Gmail encourages safe browsing, but what does that mean exactly? A new label to let you know your devices are secure, the new high tech travel scam you need to know about? Plus your tech questions answered.
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I'm Richdmiro and this is Rich on Tech, the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology. I believe that tech should be easy, helpful, and inspiring. Sometimes it's fun too. Phone lines are now open at triple eight Rich one oh one. Now it's always fun eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. If you have a question about technology, give me a call. That's eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. Email is also open. Send your message to hello at richon tech dot tv. And if you hear something throughout the show that you want to comment on, feel free to send it to the email. I will read it at the end of the show in a segment we call feedbag or feedback, one of those things I keep going back and forth. I should actually call it feedbag, but we'll say that's actually my notes inside my notes app.
Oh, my notes app. What a mess.
Last week, I told you that I switched to Notion this week. Midway through I realized that may have been a mistake. So let me bring you up to speed on what happened this week. I was an Evernote user for many, many years. Evernote sort of closed up shop in San Francisco. They laid off a bunch of people. They were sold to a company in Italy, a company that actually makes one of the apps that I really like, called Splice, and a lot of people have kind of
are worried about the future of ever note. This is an app that started I think about nineteen years ago, and at the beginning I remember downloading it. At the beginning, it was an endless scroll of notes, so it was just literally this endless, endless scroll. You can just type, you know, anything you wanted in there, and then just kind of roll up the scroll and start a new note,
and it would just be like this ongoing note. And then it got more evolved over the years into this sort of folders and to do lists and contact cards and voice memos. It just became like the Swiss Army Knife of note taking apps. Available on all platforms Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and it just became this really robust note taking tool until it got kind of slow and just too many
features that I personally didn't need. I needed the basic features, and then they took away features where you can only sync it across a certain amount of devices for free, and so it pushed you to pay for the you know, the plans. And now this thing I was just looking today, it's up to one hundred and thirty dollars a year who just for taking notes. Now there is a free level, and the free level will do pretty much what you need.
You can take notes, you can sync up to two devices, You get a certain amount of monthly uploads, a certain amount of maximum note size. You can clip web pages, and I think this was my favorite feature, is the ability to clip web pages because if you're doing a radio show or a TV segment. For me personally, I like to keep a lot of things that I sort of clip from the Internet to talk about and to remember later, and so I love the way that it can just distill the best part of a web page
and clip that. So that is still probably one of the best features of ever note anyway.
So I switched this week.
I put everything in Notion and I just figured I would try a different app, and Notion has been really good. But and Notion is like one of these apps that a lot of people are using because it's again it's like a Swiss army knife, but it's much more high tech. So it is available across all the platforms iOS, Android, Windows, Mac,
and it's just really slick. My biggest problem with Notion actually and ever note, are the icons for the apps don't match all my other apps, and it just really bugs me Notion especially for some reason I don't know, so I'm like a perfectionist with my icons, and it has kind of this weird three D icon that I don't like. So Notion please fix that, make it standardized. But Notion's really cool because it is very robust in
what you can do. You can make different tables and blocks and formats, and it just has a million different ways of using it. And no two people are going to use this app the same way. But at its base, you can clip things from the web, you can make folders, you can nest things, you can make notes. It all works really well. But I ran into a problem this week of the formatting. I like my note taking app
in a certain format, which is basically three columns. The left column are the folders, the second column are sort of the items in that folder, and then the third column is what's inside that note. And Notion gives me two of those three things. I can't seem to keep the side panel open and just flip through my notes so I can easily just see them. You have to kind of open each note individually, and so this week I was just like, Ah, this is really bugging me.
Plus making a new note you have to kind of have a place for it. So Notion is great, but it's I'm finding that it's a little bit more work than I need. And the neat thing about Notion again, it's free. You can pretty much do everything you need for free, but if you want to upgrade, it's eight dollars per user per month, build annually.
If you pay monthly, it's ten dollars.
And I'm noticing that all these apps are sort of free for their basics, but if you want to get to the next level, you got to pay. So another app that I tried this week is called one Note. This is made by Microsoft. Again, it's available across all the platforms, and I would say one Note is probably the most similar to ever note because it looks like Outlook and it does all all the three things I mentioned where it has the three columns of data, so I can see my notebooks, I can see the notes,
and then I can see what's in the note. The problem with one Note is the way that it takes the notes. It's this weird freeform canvas inside your note where you can start typing all the way in the lower right hand portion of a note and leave your text there, or you can type in the upper right hand portion or the lower left hand So it's kind of like this free form canvas that really throws me off because I like to be organized, and having text in the middle of nowhere I don't like. Now some
people may like that, I do not. And so one Note is really great and it's free and it uses your one drive storage or yeah, so it's like really easy, but it's just kind of all over the place. And so for that reason, and specifically my problem with that on mac os is printing is just impossible. You cannot print out a note on one piece of paper. It does not format the note properly. It's a non ish If you look on Reddit, you see people talking about it.
It's just really odd that they would have that issue. Then I tried Google Keep, which is of course cross platform, but again it's too simple. It's too too simple, and there's no easy print option there. Now I keep going back to Apple Notes because it has every single feature I need. It's got the organization I like, it's got handwritten notes, it's got audio, it's got great folders, it is super robust. It does every single thing I want, except it is not cross platform. You can't access your
Apple Notes on an Android phone or a Windows computer easily. Yeah, maybe you could use iCloud to do it, but I'm not doing that. I need a native app. And so Apple Notes really bugs me because it's like I message, it's like, just make it for everyone, and of course they don't. Then I tried I'm really digging deep. Now I tried this one called Joplin. This is free and open source. This is literally made by some person, one person who develops this app. It's very similar to Evernoe.
This does almost everything I want, except I'm a little concerned that it's you know, one person developing this app. It is free, it's open source, it's got apps for Windows, Mac, Os, Linux, even Android. You can attach things. They look great. It's just I'm a little concerned moving all of my stuff into one app that's just developed by one person. So I don't know. I may stick with Joplin. Then I
tried Obsidian. This is another markdown app, which is really cool, but it was a little bit too complicated for me, and sinking across platforms was a little bit complicated as well, because I just didn't really understand how to sink. So Obsidian is cool. It's totally free forever. If you want to pay for commercial use, it's fifty bucks a year. It does sink. I guess they have an Obsidian sink, but you do have to pay eight dollars a month
for that sink feature. Obsidian was actually pretty good. This was probably one of my favorites, except for I found some issue with it and I deleted it off my computer.
I don't know. I might go back to Obsidian see what I.
Deal with all week. Nimbus is also one of my favorites. I ended up really liking Nimbus. Note it worked really well. It has all the features I want, except it's a little bit wonky In the interface, it's like a little bit slower than I want it to work. It looks like it's pulling everything from the web every time. But Nimbus is actually another note taking app that I think has a lot of promise, But I don't know how
many people are using this app, so I'm concerned. And then finally I checked out an app called simple Note. Now this one if you just want simple notes. It is really really good, except for the fact that it's not very good for pictures or PDFs. You can't toss those into your documents because this is really just text based, and so it's great. But it's really really simple, so you have to literally you've got to The name says it all. This is just for simple notes. It's really
really simple, really really beautiful. But it is just for simple note taking. So I don't know where that leaves me today. At this point, I'm using right now on my computer screen. I will tell you what's open Notion, one Note, Joplin, Ever, note Notes, and Nimbus. So I am lost. I am like in a sea of note taking apps and I am just using too many of them. And now I am back before where I started, and I'm at a place where this is just I don't know. I'm not getting to the place where I need to be.
So if you have a note taking app that you like, let me know, because I just can't find it. I can't find the one that works for me.
I hope I've made that nice and confusing for you. All right.
Coming up, we've got a great show. Oh but a producer Bobo is showing me pen and paper. I did try that too. You know that's not backed up to the cloud though. That's the problem with that. Then I got to take pictures of it.
I don't know.
All right.
Coming up on today's show, Gmail is asking users to turn on something called insane Enhanced Safe Browsing. I'm gonna explain what that means. We've got some good guests. Ben Parr, author of the AI Analyst newsletter. He's gonna explain what's new in AI, including a new chatbot that I've been loving called Claude, why Meta is making their AI tool for free, and he's got this AI cheat sheet you
should definitely download. Kyle Young of Nothing VP of Nothing's gonna talk about one of my favorite phones of the year. We talked about this a little bit last week the Nothing Phone two. He will join us to talk that, and then later in the show, travel expert Johnny Jet is gonna explain the high tech travel scam you should be aware of. But first it's your turn. We're gonna have your calls coming up throughout the show at triple
eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven pour two four.
To one zero one.
Give me a call if you have a question about technology. My name is rich Demiro and you are listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here talking technology with you. This week, the tech world lost one of their most notable hackers. Kevin Mitnick was a famous hacker in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. What he was good at hacking into phones and computers
social engineering. He would trick people who worked at big tech companies into giving him passwords and information, something that still happens to this day. This allowed him to steal software and data. The government said Mitnick caused millions of dollars in damages. He went to jail for nearly five years, but after he got out, he stopped his illegal hacking and became an expert on cybersecurity. In fact, the company he worked for, we've had guests on the show here
to talk about it. They do cybersecurity training for employees at companies to help them understand these types of attacks. He then helped companies protect their systems from the type of hacks that he did. He wrote books, and of course was a big speaker. He ended up showing that hackers could change from breaking the law to using their skills for good.
His story helped people.
Understand hacking better when this was still a new thing, and he went from fugitive to a respected cybersecurity professional. Mittnick died young fifty nine from cancer. He was once seen as a threat, but later he taught companies how to avoid the same kinds of hacks that he used to do. Kevin Mitnick rest in peace. All right, let's start off this hour with a phone call.
Here.
Let's go to.
David in Melbourne, Florida. David, you're on with Rich.
Hey, great, I just have this really weird thing that I've never had. When I ran in before, I bought a new battery pack for my HP notebook, and it came with a little book and I stupidly started reading
it and then I'm like, what are they talking about? Anyways, Basically, there seems to be some They're implying that there's some rom in the actual battery pack that needs to interface with the software of the computer that's going to which this case is Windows eleven, and they give you some instructions about how to completely drain the battery so it's set to zero, and the whole part the point of all of this is apparently so that the battery indicator
from high to low is always consistent with what the battery really performs. Have you ever run into that, I heard of it, or this is like new.
News to me. I've never done that to any batteries. That also recommends that you just tried your battery completely with that same feature about every three to six months or something.
So I think what's happening here is that as batteries have gotten a little bit more high tech, the computer needs to know, since this is a new battery pack, hey, what's full on this battery, what's empty on this battery? And so by charging it full and then letting it run down completely and maybe doing that once or twice, the computer is going to get an understanding of how this battery works when it's full when it's empty, and
the software I think will do that. On smartphones, this is usually called adaptive battery or battery optimization, and it typically happens even on the iPhone. When you do a major software update, people notice that their battery is kind of wonky, like the percentage. It might go up or down really quickly because the phone is trying to learn how you use this. So I would think that's the
same for this. So once you replace the battery in this laptop, I would go ahead and then charge it fully, let it run down fully, charge it again fully, let it run down fully, and that should give the operating system the full understanding of the capabilities of this battery. So I think it's one of those things that you know, the battery is probably telling you you have to do this. Do you have to do you know, a concerted effort to make this happen.
Not.
I think your computer is gonna be just fine.
It's a fresh battery to begin with, and the fact that you can replace that battery is a good thing. So David, thanks for the call, appreciate that and get it set up, put it in and uh, I think after a couple of weeks, you'll notice that the computer will let you know when the battery is good, when the battery needs to be charged. But if it's like me, I'm just kind of charging my laptop almost all the time, which I know definitely drains the battery more than you
know understanding it. But these these this software has so much software these days, has so much smarts built in that kind of optimizes the battery to begin with.
So good question, thanks for calling today. I appreciate it.
Triple eight rich one one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. If you use Google, especially Gmail, you might have noticed a little banner at the top of your Gmail saying enable Enhanced Safe Browsing.
What does that mean?
Basically, if you turn this on, it's gonna better protect you against phishing emails, malware, dangerous websites. So the difference between turning this on and leaving it.
Off is this.
If you leave it off, Google checks the links and your emails against a database that's about thirty minutes old. If you turn it on, Google's going to check against a real time database. It does share a little bit more data with Google, but I do think that you probably should turn it on to help protect yourself just a little bit more. All right, Coming up next, Ben par AI Expert's going to give us a primer in all things AI.
What do you need to know? What's the newest?
What are these keywords out there so you can sound smart when you talk to your friends about AI? Ben par coming up next right here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology and AI is one of the buzzwords of the tech world right now.
I mean it's more than a buzzword. It is everything.
And the guy who's following all of the announcements is Ben Parr, author of the AI Analyst newsletter. He posted this great cheat sheet for generative AI. I highly recommend you download it from his website. Ben, thanks so much for joining me today. And Ben's This is actually Ben's second time on the show, so it's he's no stranger to the show. Do we have Ben Ben Kell? Hello, here you go, Hello, what's up? Welcome to the show.
Like I said, I thank you for having me on again.
Yes, this is actually your second time, and I've got a new feature on the website. By the way, rich on tech dot tv slash guests. If you hear a guest on the show, you can go there and see them and at the not only see all about them and all their links and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and their website, but you can scroll down below their
bio and you can see which episodes they've appeared on. So, Ben, the last time you were on the show was March eighteenth, twenty twenty three, and there's been a lot of changes. Let's first start with let let's start with Facebook. So Meta basically came out with their second version of their AI called Lama two. Can you talk about they're giving this away for free? What does that mean exactly?
So the incentives that Meta has for AI are different than the other big tech players. So what Metta is doing is they're offering their AI open source to developers to use, you know, commercially as they wish.
And it's a really good system.
I haven't dug into every piece of it I've started, but you know it gets close to GPT four, which is the technology of the powers chat GPT.
So why does Meta give this away for free?
For them?
It improves their AI for because they're not their business models not selling this AI to other businesses. Their business model is making it so that whenever you're using Facebook, Messenger, or you're using Thread, or you're using any of the other things that they work better, that more content is made, and so more people using Lama means more people more training for their model, which means when they add more AI to WhatsApp, for example, which they own, it's going
to be a lot better. And their plan is just to put AI into everything that they do, and this way for them to improve it is to give it away for free.
Now, unlike some of these other ais, this is not something that you can easily just go to, like you know, Lama dot com and try, right, like all the other ones we're hearing about, you can just like go to the website and try. Like a consumer version, this is more on the B to B side, right, I mean anyone can download the I guess the open source of it.
Yeah, it's just basically a big code base.
You download it if you're a developer, and then you can build something on top of it. So the way you would interact with it as a general consumer will be probably a bunch of applications that you're using or will use will use that technology under it. They might use that plus open AI's GPT four again the same called the owned chat gyptuh.
But I expect in the next couple of weeks you're going to.
Start to see some interesting use cases for it and some chat applications and others.
Now, let's talk about the my favorite chat app right now, my favorite AI assistant. It's called Claude, And this is from a startup name Anthropic, which is actually started by some folks who used to work at open Ai, makers of chat GBT. And I almost don't want to talk about Claude because I actually I'm it's like my best kept secret.
I love this AI. Have you played with this? I'm assuming you have.
I have.
And so for everyone out there, there's you know, chat GIPT is the best known like a what's called an AI assistant at the best way to describe.
But they're not the only one.
Claude is a new one, and Google has one called Bart and those two have made big strides and improvements in the last couple of months. Claude has won a couple big advantages. One of its biggest is that it has a bigger context window. What that means is that you could post in like half of a novel in there and ask it questions and it would give you answers.
It has a much shorter window for chat gpt. Chatchpt actually doubled the window this week so you could put in more content, Like you know, people are wanting to put an entire blog posts, entire email sequences, entire books and ask questions.
That's what area where claud is really good.
And bard Google's one has the all of the ability to look at images. You could upload an image and it'll give you information on that. This is a feature that chat gpt actually should have, but they haven't released it publicly yet because of the legal issues around it. But what you're seeing now is that everyone is starting to catch up because now there's been more time to analyze. People have been building on the technology. Anthropics raised billions of dollars to do it.
What are you using the most or are you just using all of these?
I have actually a recommended list that's on my website vnpart dot com of about twenty different apps that recommend for different things. Cat GPT and mid journey are so for sure my top two, but I am definitely trying out claud More, Barred More, and then it just sort of depends. So like advice for everyone out there, you know, you want to have an AI tool specifically suited to you know your needs. I kind of think of it as like hiring an AI co worker, like do I
need a videographer? Do I need a transcriber? Do I need a language assistant? When you have that, it gets much easier to pick out an AI tool that can help you that's specialized in that area.
Okay, So let's talk about this cheat sheet for generative AI that you put out, which I just love some of these terms. So you've got the terms that you need to know, key terms, key technologies, key companies, the people to know, the key resources, recommended tools and I'm guessing some of those are on your website as well. And then recommended content so people to follow, people to follow on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, the newsletters you should get,
the podcast to listen to. I mean, AI has really come up fast, And do we know anything about the future, like what this is going to do to everything? Or are we still kind of figuring that out?
We are still in the really early innings of this AI revolution. I always want to I always tell people this technology today is the worst it will ever be in human history. And think about six months ago, you could not just have a blog post suddenly written up. You didn't have the capability to create hundreds of images in the matter of minutes.
Now you have those things. Are they perfect?
No?
Are they really good at what they do? Shockingly yes?
But the next couple of years, there's thousands of millions of developers working on amazing tools. These models are getting better. But more importantly than that, there are researchers and scientists working on new versions of AI. The AI that's hot this year is called generative AI. But I've been hearing about other forms of AI that other researchers are diving into, and there's gonna be some super cool things that will come out over the next couple of years.
Now that AI has gone deep into the public consciousness.
So I always ask people when I talk about AI, like how much should we be using these like and should we feel guilty for Like I'm using them in a lot of ways, like summarize things and to kind of like research and look things up and kind of come up with answers. I mean, should we feel guilty about all of this? I mean it feels like I have an assistant.
One should I like to think of it as like you shouldn't feel guilty if you feel guilt ay using a calculator, that's like a whole like different can of worms, Like you should not feel guilty.
It is like that.
It is a It's not some sentient being, to be very clear, that's years and years away.
Despite all the hype, this is.
A really really useful tool that the new generation is especially Gen Z and like the upcoming generation, are using in everyday life. And if you're not embracing and like learning how to use this in daily then long term you're gonna be left behind. And that's just it's just a core set of tools that everyone will be using. People are using this to help them write emails, to do summaries. I use it to brainstorm. I use it
to come up with answers to lots of questions. I use it to rapidly speed up the first version of my presentations. And if you're not doing those things, you're gonna not you're gonna be left behind. And so it's not a matter like guilty or not guilty. It's just this is where things are going. This technology is already becoming mainstream, you know, for your career and your future.
I would learn these tools, and I would at the minimum just get into the habit of talking to something like chatchipt every day, even if it's just a brainstorm, just to build the habit.
And explain this idea of hallucination because we hear this, these things are not perfect. So good example, my dad was planning a road trip and he asks chatchybt for you know, I want to drive this many hours a day, this many miles, not more than this many miles, and it wrote out in itinerary. But it was wrong. I mean it got the first leg wrong. It was like the it said it was two hundred and fifty miles, but it was really like four hundred miles he was driving.
So explain the idea that these things are not perfect. And the what a hallucination is.
So a hallucination is, you know, very simply when an AI confidently says something that is wrong. And so the AI is not like reasoning like oh I'm going to go and measure the distance between Albuquerque and San Francisco. It's just using its database to predict what numbers and words most likely should appear in a sequence. It's a predictive algorithm. Therefore, it doesn't actually know the distance to anything.
It's just predicting what most people would say, and if it hasn't seen it before, it's going to predict new numbers and often sometimes they can be wrong. Now, hallucinations happen a lot less often, and for your most common questions, it's going to generally be right, like most of the time, nine out of ten, it's going to be right. But always double check the work you know, or especially if it's a really important thing.
That hallucinations are just a part of AI.
It's also honestly like a fascinating phrase that we use to describe when an AI. It's just straight up when an AI tell you incorrect information. So just always double check and AI's work when you ask you a question.
All right, Ben Parr AI Analyst Newsletter. Definitely sign up if you're interested in this and download his cheat sheet for generative AI. The website benpar P a r r dot com also linked up online rich on tech dot tv slash guests. Ben, thanks so much for joining me today, Wild World of AI.
It was thank you for having me. Hopefully next I will be me next time and not an AI talking.
Let's hope that it doesn't get that far, all right? Coming up next, prices going up on two streaming services.
You might subscribe to one of these or both.
We'll tell you about that, plus uh more of your calls at Triple eight Rich one oh one phone number to call eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. You know we are going to see Taylor. Oh yeah, we're one of them. So our tickets, my I'm laughing. My wife, you know, she got the tickets. She was one of the people who
had to deal with the whole ticket Master system. But she did score two tickets and at the regular prices, which we're still expensive, but.
Now I'm not kidding.
Our seats are going for like three thousand dollars each ticket or maybe for two tickets, I don't know. And so it's become this conversation of do we go to the concert or do we just cash on this concert? I think we have to go We've been talking about it for a long time. Rich on tech dot tv is the website to go to. I've got it fully redesigned, much easier to follow the show. See the different episodes, subscribe to the podcast, learn more about the guests, see
the products that I recommend. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see a little link that says shop newsletters on there, everything my TV segments. It's really really a great place to go rich on tech dot tv. And if you want to call me here, it's triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. That's what Jeff and Diamondbar did. Jeff, Welcome to the show.
Yes, thanks so much for taking my call. Reason I'm calling is I had an iPhone eleven, just upgraded it to a fourteen, but had problems with the iPhone eleven, which I thought would be ultimately solved by upgrading to the iPhone fourteen, and this one intermittent problem is reappearing on the fourteen. So what it is is I go into my email app, the iOS email app, and it seems to probably be Yahoo only, but I'm not sure.
When I look at the inbox, I'll see messages there, press on a message and it will be absolutely blank and it's not just loading. Many times I go into the inbox and maybe all messages or blanket, can't even see anything. So the simple solution, part of the time
is to kill the app, restarted, go back in. But the things I tried on the iPhone eleven were took it down the Apple Store and with their guidance, you know, reset the network settings, uninstalled the email account, you know, user name and password and all that, reset it up, did a variety of I think, make sure there no VPN on and it's intermittent, so you know, when it got through the iPhone eleven, graded it to the iPhone fourteen, lo and behold that same same thing. Mystery things coming back.
So here's the deal, Jeff, I am getting so many questions about Yahoo email problems. I'm ready to tell people to scrap Yahoo email. And I've got an email into Yahoo to get someone on the show to talk about what the changes have been behind the scenes, what's going on. It just seems like there are so many issues with accessing email through this service, and I don't understand why. So here's my recommendation to you. Number one, go ahead and delete the Yahoo email off of your phone and
set it up again. Maybe when you brought the settings over from your old phone, it just didn't like whatever the old settings were, and that's what's causing the problems on the news setting. So that's the number one thing I would do now, I personally would not use If you're getting still getting issues, I would delete again and I would just download the Yahoo app, the Yahoo Email app for iOS, and then I would use that to
access my email. That's going to give you the best case scenario because you're going to get all the features that Yahoo builds into their email system. You're going to get those available to you. So that means you can manage your folders, you can see your account info, you can add you know, different accounts to send them receive emails. But it's just going to make life a whole lot easier because you're using their dedicated app. I use Gmail,
and I use the dedicated app. It's not, as you know, it's not as pretty as the app that comes with the iPhone, the Mail app, but it just it just works better because I get all the features and functionality built into Gmail. So that's what I would recommend doing. If you don't want to use Yahoo's own app, then I would use a third party app, maybe check out something like Outlook. A lot of people like an app
called spark Mail. You can check out that. But I would just ditch the Yahoo on the mail app if it continues to give you problems. I know that there's a paid portion of the Yahoo email some people have that. I mean, it's just it seems like there's a lot of issues with this. I'm getting a ton of emails about it, and so it just seems like it's just not playing very nice for some reason. I don't know why.
If you go in, I'm gonna check real quick if you go into your settings on the iPhone, I'm curious when you go to set up a mail, is Yahoo one of the automatic accounts? So if I do add account, yeah, Yahoo's right there. They do support an automatic login. So I would just delete it, sign in and see if that brings back the uh, the better functionality, Jeff, because I'm just hearing too much about this, and as an iPhone fourteen, you're living in the modern world. Your email
should be working just fine. Thanks for the call today. Appreciate it. If you want to call in, it's triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. Prices going up on two popular well, I guess two streaming services. I don't know if they're the most popular out there. But let's talk Peacock first. This is NBC's streaming service. It's going up by a dollar a month, so effective August seventeenth,
for existing customers, it's happening right now. For new customers, Premium plan going up from five bucks a month to six bucks a month, and if you have the Premium Plus plan that's going from ten to twelve dollars a month. The annual price is also going up from fifty to sixty a year, or ninety nine one hundred a year to one hundred and twenty. So basically Peacock's going up. A lot of people are on a very inexpensive Peacock plan for the year. They're gonna have to figure out
if they want to continue. Then Google raising the price of YouTube Premium. Yes, some people, including myself, do pay for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads. That's increasing by two dollars a month, so used to be twelve. Now it's fourteen. If you are subscribing from the iOS app, which I highly recommend you do not do, you're gonna
pay nineteen dollars a month. One thing to know, if you're subscribing to any service through the iOS app, it may be cheaper to go to that service's website and subscribe through there.
My name is rich Dumiro.
You are listening to rich on Tech. More of a show coming up right after this. Welcome back to 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 about technology. My name is Rich Dmiro. Welcome to the show. Phone lines are open at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Still to come on this week's show,
We've got Kyle Young, VP of Nothing. He's going to join to talk about one of my favorite Android phones of the year, the Nothing Phone. Two later, we've got travel expert Johnny Jet He's gonna explain the high tech travel scam you need to be aware of. Plus I've got more stories including Hyundai and Kia models that need a software fixed. I'll tell you about that. But let's head to the phones. Let's go to Aaron in Texas. Aaron, you're on with Rich?
I yes, recently, I'll pop up him on my computer with you know, a virus took over the computer and I said, call this number, which was a Microsoft number. So I called him and I gave them access to my computer. Oh no, yeah, it was a scam.
You didn't pay him anything, did you?
No?
I did.
Okay, that's good.
Yeah.
So I turned it off and I contact my bank and I changed all my accounts.
And stuff like that.
Uh, pose all my credit clause and I turned back on my computer. It's been awful about two weeks.
Can you turn your computer back on? Is that what you're asking?
Yeah?
Well okay, so what tell me?
Explain to me how this happened. You called, so you got to pop up. You called the phone number. This is very common, by the way, So don't you know and believe me. I know, I know you're probably feeling like you really got taken here, and I get it, and I totally understand. But these scam artists really, really they prey upon people's good nature, which is oh, there's a problem. Call this number here, We're here to help. So when did you realize that this was a scam?
After I contacted my bank and the person that came on, he didn't He sounded like a male imitating a female. And I asked to talk to a supervisor and he would not. I sent me over. You know, he's saying that he was a supervisor and this is legit. And I'm looking at my computer screen and it did bring up the information on my account.
So they actually logged into your account.
They actually logged into my account.
Oh wow?
And so okay, So what were they trying to do trying to transfer money from your account to their account?
I'm guessing.
Well, I was going to order a software and they they said they put six thousand dollars more into my account. I had an extras zero and so they wanted me to, you know, the reverse the fund back to them.
Oh wow, oh man.
Yeah, so you know. So, and what they did was they called my bank. I didn't since they called them. They called them over over their phone, and so I'm thinking of talking to my.
Bank, but I wasn't, oh man.
But but I got and I was on the line for about an hour but you know, and they kept trying to get me to you know, transfer the front and I said, no, I'm not going to transfer the fund because they did it twice, you know, you know, the second time I got the same person, and I really got suspister because I knew it was a male imitating a seine though a high pid void, and so he wouldn't, you know, answer me over to the supervisor.
So I just hung up, and then I physically called my bank on my phone and they told me it was a scam.
Because they were like, because you were explaining the situation, and they were then they their red flags went up, saying, well, hold on, hold on, this is we hear this all the time, yep. And so where did you leave it? You had this, They installed this software on your computer. They made you go to a website, download software, then connect to some sort of IP address. I'm guessing right, that's correct, okay, And then you did all that stuff.
You got connected with the bank. They said they were gonna you know, they put in extra money by accident. They wanted you to refund it. That's where the scam comes in, where they you know, they say they put in they were supposed to take out this, they put in more or whatever. When you turned off your computer, how did you how was the software or was the software disconnected at that point?
Oh?
Yes, it was okay because they want to. It was like a link, you know, take over mycomputer dot com. And the person who I was talking to he sounded foreign. He sounded on a you know, you know, like you put Pakistan or Angia, which is okay because that people have taken on my computer.
Well right, and then and this is where this is where the good nature comes in, where they pray.
It's social engineering.
So if you if you work at at a company, you may call your IT T support and they and you may have a problem. You know, I need to set up the printer, I need to do whatever, and they go, oh, can we take over your computer. We're gonna we're gonna take over your computer and help you out. And you say okay. And so it doesn't seem out of sorts for someone to say, okay, let me help you, let me take over your computer. You know, this is
customer support that you called. I mean, major companies do this even as far as a couple of years ago. I remember the pixel phone had a feature where they could take over your phone screen and they may still be able to do that. I'm not sure, but you know it was. It's a feature that's built in that that allows tech support people to help you out. And so Aaron, I get it. I get why this happened. But now you're in this place. Did you did you suffer any losses with the financials?
Did it? Did they end up taking any money or no?
No, they did.
And have they gotten a hold of you in any other way since then?
No?
They called me on my personal phone, but I blocked that number.
Okay.
So and how much personal information did you give? Did you give them any account numbers or anything like that?
I gave my account number to my bank and account okay, so hit my social security number?
And did you did you freeze your credit and all that?
Yes?
I did?
Okay, good?
And then you also, did you you changed your bank account number? I'm guessing yes. Okay, good, So you've got everything kind of cleaned up.
The numbers.
The soci security number, of course, is always concerning because it's it's once, it's out there, it's out there. So with respect to your computer, so what you need to do is uninstall this program.
I don't.
I don't think if you turn on your computer it would automatically connect to this remote desktop application. Like I think that you would have to initiate that connection. But I'm also not sure how they left it. So what I would do is unplug your computer from the Internet. Do you have a physical plug or is.
It Wi Fi?
Your Wi Fi?
Okay?
So if it's Wi Fi, I would turn on your computer. As soon as you turn it on, turn off the Wi Fi. And do you know how to do that as a Windows or Mac Yes, I don't, okay, So you turn off your Wi Fi and then once you turn off your WiFi, obviously they can't be connected that way. I would go into your your application list and uninstall this remote application. So if you're on Windows, you can search on the bar, you know, ad or remove programs. It should bring you into the settings and then the apps,
and there should be apps. You'll see installed apps and go through the list and type in the name of the app if you can remember it. If you can't, just kind of search through all the apps and see the ones that you don't recognize and just write click to uninstall that app and get rid of it and then I would restart your computer, make sure it's not there,
and then you should be able to go now. Also, I would check in your task bar in the lower right hand corner, just to make sure that there's nothing in there that says remote or access or anything like that. So do you remember the name of the program that they installed?
Uh? Not really?
Okay, so it may help to it may still be in your downloads folder, so you can look in there to see if there's like a name in there, but obviously delete that as well. But just that's what i'd recommend to get your computer back up and running. If you really want to be safe, you may want to just factory reset your computer. I don't know what your backup situation is like, but that could that could be
an option as well. But I think that you'll probably be okay if you just uninstall this program through the through the panel.
Does that help?
Yes?
It does?
All right, Aeron.
I'm sorry went through this, man, and it's a good I'm sorry you went through it, but I think it's a good learning lesson for other folks listening, because it is something that happens every single day, and it doesn't matter if you're smart if you're savvy, if you're with it, if you're old, if you're young, It does not matter. This happens to everyone. It's a numbers game. And what they're doing is they're just trying a lot of things.
They're putting a lot of those messages on a lot of computers, and they're just hoping that someone takes the bait. And when they do, they really go for it. And you see what happened to Aaron. Aaron sounds like a smart guy. You know, he had to go through a lot and it was one of these things where he just wanted to get his computer fixed. And you know the thing about social engineering is that it always prays
upon number one, are good nature. Number two, there's always an element of time, Hey, we got to get this done, we got to get this finished. And then there's always an element of engineering. And this social engineering is the fact that they do things modeled after what we actually do. And so when you get a text from your bank that says, hey, did you just try your credit card at Target?
We declined that because we didn't know if it was you or not.
Press one. If it's you, reply one. If it's you, reply two. If it's not banks actually send those texts out. I've gotten them, And so what do the scam artists do. They send similar texts because we've been trained for security to respond to those texts, and so what do they do. They send the same exact texts, so that we are already trained in our good nature to respond to those and say, oh, that wasn't me. And next thing you know, they call you. And that's the part of the scam
where it kicks in. So now they call you and say, hey, this is a Chase bank. We're just following up on this and let's get everything figured out. Can you give me your account number again? And you say, oh, yeah, hold on, let me get my card. And next thing you know, before you even think about it, they've got your information. They got aaron social security number if they got access to his computer. And if you sitting there thinking it can't happen to you, oh it can. It
absolutely can. So be aware, be on the lookout, and be critical of every single email, every link, every text message. Believe me, I specialize in this stuff for a living. And I sit there and people forward me their emails and I'm looking at it and I'm going hmm. Let me see that email address. Okay, it could be yeah, okay, let me look at that text. HM. That's interesting and there's a little gives. Sometimes you get an email and it's really easy to tell, but.
Other times it's not.
So just be aware of this stuff, all right, coming up more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. We're going to talk about the nothing phone, and I'm going to tell you about if you have a Handai or a Kia, what you need to know about getting your car fixed so that nobody steals it. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four
one zero one. If you have a question about technology, give me a call, just to kind of a footnote on the last caller. Great website called scamspotter dot org. Scam spotter dot org. This is a great website to learn about the scams that are out there and how they work and how to protect yourself. So of course that'll be in the show notes as well. So if you have a Hyundai or a Kia, five million of
them still need anti theft repairs. Carfax teaming up with these companies to kind of get people in to figure out if they need this or not. So Hondai and Ki are giving customers free steering wheel locks or a free software update, and about four point nine million cars across the US still need this, so they're highlighting the issue on their website and also the vehicle history report, so if you're shopping for a used Hyundai or Kia, you can see if the car you're buying or want
to buy has already had the software work done. So this will be on the car FACS used car listing, So how do you know if this is your car? Affected cars twenty ten through twenty twenty two, and they have keyed ignition, so if you have a push button ignition, this doesn't apply to you. Basically, they don't have an immobilizer to prevent theft, and people figured this out. They made TikTok videos about it, and people started stealing these cars.
So what the software repair does is it extends the length of the alarm from thirty seconds to a minute, and it requires the key to being the ignition to actually turn the car on so people figured out that I guess he didn't need the key to turn on the car, and they were able to steal these cars pretty easily. The fifteen there's a bunch of states of the.
Most of these cars on the road.
California's number one with five hundred thousand, Florida number two, over five hundred thousand, Texas number three, and the Hyundai vehicles affected. Sonata, Tucson, A, Lantra, Genesis, Santa Fe, Accent, Kona, the venue the Palisade La car soul for the Kias, it's the soul of the Optima Forte Rio, Sedona, Sorrento Sportage. That's just a partial list, but if you want more information, Carfax has it on their website.
I'll put this, of course in the show notes.
But if you have a Hyundai or Kia twenty ten to twenty twenty two with a key ignition, you probably need to bring it in for a software update. It's free, so figure out if you need that. Let's go to let's see, let's go to Mike in Irvine, California. Mike, you're on with Rich.
Yeah, so how are you doing, Rich?
I'm doing fantastic.
How are you I'm doing very well.
So I have a little problem in my note ken. It has a thing I had on that I can't get rid of. And since I have so much stuff on my phone, I have all kinds of PDF files and you know, uh stuff I can't it's really hard, difficult to get again. So the day has been going for for about a half a year, and I've tried the heart. I tried to reset the phone, but I haven't reset with you raised everything. I got rid of all my apps, and it still presents itself. And here's what it is. It's a it's a it's a red
and white spokes wheel that comes up. It's spinning, and about five seconds after it starts, it takes you that well, it locks you on that page. So you have to shut the phone off. You have to resetart the phone to get it back to regular again.
If you just.
If it just go out on the page, you go back and you can you can get a stop for a couple of minutes. But have you seen that thing before?
Oh, I've yeah, I mean, it's uh, I'm not this particular one, but I'm pretty aware of these, uh these malware. It's probably is it is it generated from Chrome to you know, or is it coming from somewhere else.
I'm I'm not using Chrome, using Duck dot go.
I'm using Duck dot go and it still comes up.
Oh yeah, sure it does.
Ran.
Now now we're now we're bites on a bunch.
Of times and it can't get rid of them.
No, it doesn't go away.
Well okay.
Uh, and you can't use your phone because it just it takes it over.
No.
Well no, I've found a way of a way around it. But it makes it more, It makes it difficult. If I let it go to the AD, then I had to shut the phone down and start it again.
Yeah, because it's just gonna hang on that AD forever. All right. So a couple of things.
Number one, I think that uh, you know, the idea that your phone, you know, if you have something like this happen, a backup is really important. You say, you've got PDFs and things. I would take the time to offload those to something like Google Drive, get those in a safe place, and you've got a factory reform at this phone. Unless it's at the ROM level of this phone, which I don't think it is, you know, that would be that would take some really getting in there. So
I think this is on the software level. If you format this phone, I know you said you did that, but I think you have to do it again and that's going to get rid of this for sure. Also, the other thing you can do is try to boot up your phone in safe mode, and so you can, according to this is just one way power and volume buttons down until the power off prompt and then you can go into safe mode.
So figure out how to do that.
And then go into your list of apps and get rid of apps that you don't know restart your phone. But Mike, you definitely got to get rid of this stuff, and those are the probably the ways to do it.
You're listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hang out with you talking technology. I've got a great guest to talk about a new phone. Kyle Jung is VP of Nothing. Nothing is actually a phone company and they are introducing their Nothing to phone.
Kyle, thanks so much for joining me.
Oh thanks for having me.
All right, so first off, let's talk about this name Nothing.
So it's kind of a fun play on words. Why is the company called nothing?
I mean, I think the original thing behind it is we're trying. Nothing is trying to remove barriers between you and your tech, and so what's witch in being being matine in your tech?
Nothing?
So you had the Nothing phone, the original that was not necessarily on sale in the US in a big way. But this Nothing phone two is so tell me about the Nothing too.
Yeah, So Nothing Too is Nothing's first introduction, and I'd say it kind of like the premium flagship department. It's building out what the company's done over its first three years, and so it also represents of Nothing's I think beyond
entry into the premium flagship department. Also showcasing differentiation on not just hardware, which has been successful over the first two years, and why people have been choosing Nothing products, but also showing differentiation on software and combining those into one overall integrated user experience.
So a lot of the folks at Nothing at this point came from a company called one Plus, which I really enjoyed their phones. I feel like Nothing has really taken what one plus started and ran with it. So you get this phone that I've been using for the past couple of weeks, and it's a really nice Android experience.
So tell me what went into this?
Uh yeah, I mean I think a couple different areas, and I think the top line thinking is we think about is purposeful, intentional smartphone usage. And so one thing that people have noticed is we have a glyph interface on the back which is intended to allow you to put down your phone but get important pieces of information and still like you to get information without having to
necessarily look at your phone all the time. And that's something that on Phone two, we've interested a couple of new features which you think are legitimately useful and help
you interact differently with your phone. One of them is we've adapted third part notifications to allow you to basically, let's say you're calling an uber, there's a time on the back of your device that allows you have your phone down and it tracks the progress of your uber coming to you without having to necessarily look at your phone.
A couple of examples, we have something called essential notifications, where one of the glyph lights will notify you if somebody, a specific person in a specific app is trying to contact, So that way there's that one or two three people you really want to hear from on a Daytay basis but you don't want to be looking at your phone all the time, and so that's allowing you to put your phone down but will still being able to get important information.
Yeah.
So if you look at the back of this device, it is clear glass, and there's a whole bunch of like you said, glyphs, they're basically led lights on the back. And so if you had like a BlackBerry back in the day, there's that one light that just kind of turned on when you got a notification. This allows you to customize that experience in many more ways. And so this glyph light, like I have one set up. If my wife texts me, I will see that on the back.
But the interesting thing is to use that feature, you have to turn your phone upside down so the screen is down.
Is that intentional?
Yeah, it is in the sense that I think we're we hear from people. And there's a couple things we'll talk about probably in a second on software where I think people want to not be as trapped to their devices and not to the to their devices, and I think we're conscious of that and I think that's where we think technology should go.
And so another feature along those lines is you can make your entire interface pretty much black and white or gray tone, and so you've got these monochromatic icons for everything in your phone.
What's been the research on that.
A couple different things. I mean, I don't think it's I don't think it's hard to explain now that I think people are not totally satisfied with maybe the role that social media's played, the role that apps are necessarily playing in terms of how much people spend time spent under the device. I think it's pretty common for somebody to open their device, click into social media, and just get kind of lost for ten minutes, and then they realize what was I doing? You know, what did I
even come on my phone for? For this monochrome feature, we've basically taken an approach where if you reduce the colors and you know, all the things that you're used to seeing in apps, it makes you much more intentional in terms of what you're doing. And since I've been using it for the last month, it's it's changed my behavior in terms of how I interact with with apps, because I think, to be honest with a lot of smartphone companies are marketing for app companies, but I don't
think that's what users actually want. In addition to that, we've also allowed you to do some I think smart customization. You increase the size of an app to necessarily something you're using on a regular basis, to be able to get into it quicker. And also we've created also some widgets that we think are useful and functional. And you know, one example is like the weather widget. You can click on it if it's on your home screen. You don't
have to go into an app. You can quickly get you know, the five day forecast, the hourly temperature, and you're kind of in and out. And so I think that's how we've kind of thought about technology in terms of being intentional.
Let's talk about this an Android phone, it's running Android software. Does nothing have their own brand of software.
We referred to as nothing os, and this will be introducing nothing Less two point zero. And I think we're taking a different approach on software where a lot of the feedback we've heard is that, to be honest, androids a little bit kind of there's a lot of customization, he gets a little bit messy. It's not the design.
I think a lot of people have told us there's a lot of room for improvement, and I think on iOS at the same time, a lot of people tell us it's just kind of like a se of kind of apps, and so I think we've given thought to what that will look like. And I think with our introduction of Analysts of Nothing OS two point zero, we've gotten a lot of positive feedback and I think people were seeing where we're trying to go with this because we think there actually is a better way.
So some of the things that you can do differently. You can put these little widgets on your lock screen which give you one tap. I have mindset up for scanning, a QR code, the calculator, a focus mode, and then the final one is a timer, and then when you get into your phone, it's very clean.
It almost reminds me.
Of pixel esque software. So it's kind of like stock Android, which people like. And the other thing that people want to know about, of course, is the camera. So I've been quite impressed with the pictures that I've taken on this, which is no easy feet because I test a lot of different phones. The cameras are sort of basic. You get your your wide angle and then your ultra wide, so no real big optical hunter time zoom on this phone.
But the camera works and it's it's a pretty nice camera experience.
Tell me about building that.
Yeah, I think this was our kind of thought on camera and it kind of ties to some of the things we thought about on software, where we focus probably more on software because you can focus on hardware and software. And on the hardware side, I will acknowledge you know, we've we've made a big improvement of the lens on
the front and improve lens on the main camera. But because we focus more on software or philosophies, basically we should be doing more there because if you're going to add a lot of hardware to it, the phone design is going to get bigger, it's going to get bulky, and it changed the design of the device, and so we focus on two use occasions in addition, in addition to it being able to provide a flagship smartphone experience
getting all the shots you want. Our general thinking is if you have a smartphone that's pretty good in regular light, in normal setting, anybody can get a good photo. But we're trying to calibrate for a couple use cases edge cases that where people people struggle dynamic range. So one with advanced HDR we put into this. It allows you
to take better photographs where lighting is different. There's a light and dark contrast, and with advanced HDR we're basically merging eight images down to allow you to get a better photograph, taking eight images in raw domain and putting those together. In addition, we're also calibrating for quick motion,
so something we call motion Capture two point zero. It's going to allow you to take maybe sports photography your pets move around quickly and gate images that come out well though, so we're kind of optimizing for the use cases that people struggle with.
One of the tricks that you can utilize with the glyph interface on the back, it almost acts as a ring light, so instead of just using a flash, it really illuminates the entire back of the phone, so for nighttime photography.
Yeah, and we've also put a setting there too that people have asked us to kind of toggle the brightness on the glyph as well.
Pricing on this device and where's a go to be available here in the US.
You can buy it from nothing dot tech in starting at five ninety nine US.
How do you get around that entire world of the iPhone in the US not so much.
You travel a lot, so you've seen in the other parts of the world iPhone is not It's prevalent, but it's not this thing that you have to have because people use other messaging apps. But here in the US, it's all about imassage and having the iPhone. So how do you market to people and say, hey, you don't necessarily have to have that and you.
Can still have a great smartphone experience.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing we've seen is actually a lot of our partners have told us that are switching rate from iOS to US is way higher than any of the other injury companies. I think we have a much higher percentage of gen Z users, and I think people are attracted to as base earn approach on you know better. We think a user experience a better design.
And so I think that's.
Where we're starting, and you know, I think we'll we'll take it from there.
And my final question is how do I use a case with this device? Because the back is something that you want it it's almost a useful it is a useful back.
Yeah, so visitor, Well, we'll have accessories on site. And also I think people can take comfort that We've done decent durability testing Google Glass five so you can feel comfortable using on a data basis.
Okay, and launching in the US for the first time. Are you excited about this?
Very?
I mean, I think you know, I think you know. For people that are new to Nothing, check out the reviews, and I think that's our best proof point.
Kyle Jong, thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me VP of Nothing A Lot in a little.
My name is rich Demiro.
Your questions coming up next? Give me a call at triple eight rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven.
Four to two, four to one zero one. You are listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech, the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Once again, the website rich on tech dot tv. You can see previous shows. You can subscribe to the podcast version, sign up for the newsletter, which one of these days it'll it'll come soon. If you listen to the show, you know why that's becoming an inside joke.
All right.
Tom is in Woodland, Hills. Tom, you're on with Rich. Welcome to the show.
Hey Rich, how are you doing?
I'm doing great? How are you?
I'm doing? Okay. Here's nice situation. I have had a Gmail account still do. I ditched Yahoo in two thousand and seven, and so over the years, I've been.
On a number of.
High volume email lists. So I get a lot of email. And when I look at the mail app on my iPhone, it says that I have upwards of ninety nine thousand email messages unlist messages.
That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot.
Yeah.
Is that saying on your on your little like the little icon says that many?
Yeah.
Oh that would drive me nuts.
It does.
A buddy of mine looked at my phone the other days, but you don't. You don't ever read your email first.
But anyway, so my question is, is.
There a way I can log into Gmail on the web? I was reading up on this and I thought it said something about you can go into the search box and type in before colon whatever your arbitrary cutoff date is, do a search on that and it will show you everything you know before that cutoff date. Let's say January first of this year. Yep, and.
So I I did that, and I clipped on the what and then all button and it only shows me.
Fifty messages of fifty conversations at a time, right, okay, what I you know? And I'm thinking, well, why only fifty? Uh so? And if I if I want to delete a badge of fifty at the time, I'm going to have to do that, you know, close to two thousand times to.
Get rid of all this stuff.
Yep, So is there kind of you're you're breaking up Tom, But I've got I've got the question and I've got the answer. So yeah, you can clean this out and you can use the search bar. I was going to recommend that you go to Gmail on the web, so you can go to mail dot Google dot com and at the top of and this is why I love Gmail is that you know, it is highly searchable, and Google is applying a whole bunch of different things to help you find your emails fast, even in a ce
of ninety nine thousand emails. But if you want to get rid of those emails, there's also a lot of functions of that search bar that works for more than just typing in a keyword. So if you go to that search bar, and you look at the on the right, there's like some kind of like a little you know, like a setting icon. You can click that for the advanced search, and there you can get in and really figure out what you want to do. So the date there is a date search inside there which you can
kind of start to use. But I think what you were talking about is really what you want to do. And so one of the things that I typically do is look for attachments that are larger than a certain size. So let's say ten megabytes, and so I can go through and just get rid of all those emails because they're just taking up unnecessary space. But the search that you want to do is basically type in before colon the year, and I can do this right now before
twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two rather one two. So if you want to get all the emails, you know before that date, and you click that search that in and it will give you a list, And like you said, it's only going to give you depending on how you have your Gmail set up. You have fifty messages at a time, I have one hundred displayed on my screen. You can change that in the settings. But when you
click the box on the upper column. There's like a little check mark box above the messages, and you click that and it will highlight all the messages on that page. Now, like you said, that's only fifty messages at a time. This will take you a long time to go through ninety nine thousand. But if you notice, Google's pretty smart. It says, all one hundred conversations on this page are selected.
Select all conversations that match this search. You click that, and now you are selecting a whole bunch of messages theoretically all ninety nine thousand. I don't know if that's going to be true of the moment you do this. Now, I'm not going to do this right now. But then you click the trash can up at the top where it says delete, and it's going to take a while, Tom,
Believe me, this is not going to happen instantly. So if you want to practice with this, the way you can practice, if you're listening and you want to delete a whole bunch of stuff at once, go into your
spam on Gmail. Click the select box at the top of the list of spam, and it says all one hundred conversations on this page are selected, or however many you have, and then it says select all, and I happen to have three hundred and sixty one spam conversations, so I click there and now it says delete forever. And it's a little different than the trash can on the other page. But that can give you some practice as to how long it takes to delete this. It will take a little bit of time to delete, but
that's the way to do it. Yes, I would recommend cleaning out Gmail every once in a while because your Gmail does count against your Google storage. You get five gigabytes or sorry you get I think you get f fifteen storage. Gigabytes of storage on Gmail for free. In fact, when Google first started, it was unlimited and there's actually if you remember this, this is going way back to when Gmail started. Gmail started on April Fool's Day, so everyone thought it was a joke because it was unlimited
email storage. And of course that changed as Google got bigger and Gmail got more popular. But it was unlimited and it had a little count not a countdown, a count up, So every second you were on that homepage of Gmail, it would tick up another little tiny fraction of a megabyte or a gigabyte of storage, and I think it launched with one gig of storage. I can't really remember. I'm sure I could look it up, but
it launched with so much storage. And you have to remember at the time, Hotmail was the best thing going for email, and it gave you like ten megabytes of storage, and Gmail comes on and they're giving you a gig and people just thought, no way, there's no way this is true.
It can't be.
And so yes, it is good question, Tom, and clean up that Gmail. Get those ninety nine thousand messages out of there, and your.
Life will be better for it.
Okay, nearby Share for Windows is now available, So if you have a Windows computer and you have an Android phone, this is pretty handy. It's basically air drop for your Android phone to your Windows computer. There was a beta of this a couple of months ago. Google of course launched figured out how people use it. They said it's
been installed by one point seven million people. Photos and videos are the most popular type of file to send, and they've seen fifty million files transferred between PCs and Android devices. So if you have an Android and you have a Windows computer, you can basically air drop between those two things. They have to be on the same Wi Fi network, but that's how it works. With the launch of the actual program, they now have an estimated
time for file transfers. You can see how long it's going to take, and there's now an image preview within the device notification, so you know you're getting the right file that's being shared. So again, nearby Share for Windows is now available. If you have an Android phone you want to exchange big files between your computer and your phone, and vice versa, you can do it.
Go download it.
Eight to eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two, four.
To one zero one. This is rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. It's been a great show today. We're not done just yet. Eight to eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two.
Four to one zero one. Let's see.
We do have some phone lines open if you want to give me a call and ask your question about technology. You can follow me on social media. I am at rich on Tech. I'm on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and I'm still on threads. But it's hanging on by a thread. I feel like this this social media social network is uh, you know, it was the talk of the town and now it's kind of uh, I don't know, it's unraveling. Okay,
enough of the threads puns. Sometimes I just laugh at my own jokes, both here in the studio and also at home, and you know, it's just kind of one of those things.
Yeah, it just comes with comes with age. I guess.
Coming up on this hour, old friend of the show, travel expert Johnny Jet will explain the high tech travel scam you need to be aware of personally. I was just asking Johnny for some advice about a trip to Hawaii I'm trying to plan, and it's it's sometimes it's nice to have these guests on speed dial because I'm like, hey, you want to be on the show, all so can I ask you a side question?
You know?
And it's just I do that with a lot of guests. All right, let's go to Jeff. Jeff is in in Vernice, Florida. Jeff, Did I get that right?
Yes?
Sir?
All right, you're on with Rich. What's up?
Well?
You were talking about software for note taking. Yes, I had a great one that I used on a Macintosh back in the I don't know, late eighties and early nineties. It was called more by Simantek.
Oh, the security company.
Yes, really, well before they, I guess dabbled in creating useful software, and this was extremely useful. It was they called it an outlining program. You could capture your thoughts just randomly got that, you know, collect them line by line, and then use the mouse to organize them because their mouse and uh uh return keys and indent keys to organize the thoughts so that they were in hierarchical order.
Interesting drag and dropp or is this more.
Of just like drag and drop?
Okay? Wow? Interesting?
So you can build an outline of these thoughts. And what was beautiful is that then you could click a button and create presentation charts that were organized to organize your thoughts that way. For some reason, the antic didn't elect to upgrade uh the software, and then they dropped it and nobody took it up.
Wow.
To continue this, I've never heard of this one, but I'm looking up on the Wikipedia and it said it was selected editor's choice Mac User magazine best Organizer and best product of nineteen eighty six. But here's what's interesting, Jeff, what you're describing is exactly how Notion works. So have you checked have you tried Notion at all?
No?
Okay, so this is like.
The hot new program right now and everyone's using it because it's it's so flexible. But I'm not kidding. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's outline based. It's very similar where it's drag and drop, and it's hierarchical. Tough to say that word for me. You can organize things in a hierarchy by dragging. So let's say you create two pages. You can make one of the pages sort of nest into the other page by dragging it into that page, and then you can even do a third
layer and have that page nest into that. So it is really interesting in what you're talking about. This is kind of similar, but you know, a little bit different obviously. But if you look on the Wikipedia page too, Notion is listed as an outline software, and so other other softwares that I mean they also not see there. They group it into note taking slash outliner software. So I think that I don't think all of these that they
list are really outliner, but I do think Notion is. So, so what do you use these days now.
Jeff, I don't use anything. I'm gleefully retired.
Oh well, perfect, there you go, so you don't you don't need to take any notes anymore. No, but it sounded like back in the day you were you were all about this this more program.
Huh oh yeah, very nice. And do you still have a copy of your data from there or no?
Yeah, somewhere somewhere.
It's probably probably wouldn't.
Well, yeah, in the box somewhere.
Very fun. Well, thanks for listening down there in Florida today. I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right, thank you appreciate that. Yeah.
You know, look, people want to be organized in nineteen eighty six just as much as they do today. It's just that today we have a thousand more options, and it's you know, it's funny now talking to Jeff, I'm kind of like looking at Notion again. I'm like, ah, I really want to figure out how to use this. I really want to like, I want to love it because it's got everything I need, including AI. So AI
is built into Notion, which is really neat. So let's just say, let's just say you put your notes from a meeting into this notion like into a page. You can tap the forward slash and then it brings up AI and it brings up a whole bunch of stuff, one of those things being AI, so you can actually summarize I mean, you could do so much with AI on here too. So it's built right in. It's really quite incredible. Let's see, let's go to Sarah. Sarah's in Huntington Beach. Sarah, you're on with rich.
Oh yeah, how are you doing today?
I'm doing great? How are you?
I'm good.
I'm kind of excited to hopefully get some information from you today about I don't know, three years ago, maybe I was in Arizona and at a big old shopping mall they had a traveling exhibit of a museum, and one of the exhibits and it was a virtual reality experience and you just win. You put on the little goggles,
you sat on the bench and it took you. When you watched, you were like on a little rowboat going through and it was the graphics were almost like watercolor paintings around you, but you felt like you were in it. You're on this little boat and when the dog jumps in the boat, the boat tips and you grab on the bench like you're going to fall out, and I was like, this is amazing.
I have to do this again.
And I mean when I look online, there's such a wide gambit of oh yeah, video you know, VR goggles thirty nine, and then there's videos things for six hundred dollars, and I'm I don't want to play video games. I just want that experience again, like maybe river rafting or going walking through a museum somewhere else. You know, I'm not really interested in games, and I've seen I've seen those, but I don't know what I'm looking for. I don't know,
you know, what do I want? I know what I want to do, but I don't know what I you know, what am I shopping for?
Here?
Were you stationary or were you moving?
Yes, We're just like you're sitting on a bench and I could you not win that in the in the experience. And I'm sure things have gotten you know, exponentially.
More you know, yeah, more vibrant in your mind.
You're just like, oh, and we you know, we were eating popcorn while we did this, and you know it's we just we're.
Sitting in this little rowboat and then all of a sudden, the dog jumps in and in the in your what you're seeing is your boat tip And I'm not kidding. I help them, and I was like, oh, could have, but it was very primitive compared to what I'm sure.
There's out there now.
But I want to do it again, you know, And I don't know what to shop for to ask for, and I'm you know, I'm not one of the techies of the universe. So I need some help here.
Okay, Well, I have some money.
I wanted them to do this again. I want to be able to do it whenever I want, not hope to gosh, it comes back to Arizona someday, and I'm not in Arizona.
So that's the other part.
Yeah, well, a couple things.
So if you want just an experience that's similar that I think you would really love, check out a place called Dreamscape. Dreamscape Immersive is sort of a high tech VR movie theater, but it's like an experience. And I've done a couple of these. I've done a lot of them, actually, and they've got locations in La Saudi Arabia. Well, I guess La is the main one. They Wow, they must
have closed a bunch of locations. Wow, they had a whole bunch more and they're all closed, but La still has one at the Century City Mall Westfield Century City. If you haven't tried this, one hundred percent.
Go go, go, go go.
You will love it before you do anything else, Sarah, go to this Dreamscape, pay a couple bucks. I think it's like twenty b ticket, thirty bucks, whatever it is, and just try one of these adventures. They have one that's like an alien zoo. That's the first one I did. They've got an underwater They've got one that's sort of like Indiana Jones. They've got one that's based on a DreamWorks movie How to Train Your Dragon. And they've got a Men in Black one And I don't know if
I did that one. I can't remember, but definitely check out Dreamscape Immersive. Gotta go do that. It's really really cool that that'll be similar. The other thing is two Bit Circus in downtown they have in Los Angeles. They have some stuff like this that's really really cool and it's actually walking VR like I was on the side of a cliff and it was just so incredible. But if you want to do this at home, I think the thing to get is the Metaquest too.
Now.
I can't recommend a specific app that you can run on here, but I can tell you that if you want to walk through cities and things like that, they have this is this is the gold standard right now. It's about three hundred dollars for this device. It'll probably go on so during the holidays, So if you can wait a little bit, you probably want to do that. But if you really want to wait, I don't think. I don't think I could recommend spending thirty five hundred dollars,
but you said you had some money to spend. Apple is going to come out with their VR headset sometime next year, and it is going to be quite incredible, and I think it's going to unlock some really incredible experiences, things that the Metaquest can't even do, because Apple's is more augmented reality as well, which means you can see your surroundings, you can get up, you can walk around. But I think the Metaquest too right now is probably going to be a pretty good bet and you can
really immerse yourself in some of the experiences. I was talking about the hotel I wanted to stay at in Hawaii, and I actually put on my headset and I was It was very primitive, but I was able to be in the lobby of the hotel, in the in the main areas of the hotel. Stepping outside the hotel. I couldn't walk through it per se. But I think that that's going to be one of the biggest iplications of VR is going to be travel, not just to experience
different places, but also to research. So instead of going on trip Advisor and just kind of, you know, clicking through a million pictures, you're actually gonna be able to stand and look at this hotel in front of you, walk into the lobby, walk upstairs into a room, check out the beach, check out the facilities at this place. It's going to be quite incredible. So Sarah medequest to check it out if that's what you want now, otherwise
if you really want to spend some cash. I think the Apple Apple headset is going to be quite incredible later, but.
We don't know when that's coming out. Sometime next year.
All right, coming up on the show, we still got I'm going to talk about Samsung where they're doing their next event, Amazon One, which uses your palm to.
Check out that's coming to all whole food stores.
I'll explain that, and Johnny Jet gonna talk travel, travel tech plus maybe we'll squeeze in some more calls at Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four.
One zero one.
Welcome back to rich On Tech. Casey is in Millington, Tennessee. Casey, you're on with rich.
Hey, rich how you do it?
Thanks for taking my call.
I'm doing great. How are you?
I'm doing right?
Thanks? Hey, uh yeah, I had a question for you. I wonder what would be a good recommendation for affordable wireless scander that could use with just an iPad or iPhone that would require computer so good to use as well.
Oh good question.
I can tell you the one that I really like that I've tested and it works great with Android and iPhone. I'm trying to see if they still make it and it's still around. Yeah, okay, it's called the scan Snap I X one hundred. I'm trying to see do they have a newer model of this. It's been a while,
but it's this is this is one is great. It's it's portable, it's small, and it does can act right to your phone, which is really nice, so you don't have to necessarily have sort of any sort of like middleman, you know. It just kind of like works, and it works for receipts. And look, there's a million different scanners out there, I think, you know, but a lot of them are pretty big, A lot of them are there. Do you need a flatbed though, that's a question.
No, I want something that's pretty portable and just wanted I wouldn't have to look computer when I want to use it to stand something real quick, you know with my phone.
Yea, yeah, And so I think that the only and I would need to check on this, but I think that you might need to be on the same network as your phone, or what would happen is this device would you'd let's say you're in the field, right, you can scan something like receipts or papers, but then you'd have to when you get back to your home WiFi that's when it would upload.
Or you might be able to just use the the.
Hotspot on your phone to kind of get that into your phone. So I would have to because I use this at home, and so I'm not sure like out if I was like in an isolated place, without a sort of a Wi Fi hotspot or something, if this would still work the same way it does. Like I'm you know, like Bluetooth or whatever to the phone, Like I don't think it does that, but it does do
Wi Fi and it really works pretty well. So I think you could also plug it into the phone if you need it to, like you can actually physically plug it in. But it's great. It's a it's a super simple little scanner. I also like that it can scan to the phone or it can scan directly to the cloud. So I have mindset up where it can go right to like Google Cloud, Google Drive rather and it's just you know, I sit there and I take maybe once a month, I'll just scan all my documents, all my
bills and paperwork and whatever needs to be kept. I'll just scan it and it just goes right up into there and it's it's it's pretty it's a pretty good system. I think it's kind of like the gold standard for small portable scanners.
Okay, yeah, and that's actually what I use a lot is Evernote, And I'm kind of wondering to see what your thoughts are that Evernote as for a lot of out of concern any things about them. I've been using it for about fifteen years. I've got a lot of stuff in there, but I'm worried how much longer they.
May be around.
Well here's the thing, and so you know, I kind of talked about this a little bit earlier. ID I didn't get into the nitty gritty of what's going on with Evernoe, But they were purchased by an Italian company called Bending Spoons. And the funny thing is, I mean this is a big company where they're well funded and now they own Ever, no, I don't think that.
I mean, look, it could go two ways.
It could either be it could fizzle out in the next year, or I mean I think a lot of enough people have their information. And ever note where I don't think this Bending Spoons bought this to run it into the ground. I think they bought it to make it better. Now, what gives me hope about Bending Spoons is that they make an app that is incredible. It's called Splice and it's my favorite app for editing on mobile devices. And they also make another app, Let's see,
are they the ones betime behind this remedy. It's this app that does AI Photo kind of like I'm actually gonna talk about it later in the show. It does like AI Photo stuff and it's really incredible. So and if you look at their website, I mean this Bending Spoons, they do things in a very like nice beautiful way, almost like an apple way. And so I think, you know, I think that the thing that has kept me from wanting to continue and ever know is just how it
keeps getting more and more expensive every year. And so now, like I said, it's up to like one hundred and thirty bucks a year, which you know, I guess is fine, But I also think that it got a little bloated in the.
Past couple of years.
And I'm hoping that Bending Spoons kind of rewrites it and makes it faster and smoother. But I think for now it's probably if you've got fifteen years of stuff in there, obviously make a backup, you know, export your data and keep it. But you know, just you don't have to stop using it overnight, you know.
Okay, all right, well I appreciate all right, good question, K see, thanks so much. Oh look at that coming up next, Johnny Jet Travel Expert going to talk about the travel scam you need to know about plus international travel.
It's gonna give us some tips and tricks. You are listening to rich on Tech. Oh, welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro partying with you on this weekend. Hopefully you're having a great day. Great guest you may you may know the name Johnny Jet. Just came back from lots of travel. Johnny Jet's going to talk to us about some high tech travel scams, the one you need to be aware of, and just all kinds of travel goodies.
Johnny, Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Can I call you Johnny or is it always Johnny Jett?
Just Johnny Jet.
I'm kidding, so welcome to the show.
I can't believe it took me six months to get you on. Yeah too, you know, but thanks for being here. And so where did you go? You've you were on a whirlwind of travel. I know, you know, it's like it went from zero to like one hundred definitely.
I mean during the pandemic, I was so cautious, too cautious. But you know, back out I just came back from I was in seven countries in the last five weeks. I took my two kids, three and six years old. My wife and I are on the plane from Toronto to Spain. We're like, what are we thinking? Yeah, but it turned out to be one of the best trips of our lives. And yeah, Europe is crowded, it's hot, but it is memorable.
So well, I've said this on the show.
I went to Italy last year with my wife on a she had a work trip and I just kind of tagged along for four days. It was kind of like, we Hemden Hall, like should we do it? It's a lot of money, this and that. And I'm not kidding. I have not ever gone a day in the past year without thinking of that trip because it was so incredible.
So when in doubt, go.
Right, definitely. I mean time is now. I mean, we know what it's like to be locked up and you can't go. So I think that's why Europe is so inundated, and I think the rest of the world too.
And the and the prices.
That's the only thing that I really take issue with is the price of travel right now is just through the roof. And I totally understand if you're if you're sitting there thinking like rich, it's so expensive right now and I get it. It is and believe me, I've paid these prices where I'm like, this is kind of not cool, but what are you gonna do. It's just the going rate right now because it is in demand. So but people had some savings too from the pandemic.
Like we had like our little travel fund. It was like it was well funded because we were like, well, we can't use it right now.
Anyway, there are ways around, which we can talk about another time, but there are ways around to travel without spending a lot of money.
So Okay, we're gonna we'll dive into that in another show. But let's get through some of these things Johnny Jet, because I want to. Let's first talk about this Twitter. This Twitter user that discovered scam numbers listed for airlines. So basically, his flight was canceled. He called a number that he googled, and what happened.
Well, he was in New York's JFK Airport, but he did he googled Delta Airlines JFK airport number, which I mean, I mean, how how's Google You're gonna monitor this stuff when you're just searching like a specific airport like JFK airport phone number. Yeah, you're bound to get a scam number, and sure enough it did. And it's not just Delta. By the way he looked up. He did screenshots of all the airlines. You know, if you're gonna look up a phone number, don't put in a specific airport like that.
And you don't I don't know if you really want to trust Delta or Google anyway, Yeah, go to make sure an eight hundred number. It's got to be an eight hundred number. And you know somewherelines like Frontier don't even have front phone numbers. Really, Yeah, I would go directly to their website and look for it that way instead of doing a Google search.
But if you're going to do a Google search, just to make sure it's just a generic one, not specific.
Yeah, I tried searching like just Delta, and it did come up like up at the top like on a you know how Google like surfaces like little bits of data at the top, you know, without clicking, And that's what came up like and it did seem to be the right phone number. But the problem with googling phone umb vers is that these scam artists know that people are doing this, and so of course they prey upon that. So when in doubt, go to the website and you know,
just find the phone number on the website. A lot of times it's hidden because they want you to use the chat functionality or they want you to use you know, email or whatever.
But you know, go to the website, go to the app.
And he went back and forth with them. Yeah, and you know they're trying to get his money. You're trying to get his debit card. Never use a debit card, always pay with a credit card. There's little there's obviously some red flags, and you know, savvy travelers like I think most of your listeners know not the fall form. But you know, when you're desperate and you're in a hurry and you're in a pinch trying to get on the next flight, you know, you're vulnerable.
And that's what they that's what they pray on.
Yeah.
So I'm looking at your Johnny Jet dot com Twelve things I learned from traveling to Europe, And you mentioned the taxi app that a friend told me about when I went to Italy. I just assumed, yeah, I just assumed you'd use Uber, which they had a big advertisement in the airport.
But apparently everyone uses this app. Tell me about it.
Well, you don't want to use Uber in Italy because you can only use black cars and they're about five times more expensive than getting a regular taxi. So use this free now. It runs just like Uber. You put your credit card info in, you order it the same way. And what's nice about it is you know, first of all, you don't have to worry about any translation, you just put in your destination. You don't have to talk to
the driver, although obviously it's great too. And also when you get out of the car, you know there's no money being transferred, it's just they take it from your credit card. And also what I like about it is it keeps the taxi drivers honest, which.
I mean I think a lot of them are.
But you know, when you're paying by cash, they can take you the long way, but this way they're not going to take you the long way. And so definitely, Yeah, a lot of my local friends say they use it all the time, but just be warned that, especially in Rome and in Florence area, it is difficult to get a taxi or even a car service.
Oh wow, And I mean I.
Almost smissed my train from Rome to Naples because I was cutting it short and I could not get when I had the hotel helping me. And then when I got off, I got took a Princess Cruise for seven days, and then my taxi driver canceled the night before to get a ride from the.
Port to Rome.
It was like pigeons at the beach trying to get a bag of Potata chips. Everyone, all the passengers who did not pre order were just trying scrambling to try and get it because it was hot out.
That works in the US too. By the way, the pre order you can do that with Uber and I've done it. But here's the thing I've noticed that when you pre order, because it obviously takes a little bit of the pressure off, right because you're gonna have a ride in the morning when you wake up, it's more expensive to pre order because they know that, they know that you know you're getting something in return, which is
peace of mind. So it may be cheaper to do it on demand, but it's you know, then you got to you're taking your chances.
Yeah.
I think the flat rate between Chibetechia the Port to Rome, which is just over an hour, as one hundred and twenty euros.
I paid three hundred and fifty euros.
Oh wow.
All the drivers are just canceling on people because this is their time to make some money.
I mean, they're making up for the pandemic.
What did you, I mean, what did you think of Google Translate? You downloaded that? You think it's better than the Apple one built into the iPhone or what?
Yeah, you know what, I like it.
You know, I only had one or two drivers that did not speak English, so I used it and we had no problem. I Also, what I like about the Google Translate is, you know, if you're in a real Italian restaurant where it's not a tourist section and the menus in Italian or whatever language, whatever country you're in, you can just hit the camera icon and it translated
for you, which is brilliant. And you know, that makes a big difference, because again, when you travel, you don't really want to go to these touristy restaurants that cater to Americans. The food is not that good and it's overpriced. Try and go where the locals go, but it's going to be in the local language.
The menu.
Yeah, the best restaurant I went to in Rome was recommended by a local and it was. It was incredible and it was super local. Uh okay, the e SIM so the the service is always an issue overseas. You know, people don't want to pay theyn't want to you know, pay for a ton of extra roaming data and stuff.
What do you use?
Well, I would call your provider first, find out if they have an international plan.
I have T Mobile. They do a great job, although it could be it.
Could be slow once in a while. So one of my buddies who owns cilly Are abroad is like, listen, use this company. You biggie U b I g I dot com And uh, you know, because I've an I have an e SIM in my phone. You just sign up. It literally took less than five minutes. So I had a second line that I could toggle between if I needed to, I could just leave them both going and that pay for all my data. I actually paid fourteen dollars worth of ten gigabytes and it was way too much.
I only use one gigabyte. So, and they have plans all around the world. It's not just Italy, it's they can do it Europe, you can do it in North America, Asia, wherever, And there's a lot of companies out there. So if you're going to in one country, like if you're gonna be in France, you might just want to use Orange. If you're going to be in Italy, you might just want to use TIM. You can go to their stores.
But it's nice to have an eSIM. If you don't have a newer phone, then you can look looking too getting your phone unlocked if it's not already, and just you know, switching SIM cards, but that's kind of a.
Pain, yeah, the switching sims. And most of the American phones do not have dual SIM functionality. Some of the international ones do, with the American ones don't, and so you would literally have to take out your SIM card and put in the other SIM card, which is kind
of annoying. So if you have an eSIM, you can have both of them at the same time, which is nice because you can activate Wi Fi calling and texting on your regular line from like Verizon or AT and T, turn off roaming, and still get those calls and texts, but then for all your data in that foreign country, you can use the eSIM all right, now, this was a new one. You said, have a four digit pin for your credit card.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, Well, we were in Germany and trying to get a train to downtown Munich from the airport, and the train was there and I'm just scrambling. I wouldn't take my credit card because it says you need a four digit pin.
I'm like, I don't think.
I ever set this up, and if I did, I definitely don't remember my pin. So anyway, I ended up using my ATM card, which I had to go into my app, unlock it and then use it. And that's the way I bought my card, because there's no man booth or anything. There was just you know, it's all machines. So make sure that you know your four digit pin for your credit card and create one if not, and make sure it's four digits not six digits, because you
have a problems. And it's nice to have two different credit cards just in case one doesn't work, because there's a lot of you know, a lot of these unmanned stations.
And when I was in Tokyo last year, I'm not kidding. My card, my debit card was turned off the second I tried one transaction, and I had to sit on the phone my bank for a half an hour to try to get this thing reactivated. It was an incredibly horrific process. And so tell your company before you leave. I know, it seems weird that you still have to do that, because I figured in the year twenty twenty three, why would you have to do that? Yeah, you still
do some time. So went in doubt, call your bank, let them know you're traveling. All right, Finally I just got another minute here this ATM conversion. The ATM always says like, do you want to accept the conversion or decline? It's like a trick question. Tell me how to answer that.
Protely trick. Always decline it. Pay in local currency.
I first learned about this over a dozen years ago when I was shopping in Herod's in London and they swipe my credit card and they go, always like to pay in US dollars.
I'm like, yeah, that's easy.
Turns out they get a piece of the pie and it's not as good as a transfer rate. And so always pay in local currency. You just say nope, paying pounds or what if you're in Italy, say pay in euros?
So deny it, okay, local currency.
So just to be clear, you see accept conversion, decline conversion. You always say decline, and you never want to pay in US dollars. You want to pay in the local definitely the local currency.
But contact your bank too and find out if they have any partners with ATM so you don't get hit with the you know, fees for using someone else's network. In that way, you can save some money and don't keep going to the ATM. You know, just go once in a while. So take out enough cash and you know, I pay everything with my with my phone or with my credit card.
Okay, but here's my question. Here's my question.
So one time I got I got stuck in Japan because I landed and my my ATM card didn't work to take out cash, which I typically take out some local cash, I couldn't and I couldn't get on the train because I needed that cash. They wouldn't take a card. So do you recommend in the airport before you leave converting some cash.
I don't.
I don't ever use those currency exchange booths. They rip you off. You know, if you're really nervous traveler, you can go to your bank, find out what the change fee is and do get some cash. For instances like that. But you know, I use a major bank. Once I land. You can use it in the at and the airport or go to you know, a repudal bank in the city.
Right, And that was a while ago, by the way, Now it's been a lot better. When I first started going to Japan, it was a lot trickier, Like I had City Bank at the time, and I could only use their ATM. I couldn't use any local ATM except that. Yeah, I mean now things have changed. It's gotten a lot.
I've never had a problem in Japan, and I carried multiple credit cards. I have America Express Visa MasterCard just in case, but Visa MasterCard are accepted everywhere like they're commercial.
All right, Johnny Jet, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me.
All right, Johnny Jet dot com. Twelve things I learned from traveling to Europe this summer. Also on the website rich on tech dot tv, scroll down to where it says guests at the bottom and you can see all of the incredible guests that we have on the show.
All right, coming up, we're.
Going to close out the show with the feedback segment.
And I'm gonna tell you how you can.
Get an incredible AI headshop for great you're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Closing out our number three of the show. This is a party because it goes so fast. It's like any good party. Right, let me get through a couple things before we get to the feedback segment. First off, Amazon one is coming to all Whole food stores. If you're not familiar with what Amazon One is, this is Amazon's palm recognition service that lets you pay with the palm of your hand.
So already it's being used at four hundred locations across the US. I did a story on this for KTLA and tested it out. You basically scan your hand to register it, you link a credit card, and now you can pay with just your palm, No phone, no nothing necessary. So now this is going in to all Whole food stores in the US, all five hundred plus Whole Foods locations, and you'll also be able to link your Prime membership, so you'll get your Prime points or at your Prime discounts.
Plus that no need for a wallet or a phone. And so they're also using this at Panera Course Field, which By the way, you can buy Booze with this, so they can verify that you're over twenty one if you link your ID, and Amazon says it's secure because it does not use raw palm images to identify you. It looks at the palm and you're underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical vector representation called a Palm signature.
So yeah, a lot of thoughts on that came in fast and furious on my Facebook page.
Let's see.
Samsung next week is doing their Unpacked event in Seoul, South Korea. They said the first Unpacked for the Galaxy s was in Las Vegas in March twenty ten. Since then, it's been held in major cities around the world, including Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, and now Soul, South Korea. On July twenty sixth. It's gonna be exciting. I'm excited for that, so we will find out what the new foldable phones from Samsung are all about.
The z Fold five and the z Flip. Gosh sore.
They both the five, Z Flip and the z Fold, and then AI headshots. This is pretty cool. An app called Remedy is making AI headshots.
The app is available for.
iOS and Android, and I put this on my website at Richontech dot tv. If you want to link, you download the app. You upload eight to twelve selfies. Bobo, you gotta try this. It's I'm not kidding. I Like I said to my photographer, your wife is gonna want to remarry you when she sees these pictures, because I mean,
Bobo just got married. So yeah, it's incredible. You upload eight to twelve selfies from different angles, You sit back, you choose a model, and then it takes about ten to twenty minutes to generate your pictures and it is quite incredible. Now, the trick is they ask you for ten dollars a week, so do not pay that if
you don't want to keep that. Yeah, so you got to sign up for a free trial, and then what I recommend is cancel that free trial right away so you don't forget, and you get access to this feature for three days remedy. Let's see. Sarah says my Alaska Airlines mileage account was hacked. They took fifty thousand miles and booked two flights. Alaska caught the thief and declined his second flight. Now they sent an email with a CASEID. We had to reply with a picture of my driver's
license and establish a pin. Now we have to use that anytime we want to use miles. Fortunately, I will get my stolen miles back. No idea how they got my Alaska Miles account. I thought you should know. Yes, I was just talking about this with my wife. Secure your leg accounts. Don't use a week password. You don't want someone to take your miles. Bertie says, I just heard your show. Sorry I'm late, not sure if you mentioned it, but I've been a very happy Notability.
User for years. It's very robust.
Notability is primarily for handwritten notes. I don't know if they do text base, but I'll check it out. James says, I am extremely happy with Apple Notes. Yeah, I agree. Apple Notes is nearly perfect. I just wish it worked on different platforms. And then let's see PJ says for note taking. Please take a look at qown notes, q qnoes dot org like it much better than the others you mentioned today. Okay, I'll take a look and wow,
that's gonna do it. I'm rich Dmiro, thanks so much for listening to the show.
Let's see. Well, I don't know where the end of the show is anyway, Thanks so much for listening to the end of the show.
Next week we're going to talk Samsung's new phones, very exciting stuff. There are so many ways you can spend your time. Thanks for hanging out with me. My name is rich Demiro rich on tech dot TV. Have a fantastic day.