gonna, you know, imagine bringing this giant thing that weighs so much and just tapping it to the ground ever so lightly, because if you tap it really hard, you know, you're gonna mess that thing up. And so that's why the last little portion of that flight is very crucial. So the whole thing is that the last twenty seconds are critical.

They're worried that these altimeters could be influenced by the five G. We're not really sure if that's one hundred percent the case, but that's the concern. And so I was reading this thing from the FCC and they said, well, what about other countries they do this, And so in places like France they have they have done a buffer zone around the airport's kind of like what we're talking about here in the US. And also the antennas are turned down towards the ground instead of up, they're not

aimed up around the airports. That helps the frequency kind of stay more towards the ground and not up towards the sky towards the plane to interfere. And also the power that we're we're letting the carriers activate their networks at here is apparently a little higher than the power that they're allowed to use over in Europe. So those are kind of some of the reasons that they're concerned.

I've heard other things that maybe this is kind of a political thing or just you know, a bureaucratic thing. You know, the government agencies are kind of fighting. I mean, it's all there's so much like what's going on with this? Because also why did it take you know, everyone knew what days these networks were going to light up. Why did it take until the last minute for this whole thing to kind of develop, you know, where they said, Okay, we're going to give another two week time period to

kind of sort things out. So in the meantime, the wireless companies have lit up the spectrum in places that are not the airports, and they've kind of built these buffer zones around the airports. So that's what's happening and with these with this whole situation, and it's just it's very odd, you know, but that's what's happening. So now you know, all right, let's get to another question here, Rich,

can you help me understand something please. I just read an article about clearing apples Safari browser issues and recommendations to clear history and website data. I happen to notice that in the Apple setting Safari all the way at the bottom is a section called experimental features, and certain things are on. What are experimental features? And should there be features turned on? I appreciate your time and all the great tips you give on your site and your broadcast. Respectfully, Mark, Mark,

very respectfully. I would not play in there unless you have a reason to. Because I'm looking at this and I you know, I never really looked at this, but this is okay, experimental features are all kinds of like wild things that you just don't need to worry about. This is if you are a developer. This is if you need to enable a very specific feature to test something out inside Safari, or if something's not working properly

and you know what you're doing. But for the average person that's using their iPhone, there is no need to look at that whatsoever. The closest thing I can think of is on Chrome, there is a similar thing called flags, and what those do is they activate kind of internal

features in Chrome. So for instance, if you want to try out a new feature, or you want to test something, or you want to kind of change the browser to work in a way that you want it to, there's a lot of little toggles you can find inside the Chrome flags. And yes, I've messed with those a bunch of times, and it looks very similar to what's inside

that advance that you were talking about in Safari. But for most people, unless you know what you're doing, or unless you're enabling a very specific feature that someone's writing about, like in a blog post, there's really no need to mess with that stuff. So that's I would just kind of leave that stuff alone. Hopefully that helps you out there. All right, let's talk about Instagram, everyone's favorite social media network.

Instagram is testing out subscriptions, monthly subscriptions, and so these subscriptions are kind of emulating what was launched on Facebook in twenty twenty. But with subscriptions, you basically get to charge your followers to follow you. Now, not all of your followers. They can you know, you can decide how much do you want to charge, and you can go from ninety nine cents a month to one hundred dollars a month, which is that's a lot. I mean, one

hundred bucks a month. That's like some serious, serious coin. Ninety nine cents is pretty good. I think that's a nice number. You know, maybe like the sweet spot, I mean depends on the creator. You know. The thing is, you know, by the time you know, you take out all these levies from these tech companies, you know, the standard like thirty percent or whatever. You know, ninety nine cents becomes seventy cents, two dollars becomes you know, whatever

that is in math. But one thing that's interesting about this is that Facebook has said they are not taking any fees until twenty twenty three at the earliest. Now, that sounds really far away, but we're already into January of twenty twenty two, so that's really only eleven months. But what they're trying to do is get people to use this. They're trying to get people on board and also give these creators a little taste of the cast that they can make on Instagram. Now a couple things

that you'll be able to do. So if you are if you subscribe to someone, you would get to see live broadcasts that are exclusive to subscribers. Now, I think this is brilliant for someone like me because let's say that I took this tech show to Instagram, and you know you've been texting me, you've been emailing me, and I never answer your question. Well, let's say I do

an exclusive show every week just for subscribers. The chances of you getting your question answered are a lot better because it's going to be much more intimate, much more exclusive. So that is just one example of a way that this could work out in everyone's favor. And you pay two bucks a month, it's not that much money or whatever it would be, and you feel like you've gotten your money's worth because now you have kind of a personal tech tech help person. And that's just one way

of doing it. Subscriber stories, so you can do stories that are just for subscribers. And if you've ever used the feature on Instagram that lets you do su a story just for your close friends, this is very similar, except it's just for subscribers. And the other one is subscriber badges. And this is kind of like if you've ever been on Facebook, if you've seen the badge it's called top top Fan. Maybe only I can see that, but maybe you can see it too, if you're a

top fan of someone. But you will get a subscriber badge next to your comments and messages, so that me, as a creator can see that you are a subscriber, and I would scroll down the list and say, oh, let me let me throw them a bone, let me answer their their message or their or reply to their comment, because they're paying me a couple bucks a month. Now, I'm not saying I'm doing any of this. I'm just saying in theory, this is how I see it working. And so that is right now being tested with just

a handful of creators. But I think this has a lot of power but here's the problem with all of these systems. So if you know anything about Patreon, they kind of pioneered this idea of going direct to your fan base, right to your subscribers. But the problem is there are now too many ways to do this. Twitter has their version, TikTok said they're going to do something

similar to this. Instagram has it, Facebook has it, and then there's a million and one other you know, like obviously only Fans was kind of they popularized it, but for more adult reasons, and so this is kind of like if you imagine it's only fans, but for everyone, and only fans I think even tried to pivot into being for everyone, but that name is just so synonymous with adult content at this point that I think they're gonna have a really tough time getting you know, mainstream

folks on there to be on that platform. But Instagram has a really good thing going and this could really take off. But the other thing is, okay, so then you have podcasts. You know, you could subscribe through Apple Podcasts, so let you know, it's just there's too much going on, and so what someone needs to do is figure out a platform that works with all of these that's universal.

Or on the flip side, you know, if I'm paying three dollars a month, which doesn't seem to be a lot of money, but if I'm paying that for like five people, or YouTube has it as well. So if I'm paying that, let's say I'm paying the four I've seen. Most of the people I've seen are like two ninety nine a month or three ninety nine or four ninety nine a month, which is fine, and it's it's a great number for a creator that you listen to their podcast every day, or you love looking at their stuff

on Instagram, or you really learn from them. But when you start adding these up and you support three, four, five, six seven creators, I mean, and that could really add up to a lot every month, and I think that's the biggest issue. So what I think would be a better system is sort of one monthly bucket that you put your money into and that is distributed among all

of the ways that you interact with people. So if I look at your story on Instagram and you're a creator and you're kind of in this system, then you know a portion of my I mean, it's tough to explain, but let's okay, let me just give you this example. Let's say I have Let's say I put in ten dollars a month into this little this bucket, okay, and I look at, let's just make it really easy, ten

different things that month. I look at a story from you on Instagram, I listen to a podcast from someone else on Apple, I watch a YouTube video from someone else, and I do ten different things. But all of those ten things on the back end are somehow linked up to this little bucket. And so at the end of the month, the bucket goes, Okay, what did Rich do this month? He looked at this person's story, He looked at that Facebook video, looked at that YouTube video, he

listened to that podcast. We divided up. Every one of those people gets a dollar because he looked at ten things and he gives ten dollars a month, and if he looked at one thing that month, that one person would get his ten dollars. So that is a system that I think would be really cool. Yes, it would take a lot, and I guarantee it would never work because none of these main platforms are going to get in on something that is universal and you know, kind

of a Switzerland of payment systems. Now, if someone can get them on board, it would be amazing, It really really would. And so that's where I see it being much easier because I love supporting people. You know, I listen to podcasts, I watch people on YouTube. But right now I'm not doing the individual subscriptions because it just gets kind of messy, like why is this person more valuable to me than this person? Maybe one month I

watch a bunch of their stuff. The next month, I don't watch any of their stuff, And so I'd rather have my money directed to the places that it it should go that month, right, because it's kind of like you're directly rewarding for what you're looking at. So I don't know, that's that's kind of my idea. I think that would be a really really cool way of doing it. I just don't see it happening. And ten dollars a

month seems whatever you want. Let's say you're you're rolling in it and you're saying, oh, a hundred bucks a month, no big deal, and I'll divide that up between everyone. I mean, it's just such a cool way of doing it that I wish someone would come up with that. But you know, these these platforms like to really silo you and keep you kind of separate from everything else.

And I think, you know, there's been a lot of talk about this Web three, and I think when that is being built, a lot of this stuff is going to be much more decentralized and much more cryptocurrency based

and much more blockchain based. And I think we're going to see a lot more opportunities to do stuff like this versus right now where we are just looking at big platforms like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and you know, Apple podcasts can trolling such a large swath of our entertainment and the way that we do things, the way

that we pay for things. But I think in the future, as the Web is being rewritten, we will see a lot more of this stuff linking up on the back end because a lot more of it's going to be decentralized. I at least hope that happens. All right, let's get to the next question. This question comes from Chip in Long Beach. Hey, Rich, I recently made the mistake of purchasing the Apple AirTag thinking it would work with Samsung Android phone as a true tracker. I found out it

does not function in that way. I want to purchase a tracker for the purpose of monitoring my car if it's ever stolen. What tracking device would you recommend for this purpose? All right, well, I'm assuming you return the air tag. You probably could have activated the air tag with like an iPad. That would work if you have an iPad, but if you have an Android, maybe you don't. So the thing I would probably recommend at this point is a TILE tracker. And the reason I would recommend

Tile is for two things. Number One, Tile is, you know, they're like the number two out there, and so they're going to be big and people know about them. And I think their network is pretty good, especially with the acquisition that they were acquired by Life three sixty, which is installed on you know, thirty million phones, and so that immediately is going to help this finding network grow. Now I'm not sure that's happening just yet, but that's the plan. And so Tile went from just being on

a bunch of different phones. I don't know how many phones they had in their network, but now I mean, with thirty million phones, that's a pretty good number. And so the way that these finding networks work is that the phones anonymously sort of scan Bluetooth around them and when they see something, they report the location back to the server, and then when you look for your item, it says, oh, yeah, we know wh your item is. It's right here. That would be probably the best one.

Now you can go with another one. The other one i'd recommend is probably from uh Tea Mobile and they have a tracker I think it's called the sync up, and that one would be good because it has it has real GPS built in, so you're always gonna get

a true, actual location. But the problem is with that, you're gonna have to pay a monthly fee, and if you don't have Tea Mobile, it's kind of complicated because I think the monthly fee is more, But that would be the way to go if you want something that's dedicated, and in the case of a car, you could probably figure out a way to keep this thing plugged in to like a USB outlet in your car that just kind of keeps it powered up all the time, because the downside of the GPS one is that it's not

gonna it's gonna lose its charge over a couple of days, whereas the tile tracker is you know, one battery for a year, or something like that. And so the air attack would be great if you could I think the air attack would be the best if if you could somehow activate it on your account. And I think that you need to use an iPad to activate the air tag. Let me see what Apple says here. So if you look at air tag, let's see iPad. So you can

activate with iPhone iPad or an iPod touch. So if you have anything any one of those things, you'd be able to do it. It's funny that you can't do it with a Mac computer, which just doesn't really make sense. But anyway, if you have one of those three things, I think Find my Network is the biggest and the best. In fact, I had to use it yesterday. Now I didn't have to go to the Find my I just had to go to So there's it's kind of weird because there's a find my Network and then there's just

like kind of find my stuff. So I was looking for my air pods yesterday. I was going out on a run and I'm telling you, I could not find them for the life of me. I'm like, where did they go? I was using them at work, I came home, they were in my bag and they were just disappeared. They they had literally disappeared, and so I'm like, ah, I must have left them, or maybe they fell out of my bag, or maybe I left them on my

desk at work. I'm like, oh, let me try to find my and so I fire up Find My on my phone and it's saying that the I can't hear the sound. You know, the AirPods play a sound you can you can't hear it unless they're really really out in the open. So I'm like, all right, so let me try the proximity finding, and so it says like, hey, we connected to your AirPods. They're here, and I'm like, there's no way, I'm looking everywhere for them. So it turns out that I kept doing like where it shows

you exactly where it is like proximity. It's like signals getting weaker, so it's like it's almost like a honing device where it hone's right in. And so I'm standing right in front of my kitchen table and it's saying they're here, They're right here in front of you, and I'm like, no, they're not. I'm looking at my table and my wife goes, oh, are they my backpack. Turns out I took them out to put them on the

table to go running. She thought they were hers. She just grabbed them, put them through them in her and so she pulls two pairs of AirPods out of her bag and she says, oh, and I said, oh, my gosh, that explains it. So anyway, it was a pretty good use of the whole find my system. But that's really, uh, that's really the best one out there, I think. But Tyle probably number two. All right, so let's talk about it. We want to talk about COVID stuff. Yeah, yeah, I

guess so's it's it's late enough into the show. So the COVID tests, I you know, of course, when you're dealing with COVID in your house, the whole thing is like these COVID tests because you want to make sure that everyone is clear and free and clear. And so a couple things. Number one, the US government came out with their free COVID website, which if you're listening to this podcast, I'm assuming you're savvy enough that you've already

gone to this website and ordered your tests. If you have not, I would recommend that you do, because if you're like me. I was kind of making fun of the tests in the stores, saying, oh, come on, who needs all these? And sure enough, when you have a COVID scare, you do need them, and so it really helps to have them. And I was making fun of them six months ago saying, oh, look, they can't even sell these things, and then you know, a couple weeks

ago you couldn't even get them. So if you go to COVID tests dot gov, you can get four free at home COVID nineteen tests and they will ship free. There's a lot of bogus websites out there, so be sure you're going to the official one, which is COVID tests dot gov. And you know it wouldn't be a government website if it wasn't a little confusing. And I think it is a bit confusing because it's simple to use, don't get me wrong, But the website that it links

you to is USPS dot com. So when you click the big link on the homepage of the of the main website, it brings you to this special dot USPS dot com slash test kiss website, which is not ideal because if you're looking to you know, scam people or

mislead people. That now gives you two opportunities to do this, because you can slightly misspell the first url, and then since it takes you to a completely different link to actually order them, you can then misspell that one, and now you're two clicks in and you can really mislead people. So I think most people probably got it right. I'm sure there's an element of some people who are being misled and bogus sites and this and that, but hopefully

most people got this right. So I ordered mine pretty simple. You put your address in. I know some people had issues if they have an apartment that they live in. Hopefully that's been fixed. But I thought this was pretty smart by the US government to kind of piggyback on USPS dot com because they have a database of all the addresses in the US and so they can kind of mark them as ordered or not. Obviously, they've got

the fulfillment down because of the post Office. So all I know is that these postal carriers are going to be delivering a lot of tests to people's houses in the next couple of week weeks. It says about seven to ten days to get them. Now, once you've done that, if you feel like that's not enough and you need to get more tests. You can order them online, and

I think that's the easiest. I tried to. I made the mistake of trying to go to a couple stores and you get like you get into the front door and you're like, hey, do you have anything, like no, no COVID tests, and they point to like one thousand laser printed signs on the store door, and I'm like, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry for asking, but you can use I ordered mine from CVS dot com and Walmart dot com and they both came in about three days. There's a certain amount

that you can order. I ordered kind of the maximum from both, so I had a bunch. And believe me, you need them. If you're doing these tests every other day like we were for a while, it's like, you do need these tests. You need multiple tests. And so anyway, if you want to see some of these websites, it's funny because Wall Street Journal did an article about these

in stock websites. We've talked about them before for things like PlayStation five and XPO the new Xbox, and now they have they at one point were listing products like you know, hand sanitizer, and lysol wipes, and now they're listing COVID tests. So websites like now in stock dot net, zuler dot com, hotstock dot io, and Brickseek, which originally started as a lego finding website, are now all showing

links for COVID tests and whether they're in stock. Now, I will tell you just in my experience, they're not the most accurate when it says they're in stock. You can go to the Walgreen's website and they're actually not in stock. But I did find the Walmart stuff. I just kind of kept refreshing the page and it worked and I ordered them and they were on their way. And the same thing with the CVS ones that I ordered.

So just if you need them, it's one of those things that you know, you kind of I feel like it's just easier than driving around. It really will just save you kind of a little headache there. All right, let's get to the next question. Let's see this comes from Let's see who is it Dennis. Dennis says, I wonder if you can help me with a problem I'm having concerning boost Mobile. Someone is telling me that they're doing away with three g January first, twenty twenty two.

But I have a four G boost Mobile phone. I called boost Mobile. They said, yes, three g's going away. I need a new phone, but they will not answer me whether four G will work on their existing network after three G goes away. Do you have any information on whether four G will continue to work or whether I need to get a new phone. Are they just trying to get me to buy a new phone with five G? Thank you, Dennis. So here is the deal, Dennis.

Boost Mobile used to run on the Sprint network, and so Sprint had three G, they had four G they I believe did they had five G. I don't even if they made it to five G by the time they were purchased. So Sprint was purchased by T Mobile. T Mobile is slow but surely dismantling the Sprint network to get folks over onto the T Mobile network. And T Mobile has four G and five G. I'm not sure if T Mobile is shut down their three G yet.

But so what they're saying is it's a little confusing because if you have one of these older handsets and they're shutting down three G, that means in June of twenty sorry, in April of twenty twenty two. It looks like they're shutting down the three G and four G on Sprint, So that means that anyone that's on those networks needs to move over to a T Mobile network.

So I think that's what's happening with your phone. I don't think they're misleading you, but it sounds like you don't have that much You don't have that much time left to get your phone switched over. So if I were you, I would upgrade to get to get over on the T Mobile network. That's really very confusing. But the bottom line is, if you have a Boost Mobile phone that's a little bit old, three g's going away. Yes, your phone supports four G, but four G is also

going away because of the Sprint stuff. It's not going away in general. Yes, if you had a T Mobile phone T Mobile compatible phone, it would just go to four G. But since you probably have a Sprint phone from Boost Mobile, you're still in that Sprint network. When three G goes away and then four G goes away,

your phone's not gonna work. So they're trying to get you onto T Mobile, which, yes, your phone will have four G and five G with T Mobile, but T Mobile is not putting that away anytime soon, so I would definitely get the upgrade. See what you're thinking, offer you and move on. Okay, I tried something out that's really really cool and this is Oh wait, I skipped a story. Hold on, let's talk about Samsung's S twenty

one FE. This is their Fan Edition phone. I think I talked about it on the podcast from CS but i'll I did get one to test, and so I'll just give you my thoughts on it. And it comes at an interesting time because the new Samsung devices, the S twenty two's, are going to launch in February. That's when they typically launch, and so I'm expecting that to happen. But the S twenty one FE came out just a couple of weeks ago, and this is called the Fan Edition.

The S twenty Fan Edition was very, very popular, and so they came out this S twenty one FE, but it was like way delayed for some reason. I'm not sure why. They never really gave an example. So this is a phone that's sort of less expensive than a flagship, but it has all the essential features that you need. And so I talked to Ben shown at nine to

five Google. He's a senior editor. I love following him on Twitter because he's always talking about Android stuff and specifically mostly the Pixel and so I just love seeing kind of his take on things. So I talked to him about this phone, and he thought it was a great phone. I mean, I kind of thought it was a great phone just using it. I was like, this is a really nice little device. It's the perfect size, it's got a great screen, it's got all the features

you need, like a fast processor. It's got a decent amount of memory. You know, I'm talking the RAM and then the storage. It starts at I believe one twenty eight, so you've got plenty of storage there for most people. And it's got all of like the features that you need, like the three cameras. It's got a good selfie camera.

It's made of you know, plastic instead of glass and metal, so it's a little I mean, of course, I'm sure there's some metal in there, but in the frame, but like the glass, the phone is plastic mostly, and so it looks like a baby version of the S twenty one Ultra. And it's just a really nice phone. And Ben said the same thing. He said that this is a crowd pleasing phone. It's gonna get three years of major updates and other year of security updates. It's got

Android twelve built in, which is the latest Android. It's got a wireless charging capability, comes in a bunch of fun colors like graphite, all of lavender and white. But then we get to the price. And here's where it gets kind of complicated, because this phone retails for six hundred and ninety nine dollars. Now out of the gate,

they were offering one hundred dollars discount. So let's just say that this phone is really five hundred and ninety nine dollars, which puts it squarely in line with the Pixel six. Now, the Pixel six, I would argue, takes better pictures, even though I haven't personally tested that phone. I've been testing the Pixel six Pro. But the Pixel always takes great pictures. They're always a little bit ahead

of Samsung. But I will say I think Samsung's cameras have come a really long way and they're doing a great job. And I would almost argue I would actually I will argue that Samsung software is more refined at this point. Now I get that Pixel software is much simpler, and I do prefer the Pixel software over the Samsung software.

But when it comes to like software updates and just kind of you know, Samsung's been doing it a lot longer, and so I feel like their side of things is just much more stable, right, They've been doing it for a while, they know what they're doing. Their updates come out like clockwork at this point, whereas on the Pixel

side of things, yeah, not so great. And I don't understand what Google's problem is with these Pixel updates, but they're just so like all over the place, and the software is like, you know, kind of jittery sometimes, and it's like I just don't understand why by Google can't get this stuff right. They make Android, why they make the Pixel, Why can't they make the pixel like so perfect?

So it really comes down to do you want the Pixel that has a better camera or do you want the Samsung which has you know, kind of that Samsung brand appeal and kind of more accessories, a better ecosystem. So it really comes down But the bottom line, I think for this phone, if the price is right for you, So if you're purchasing this phone at a really good deal, if you have a good trade in or if you

like Samsung, it's gonna be a perfectly good phone. The only caveat you need to know is that the new S twenty two models are likely going to come out in February. So if you're thinking of upgrading to those want the latest, greatest, you know, the new S twenty two, like standard model, which I would compare this one against, is probably going to be about two hundred dollars more

than this. Maybe it might start at like seven ninety nine, eight ninety nine perhaps, so you know it's going to be more expensive, but it's going to be a higher end phone because it's going to be a flagship versus this fan edition. So that's kind of what you need to know about the S twenty one f E. It's a great little phone. Like Ben said in his review,

it's a crowd pleasing device. It's just one of those phones that's it's going to have a long lifetime with the way that they sell Samsung devices, because people are going to go into you know, T Mobile for the S twenty two and they're going to see this phone that's a couple hundred bucks cheaper, and they say what's the difference, and the person at T Mobile or Verizon or eighteens's going to say not much, honestly, like you

might as well just get this one. So that's why I wanted to make sure I had this review out there, because I think that a lot of people are going to purchase this phone. The one thing you do need to know about it there is no micro SD card slot like there was last year. All right. Next question comes from Let's see Kathy says, if a picture is sent to someone in Google Cloud, can it be deleted forever or is it still in Google for someone to

run across. Interesting question. So, Kathy, I don't know if you're talking about Google Photos or a photo that's just opened on the web, on the Internet that's just out there. But let's just say with Google Photos, let's say you sent or maybe through Google messaging. But let's say you have a picture in Google Photos and I delete that picture number one. It sits in my Google Photos for thirty days until it's deleted out of my Google Photos.

So if you look at and this is pretty standard the way the iPhone works, the way Google Photos works. When you delete something, it's not actually deleted immediately. It's deleted in it's moved to a delete folder, and it sits there for thirty days, a rolling thirty days, so on the thirtieth day or whatever, it will automatically self destruct. Now, if you want to get rid of those things a little bit earlier, you can go and empty either the trash or the recently deleted or depending on how your

cloud program calls it. Now that's number one, So it's gone for all intense purposes, it's gone. Now. Is it still on the Google server somewhere for at least a period of time? Yeah? Probably? Is it there forever? Probably not, so, I would imagine, and I'm not sure if this is documented or not. I'm just kind of saying what I

think how I think Google operates. I would imagine that once it's deleted from your trash inside Google Photos, it then lingers on the Google Cloud for a period of time, let's say, like ninety days or something, just to you know, make sure if there's any legal issues or if there's any problems, or you know, probably mostly legal or even backups.

If there's a backup of it. It just might take a little bit for all the deletion command to propagate through everything, and it might be delayed for a reason. And so that's kind of the main answer that I would give to that. Now, the second part of your answer is is it still in Google for someone to run across that part, I would say no, if the

person running across it is just a regular person. Now, if it's someone inside Google that either wants to find this thing or needs to find it for some sort of legal reason, yeah, they might still be able to access it even if it is deleted from you. So I think that's pretty standard practice when it comes to deleting anything online. Like they always say, when something is

put online, it's not truly ever gone. And I think that that's, you know, a generalization, but that's the mindset that we should keep when we do put stuff online, that it's not really going away ever. Now, I think that's relying to the referring to the public Internet, Like if you upload a picture to a website that's public, yeah, that picture is going to be there forever because anyone can download it and propagate it and continue to propagate

it forever. So that's that's the answer that I would give for that. All right, now, let's talk about this cool feature that's rolling out at Hyatt Hotels. It's called room keys in Apple Wallet. And I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time on this, but there's only six hotels in America that do this, including the ANDAs Maui in Hawaii, a resort in Key West, the Hyatt House in Chicago, the Hyatt House in Dallas, the Hiatt Place in Silicon Valley, and the Hyatt Regency in

Long Beach. I went to the Higatt Regency in Long Beach to test this out, and yes, it's a key inside your Apple Wallet. Now you might be saying, rich, I've done this before. I've used my phone as a key for a hotel room. It's kind of annoying, but there is a major difference here. The major difference is that you do not need to do anything special with your phone once you download you know, of course, you

have to download the Hide app. You need to check in online and it will tell you when your key is ready and it puts it inside Apple walle But once that happens, there is nothing special you need to do except just hold your phone up to the door to unlock it. You don't need to unlock your phone. You don't need to call up an app. You don't

need to call up the key nothing. They've programmed this so that when you go put your phone near the door, the door talks to your phone and says, hey, can you call up Rich's a hotel room key and unlock this door? And it does it, and it's brilliant. Happens in under three seconds and might even be quicker than that might be a second. But the goal with Hyatt, they said they told me that the goal was under three seconds. And it's really fast. It's really easy, and

it's different than the app because it's using NFC. The If you've ever used an app as your hotel room key, it is not fun. I've done it a bunch of times because I wanted to try it and use it and feel like I was on the cutting edge. But it's not a very good system because it is Bluetooth and you have to basically open up you have to unlock your phone, you have to open up the app,

and then you have to activate the key. And when it's activating the key, it's just basically firing out a Bluetooth signal at the door to say that you're in front of it. Not a very good system. It still works, and yeah, a lot of hotels are enabled with that. That's why this is so different because it is a very specific technology. It is firing off NFC. Now. I think that we are going to see this in use in so many places in the future. I mean, right now, I have a card key for my work that I

use to open the door at work. It's a you know, it's an RFID key that is definitely going to replace by phones in the future, getting in and out of parking garages. I mean, all these things where you have some sort of plastic key card are all going to replace by the phones. And I'm not just talking iPhone. You know, this will happen with Android two. It just so happens that iPhone. You know, Apple is such a big brand and it has so many users that it's

an easy sell right now. And so I asked Hyatt and said, hey, is this going to come to Android And they said, yeah, we'd love to, but it's not right now because I'm not even sure that Google has the framework. I'm sure they do. Actually, I know they do because you can unlock BMW's with the Google walle as well, so or Google Digital Key or whatever so it's happening more and more. It just takes a lot to sort of program this stuff, but I will tell you,

having tried it out, it is magical. It is amazing, and it's the first time I think that the phone can truly replace a plastic hotel room key card. Previously, if you were a nerd, if you were kind of on the cutting edge, you just wanted to prove it to yourself that you can use your phone as a key for your hotel room. Yes, it works, and it will continue to work, but it's just not as smooth, not as fast, not as seamless as it is when

your phone is programmed to do this. And I'm telling you it's so easy and magical that you just hold your phone near the door and it unlocks, and it's just so great because you don't have to do anything in advance of bringing up that key. So good job. If you happen to be at any one of those high hotels, definitely definitely check it out, all right, Kyle says, Oh wow, this is kind of works with what we were

talking about. Kyle says. It was a credit card sized device that is kept on your person and used to keep hackers from stealing your credit card info. I know it was quite a while ago. I know. Thanks. Okay, So Kyle wants to know what that device was. The only thing I can think of that you're talking about is a company called Silent Pocket, and so they do things called Faraday bags, and Faraday means that it's no signals can come into the bag, no signals can leave

the bag. And so we did a story with these folks a while ago, and you know, their whole thing is that it blocks all everything in and out. You can block your cellular connection, r if ID, you can satellite navigation, GPS, camera, weather, bluetooth, I mean everything you put. You put your phone in this bag, and it is it is locked out. In fact, I still have the bag that they gave me as a sample, and I put my phone in it the other day because I wanted just a total break from reality. And so I

just threw my phone in this bag. And yeah, it didn't didn't do anything. It's just kind of it just kind of it cuts off the signal. But the cool thing is it actually doesn't ruin your battery. And so I asked the guy with a company, like, what's the deal with the battery doesn't drain it, And he said, no, the phone just kind of goes into a low you know, a low power mode or something that it you know,

it's not it's not constantly. Remember the old days of cell phones, if you had no signal, it would search and it would just literally drain your battery. That doesn't really happen anymore because phones have gotten a little bit more sophisticated. And so when I put my phone in this pouch, it didn't really drain the battery. But that's

what I think it is. The website is Silent Pocket, or the company is Silent Pocket, and the website is sl and T sl and T. It looks like they kind of change their name from Silent Pocket to just Silent SLNT. And they have everything. They've got wallets, sleeves, bags, key key, fob guards, they've got all kinds of things. So if you want to protect, you know, protect your signal, you can do it. All right, let's talk I guess this is our final story. Let's talk about word All.

Have you played word all? Wordle is this word game that everyone seems to be playing overnight, And the whole thing about this word game wordle is that it was. It's just a simple online word game, and it became popular. I think the first mention was in the New York Times over Thanksgiving, and it kind of built from there. And the reason why it built is because everyone was sharing these little cubes, these green and yellow cubes on

their social media. And what that reveals. It's actually bragging. It's showing how it says wordle a number and then a number out of a number out of six. And so wordle is the name of the game. Two twelve means it's a two hundred and twelfth wordle. Five means that it's you got it in five out of six tries. And so it's a fun little game. Uh you know, I've been playing it on and off. But you guess five. You have six guesses, six chances to guess a five

letter word. It's just one puzzle every single day. You know. If you like crosswords and other sort of puzzles, that's that's kind of what it is. And so when you guess a word, the correct letters are highlighted. Green means the letters in the right spot, and yellow means a letter is in the wrong is in the word, but in the wrong spot, so you need to kind of figure out, you know, where, how to get those letters,

you know, in the right places. This was created by a New York based software developer named Josh Wordle not not wordle Wa. This was a pet project. And the thing that's confusing about this game is that it's only available at this random website called power Language dot co dot uk slash Wordle and that's led a lot of people to try to download apps for this game, which

there are none. I mean, there's no official app and there's no need to pay to play, so you can just add a shortcut to your home screen in Safari if you want to just play this thing every day. So people are sharing it on social media. That's kind of the main thing is that's really what spread this virally, is that you can share your results and people are like, what is that? And then they start playing, and then they get hooked and next thing you know, they're playing

it too. Now semi spoiler alert, I'm going to give you a couple of words that you can start with that really helps. So if you've ever watched Wheel of Fortune, you know that the word rst or the letters rst lne are always the first letters that people guess when they go on Wheel of Fortune to solve the final puzzle. And after a bunch of years, if you're old enough to remember, they now give you rst lne. That wasn't

he's a thing. But so many people when they get to the final round just that R S t len E. And so now Wheel of Fortune gives you those and then you pick your extra whatever three or four letters, and so these are these are kind of the equivalent of R S T len E. And I got some of these from Evan Bernholds. He's a Sunday crossword writer for the Washington Post. And also I talked to an expert in word games named Amanda Raftkin, and so she shared some of these. So these are the tips from them.

A lot of people like to start with arise A R, I, S C because it gives you three different vowel vowels and R and an S, which are all very common letters. Other hot words to start with include audi uh, how do you say it out to you? Out of you? It's a French word out you. I don't know how to say it, A D I e U and or is it a do? No? It's not a due and then followed another word is front, so front is another one, and so all of those have a lot of common letters.

So anyway, if you want to try wordle give it a try. I'll put the link on my website at Richontech dot tv. Well well, well look at that sound. That sound means we have come to the end of another show. That's going to do it for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, you can go to my Facebook page Facebook dot com slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or you can go to rich on Tech dot tv and hit the email icon. I would love it if

you would rate and review this podcast. Just go to the listening app of your choice and write a quick line about what you like about this show, so let others know what is it about rich on Tech that you like and that will help people when they're searching in the app store searching in the podcast to see why they should listen. And that's the best way to

do it. You can find me on social media. I am at rich on Tech on all social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, picked one, and you know I'm slightly different on all of them. But I'm there and no matter where you live in the US, you can download the free KTLA Plus app on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the technology section and you can watch all of my TV segments on demand. It's my special treat to you. My name is rich Demiro. Thanks

so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending with me. I will talk to you real soon.