Why You Should Stop Swiping a Card at the Gas Pump

which is just insane all time high. Welcome producer Megan to the show.

a very common thing. And so for my mom, she's going to go over all the things I did because it was crazy. It was one day, but everything changed for her. And this is the thing. You know my mom, she rolls with this stuff. And this is the beauty of technology is that it doesn't have to be super complicated.

Everything that I do when I set up my friends and family with tech is I want to make it not so complicated so that they can enjoy it and understand it and just love it and not have to be figuring out fifteen different remotes and this, how do I switch to this input in this and that. So first thing I did, I basically upgraded my mom's fire

TV stick. She had an old Amazon Fire TV stick, not the four K version, and so I actually had given her a four K Fire TV stick, like I think it was over the summer for like her birthday, and I was like, oh, here, you need an upgrade. And she never set it up. Of course she didn't because she doesn't set things up herself. So I get home, I see this thing on the table and I'm like, Mom, can we set this up? So we set that up and I'm using her old firestick and wow, it was

so slow. She's like, well, this thing always has problems. I'm like, yeah, I can see why, because it's so slow. It was ridiculous. So I got the four K one worked so much better, logged her into different apps. Then I'm looking at her at and T TV. I'm like, hey, let me see your bill, your credit card bill for this at and T direct TV now whatever it used to be called. And she shows me your bill. It's sixty five bucks a month. I'm like, sixty five bucks

a month. How many channels are you watching? She only watches one out there in New York, it's like ABC seven. And so I'm like, well, you know you're paying like sixty five dollars a month for all these different channels that you don't watch. It's like, well, sometimes watch Food Network. I'm like, can you do without it? Because we can save you sixty bucks a month. So it's like yeah, I'm all right. So we cancel that, and so DirecTV eighten T now whatever's gone. But now she doesn't have

a local channel. So I look up low Cast. I remember we talked about this, This is the app that lets you get your local channels. Oh OK, A lot of people have written in with mixed reactions to how good it is. But anyway, so I set her up with that low cast dot org is the website. Plus they have an app that lets you get your local channels.

Even in LA. You can get KTLA on there. I don't know how long it's gonna last, and it's not illegal, but they're operating as some sort of a gray zone that the broadcasters are kind of fighting it, so who knows, but it works for now. And I set her up with that and to get rid of all the kind of clutter on the screen, like they kind of bombarred you every fifteen minutes with like an AD or something. You pay five bucks a month. So I was like, all right, for five bucks a month, are you willing

to pay that? She's like sure, So we did that. Then we were on a roll. I said, well, now you've got a four K fire stick, do you want to upgrade your TV? And she's like sure. I said, four KTVs are so cheap. So we found one of Best Buy TCL five series. It was three hundred and twenty nine dollars and I was like, for three hundred

twenty nine dollars for four KTV. By the way, way bigger fifty yes, she had a forty two, so fifty five and by the way, forty two with like these giant bezels, you know, the black bar around the screen. So we go to best Buy. We order it online, pick up in store. I gave her my five dollars best Buy rewards card five dollars off. So we do that. We come home, we set it all up, the TV so light. I can carry it by myself up the stairs into our place and you know, set it all ye,

So we do that. Her TV looks fantastic. So all that's done. Then I upgrade her computer. I bought her computer a couple of years ago, and so I upgraded that to another computer that I had given her, like one of my old ones. Yeah, and she never really set it up again. So I got that all set up.

right now? So I research online. It turns out that at best Buy they charge you to like recycle a monitor, it's like twenty five bucks. But at Staples they'll take anything with no fee. So we drove her to Staples, brought the computer to the old computer and the old monitor, and we recycled there and that was good. I also gave her a Google Home Hub. This was one of her Christmas gifts, so I got her like the little one. I want to get her the big one, but I

was like, she really got a video chat? Probably not, so got her the little one. And the thing that she loves about this is the pictures. So it's basically a picture frame. It's now called the Google Nest Hub, but it shows your pictures when you're not using it, and she loves her pictures blah blah blah. So we did that and now she's got her pictures on this

little thing. And finally I gave her my old pixel because I upgraded to the iPhone, so I gave her my old Pixel three Excel that I bought, and she still wanted to stick with a pixel. She's had a pixel now for I think two years three, okay, and she really likes it and she loves her pictures from it.

It gets easier and easier every year. Next time I go home, I'm gonna set her up with some smart plugs because I think that she'd really like the idea of turning on and off lights around ther house with just her voice. Oh yeah, and also setting some of those on timers, because right now she's like walking through the house turning things on and off, and I feel like she'd probably really enjoy having some of these on timers.

I also think she'd really enjoy a chrome Cast that would show her pictures on the big screen when she's not using her TV. Also, so I've been doing that at my house. I come home and I now say, h, Google, turn on the living room chrome cast and if you just do that, it'll turn on your TV, switch to the chrome Cast input and just display your pictures as a screen saver, which is really nice because your TV, if it's sitting there with a dark screen, it's kind

of useless. So I've been doing that. The only problem is when I want to switch back to fire TV, I have to like use the input button on the remote, which is kind of annoying. So I'm trying to figure that. I don't know if you can add your own pictures

to Roku. Last I checked, I don't think you can. Natively, there might be a third party app that lets you do it, and you know, Google or Sorry, the Amazon fire Stick lets you do it, but you have to upload your pictures to Amazon and so that means curating them, whereas Google just does it for you, and then Apple same thing. You can do it, but you have to curate your pictures and it's kind of a anyway. All right, So now you heard my story. Let's get one of the questions.

for depending on their ages. My twelve year old is a seventh grader and my nine year old is a fourth grader.

the web doing work. Now I can get ninety nine point nine percent of my work done on the web, which includes resizing photos, checking my email, watching YouTube, uploading pictures, uploading videos. What else did I miss surfing the web? The things I can't do mail, email, spreadsheets, making documents, google docs, typing up documents. The thing I can't do is basically edit video. And that's it. So if your

daughters are they both daughters? Did she say yes? So if your daughters are only doing things primarily, I think the delineation is this, do your daughters need to download any sort of specialty apps for their use? So if there's a special let's say they're a scientist and they need a special science app that you need to download to a computer and run it, the chromebook will not run that app because it's generally a Windows app. Okay,

So that's the main thing to keep in mind. But otherwise I would say, talk to your kids and see if they use like, ask them, hey, what apps do you use? Like what? Don't use the word apps? Use programs because apps think you think of phone, So program is like on my computer right now, I have like ever note is a program. Now you can run that in totally in the web, but it works better as

a native app. I've got my Reminders that's a MacApp, so I use that, you know, on the computer, But ninety nine percent of what you want to do for the average person is available on a chromebook, so I'd recommend going with those. The benefits of a Chromebook are security, so there's really no viruses for them. Software updates are automatic, and they're really fast, and they're kind of invisible. It happens when you kind of restart the computer and that's it.

like a Mac would be the perfect compliment. Otherwise, most people that I'm talking to are not going with a Mac, and they're going like, I'm talking average person who's just doing web surfing stuff. And in fact, I love the Mac. I think that the Mac is amazing. Do I recommend it for everyone? Because no, you probably don't need it. If you can save money, like just surfing the web on a chromebook, go ahead and get the Chromebook. And

it also has a lot of advantages for software. You don't have to think about updates, you to think about apps and things like that. So for most people, I would say a Chromebook is the way to go. And when people are looking at laptops and chromebooks, I always recommend Costco because they generally only have one to two selections, so it's very easy and they're always better than what you find anywhere else. So let's say they had the same exact chromebook at Costco that they do at Best Buy.

The one at Costco will be a little bit cheaper and the specs will be a little bit better. It's always like that. It's the way Costco cuts their deals with these retailers or these manufacturers.

card reader and steal your number. They don't bother with that anymore because people are kind hiped to that if you see some big old thing on the scanner, you're gonna be like, I'm not using that. What they do is they hack the gas station software and once inside, all they have to do is scrape all the card numbers that are flown through that software when you scan

your card at the pump. And the reason why Visa's warning about this is because it's basically in their best interest to have these gas stations upgrade to the chip and pin And if you've noticed, every retailer now pretty much has chip and pin so which chip Most of the time they're chip so, which means you pop your you insert your credit card in, you don't swipe it anymore.

it doesn't cost them as much. So if you think about a billion transactions in a year or however many they do, even a penny per transaction is a lot of money.

little bit more of this story. So the hackers are getting these numbers because they're they're exposed when you swipe your card, your actual card number that's printed on the front of the card is being transmitted over the internets when you dip your card, when you pop it into that slot. As a chip, it's creating a one time number that is transmitted. So if someone, let's say, you got my number, you can't do anything with it because that number only lasted. It's a one time number. It's

disposable for all intents and purposes. So this is why we switch over to the chip because it's much more secure. And Visa saying that gas stations the reason why they're so dangerous is because they are the last place that does not have chip. Everyone else has chip now and I'm not talking mobile payment chip. Chip is still chip and dip. It sounds like something you would have it

you're a fourth at your your super Bowl part. So my recommendation on this with a gas station, and I've found this to be true with myself, find a gas station that uses tap and it's very tough to find. I find in the Los Angeles area. Arco is really good at having tap to pay, so is Chevron. That's it. The rest of the gas stations they don't. They all have this still the swipe where it's actually insert, but it's not really a chip. It's still it's a swipe

insert kind of thing, you know what I mean. I think it's not a true chip anyway. So that's my advice because when you use tap to pay or use your chip, or if you even tap your credit card, A lot of these credit cards, if you look on the back, they have a little wireless symbol. Your credit card is actually taped to pay enabled, so you can actually physically a lot of the Chase cards you can tap to pay. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's the cards that I got.

I don't. I have to look at that. In the meantime, while I look that up, you go through your next question.

It's also easier because when you run into a problem, you can ask a friend versus an Android, where a lot of people put their shoulders up and they're like, I don't know. So that's another reason for the iPhone. You've got the Apple Store, so if you really have, you know, you want to really take it to the next level, you can take some classes there about how to use your phone. There's also this book, what's the book book? Did someone write an iPhone book?

just that'll last you three years. You'll be great, you know, three years, if not more.

al yeah, I hope they're not. I mean, but if you're in the public, if you're in the public, and a lot of people do bully public figures because they figure, I don't know this person, like I could just say whatever I want, you know, model Supermodel posts like a picture and they're like, oh, you're too fat, like yeah, and people do it right, and they do it just to be like mean yeah, and you know, it's it's really bad on YouTube. YouTube meets to license this technology

from Instagram. I I always call Instagram like Disneyland. It's like the Disneyland of the Internet because it really is like happy. They block all the hashtags that are bad. You know, you try to type in a bad hashtag on Instagram, I don't try it, Okay, well do you try. I've tried, yeah, and there and it comes up nothing. They say that this hashtag that was a couple of years ago where they started doing that, And they even do it where they find trending because people get around it.

So people pick a hashtag to do something dirty with or something bad with, and Instagram will pick up on it and they'll block it. They'll say like these tags have been registered as offensive or something. So anyway, my point is, ye, and I remember this whole thing happened. This actually happened a couple of years ago by a viewer unbeknownst to me. She said, my son is finding these really inappropriate pictures on Instagram. And I was like,

there's no inappropriate pictures on Instagram. Sure enough, I did a main main hashtag that she sent me. It was like I don't know, ice cream or something, yeah, whatever it was, it was something very like simple, and sure enough, the pictures that came up were filled with terrible stuff. And so I was like, wow, I had no idea. And so this is when I kind of realized that Instagram is doing that. And then they after that was like probably six months later that they said, oh, we're

going to start filtering hashit. Anyway, so now they're doing comments. So when you type a comment, it will say can you please reconsider this because it might be mean, And it's AI that's figuring out if it's mean or not. So you say eat a burger to who's adi? So if you say eat a burger to her and maybe like Megan, do you really want to say that?

throw out two recommendations. The first is nix Play and I X P L A Y. They make some of the best frames out there. I've tested these in the past. They work really well, they do what you want, and you know, they're pretty simple. It's a picture frame that's digital. You can send stuff from your your phone to the frame. You can send stuff to your loved ones frames if they have it set up that way. It works, and it's you know, they have cloud frames. They have ones

that you can plug the USB into the back. However you want to do it, they'll Nixplay will do that. The thing that I personally like better is, well, there's another way you can do it. Well, there's a third way I'll tell you in a second. But the other way you can do it is I really like the Google Nest Hub and the Google Nest Hub. I get it. It's a smart speaker. It's listening. It's evil because it's Google listening in your house with a microphone and potentially

a camera. If you get the big version. But let's be honest, we all have those things in our home. So it's like, come on, what are you gonna do.

can do a combination of whatever you want. And that's why I think the Google nest Hub is the best way to go because it's so flexible and you can change your pictures at a moment's notice. Yeah, like I said, when we had the birthday party at my house, I changed all the digital displays to show just Tanner first Birthday's amazing. Nobody noticed, but I was hoping one person might be like, oh, he's yeah anyway, But to me, I smiled, They probably thought.

ten gadgets to the twenty tens. I'm not going to talk about this too much because I actually talked about this at length in another podcast, my friend Brian Tong's podcast, the Apple Bits XL. So if you want to hear us discuss all these gadgets of the last decade, check out Apple Bits XL with Brian Tongue. He's my pal from when I worked at c net and we talked about this. Your helm, yeah, actually lives close by to me.

We never see each other. We're always like, oh, we got to hang out, and we only see each other like out and about at events. We're like, we got to hang out. We never do. So one of these days, one of these days we will. Apple iPad that was one of the top ten Tesla model s that was a big game changer. Raspberry Pie do you know that one?

like thirty five or fifty bucks. It was like, well, wait, what what is it now? I think it's thirty five maybe, but don't forget. Now you have the Roku sticks and you've got the Amazon sticks that are so cheap that like everyone assumed streaming can be cheap, but back then it wasn't. No, you had like Apple TV, Apple TV yeah, and that was like two hundred bucks. Yea. I think now it's like now it's still two hundred.

that's a great overall device. If I had my way, i'd probably carry the Pixel if I wasn't if I was not creating well, if I was not creating content for social media, Yeah, because the iPhone and also the apps, because Android just doesn't have the apps that the iPhone does. But I love the smarts of the Android platform and especially Google and especially the Pixel. So that's uh, you know, that's that's the difference.

you just leave it there, Boom, it's dead. It's gonna fall off because this cat's gonna claw it, and you know it's gonna go off the side. I would recommend, and this is what I've had on my kid's iPads for four years now, the otter Box. And they make an iPad case that is one hundred percent inclusive of the iPad, so it goes on the back and then it also has a thing a cover for the screen, and they make several cases, but I would go with one.

It depends what was her name again? Diane. Her name was shoot Kristin, So I would say Kristin that if you think you're gonna be responsible enough, you can get a case that doesn't necessarily cover the front like the screen. But she specifically mentioned the screen, so I would probably get an otter Box case that covers the screen and it encloses your entire your entire iPad. Now with that said, your iPad, it's going to be a lot bigger than normal.

It's gonna be a little bit heavier, but it's for most people that's fine. And outer Box has a lot of different cases, so you can see, like maybe you want one Defender is kind of like the main one that's the biggest one, that's going to be pretty thick, but you can get other ones like a symmetry case. Let's see what else do they have in Alpha that's a screen chector. But I would say just look what they have. But that's the company i'd recommend is autter Box.

So good question. That's protected my kids iPad for many years until my kids threw up on his iPad the case and so I had to take it off. So my kid's actually gone caseless for about three months. Now, I need to buy. In fact, I need to buy a new case for him. It's been in my Amazon shopping cuts. But it was gross because it was like the throw up got like, you know, in like under the screen and I had to like clean the whole thing, and like it was so gross. I just wanted to trash it.

is a new Wi Fi enabled network tuner. A lot of times what happens is you get these streaming services and you have to somehow figure out how to get all your channels. Like, for instance, the TV station I work for KTLA is not currently on any of the streaming services. So when you get something like YouTube TV or Sling TV, all of a sudden, you're like wait, where's my local channel five? You don't have it, then

you have to go and get an antenna. And you can get an antenna, and now you have to figure out how to integrate that into your streaming setup, which means do you put it on a separate input on your TV? Do you get a box that integrates it? Like for me, I have something called Amazon fireTV Recast which integrates into my fireTV okay, which means I don't have to switch in puts to go to my antenna. So if I want something on regular TV, I just

go to my grid on my fire TV. But there it gets complicated because if you're just hooking up an antenna to your TV, now you have to switch to that antenna input to watch anything on there, which most people, if you're cord cutting, you're streaming everything else, And then I get switch inputs. It's a big pain in the you know what. So you don't want to do that. So this new AIRTV too is a Wi Fi enabled network tuner. And the beauty of this thing, it's kind

of like my fireTV recast. You put it in the spot in your house that has the best reception, so that may not be near your TV, which in the case of my mom's house, I did try an antenna there, she didn't get reception near her TV. I didn't have time to relocate and do this whole setup with her, you know antenna. So you put this little box where you get a signal and then the box uses Wi

Fi to connect that to your TV. And in the case of this device, it actually it actually streams your local channels right into the TV app, and the Sling TV app pretty much works with most of the fire sticks and the Roku devices. So I know it sounds overly complicated, but the bottom line is you connect an antenna to this device, the device connects your Wi Fi network. You can now watch your local channels on the same screen that you get all your other streaming content on.

So you can watch Netflix and then you can say, oh, I want to go to my channel five. You just bring up the Sling TV app and Channel five will be in there. So and it's free, by the way, once you pay there's you know, once you pay the ninety nine bucks to buy this thing, there's no subscription. Yeah, people forget that Free TV has a lot of stuff. This also has a DVR. If you connect a hard drive to it. And let's see what else is there that's about it. I mean you can watch things out

of your house. You can watch on Roku, Amazon, Fire, tv iOS, and Android devices. That's a lot. That is a lot, and it's available for ninety nine ninety nine And yeah, I mean that's all you need to know about that. It's pretty cool. So sling dot com slash AIRTV offer, or you can just go to airtv dot net. If you purchase an AIRTV two on airtv dot net,

you'll get a twenty five dollars Sling TV credit. You do not need a Sling TV subscription, by the way, to use that AIRTV So if you just want to start out with your your local channels, you can do that. Then you can always add a subscription later. All right, I've spoken enough Megan.

I almost feel bad giving out this trick because it's so easy. It's scary. Do I give it out? Okay?

Safari and blocks all your ads as you're surfing. It only works on Safari doesn't work on other apps and other things, but that's an easy way to block ads just when you're surfing the web on Safari. On Android, the easiest way that I know of is in Android ten. All you have to do is change one setting. Okay, so I'll tell you where to go. You go into settings on your phone, you go into network and Internet, you go to Advanced, and then you go to something

called private DNS. And DNS is how the internet or your phone looks up things on the Internet. So when you search for something, it goes to a DNS and it kind of sees like, okay, everything has an address on the world on the internet.

block all the ADS that comes through that connection. So what you want to do is change private DNS two dns dot adguard dot com and ad Guard is a big company that does all these ad blocking services. And now, when I talk about ads, obviously a lot of people make money off of that. So if you're thinking about blocking ads, you always want to take a step back and think, am I hurting people's ability to feed their children?

So just keep that in mind and you're fine with that, and WHOA A lot of times these are what I call nuisance ads. So this will actually help in a lot of these things. And this is why I have no problem recommending this. A lot of times you go to a website and you get blocked in by some sort of really obnoxious AD that is popping up on your screen a thousand times saying you want a gift card, or you want an Amazon prize or you're the tenth

winner and you can't get out of it. And that's why I say, sure, go ahead and use this, because you're blocking malicious stuff as well, and that's what a lot of people run up against anyway. So you type in DNS dot adguard dot com into this little box under private DNA and boom, it's all your ads on your phone are blocked. Now, not every AD is going to be blocked. A lot of times it's a cat and mouse game between the big ad companies and services

like this. So sometimes you might be like, hey, Rich, I'm still seeing ads. Can't get rid of them all. Like, if you're browsing, you know, Twitter, you'll probably still see Twitter ads. A lot of times. You can't get around some of the ads, but especially the nuisance ads, like the really annoying ones, you'll get rid of. And that's

the easiest way to do it. Now, if you ever lyle have a problem where you can't load a website or you can't connect to a Wi Fi network, you can just go ahead and turn this off and when you're done with that network or you're done with that website, you can turn it back on. But that's kind of like the deal. And you know, that's some real insider info.

But like I said, a lot of people that I see browsing the web, they're coming up against some pretty bad stuff that they can't really figure out how to exit the browser. It's scare tactics. You know, you've got these things that say you won hundred dollar Amazon gift card. You fill out these forms, it's all garbage, and so you know, if this can help protect one person from getting scammed into something, then hey, it's worth it. There you go. Okay, finally, let me close the show with this.

We did a fun story for KTLA on some of the cool ways you can interact with Santa this time of the year. And I'll just start with the smart speaker. So if you're on a Google Smart speaker, you can say, h Google, Call Santa and you'll get connected to the North Pole and they play this fun little game with Santa where you kind of pick some things. It's like a choose your own adventure almost. That's kind of fun.

On Amazon Echo, if you want to directly call Santa using you know what rhymes with abexa, you actually have to go into the Alexa app first and enable the call Santa skill. And there's a bunch of them, but look for the one that says Amazon dot Com above it. There's a whole bunch of call Santa skills. You probably want the official one from Amazon. Enable that in the app first. Then you can go to your Alexa or your ex device and say, hey, call Sanna. So that's

one on Siri on the iPhone. Don't even bother. She just gives you some like she really just plays some games with you, Like she's like, oh, flap your hands five times and say ho ho not come on, come on, Apple's Apple. Let's make something fun. Other things to do check out Santa Tracker dot Google dot com. This is where you can see a countdown to Christmas along with fun games and there's some cool apps as well. So on the iPhone, there's an app called Catch Santa ar.

This uses the augmented reality feature of the iPhone where you can aim your video camera at your Christmas tree and catch Santa sneaking by present. It's really cool and you can record it and you can send it to friends, put on Instagram, be like, hey, we caught Santa in the act.

was very similar. But we had so much fun, like taking pictures in front of the tree like with Sanna, and all the people at the party were like cracking up, so it was really cool. We put them on Instagram party trick and again that one's called Capture the Magic. And of course you know about Norrad where you can track Sanna on Christmas Eve. Yeah, so again a lot of fun you can have with the kids during this time of the year. I was looking for something with

Elf on the shelf. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, so that's like the new thing, right And do they have a tech? I'm sure they do, but I didn't really look it up. So anyway, those are kind of some fun things you can do with Santa this time of the year. So there you have it. It's always fun, have a great holiday. We are this is the last show of the year of twenty nineteen. We are going to start the year off. I think there's one show

before we go to Seat. Yes, so we'll do one show at the beginning of the year and then we go to CS and at CS have a fun thing planned for the show, so we're gonna be recording it on the scene, but in kind of a fun location. So I've got that going on. Follow me on Instagram. I am at rich on Tech. That's where I'm doing almost all of my posts these days. So at rich on Tech. If you see my stuff, you know it takes me a bit to do these things. So if you see it, the least you could do is like it,

oh yeah, or share it or comment or comment. I mean, just just throw me a bone. Follow, follow, share with your friends. I really I'm getting into this thing. I really like sending posts to friends that It's great.