Apple surprises us with new laptops and a new home pod. Amazon makes customers frown with its latest move. Why you should change this setting on your password manager? Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on? I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech. This show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer the questions that you ask me. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel
five in Los Angeles. And if it's your first time tuning in for a while, yes, I've taken over for Leo Laporte, who has retired from radio. This is a brand new show. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening. All right, So this show is going to be packed with useful news, tech tips, reviews, cool new apps and websites, plus interviews and information to keep you safe and productive. Online. Phone lines are open. The phone number to call is
one eight eight eight Rich one oh one. That's one eight eight eight seven four.
To two four to one zero one.
You want to talk to me, We've got a couple hours to do that right here. Saw a story this week about gen z. These are young adults that were born anywhere between the late nineteen nineties to the early twenty tens. Apparently they are turning to flip phones. So I know that we hear stories over and over about, you know, different kind of trends that we see with the young people and technology and how they reject some of the new stuff in favor of the old stuff.
This was both on The Today Show and CNN, and the bottom line is, you know what's happening here. They're sick and tired of their smartphones consuming them. Have you ever waited in a line anywhere, like at Starbucks or yesterday, I was waiting for a pizza I was picking up, and my initial reaction while I'm waiting for this pizza is to just look at my phone and to just sit there and you know, scroll Instagram, scroll Facebook, scroll Twitter.
And I sat there.
It's one of these pizza places that has like all the photos on the wall and stuff, you know, of the old celebrities that came in there, and the movie posters and old pictures of New York City. I was like, what am I doing? Let me look at some of this stuff in this restaurant. You know, they put this stuff up for a reason. And so I put my phone away and it was really tough. It's not easy. But this is what's leading these young people to put away their phones. They just want their smartphone to be
quiet again. So they're picking up phones like the Nokia twenty seven to eighty flip phone, a phone that just does camera, texting and calls, all the basics you need. They want to be present with each other. In the CNN article, they quoted Camilla Cabello, the singer. She said, I'm team flip phone Revolution, and then actress Dove Cameron, who is on the Disney Channel show Livin Maddie, said she switched to a flip phone. Spending too much time on the phone and looking at social media is quote
really bad for me. She said, I found I went through my tech closet and I found an old flip phone that I had tested a while back from Alcatel and it's the Go Flip and I charged it up last night and just has this reassuring you know that sound like that when you close it. Remember when you were done with a phone conversation, you just close the phone and you knew it was over. Now, when people
hang up, I don't even know they're still there. Because I look at my phone, I still see the little waves at the top of my phone, so I never know if they're still there or not. But this is the trend because here's the thing. Technology has made our lives easier, but it also has made our lives a bit more complicated. For instance, I was booking a flight to go home from New Jersey, and I was booking a flight to go home with my kid, just me and him, kind of like some you know, father son
bonding time. See my family back east. There are no less than five seating areas you can choose from on a United Airlines plane, Basic Economy, Economy, Preferred Economy, Economy Plus, Premium Plus, and Business Class. Now, as much as my kid was saying, hey he wanted that live flat seat, I don't think we're doing that one. But each one of these seating areas comes with their own rules and restrictions and price. There's entire industries built around where to
sit on a plane. Have you looked at the website like seat Guru. I mean, before I book any flight, I'm sitting there looking and some of the seats are in red. Don't sit there. Some of them are in yellow. It's you might want to wait and see.
On that one.
Some seats are in green and then some seats are just nothing. There's also on the United website a virtual walkthrough of the plane, so you can see in three D where to sit on this plane, and you can walk from the front of the plane to the back of the plane.
I mean, it's pretty wild. Now.
Restaurants in entertainment that might be the most complicated.
Now.
So when I'm booking a restaurant, and maybe this is just me, I might as well be doing a research paper on this rest because I am researching it from every angle possible. We're going to a play in dinner soon, and the first thing I did was tweet about, Hey, are there any good restaurants around this theater that we're
going to? And of course I got a bunch of responses from a whole bunch of people telling me this restaurant, that restaurant, why this one's good, why that one's bad, why this one is you know in the middle, then of course there's yelp. If a restaurant has less than four to five stars, are you even gonna consider going to that restaurant? And don't mind looking at all the photos of the interior, the exterior, the random reviews from people you don't know. I mean, I could scroll this
stuff for hours just to pick a restaurant. Then, of course there's the question of do you check out the menu before you go to the restaurant. Now, I come from the side of I would like to be a little surprised when I go in this place, but I also want to make sure they have something that I like, and so I'll kind of peruse the menu, see what it's like, see what things are on there, see what the prices are like. I was looking up the directions to the play and it, you know, on ways, it
tells you the best place to park. Many wasers park at this parking lot, which is near the theater. And if you've been on Google Maps, they've got a thing called a match score. So Google somehow looks at all the restaurants that you've gone to in your lifetime, and the places that you've looked up, and the reviews that you've made and the pictures you've uploaded, and each restaurant now has a score of is it a good match for you? Eighty seven percent ninety seven percent. If I'm
not like at a ninety five percent. Maybe I'm not going to that restaurant because Google's thinking it's not good for me, and Google knows everything about me.
Maybe I just don't go.
I've even done the thing where I'll see how long it is to uber from my house to the restaurant from the restaurant back home. Maybe I'm going somewhere else in between. I want to see how much that uber is. It's a lot. It's like by the time I get to this restaurant, I'm exhausted. Now what about the table you get at a restaurant. I was making a reservation for a restaurant in Las Vegas the other day and it said, do you want to sit by the window?
It's an extra twenty five dollars that'll give you an unobstructed view of the Las Vegas Strip. Now I've sat in this restaurant several times. I never really thought about that. I mean, I could see the strip from the tables I was at, but I never sat next to the window. Maybe because I never paid. There's a startup called Tables that's table with a Z. They say on their website that diners are willing to pay for their preferred table
so this is coming. The ability to book the table you want at a restaurant, just like booking the seat on the plane that you want. So now you want that window seat, You're gonna pay a little extra for that. You want the seat in the good dining room, You're gonna pay a little extra for that, and guaranteed people will probably pay.
It's a lot.
By the time you get to the restaurant, everything feels familiar, down to the dish that they put in front of you. I don't know, can we go back to the old way at this point? I mean, I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, here's how you picked a restaurant. You walked around. You were in a new city. You walk down the block. Oh, that place looks good. Let's go in there, let's see how it is. And maybe you might have looked at the menu that was
sitting outside the restaurant. Maybe maybe you snuck a peek at it. Maybe you talk to the made or d for a second about hey, what do you have?
What's good?
And you know, once you went to the restaurant, then you discussed with your tablematee whether that was your friend or your spouse or whoever or the group you would say like, hey, what'd you think of that place? Was it good? Was it bad? And that's the way things worked for many, many years. So technology is fun, it's amazing. I love all these things. And maybe I'm the only one that does this stuff. Maybe you're listening to me
and you're saying, rich, nobody else does that. Nobody else researches all the different angles of these restaurants and plane seats and you know, tickets, Oh yeah, what about booking a ticket for a concert or the play. Even I was on this website called a view for my Seat,
and I'm popping in the seat numbers. I'm on ticket Master, and I'm like cross referencing the exact and seats and putting him into this website to see pictures that other people have taken from that seat, so I can say, oh, that's a pretty good view from the right there, or the left or the orchestra. I mean, these are the
things we do nowadays, all thanks to technology. Back in the day, maybe things were just a little simpler, where we didn't have to think about the exact place we were going to sit on a plane, in a restaurant or in a theater or in a gymnasium.
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm not giving it up. I still love it. It's all a lot of fun, and this is the stuff that I think about on a weekly basis. Wait till I tell you about my dilemma with the new Apple laptops. We've got a great show coming up today. We're going to talk about some of the surprise announcements from Apple new laptops fourteen and sixteen inch laptops. They also have a new speaker called the home Pod. Amazon is shutting down a popular charity program. I'll tell you about that.
If you have a small business, there's a new tool that you need to know about for sure. And I've got three guests this weeks, including a reviewer from Wired, a cybersecurity expert, and the guy who has helped millions digitize their personal photos. The phone lines are open. The phone number is one eighty eight Rich one on one. You're listening to me, Rich DeMuro. This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is Rich DeMuro. You can find me on social media at rich on Tech.
Check me out on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Steve is in Murrieta, California. Steve, Welcome to the show.
Yeah, Hi, rich G.
Thank to you.
I have a quick question. I just recently upgraded to the iPhone fourteen pro line in you know what the new USBC charging cables? Do I need to throw away all my old chargers because what the cell phone stores are telling me, oh, you got to buy this new high watt twenty five thirty watch charger because if you don't use your old chargers, it's going to ruin the battery.
So I don't know is it a sales gimmick or is there some truth behind the new cables and the higher output charging either the cigarette car adaptor or the wall chargers and or the flat touch chargers.
And which phone did you get?
iPhone fourteen Pro?
Oh?
Nice, nice choice? And you loving that phone so far?
Actually I am. Yeah. I came from the XSS, so it's been a few years since I've upgraded, so I'm really really pleased with it.
Yeah.
Oh nice. Well, okay, so you know they're sort of they're sort of half right in this stuff.
So I don't think that the old chargers are going to ruin the battery on this phone. That's probably not the case number one, it's a charger. It's going to work, it's just going to be very slow. So I think the biggest change that you're looking at here is do you want fast charging on this device? So if you are charging it overnight and and it's just gonna be sitting on the charger for a very long time, you can probably safely use your old cables and chargers and
you'll be okay. Now, what you're referring to is USB C the new charger, So in the box of the new iPhone, you actually just get a cable. You don't get the charging brick that plugs into the wall anymore. And if you look at the cable that you get, it won't plug into your old chargers because they're using a larger size USB port and the new USB is USB C and it's much smaller. So those new cables are not going to plug into the old charging bricks. So do you get a new brick? My recommendation would
probably be yes. And the reason for that is not that you're going to ruin your phone with the old chargers, is that you will be able to charge your phone a lot faster with the new cable setup and The reason that is is because the old phones don't support fast charging. So the iPhone eight and up support fast charging. So you actually had a phone that would you know, fast charge back with your older phone, but you're using the older cables anyway, So I would probably recommend getting
the newer charger. And the one you want is the twenty want USB C charger, and so you can get it from Apple, you can get it on Amazon. I like to get ones that are not sort of like the super duper cheap ones, because you know, it is electrical, it is charging, So maybe pick up a brand that's that's highly rated. You know, there's there's many many out there, but you know, if you want Apple's specific you can
do that one as well. But that's really what you're going to notice, Steve, is that your phone's going to charge a lot faster.
Now.
Apple says that you are going to get about a fifty percent charge in around thirty minutes, and that's if you're using the USB C a lightning cable with one of the fast adapters. And so you want a USB C power adapter that supports USB c PD, which is power livery and you can look on the back of the the you know, if you look on Amazon, it'll basically say if it's a PD, or if you go into a store, just look for one that's labeled PD. And twenty watts is really the magic number that you're
looking for. Here, you can use one that's faster. It's not going to ruin the phone. The phone is going to regulate the charging situation itself.
So but it's a good question.
It's you know, it's one of these things where we have all these cables around, We're we already you know, they're already in different places, whether they're at work, whether they're at home, in the car. You don't need to replace them overnight. But if you're noticing that your phone is charging really slow, that's when you want to replace them. And that's really the only reason that I would see
for that. I you know, when it comes to charging, the iPhone's actually pretty slow compared to a lot of other Android phones out there. So for instance, when I was on a trip and I was using my phone all day long, it was like I'd get back to the hotel room before dinner and I literally could not charge my iPhone fast enough. It just would not charge. And so when you're comparing against something like a Samsung phone that can charge it maybe forty five watts, it's
a lot faster. And then you've got phones like the one plus Android phones that charge extremely fast. I mean they have like super fast charging built in, but you need a very specific charger that they sell and even a specific cable that they sell that for best results. And then the Pixel is somewhere in the middle. So if you had to rank the charging speeds of different phones, it'd be like iPhone at the bottom, then it would be Pixel phones, then it would be Samsung phones, and
then it would be the one plus phones. So charging is definitely a thing. I think it's less important than it was before because these batteries are lasting much longer, but at the same time, it's still a thing. It's you know, it's a big deal to make sure your phone is fully charged up. And also you've got a phone that has wireless charging as well, so maybe think about getting in on that wireless charging situation too. Steve, good question. Enjoy the new phone. I think you'll have
a lot of fun with it. All right, let's talk about Google. This is you know, we've seen all these layoffs with big tech companies. And this is not really a show where we're going to talk about, you know, stuff like this in a big way, because you know, this show is for consumers, so it's how do things affect you? And this is more of an industry wide thing.
We've seen Facebook lay people off, We've seen Microsoft lay people off, and now Google this week, which to me, it just signifies the fact that this giant tech party is over. We're seeing a change in this industry. So Google, they're reducing their workforce by approximately twelve thousand people. And this is the letter from CEO Sundar Pachai. He said, over the past two years, they've seen periods of dramatic growth and they hired for a different economic reality than
the one they face today. And so they're going to take care of these people that are leaving. They're going to give them a lot of several and sixteen weeks plus two weeks for every additional year they've had at Google. But the big kind of takeaway I see is that number one Google has been around for twenty five years, which is just wild. But is that AI is really changing the face of Google's business, And not just AI,
but things like TikTok is impeding on YouTube. It's just a lot of different things are really affecting the way that Google does stuff. And with this AI, especially with chat GPT coming along, we're seeing a whole different world when it comes to the way that Google will do business in the next ten years compared to the last ten years. So thoughts go out to anyone affected by these layoffs, and it's probably not the last we've heard of them. All right, coming up, we're going to talk
about Apple's new laptops. They've got a new fourteen inch model and a new sixteen inch model, plus a new home pod. My guest is going to talk about all of those gadgets, plus your calls at triple eight rich one oh one. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. My name is rich DeMuro. We're talking about the tech stuff I think you should know about and answering your questions at triple eight rich.
One oh one.
That's one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. My next guest is a product reviewer and writer for Wired, and she is also taking a look at the new Apple gadgets. This week, we saw new MacBook computers and also a new home pod Welcome to the show, Brenda Stollier, Brenda.
Welcome, Hi, thank you for having me.
So let's talk about some of these gadgets from Apple. They didn't do a formal announcement, I guess a formal in person announcement. What did you make of how they announced these just by putting out press releases And that's basically it.
Yeah, so whenever they go for the press release option, it already kind of sets this tone that it's likely a more like a marginal upgrade. It requires such a big event because they're not announcing anything so groundbreaking that it requires the production of, you know, a large scale event. So yeah, with and this is kind of part for the course, especially with these MacBooks specifically and the chip sets. So I wasn't surprised that they went with a press.
Release, even though they still did sort of their own event like taped and they played that and it looked like it was an event in person, but it wasn't. It was something that they you know, these slickly produced productions that Apple is now sort of famous for ever since the pandemic. So the products they announced new MacBook Pro with an M two Pro and M two Max chips. This is their own chip inside these laptops fourteen and
sixteen inch MacBook Pro models. Best ever battery life now up to twenty two hours, better Wi Fi so Wi Fi six e, but I don't think most people have that support on their router anyway. As well as better HDMI, it now supports eight K dis plaze and you can also get up to ninety six gigabytes of memory in the Max model, and the cameras also improved ten adyp FaceTime HD availability beginning Tuesday, January twenty fourth. So Branda, what are your sort of initial reactions to these computers.
So, Yeah, the initial reaction i'd say is, I mean it's definitely you know, on paper, Apple loves just throw kind of that marketing jargon out, so you know, it's they're forty percent faster overall or compared to you know, last year's tips. You've got twenty percent greater you know, graphics performance or just overall performance compared to the M one Pro and the M one Max. And so when you're looking at these numbers in front of you, it
could feel like, you know, a huge improvement overall. And I have yet to you know, get my hands on these chips and test them. But initial reaction is that, you know, it's like it's it's not you know, that much greater of an improvement.
Well, I played, you played with the first ones, right, the M So, the M one ship was Apple's first, you know, their own ship. They they've been making their own ship for the iPhone for many years. Then they decided, let's do this for our laptops and computers.
What was I mean?
The M one chips have gotten phenomenal reviews, right.
Yeah, Yeah, they were definitely the groundbreaking tip, I'd say compared to coming from Intel. You know, we saw greater performance, greater battery life, and it was just a lot uh easier to use, like especially because they kind of made this case that they wanted to make it feel like you're using you know, an iPhone or an iPad, so which is kind of tied into the ecosystem, you know, the app obviously with an in house chip play nicer with the with the the MacBooks.
Yeah, they're controlling, they're controlling sort of the hardware and the software and that's what enables them to you know, with these efficiency cores. So with something like final Cut,
you know it's more efficient. But they said, you know, even of Adobe Photoshop imaging processor is eighty up to eighty percent faster than the fastest Intel, forty percent faster than the previous generation, rendering in title animations and motion up to eighty percent faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro, and also twenty percent faster than the previous generation. So the question is now, I have an Intel MacBook Pro sixteen inch, and I'm trying to decide do I go
with that fourteen inch? Do I go with the sixteen inch? But there's no question in my mind this computer is really going to blow away what I've had for the past couple of years.
Would you agree with that one hundred percent?
Yeah.
I mean, if you're coming from an Intel, you're going to see the difference. You're going to feel it in the in the power that it can deliver it to your workflow. Performance is just going to feel a lot smoother. You know, those fans aren't going to be like kicking in as quickly, and it's not gonna be overheating as much. So when you're coming from an Intel to these end series,
you're gonna see a difference. The difference is less so apparent when you are going from an M one to an M two or an M two I'm sorry, or an M one Pro to an M two Pro, because it's really important to remember that there's just, you know, not that much time in between. It's been like a year, if not a year and a half, and so it's.
Yeah, you're not going to see a huge increase from me. I got someone asking me, Hey, should I upgrade from the M one?
I don't think so.
I mean, you're you know, you just these computers last several years, I mean many, many years, and so you know, I get it if you're trying to like squeeze every last bit of processing power out of your computer, if you rely on this for your you know, your workflow and you're editing with large videos and stuff like, sure, you want things to be faster, but I can't imagine that it's going to be worth the price to upgrade this quickly. And you know, everyone's different and everyone has
different priorities. So but to me, it seems like, you know, I'm a pretty heavy power user, and I'm I'm looking at a twenty nineteen MacBook Pro right now, and so my mind is like every three years and I was waiting for these, by the way, Specifically, the fourteen inch MacBook Pro with the M two pro starts at two thousand dollars. The sixteen inch MacBook Pro with the M
two Pro starts at twenty five hundred dollars. Don't forget, if you've got a student in your household, you qualify for that pricing, and so that will take a little bit of money off of there. All right, let's switch gears to the HomePod. This is the second generation HomePod. The first one was discontinued a couple of years ago,
and it got good reviews. I think it was just way too expensive for what it did, and it mostly used Apple Music, and it was three hundred and fifty dollars at a time when everyone was picking up Amazon Echo speakers and Google speakers for under one hundred bucks. So what do we think, Brenda this time around? Do we think that the home pod second generation is going to be worth it at two ninety nine?
So I still very much think that the HomePod is for the audio file specifically, like somebody that really values and the sound that comes out of these speakers and wants it to sound, you know, the best that it can.
And so while they have added in a lot of these new smart home features like you know, room sensing technology and the ultra wide band sound recognition, and just also enhanced the smart home like control capabilities, I still do think that if you're going to get the new HomePod, you should get it for the sound more than anything else.
So a couple of new things in this new home Pod, like you said, the home automations with Siri. I don't know of almost anyone that's using home Kit for their home automations. I mean, if you do great, and I think with matter things you're going to get better. But right now, you know you've got most people are on the Amazon ecosystem or the Google ecosystem, and the Apple
has not taken off in that area just yet. It also has the ability to listen for a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm in your home that's coming in the spring. So if you've got a standard smoke alarm in your home and it goes off, the HomePod will text you on your phone and say, hey, you might want to
check on this. It also has sensors for temperature and humidity in a room, which is cool for home automations because you can use that to trigger certain things, like if you have a fan that goes off when the temperature in the room gets to a certain degree. These are available on Friday, February third, and so again two hundred and ninety nine dollars for that is the price, and it comes in either white or black.
And the other cool.
Thing that you know, they didn't really make a huge deal out of this, but I thought it was kind of neat is that the cable is now removable. So on the first iPad or the first HomePod, the cable was not removable, and now it is.
Yeah, I think that, you know, with all those features that you mentioned, I think it's also important to point out that a majority of these are also available on
the home Pod Mini. And so you know, if we're talking about whether or not, you know, you want to go for the home Pod Many or for you know, the standard HomePod, I would also just take into account like your space, because you know, the HomePod Mini is ninety nine dollars and so you're going to be saving yourself a lot of money, and so just really take into account like what space you're putting it in, how much you know, room you really need to fill with
the sound because at the end of the day, you're not losing out on features when it comes to the Mini. So it's good that they give you those two options now without having to sacrifice capabilities.
All right, Brenda Stoller from Wired, thanks so much for joining me today and I assume you'll be getting your hands on these very soon.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
All right, thanks for calling in, appreciate it. One more thing to know about the HomePod. If you want to pair these things up and use them with something like an Apple TV for stereo sound, you do need to have two of the same exact models. So if you have an old HomePod and a big you know, the new HomePod, you can't pair those up. You got to use the same generation to pair those up. HomePod two hundred and ninety nine dollars.
All right.
Coming up on the show, we are going to talk about Amazon closing its charity program. We'll tell you why they're doing that and what they're doing instead. Plus Instagram wants you to log off, HM, why do they want to do that? The phone lines are open at Triple A rich one oh one one eight eight eight rich one oh one you're listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. This is the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should
know about. It's also where I answer your questions. My name is Rich DeMuro. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles and here on.
The radio with you.
You can also find me on social media. I'm on Instagram, rich on Tech. My website is rich on tech dot TV. We've got Nancy calling in from Corona, California. Nancy, you are on with Rich. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, rich All. I just have a several questions. Explain the cookies to me. Should you accept? Should you not?
That's a good question.
I don't understand.
Okay, yeah, cookies. They have such a nice name, don't they like the It sounds like something you want.
To eat, right, I guess.
Like they They couldn't have come up with a better friendly name for this thing that does good and bad on our computer. So where are you seeing the references to cookies? Are you just seeing it on your computer?
Or where on the computer you go on a company or a website? You know things like that.
Oh, so you're talking, You're are you talking about when you go to a website and it says like, do you want to accept all these cookies?
To be oh.
Gosh, every single website and this is all this is all because of a law over in Europe. Let's say said GDPR is that what it's called General Data Protection Regulation, and so over in Europe they have very very strict privacy rules and regulations, way stricter than here in the US. But the problem is every website does business worldwide, or pretty much every website does, and so they're trying to stay in line with these rules and regulations over in Europe.
At the same time here in the US, we're seeing the same messages on our screen because they don't want to make a different message for every single country that visits their website. So what you're seeing when you go to a website, it's saying do you accept all of these cookies? Do you want to accept some of them? Do you want to accept all of them? Do you
want to accept just maybe a few of them? And every single place you go wants you to go into this setting page and either accept or deny or whatever.
It's a lot of work.
It feels like surfing the web is just you know, so much more work ever since this started happening. So here's the deal on the cookies. Cookies are little pieces of information that help these websites know that you've visited. But also they can be used to help other websites know that you visited a website.
What do I mean by that?
So if you go to a website that sells new mattresses, there might be a cookie on that website that talks to a marketing cookie from Facebook or Instagram or Google, so that when you search on Google for mattresses, the website that you just went to might show up as an ad on Google higher up. Or when you're you know, surfing on Facebook, it may show an ad for that mattress company just to remind you, you know, you came to our website and maybe you're still thinking about buying this.
And so cookies can do various things. They can you know, they can help with marketing of a website, They can record your visit and also they help remember your login, so if you've been to a website you've visited before, it will remember that you've been there. So there's good and there's bad about these. So my thought about the you know, the cookies that you see when it says accept all. Typically, I'm just so frustrated every single time
that I just say accept all. If it's easy to deny all, I'll just press that denial button because it's just simple. But most of the time, when they make you go into that big menu that says you know, there's definitely there's like six different ways of like accepting them, I just say, okay, fine, accept all. There is an extension that I like for Chrome. Okay, and this is the one that I've been using that will automatically accept these cookies or reject them if it can. It's called
I don't care about cookies. So do you use the Chrome web browser?
Yes?
Okay, So if you install this I don't care about cookies And I've tested several of these. There's there's several cookie kind of managers. It basically removes the cookie warnings from many websites, and it will try to deny the cookies if it can. If it can't, it will accept them for you. But it kind of will do whatever it needs to do to get rid of that pop up. So is that something that you think you'd be interested in?
Yeah? I'm going to check that out. I'll check it out.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely care about cookies, but I like more of like the chocolate chip kind of cookies.
You know, you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I know your information goes here and there and everywhere, you know, and I just say no, I don't accept them.
So yeah, if you can say no easily. Not every website lets you do that very easily. Some of them make you go to like the secondary page and it just becomes too complicated. Now, the other setting that I really like is inside Chrome. There's something called third party cookies, and so third party cookies are the most nefarious out of any cookie out there. What third party cookies do is they report to other websites that don't really need
to know about your visit. And these are mostly marketing cookies. And so when you go to a website, sometimes there may be thirty cookies on that website that report to other places. May report to Google, it may report to Facebook, it may report to Instagram, it may report to all
these different advertising networks. And those are the cookies that you don't necessarily want, because why do you need to tell all these advertising networks that you went to a website you don't and yeah, yeah, because it's your privacy, and that's you know, it's look, when you're on the web, there's not much privacy.
Let's be honest. It's just there's not.
But there are certain ways you can reclaim at least some of that. So in Chrome, what I'd like you to do is go to your settings. That's the three dots in the upper right hand corner, next year profile picture. Then tap settings. I don't know why Google doesn't make this easier to find, Actually I do know why, and then go into Privacy and Security, and under there there's an option that says cookies and third site other site data, and then there's there's an option that says block third
party cookies. So I would choose that option. I turned that on on mine, and it basically will try to block any third party cookies on a website. The one thing to know about all of this, Nancy, is that sometimes websites don't work properly when you've got these cookies blocked, and so if that happens, sometimes you might need to go and turn this off for a little bit, or
accept the cookies on that website. The one thing I would not recommend doing is clicking the option for block all cookies, because if you do that, it could really you know, it could make your web surfing just a.
Little bit trickier.
Yeah, does that help?
It helps a lot a lot of information today. And thank you very much for all your information. I truly appreciate it.
You can't go without telling you what your favorite cookie variety is, of the of the actual cookie.
I like, what has a hey honus, Oh.
Okay, that's that's a fancy cookie. All right, Well, Nancy and Corona, thanks so much for calling the show.
Appreciate it.
The phone number is triple eight rich one, oh one one eight eight eight rich one O. One great question, Nancy. Uh, let's talk about Amazon. They are closing Amazon Smile. Now, if you've got a kid in a school or you belong to a church, you've probably heard of Amazon's Smile. This is Amazon's charity program. It started in twenty thirteen and they launched it as a way for people to support their favorite charities. But guess what it is shutting
down after almost a decade. I'll talk more about that when we come back. You're listening to Rich on Tech Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is Rich Jimiro, and this is the show where we talk about technology and answer your questions about technology. The phone number one eight eight eight rich one oh one one, triple eight seven four to two, four to one zero one free call from anywhere.
Give me a call.
We can talk about technology and if you're having trouble with a gadget, or want to compare something, or just need some advice, I'm here for you. So my name is Rich Demiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. You can find me online at rich on Tech. This is episode number three of the show. If you can believe it, Wow, it feels like it's flown by. So it's been fun. You know, I people are still
learning who I am, understanding who I am. Maybe you've seen me on TV on KTLA or one of the other TV stations I'm on. But you know, I'm a dad. I've got two kids, and I'm learning this tech stuff just like everyone else. I just happened to make a job out of it. And so this week I had some good and bad with the kids. So you know, in my house there's a lot of technology. There's a lot of stuff to play with. There's a lot of screens, and I had a really good day with my kid
taking them to the field trip. They had a field trip for school. And you know, back in my career, back in the early days, I probably wouldn't have taken a day off of work to go on a field trip to Dodger Stadium. But I said, you know what, you know, these kids don't get any younger, and so I said, let's do it, and so I volunteer for the field trip.
It was great.
It was really fun behind the scenes at Dodger Stadium. I have so much respect for teachers after being on that field trip because I realized I'm in the right business. I could never be with that many kids on a daily basis. I just can't do it. I don't have the patience. I mean, these kids are jumping, they're running, they're falling, they're tripping, they're you know, pulling on each other's jackets. I mean, it was just wild. Now, they
were well behaved, but this is what kids do. They just play, They jump, they crawl, and so of course my kid was in there as well, but it was so much fun to see, you know, the different kids and how they interact with each other. And of course getting to see behind the scenes at Dodger Stadium here in Los Angeles was really neat as well. So that was fun. Now that was a good day. Then of course there's the bad day. So two days later, I pay got my kid from school and I'm like, where
where's my kid? Where where is he? He's in one of the you know, the spare room and the door is locked, and I'm like, what's going on here? So I opened the door. He's on his iPad and he kind of closes out the screen real quick. Now, mind you, he's eight, and I'm like, all right, what's going on here? You know, what are you watching?
Tanner? Oh?
Nothing, just you know. So I'm sitting there as with an eight year old, and I've got to figure out, now, why is this child closing out the app on his iPad? Like what was so bad that he's watching that? I need to you know that he doesn't want to show me. And of course he switches to a game on his iPad this and that, and mind you, I have my
internet pretty locked down at the house. You know, We've got the filters on there, and we've got you know, different kind of screen time and all this stuff that's enabled. But still somehow when I finally got him to show me, it was a YouTube video. And it wasn't really a bad YouTube video. It was fine, but it was just something you shouldn't be watching, you know, something for maybe a little bit older kids. And I can't even remember what the title was, but it was just something that
was just not very good, right. And so my first question was, Hey, how did you get on YouTube? Because I have YouTube blocked on your iPad and to this minute, I still can't tell you how. So I went through looked at all the settings, and I guess the reason I tell you this story is, you know, not to feel sorry for me, but really to kind of understand that it's tough.
This stuff is really tricky.
I'm sort of a tech expert in all this, like you know, monitoring and these gadgets and this and that, and it's really tough for me to understand what these kids have access to and what they're able to do because ninety nine percent of the time they're actively working against me to try to figure out ways around this stuff. And you know, I've got the filters and I've got the screen time alone. I was just looking at all
the different settings inside screen time. There's so many of them, and to sit there and go through it all is just really tricky for the average person and it takes time. And then, by the way, when you lock down something, then your kid asks you, hey, can I buy this program? Or can I buy this in app purchase? Or can I access this website? You have to go through and
change all the options. So I don't really have an easier solution for you, except for the fact that I hear you, I feel you, and it is not easy. It's definitely a tricky thing with these kids because they're smart. They're digital natives, and they've been they've grown up with this stuff, and so they know, they know how to use it, they know how to get around it. And believe me, they're on all the time with their friends.
And you know, you may have rules in place and other families may not, and so, you know, like I said the other night, there's always a kid on the iPad that's ready to play with my kids. And that's something that just didn't happen when I was a kid. You know, you had to go over someone's house and play with them, you know, or you maybe you talked on the phone with them, but now you have access to a friend at any time of the day, and you know they can play the iPad with your kid.
So it's a challenge, believe me.
All right.
Coming up in the show, we're going to talk about this Amazon smile shutting down. I sort of started talking about it and ran up against the break, So we're going to talk about that. Also, this Instagram, they've got new settings they basically want and I guess this kind of goes into what I was just talking about. They want people to kind of turn off Instagram for a little bit, take a break from Instagram. I've got a great guest coming up, doctor Chris Pearson. He is a
founder and CEO of Black Cloak. He's a cybersecurity expert, one of my favorite people to talk to on KTLA, and he is going to be joining us as well. For now, let's go to Gail in Huntington Beach. Gail, you're on with Rich.
Hi, Rick, Thank you for being there for me. I have a question related to my attempt to cut my cable bill in half as possible with all the increased costs of living these days. That's one thing I think I can do better with because I hardly ever watch regular network stuff. I'm pretty much a streaming person. Occasionally I'll watch one channel, but for the most part, I'm
a Netflix Prime and Paramount user. And so I did did doing all my slooping around, I looked at antennas, and I looked at this that I knew I needed a box, and I came across this product called the Superbox S three, and it seems to me to be solving all my problems at once because I have an old Logitech Elite remote that's dying and I need a new hub for it or a new base, I'm not sure which, And so I'm I'm looking at all these options and thinking, I think that Superbox sounds like a
solution for me. And I'm wondering what you think about So.
I have not heard of the Superbox, but I have heard of similar devices, and these I would fall into what I would call the gray area of legality.
So of what a gray area of legal Yeah, exactly, Well, I'm not I pay my dues and I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that. I just want to access what I want to access.
Well, Okay, So what does this do that something like a fire TV doesn't.
Do, or you know, it comes with a remote, and it comes with cloud storage.
Okay, and does it promise It says allows you to watch local and top cable channels without cable So is there something that it does that I'm still trying to figure out why it's better than something else out there that doesn't seem to promise the world. And also it's three hundred and twenty nine dollars.
Yeah, I know that's a lot. I realized I can go with Roku a lot cheaper. Yeah, but if I want one or two network, if I want ABC or Fox News or NBC once in the Great While, I would be able to get it with this device, right, I don't think so?
No.
I mean it says it's promising every single cable channel out there, including Cinemax, h BO, ABC News, BBC America, CNN Discovery Channel.
Let me ask you this, here's my question bottom line. If this is priating, why is it available on Amazon? Why are they selling it?
Well, I mean Amazon sells a lot of stuff. And number two, the system itself may not be illegal, it's just software. Now, the software on it and how it gets these channels may not always work. And believe me, I get this question all the time from people. They send me these emails that say, Rich, I'm looking at this box and they all have a million different names. The name of this game is that they're going to sell you this box, and it may or may not work.
It may or may not do what it promises to do. And so for that reason, I cannot recommend anything close to these black boxes. Back in the day, people had cable boxes that were black boxes that got all the channels. Sometimes they work, sometimes they didn't. Again, it's a gray area. I'm not saying it's doing something illegal. I'm just not sure what it's doing, and I know for sure that it's not doing what it should be doing. Like something like a Roku box or a fire TV or an
Apple TV. Those are regulated. They've got apps in there that are vetted, and they've got official apps from these providers. This box maybe just getting a stream of different channels pulling it from the internet somewhere. It's just not something I can recommend. So I would recommend something like a fire TV if you want the functionality and have that web browser. I think that's probably the best. Roku is
also a very good choice as well. Apple TV is probably the least flexible when it comes to getting other programming, although you can always mirror your phone from there as well. But I would I'm not paying three hundred and twenty nine dollars for this device. And the reason you know that Amazon sells it is it's software and it's hardware. So what you do with it, you know, it depends on the end user. But it's promising the world. It's
promising every single cable channel. And while it's not saying that, you know, it's illegal, it's definitely not something that is standard for many people. So that is my recommendation. Thanks for calling me and Gail. I would just go with a Roku or a fire TV. I think that's going to be a lot better for what you need and you can easily, you know, lower your cable bill with one of those two things. All right, coming up, we'll talk about Amazon closing this program, we'll talk about Instagram's
new settings. Plus I've got a great guest to talk about cybersecurity. You won't want to miss it. Rich on Tech coming your way, phone number triple eight, Rich one, Oh one eight eight eight rich one oh one. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. This is the show where we talk about technology and the stuff I think you should know about happening in the tech world. My name is rich Demiro, Tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Phone number to the show triple eight, Rich
one oh one, triple eight, Rich one oh one. Let's get your call on today's show. Gail really hit a nerve with me because I was thinking about, you know, it's one of these things where we all want stuff for free, right, I mean, who doesn't want programming for free? And you know I work in broadcast television. We give away our programming for free. But you know, other than that, you want Netflix, you gotta pay. You want Showtime, you
gotta pay. I mean, there's an entire city that I live in that's built up around people making a living making TV shows and movies, and they don't give them away for free. Now, they do if there's ads attached to them, but that's not what we're talking about here. These boxes that let you get these channels or promise these channels. I mean, just looking at the website for the box you mentioned, there's no way that you could get every movie for free, every sporting event for free,
every game you want to watch for free. I mean, I pay eighty five bucks a month for YouTube TV, and somehow this box is promising those same very channels for free. It just doesn't make sense.
Could you do it?
Sure?
Go ahead?
I mean, I can't stop you from paying three hundred and twenty nine dollars for a box that promises the world. But at the same time, do you really want to spend that money on something that's unproven. There's no support for it, it could go away at any time. What's the software update look like? What do the apps look like? How do you install apps on this thing? So if you want programming, you've got to be prepared to pay for programming. There's plenty of free places to watch TV
at this point. There's a service called Tableau sorry Pluto, I'm thinking Tableau for over the air if you want to. If you want to, just set up an antenna so you can do that. But you've got Pluto TV. You've got to be TV. And these are legitimate, you know. These are websites that are created by the content companies that have advertising, and so it's kind of like over the air programming, but on the Internet, and you can do to be Peacock has a level of free. There's
a whole bunch of these things. Roku channel has free.
There's a lot of.
Ways you can watch for stuff on the different boxes from Google and Apple and Amazon.
So, I know Gail.
Didn't like the answer that I had, but I just have to put it out there that, you know, I feel like there's a lot of people that make a living on this stuff. And sure pirating has been going on forever. You just have to choose whether you want to do that. You know, it really comes down to personal integrity.
I think.
Okay, let's talk about Amazon Smile. Amazon Smile is a program that Amazon started to help donate money to charities, and it didn't really cost anything extra for shoppers. Shoppers just had to go to smile dot Amazon dot com, choose a charity, and Amazon would donate a small percentage of whatever they shop For the financial side of it,
they would donate this to charities. And so this started in twenty thirteen, and they said there's been over a million organizations that signed up for this and that used it.
But now they are winding it down. Amazon Smile will shut down by February twentieth, twenty twenty three, and so to help with the charities that are part of this program that are no longer going to get money, Amazon's going to give them a one time donation that's equivalent to three months of what they earned in twenty twenty two through the program. And for some of these charities, they earned, you know, maybe a lot, maybe a little.
I got one person that message me and said, look, I run a charity, and the money we got from this just wasn't very substantial, but it kind of made people feel good, and I think that's why Amazon did it.
But they didn't make.
It very easy to use it, because every time you wanted to use it, your Amazon page would not default to the Smile page, and if you didn't check out through the Smile page, it wouldn't give the donation. So I think that Amazon could have made this a lot easier if they've really.
Wanted to donate.
The website said they donated about four hundred million dollars over the past decade or so, But I mean to Amazon, that's that's you know, to charities, that's a lot of money.
I'm not sure if that was a lot to Amazon.
Once Amazon Smile closes, Amazon is advising charities to seek support by creating a wish list. But see, here's the deal. A wish list is very different than just shopping on Amazon. A wish list you have to go on know the charity, choose the item, and purchase it. Whereas if you go to you know, Amazon's Smile, it's just a portion of whatever you're spending is getting sent to this charity. So I think it was a lot easier that way. Amazon says, look, we're not going to never you know, give money to
charities again. We support a bunch of charities, including housing equity, future engineer charities, community programs for food banks, disaster relief charities, and also community giving, which is, you know, things like youth sport leagues. So Amazon, I think going through a change like every other tech company right now, where they are saying, look, you know, we've got to cut costs in different places. It's sad that this was one of
the places that they decided to cut. But if you have a school or church or whoever uses that, it definitely will be an impact. All right, Instagram, I was talking about this and kind of teasing this throughout the show. Here, this is a new program that Instagram has called quiet Mode. Now we know that these tech companies made the name for themselves by getting us to use them as much as possible. And what that's done is if you don't have any self control, it's really tough to stop using
these programs like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And so these tech companies are now getting hip to this. And it's not because they want to make you stop using it. It's because they fear regulators, and they fear rules and laws that may stop people from using these as much, and so they're trying to do their own thing to keep them from being regulated. And so Instagram knows this.
So now they have this new feature called quiet Mode on Instagram, and it's aimed at teenagers, but anyone can turn it on and quiet Mode kind of functions the same way that you would have on your phone. When you're in quiet mode, they're going to send someone that sends you a message and auto reply. This says, hey, Rich is trying to take a break from Instagram. You can turn on this at night, you can turn it
on any schedule you want. But they're going to prompt teenagers to turn on quiet mode when they spend a lot of time on Instagram late at night. Quiet mode is already available today. You can check your settings to see you know what your quiet mode is enabled for or if you want to turn it on. I think this is a smart thing because we need boundaries. I did a story where teenagers still leave their phone on with the notifications chiming throughout the evening because while they're sleeping,
they don't want to miss anything. That's just wild to me. I can't believe that people would actually do that. So if you're using too much Instagram, use those settings to kind of set some time limits on things. Coming up, I've got a great guest, doctor Chris Pearson, CEO of Black Cloak. We're going to talk cybersecurity and how to keep yourself protected on the Internet. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. This is the show where we talk about tech stuff and answer
your questions as well. Phone lines are open at triple A rich one, oh one. My next guest is a cyber SGUs security expert. It is doctor Chris Pearson. He's the founder and CEO of black Cloak. Chris, thanks for joining me on this Saturday.
Hey, not a problem, can you hear me?
Okay, I hear you. Great, So, Chris. I'm reading this headline about T Mobile and thirty seven million accounts, you know, exposed in the latest data breach, and this is how they play it down on their blog. No passwords, payment card information, social security numbers, government ID numbers, or financial
account information were compromised. Only some basic customer information, nearly of which the type is widely available in marketing databases or directories, was obtained, including name, billing address, email phone number data, birth account number, and information such as the number of lines on the account and service plan features. Sounds to me like they got a bunch of stuff that's pretty good.
Do I want that stuff out there? Probably not.
No, you really don't. What you want is to be able to trust third party, these folks that you are sharing your information with, to actually keep that quote unquote subscriber information confidential. To keep it private. I mean that's part of the job of offering services to other parties. And in fact, that information is useful. It's useful for
missing attacks that the tax that are via SMS. I e via text because now you know the phone number that somebody has for a mobile number, you know their address, you know a little bit about them, and so you can do some social engineering, you could do some fishing, you could do some smishing, and quite honestly, with that text message, that's what most banks, financial accounts and others
use to send a verification code to your phone. If somebody has all that information about your phone, your phone number, your service and all the rest, there are ways that cyber criminals can go ahead and attack you. So it's a lot of subscriber information really juice the information. A lot of it is publicly available, but this is a Trevor research for cyber criminal Yeah.
And these companies, you know, their job is to play is to downplay any sort of data breach, and you know, I get it. That's their job is to say, look, this is not that big of a deal. It's just your name and address and phone number something. You said the smishing, So can you explain that. I think that's the first time I've heard that term. What is smishing?
Yeah, so smashing is going to be phishing via SMS text messages. So just like you receive in your email maybe your Gmail or Yaho. You'll receive an email that says, hey, your PayPal accounts been suspended, your Netflix account, we need new payment information, your bank needs a new credit card. Well, folks are used to answering and seeing messages from their
accounts via text message all the time. Cyber criminals have gone ahead and use that as a mechanism for attack because something like ninety nine percent plus of all text messages get read, and so the bad guys know that you're going to read it, and so what they'll do is say, Hey, this is Larry, account representative from ACME Bank. Your account is going to be locked, your your credit card is going to be locked because we don't have
the right information for you. Click care on this link to go ahead and confirm, reconfirm this information, and then we'll get your account all set. Or maybe it's Hulu and it's a Friday night, or Disney Plus and it's
a Friday night, whatever it is. Those are attacks that are directed towards you as a as an individual, and if you have that number, if you have your cell phone number, can tie it to a person and address other defined information, you can make that attack all that much more likely and believable, and once the person clicks, they're had. They're the bait, they're the target.
And what's so tricky about this new type of targeting is that you do get texts from your bank, Like if you use your credit card and you know, the bank texts you it says, hey, was this you that just tried to make this purchase a best buy? So they're actually using those and these bad actors are taking that kind of twisting it on us to take advantage of us because we don't Sometimes it's tough to tell is it really coming from my bank or is it coming from someone that's just trying.
To get me.
Look, it's one of those things where we expect, we want, and quite honestly even demand, right that our institutions communicate with us via easy to understand mediums, via quick messages so you don't waste our time. And so for text messages, that's quite honestly what we consumers want, and it plays
right into the hands of cyber criminals. And I will tell you even more, it's like when you take a look at when you take a look at the attacks that just happened on Uber and Twilio this past summer and actually we just released earlier earlier today, get it again another attack. These were targeted towards employees via SMS text. So they're going around corporate defenses, targeting employees and their
personal devices. And if you said, well, where can somebody get a treasure trove of information such as all the mobile numbers for everyone who works at this defense company or this high tech company or this BioMed pharmaceutical company, Well you don't have to look any further than this team mobile breach. Unfortunately.
We're talking with doctor Chris Pearson, CEO and founder of black Cloak, a cybersecurity expert. Chris, can you talk about some of the ways to know if your email or password has been compromised, because now you know, people get emails to say, hey, we found your password in a database, or even Chrome will send you a message that says, hey, we found when of your passwords was exposed. Can you tell people how we can figure out how to see that.
Yeah, So there are a few things that consumers can do that are, you know, a little bit easier. We like keeping it easy so people know how to do it and can rely upon it. Like, just like you said, they're baking in identifications of breaches into browsers like Chrome or into other services, so you can use something like that. You can even see some of the same stuff through password vaults, and you can even see stuff through maybe
an external website like have I Been Poned? And what that will do is allows you to look at your email address and then if your email address you so crisitgmail dot com, if that is tied to the T mobile breach, when a treasure trope of information is found on the dark web, when a treasure trope of information is found that has been hacked, and I'll say, hey, you're part of this breach. Sometimes you don't know if
your password is fully exposed or not. The fact of the matter is if your user name has been part of a breach, the easiest thing to do is to just go ahead to that service, whatever it might be, to go to that service, log in, change the password, and make sure dual factor authentication is set up and on the account that'll enable a text message to come to your phone to verify the ownership of that account
or secure it. But there are lots of mediums and mechanisms that people can use to go ahead and understand more about what is happening to their personal information post breach, once it's been stolen, once it's been used by cybercriminals.
So the website you mentioned have I Been Poned? Have I Been Pwned? Dot Com? Now people are going to ask it says for your phone number or email?
Is it okay?
Is it safe to put your phone number or email into this website?
So on this website, what you're actually doing on have I Been Pned Pwned dot Com is you're actually putting your email in there. And what it will do is go ahead and do a lookup of databases that have been breached on the deep web, the dark web. It is in fact safe to put your email addrest in there. We'll confirm the account ownership of that it can and what it will do is just let you know what every cybercriminal can see. So the information is out there.
It's almost like you know a vehicle has been stolen and put in a tracker for your car and you say, hey, has anybody seeing a you know, red BMW sitting in a parking lot in New Jersey. Well, the simple fact matter is that everybody within you know, within visual range,
can actually see that vehicle. So you're not putting yourself at any increased risk of harm whatsoever by placing your email address into a service like this to understand how many breaches your email has been part of and what steps you may or might want to take to go ahead and better secure it.
I've got about a minute, and I'm curious from your standpoint. People always say to me, Rich, I got what are they going to get from me? It's not that big of a deal like what I have. You know, I use these passwords that are simple. Is the average person putting themselves at risk on a daily basis to being breached or hacked or anything.
Yeah, So you know, unfortunately it's the wrong type of approach. You know, just look at your email address and protecting what's actually in your email account, maybe your Gmail account. Literally are the keys the kingdom. So all of your tax information or trusting estate information where you're flying, information about your home relatives, all the rest your pictures when people send them, right they get loaded into Google Drive. All of that is there. There is meaning, There is
value in all those things, whether it be there. We always say this, pay attention to four top things. One email accounts, two your financial accounts, three your healthcare accounts, and four your social media accounts. Those are the big ones to pay attention to. Those do matter. They're worth money to cever criminals. They want them, they want what's in them. And one set stuff is gone. It is
gone forever because it's digital. You can still access it perhaps, but the bad guys now have it and will have it forever. So you really do want to mitigate that rest all right, And.
It's really tough to get those accounts back once they're hacked. Doctor christ Goosh, founder and CEO of Black Cloak black cloak dot Io. Thanks so much for joining me on your Saturday.
I appreciate it.
Hey, not a problem, Take care all right.
Coming up, I'm going to talk about the new feature from Apple. If you own a small business, you definitely want to know about this. I'll talk about that, plus more guests in the show, we're going to talk about digitizing your photos. My name is rich Dmiro. You're listening to rich on Tech.
Back after this.
Rich Demiro here, rich on Tech. This is the show where we talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions at triple eight rich one oh one one eight eight eight rich one oh one. Let's go to Troy in Hollywood. Troy, You're on with Rich.
Hi, Rich, Hi, thanks for taking my call. Rich. My problem is with an old MacBook. I have to twenty ten. The only reason why I don't use it. The only reason why I have it is the photos that I have on it. I'm trying to save to some other device. I've tried many things, and because this MacBook is old, I can't update it past ten point seven iOS lions? Does it have any suggestions?
Does the MacBook still work?
It turns on my photos up there? If I try to, like email a photo I've tried, I can't do that.
Why not?
It may have to do with my settings. Maybe I need to I'm not sure.
Can you get on the internet on this computer?
Sorry?
Can you get on the internet?
Like?
Can you go to Google or any of those websites?
I can?
You can't know.
It's very slow, and it's slow, Okay, it comes on a lot.
How many pictures are we talking about here?
A little over one thousand, maybe twelve hundred, okay.
All right, and so this is just you've been kind of this computer's been lingering around because you don't want to get rid of it because you've got these things on there.
But it's takes.
It just seems to not be an easy process to get these off of.
Their no, and I thought a no brainer would was? I was excited would because I thought I could easily do it with Google Photos.
Yeah, and that doesn't work.
Google Photos doesn't work because my Google out, the Chrome out, it's coming up. I need to update my computer in order to use it.
Okay, got it, got it? Okay.
So here here's a couple solutions that I think. So if you can get this computer on the internet, it's gonna you know, it's gonna take a bit, but I think that your best bet is to drag and drop these onto some sort of cloud based storage program. So
there's a couple that I'd recommend that is easy. First, you can use Google Drive, so if you just want to go to drive dot Google dot com on your browser, and then you're gonna make a folder that says, you know, old photos whatever from this MacBook and then just take the pictures and just try one and drag it in and see if it goes in there, and you can through the web interface drag and drop on to Google Drive.
So that's number one. If that doesn't work, or if it's too slow, or it just doesn't seem to be right. Google Photos also has a web interface which I would recommend, so you can go to photos dot Google dot com and same thing. You can just drag and drop and this works for any picture. You don't have to have an old, you know computer, this, you know, you don't have to download the Google Photos desktop uploader for this, you can try that.
What about?
And then of course there's things like Dropbox. You can just sign up for a free Dropbox account, and I think I don't know what they're given away anymore for free storage. Maybe it's a gigabyte or two. But you can, you know, sign up for Dropbox and go to dropbox dot com. So what I'm getting at is all of these solutions I'm offering are all through the web. So
you don't have to download any special software. Because this computer's so old that any software you're trying to download, it's either saying sorry, we can't do that, or it's not going to on on this program or on this old laptop. And so it's just not a non starter to be able to use one of these programs that's going to be a lot easier and faster. But the webway is the way to go. Do you think that would work for this?
I'm certainly gonna try. My last attempt was buying a stick off yeah Amazon, Yeah, a cheap, a cheap one. But it didn't work for me.
So so you bought I was going to say, because that was my other option is to get a flash drive and to just plug this flash drive into the computer and drag these these these photos over to the flash drive.
That's that didn't work either.
Well you know, I inserted the stick and nothing comes up on the screen. Okay, And I'm not tech savvy, so I know there's some sticks where you put them in and then the screen pops up and you go from there.
But yeah, that doesn't really happen on a MAX so much, to be honest. And also, I think that you would be better off with just a standard flash drive, one that is not a photo stick. Person, say so, if I were, you just go to you can go anywhere. You can go to a you know, a CVS or a Walgreens and just get a little USB stick, put that in. Now, if if it's not showing up on your you know, in your computer or on your home you know, your desktop or in your finder. What you
want to use is an app called disc Utility. And so if you go on your Mac and search for disc utility, that will enable you to format that drive and to make it work on a Mac. Because it may not be formatted to work properly. So write that down disc utility and so that will help you format the little flash drive to work properly. But look, Troy, these photos are out lost. The fact that this computer still works. I think you've got many many ways of
doing this. If you can't figure this out, you can always bring it into like a little you know, data recovery place and they can help you do this. But I think because this computers working, you're you're in.
A good place.
Thank you, Rich all right, thanks so much for calling in from Hollywood. Right around the corner for me. Yeah, all right, have a great day, have a great weekend. I've got some hard drives just sitting around the house that I have been you know, just they're just sitting there because for so many years I've been waiting to get the pictures off these drives. Even though I'm pretty sure I have the pictures somewhere, I just want to
make sure that I have them. And it's one of these things where it's I never get around to it because I just don't want to. It's like the last thing I want to do is sit there and try to, you know, fire up this hard drive and get all this stuff off of there. But you know, and I think I have all the pictures in my Google Photos, But back up your pictures. That's number one. That's I guess my biggest piece of advice is just to please
back up your photos. I personally like Google Photos. If you use an iPhone, you can use iCloud, but just get them backed up.
You can use one drive.
There are so many ways to back up your photos that I get emails all the time from people saying, Rich, I should have taken your advice, but I didn't, and when it's too late. Believe me, the feeling that you get is not good. I've lost a picture or two here or there over the years, and it's just it's a bad feeling. So don't let that happen to you. I also had a computer someone trusted me with their old computer, and they said, hey, can you delete this before you donated or whatever or.
Get rid of it.
We don't know how to do it, just take it. And I knew that they had a bunch of personal information on that computer. And I held onto that computer for like a year before I figure it was really tricky to figure out how to get this thing booted up and to delete the stuff off of it because kind of like the last caller, the computer was just so slow and it was just so it was just
not cooperating with anything I wanted to do. So it happens, but you know, just try to keep on top of these things before you get to a point where your computer's so old and it's just really tricky.
All right.
Coming up, I'm gonna tell you about the new feature from Apple. If you have a small business, you definitely want to know about this. Plus we're going to talk about digitizing your old photos. I've got an in studio guest, the first in studio guest for this show. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome to the third hour of
rich on Tech. My name is rich DeMuro, talking technology, answering your questions and basically helping you stay informed about all the stuff that will keep you safe online, the new gadgets, the new programs, basically anything that I think is interesting that you should know about because I'm following this stuff on a daily basis. I'm the tech reporter for KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Coming to you just about anywhere right now. So thanks for listening. Got
a lot to talk about in the next hour. We're going to talk about digitizing your old photos.
I've got an in studio guest to talk about that.
We're going to talk about Apple's new program to help you if you're a small business. And you can find me online at richontech dot TV. So if you want to see some of the stuff I do for TV, or you're just interested in my Instagram, or you want to talk about my Twitter, or I can't think of an F word for the Facebook.
But anyway, so you know what I'm talking about. You got it.
There's a lot of ways to see what I'm doing online. All right, Let's get to Bob is in Arrowhead, California.
Bob, you're on with Wretch. What's going on?
I have a a pixel sixth bro And the screen started flashing green on the right and then it got worse and worse, so like I finally couldn't read anything, and I went online and they were that's a I guess it's a very common problem. And I called Google and they told me to try a couple of things and they were the same things online and then they told me it was out of warranty and I got it.
That's February, but I ordered it in December and they said a warranty starts on the day place you order, not when you get the device.
M that doesn't see that.
I google that and that's California law really in state to state, but in California, your warranty starts the day you place the order. Well, it takes like six months to get it in to one you warranty. But I wondered if you had any suggestions or wow ideas.
Well, that's that's news to me. That I mean, that makes zero sense. And usually California is pretty ahead of the curve when it comes to consumer protection laws, so the fact that the warranty starts when you place the order makes zero sense to me. I'll have to double check on that one, but I'll take your word for it at this point because you've talked to Google. So basically, you've got a phone that doesn't work. Can you use this phone?
I know it's on because it makes noise and and reacts to things. So but the screen is just as it's on, but I can't see the screen.
So yeah, I can't do anything.
Well here's yeah, yeah, they say hold the power button, then the volume up, will hold the power button and the volume down. But neither of those who do anything.
It's just yeah, so nothing. Okay, So a couple of things here. Here's what I do.
So first off, I think what you're referring to is a the recovery mode to sort of get your phone if it's not responding, to get it back to working. Now, here's the thing. So is this your primary cell phone?
It was, but when it died I ordered a seven Pro.
Okay, so you've got a new phone. So this phone. You just basically want to figure out what to do with this at this point, like to get rid of it or try to recoup some financially off of it.
What what do you want to do with this phone?
I'd like to be able to get it to work, so I could you know, sell it or something? I mean I couldn't trade it in because the screen is blink or you know green, right, Okay, okay, So.
So first off I would I would try the recovery Yeah.
Yeah, I won't want to throw it away because I.
Can't yet you've got data on it. Okay, So I would first off, I would, I would do the recovery mode. So on a pixel again, you know, like you said, it's it's a power. It's a series of buttons that you press and you can look it up online if you look up how Google and so. So it won't it won't restart your phone. When you do that, you can't get to the recovery mode.
I can't get to the recovery mode.
Interesting, Okay, there's also do they talk about this whole like pixel website that you can go to the software repair tool or no?
Do they talk about that?
No they didn't.
Okay, So there is a website pixel pixel repair dot with Google dot com, and you can plug your phone into a computer with a USB cord and that may help.
So I would definitely try that and see if you can access your phone through that way, because it may just come up on your screen to give you the options to fix this phone, So that would be my first choice is to go to this plug your phone in with USB cord to your computer, go to this website pixelrepair dot Withgoogle dot com and follow this instructions on screen and see if that finds your phone. If your phone is on and working and the software can talk to it, it may display on your phone on
your computer screen. Hey, what do you want to do with this phone? Do you want to factory reset it? And at this point that's pretty much what you want to do, is you want to get this factory reset so that you can clear your data off of here and move on with your life. That's the first thing to do. So if that doesn't work and you can't do that yourself, you can bring it to a place like you're in Lake Arrowhead. You can bring it to a place like you break I Fix. They'll do a
free diagnostic and they can tell you what's wrong. And even with their free diagnostic, you may just be able to say, look, hey, if you can get access to this phone, can you just erase it for me and they'll take it. Or you can send it to a place that will safely erase it and take the data.
Now you have to have a little bit of trust.
But there's places like gizmo Go so that they will actually take this phone from you and they will erase it safely and securely and either resell it or recycle it if they can do that, and also pay you anything for this phone if you want. The website is giz Mo g I z m O Gizmoto. Let me sorry, I'm trying to trying to get this website right. I don't want to say the wrong website, cause there's there's another one that's similar, but it's gives g I z m O g O and we did a story with
them on KTLA. They're a store, a local place in Los Angeles, and they will take your device that's not working.
They will safely erase it.
I watched them, I sat down with them, and I saw them take these devices and connect them to computers and erase them and then they'll recycle them or sell them. But that would be my advice for you because you just want to move on. It sounds like you've got a new phone, but I get it. You don't want this phone floating around with your information on it because it's got your personal data. So those are the things
I would do in the in that order. So and hopefully you can get this figured out and move on.
But that's that's unfortunate.
A phone should last more than a year, you know, if you ordered it in you know, less than a year ago, I.
Would push Google a little bit harder on that.
You know, maybe just try to escalate your you know, your call to the supervisor and just see if they can give you a new phone. You'll send them back the old phone, but maybe they'll send you a refurbished ask them to make a one time exception. Those are those are usually the magical words that I use when I'm calling a company and say, look, can you make
a one time exception here? I know this is your rules, and you know rules are you know, they're made to be broken sometimes, So can you make a one time exception and make a customer happy? I bought another pixel? I mean, come on, you can see my second order of this phone. So I think that a little kindness goes a long way with some of these companies. And again getting to that supervisor that can maybe override the
system is also very helpful. So, Bob and Lake Arrowhead, thanks for calling the show.
I appreciate it. Okay.
So I've been talking about this new tool from Apple. If you own a small business, you got to know about this tool. It's called Apple Business Connect, and it's brand new. It's from Apple, and it's the equivalent of a new tool that lets you update your business listing across iPhone, across Apple Maps, across messages, across Apple Wallet,
Siri and other apps on the iPhone. And so if you own a small business and you want to update your phone number or your website or a special offer, typically you would just have to wait for Apple to find this information online or through a data broker, or through some sort of third party system, and then update that information in Google Map or in Apple Maps. With this new tool, you can go and do this directly.
It's a lot faster and it's a lot quicker. So now businesses around the world can directly manage their information in the Apple Maps place card. So if people use Apple Maps to look up your business, they will see the information that you updated. That includes your photos, your logos, and any links you want. So, if you run a restaurant and you want to put a link to your menu or a link to your reservation, how they make
a reservation, you can do that as well. You can also do something called showcases, which is a special offer. So if you have a seasonal discount or sorry, a product discount or a seasonal menu, you can put that on there. So again, this is really just the ability to update your business listing across the iPhone. Now I understand that many people use Google, many people use Google Maps.
This is sort of Apple's equivalent of saying, you know what, We're going to take this stuff a little bit more seriously. We're not just going to rely on third parties to update this information. We're going to let businesses update this information themselves. Google has something I think it's called the business Let's see Google Business Manager.
Let's see if that's what.
It's called Google Business Profile. So if you have a business, a small business, you should be on this as well. So if you type in Google dot com slash business, you can update your business on Google Maps and things like that. So it's very important to do that. This
Apple website, Apple Business Connect. If you want to go to this website, let me just get what the website is exactly, because it's Apple and they're a little bit different here, and you do need an Apple idea to do this, but it is business connect dot Apple dot com. Business connect dot Apple dot com. If you have a small business, definitely update your information across these two platforms because you know you've got a billion Apple users out there,
and you've got many many Google users as well. So if you want your business to be found, you want that accurate information, do that for sure. Coming up, I've got a great guest. He has helped many many people digitize their old photos, so we're going to talk about the best ways to do that, how he can help, of course, and also just the idea of all these pictures laying around your house, you want to get them digital. So we're going to talk talk to Mitch Goldstone. Coming
up next. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. This is the show where we talk about tech stuff and answer your questions.
I have my.
First in studio guest here. I'm very excited. We're going to talk to Mitch Goldstone of scan my Photos. He gosh, he's helped so many people scan their pictures over the years, including mine.
And so if you've.
Got that pile of pictures sitting in the closet and you're thinking, I know I need to do this. He's going to offer some great tips on how to do that and why you should do it. I think that's the most important thing, because you know, we talked about losing digital photos, but imagine losing physical photos and that's what's happening. So we're going to talk to him in the next segment. It's gonna be a lot of fun.
Let's ste another call, should we hear?
Let's see we've got Jeffrey in New York, New York. Jeffrey, welcome to the show. You're talking to Rich on Tech.
Hi.
How you doing?
Rich?
Oh?
I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing? How is the weather out in the East Coast.
Where you're all stopping ground? Is thirty seven degrees right now? We're in Rockland County. I know you're a Jersey boy.
Nice yep, I am.
I should know my geography better out there. I mean I've heard of Rockland County obviously, But anyway, so what's on your mind today?
It's something that I went to one of the local oppa stores today and we've got any issues with his battery for twelve but they suggested a mag Safe. You know, battery for it, you know the clips on the back, but I say're pricing a little bit high. I wondered if you know and you'll turn it in. Plus I know you could get mag Safe speakers too, because I kind of look on Amazon and kind of order it wise.
You know right now, Oh you did nice.
Yeah, Once you go down this mag Safe road, it's actually pretty fun and it's it's one of the advantages that the iPhone has over Android, but only for a little a little longer because they are gonna reconfigure the way that wireless charging works on androids very soon and it will work in pretty much the same way mag Safe work.
So Apple kind of gave.
That it's called the Chi Consortium, which is like the wireless charging people kind of gave them the information about mag Safe and said, you know what, you can use this for all your phones now because it's it's anyway. Apple basically took the standard and they said, this works, but we're going to try to make it work better. And that's how they made the magnet and how everything
aligns perfectly, which gives you more efficient charging. So you've discovered that, so what you're trying to look for a battery that clips onto the back of his phone.
Yeah, his battery life isn't that great. Plus he's always on. We went there and they said he's on TikTok a lot. So they said, that's not gonna see So.
Well, what kid isn't basically okay? So I like, I've been testing a lot of these things. I carry a bunch of them around, so I always have a wireless mag Safe battery. I'm going to my website rich on tech dot TV. I've got a whole bunch of recommended gadgets and I'm going there because I like this Belkan one. But I want to get the name just right. And so if you go to the one from Apple, theirs is probably the most expensive which Apple sells in their store.
Obviously it's probably, you know, sixty bucks something like that. This one I like from Belkan is wireless power bank with mag Safe. It's thirty nine to ninety nine and so it will work with all of the different gadgets. The thing you want to look for in a mag Safe wireless charger is the capacity. So the capacity is going to give you the amount of charging time, like how many times you can charge his phone. So this
one is pretty thin. It just has twenty five hundred million powers, which means it's pretty much going to charge your iPhone once. That may not be sufficient for your child. He may want I was it here or she I didn't get that part, okay, So he may want something that's more like five thousand million hours. But the bigger the battery is, the larger it's going to be physically, so it may be tough to actually hold the you know, the battery on there at the same time as holding the phone.
Does that make sense.
Yeah.
The other question with that is will it charge while it's on both batteries?
Does it works?
Uh?
Yeah, it'll Oh you're saying you want to charge the battery while it's wirelessly charged while it's wirelessly on the phone.
Yeah, you phone told me you could plug it into the mag safe and it'll charge the phone well through it or something.
Uh, okay, So the mag Safe battery attaches to the back of the phone. It will charge it wirelessly. You can also plug a cable into the from the phone into the battery and it'll charge it that way as well, but you wouldn't want to do those at the same time.
Right, Okay, yes, but I met is the Balkan one.
Yeah, yes, And that's the other thing to look for is USB C And you know, in portable chargers in general, the wattage that they have, like the the watts like this one's a seven point five watt. The maximum wattage that mag safe can do, I believe is fifteen watts, and it's it's kind of rare that you find a lot of wireless charging banks that do that. The higher the wattage, the faster it's going to charge your phone.
So if he's on TikTok and he's looking for this thing to charge it, like in real time while he's on the phone actively, it's probably not going to be the best solution. Like I think a wired solution would probably be better. But you mentioned that there is some sort of issue with the wired so maybe that's not that's why he's looking at wireless because he still has that option.
Yeah yeah, and that's when he's home, we're gonna have it plugged in. Okay, Well that's play on the road. I figured because you've been using it, like you said, like every other kiddies or about home crazy.
Yeah, this is this is a whole thing. I mean, this is like basically my entire life is keeping my iPhone charged at all times, so especially when I'm at like an event like CEES or any of those things. Like I am, I'm a stickler for just trying to charge my phone at any given time that I'm not using it, because that's really the thing that you want to do, is make sure that when you're not using it, you're having it charged, and even when you're using it, it'll
be fine. But they're plenty of these out there. There's another company that I like called my Charge, and so they have another portable power solution that I like that I've tested and it.
Works really well.
It's called Maglock, and so it's not necessarily mag safe, they don't use that term, but it does work with mag safe cases and so that will work as well. And they've got three different sizes. One is pretty pretty large size.
Let me see which one that is.
They've got a nine thousand million amp hour which will give you an extra forty eight hours of battery life on top of your iPhone. So and yes, they have speakers and all kinds of stuff. So mag Safe fun thing to have on the iPhone that is on the iPhone twelve and up I believe, so if you have the iPhone twelve and up model, definitely check out mag Safe. Coming up, we're going to talk scanning photos. You got
a bunch of photos at home. We're going to talk about how to get those digitized so you can save them forever. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech. I've got my first in studio guest. Mitch Goldstone is founder and I'm assuming CEO of scan myphotos dot com. This is a website based in Irvine, California that has helped many many people scan their physical photos. And we all have that box of photos laying around the house that you want to get to one day,
but let's make that today. Mitch, Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here in person.
Thanks rich you know it's it's so wonderful to be your first guest. But I've been learning from you since I'm going to date myself seen it.
Wow, It's been a while since I was at CET, but thank you and I appreciate it. And you know I followed your stuff. I actually did a story with you. I don't know how many years it's been at this point with KTLA where we talked about scanning photos and even back then it was important to do this, and that was probably five, six, seven years ago. Tell me about the state of the business, like, are people doing
this on a regular basis? I assume so, And why do you think it's important that you digitize your fair photos?
They are rich When you did the segment, sadly it was before COVID and the pandemic. When that hit, there are people that had to rush to prepare for memorial services. And that's where we kind of reinvented the business because people couldn't wait weeks months. Everything had to be done the same day. So that was a big part of the change.
And so what what do you do?
You've got I remember when I came there, I just saw like palettes full of like boxes that people send in. Are people so clearly people are comfortable mailing pictures in to be scanned.
How safe is that?
Because that would be the first question I'd have is like, I live in you know, Kentucky, I'm sending you pictures.
Is this going to make it through the system?
Okay, sure, We've preserved over a billion pictures. We never lost anything but excuse me. And at CEES, I spent an hour with the US Postal Service executives discuss that very question, and what they loved is that people trust them the US Postal Service with delivering the most precious possessions photos and even on the website on the homepage was a link to the commercial they made, which no small business gets commercial from USPS.
It's kind of an honor what you were in there.
Yeah, so okay, so how does it work? So I order from you, I get like a box. Do you send me a box or do I just find a box of the post office and just throw my pictures in there?
And what we do we do for smaller orders you could just send in your photos, slides, home movie film, all of that. For larger orders, just go to the website and you get a prepaid box. Fill it up with your photos, slides, movie film as well, send it to us and the coolest new features. If you select express scan fast, we do it same.
Day, so you'll as soon as you get those in you're going to scan them. And then when I did it, it was like a flash drive or a CD. I can't remember, but now, well you'll just directly upload these two online site that I can download immediately.
Indeed, so we have the DVD data desk for all the files, regular DRAPEG files, they're yours, are not locked or anything like that, or a flash drive, a gigabyte flash drive. Most people now select the upload service. So as soon as your images, your photos, slides, home movie films are digitized, you get an email and you click on it and all your resolution high five files are there.
And so speaking of resolution, when I was doing this myself, you know, because you can if you have a printer that's got the flatbed scanner. You know, if you have a couple of pictures, it's easy to do this yourself as well. Which and I highly recommend that you no matter what, just do it, Like whether you use you know, a website or you send them out or whatever, or you do it yourself.
Just do it.
That's the important thing. So what resolution do you recommend that we scan our pictures?
In act?
Because I've noticed there's like, you know, six hundred or three hundred do I need to do.
The high resolution photos for images that you want to make enlargements of historic photos? All of that, you should always select the highest resolution, but we had a lot of customers that were saying they just want their photos digitized to upload to social media. Scan my Photos now is a content provider for all photo sharing apps, whether
it's Instagram, Facebook, Snap, all of them. But what people are doing is they just want the files to be uploaded so they don't need to be that large because we're talking about large quantities of photos. Five thousand photos. Someone sent in twenty thousand slides just this past week, and we have the new slide Carousel service, so we digitize the slot entire slide carousel.
Wow.
I loved watching the machines at work at your facility because they just so fast. They're so fast and they just work really really well. Have you ever lost any photos?
We've not, but man our customers have and it's so heartbreaking. We get messages all the time, Hey, you digitize my photos ten years ago to twelve years ago, fifteen years ago, I lost them, fireflood, whatever do you have them? And it was because of so many people saying they lost their photos that we added a new archival service. We're working with Amazon where everything is uploaded on our side securely in the cloud. So if you had an order
and you selected to have us archive it. It's there permanently. But I don't want to be the depository of your photos. I want to please for you to save copies offsite, make extra copies, give them to friends. You mentioned Google Photos wonderful source, and also in a safety deposit box. Even please make lots.
Yeah, don't just have that one copy.
That was my favorite thing about getting my photos digitized. And by the way, when I got my photos digitized, it was just my personal collection. I still have a lot more. My mom's garage is like an untapped resource and she won't really let me in there to do this. But one of these days I will go in there and get these pictures and send them in because I I really want to see all these pictures of me
as a kid and my siblings and my parents. But what was so fun about getting these pictures that I had just a couple of them digitized, is throwing them into Google Photos and it does its magic. Where it was finding my grandfather and my grandmother and putting it in their little face kind of recognition system. I mean, that was really incredible, even with video. People may not
realize this when you digitize a video. Google Photos will go through that video and identify the people in that video, and then when you click on their face, you'll see that, oh, they're in this video for my birthday party when I was eight or whatever. I mean, that's pretty incredible. It's just I mean, once you get these pictures back, I imagine your customers just spend time just like sitting there and looking at them for a while.
So much.
I have a great story. But I'm that too with Google Photos. With videos, it's also a home movie film where scan my Photos digitizes each frame so you can actually capture a single frame to share it. But a great story you mentioned about your mom and trying to get those We have a CBS News correspondent had one hundred boxes of slides from his mom that somehow he was able to get away from her. We digitized it same day, so that night they got a link. They got all of them, and it was for his mom's
ninetieth birthday. He had a whole big celebration, the whole family there and everything was digitized fifty years ago from New York City from the World's Fair. Images that people haven't seen ever before. That's why it's so important.
We're talking with Mitch Goldstone, founder of scanmyphotos dot com. Mitch, I know that recently Costco has gotten rid of their photo processing facility in stores. This business of pictures, like when I was a kid, you would have one ten film, then thirty five millimeter film. You'd bring it to a place like remember those little like tiny places they had in parking lots where you like a photo processing facility,
You put it in an envelope. They would give you the pictures like a week later, and you'd be so excited to see what those pictures were that was on that role in ninety percent of them were just trash because you know, you didn't see what you were taking a picture of. What do you make of this changing industry now that everything's digital, we're taking more pictures than ever. Is your job ever going to be done getting these old pictures digitized?
Not at all.
They're trillions of images. Big thing though, is most people are just uploading recent pictures. I'm sure your listeners are smirking now because they're also uploading pictures from their smartphone camera role basically if they're like me, of the food they ate last night. Sure, but not from the World's Fair in New York City.
All of that.
Costco is very interesting because my partner Carl Berman, and I started as retail photo lab owners in Orange County and everything changed. Our biggest competitor was Costco. I remember people would walk in and say, well, I'm not going to pay you, I can just go to Costco.
And there's a lot cheaper. It was a lot cheaper, and.
It was cheaper, less expense, I should say, less expensive and cheaper. But what Costco just announced now is really troubling because they close down their pitt labs at Costcos and they just announced they're closing down online Costco, which was a really great feature. You could upload all your photos, print them everything, and they transferred all of that to Shutterfly.
I'm not sure exactly what the arrangement is because Shutterflies discounted prices so much anyway, But the biggest thing is that that segment has disappeared its retail, the photo labs, all of that stuff, even from Back to the Future that Kiosk in that scene with the Dolorean, all of that has disappeared. But what hasn't disappeared but is disappearing or all the photos, all the slides, all the home movies. They're getting old and they have to be digitized and backed.
Up and very quickly.
Do you recommend if you still have the film like let's say you remember how when your pictures came in the little packet and it had the film roles like sliced up, would you recommend that people get those digitized or just just scan the pictures.
We do all of that too with negatives.
Meetium for negative forgetting. It works exactly.
And you know, it's a great question because some people want to digitize their negatives. Just send your photos to us. The quality is so we never had anyone say I don't like the quality of the photos, so please do the photos.
It's a lot less money.
But not to say that negatives aren't important to to digitize, all right.
Mitch Goldstone of scan my Photos dot Com down in Irvine, But you don't have to go there. Can you still drop off if you wanted to, if you didn't trust the mail or whatever.
We're headquartered in Irvine, but only about ten percent of our business is from California. It's all over the country, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, all all over for that. Even on the website if you go to the top, I think we just added a promo code for rich on Tech.
Oh nice, use that promo code rich on Tech. Mitchicoldstone, thanks so much for joining me first in studio guest here on the rich On Tech Show. Coming up, we are going to talk about the best journaling apps and this calculator that can help you determine if you should pay for your travel with points or cash.
You're listening to.
Rich on Tech, Laura, perfect song for the end of the show closing time. Ah, yes it is. But before we go, we got a couple of things to talk about. Rich Demiro here rich on Tech, hanging out with you talking about technology, and you know, I have started to journal. I think that journaling is very important. I think it's good for your well being, for your mind, and also it's just kind of fun because you're like, who's going to read this in the future, Like, who's going to
read what my thoughts are in the future. And so I've been testing out a bunch of apps and I do have my favorite, and actually I switched, but let me go over the apps that that I tested first up. Clearful,
this is an app that I really like. I interviewed the founder and it's kind of what's neat about it is that every day it gives you a question to answer, and that makes journaling very easy because you may sit there and look at this blank page and say, I don't know what to say, So this gives you a question to answer on a daily basis. You can use it, you don't have to use it. It's also available for iOS and Android. It's called Clearful. I really like that.
That's one of my top apps. Next up is Reflection app, and I like this one as well. They're very similar. Clearful and Reflection almost look and feel the same. The slight edge I like about Reflection is that not only does it give you starter phrases, so you can say something like I'm feeling or I've been thinking about or I'm grateful for and you can also make your own prompts as well, so you have to upgrade to a
paid plan to do that. But what I like is it has this little light bulb button, very similar to Clearful, except you press that button when you want a question. So maybe every day you don't need a question, but you can just press that button and get a question, which I really like. Tangerine is Good was not my favorite, but this is more for overwell, overall well being. It helps you track your daily mood and your habits. That was not my favorite because I'm not one of those
people that's like trying to form a new habit. I mean, I know I should, but I just I don't know, not this year, maybe next year. And then the other one I really like is called Day one. Now this is more of a journal that is almost like a personal blog, so it's not so much focused on that daily question, although they do have daily questions. But this has so many features and you can add photos, you can add files, you can add audio. It's almost like
your own private Facebook feed for your memories. And I also like how this has apps available across everything iOS, Android, desktop, browser extensions, and it's just really slick. And actually I started out using one of these other apps and I switch to Day one because I had been using Day one as a journal. But then I was like, well, I want kind of a work journal. So now I have two journals inside my day one. One's a work journal, one's a personal journal. And when I want a question,
I can answer it. When I want to do work stuff. It's almost like just a personal blog for me, and I really really like it. Again, all of these apps, they're all free at the base, but if you want to use a lot of extra features, you're gonna have to be prepared to pay just a little bit extra. And for day one, after using it for two days, I paid I think it was twenty five dollars for the year, and it's well worth it because that's like two dollars a month for this feature, for.
All of those features.
And the other thing you want to look for when you choose a journaling app is make sure that it's encrypting your information, because you want this to be secure, but also maybe you want to give someone the keys to this so that later on, you know, I don't want to think about the worst, but you know, you don't want to just write this and have it disappear.
You want maybe your legacy to have this and to read what you're doing, thoughts were, and what your feelings were on things, and what you went through in your life that your kids may enjoy at some point when you're no longer around. It's just really it's weird to think about, but it's it's kind of strange. I mean, it's just very very kind of weird, but kind of cool too. So again day one, if you want to see all these picks, you can go to my website rich on tech dot tv.
I thought this was cool.
I was planning a trip to New Jersey with my kid and I was like, is it better to pay for this trip using cash or my points? And I know that you can go on websites and see how much a point is worth. You know, Delta point is worth this amount, United Point is worth this amount. But the points to at the pointsky dot com makes it really easy. So if you go to the points guy dot com slash calculator, you just type in the loyalty program.
So if it's Southwest and you want to figure out if it's better to use Southwest points versus your cash, you put in Southwest. It asks you for the cost in points or mind, so you can put in let's say it's twenty five thousand points.
For that flight. And then fees.
You know, some of these things have like a little tiny fee attached. Sometimes it's small, sometimes it's big.
Let's just say the fee is.
Six dollars for taxes and then we compare to cost and cash. So let's say this flight was actually two hundred and sixty seven dollars. You press calculate, and now it says if you use cash, you're gonna save one hundred and fourteen dollars. It's saying that the points guys estimating the points are worth three seventy five plus six dollars compared to the cash price of two sixty seven, you're gonna save.
One hundred and fourteen bucks.
So again, that's at the points guy dot com slash calculator. It's one of these things that I feel like I would have known about for a long time, and I've been doing these calculations myself. But now that I know this website, I'm just gonna use that and I know the points Guy. Believe me, I've interviewed the points Guy great success story, sold this website or created this website and just just did very well for himself. So this is really really cool. Brian Kelly, great great guy knows
a lot. I follow him on Instagram now he knows a lot about travel. He's always going somewhere. Finally, one feature you want to change on your password manager is how long the password manager stores passwords on your clipboard, so there's a setting inside the password manager app that
you're using to clear the clipboard contents. Not every one of these password managers clears the contents in a timely manner, So you want to make sure that you have this setting that says, hey, clear this after thirty seconds, so that anything you copy and paste with your password is not stored on your phone and a hacker may have access to that. That's a PSA from TechSpot dot com. Very very smart to do because these clipboards, a lot of them now is just save things for a long time,
and so you definitely don't want that that save. So I'll put all these links. I'm gonna put them all my website rich on tech dot tv. Be sure to find me on Instagram at rich on tech. Can you believe it? But that is going to do it. For episode number three of the show, when they said rich you got to sit here and talk about technology for three hours, I was like, how am I going to
do that? But clearly it can be done. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, you can go to richon tech dot tv, hit the email icon you can find me on social media including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at rich on Tech and don't forget to check out my KTLA TV segments on YouTube. Next week I'm testing out a fitness tracker that attaches to your sneakers. Plus i'll talk about a new competitor for Facebook. My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There
are so many ways you can spend your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here with me. I'll talk to you real soon.