High tech, pat insurance and epic Twitter hack, t mobile tackles, robocalls plus your tech questions answered?
What's going on?
I'm Rich Damiro and this is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer the questions you send me. My name is Rich Damiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Still safely at home for month number four? Now did anyone ever think this would go on this long? I don't
know why I didn't think it would. So when I first came up to my boss back in March and said, Hey, are we doing this whole work from home kind of thing?
I didn't know.
What to expect him to say, And sure enough he said, yeah, I think you should. And it was kind of a big departure from what I was used to. And now that I've been doing it four months, it's really wild to think how long did I think this was going to go on for? Did I think a global pandemic was going to be solved in two weeks? Now wondering when it's ever going to be solved. So I've been safely at home I've been learning a lot about myself, a lot about my family, a lot about friends who
I never see anymore. But the biggest thing I think that I'm taking away from this is just how fragile everything in life is that we take for granted. Whether it's going out for dinner, whether it's going on a road trip, whether it's traveling somewhere, seeing my family. My family lives out in New Jersey, and just all those things are jobs, they've all been impacted.
School, all these little things that.
You just make up the fabric of everyday life have been impacted by this pandemic. Going to the dentist, going to the grocery store, going out in your car. I was, you know, I usually drive for stories to different places around Los Angeles, and I have not done that very often. We go to some stories, but every time I do, when I get in my car, it's just this feeling of like this is weird. I'm not used to being in my car. I've had my car sit for four or five days at a time now on the street
without even a thought. Whereas it used to be every day you get in your car, you go to work, you drive, you commute, you come home, you go to the gym, all these things that we no longer do. I've been working out in the house. I mean, everything happens in our home right now. It's just weird. Anyway, I'm doing okay. I hope you're doing okay. I know that we're all getting used to this. I don't want
to get used to it for too long. But with the school year coming up, the reality is that it sounds like the kids are going to be at home once again, which is going to create a lot of technical challenges for parents and especially working parents, especially to working parents.
But we're gonna get through.
This, and we're gonna figure it out, and I have no doubt life will be back to normal at some point, but at this point, it doesn't seem like that's ever going to be possible again. But it's you just have to take it every day. You got to take the good, you gotta take the bad. And I'm trying to keep
a positive attitude throughout this whole thing. Some days, as I'm sure happens with you, are better than others, and on those days, you feel a little bit kind of out of sorts, just kind of thinking about everything that's happening, and then other days it's not so bad.
When you're sitting there having.
Dinner with your family or playing with your kids, it doesn't seem that bad. But then when I go to make a haircut appointment, all of a sudden, the reality sets in again that oh, salons are closed again.
So we'll take the good, will take the bad.
I hope you're doing okay, and I hope that this podcast is a tiny escape where again I like to talk about the stuff that happens in the tech world that I think consumers should know. This is not a nerds podcast, This is not a insider podcast. This is a podcast for people that just have a smartphone, are trying to figure out Zoom, trying to figure out the iPad. That's what this is all about. Let's get started with the first story of the and this comes from T Mobile.
I watched their big T Mobile uncarrier move yesterday and I'm always curious what T Mobile is gonna do. This was the carrier that was kind of like the little engine that could for many years because they were the little guy.
You had Verizon at.
And T Sprint and then T Mobile, and T Mobile was always trying to challenge the status quo.
Now that they own Sprint.
I hope that that progress continues. I'm not so sure it's going to continue in as big of a way as it did previously when they were sort of the underdog. And now that they're just one of the big carriers like the other two big ones, will they do as many things that are in the interest of the consumer?
I hope so.
So the latest uncarrier move is something called scam shield and I do think this is cool, but you know, you see what you think of it. So number one, T Mobile is going to do free scam id and blocking. So if you get a suspicious call, and robo calls are a huge problem. I get them all the time. I'm sure you get them all the time, and it seems like we have the technology to get rid of
these things, but why are we not. So T Mobile is doing something called free scam id and blocking, So suspicious calls are going to be flagged and it'll say that right on your phone as someone calls, hey, this is suspicious, this is potential spam. We're already seeing that from the major carriers, but T Mobiles taking it a step further by letting you block those calls so you never see them again again, something that I believe you can turn on with other carriers. I've been too lazy
to do it, but maybe it's out there now. The feature I think that's really cool is free caller ID. So T Mobile is giving free enhanced caller ID to all of their customers on the higher end plans, which is basically they're unlimited plans, so you know what the number is that's calling, which, uh, I mean, why didn't hear that's what I meant to do? Why don't we have this before? I mean has been around on landlines forever.
Remember when you have to sign up for it and pay for it if you still have a landline, maybe it's included now, but caller ID just seems like a given. Why do we have to pay for this? And with other carriers you do have to pay for it. T Mobile says that other carriers charge up to eight bucks a month. There's a whole bunch of apps you can download to get caller ID. But now if you're a T Mobile customer, it's included in these plans and that's fantastic.
So that's going to help a lot, especially with business numbers, you know, if it's a verified business. The other thing they're doing is called a T Mobile proxy. This is a secondary phone number, and this is a virtual phone number that they're giving to you on your account. And this is a phone number that you can freely give out anywhere without worrying about it. Because guess what, you can turn off the ability for this phone number to ring.
It will still ring.
It will You'll still get your voicemails from it, you'll still get your text messages from it, but it's all virtual and inside and app So the default is that this will ring your primary number, but you can turn that off in a heartbeat.
So how is this good? Well, when you sign up.
For car dealership inquiries, when you sign up for a supermarket club card, when you give your number out to the gym wherever, it's still a real working phone number that people can reach you on, but you give it out to those folks that might share it with others and in turn might get you more robo calls. That's pretty brilliant. You do have to activate that. Then you can also change your number for free. So I think
it's about fifteen dollars. Last email I got from a viewer said, you know, at and T or Verizon wants to charge me fifteen bucks to change my phone number, and I said, well, that seems crazy. Well, Tea Mobile's doing that for free. They're doing a whole bunch of other things, but that's the reality. Those are the big changes. That's the scam shield protection. I think it's great, and to be honest, I'm actually considering a switch to T Mobile because I do believe that they have the customer's
interest at hand. I don't know if they have the network to back up the quality and coverage that I want. I'm very happy with what I have right now, but I'm willing to give up maybe just a little bit of that for a company that I feel like does have the customer's best interest at mind. And also hopefully these things force the other carriers into doing similar things. I know that Verizon T Mobile was the first to kind of push the unlimited envelope, and then everyone else
followed suit. Now the other thing that's changing, and I think this is very important for consumers, is that Sprint is going away on August second. August second, twenty twenty, say goodbye to Sprint and it will be T Mobile. Now, now, before you go crazy and worry about your whole plan and everything, all that stuff is going to stay the same. Yes, they're going to try to eventually push you to a T Mobile plan, but right now, if you have Sprint,
they're not saying that anything's going to change. You will get your service just fine. Everything will work exactly the way it works. But as a company, they are going to switch over to T Mobile, including all their stores. So if you have a Sprint store in your neighborhood, boom, it's going to be a Tea Mobile store and they're going to paint them all that T Mobile magenta. Now, for me, this is kind of sad because I'll be very honest, when Sprint first came out in the United
States and cell phones were just kind of starting. I remember, and you may remember this, Sprint PCs as it was called, had all these billboards around town and they were all clear and they said, the difference is clear.
And what I loved about Sprint.
PCs, even though the network was kind of garbage back then, was that it was a all digital network. And to me, as a nerd, as a teenager, whatever I was, I loved the idea of being on a brand new purely digital network PCs Personal Communications Service I believe is what it was called.
So I switched to Sprint.
I had them for many years and they were kind of horrible because the service was either you had it or you didn't. With cellular, when analog cellular was around, and I know if you're too young to remember this, analog cellular, the signal went in and out.
It was like.
Shyn hear, hear you. It was like it was a radio signal. And when digital came out to me, it was just so cool. It was either all or none. You either had it or you didn't. And that's when we started hearing that, which is what we have right now.
So long story store.
I'm kind of sad to see sees the Sprint brand go away, but it's still you know, we'll see. All right, Let's move on to the first question from a listener, and this is Jerrelyn. Jerlyn says, I was emailed an e gift card for one hundred fifty dollars from Sam's Club as a promo for purchasing an iPhone. Two days later, someone in Allentown, Pennsylvania, charged purchases using the entire amount. My email does not appear to be hacked, but I'm more worried about my email account than one hundred and
fifty dollars. How should I go about ensuring none of our other email documents have been compromised?
Well, that's a good.
Question, and I know that there are there are a lot of issues with gift cards, and if you're getting an e gift card that's email to you, it seems like that should be pretty straightforward. And if it's getting email to you in a secure way to your email account,
you should be fine. But the fact that someone was able to use this amount two days after you got it is very scary to me, and I would think about that when it comes to your email, because there could be someone with access to your email if this account or if this card was used. Now, I don't know, I feel like that is a stretch. Maybe this was just a fluke, and I hope you can get your
one hundred and fifty bucks back from Sam's Club. But what I would do is go into your email account and check the permissions, and number one, I would go into security settings, no matter what email account you have, and log out your account from all other locations. So there should be something in the settings that says log out all other sessions of this email.
So maybe you left your email open on a pub computer.
Maybe you left it open on cell phone that you sold to someone and they're still somehow accessing it. That could be one way. I don't think that's very realistic, but that could be the first thing I would do. Second thing I would do is check the permissions, see which apps you have granted access to your email and get rid of the ones that you don't recognize or don't need anymore. And that usually in your email settings will look like something like third party apps or authorized apps.
That's what you want to look for to kind of figure out if anyone has access, and if you see something in there that's kind of weird, just get rid of it. I think between those two things that should secure your email. But I would call Sam's Club see what happened, and at the end of the day, unless you gave this out, I would really argue pretty heavily that you should not be responsible for this one hundred and fifty bucks that was taken from you. All right,
good question. Let's move on to Oh, this was big this week, this big Twitter hack. This Twitter hack was kind of an epic Twitter hack. And by the way, I'm looking at the comments on YouTube, and Tony says he would also change your email password and set up two factor authentication. That is one hundred percent right. I should have mentioned that, yes, change your email password. After you do all that stuff, make sure it's a strong password.
Two factor authentication I always talk about, and I just maybe I just think that's a given at this point, but you should always have two factor authentication set up on any account that supports it. And what two factor authentication does is it will send you a text message when someone tries to log into your account, even if that someone is you, and that login will not proceed unless that code is entered. And the idea being is that the person might have access to your password, but
they don't have access to your smartphone. So if they have both, then you're in trouble. But hopefully they only have one and it will stop the login, so good good ad there. In fact, it kind of leads me into this whole Twitter hack, because when I first heard word that Twitter was hacked, I thought that it was maybe a two factor authentication thing, a password thing, a pretty simple hack, but it turns out it might have been an inside job. Now I feel like Twitter and
I call this a consumer show. I don't feel like Twitter is very consumer. I feel like Twitter is very different than Instagram and Facebook and YouTube, even when it comes to being a social media platform. To me, Twitter is for people that are super interested in news, politics, technology topics, and is not your everyday consumer that is on Twitter. So I rarely do stories about Twitter and new Twitter features because most people are just not that
excited about Twitter. They don't have that many users when you compare them to Facebook and Instagram and YouTube or TikTok, and so I kind of leave Twitter out. But I do think this is important because this is scary. What happened is on Wednesday of this week, a bunch of very high profile accounts started tweeting out a scam tweet that said, Hey, if you send me a thousand bitcoins or one thousand dollars in bitcoins, I will send you
back two thousand dollars or something to that effect. And by the way, this went out from accounts that were huge Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett all kinds of big name Twitter account holders, which was crazy. How can you get access to all those people? Did none of them have two factor authentication?
Did all of them have terrible passwords? No? It turns out this looks like an inside job old school, where someone paid someone an employee of Twitter on the inside, to actually go in there to their what I would call the God panel, this god control panel that controls everything inside Twitter and sent out those tweets from it and really kind of caused some problems for Twitter. So Twitter ended up having to kind of go into a
scramble mode of what's going on here? And again, these are high profile accounts, so social engineering attack, that's what they're calling it. This means that they either tricked one of the employees or they paid one of the employees, we don't know yet, and they went in there and just tweeted these things out, and then Twitter had to go through and lock people's accounts out, and they had
to lock up including mine. Anyone that was verified was not able to tweet for a certain amount of time in the afternoon because they were worried that maybe everyone that was verified was at risk, which maybe they were and what did the hackers do. They made off with about one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars. People actually did send bitcoin to these addresses, if you can believe it.
There's not much more about this story right now, is that it just kind of reiterates the fact that to me, it's scary that even if you take all of the proper precautions as a consumer with your account, which is a strong password and two factor authentication and not sharing your account with a bunch of people, there can still
be potential for a hack at this level. And when you hear heard those names that I mentioned, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, I mean, imagine sitting there on their end and you're watching your Twitter account be taken over, and you know you have a strong password, and you know you got two factor, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That is scary.
And so this just leads me to a bigger thought about everything that you do online. Whether you think you're secure, you're really not. And that's what you have to just think about. And I always say, when you send a text, and when you send a DM and when you send anything through the internet, what if that appeared on the front page of a major newspaper.
How would that make you look? You have to keep that in mind.
No matter what, even Snapchat and all these things that you know, oh well, you can't screenshot it. It's all safe. It disappears. Instagram stories number one, nothing really disappears. So
you have to keep that in mind. And that is the main thing that I take from this is that you just have to be as as protect your accounts best you can, but also just keep in mind that no matter what you do, there's always a back end system that these companies have to manage their systems that yeah, if someone wants to look at your Instagram stories from a year ago, they're going to be able to do that, including governments whatever, if these companies want to hand them
over if they choose to. So you just have to keep that in mind. I'm not saying do bad things. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying break the law or be secret about it. No, no, no, I'm just saying that you need to be aware that on the Internet, if it's traveling through the Internet, chances are there is potential for things to go wrong.
That's what I want you to keep in mind.
All right, let's get to the next question from John. John says, I'm a sixty nine year old guy who enters a Zoom meeting once a month for cancer support group that I'm invited to from an email I receive. I'm using a PC with Windows ten. I have to call in with a landline phone and use a special code or number in the email. People do not see me, but they're able to hear me when the host addresses me. I finally found out where the mute button is. My question is does my computer come with a built in
camera or not? How do I get it set up for video and audio for this meeting? Hopefully it's very simple. Now, you said you're using a PC, which is usually a desktop. I would think if you said if you had a laptop, I would think you would have said, I use a laptop. So if you're using a laptop it has a camera built in, you would just have to go ahead and activate that camera inside Zoom. I get the feeling that you're using a desktop computer that does not have a
camera built in. Most of them do not. If using an all in one computer, they do have them built in most of the time into the monitor, but it sounds like you're using a run of the mill PC that is just a desktop computer with a monitor that does not have a webcam. The easiest way to get your webcam up and running is to purchase a webcam that you put into your computer using USB.
You just connect it with a cable and boom, you're up and running.
Right now during the pandemic, webcams are really tough to come by. You go on Amazon, they're sold out, it's a pain. They're shipping in a month or two. So I mean you could try that. That would be the easiest way to do it. You already have the computer, buy the webcam. I don't want you to overpay for webcam right now. So that's my first solution. My second solution, though, is actually quite easy, and you can get this thing in your hands tomorrow. And what I'd recommend is buying
a cheap Amazon fire tablet. I recently did a review on the fire Tablet eight. It is ninety dollars, it's from Amazon. It handles Zoom. It's simple, it's easy. You say, you're a guy that let's see a sixty nine year old guy that doesn't up Okay, I mean I think it's pretty easy. It sounds like you want something easy,
so I think that's very easy. And what I would recommend is on Amazon if you type in Amazon Basics tablet state and you would find a tablet stand for their little tablet that is nine dollars and forty nine cents as of this recording, and by the way, both the fire tablet and the tablet stand are available in about two days. Versus a webcam that you're gonna go on Amazon, you're gonna search through a million listings and you're not gonna find one that's available very quickly.
This is much easier. You install Zoom on.
It, it works perfectly, and all you have to do is get your email on there, or you could even type in the Zoom code on the tablet and get connected that way.
That's what I would do.
I think that's pretty easy, and at this point it's probably easier than finding a webcam.
So good question.
All right, let's see. Speaking of webcams, this is actually another story I did on KTLA was turning your smartphone into a webcam, and a lot of people are doing that because they can't find a webcam and it's gonna with the school you're starting and all of these kids and people still working from home. These webcams are not going to get any easier to find. It's like a lot of things. We still can't get chlorox wipes half the time. You still can't get a lot of stuff.
I mean, it's just it's we're in different times right now. There's a new app called Camo c Amo and this app will turn your iPhone into a webcam for your computer. And this company made it very simple. They wanted it. You know, We've tested out a few apps that do this and I'll mention them again KTLA Webcam. Okay, so we tested out a couple of apps and I found them to be somewhat easy. They're not it's not like plug and play simple. But the two apps that we
looked at were epoccam, epoccam and ivcam. They're okay, they're not perfect. This Camo looks to be a really nice solution.
But guess what.
You have to have an iPhone and you have to have a Mac computer. So if you have those two things, I mean, chances are you probably already have a webcam. But they're saying that this webcam is going to make your zooms look much better than the webcam on your computer, so I get it, But do you really need it? I don't know, but it sounds like it's simple. It's saying using your iPhone is gonna make a huge difference
compared to regular webcams. Lets you look your best, and I get that again, You're probably gonna want a little stand for your iPhone so you can put it up, But it's also kind of nice to have it, you know, maybe on the side of your computer.
I don't know.
I feel like I kind of made fun of the dedicated zoom device, but I actually think it's kind of cool. I've got one of those Google Home Maxes with the video camera, and I love video chatting on that with my mom, who I actually want to buy one of the Maxes for her so that she doesn't have to hold her phone. The whole problem with video chatting on your phone is that it's very uncomfortable for long periods of time. People are moving, they're flipping their camera around,
they're walking around. It's not very nice. It's perfect for short chats, but for long chats when you just want to relax and like at with someone, it's much easier to have something that's sort of sitting up and solid and not moving anyway. The app is called Camo Cimo and it just came out. I have not tested this, but it's from a company called Reincubate, and there's a free version and there's also a pro version that's forty dollars. So and they say that they're going to do a
version for the Windows PCs. It looks like right now it's just yes, right now, it's just for Mac. So they're they're gonna do Windows a Camo for Windows soon, so you can get on the mailing list. But I would say that, okay, here's what it says, how can I mount my iPhone as a webcam? And we bought every type of phone mount on Amazon and tried them all and wrote up our experiences and recommendation.
So I like this company.
That's very cool that they recommend let's see, for laptops and desktops with no sticking required. This flexible arm for twenty dollars is my current choice. I'll put this in the notes and that's.
Oh, that's funny.
That's exactly what I have. Whatever they showed is exactly what I have. So if you're on the YouTube right now, you can watch this. But I've got this arm that's flexible that I bought for recording stuff. Mine is called banks b E NKS. Their's is called shaw Shawe, but it's a flexible. It's kind of like a holder that you grip onto your desk and then it's got a flexible what do they call it, like a goose goose neck kind of thing, a gooseneck mount, and then your phone just kind of pops into it.
I love this.
If you look at any of my stuff on Instagram at rich on Tech, all the stuff that you see that I'm recording on a smartphone screen which is kind of hands free, is always with this device, and I find it to be just easier than a tripod. So that's what they recommend. So look at that. I was using something that they tested everything and I just kind of picked this thing out.
So pretty good there.
All right, let's move on to the next question. And again, anything I talk about I put in the show notes, So if you're watching this or listening to this on the podcast, you can just look in the show notes for links to everything that I talk about. Janet Rights, Hey, rich I need to buy two smartphones Samsung, one basic around three hundred dollars, the other around seven hundred dollars. We don't need all the fancy stuff, just want a good,
reliable phone. We're retired on a fixed income, so don't want to pay thousands of dollars. Any suggestions would be greatly approved.
Thanks.
Well, at that price point, I would recommend something in the Samsung. If you want to stick to Samsung, I would recommend something in the A lineup. And so there are a couple of phones that they have in their A lineup. The main one is the A fifty one. And this is a phone that has, you know, pretty much what you need. It looks it almost looks like the latest Samsung Galaxy Ultra. It's got one, two, three,
at least three cameras on the back. It looks like, let's see, it's got a six point five inch edge to edge screen, long lasting, battery, fast charging, higher storage, enhanced camera. And this is just the stuff that they're saying on there. But forty eight megapixel main lens. Oh, it's got a let's see, it's got a depth camera. It's got a main camera, ultra wide camera, macro camera.
So I love the wide lens. I know that Google made fun of the wide lenses on cameras when they did their pixel event, but I love the wide camera. It's just so much fun. One hundred and twenty eight gigs of storage, four gigs a RAM. You can also add a micro SD card slot and you get six months to Spotify on them. So I think the A fifty one would be a fantastic device for you. And I'm looking at how much it costs, because that is
the main factor here. It is three hundred and ninety nine dollars, so you can get that for three ninety nine, and that's probably what I recommend if you're looking and maybe just by two of those, you said that you wanted one that was A three hundred and one seven hundred, so that's a thousand. So if you divide those, if you divide it by two, that's five hundred on each phone. It's now you can both get it, and I think that would work out for you. There are some other
phones in the A lineup. I'm trying to figure out where those are on the Samsung website.
Let's see here, where do they? Okay, smartphones, watches, an audio, let's see Mobile Summer of Galaxy. Wow, there's so many. Okay, well, I'm not really finding that on the Samsung. Let's see if I can look it up here. A fifty one.
Sometimes I have to go to my email and find stuff that way because you know, I get emailed from people, and it's it's much easier because they give me the direct.
Links to stuff. All right, let's see the A fifty one is. Let's see here.
So there's the in the A series. There is the A zero one, there is the that's one hundred and nine dollars, the A eleven, which is one hundred and seventy nine dollars, the A twenty one, which is two forty nine, and then you've got the A fifty one, which again is I can't see because my screen is all covered up here.
Let's see.
I I can't see the price on that one. But anyway, that's I just mentioned it three ninety nine. So that's what I would recommend. I think those are the phones that would be perfect for your question. Good question there. I always say good question. I mean I pick these questions, so most of the time I'm not going to pick a bad question. It's questions that I think a lot of people are wondering about, all right, this next thing
I got beat up for on my Facebook page. I've noticed that people are beating me up on my Facebook page much more often now than before. And I get it. With the whole world of fake news and politics, everyone's very heated these days. Facebook used to not be as heated, especially for a tech guy, as it is now. And I think maybe, you know, politics change that, or maybe Cambridge Analytica changed that, But everyone's very skeptical, even of me.
I am supposed to be a trusted news source for you, and you know, I've been reporting on technology for fifteen years now. You would think that when I put something out there, it's going to be factual. And I try to do that, and I think I've talked about this before, but the reality is people question what I choose to post.
And that's fine. I get it.
That's within your rights, and that's well within your rights as a person that's following me, because you know, with seven hundred thousand followers on Facebook, not every single person has seen me on TV, not every single person knows me personally. Sometimes you just saw some cool viral video that I shared, you followed me, and now you see some other posts six months later.
You're like, who is this guy? What are you saying?
So this happened when I talked about this new app called Uproad, and I said that this was so cool because this app lets you ditch the transponder on your car and take California toll roads just using your smartphone. I thought this was brilliant. Clearly I am the only person that thinks this is smart, because everyone on my Facebook page said rich. Number one, there are no more transponders.
It's a little sticker that you stick on your car. Okay, fine, Number two, Why would I want to pay a premium to use an app to pay toll roads? And I'm already paying a premium? Four And let me explain myself. Number one, the sticker thing, it's still a transponder. There's still a little wire in that sticker that sends a signal or reflects a signal from the toll road to let them know that you.
Have passed through the toll So technically I was correct on that. Number two. The whole thing about signing up.
I have lived in California for going on I don't know, twenty years, and I have never signed up for a transponder, nor will I ever in my life put a piece of plastic from the California Toll Authority on my car because guess what, I use the tolls about zero times a year. Now, I use them zero times a year because I refuse to pay for a toll most of the time, because I've done it before.
I learned my lesson.
When I took the toll road and I forgot to pay and I got hit with that two hundred dollars fine and I get it. You call them up and it's like, no big deal. They just say, you know, okay, like this was the best. My wife, I get the fine in the mail for her. She took it last year, a year before. And I get the thing in the mail. It's like two hundred and twenty five dollars. I'm like, Lynn, what happened here? She's like, oh, yeah, I forgot to pay that. I'm like, of course you did. That's what
they want everyone to do. So I call up the toll place and literally before I even said, hey, what can you do, the guys like, all right, we'll do it for twenty two dollars. I'm like, what like, I didn't even have to negotiate this, So they know that a lot of people go through these things and forget to pay.
That's number one. Number two.
I just don't like the idea of having to remember to pay within five days. I got a lot of things going on in my life and I can't remember that. So my thing has always been I want to pay then in there or this is amazing, this is to me. It's still brilliant because now I will actually take the toll roads. So here's how it works uproad. You sign up for it. It's an app. You put in your credit card, your debit card, your PayPal, your Venmo Boom. You are ready to take the toll roads in California,
including if you live in southern California. You've heard of these the SR one thirty three, the two forty one, the two sixty one, and the seventy three. I'm only familiar with the seventy three. I've seen that one. It also works on the one twenty five in San Diego in northern California, which I've taken some of these bridges. It works on pretty much all the bridges that I've ever heard of, including the Bay Bridge, the Dumbarton, the
Golden Gate Bridge. So again to me, when I go up to do Leo's show a couple times a year, I gotta pay, I gotta wait in the toll thing. I don't have a transponder. Yeah, well, I guess if I'm driving, I can do that. If I'm taking a rental car, it's a little more complicated. But the reality is you sign up for this boom, you're up and running, and you just have to register your license plate. You can register up to ten of them, so all the people in your family. And here is the brilliant part.
And you go through a toll, it tells you on your phone with a notification that you just went through the toll on how much it costs?
So how much does this cost?
Well, Uproad charges a fifteen percent transaction fee on top of the toll fee. And before you go all crazy about that, for someone like myself who travels to San Diego twice a year, and I don't know how much the toll is. Maybe it's six seven dollars. Let's say it's eight dollars. Fifteen percent of eight dollars fifteen times eight is a dollar twenty So Okay, nine dollars and twenty cents.
I mean, I get it.
It's expensive as but one time, not that big of a deal to me. If I buy a soda on the way down there, which I probably wouldn't ID probably buy an energy drink, you know that's gonna be three dollars. Or you can pay two dollars a month or twenty dollars for a yearly membership and the transaction feed drops to four percent. So if you really want now, I get it. If you're traveling these roads all the time, you're saying, rich, this is stupid, Why would I need this?
I get it. You have a transponder. You are not the toll.
You're not the target of this, but now eventually you might be. Because here's what Uproad is doing. They are making this so that every road in America works with this app.
That is the goal.
Now, don't get me started on the whole should we have toll roads in general, because I'm not getting into that argument. I love the fact that I live in LA and the roads are free for the most part, even though they're crowded. I grew up in New Jersey where everything was a toll. I mean, just to go to the mall. It would cost Back in the day it was twenty five cents each way. Now it's they've taken the tolls off one side, and it's like a dollar to get to the mall and free to come
back the mall. Of course that's where you go when you're in Jersey anyway. That is the uproad situation. I think it's brilliant, and I get it.
You can.
You can fight change like this all you want, but no pun intended with the tolls. But the reality is this makes much more sense to me that you can be on an app instantly up and running in two seconds, and versus filling out paperwork or some sort of online application for the toll road people waiting for your sticker in the mail, putting that sticker onto your car and using it and then waiting for them to charge you and to make sure, Oh did I go through the
toll on that day? Yeah, I guess that was me. Or I can have an instant notification on my phone the bill is paid, it's done, boom, and yeah'm paying.
A little premium for that.
But for the three or four times a year that I might take a toll road and By the way, it's a big it's a big argument with me and my wife with these toll roads because when we're going down to San Diego, she's like, you gotta take the toll road. It saves twenty minutes. I said, uh ah, I don't play that game. I'm not doing the toll road. I'm not paying extra. I'm going down and I will take the regular road. I don't care how much traffic I got to sit in. I'm not paying the extra
eight bucks. Now I probably will because guess what, I'm a sucker for being a tech guy that thinks this is really cool and now wants to try it.
So there you got me? All right? Wow?
Am I really heated up on this show today? I feel like I am. Oh my gosh, show's almost over. Okay, let's see Susan while watching Oh, Susan says, while watching your segment this morning, I noticed an object on the desk in your background that may have been one of the blocks air conditioners I've been reading about. If that's indeed what it is.
Do you like it?
Should I get one? The short hand, sir, Susan is absolutely not.
Number one.
This is not an air conditioner. If you're watching on the live stream. What I have behind me is a little radio called the Retro Mini from a website called MYVQ dot com. This is an homage to the fact that I love radio. I've always loved radio since I was a kid. If I was not on TV, I would be on the radio. In fact, I am on the radio with Kfi twice a week and with Leo filling in for him. But I would have a full time radio job if I want, If I want it now, someone would have to hire me.
But the reality is I love radio.
So that's my homage to the fact that I absolutely radio is so near and dear to my heart, and podcasting is kind of the closest thing you can get to it without actually being on the radio. So anyway, let me just really quick mention this blocks Blaux air conditioner. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that properly, but I've gotten a lot of emails about this thing, and I will tell you. To me, it looks like a utter
and complete scam. And the reason why I say that is because Number One, it's a little tiny air conditioner that cools off any room. I mean, come on, really, Number two. Every you can't find a.
Review of it.
That is a red flag when you find I get emails about these products all the time. They do huge social media buys, which means they blast social media with advertisements that look so good to be true that you want to buy this thing in an instant and you go online, you search for some information about it. You can't seem to find anything, but you find the website, you find some write ups that they have placed, and next thing, you know, you want to buy it.
Don't buy it. Don't fall for this stuff.
I see it with headphones, I see it with with all these things. It's literally if you look, if you search Blaux on Google right now, number one ad for it, number two ad for it, number three, ad for it, number four. Do not buy this on YouTube, Number five in Amazon whatever. I don't know how if they sell it on there, if it's real or not. Number six AP news, Oh, that sounds promising, you click it. It's actually a press release that they released to AP news.
And by the way, they keep doing it because the date is constantly updated so it looks fresh. But it's completely a scam. The next one Discover magazine, Oh sponsored Number next one tech Times dot com home reviews. I'm not sure if that one's legit or not. Maybe it is the next one SF Examiner dot com marketplace again some kind of sponsored placement. The next one MarketWatch sponsored next one Mercurynews dot com sounds legit four days ago, Oh my gosh.
Sponsored.
These folks run such a smart marketing campaign that look like it's hip and it's fresh, and people are buying it and it's up to date. Do not fall for this stuff, folks, Google when you look at it, you really have to analyze what you are looking at. When you see Google, look for reviews from real places. What do I mean realplaces? Cnet dot com I know, kind of old school used to work there, still near and dear to my heart, the Verge, Wirecutter, tech crunch, digitize,
all these websites, digital trends. They are going to review something that is sort of in the main consumer spotlight myself news channels. You don't see any of that stuff with this air conditioner. If this portable air conditioner was as good as it says it is, wouldn't you see a bunch of reviews for it?
Do not buy that thing.
I know, I'm going off on kind of a tangent here, but it just gets me so angry that it's so easy to make something look so amazing nowadays in the online world. This is why I like people like myself and other tech reviewers, is that you find someone that you like, you find someone that you trust. I'm not gonna build your trust overnight.
That doesn't happen.
You don't just see me on Instagram and say, oh, Rich posted something cool, let me trust him now.
No, it takes years to build that trust or months.
And so to me, my thing has always been that I want to show you stuff that I think is important for.
You to know.
That's what I do in this podcast, That's why I do in my tech report, and I want to explain stuff to you. And when I start seeing a bunch of emails about this stuff, yeah, you're gonna find someone on YouTube that says it's amazing, But do you know who that person is. That's what you have to be careful about. In today's day and age. There's a lot of opinions out there. Not all of them are good. Okay, wow, I can't believe we're almost done here. I didn't even
get through half of my stuff, all right. I want you to mention this because I thought this was really cool. If you have a pet. Lemonade is a high tech insurance company. And I know that because they pitched me back in the day when they first started and it sounded just too good to be true. I believe that, I don't want to let me see. I believe that Ashton Kutcher was literally one of the original like investors
in this. When they first sent it to me, it was like, wait what And if you want to look at like, oh I can't, that's really tough to search Lemonade in your email. Lemonade Insurance I NSU are a c. When you look at this insurance as homeowner's insurance, it's really cheap and you wonder, oh, yeah, Ashton Kutcher backed. I don't know if he's still an investor or not, but this launched back in twenty seventeen, and they are all digital. So to get this insurance, you go on
their website or their app, and it is fantastic. It's really pretty amazing actually, and it's insurance for renters.
And also homeowners.
And what they do is they kind of they take a twenty percent flat fee of your rates and you returned. They return unclaimed money in an annual give back and they give them money to like, I think charity or I don't know, whatever somewhere.
But it's really pretty slick.
And when you try it out and you get your quote for your homeowners, you're gonna be like, why is this half of what I'm paying or you know, forty percent or what I'm paying or sixty percent whatever it is. But it's legit, it's real, and they have, you know, it's technology on their side. They've taken all the inefficiencies of your standard insurance from big companies and they just said, how can we make this more efficient using technology?
And they did it.
So now they're doing health insurance for cats and dogs. Again, I don't generally recommend dog or pet insurance, but a lot of people like it, and I if I had a pet at this point, I might think about getting this because it's starting at twelve dollars a month. You can get it for new customers, existing customers, and it just you know, it covers a bunch of stuff and I don't know, it's a it's a hassle.
Fleet If I.
Was going to buy pet insurance, I would do this, so you sign up digitally. It's available in thirty three states. It's artific intelligence powered, so a lot of times you can submit a claim on Lemonade if you know your cat or dog needed something and they would like pay you out in like five minutes. I mean, this is how crazy advanced their system is because they use artificial intelligence to figure out, Okay, you said your cat broke
their foot. We've seen this before. We don't think you're lying. Okay, here's your money.
There you go. It's that fast.
Now, I'm not saying I've experienced with that, but I've seen I've been following them throughout the years, and that's kind of what they say. And the okay, so they do lightning fast claims, best in class customer service, and a donation of leftover premiums go to animal focused charities Customers care about Again.
It starts at twelve dollars a month, and you can do.
Unique add ons, including a Preventative and Wellness package designed to keep your pet healthy, which includes the costs of routine wellness exams and vaccines. The Extended Accident and Illness Package covers pets recovery, including more advanced treatments and veterinary care. You know, if you've had a pet, which I've had a pet in the past, believe me, they can get
very expensive. My father in law, long story short, but we had a dog and we moved to New York City and we couldn't have a dog in New York in our place, so my in laws took our dog. They watched her for many years, but we would still take care of her when it came to the vet and bills and all that stuff because they were watching her. So you get a call from your father in law and like a Friday afternoon, he's like, rich, Ali's paw is looking like she might have stepped in something or
done something to it. It looks like it's kind of painful, okay, And it's like you bring her to the vet and it's seven hundred dollars later because her toenail was impacted or whatever it was she broke. I don't know, but it's those little things. And if you have a pet, you know, those happen all the time. Maybe not all the time, but they happen. And so if you have insurance,
maybe it would cover something like that. And yes, you're paying for insurance on a monthly basis, but hopefully the amount you pay, maybe it's ten percent of the fee of whatever the seven hundred dollars is. It's seventy bucks at that time versus the seven hundred, it could be worth it. So anyway, Lemonade dot com slash pets, am I guessing, I'm guessing, or just go to let me just say, is it lemonade Lemonade dot com and you
can just go on and look for where they have. Yeah, pet insurance is Lemonade dot com slash pets and you can just go ahead and get your quote right away if you have a pet. So good information there. And Tony by the way, on the Live podcast said, I've used Lemonade very easy and cheap. I've had my Facebook page for a couple of years now, and you get to know certain people. And it's funny because now Facebook tags people with either something called topfan or valued commenter or.
Little things like that.
You know the people that regularly check your page, which is kind of cool because the idea is that if you see a comment from them or a topfan badge, I'm gonna be more app to kind of notice that and respond to it because you're sort of giving your time to me looking at my stuff and sharing it, and then I should give you some more of my time and attention because you're a top fan and it makes sense. Facebook is brilliant at this stuff. So I do recognize some of the regular names I see as
we go along. I don't always get to say something to you, but you're there and I do appreciate you. And by the way, when I first started my Facebook page, which I'll never forget, the morning I was at KTLA, I was talking to my producer Jacob back in the day, and I was like, should I start a Facebook page? It's like sure, And I couldn't imagine having even more than, like, you know, a couple thousand followers on my page. That would be amazing, right, like five thousand. I was expecting
maybe a couple hundred. And now when you look at the page it is up to which.
Is just wild.
Let me see here on my Facebook, six hundred and ninety five thousand, one hundred and three, six hundred and ninety five thousand people could potentially see what I say on Facebook. Now that doesn't always happen. My stuff is shown to an average, I would say a good post is probably it tells you how many people see it. A good post is probably seen by about fifty thousand people. Average post I would say for me is probably twenty
five to thirty thousand people. A great post like my Nintendo post the other day, four hundred thousand people.
A really good post.
Okay, So the most engaging post from this month this little inside baseball but kind of fun four hundred thousand people, one hundred and fifty thousand people, one hundred and twenty one thousand people. So it tells you how many people saw it, and then how many people actually did something with that post. They call it engagements and so on
that post. So out of four hundred thousand people that saw my lego post, twenty two thousand people decided to do something with it, which is comment, share or like it. On my post that had one hundred and forty two thousand people that saw it, twenty thousand people decided to do something. So what I'm trying to say here is just because you have huge followings on the social media platforms does not mean that all those people see what
you do or even care about what you do. So that is why I continue to fight and really try to post the best content that I can because the better stuff you post, the more people that interact with it, the more that Facebook shows it to more people, and it goes on and on. So that is how it all works. And now that you've listened to the end of the show, you get little tidbits of stuff like that, and Kenya believe it, the show is over. That's gonna
do it for this episode of the show. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, all you have to do is go to rich on tech dot tv and hit the little email button at.
The bottom of the page.
And yes, as a guy from Jersey, it takes a lot for me to say the word button like that. I would say button, but you know sometimes people judge me for that. We would love it if you would rate and review this podcast to help other people discover it. We've got one hundred and seventy seven ratings on iTunes
and by the way, five stars. So if you want to rate this show and have your rating or your little review read on the show, just go to rate this podcast dot com slash rich on tech, or you can just go to iTunes and do it and I'll read those on a future show. You can find me online everywhere at rich on Tech. My name is rich smiro On, behalf of everyone that gets this show to your ears.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you real soon